​Jill Barrie

​

​

Margaret at the Window                                                                                 

​

Margaret at the window

sees the rampant sun rise,

hears the wind hum 

tunelessly as an old woman 

 

who lives alone. Last night,  

she heard an unknown beast 

or bird cry out in pain. 

Trains warned at crossings 

 

as they pushed through the sprawl. 

Sirens pierced the darkness 

like auditory stars. Daybreak, 

a red-tailed hawk sweeps 

 

down from a pole to pluck 

a vole from the lawn.

Rising, tail feathers spread,

blood on the horizon.

.

൪

 

Poets who have caught my eye, ear, and often my heart over the years include Ai, John Berryman, Elizabeth Bishop, T.S. Eliot, Gloria Fuertes, Jack Gilbert, Richard Hugo, Laura Jensen, Yusef Komunyakaa, Philip Levine, Robert Lowell, William Matthews, Marianne Moore, Pablo Neruda, Mary Oliver, Sylvia Plath, Mark Strand, Tomas Tranströmer, William Carlos Williams and William Butler Yeats. I appreciate the craft in their poems, beautiful use of language and imagery, and the passion they imbue. I try to use these elements in my poems.

​

—Jill Barrie

​

Caroline Bassett

 

 

Halibut Dinner, Dingle, Ireland 

 

A slab of white fish floating

on a pink sea of red pepper sauce, 

cushioned on clouds of mashed potatoes.

No bones to catch in the throat. 

 

In this land encircled by sea,

the long beauty of churches and forts

still stands after one thousand years.

An oratory of flat gray stones, 

 

a door to the west,

a window to the east to look out upon 

a hopeful rising sun, away 

from a bleak, torn, ragged life,

 

away from the babes who slid out

and died soon after, unbaptized

and doomed to Limbo, buried 

at night, a stone for a pillow,

 

in the flinty unconsecrated ground.

For a mother who knows her child 

will never see God—

what a catch in the throat.

​

൪

​

“Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky…”

 

These lines that begin T.S. Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” stay with me, many years after reading this poem for the first time. Also, “In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo,” and “The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle upon the window-panes…”

 

An invitation to enter, repetition (the women coming and going), images (the yellow fog), the description of a rather pathetic figure, the ambivalent closure of drowning to human voices—this poem contains so much that I admire. And some things that I don’t too, such as the contempt for poor Mr. J. Alfred. I do not read this poem for solace except for the consolation that comes from the joy and the magic that poetry gives us.

 

Other poets that I read include Liesl Mueller, Wisława Szymborska, Jane Hirshfield, Robert Frost, Seamus Heaney.

 

I wrote “Halibut Dinner” after a visit in April 2023 to Dingle, Ireland, as part of a sort-of retreat for my poetry group with our leader, Jude Nutter. She’s a prize-winning British poet who lives part-time in Ireland and part-time in Minneapolis, my home. I say “sort-of retreat” because we spent little time on poetry as words on paper and more as visuals to become words later on. So much beauty there and also the opposite: broken forts erected for protection during wars, for example, and for me the Gallarus Oratory (chapel), about 1300 years old, made of stone, has never leaked, but so barren and bleak a setting that I felt sorry for the families who lived on its grounds—and those dead babies buried with a stone for a pillow. Now that’s an image in need of solace. 

​

—Caroline Bassett

​​

Tanya Bellehumeur-Allatt

​
 

Mirabile Dictu: Notre Dame in Flames

April 15, 2019

 

Obscene flames lick the flying buttresses,

claw at the latticework roof. Eight centuries old, 

shrouded in black smoke,

the spire cracks like a matchstick,

topples—mysterium tremendum—

and is swallowed by the gaping maw.

 

All of Paris watches open-mouthed—

like the chimeras and grotesques

fastened to the cathedral’s corners—

impotent witnesses to the blessed 

canopy’s destruction.

No amount of water can stop the fire. 

