Poetry

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Please see the revised submission periods on the Submissions page.

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Caroline Boutard

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Hearting the Wall

That morning’s theater of overhead clouds

in red dawn was auspicious for a project

and I was there with you under the oaks to build a wall.

The shady edge along the house, 

needed protection for a young garden—

already thin blades of camassia just showing,  

the blue-gray of dicentra seedlings lifting the leaf litter.

Stones from our fields sat near-by, polished by last night’s rain—

schist, glittering with minerals, the salt and pepper of granite,

basalt which had flowed here as lave

before mastodons browsed our Tualatin hills. 

We worked together, our bodies silvering with sweat 

and worked some more. I helped like an artist’s muse. 

You knew how to stagger the joints with alternate sizes 

and narrow the width toward the top—amazing that anything 

as awkward as rock could fit together so snug. 

I filled the gaps with smaller stones to give our wall

what builders of rock walls have named its heart.

Half-dusk and we called it a day, not finished but already knowing 

we had pinned something down. That night, rain pounded on our roof

like a thousand people clapping.

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For twenty-seven years, my husband and I farmed a rich piece of the Tualatin Valley in Oregon and most of what I write about is connected in some way to the landscape—the physical challenges, perseverance and solitude required when working land and always the magnificence of the natural world. We now live close to family in upstate New York, but the wall I describe in this poem is as solid to me now as the day the last stone was put into place.

There were intermittent attempts to write over the years but when my husband was diagnosed with terminal cancer I needed to find a way to describe the impact this had on the two of us and our farming life. This led to a book of poetry, Each Leaf Singing (MoonPath Press, 2021). An MFA helped me find several writing communities on both coasts which have pushed me to continue to challenge myself. Like farming, writing is a solitary experience, made more gratifying with encouragement. 

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Many of the poets whose work I return to, such as Ted Kooser, Larry Levis and Ross Gay, are engaged with the natural world or had some background in agriculture. The landscape for all of them is more than a rhetorical device. It is a way into their story. No doubt I am among a multitude completely captivated the first time they read Mary Oliver’s poem, “Wild Geese.”  How could anyone, looking up at that V of bodies in the wide open above their head, not be glad for the world announcing their place in the family of things? Oliver’s advice in “Sometimes” to “Pay attention. / Be astonished. / Tell about it” is good encouragement for writers in any genre.

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—Caroline Boutard

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Polly Brown

                        Felicia

      In our father’s greenhouse, the scent

of marigolds, we sat transplanting with Felicia, 

      from the Research Farm, who came 

at rush times to help. Her eyes reached me 

      before her story, heard years on: 

how in Poland she had been raped again, again 

      by German soldiers; how she had wanted

to become a nun, but felt too defiled.

      Transplanting, unaware, we sensed 

only a glad shyness, her care for the fine,

      fragile roots of infant flowers. Now, 

decades later, one April week we each 

      recall Felicia. Sal hears her contractor 

speaking to the plumber in Polish. Nan reads 

      reports of the Russians in Ukraine. 

And in my neighbor’s hoop house, as I pick

      the crisp green fragrant leaves of young 

spinach, I see in my worn hands

      hers. Our three lives, our separate 

timings of sprout and blossom—Felicia 

      finds us. We say her name.  

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I love the way a single poem can be like a fruiting body for a whole mycorrhizal web of questions and influences.

When Jan Hutchinson, in one of her daily prompts for the month of April, suggested writing about three of something, I arrived at an early three-ness in my life: the three sisters of whom I am eldest. As it unfolded, the poem found its way to something in our ongoing conversation. 

When I discovered the odd coincidence of all of us thinking about Felicia, a Polish refugee, I thought of poet Martha Collins, who encourages us to explore the ways war or sexism or racism have been felt in our own lives. (For example, in many of her own poems Martha has explored her “white” family’s participation in deeply-ingrained conventional racism.) I have never been a soldier on active duty—but my life has been full of the shadow of war, its impact on my family, other families, refugees. So much need in our world—not directly connected to war—goes unmet because of war’s terrible appetite. 

