൪uartet will go to three issues a year beginning with the January 2023 issue.

Please see the revised submission periods on the Submissions page.

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Anne Barney

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Another Autumn 

 

Tree branches

scrape the sky,

like bucks removing velvet.

 

They toss their flame bouquets

into the wind.

Whoever catches them is next.

 

Their fires race along the path.

I catch a scent of smoke.

The chestnut vendor offers me a bag.

 

An older man

is playing “Autumn Leaves”

on his tenor, his heart

 

slowly breaking.

Each note rises and falls,

but my own breath stops

 

with the refrain:

“I miss you most of all, my darling,

when autumn leaves start to fall.”

 

But the sky is Canadian blue

and the air as crisp

as a wine-sap apple.

 

I will sink my teeth

into what is left

of this glorious life.

 

I will get drunk 

on the hot-mulled wine of love,

stirred with a stick of cinnamon.

 

And I will still remember 

that summer,

and how it ended,

 

the change in temperature,

the shift in light,

and the urgency of yellowjackets

 

searching for one last sting.

 

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My late mother, Jessalyn Gordy Barney, was the first poet I knew. When I was growing up, she was

the neighborhood “Poet Laureate,” penning poems for the newsletter and friends’ parties. It wasn’t until she’d passed away that I found her serious poems, tucked inside an envelope in her desk

drawer. I suppose I started writing poems to be like her. And, when I was nine years old and Jack &

Jill magazine awarded me Honorable Mention for one I’d written, I was hooked on the idea of

having a book of my poems published!

 

I achieved that goal in 1993, though in bittersweet fashion. After four years of infertility treatments and one miscarriage, I gave birth to my premature daughter Jessalyn, who lived a few short minutes. After 44 rejection slips, Stolen Joy, the book of poems I wrote afterwards, was accepted by Icarus Books, a now-defunct press in Baltimore. 

 

After my son David’s stillbirth two years later, my husband and I determined our family of two was all the family we needed. I continued writing poems and getting three more chapbooks published, until 2016 when I ran smack into an unexplained writer’s block. My trying and failing to write

poems felt way too reminiscent. I was fortunate to have a good counselor who recommended I try visual arts as something totally different, and good teachers who have helped me in my pastel painting, which I love doing. 

 

It was during the pandemic I joined the Rehoboth Beach Writers Guild and discovered their

monthly Art in the A.M. program. Between that and Rattle magazine’s Ekphrastic Challenge, I

found writing about someone else’s artwork incredibly freeing. My writing had come back to me, from wherever it had been, like someone I had missed for so long. 

 

—Anne Barney

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Maria Berardi

 

 

Released

 

I may be starting to be done 

with this     starting to not be 

needing to do this

 

to be heard     it has all been said 

it will all be said

I do not need to be the one who says it.

 

All of this is holy.

That we get to be here at all

here     I am writing how

 

I might not need to write any more.

I smile     I sense in a hot upstairs 

attic room in my mind

 

a veil slowly falls     puffed with sunlight air

shimmering slightly in the dust motes

slowly     luxuriously     it settles on the wood of the floor.

 

An invitation for a picnic on the wood of the floor

which is also the roof of the room below.

Silence      no movement      heat     air.

 

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I did not write poetry seriously until I was twenty-four because I had T.S. Eliot grafted onto my

brain and felt I could never live up to that. I invested in a small metaphorical hatchet to free 

myself.

 

My inspiration is, essentially, the profound strangeness of being alive at all, and of the strangeness of being human in a universe that is not. My artistic project is the probing of what exactly a poem is,

so much closer to visual art than to a novel: this child from the long-ago divorce of music and words, given in custody to silence. My workspace is in my kitchen, which seems just about right. My process is one of listening for transmissions and trying to catch them on paper before they dissipate: the glimpse, the complicated knowledge.

 

I like to read some older poetry as the last thing I do before sleep. And I like to harmonize it in

some way with the season, often a long work – the Duino Elegies for summer, Sonnets to Orpheus in autumn, Four Quartets for winter – I read the same sequence over and over for that quarter of the

year, let it penetrate and infuse my daily life. This past summer I had the delight of a deep dive into Basho, Issa, Buson, and their students, so many poems about chirping insects read in the dark, listening to insects chirp through my window. This winter I am reading all of Emily Dickinson’s

work – I think I am old enough now, and weird enough. Maybe.

 

—Maria Berardi

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Anne Wessel Dwyer

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Blessed 

 

Those first mornings after Jack’s birth, she woke astonished

by his fierce grip, his breath, her easy surrender 

to the routine and respectability of motherhood.

 

The twins that followed were velvety and blue-eyed, 

and her husband bought her a box of oil paints she left unopened 

and beamed when they toddled into St. Paul’s for 9 o’clock Mass.