 

Two centuries to construct, 

the sanctum sanctuarium

surrenders in mere hours to the mammoth blaze.

Deep in the cathedral’s belly 

sits the wooden, eight thousand pipe 

Cavaillé-Coll organ: immovable, helpless. 

 

But next morning—mirabile mysterium—

like Christ’s crown of thorns plucked 

from the inferno, the instrument,

though coated in toxic lead dust, 

is intact—mysterium tremendum et facinans—

protected by the vault above, 

as if covered by Heaven’s wing. 

​

൪

 

I write about what troubles or fascinates me. As I watched Notre Dame go up in flames, I poured my horror and disbelief onto the page. I was devastated by the toppling of the spire, especially at the beginning of Holy Week, when the cathedral should have been a sanctuary of peace instead of a blazing inferno. 

 

I wove in Latin phrases from the liturgy of the Mass as echoes of the centuries of worship that have ascended from that iconic place. The poem moves from lament over what was lost to wonder over what was saved: especially the magnificent grand orgue.  I love what Henry Miller said: “Either you take in believing in miracles or you stand still like the hummingbird.” 

​

—Tanya Bellehumeur-Allatt

​

Charlotte M. Friedman

​
 

I give thanks

 

when I wake and he is not next to me 

but already out the door, in the car, on his way 

to an AA meeting at seven a.m.

 

while the water heats for coffee, 

and I scoop kibble into a bowl, kneel down

next to our seven-month-old puppy, his dainty bites 

as the bowl is emptied.

 

as he strains at the leash, pulls hard 

toward a pile of leaves and my husband sits 

in a folding chair in some church basement, 

thermos resting on his knee, listening to strangers 

struggling with sobriety, the holiday, family.

 

for yesterday at the breakfast table 

when I reached for the Times spread out between us, 

and he shared stories of men, some women, but mostly men, 

who’d hit bottom, lost spouses/children/houses/jobs. 

for his stubbornness and belief in change at 70.

 

for the days he might say

I never thought of that 

that must’ve been hard 

I didn’t realize you worried. 

 

while I chop Brussels sprouts and chestnuts,

break open a pomegranate for the clear, red seeds 

stir the onion, tear the bread, boil the yams

and he does not say, as he did last year and the year before

it doesn’t matter about the food. 

 

when he comes in downstairs, this man 

who never wanted a dog, and I hear him 

not talking but cooing 

you are the most beautiful dog in the world 

yes, yes, you are. 

​

൪

 

I am in my third marriage, as is my husband, and, needless to say, it is complicated. There continue to be surprises—good and bad—as well as great joy and heartbreak. Li-Young Lee’s Rose, Sharon Olds’ Stag’s Leap, and Margaret Gibson’s Broken Cup are a few of the collections whose explorations of intimate relationships I greatly admire for their bravery, tenderness, and honesty as well as their gorgeous language. I look to poetry as a place to puzzle, to remember, and to delve deeper into life. Poems always offer unexpected discoveries, and to share those with readers is a particular pleasure. 

​

—Charlotte M. Friedman

​

Shelley Blue Grabel

​

​

In Praise of Spiderlings and Motherhood

                       after Christopher Smart

 

For I will illuminate Mabel, my porch spider, my Golden Orb Weaver

For I will extoll the elaborate charm of her dense circular web

For her daily spins and pulls from her own center

For the pods she crafts to contain her offspring

For the weeks she has spent outside my window

For being undaunted by my watchful face

For the yellow streaks down her busy back

For the way her limbs dance across the silk harp

For strapping her pods to different corners

For being more skilled than a sailor tying down his cargo

For the mysterious zipper line down center web

For her body as maker as material as source

For her motherhood is hailed in deep tufts of grass

For she is gone 

For I will guard her spiderlings until they too are gone

For all of this I thank you Mabel, Orb Weaver, Argiope, friend.