In the years since I knew Felicia, so much has happened. I wish I could speak with her now, adult to adult. As I grow older, I feel vividly how a poem, or a grouping of poems, can be a conversation among chapters in a poet’s life, stitching together several selves. I’m so grateful to watch that in the work of poet friends; grateful for that stitching in my own.

—Polly Brown

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Sharon Carter

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On the 33rd Anniversary of my Mother’s Death

A rabbit crossed my lawn last night. 

Its footprints like two ghosts—

one set following the other.

Branches snap under wet snow,

their pistol shots resound, 

sending crow clouds into flight. 

Winter lace brightens mountain peaks,

whitens hemlock and pine.

Christmas card perfect, you might say.

The plum pudding, your recipe, lacked

its ginger kick this year. You looked

over my shoulder, said, don’t cheat 

with dried spices! Always direct, 

contradictory: Xmas, a hot beach—

such opposites, your favorite occasions.

We braved the North Sea, you never

learned to swim— lips blue 

with shivers after twenty minutes. 

Stoic, just like your father— a frequent 

comment though I grew into an even split.

Today I walked Tadpole Pond—

its sway-backed bridge dipped into water’s 

cracked glassine. Mallards studded 

the dark mirror, heads submerged, raised

butts like Bishops’ miters. You would

have enjoyed the view, pulled out

a pack of twenty, leaned on the rail.

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Chemistry was one of my best subjects. I came to poetry late in life after reading Sylvia Plath’s poem “Ariel.” Initially curious about the influence of a poet’s life on their creative content, I soon focused solely on their work. I was fairly isolated, living on a small farm when I had an insight that sentences were much like chemical equations, but words, as in “the cauldron of morning,” can imply more than one meaning! That’s when I began to write. 

My work tends to be sparse and imagist though this particular poem is longer. I’ve painted since childhood so I understand a creative need that demands satisfaction—often a poem will inspire a series of paintings, but rarely the reverse.

The role of cigarettes and their consequences are recurring themes in my family poems. I’ve been working toward a rapprochement in this mother-daughter piece. Our birthdays occur two days apart in March, linked but dissimilar celebrations. The poem addresses my own fragility, invokes my mother’s personality and ends with a reminder that even physicians may have no impact on their loved one’s choices.

—Sharon Carter

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Susana H. Case

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The Other Couple

The insurance-broker husband, the face-

lifted wife—with whom we share 

a guide and driver—don’t like us, 

say it’s nothing personal, but

can we please not eat dinner

near them. When we’re at the bar,

they look around, see us, and leave.

Perhaps it’s my tattoo. I dream 

that the very large husband falls off 

a long boat into the Chao Phraya 

and I don’t do anything to save him 

from drowning. I wear superhero

spandex and make a choice. 

I don’t like rejection.

In daylight, I say, Good morning, 

a pity you left last night—

the view of the river 

was unforgettable. It’s how I do things—

my smile that means I don’t know 

how to fix this, so I will just float by, 

like the river, flood their house

and drown their children, 

when the opportunity rises,

as it will, along with the water.

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I suppose one can characterize at least a part of my poetic practice as “confessional-adjacent,” since I mine my own experience for poems (though I also mine artifacts from archives which have no direct connection to my life). Because “confessional” is a word that has fallen into disfavor, I hesitate to use it. But the poets I currently read tend to also make use of material from their daily lives. I am strongly interested in poets who examine various forms of power inequity and who tell stories.

I’ll give some of the context for writing “The Other Couple.” I was on a month-long trip to Indochina with my spouse. To help with expenses, we shared a guide and driver with another couple whom we did not previously know. We were put together by the travel company. Though the month was unforgettable in many wonderful ways, the relationship with the other couple did not work out. It was clear we were getting on their nerves.

My feelings were hurt, largely because I have been fortunate not to experience very much social rejection in my lifetime. Instead of confrontation, I dealt with my feelings by writing this poem. The other solution we’ve found, in adjusting to the experience, has been humor. The other couple will probably be part of our lives for a while, as we tell jokes about them, until we find something else filled with irony with which to amuse ourselves.

In the poem, I allow my id to run amok. I want to be clear that in my “real” life, I would never do what I imagine doing in my poem.

