Editor's Note Section

Mélisande Fitzsimons 

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Irma

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You gave me jazz and Joe Jackson, your tight kobo boots for a season, purple letters in your bewildering hand and a postcard of night walking with tall wings to the edge of a cliff when I was ten. Before I hit thirty, you said as you took my hand, I’ll either be a saint or crazy. But what a lie: you never took my hand, you were too angry all the time. I tried to force you out, but your smell kept coming into my mouth. I tried to tie you down, but you were every woman on the streets in Paris. I don't know what you chose in the end. Something easy slipped on, pillows pushed away like boulders when the air got too heavy? My sister, my sister, without skin or bones, who is to say that it is better to live than to die? Who is to say that it is better to die than to live?

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II

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My sister Mimosa is on the phone. She is pulling on the line, a spring-loaded plastic cord that looks like the inside of Charlie Brown's bubbles when he feels lonely. She tugs on the cord to drag me into the underworld, a place that reminds us of the Brazil that she loved so much. I don’t want to join her, not even sure why, even if I live, warmed by the spring light on the tiles, still a little for her.  So I turn a deaf ear and resist, hurting her as she tries to draw me into this foreign land that seems just so dark, and we are like the Queen of Hearts, cut in two, half black-half white, she, me, upside down or right side up, who can tell. The conversation ends eight days later, in light-stone silence. Over there: her bed, a white line between her lips. I hope she is loved by the Gods now.

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III

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Women in fairy tales all look the same when they wake up. My sister, all surface foam, has landed on the beach. A Marlboro Light in her hand, she is tanned and graceful. When she plays Loneliness in Paris, I don’t hear it and only see her smile and hands painted by Leonardo. Show yourself when I touch this toxic mass of pins with my fingertips; when I speak in your voice, I see a sign in the broken glass at my feet. Over the years, I have added lines, the rings on a tree trunk that separate us. I still see your scaly figure in the picture you thought was missing. I would give so much to be in your river again. There is a wide page-margin between us and night walks on, ever so gently.

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IV

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I would have given anything to hold back your gesture, starve this restless fever in you. Here you are again in this vast nowhere, stiff and mute like a pine. Your death was so awkward and wide-shaped that you are at best half my sister now. Can't you see my patience, as I imagine and wait for a different ending for you? There are few words to describe the stillness, your pallor in my lines, when nothing is visible. I want to catch that part of you that has always slipped through my nets and, scared as I am of seeing you resurface, I will keep looking for you in exile. I listen in the conches where you hide, I pour wax into water to read your face but you left your wedding ring in an ashtray at Orly airport a long time ago and life still wants me.

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I write as a translator and going back and forth between French and English has been a constant for the last twenty years. I love English. I love the fluidity and the colour of the language, and its playfulness. I am in a space where the two languages co-exist, even though I operate mainly in English in my everyday life. I push against it, but it tends to dominate my writing, even though it hasn’t eaten my French yet. So the two languages are in productive conflict with each other, I am caught between two beautiful fires and the interference from both feeds into my poetry.

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"Language is translation", says Hisham Matar. Each word we use stands for something but can never be that thing. It’s always an effort to navigate around linguistic traps and tongue-twisters. There are words I avoid using in my poems as I might stumble when reading in public. But a language that goes straight to the heart of things doesn’t exist, and there is no such thing as a perfect translation, anyway. 

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I try to put reality and fiction into a dialogue and engage with the borderline areas between facts and writing. A poem can start with a simple phrase I have heard or read. I take lots of notes and write drafts long hand. I read the lines aloud then type them until I am satisfied with the coherence of the poem-which is never! Lavinia Greenlaw calls poetry “unsettled language arranged so that its less obvious aspects, such as its music, come to the fore.” The music, shape and texture of words inform my poems. I think that translation has encouraged me to focus more closely on language and its construction. All the time, I hope that the reader will activate the poem and treat it as an experience, rather than as an object, and that our imaginations will eventually meet half-way. 

I am currently rereading an anthology of poems by Claudia Rankine, Denise Riley and Maggie Nelson. I find their “massive, weighty (…) compact body” (Claudia Rankine) of work and distinctive voices daunting and really stimulating. My poem, written in a mixture of French and English initially, is based on my sister, who killed herself in 1989.