 

൪

​

This past summer, late August, I was frozen in place by a recurrence of Mono. A gift from my 19-year-old self. I spent days in my chair watching through my window, an enormous Orb Weaver spider spin the most spectacular luminescent web I had ever seen. I spoke words of encouragement to her daily. I researched her species to better understand her lifecycle. I sometimes wish some of my ex’s had done the same for me, but that is another story, another poem. 

 

We had quite a relationship, she and I, long term, lasting if you count it in spider years. I watched her pull silk and prepare pods for her children. I made promises to her. She knew me better in that moment than I knew myself. She distracted me from exhaustion and sore throats, body aches. I will never forget her yellow stripe down her back.

 

This is how I feel about the poetry that gets written through me, fragile as a spider web, strong as an iron rope. Always a contradiction.

​

—Shelley Blue Grabel

​

Lois Marie Harrod

​
 

The Dull Edge of Husbandry

 

            . . .  and borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry. Hamlet

 

She lent him her night

but he kept it

in the unfinished garage

with the tin cans

of rusty screws, 

the empty Mason jars

bequeathed by his mother

and the hedge clippers

too dull to trim 

the forsythia. She knew

when she asked for it back,

he would look at her

and say What night

are you talking about?

​

൪

​

A literary critic might say that Harrod’s poem “The dull edge of husbandry” uses many of her characteristic “devices” or mind patterns.  Her title is a quote from Polonius’s bloated speech of clichéd advice to Laertes: “ . . .  and borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry,” and Harrod, whose parents read the King James version of the Bible to her and her sisters twice a day, learned to love language and doubt religion at an early age. 

 

And such a critic would be right, for I see my poems as part of a long literary tradition which I love, quibble with, and sometimes deny. I like connections with what has been written; it’s where I began. I love puns and word play—not just because they amuse me, but because they create multiple meanings with their wacky dualities, ambiguities, double-talk, and puns. Words surprise and jolt me with implied insights. 

 

In “The dull edge of husbandry” the surprise word was husbandry, which means, of course, the care, cultivation, and breeding of crops and animals.  But husbandry also contains the word husband, which some wives like to care for, cultivate, and breed.  So in this little poem about borrowing and lending, a wife lends the night to her husband. In this exchange, the night, like a pair of trimming shears, dulls with things that must have happened in the night.  The husband misplaces what he borrowed. He forgets what he has done with the clippers, but if the poet is lucky, her reader sharpens Polonius’s snips. Her reader understands.

 

But how such meaning emerges as I write, I don’t know.  I don’t even remember what came first—the poem or the title. I just write until the poem happens.  Afterwards, I too understand.

​

—Lois Marie Harrod

​

Angie Hexum

​

​

Visiting My Dad

 

Sleeping in the guest bed, 

windows open and door ajar,

my husband and I leave a margin 

of cool mattress between us. 

My father is nearly eighty 

and likes it warm.

 

In the hallway, a nightlight 

casts a yellow glow on the open 

doorway to his room—

sleeping near him, a comfort

both familiar and foreign now. 

 

In the morning, I wake 

to find our door closed. 

Dad must have risen before dawn 

as he always does 

to have his toast and coffee, 

read the paper. 

 

I didn’t need to see him grasp the knob 

to know he turned it slowly, carefully, 

to know he pulled it to

so the door just met the jamb 

with a gentle kiss.

​

൪

 

I often have the sense that the world is not particularly clamoring for my poems. Sure, among the community of poets there is a passion for poetry, but for the public at large, I’d wager it ranks somewhere between cross stitch and throat singing. Yet, remarkably, I keep at it. 

 

At first, I wanted to write for the usual reasons: I loved books, I yearned to say something that mattered, I thought writers were cool. In my early twenties, I tried writing a novel. It turned out to be a lot harder than I imagined it to be, so I put it aside and got on with my life.

 

It was sorrow that brought me back to writing. In 2015, my youngest brother overdosed the night before Thanksgiving. In the face of that loss, I found solace in reading and writing poetry. For a long time, I kept a Stanley Kunitz line on a notecard on my desk: “How shall the heart be reconciled / to its feast of losses?” Somehow those words gave me comfort, I suppose because they assured me I wasn’t alone in my pain. 