 

But one night, she heard the rabbit screaming,

and that afternoon, wiping the highchairs and washing urine-soaked diapers, she

removed herself from herself so she could feed the children and put them to bed.

 

On her mother’s advice, she saw Father Casey in the rose-wallpapered rectory 

where she embarrassed herself by weeping, as Father poured tea, stirred 

sugar with a silver spoon, assured her of her duty and heavenly reward.

 

Driving home, she remembered one pink and white spring afternoon, 

leaving school with a boy in a red Corvette - Sinatra on the radio, the caress of breeze 

under the promise of blossoms,  

 

and Sister Madonna, bent and small, peering through the barred 

convent window, waxy hand raised through her fallen black sleeve  

       -  a blessing  -   a warning  -   a wave goodbye?

 

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I learned to read from three gold cloth-bound books called Lives of the Saints, shelved with a family Bible. My parents and extended family were quite faithful: a favorite uncle was a priest; one grandmother refused to divorce so she could take communion. I was taught by traditional nuns and priests before attending a Jesuit university where questioning religion was not only accepted but encouraged. The Jesuit notion of “a man [sic] for others” rooted my life, but gradually I disconnected from many of the Church’s teachings. 

 

When my mother died five years ago, I was swept up by thoughts of women like her who attended Mass every Sunday with five, eight, ten, even twelve children, and were denied pleasure and power over their lives by the institution and the clergy. I began to see this as a certain type of enslavement. This poem emerges from that time, although I did not write it until I retired from teaching and my own children needed me less. 

 

There are so many poets I return to, but I love when a friend shares a new poem or I find a new poet who sends me into that space where I feel connected.  At the Dodge Poetry Festival in October 2022, an already favorite, Ellen Bass, wowed, but one program with Jake Skeets, Kari Gunter-Seymour,

and Geffrey Davis, among others, made me turn, teary-eyed, to my companion, also raised in the Church, who agreed it was, “Just like church … only not our church.” The beauty and humanity

present in poetry has become the conduit to a necessary life lived deeply - and, fortunately, one that inspires joy and awe.

 

—Anne Wessel Dwyer

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Christine Jones

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My daughter is in love                          

 

My daughter is in love with an immigrant who raised his little sister on his own from the age of fifteen, who learned  to  cook  and  clean  and  be  the  kuya  she  looked  up  to. Now I see the look 
in my daughter’s eye, half hidden by the sunflower in the field, intent on her uyab, the one holding

the camera, the one who has captured her light, who’s lifting her, in another photo, above tall stalks reaching for the cloud that looks like the cloud from her favorite children’s book which we read over and over and imagined every animal that cloud could be, always settling on the sheep, soft as her puff she  still  keeps  tucked  in  her  pillow  she  now  shares  with  him.  I  hear  the  calm  pitch
in her voice to his quick generous stitch of our language he’s learning still. Look forward to tasting the ube sweet bread he’ll make. And when he shares the tale of Lapu Lapu, his city named after 
the chieftain who killed Magellan, he repeats the spelling with the same patience I imagine he had when he taught his little sister how to read, how to make her bed, how to be kind. In Baltimore, 
he manages a bakery and passes out pastries to everyone he meets. Carries them in his basket 
on his bike, which is how he met my daughter, when they both had separately stopped at a light, 
on an idyllic blue-sky day with those clouds shaped like sheep, and he said with a lilt and a smile Isn’t it a stupid, I mean stupendous day? 

 

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I chose the practical path of a career in physical therapy despite having an inner desire to attend art school. More than twenty years passed before I picked up a brush again. A few mediocre portraits of my children reignited a spark, but it was poetry that called to me. With the transition of a divorce

in full throes, my best friend gave me Love Poems from God, Twelve Sacred Voices from the East

and West, translated by Daniel Ladinsky. She remembered the homemade curtain in my dorm room with a sketch and inscription of Shel Silverstein’s “Hug O’ War.” Silverstein was my first poet love. Later, came Mary Oliver.

 

I rediscovered my affinity for the sound and feel of words when I fell in love (truly in love) with the man who would become my second husband. He encouraged me to explore my creativity and gave

me the courage to share my voice by attending an MFA program in my forties. There I was

introduced to a plethora of poets. Elizabeth Bishop, Linda Gregg, Paul Celan, and Charles Simic

sang to me. Currently, on my nightstand are Vievee Francis and Frank X. Gaspar. 

 

My daughter being in love is a joy. My featured poem flowed after a prompt from poet, Campbell McGrath during a workshop at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA. I was interested

in Campbell’s workshop because of his use of narrative and the long line. My tendency is to lean the other way, but it was freeing to let the narrative and line flow naturally in this poem. As we hope love flows. To quote Mary Oliver,” “Joy is not made to be a crumb.”