—Mélisande Fitzsimons

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Sylvia Freeman

Omen Bird

his shadow passed over me

wingspan five feet   maybe more   

stopped in traffic   

released steering wheel   looked

over my shoulder   his slate grey body

long beak   elegant neck   curved 

against overcast sky

once when my tea leaves were read

a bird    circling the bottom of my cup

promised renewal   transformation

was he a messenger   protector   shaman

or as Michael Collins once wrote

an omen-bird…caught between earth and skies…

I park the car   stand 

on edge of darkening woods

inhale advancing mist   listen 

for the heron’s stark call   reach    

as if to touch

the powdery down on his chest

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The musicality of Southern speech patterns had a major influence on me. My earliest memories are of family members playing instruments, singing, or quoting Yeats, Wordsworth and other poets. I was encouraged from an early age to make up songs, and paint. Poetry ties words, music and visuals together into an art form that I find satisfying.

There are many poets that I love, but one poem always comes to mind when I’m asked for a favorite. The last few lines in “The Rhodora” by Ralph Waldo Emerson says “…beauty is its own excuse for being / why thou wert there O rival of the rose / I never thought to ask; I never knew / but in my simple ignorance suppose / the selfsame power that brought me there brought you.” In this poem, a simple flower in the woods is meaningful whether anyone sees it or not. I think this is the true spirit of creativity. Create for the sake of creating. Create to better understand your life. Create to bring a thing of beauty to the world, even if the world never sees it.

—Sylvia Freeman

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D. Walsh Gilbert

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Kingfisher by the Waterside

          —Vincent van Gogh (Netherlands) 1886   

She lifts from a blade of sawgrass in the marsh,

and the point of her beak spears a silver minnow.

Like the surprise ending of a whodunit,

the fish never sees it coming.

This bird’s a blue-green shaft of lightning, wings

tucked into a silent arrow.  Ah, little fish—

this is how I want to die—

not knowing what hit me.

From the shoreline, I await the bird’s return,

sketch her pitch through lily pads until

she retreats into her nesting tunnel.

What taught the kingfisher her diving

skills? When did she first plunge? How

many times did she risk drowning

before rebounding from the deep with a full

beak, all the wriggling quieted, water dripping

from her stubby tailfeathers as she ascends,

nourished, with one more day to live?

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I wake each morning looking for inspirational artwork which can take me to other time zones and faraway places. I'm currently collecting my writing travels into an all-ekphrastic poetry journey through the world of fish and into the atmosphere of birds. “That’s the place to get to—nowhere. One wants to wander away from the world’s somewhere, into our own nowhere” (D.H. Lawrence). My favorite poet is Emily Dickinson whose poetry has taught me that going nowhere can bring a woman everywhere. We all owe that pilgrimage to ourselves no matter what our circumstances. Thank you for coming along.

—D. Walsh Gilbert

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Kathryn Kirkpatrick

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On Finding Monarch Caterpillars in September*

And whatever love a parent

feels stealing bread for a starving

child, I have it as I dig by

the flimsy light of my bargain

headlamp, having driven miles for the last

of the chain-store milkweed, which will

feed these ravenous young in their striped

skins, who are no metaphor, who stand for

themselves only, though in my ecological

worry, my long-range fright, I am surely

standing for something as I shovel the dark.

*In their multi-generational migration pattern, the endangered monarch butterfly bears its fourth generation in September and October. Rather than dying after two to six weeks as the earlier generations do, this generation migrates to warmer climates like California and Mexico, living six to eight months before starting the process again.

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For several decades I’ve been writing through grief over first, global warming; then, climate change; later, climate crisis; and now, climate emergency. A line that has stayed with me is Adrienne Rich’s “There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors.” I felt a thrill of recognition when the editors of the new collection about climate crisis, All We Can Save (edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine K. Wilkinson) mentioned Rich’s line as a guiding mantra.

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Partnering with the resilience of the other creatures with whom we share the planet is a choice I find myself making whenever I can, and I believe those of us who have grown up with the erasures of modernity are only beginning to know these “other nations” of beings. It’s painful to realize that our species is causing the decline and extinction of so many others. I try to make poems in which the lives of other animals matter.

—Kathryn Kirkpatrick

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Sue Scavo

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[to sit] / [against] 

Let me pause again, let my eyes follow others to see where they land. This one,

this one here. He stared and stared, and my eyes followed his eyes to see where

they landed, his lips licking his mouth. I followed with my own eyes, mouth

dry in the fire slurped air. The colors of others popping into view, the things

they showed, popping into my sight. How the color blazed my eyes, how

enticing, how I wanted those colors, their colors, so like but not mine, how

they blazed and filled my eyes, my throat dry, thirsty. Such thirst. I had

forgotten about color, forgotten about the promise of reaching for that color,

for wanting that color. Their color. Dizzy with it. The wanting.