 

I think it’s this sense of communion between poet and reader that draws me to poetry. A good poem feels like a window into the poet’s heart, whether the subject is some small beauty that moves them or the longing that unsettles their nights. My favorite poets are those that offer that interior glimpse in language that is both beautiful and accessible—Ted Kooser, Ellen Bass, Ross Gay, Ada Limón, and Danusha Laméris to name a few. If I ever doubt whether poetry matters, they restore my faith.

​

—Angie Hexum​

​

Jeanne Blum Lesinski

​

​

Cento:  Close to the Ground

 

Many things I do not think of,

but what I’ve glimpsed

I long for in my most hopeful of daydreams:

 

Thistleweed bursts open,

breaks and breaks and lives by breaking,

is set loose in the world,

over the yellowing, early-summer field.

 

Examine it closely.

 

Sometimes the river becomes the heart.

 

At times like these, we must learn 

from watching animals who swim by instinct,

listen to the way honeybees drone

and hover in and of the mind.

 

Choose one word—

choose to keep it or not

and say it over and over.

 

Yes.

 

We will sleep within the muted infinity of each other. 

 

 

Jack Ridl, “That’s Enough,” “The Enormous Mystery of Couples,” Li-Young Lee, “Epistle,” Brian Turner, “Jameel,” William Carlos Williams, “The Mind Hesitant,” Stanley Kunitz, “The Testing-Tree,” William Stafford, “Big World, Little Man,” “What If We Were Alone,” Elaine Seaman, “Joseph’s Coat,” Diane Seuss, “The Casket Company Is on Fire,” Conrad Hilberry, “Deaf Ear,” Gail Martin, “For My Mother, Afraid of Water,” Tim Seibles, “Something Silver-White,” Naomi Shihab Nye, “How Palestinians Keep Warm.”

​

൪

 

I read widely among the works of modern poets, and I participate in local and online poetry activities, which include workshops and readings at the Roethke House, the Saginaw, Michigan childhood home of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Theodore Roethke [Ret-key]. In his poem “Open House,” Roethke wrote “My heart keeps open house.” Mine does too. This is clear in my debut poetry collection Tethers End and in subsequent poems, like my “Cento: Close to the Ground.”

 

At a Roethke Foundation sponsored workshop, I first learned of Marion Starling Boyer’s novel in verse, Ice Hours, which contains a cento poem. Cento is Latin for patchwork or collage and has been around since Homer and Virgil. During a workshop, Boyer provided participants with a list of poetry lines and their citations that could be used to inspire a cento. Each word in the cento poem must come from a previous source and that source be acknowledged. 

 

As with most of my poems, I’m not sure exactly how “Cento: Close to the Ground” came about or what I was trying to say when I first pieced together the collage, literally pieced when I rearranged the strips of lines I’d printed out and cut apart. Upon later reflection and editing, I realized it is a love poem to an individual and to being in love with life enough to risk interactions with the world. 

 

Innately an observer and input collector, I often joke that I’m a font of trivial knowledge. And now, more than ever, I’m likely to write down lines by others that strike me as particularly memorable from works that I read or hear, in case they should become an inspiration, epigraph, or quotation within a new work of my own.

​

—Jeanne Blum Lesinski

​

Mary Rohrer-Dann

​

​

The Good News 

(after Thich Nhat Hanh)

 

The good news is: You can do it.

You can stretch out your foot, then 

 

the other, walk the same route

with the dog, dodge the same 

 

pavement cracks, pass the same winter-

weary trees and introverted houses, 

 

gardens buried under last year’s scruff.