 

—Christine Jones

Jayne Marek

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Cloning

 

 

When I look out the window, they are there:

father and mother, having stood for years in the weather

 

I left them to. I said they left me.

 

What makes words into yarn, spun like a snare

as invisible fingers twist them into a skein, a skin?

Scientists cloned a black-footed ferret from flesh 

 

dead for thirty years. The baby knit anew out of stupor

kicked awake and suckled false milk. Sleek-furred, 

 

black-eyed, aware, but without an adult

 

to warm against. Here, young one, I want to say, 

wrap yourself in this swath, survive the seasons.

 

I worked it myself but never gave it to anyone.

 

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This piece arose from a prompt in a poets’ group, as we wrote drafts toward a particular form (couplets alternating with monostichs). My topic derived from a news story about cloning intended to assist in the conservation of an endangered species. I have mixed feelings about cloning. If we’re

so smart, why can’t we take more decisive action to help preserve an ecosystem? Further, what happens to the individuals displaced from their normal environments? That idea got under my skin. On its way to the page, it picked up some anxieties about my relationships with my parents. Even in loving families, there are plenty of ambiguous or downright unhappy details that combine to tie us and shape us. I’ve always wondered how best to deal with feelings of dissatisfaction about my own agency in the family group, even years later.

 

The first draft came out fairly quickly, empathizing with the young living creature in an alien environment. The tone was somewhat distant, a bit resentful. There were also nuances of offering amends for the inevitable processes of rejection as offspring learn to become autonomous. The

drafts became a tangle of alienation, connection, and creativity. When knitting as a metaphor

popped in, as if with its own energy, I realized it could work. (It constitutes a nod to my sister, who

is an expert with yarns.) The ending—as many do—went through numerous revisions to arrive at the final first-person statement. To me, the poem characterizes the complex mysteries of relationships and self-expression.

 

—Jayne Marek 

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Kate Maxwell

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A View to the Opera House

 

She stands staunch: sure, before high sandstone 

wall, long limbs splayed—fanning out her foliage 

finery into wafting warmth of day like the swathes 

of a silk green opera stole. She’s outlasted centuries. 

 

Old Dowager Fig—her partner taken long ago 

by arborists claiming rot—commands her harbour

front abode, casting shade and aged splendour 

over our small dreams. Slowly, she’s crept tendrils

 

into cracks of bricks, her gnarly roots and branches 

mocking stone and man-made barriers. She will not

be moved. Dressed in heavy, musty ruffles of wooded

brown and dark emerald, she is an umbra haven

 

in the humid kiss of summer—a canopy of old grace

along the foreshore. We clamber over high curving 

roots, run fingertips along her craggy hide and nestle 

into her embrace. Leaves fall, larger than footprints,

 

carpeting the ground in moist, pungent leaf litter.

We sweep aside the fallen with the sides of our shoes 

before laying picnic blankets. Brush turkeys bob along 

the periphery of her shadow; bow-legged, plodding 

 

and pecking, swaying their plump sides as they fuss

and forage. Her fruit is small and hard, often dropping 

like pellets into the reverie of a shady rest or a tossed 

garden salad. Even grand old ladies get irritable,

 

dribble when they rest or become restless with wind.

On summer nights, bats fly from the Botanical Gardens, 

forming angle shapes in the indigo sky, and roost within

her branches. They savour her wizened little fruits: hard

 

as rock, nutty and round, while beetles scurry in mulch

around her trunk. Air is laced with rot, salt, and bat piss,

but still, we gather beneath her generous arms, lauding her

longevity as we hail the sculpted shells across the harbour.

 

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This poem is both a celebration of the aged feminine and the natural splendour of my beautiful harbour city. I originally named the poem ‘Old Diva’ but that seemed to take away from the grace

and strength I wanted to portray in this poem about an old fig tree. My poetry usually leans a little dark and cynical, however, I wanted to explore more of the ordinary beauty and wonder around us every day. 

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I’ve written since childhood, dabbled a little more in my late twenties, and then lost my literary soul entirely for decades as I devoted myself to family and teaching. I’m not sure how I coped without writing. I’m not sure I did. Still too busy to read as much as I would like, I spend my free time

reading literary journals and writing poems, flash, and stories. I have yet to decide which genre I prefer but I am content to settle into my mid-fifties with a view to enjoying more creativity. 