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—Susana H. Case

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Pippa Brush Chappell

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Torre de Bélem

watching the tide    the sky

wives   children in the arms of their fathers

creak of timber   smell of salt and tar and fish

come back to me     volte para mim

women newly with child    facing death    

his    theirs     her own    

stay away from the edge   you'll go over

now there is only the view from here

to the edge of the world

and the relentless thud of my own heart's longing

come back   come back   come back

watching the weather     the horizon     the ocean 

come back to me from the edge of the world

come back to me     a borda do mundo

wind pours in     salt in my waiting eyes 

your breath     catches in my silent throat

new-carved stone rough from the mason's chisel 

Bélem     birth of our Lord     place of beginnings

tower of your going

resurrect yourself     come back to me

you are not dead     volte     you will come back   

three days     three years     three lifetimes

I will wait here     eyes on the edge of the world

I could not be yours     eu não vou pertencer a mais ninguém

but I will be no one else's

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I write both fiction and poetry, although poems are few and far between for me. When I do turn to poetry, I always start with many more words than I end up with: the writing process is mostly editing, cutting, taking out a word here and a word there. The challenge for me is always about trying to make each poem say as much as it can as economically as it can. And place matters: writing poetry in the chaos of family life is too difficult for me, and I find that the silence and space provided by my residencies at Stiwdio Maelor are always so fruitful. Fiction, I can write at home. Poetry requires another space entirely.

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Recently, I’ve been revisiting Vikram Seth’s All You Who Sleep Tonight, with its tight rhymes and aching sadness. The final couplet of his poem ‘Soon’ has stayed with me since I first read it, nearly thirty years ago: “Love me when I am dead / And do not let me die.” It is so beautifully simple, yet so utterly devastating. But I also love Carol Ann Duffy’s rich and insightful work, as well as her delicious humour. Her short poem ‘Mrs Icarus’ is just brilliant. 

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This poem was written at Stiwdio Maelor following a visit to Lisbon. The sixteenth-century Torre de Bélem, on the banks of the Tagus, was the place at which explorers embarked on their perilous voyages. The sense of history there was almost overwhelming, and I sat for a long time wondering what it would have been like to see someone you love sailing towards an uncertain horizon, not knowing whether you would ever see them again – or whether they might, literally, fall off the edge of the world. What would that feel like?

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—Pippa Brush Chappell

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Patricia Clark

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Blooms Gripped in a Fist

A child’s voice in a documentary long ago,

the narrator asking, as he’ll ask multiple

kids, “What’s it like to be old?”

This boy sits in a small chair, kicking his heels 

against the chair leg. Dark hair, dark

eyes that have witnessed. “It’s loose skin.”

Others offer up other answers like a bunch

of blooms gripped in a fist—black-eyed Susans,

bluebells and delphinium, liatris, daffs.

“It’s when you forget a lot.” Or this, seen:

“You walk more slowly.” Or: “You’ve lived through

many wars and many times.” I look down

at my arm, how the skin on the lower part

of my right bicep is wrinkled and ruckled

like the sand along a shore, water gone.

Do I drink my eight to ten glasses a day?

At the park, along the river, I keep up my pace

with a dog—our third one. I know years,

presidents, and wars. Some of our friends, all

of our parents, are no longer walking the earth.

What is it to be old? Another says, cloudy eyes.

The children do not seem afraid. This one says

how his grandmother taught him to make repairs,

to thread a needle and sew a button on a shirt..

They make a few distinctions between what’s seen

and what’s not. A bent back, loose skin, gray

hair, but “my grandfather knows a lot of words.”

To rise each day, living, and breathing.

The children have seen enough; now they dance away,

out of the studio into the bright air.