                                     Once there was a girl who remembered the taste of river.

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When I was a girl, I created my own language. By which I mean literally - my own words, my own phrases. Gibberish to anyone but me. I imagine that girl as one who understood the power of language from the start. Refusing language that did not fit in her body, her mouth.

Poetry, for me, is about dialogue/conversation/argument. First, with the girl in me who knows what language can do and is always striving to find her own language and her own way with it. 

Also, with the self [selves], with the spiritual, with others, with other poets. All poets are influenced by poets we love, by our teachers, by the world, by our spiritual practices [even when those whose practice is to not have a practice]. When I write, I am [mostly] conscious of these conversations, which can also be [usually are] argument. Engaged in my ongoing arguments with Dante, Milton, Blake. Engaged in my ongoing conversation with Hildegard, Porete, Dickinson. Engaged in my ongoing dialogues with Jean Valentine, Linda Gregg, Alice Notley, Linda Elkin, Joan Larkin, Louise Glück, Yanyi, Kasey Jueds, Karla Van Vliet, Ilya Kaminsky. Engaged in finding new conversations with poets like Victoria Chang, Danez Smith, Don Mee Choi, Terrance Hayes, Donika Kelly, Kerrin McCadden, Monica Sok, Alison Rollins, Amy Nezhukumatathil. 

I am a dreamwork practitioner and teacher: poetry and dream, for me, exist and bloom from the same place and share a language. A language and lexicon crafted and offered to be curated for/by me. I love discovering this in other poets, in other dreamers.

—Sue Scavo

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Annette Sisson

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Scanning for the Dippers

Hunched in the passenger seat, you beg me 

to start the car: I can be a no-show. 

You want home, your unmade bed. In the building 

behind us, directors, auditions—your monologue wobbly, 

stalling out. My hands clench the steering wheel. 

I utter words like character, professionalism. Your eyebrows 

purse. The silence after the chau gong clangs. 

I quiet my breath. Maybe the stars know 

if my sermon is grounded, but do they imagine our vacuity, 

our limited orbit? I stare at my fingers, filter 

memory, scan for maps, charts, a text 

to furnish a clue, a sliver of reassurance. Nothing. 

Then you are ten. We are boarding the King Cobra, 

its slick loops, high canyons, riders 

standing, arms loose. Miles of open air 

above all the other coasters. I won’t let you 

bolt from the queue when nerves chew at your stomach. 

You blanch as we ratchet our way up the long 

first climb, your fear a skitter in my chest—

with each new lunge, diaphragms constrict. 

When we wrestle free of harnesses, the thrill of coils 

and cliffs, you lobby to ride again, ricochet 

back into line. You could have crumpled. Or sidestepped 

my hug. You could have been struck dumb. 

It could have been disastrous. The coaster might have 

spiraled off the rails, or this morning’s director 

might have blasted you instead of serving up 

honey and roses. I wish for a planisphere to plot 

my point in the universe, or an updated list from Leviticus, 

laws to observe and live by. Maybe some mothers 

grasp the prophets in ancient Hebrew. Maybe some 

see dippers in the cold night sky without straining. 

Across the center console of this vehicle, as unmoved 

as our positions, I recall that fevered 

summer when you turned five, discovered mortality, 

couldn’t sleep for crying. I finally told you 

death is a billion Roman Candles soaring 

into space; you watch them explode, their impossible colors—

you the sizzling particles, limitless, ravishing. 

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I teach Modern Poetry and British literature 1900-present; these cultural influences undoubtedly fuel my poetry’s immersion in image, nature, and the music of language. Besides these historical influences, I am most drawn to the poetry of Mark Jarman, Jack Gilbert, and Mary Oliver, each for different reasons. I love Mary Oliver’s call to notice nature for its own sake and Mark Jarman’s meditations and contemplative storytelling. I return again and again to Jack Gilbert’s The Great Fires and the challenge of knowing that he poses in his poems, exemplified by the lines, “We find out the heart only by dismantling what / the heart knows. By redefining the morning, / we find a morning that comes just after darkness” (“Tear It Down”). Like “Scanning for the Dippers,” published here, my poems often explore living in uncertainty, in mystery.