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I’ve always enjoyed the classics, Plath, and Yeats especially, but have immersed myself in Australian and Irish poetry lately. Sarah Holland-Batt and Toby Fitch are great contemporary poets, and I am also enjoying emerging poets such as Audrey Molloy and Denise O’Hagan. There are many poem

lines that have stuck with me over time but possibly none as powerfully as Auden’s four simple

words: “Stop all the clocks.” I remember physically catching my breath the first time I read those words of grief.

 

—Kate Maxwell

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Gloria Monaghan

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The Sorrow of Stones                                                              

 

When I do weep, they humbly at my feet

Receive my tears and seem to weep with me;

And, were they but attired in grave weeds,

Rome could afford no tribute like to these.

                                                            Titus Andronicus

 

Almost November and the yellow elm leaves pretend nothing

petunias and zinnias blossom partially.

The retaining wall, which is at least as old as I am, built in the sixties

collapsed during night rains.

 

The mason tells me it is a lost cause

each stone is different from each other, no sister no brother.

He laughs when I weep about the wall. 

I think of Frost and am grateful for my neighbor

the cats, the curling sun drenched leaves.

My fingers now ache when I wake.

The sun falls partial on the pokeweed and wild celery

of the side garden, which must also be taken.

 

It is not a disaster, this shelter in place.

There was no gunman at school, just a girl in a killing outfit.

I wonder why I love the wall so much.

Each stone different tells its own story

of suffering and survival only to collapse.

Ignoble acquiescence among the mist slim tender leaves 

like the school children off the yellow bus, they gather together.

 

The mason tells me the stones are all different 

some are made of granite. He knows little of their lives.

Half of the wall looks more like a path more like the stones

in Titus attired in grave weeds. If they could talk, here is what they would say;

Learn from us that beauty is transitory,

and it is impractical to put sharp rocks on top 

(it doesn’t matter- they do nothing.)

The trees can fight back and knock down walls.

 

I try to touch one, but the caress is one sided

            The moss over the stone says, leave me be.

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It is always hard to say goodbye to the yellow and orange, flowers in late fall- to know that the

winter is coming, and they will die maybe not today or tomorrow, but it will happen in the near future. Like any transition, one is attached to the past. There is a sense of melancholy and nostalgia before the actual event. Perhaps this happens more to older people who understand that their time

is limited.  In the case of the wall, still saying goodbye was almost like Titus after losing everything. His sons now dead, his daughter raped and silenced forever by her rapists. His senators, friends and colleagues walk by him. They have forgotten him and in his own deep loss he confesses and weeps to the stones. 

 

When the ancient retainer wall covered in moss collapsed after heavy rains- my heart collapsed with it. I would write and read there usually in summer in my chair looking at the wall and the side

garden. When the wall fell, it took me back to other losses and heartbreaks that I faced alone after divorce. I know the wall could never be replaced that kind of stone building is gone now in this century. Whether it is a child with problems, or one who leaves you for greener pastures, or bad

news told in the rain, it seems we need a place to confess, a place to weep, a place of anonymity.

When I finally hired a more sympathetic and handsome mason, he told me that the water and tree roots pushed the stones away. This metaphor that the roots of what we look at every day, and the

soft rain outside can conquer stones a man built over a century ago gave me wild hope. 

 

—Gloria Monaghan

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Miriam O'Neal

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I Imagine Talking to the Man I Left in Spring

 

You ask what’s changed. 

And though it’s everything, 

I only have the heart to tell 

about the wall we’re building 

to keep the sea from devouring 

more coastline. 

 

This strip of sand is home.

This cove cradles the ashes of our dead. 

And lately the whole world seems

like a beam post beetle’s hatched eggs

devouring us from the inside out.

 

I read somewhere you’ve found success 

designing homes where inside walls 

can be moved or removed without the roof

falling in—the way old barns were built

with room for the breath of horses.

I read that people love your work.

 

I thought of the cottage near a beach

I never got to see, where summer marked 

your adolescent cells—salt-glazed, 

sun-struck, grit of sand beneath 

your feet on worn linoleum 

And waves—always—even in dreams.

 

It was for the best, the way we left it.

Or, let me say it, I left. 

For months after, on days alone, I felt 

the crushing lilac shade of that parting,

the sleight of hand as yours slipped

out of mine.

 

This spring the willow lost its grip— 

and up on the bluff, condemned but 

unremoved, the neighbor’s rotted 

cedar deck dangles above the beach.

The bay glitters with Right Whales’ 

spume. Some days, hope is exhausting.

 

I tell you, Now I am this  

and there is no way back.

Like the shallow rooted willow,

Now, failing is what I do best. 

You ask if I still love my children. 

God! Yes! I say and you say, 

 

Okay then. Good.

 

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I heard poems in the womb. Irish ancestry and parents who loved poetry and fiction brought me to the music in language early. 