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I’m a big fan of memorizing poetry. I think it’s great ear training if you want to be a poet, or a writer of any kind. Memorizing also allows you to possess a poem, or maybe “inhabit” a poem sounds better, less materialistic. All to the end of teaching you qualities about the poem that are not immediately perceived but come out after much rereading. I once had an old blue Plymouth Valiant station wagon with an unreliable radio. On long distance drives it was helpful to be able to recite poems—to keep me awake, the way as a child I used to sing with my siblings in the car to keep my father awake at the wheel. And I had a wonderful teacher at the University of Washington, poet and scholar Richard Blessing. He walked into class reciting poems and that impressed me so much, I vowed that someday I would do just that. Some poems I have had to memorize and others I learned by heart through teaching them, like Robert Hayden’s wonderful “Those Winter Sundays” or “Traveling Through the Dark” by William Stafford.  Others I learned by heart: Wallace Stevens’ “Sunday Morning” and “A Postcard from the Volcano,” Emily Dickinson’s “A narrow Fellow in the Grass,” & “After great pain, a formal feeling comes.” Frost’s “Directive.” Many more. These stay with me like lodestars, like talismans. Studying opening lines, like this from “A Postcard from the Volcano” teaches me technique: how to entice a reader, how to build mystery, how to add tension. “Children picking up our bones / Will never know that these were once / As quick as foxes on the hill.” Wow! What an opening! How did the poet do that? We read—and memorize—to find out.

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—Patricia Clark

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Laura Foley

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Returning Home After Two Days with Evelyn

I still feel her mittened hand in mine,

and hear her admonish, as we cross the big street,

Watch out, we don’t want to hit the cars—

an alternate world view I’d never thought of,

a sphere she welcomes me into.

How, when I ask for fun, 

Why does the sun go down?, she has a ready answer, 

Grandma, because it’s tired, 

for which she has ready empathy,

exhausted daily by her growing.

Her intuitive understanding of mortality,

as we form snowballs we name and toss

into the icy river I can’t help seeing as the Ganges;

how she pulls icicles from the beachside cliff,

licks them, like the sweetest lollipop.

Her world of waving at every passing stranger,

and their waving back at us, 

serious expressions replaced 

with beaming, untired suns,

as is mine, all the time I’m with her.

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I’m inspired by spending time with my grandchildren, seeing the world from their perspective, learning from them. They slow me down, remind me to pause, to look, to take in the sunlight on a lake, the sound of a passing truck, to remind me to smell the leaves of a peony, not just the petals.

Once, when very little, Evelyn thought the garbage man was Santa, waved and called him that. He waved back at us and then “Ho Ho Hoed” away, down the road. So, she transforms the world, and it in turn transforms itself. Recently, after watching the British Coronation on TV, she saw a lady outside whose sparkling hair, she thought, made her look like the Queen. We told the lady, who brightened up. I’m sure we made her day! It made me think about how we can all coronate ourselves, a kind of self-blessing.

I’m now compiling a chapbook of grandmother poems. When my children were little, I wasn’t yet writing poetry (I started when I was forty-five, now have ten books published, with more on the way), but I wish I could have transformed into poetry some of the experiences of watching my children grow. Instead, here I am as a grandmother, with a second chance.

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—Laura Foley

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Jen Karetnick

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After the deluge,

a glaze of aromata: ghosts of sewage haunted 

the streets; earthworms that had migrated 

to the top of slip-and-slide lawns

curled into sun-dried, decaying disks;

the shells of apple snails collected,

half-crushed and empty of their occupants, 

on the brackish banks of the Little River, 

where the nests of spiny softshell turtles 

had been pounded into yolky shards. Mold 

had already started to whisker, bearding the deck. 

So many musky missives a flash flood leaves 

behind that even while we worried about incursions 

of water into underground gas pipes and stalled cars 

piled up on highways and an airport that remained 

closed, the dogs knew to flop over on their backs,

ears spread out like leaves, eyes rolling in deep 

communication, wriggling with the urgency needed

to grind those dispatches into their blood terrain.

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No ideas but in things. My first mentor, the late poet and memoirist Deborah Digges, recited this William Carlos Williams quote whenever our lazy undergraduate poems became grandiose and abstract, which was every workshop session, of course. When I was attempting to write this poem, about the historic 25-inch rainfall that flooded Fort Lauderdale in a single day not too long ago, this lesson popped into my head. How to describe the hypothetical—the climate crisis—made factual? Name things. Not just big ones, like cars being swept away. Those were pictures you could get from the media. I heard Deborah, who introduced me to what were then called “agrarian” or “rural” poets (and who would now be called eco-poets) like Wendell Berry, tell me to include the minutiae. Look at the turtle nest on the local beach, she said in my head, and see how the eggs were smashed by the hard-driving rain that wouldn’t let up. She directed my eyes: Note how many worms washed from the earth onto the street and never made it back underground. Deborah was only 59 when she died, reportedly by suicide. As I approach that age, I find myself re-reading her poems, from her earliest to her posthumously published ones. Her perception always seemed beyond her years. I wonder what wisdom she would have granted us had she survived. 