—Annette Sisson

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Merna Dyer Skinner

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I PRETEND I’M A LONG-DISTANCE JUMPER 

Visiting child of the other woman / barefoot / I bound

            through the four-room house / of my father’s first wife—

sprint from front to back / shove wide

            the splintered screen door / catapulting myself

off the rail-less porch / into summer’s muggy air

            the very moment / falling from the Sycamore tree / a brown blur   

outpaces my landing / my naked foot / slips easily

            into the nest’s severed top / before the swarm breaches—

a thousand stings / pierce my flesh / meant perhaps 

            for my mother

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Charles Simic once said in a New Yorker podcast (and I’m paraphrasing): some poems are as carefully considered as a well-executed crime; others arrive in a flash.  For me, this poem arrived almost whole, during a moment when I was thinking about the curious convergence, or timing, of moments in one’s life. The same applies to my becoming an “accidental poet” at age 63, when, after a terrible hiking accident, I decided to take my first poetry class, once casts came off and I could walk again. For over 30 years, in my professional life as a communications consultant, I’ve helped thousands of people acquire skills to interact well with others, and the confidence to speak with conviction. Through poetry, I’ve now discovered my own voice, and with the guidance of wonderful poets and teachers, I continue to hone my skills. My two adult sons remain my greatest champions of my new journey.

—Merna Dyer Skinner

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Virginia Smith

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Biking Through The Stone Age

Swiping sunscreen on 

their soft necks and faces, 

a strap check of their bike

hard-hats, my grandgirls

ask, again, about the before

times: Were there helmets,

Bin Bin, when you were a kid?

A proper grandmother might

offer nostalgia or longing: 

No, those were simpler times,

kids not pampered or protected. 

But none of us prize proper, all

three filled with sass and badass,

biking along the canal, frog spotting,

heading to soft ice-cream with twists

and sprinkles.

Later, hands sticky, tongues working

to tidy their cones, the girls serve up

silence for my free-range fable: 

Summer days after lunch I’d bike to the pool--

who’d heard of seat belts or helmets?

---my tender brain laid bare as a 

pumpkin to car tires, sun-splashed 

hours swimming and diving, no SPF

to shield us, this Scots-Irish skin crisped

nearly to the bone, burst burns on

my shoulders rubbed raw as I slept. 

Nights before the fireflies lit, we kids

chased the DDT truck, danced in

the smoky, gray billows blown from the

back, mouths open to swallow its secret--

how the poison cloud could keep us

safe from mosquitos and malaria.

Rinsing sugar from their mouths

with their BPA-free water bottles, 

the girls signal they’ll say my

unsaid: Sounds awful--dangerous, 

primitive, like the Stone Age.

We wheel our way home, pedaling   

past my Paleolithic Era and into 

their future--the Plastiocene Age,

their beloved polar bears 

drifting toward extinction, 

floods rolling past the fires.

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Poetry dotted the syllabi throughout my college teaching career; likewise, I dabbled in verse writing during that time, with long, inactive stretches. It wasn’t until three to five years back that writing poetry became my daily work, passion and struggle.

Oh, the stack of poetry in my writing room is a few feet high and eclectic, y’know—Kate Bauer, Sonia Sanchez, Yeats, Auden, the work of poet friends. Rita Dove’s collected works is currently my night stand sentry. My favorites, and the poets I yearn for and return to, are Anne Sexton, Margaret Atwood, and Mary Oliver. I love Sharon Olds, whose obsessions, brilliance of detail and range of knowledge always astound me. Most recently, her arias and odes speak to me. Running throughout all of her poetry is the radical physicality of the body—in birth, sex, and death—an intimacy of being that I admire. I also visit Shakespeare’s sonnets several times a year so that the fusion of formal verse and image/idea might wiggle back under my skin.

What keeps me writing is the call to honor life and death and the whole shebang. Poetry allows me to crystallize memory and to celebrate peak as well as quotidian experience. Poetry is my blessing on being.

—Virginia Smith

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Beth Thompson

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Unwounded

I was a feral child. I know what you are thinking, how you are bracing yourself for the kind of story that can wound when heard in the chambers of a mother’s heart named for ears. But all stories are more than their sadness, and when you are feral, you do not have to brush your hair, you may leave

it unruly, and wild. You may take coffee with milk outside to the yard, where the morning sun falls warm on your neck, even though the neighbors will see you looking like an unmade bed, and drink

in two of those things while paying no mind to the other. Your sleeping clothes can become your waking ones, and in them, you can walk to the ocean, sink your toes into sand still cool from the unwatched nighttime, chase the morning shorebirds darting where they wish. No one will say you should not. Later, you can make sandwiches for every meal, pitifully uncut as when—you feel the wound at the very thought of it—no mother is involved.