 

There was also loss and a subterranean sadness I had to find a way to locate, bring to the surface,

and expel from my own life. As Rilke wrote in “The Singer Sings Before the Child of Princes,” “Your life is so inexpressibly your own / because it is laden with so many. // Can you not sometimes feel how all pasts/ grow light, when you’ve lived awhile, / how they gently prepare you for amazement.”

Granted, Rilke ignored childhood trauma in this passage. But his focus on “when you’ve lived

awhile” speaks to me after 50. All that I bring to the surface through my poems, is accompanied by

my amazement at still being here. Poetry may be one way we survive ourselves, at least for a while.

 

We Start With What We’re Given, my first collection (Kelsay Books 2018) has a section dedicated

Esther Lurie, who survived the Lithuanian Ghetto of Kovno and four different slave labor camps. She believed the artist’s work was to bear witness to the world as it is. But she also loved showing what might have been missed, like girls in the garden in the Ghetto. The mystery hidden in the quotidian

is my favorite kind.

 

Rilke’s “light” means a feeling but it could also refer to a means of seeing. My touchstone in this moment is Linda Gregg. In particular, I love, In the Middle Distance. Her poems weave daily life (observation, heartbreak, celebration, and mystery). She offers an unflinching gaze. I like to think

my poem, “I Imagine Talking to the Man I Left in Spring” uses Rilke’s light of time passed and a

gaze like Gregg’s.

 

—Miriam O’Neal

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Michele Parker Randall

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Everglade Girls

     after Two Girls by Tina Blau

 

The girls in blue could be any girls, and any marsh 

could be the marsh beyond them, with smudge-white 

light in the far distance, across the calm water—all 

 

visible light is light—be it house, beacon, streetlamp, 

or fire. The girls stand between upland and shoreline, 

next to the kind of boathouse someone’s uncle builds

 

under the charge: how hard can it be?  Unmatched 

corrugated metal panels are staggered, and in a storm

under those metal waves—the girls’ favorite place—

 

rain drum and wind rattle drown worries for a moment. 

The girls don’t break. Won’t break. Their days continue,  

blue skirts dry before sunup and a return to their nets. 

 

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Old and new—two poets I keep returning to are Takamura Kōtarō and Evelyn Araluen.

 

“Lemon Elegy” by Kōtarō was written for his wife, Chieko, and I’ve read a handful of translations, each taking nothing from the other but adding layers to my understanding of his mastery of

language. His opening lines: So earnestly you’d waited for a lemon / There on your sad, white,

shining bed of death. One translation has sad, bright white death bed, four descriptors in a row—a

word-car pile-up where each one has its own impact. Memorable, but the language that makes my heart stop, still, after a decade of reading it:

 

Right on the rim of life, she concentrated 

Into that slipping moment the sweet core 

Of all the love in her life. 

 

My favorite translation has all life’s love into one moment lived, while another translation

has fallen instead of lived. My brain superimposes the differences, and I hear them all, like the aspect perception duck-rabbit illustration. All are true in the one image.

 

Evelyn Araluen’s work contains similar illusions: sunslip, sunsink, belly&bones. The pressure

pushing words together creates magic. Sunslip is not the same as sun-slip or sun slip.

And, sunslip comes as a surprise, tucked into the middle of three lines:

 

To learn to sleep the scrub again

To gather enough sunslip for my belly

To wash my skin back into its scent (from “Home, After the Fire”)

 

Araluen has a memorable word-car pile-up in her poem “Blood Mouth:” the blue grey green of

winter sunsink. Each word impactful, but together they form an unexpected union where the combination is each individual word and a new expression. 

 

This is how I want to write.

 

—Michele Parker Randall

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Claudia M. Reder

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Chagall’s Blue

 

Chagall conversed with blues: waistcoat blue,  

flax blue. The blue that shapes 

a bouquet of flowers or a pair of lovers; 

ultramarine illuminates lovers kissing, 

or a pair of white pigeons atop the sky-blue tree.

 

Blue becomes a napping place.

I lie down beneath it and look up

at the shining blue faces,

at the hooves already leaping into the blush of clouds.

 

But what would Chagall do with this heron  

outside my door, the gray blue  

underside of its wings, the one crackled stump? 

 

The heron lodges in the sky, the blue opera,

filling the heavens.

 

All these years, I keep writing into the wound, 

salt it with tequila or vodka. Instead, 

I could tilt the palette, 

plant flowers in the sky  

with tender hands. 