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—Jen Karetnick

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Hilary King

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Knowledge Duplex

           With opening line from Rebecca Black

Let me live without lessons.

I’ll burn the schoolhouse down.

          What school could house what you

           tried to teach me with your fists?

Nights your fists reached me the moon 

hid behind clouds in horror.

            I hid, like lightning in clouds.

            You sensed pressure building.

Animals can sense catastrophe building,

Know to run before the tidal wave breaks.

            You broke all of your knowledge on me

            That last evening of your freedom.

Let me live without freedom.

I burned your schoolhouse down.

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“Knowledge Duplex” sprang out of community. A few years ago, a friend and I started a poetry book club. We had met in a poetry workshop, but realized in our writing lives, we both wanted to read and study major poets. We invited a few poets to join us and started a monthly poetry book club. We’ve studied Dianne Seuss, Kevin Young, Nikki Giovanni, Chris Abani, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, Martha Collins, Ilya Kaminsky, C.D. Wright and others. As a few members left and others came in, we realized we had not all read deeply of each other's work. We set aside one gathering to do just that. 

This is how I came to a line by book club member and now friend, writer Rebecca Black: “Let me live without lessons.”  I found the line liberating and thrilling, and knew that I wanted to use it in a duplex, with its back and forth rhythm. Aren’t we all often being taught, being told? How maddening it is sometimes, how oppressive. Sometimes I long to live without lessons, without freedom, to burn the schoolhouse down.

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—Hilary King

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Eve F. W. Linn

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Stieglitz Recalls An Argument, New York City, Summer 1918

after Alfred Stieglitz

I'm sure it was Japanese, 

that kimono, a peace offering

after an argument, just crossed over

your breasts like wings or maybe

just the pattern of flying cranes

said to be auspicious.

As you lounged, you odalisque, 

I remember the pale oval 

of your face brushed with brows

your unbound hair 

trailed down your arms––

those wild mustangs of your girlhood

your clavicles, your neck urgent 

taut with muscles

you did not want me 

so I sat in the straight chair

watched steel going up

beam upon beam girder to girder

your hands almost serene

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“Stieglitz Recalls An Argument, New York City, Summer 1918” is one of an ongoing series of poems about women artists. I am drawn to write these lyric biographies as a way of finding out more about these women and their lives. In my MFA program I was introduced to the ekphrastic genre and found it to be one of my favorite ways of writing, as it incorporated my earlier background as a visual artist. The poet, Linda Bierds, was a great influence, as she manages to capture the lives of a range of historical figures in indelible images. Her poem, “Thinking of Red,” about Marie Curie is one of my favorite examples of how every element contributes to the whole.

In this poem, the photograph was taken by Stieglitz as one of many hundreds of images he made of his wife, Georgia O’Keeffe, before they lived apart. I particularly like this image because it shows O’Keeffe before she became famous, as a young woman, in an intimate pose, but still directly confronting the viewer. She is already a commanding presence. I took liberties with the backstory, because the portrait itself is silent. I expanded the narrative and introduced an element of tension— was there an argument or not?

—Eve F. W. Linn

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Gina Malone

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X

X

stands for Christ whom Lula sought all her life, she who sat with back as upright as a pew, who recited Bible verses as if she were their author, who in her widowhood went to the auction house

with her tobacco bales, stood with fingers crossed and closed her eyes in long blinks, praying the

same prayer she prayed always: Help me do this, Lord. Help me.

X

equals the unknown that must be solved for. What then is the meaning of life, of a life, of her

life, her childhood spent not behind a desk or running through fields of flowers but working off

her illegitimacy in a boardinghouse?