But when you feel the jam, wet and cold and distant on your cheek, and strain to reach it with your tongue, you make a silly face, you make a funny noise. You laugh. You see that the uncut sandwich is not sad at all, the uncut sandwich is a game, though you have cut legions of them into shapes

believing otherwise, believing that this is what good mothers do. And when, in the long light of late afternoon—with no dinner to get on the table, no babies to be bathed and bedded—you grow

restless, you can run away. You can pedal longer and farther and faster than would have been

allowed, bathed in golden rays that, having traveled far, stoop low to meet your gaze, like an auntie come to visit. And all the while, your mother the wind will touch your deeply lined face and smooth your wild silver hair, reminding you in whispers that your story will always be more than its sadness.

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Even if we are fortunate enough to arrive at midlife, no one arrives unwounded. From its title, this poem speaks of paradoxes and conflicting truths, of the many versions of ourselves, of old narratives alongside new perspectives, of our quest to remain open-hearted even though we have been broken-hearted. 

As a student (and rule-following oldest child!), I found comfort in the steadfast rules of good grammar, the reliability of meter and stanza, the integrity of a complete and well-constructed sentence. I think this is why prose poetry—with its recalcitrant, devil-may-care attitude, its blatant disregard of form and meter and structure—both challenges and seduces me. “Unwounded” was born of an ordinary day I spent alone at the shore. The day evoked a felt sense of the curiosity and freedom of youth, and the form allowed me to tell it in the way I experience it in midlife: in fragmented thoughts that can make up complete ideas, incorporating old wisdom and new perspectives, in both solitude and communion with all those who came before.

—Beth Thompson

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Dawn Terpstra

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Man without shadow

            inspired by Excursion into Philosophy by Edward Hopper

At noon on the piazza                          he remembers 

a table beneath a canopy                      the feel of fire between his fingers—

view of a fountain,                                a redhead with freckled calves

once he tossed a coin                            with nails the color of embers,

wishing for love—                                 she is like smoke

he craves                                                surrendering through an open window—

polenta, anchovies, figs,                        an offering,                  

a bottle of Barolo                                  prayer from an empty temple

sunlight at his feet                                shadow burns to ash.

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Having enjoyed a long career in marketing and corporate communications, I am now experiencing the joy of dedicating more time to my own creative writing projects. My curiosity and sense of discovery are fed by reading and by connections with poetry communities both locally and across the country. Most treasured is the community of women poets who inspire with their gifts of language, resilience, and wisdom. 

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Like most of us, I come back to those poets whose work invites me to experience more with each reading—Emily Dickinson, Mary Oliver, Dorianne Laux, Kelli Russell Agodon, Ada Limón, Richard Blanco, and Ted Kooser. Recently I have enjoyed Susan Rich’s The Cartographer’s Tongue and her treatment of identity and borders. This line from her poem “Wendy in the ‘90s” captures the exquisite nature of storytelling for me: And then like the pilot resisting / the runway home, she’d hold her breath / and offer up this / pleasure—the telling / of the journey out alone.

— Dawn Terpstra

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Ruth Weinstein

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I PROMISE HER OKRA IN AUGUST

I visit a friend and take food:

French lentil soup rich with carrot coins

and threads of silken spinach,

cornbread that welcomes the melting yellow butter

as a ginger cat seeks sunbeams on a cool spring morn.

Salad greens freshly picked from my organic garden,

and radishes, triple washed, the red and white roots trimmed.

Flowers to grace the table where she may sit for a moment,

sip some soup, pick at cornbread and salad.

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She is polite, grateful, though the cancer gnaws away

at her and drugs numb any appetite for food. She can’t

use cannabis to stimulate hunger, all her hunger magnetizes

to more life. She asks about the garden. Her face becomes

wistful, then she asks if I have planted okra.

I tell her about the heirloom red okra seeds nestled

among rows of spinach past its prime, with new onions.

I promise her okra in August though we both know

how slim her chances are of making it to August,

slender as her shadow already slipping through worlds,

sliding right between life and gone.