 

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When I was young I hummed poems. I remember loving Poems of Magic and Spells ed. by William Cole and Silver Pennies, by Blanche Jennings Thompson. I always loved words. When I was about

ten someone gifted me a book of Emily Dickinson’s poems. I remember the cover was pale blue and I think (or misremember) that it contained black and white illustrations or etchings. I did not understand what I was reading but I loved the sounds of the language. When my parents divorced I was twelve and in those days divorce was rare. Writing my private poems kept me going.  Poetry was and is a constant. Now I am retired and live near the beach in southern California. Walking along

the coast and viewing beautiful sunsets replenishes my creativity.  

 

The poets I searched for spoke from different centuries: Sappho, Dickinson, Bishop, and

Akhmatova. These women poets offered their words to me when I was a young girl who sat on the stoop reading, traveled on subways and buses reading, who went to college and found that I could choose my poetry family. Later there were other poets to admire and learn from: Rilke, Celan, Szymborska, Alicia Ostriker, Eavan Boland, and Ruth Stone. Too many others to mention.

 

Sometimes I think I became a poet because my mother (Latvian) and her mother (Russian) spoke in metaphor as Russians do. Having escaped the Holocaust and landing in New York City, they surrounded me with their Eastern European relatives. Those relatives are gone, but in my mind I

still hear the accents, the laughter, Yiddish thrown in their talk, the joys, and always more talk. And the food! Don’t get me started— always delicious food.

 

https://yetzirahpoets.org/jewish-poets-database/?_search=Reder

 

—Claudia M. Reder

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Caroline Reid

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Mary Ruefle is Right: Menopause is Adolescence All Over Again

 

and now that I don’t fucking care I will bang on about poetry and my dog and the poor visibility of stars in the smallest city how I long for desert darkness or a trip to anywhere with less light pollution or is it childhood have I forgotten how to breathe? flush with blood rushing at the hour when birds aren’t singing and I can’t sleep I stumble after my dog into a field to seek stars as if I were puberty’s runaway astronaut or a child pining for her lost mother’s love and once again I remember to love how beautifully my dog balances on three legs splashes pink hibiscus with his stream of piss how he swaggers across summer-dry lawn digs a hole all the way to China or is it Venus where old age grows wild like a flamboyant dancer on bare beckoning feet? and Ma is just three months gone it wasn’t a peaceful death even though that’s what we said I sang her to a heaven she didn’t believe in on Facetime in the fist of a hotel room behind shatterproof glass the stars and moon my quarantine guards and after she went they had to sedate me I was that wound up on the eighteenth floor remembering how she lay still like a body in a field remembering when there were more fields remembering 12-year-old Aphrodite turning cartwheels on the grass hands-free only in my dreams am I that weightless.

 

 

NOTE: The title of this poem is taken from Mary Ruefle’s “Pause.”  The lines “old age grows wild like a flamboyant dancer / on bare beckoning feet” are a reconfiguration of Ruefle’s line “Happy old age is coming on bare feet.”

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I had long thought about the connection between menopause and adolescence but didn’t know how to write about it. “Pause,” Mary Ruefle’s meditation on menopause from her collection My Private Property, gave me permission to try. Ruefle’s writing is unsettling and surprising: the way she juxtaposes sadness, fear and humour, combines the small and the large, imbues the ephemera of

daily life with universal meaning, splices the familiar with the strange. The young New Zealand poet Hera Lindsay Bird does the same. And I’ve realised this is also what I strive to do in my writing.  

 

I began this poem in 2021 as a meditation on menopause and adolescence. But it wasn’t working.

Then, in January 2022, I flew across Australia to be with my dying mother. As soon as I arrived the state authorities ordered me into hotel quarantine. My mother died over the next 12 hours. I

watched her death on FaceTime while my brother and sister-in-law were in the room with her. It

was hard, humbling and surreal; incredibly sad but there were also moments of laughter and

dancing. That experience became the missing piece in the poem. Death, menopause, and adolescence are all states of transformation that we can’t control. The process of writing this poem showed me how they are always there, sitting alongside, echoes of each other; and how much is beyond our control. 

 

Lately I’m reading Tishani Doshi, Victoria Chang, Ocean Vuong, Tracy K. Smith, who show me new ways of relating to grief, loss, memory and letting go; and Australian poets Caitlin Maling, Jill Jones, Rachael Mead, who all write place so well. 

 

—Caroline Reid

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Maggie Rosen

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Reckoning: Plantation Desk

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Stand and write all you want: 

Account for gains in time, wealth, pride.

 

You think you owned this desk,

those slaves, that land. Your ink

scratched maps - the lines marked

what you claimed, bequeathed.  

 

You think you wrote immortal words:

truth and only truth.

Deeds, records, certificates. Bill of sale: Jane and four children.

Last will and testament of an alcoholic racist.

 

I will outlive all of you.

My grandfather was an

oak branch that received nails, like Christ, 

stained brown the color of eyes that see everything, 

imagine the bend of a branch forced to hold a body’s weight.