X

marks the spot where she is buried. I Find a Grave, stare at the stone as if I stood again on that

fertile ground, in the dry grass that bristles, in the drench of heat, cicadas so loud you don’t hear

the passing cars or the twitter of birds in pines. Here lies a stop on the journey stretching from

the beginning of humankind to my own life. All of the variables. If she and he hadn’t—at that moment—then the birth of my grandmother—she, married—and my mother—who survived her mother’s uncertainty and was nevertheless taken care of and grew into someone who did want to

be a mother—and if she and my father hadn’t chosen that particular point in time––This

unknown plus that unknown begets another unknown.

X

is the name of a generation, of my generation. The world labeled us all—in our 20s—apathetic.

They said we were unknowable. Or not worth knowing. One dictionary states bluntly: “typically perceived to be disaffected and directionless.” We were held up against the revered Greatest Generation and the Baby Boomers handed much to fight for and rebel against. We are the grandchildren and children of gold and silver forebears, and we are tin in comparison. 

X

signifies Death. Crossbones. Arms crossed over breasts. Cartoon characters died with Xs over their eyes, and we laughed. When both parents die, you are no one’s daughter anymore. Your feet

walk on towards destiny, towards the day someone wonders where your soul has gone and what 

your life signified. They will seek to solve for the unknown that was you.

X

is the letter Lula signed her marriage license with, a shaky, ill-formed X at that as if no one had

ever asked anything of her before. X was the only letter she knew, and, proud or stubborn or

scared, she never asked a soul to teach her the rest, to show her how to put them together so that

she could read on paper the words memorized in her mind, the ones that slipped off her tongue

when she told and retold stories, the ones on the thin, whispery pages of the family Bible she

would hold, heavy, in her lap; words she could have used to write letters across the miles to

where her daughter lived:  Dear Maggie, We are all fine here. It will be time to harvest soon.

How are you and the children? I wish you could see my ferns and flowers. When we pull up in

the yard after church, it looks like the whole porch is blooming. It’s a sight. Write soon. Love,

Mother

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Although I never heard that my great-grandmother was an unhappy woman, I ache when I think of her going through life without being able to read. I have loved language and books since my mother read to me as a child, and when she lay dying last year, seemingly unaware of what was going on around her, the hospice nurses assured us that she still heard us, and so I read to her—poetry and the first chapters of a novel she had loved as a child. 

There is so much I want to know about the past, about the lives that have led to my own—and so much of it will never be known. As I grow older and as I accept—reluctantly—having lost both my parents in the last four years, my poems have become “visits” with family I never got the chance to know, or knew but perhaps not well enough before they were gone. I visit, both to know them better and to give them voices, imaginary as those voices may be. 

I read poetry as I have read everything in my life—with reckless abandon. Discovery of one poet leads to another. A few of the poets I read to understand craft while also seeking beauty and wisdom are Adrienne Rich, Jane Kenyon, Natasha Tretheway, Michael Longley, and Ted Kooser.

I am fortunate to share my days and nights with a painter. Richard has taught me to see in different ways than ones that come naturally to me. I cherish our talks about creativity—its rewards and frustrations—and how our explorations are different and yet the same. As Leonardo da Vinci said, “Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.”

—Gina Malone

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Elizabeth McLagan

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You Drive but You Can’t See

            The brain is locked in total darkness—Anthony Doerr

A pool of shade, and I’m blinded. 

            The retinal screen

                        goes gray, the photoreceptors 

            are silent. The world

the mind believes in 

            sputters out. 

Panic

            imagines a deer 

                        leaping into the edge.

            Hold onto your seat. 

A curve at sixty miles  

            per hour. No brake time.

                        Possible micro-seconds

            of disaster. 

Only a held breath—

            an act of faith?

                        will see us

            back to the light.

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I am always looking for literature that goes beyond the human drama, taking me out of myself into a place of wider perspective, calming my anxieties about our current troubles and giving me hope for the future. Two books of poetry on my current shelf are Dawn Chorus by Alice Pettway, and Dear Specimen by W.J. Herbert. They do that trick for me. The quote in “You Drive but You Cannot See” is from Doerr’s novel All the Light We Cannot See, one of my favorites for its historical context and gorgeous language. A number of years ago I developed wet macular degeneration and despite excellent medical care the possibility of partial blindness exists to the point where reading might become impossible. To mine this situation for poetry, I’ve done lots of research on eye anatomy, but this poem comes out of the experience of driving back roads in the Pacific Northwest on the way to and from trailheads. Those panicked moments travelling between light and darkness seem like a microversion of the possibilities I face.