The good news is: You can enter

 

your dog’s dedicated alertness, 

his bliss at every tree he lifts 

 

his leg against, the paths of squirrels 

and early robins he tracks, the crows 

 

on the wire who recognize him and jeer 

and he doesn’t care, just sniffs 

 

the other dogs who have pissed 

on the same trees, the winter-fattened 

 

cats who have snuck across the street 

to crouch beneath a parked car, watching 

 

with narrowed amber eyes and fluffed fur.

The good news is, if you pay attention, 

 

a curl of damp earth threads the air, 

purple rockcress, bright as confetti, 

 

fills the sidewalk seams, a gaggle 

of yellow crocuses chatter 

 

under the hedge, and now, see 

how the sun edges the clouds in fire.

​

൪

 

Sometimes a poem is like a piece of sea glass you find at the ocean’s edge. It needs just a quick rinse in fresh water to reveal its artless self. This poem was one of those gifts, inspired during a spiritual writing workshop led by Donna Baier Stein of Tiferet Journal. To hold in my mind and heart both the world’s relentless suffering, and its miracles and mystery–that is my daily challenge. My aging pup reminds me to be awake to each moment. Even more, I am at my most fully open when with my fiercely, hugely alive granddaughter. Poetry, writing and reading it, helps me balance life’s anguish and fears with its utter gorgeousness and grace.

 

The deep humanity, spiritual intelligence, lyricism, craft, and sheer joy in language of Lisel Mueller, Louise Glück, Jane Kenyon, Dorianne Laux, Ellen Bass, Barbara Crooker, Lucille Clifton, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mary Oliver, Joy Harjo, Enid Shomer, Yeats, Neruda (and so many others) inspire, guide, and ground me.

​

—Mary Rohrer-Dann

​

Lynne Schilling

​​​​​

​​​

​​A Dream Reimagined

Dreamt on my 75th birthday, 2021

 

Inappropriately dressed in a torn white shirt and painter's

pants, I join a faculty lunch at work. Inside the room, I see the

ex-dean’s Pekingese is peeing, once again, on the carpet. The

dean is scowling and sipping a dry Chardonnay while talking to

someone wearing a Richard Nixon mask.

 

I spot a woman propped against a door jamb. She has a thin,

flat circle for a head; the rest of her is made from overcooked

spaghetti. She doesn’t speak. Strange as she may seem to the

others, she is familiar to me. I carry her in front of me, over my

heart, bracing her so she can walk with me. She likes this,

smiling as we share our very substance—our bones, our blood,

our breath (such as she has).    

 

Distracted by the barking dog, I stumble, dropping the woman

on her head. I shake her, fearing she is dead. She revives, but I

realize she has become too heavy for me to carry—a suitcase

over the weight limit. With a mix of regret and relief, I give her

to a sturdy woman with kind eyes and a clipboard.

 

I hurry out the door and take the first train home. I will build a

whole new level atop my current life. There will be walls of

windows and glass doors. 

 

I will paint the sky.

​

൪

 

I am currently rereading Prayers of Little Consequence, the delicate and revealing poetry of Gilbert Arzola. He describes in his poem, “Why,” two of the reasons he writes: I write because I cannot shout / loud enough. I write because / I cannot swallow what is bigger than me. I feel the same, but I doubt I could have said it so beautifully. I also write because I have always loved words and images, and well, I can’t stop. Now 78, I started writing poetry in my thirties, but wrote only sporadically until a few years ago when I began writing most every day, and eventually started taking poetry courses, finding mentorship, and recently, an online writing group. The dream that resulted in the recently written “A Dream Reimagined,” was dreamt at the beginning of my writing renaissance. I didn’t realize it then, but the dream revealed my readiness to start writing as a way of life. Two bits of poetry often run through my mind. I love May Sarton’s poem, “Moose in the Morning.” In particular, these lines resonate: You set me free to shirk / The day’s demanding work / And cast my guilt away. / You made a truant of me / This moose-enchanted day / When all I can is see, / When all I am is this / Astonishment and bliss. I am also a big fan of Jack Gilbert’s, “A Brief for the Defense.” When the world seems too much or my life is clogged with problems, I think of this: We must have / the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless / furnace of the world. And it helps. 