 

The building where you wrote the future burned down long ago. 

 

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I love poetry writing because it forces me to be quiet and think. My life as a high school teacher,

wife, mother, and daughter is busy and noisy, and the calm when I sit to write offers an essential counterpoint. I grew up in North Carolina; writing about racism, slavery and the legacy of the white South is a central theme in my work. My chapbook, The Deliberate Speed of Ghosts, centers on my

home town of Greensboro and its complicated relationship with racism. Some of my work is hybrid

– combining maps, documents and photos with poetry. White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia by Kiki Petrosino and Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine are two works that have encouraged

me to be bold with form and structure as well as content. 

I am interested in writing about uncomfortable truths, focusing on small but potent events and things (such as thoughts of a plantation desk as in the poem here). C.D. Wright was my poetry

teacher in college, and she influenced my interest in deceptively simple, powerful images. I love her final lines from “More Blues and the Abstract Truth”: “Even. Though. The. Sky. Is. Falling. / My.

Peace. Rose. Is. In. Bloom.” 

 

—Maggie Rosen

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Deborah Straw

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Hooded

 

When I saw that middle-aged woman

go up to the podium and be hooded,

that’s when I knew I had to go for my Ph.D.,

my friend told me as, 

after eight years of

serious, complicated study,

she proofread the last copy of

her dissertation. 

 

Every comma was in its right place, 

every 12 letter environmental word spellchecked,

every citation done accurately.

She took no shortcuts;

she was both immensely proud 

and insecure about her final paper.

 

I don’t care about the doctor title, but 

it will give me bragging rights for a long time.

Her thesis on civil

rights for Native Americans and

the continual degradation of their lands,

shows her concern for all things just.

 

A woman of color herself,

struggling with physical ailments,

she is late middle aged, single,

no children. Working class.

She plays traditional fiddle music,

loves garage sales,

often hangs with her 85-year-old mother.

 

The irony of the word hooded is not lost.

Just thirty years ago, this courageous woman

might have reached another, 

less propitious point, 

not at all a pinnacle, 

but its opposite.

 

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I was fortunate to be mentored by the poet/memoirist/novelist May Sarton for many years. She inspired my poetry and much of my other writing. Others who have strongly spoken to me in their work are Joy Harjo, Mary Oliver, Billy Collins, W. S. Merwin, Galway Kinnell, Wendell Berry,

Donald Hall, and Jane Kenyon. Favorite poems include “Now I Become Myself” (Sarton),

“Remember” (Harjo) and “Biscuit” (Kenyon).

 

For 30 years, I was an instructor of literature and writing at various Vermont colleges, and I have

two published nonfiction books: Natural Wonders of the Florida Keys and The Healthy Pet Manual. Animals, friendship, the elderly and the resilience to overcome continue to inspire me. My husband and I have been in love with Paris for decades.

 

The loss of people, animals and a healthy natural environment sadden me, but writing, reading, classical music, visual art, and the comfort of animals and friends (and a good husband) continue to sustain me. 

 

—Deborah Straw

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Dawn Terpstra

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                                                     Night              flights

 

               I love the mystery of shadows            distance and romance              

           sliding across my pillowed head,            I hate how they suffer in daylight;

   

  nights with six million winged spirits,            waning moon sets at noon,

                  aloft as angels above dreams            owls camouflaged & watching,

 

                      drop feathers like swords             wait for blood-smeared lips

                upon September’s dry breast:            to drink autumnal desiccation,   

      

      nocturnal flotilla imagine my sweet           silence.

                  Secrets aboard a small boat,            The waters I long for, 

     

                                                pulled by            seahorses and fish flying,

                           your swirling currents,           diurnal sun-drenched tides. 

 

            Against a South American shore          Migrations are not mythic beasts,

           desire hides beneath coffee trees,           minor gods with melted wings

 

                   & jungle canopy pregnant              casting cloud-shadows by day 

                    with bananas and mosses,              pillars of flame by night.

 

          Soaking rains, season of shelter               Let me love the mystery,

     heat and salt on my foreign tongue,            this transient birthright,

  

                         I will never look back               soaring past the sun. 

 

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“Night flights” was written this fall as bird migrations were beginning. I am an avid birder—a

passion that developed during a time of physical recovery. I am constantly curious about the birds that move through our woodlot. After reading migration forecasts, I know on certain nights

millions of birds will fly over my small part of the world. Some of these species will appear in my

yard the next day to bulk up on insects or fruit before continuing their flights south.