—Elizabeth McLagan

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Shaun R. Pankoski

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Driving to Chemo, Early Morning

I revel

at a flock of snowy egrets, 

flying in the bluest sky.

They line up

like a knotted string of pearls, 

strewn across my windshield.

Vagrants, like me,

they were blown off course, 

traveling a long distance 

without rest

to find themselves here, 

only the glass dividing us.

We've met this way

for months now.

As I drive from the mountain

to the sea,

they journey from silty tidal flats 

to tall mangrove trees.

The sky is my church

and they are my familiar friends, 

my prayer beads,

my congregation in white. 

Steady guides

in the face of uncertainty.

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I came to poetry in fits and starts. I toyed with the idea of being a 'poet' but never seemed to have/make time for a disciplined practice. I fantasized that I would actually have the time and inclination to do so with retirement in 2020 from my County of Hawaii job. But it took a second breast cancer diagnosis in 2022 and a simultaneous, serendipitous posting about Molly Fisk's Poem-a-Day group on Facebook for me to get serious. I have been writing with them online for a little over a year now and I truly believe it saved me. What a lovely, talented and supportive assemblage of human beings! I seem to respond well to prompts, I like the idea of 'solving a puzzle,' so to speak, and being accountable to the group. It has helped me immensely, both in shaping my voice and writing consistently.

I have lived on both coasts and the Midwest, currently from Volcano, Hawaii. I have been an artist's model, a modern dancer, a massage therapist, waitress, house cleaner, census taker, and honorably discharged Air Force veteran. So I guess I have a lot of raw material! This poem came from my recent breast cancer battle. I would say that Mary Oliver brought me to poetry as a young adult. But every day I read someone else's work that catches in my throat and makes me sit very still, eyes closed. And every day I get to wake up and be a poet. What a blessing.

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—Shaun R. Pankoski

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Cindy Veach

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Missing

          When my body no longer contained his 

I made a point of taking him out to the sandy spit

where I walked days he was becoming somebody.

I won’t say when god was making him—mouth, 

eyes, limbs, heart—because I can now admit

I don’t believe, the way I can now admit this:

I didn’t recognize myself after his body left my body. 

          At the spot where the Sound wraps around

the point—where loose logs, deadheads, culls

once washed up from the old Pope & Russell

sawmill—there’s now a fancy inn, condos. I missed 

the flutter, even his sharp ankles, or was it a fist,

between my ribs. A thousand iridescent mussel 

shells, split open, soft bodies pilfered by gulls. 

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Like many women I put writing on the back burner while raising children and working full time. My writing hiatus lasted twenty years and, as odd as it may sound, I was inspired to return to poetry after seeing the movie Julie & Julia. Instead of tackling a Julia Child recipe every day for a year and blogging about it as Julie did in the film, I wrote a poem a week for two years and shared it on a blog. At the same time I started attending a local writer’s workshop where I became part of a community of other writers. 

While writing is largely a solitary endeavor I have found that the company of other writers is a necessary ingredient in my writing life. Together, we workshop our poems, cheer acceptances and encourage each other when the rejections inevitably arrive. Since rekindling my writing life I’ve had work in many wonderful journals and published two full-length poetry collections both after the age of sixty. 

My poem, “Missing,” is a postpartum reflection thirty years after the birth of my first child. Sometimes the passage of time allows us to write about something that went unsaid and unacknowledged for decades.

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—Cindy Veach

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Kristin Camitta Zimet

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PRACTICE DOES NOT MAKE PERFECT

Nobody tells you, or it won’t sink in—grief gets

stuck. Not like training wheels that come off,

finally, when the hands that steady you let go,

and you are done with gravity, with picking 

gravel from your knees, and you can fly, standing 

on the pedals, both hands in the air. You’re more

kin to the black lab pushing sore hips to hinge, 

circling on the bed that’s getting harder, flopping 

to a new position. Never quite closing her eyes.