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I have been a rural dweller and organic gardener for almost fifty years, and the poem that I hear always in my deepest, cellular being is Yeats’ “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” This 131-year-old poem is a mantra for me, especially in times of such global sorrow as we are living through now. Its monastic simplicity of meter, rhyme, unobtrusive alliteration, and message beat evenly and steadily in my blood. However, I am also urbane and unsentimental, and to satisfy that part of me I am currently enjoying the work of the N.Y. poet and professor, Susana H. Case, who never puts herself in the center of an emotional universe, but instead observes from the edges and creates painterly film noir scenes or bathes small, unromantic lives in compassionate, poetic balm. At the time I am writing this, I am serving as a first reader for a poetry competition and getting to experience a wide range of work, learning so much about what makes a strong collection, and being surprised by poetry I thought I would be predisposed not to like so much. There is a whole world of work out there to bring delight and deep thought to the readers of poetry.

—Ruth Weinstein

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Tori Grant Welhouse

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Drive-Thru

           In the drive-thru at Starbucks,

at the barista's shovel of a hand,

I scrabble for more change.

            The looping of moment,

flat sky overcast with farewell, tunnel

of overhang, smell of peat in the air.

            I feel disconnected from my limbs,

this disruption of sense receptors

a derangement of grief.

            “Mom,” says my son, gently, unlike 

himself, saving rebellion for another day.

His younger sister leans her cheek 

           against my arm, unsure what else

to do, trying to provoke a small sun 

on my skin. I see myself stricken

          in the whites of their eyes. The barista 

gives me a look of long-suffering. Oh, I say, 

aware suddenly of the loose coins in my palm.

          A fit of shoulder-shaking 

overtakes me. Dumbness. Numbness. 

Sorrow a ringing lantern in the fading light.

            My children wonder if I laugh or cry. 

I wonder at the day’s absurdity,

giggling a kind of hysteria.

          The disaster of laughter 

gives my son and daughter 

hope that I will become myself again. 

            That I will somehow know 

what to do, how to behave

at the funeral of a sister. 

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I started writing poetry in college, inspired by the writing of Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and Erica Jong. I wanted what they accomplished on the page in my life — the language, the self-expression, the free-wheeling emotions — and find myself most drawn to poetry of moment. An Erica Jong quote especially resonates with me, “If a woman wants to be a poet, she must dwell in the house of the tomato.” I am currently reading Grim Honey by Jessica Barksdale.

—Tori Grant Welhouse

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Editor's Choice

൪uartet Interview: Barbara Crooker

Barbara Crooker is the author of Radiance, which won the 2005 Word Press First Book competition and was a finalist for the 2006 Paterson Poetry Prize; Line Dance, which came out from Word Press in 2008 and won the 2009 Paterson Award for Literary Excellence; More (C&R Press, 2010);

Gold (Cascade Books, 2013); Small Rain (Virtual Artists Collective, 2014); Selected Poems, (FutureCycle Press, 2015); Les Fauves (C&R Press, 2017); The Book of Kells (Cascade Books, 2018, winner of the Best Poetry Book 2018 from Poetry by the Sea); and Some Glad Morning (Pitt Poetry Series, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), which was longlisted for the Julie Suk Award.

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Her poems have appeared in magazines such as The Sun, The Christian 

IT’S MAY,

and everything we’ve been waiting for opens.

The iris wave their flags, every shade of the rainbow,

and the peonies have unclenched their fists: pompoms

of snowdrift, cherry, carmine; almost too much

to bear.  Because the rest of the news is bleak: 

arctic ice melting, CO2 at an all-time high,

the Middle East’s a mess, and here, where we’ve

got it all, the Great Divide widens.  Somewhere,

there’s a nasty little virus about to go airborne. . . .

But it’s May in the garden, and we’re restored

to Eden.  The evening primroses unfold

their four-petaled skirts, ruffled flounces around

the edge of the bed, and the lupines’ spires

sway in the breeze.  An Oriental poppy is about

to stamp its orange exclamation mark.  And 

when they’re done, roses and lilies, then pink

coneflowers, black-eyed Susans, Russian sage.  

Why aren’t we on our knees? Why aren’t we

picketing with placards and day lilies, demanding 

an end to GMOs, a reduction in carbon emissions 

and the use of fossil fuels?  

So simple: subsidize sun and wind, not oil and corn.  

Is it impossible to plant change?  What are we here for, 

if not inflorescence?  Let’s praise everything, even chiggers,

ticks, and stinkbugs.  Let’s sink our feet in the grass, 

and bend in the wind.

"It's May" is from Barbara’s most recent book, Some Glad Morning, and re-printed by her permission.

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Some Glad Morning, by Barbara Crooker, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019,ISBN 978-0-82296-592-3, $17.00

൪uartet wishes to thank Barbara for her time and generosity in granting this interview, conducted via email by ൪uartet editor Gail Braune Comorat.