 

This poem is especially dear to me as it came from an exercise during a women’s poetry retreat. This workshop and the women involved (Susan Rich and Kelli Russell Agodon) continue to inspire me as poets, educators and community builders. The exercise, to write a love/loathe poem, came together

as a double-voiced contrapuntal. I hope readers recall a sense of their own migrations through this poem.

 

After retirement I decided to return to school for my MFA in creative writing at the Rainier

Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University. Every reading and writing assignment feels like discovery and opportunity. I have been reading Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Elizabeth Bishop, Camille T. Dungy, Patricia Smith, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Kiki Petrosino, Sylvia Plath and Oliver de la Paz. Mary Oliver is a perennial favorite. 

 

Thank you, Quartet, for this beautiful journal filled with the voices of women over 50. In our

writing careers, we all know the best is yet to come.

 

—Dawn Terpstra

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Marjorie Thomsen

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Penguins

            In Memory of Gary Galanis

            

               When penguins are floating

               in the ocean, only their heads

               are visible. This is all they need

               to recognize others of their species.

                      

                          —New England Aquarium placard

 

It was like that with us—

 

I stood on your socked feet 

 

then you stood on my mine 

 

we weren’t even kids 

 

or drunk. Is being quirky 

 

a kind of species? 

 

I should quote Bukowski

 

in this poem for the gone you

 

but Ginsberg comes to mind—

 

The weight we carry is love.

 

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At a recent poetry event, a community leader read a poem that had been in one of three books he carried with him decades before when fleeing his country during war. I forced myself to think about which three books I would carry with me and why, if today were the day I had to leave my home and every book. 

 

I would grab the Collected Poems of Jack Gilbert. There’s a poem in it I cannot live without (and it’s

too long for me to memorize): “Failing and Flying.” The final two lines are “I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell, / but just coming to the end of his triumph.” These lines continue to give me perspective on loss and renewal, help me guide my psychotherapy patients, and add to the wisdom I store for parenting. 

 

I would take Nathalie Handal’s Love and Strange Horses because these poems transport me to other cultures, other bodies, other landscapes while also offering courage to write about my own sensual experiences. At 80, 90, I still want to be a woman who might ask, as Handal does: “In what hours do lovers arrive?”

 

And to keep my friend’s voice close by, I would pack Glenn Colquhoun’s Playing God.  Meeting him got me writing and reading him keeps me paying close attention to what matters and what doesn’t.

In his poem, “A spell to be cast prior to dying” he implores: “Die, die as if your whole life depended on it.” 

 

—Marjorie Thomsen

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Susan Zimmerman

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The Long Slow Time

 

 

The first sign of terminal nostalgia is intermittent blindness. A dark smear spreads over my one

good eye. Over the lens, the macula, the inner eye. Flat as the horizon, lost.

 

That was the day I forgot my name and couldn’t find my watch, the night I lost my way in the underground garage.

 

Fading eyebrows, sunspots, skin folds into little hoods. The home mirror grows familiar, benign. Strange mirrors sabotage like small bombs.

 

It was not Monday, not Thursday, not the same season or reason. Not the same woman.

 

So many days, it was not over, not ever. We quarreled, reconciled, quarreled again.

 

You waste your time as darkness falls, said the bearded man in my dream. My father’s voice but not his face.

 

This is what we did until nightfall, what we expected. We played in time like children play with

water. It was Monday or it was December and then it was over.

 

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During many years of graduate work in English literature, I learned how to read poems, but not how to write them.  After retirement, taking poetry courses and workshops outside the academy, I began to learn how to write poems.  

 

Zoom was a gift of the pandemic, enabling me to work with writers I would otherwise never have met. One was John Murillo, my seminar leader at the Palm Beach Poetry Festival in January 2022.  

He taught me to ask: how did the poet do that? how does one poet get away with something that another poet can’t? One exercise he gave the class was to prepare a “map” of a poem that interested

us, a fill-in-the-blanks Mad Lib.  

 

“The Long Slow Time” began this way. My inspiration poem was “AND WHAT MY SPECIES DID”

by Elizabeth Willis.  Filling in the blanks kept my left brain occupied—the way writing in form can do—so that my right brain was free to surprise me. It’s blissful when the unconscious mind takes

over. Whether the poem ever gets finished or published is beside the point in the face of such

ecstatic experiences.  

 

These days I devour the daily poems that arrive in my in-box and revisit great women poets I discovered in the ’70s such as Denise Levertov and Marge Piercy.  I’ve also returned to something I missed: reading aloud with others, now Ada Limón’s The Hurting Kind and Canadian poet

Catherine Owen’s Riven, which missed its deserved hoopla because it launched during the

pandemic.

 

For years I thought graduate school had been a waste of time.  But now I know it was preparing me for a wonderful retirement.  My head is full of poetry and I need every bit of it.

 

—Susan Zimmerman

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