And yet at 70, you have to learn to do it, grieve,

like practicing your great-grandmother’s tongue.

It’s part of your inheritance, but so unnatural,

you can’t imagine fluency, although you find 

sometimes you’re praying in it, this time let me

settle, let me roll forward. Is this your voice, 

grunts and whimpers in the back of the throat? 

Alphabet unfamiliar, root words unknowable. 

The verbs wrong, too many tenses for the past.

What can you do but growl the syllables until

they sort of start to have a resonance, a meaning

builds, you give up but almost begin to guess.

What can you do but brush at your torn pants,

straighten the bent handlebars, maybe weave 

a playing card into the back spokes so for ten

seconds, twenty, your bike revs the runway, 

is a jet? What can you do but gather yourself 

to make room this time, each time the dog thuds 

down and sighs nearly to sleep against your knees? 

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On certain evenings my mother and father, each with a book, would sit on facing love seats before the unlit fireplace. Poetry was the fire. My mother often chose Robert Browning’s soliloquies; my father liked Elizabeth Barret Browning’s love sonnets. They would take turns reading aloud, smiling, sighing, letting words sink in. 

This was an anomaly. We did not talk about feelings in my house; we talked about ideas and achievements. My mother did not say, “I love you”; she taped approving words to the foot of my bed. As a child, then, this sharing of poems was the most intimate act I witnessed. 

From it I understood that poetry was both manly and womanly. It was a grownup thing. More than beautiful, it mattered. You came back to it and leaned on it. Poetry was connective, and it filled out what was hiding in plain sight. Poems, like people, had layers—what they said, what they revealed without saying, what they brought into being. I saw that as a poet I too might own the complex and unsayable. And I might be heard.

I began to write at age six. Passion was not seemly in my family, but it was the native condition of the poets I loved and followed. I still vibrate with Roethke, his urgency, This urge, wrestle, resurrection of dry sticks, / lopped limbs struggling to put down life…(“Cuttings”), and his embrace of the imperfect and ambiguous, Light takes the tree, but who can tell us how? (“The Waking”). I still share with Hopkins how passion struggles with discipline and how we revel in the living texture of language. And I hope, with every poem I write, people will sit down together and read it aloud. 

—Kristin Camitta Zimet

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Patricia Zylius

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Walking, I pick up a stone                                                                              
 

and burnish its flanks with a bit of old flannel.

It’s dense and heavy, smooth

as a tusk, with the vague shape

of an elephant — here a trunk, here an ear. 

How will the wild gold swath

of dry grasslands suffer

the silence of trumpets gone to ground,

weeping that echoes

when the herds are dust?

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I was walking on a beach in Baja California, picking up stones that appealed to me. I was about to return to our campsite when one more stone called Me! Me! Out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of its smooth surface and dusky green color. California serpentine. My hands were full, but I managed to add it to the pile I carried. I didn’t look at it closely until later, when I noticed that different faces of the stone took the shapes of different views of an elephant’s head — ear, trunk, eye. I love elephants. Some time later, in a workshop with Dorianne Laux, following a prompt to write about an object using “Acorn” by Phillis Levin as a model, I started this poem. The early drafts had way more story and description that got weeded out. The resulting poem is vastly different from the model, but “Acorn” is what gave me the start. 

I had the opportunity to study with Ellen Bass for years, when she was holding class for a group of us in her home. I’ve also taken part in many workshops with Marie Howe, Dorianne Laux, and Joseph Millar, all of whose work I love and turn to often, along with that of Sharon Olds, Ross Gay, Jane Hirshfield, Wendell Berry, Ada Limón, and Jack Gilbert. 

I believe in the value of learning poems by heart. Some of the ones I hold inside are “Failing and Flying” (Jack Gilbert), “Kindness” (Naomi Shihab Nye), “The Peace of Wild Things” (Wendell Berry), “Love after Love” (Derek Walcott), “Those Winter Sundays” (Robert Hayden), and “Beach Roses” (Mark Doty). I love Marie Howe’s “Singularity,” but haven’t felt brave enough to try learning that one by heart. Maybe someday. 

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—Patricia Zylius

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