​

—Lynne Schilling

​

Kimbol Soques

​

 

before frost

​

​

Winter’s coming.
I’m harvesting basil.

 

Defying the odds of drought,
          bleaching heat, 
          brick walls,

 

our basil crop soars past my waist, leafing
like fragrant umbrellas                     from April

​

until now.

​​

​​

On the day before frost —
this time it’s after Thanksgiving —
I take the pruners out the front door
and pull down the ebullient stalks.

​

I stretch the swath across the counter,
fish out a bowl,
and start pinching.

​

The girls wander from the back of the house:

Is it going to freeze tomorrow?
Are you going to make pesto?
Remember when there was so much we had to give it away?
You were elbow-deep in branches, that year.

​

Bruised, basil’s oil atomizes into
its final penetrating bouquet.

​​

​​

Tomorrow, we tuck ourselves beneath the straw.

​

൪

 

I'm sitting in a kitchen with two other poets, trying to remind myself what keeps me writing poems, specifically. I recently started a new vocation as a theologian — there's a lot of writing there — yet for me poem-writing remains essential. Distill me, and poems continue to drip out. Why? One thing: how I see and hold on to the world lends itself to poem-making. I notice, look again, examine more closely, weave it into what I know... and capture that in a poem, for later. An opposite thing: I often move through the world abstracted into my head... when my senses bump into the world's materiality, and I stop to say, oh right, wait, what is this, exactly? In a poem, I can pull myself down to the ground, even to the roots beneath the ground. Also, sometimes I wish we had telepathy, so we could swap experiences immediately and precisely. Then we wouldn't need to resort to poems. But we'd likely lose those wonderful gaps we fill in when we do resort to poems (reading them, making them)... we'd lose the way our own thoughts separate from us into something more. I keep writing poems because I keep snagging my fingertips on something more, and I have found no better way to hang on to More — not with theology, not with essays, not in conversation. And this More is as central to me as breathing. So I breathe, and write poems.

​

—Kimbol Soques

​​

Elaine Sorrentino

​

​

Belly Dancing in a Brown Sweatsuit                                                 

 

The suit.                                                                                                          
Chocolate-colored,
more milk than dark 
with a light aqua line racing up the leg,
my little pop of femininity
in otherwise masculine attire
for an activity designed to make one feel
vibrant and sexy 
after nine months of treatment.
They said wear comfy clothing.

 

The instructor.
Dark-haired, exotic, energetic, 
smiles as she greets the class 
while donning her multicolored hip scarf,
shimmies her torso,
her percussive movements rewarded 
with jingling at every thrust.
Okay ladies, now you try.

We configure ourselves 
in a line-dancing pattern, 
mimic her gyrations,
uncertain how to make our hips snap
without appearing ridiculous and clumsy,
Let me show you again.

 

Arms crossed, women stand  
like a row of angry Mr. Cleans 
but with hair, they refuse to try it again, 
preferring to watch her dance−
except for the brown-suited belly dancer
who’d already spent too much time on the sidelines.
I’ll give it a go.                                                                                                           

 

The solo.
As I shove my stiff arms to the side,
like a department store mannequin,                                                                
move my hips in a circular motion
I hear laughter behind me,
a satisfying sound, preferable alternative

 

to surgery, infusions, radiation,

and I’m happy to provide amusement.

I didn’t come to watch.

​

൪

 

When I returned to poetry in my 50s, one of the first chapbooks I discovered was Zeina Hashem Beck’s 3arabi Song which featured poems of survival, music, and love during a time of war, unrest, and displacement in Lebanon. Her standout line “Give me your pain and I will break it into quarter notes” still moves me to this day. Much of my poetry incorporates humor, something that has served me well through challenging times such as divorce and cancer. I appreciate Billy Collins’ informal writing style, his offbeat, some may say “snarky,” method of expression to get across a serious topic, much in the same way I enjoy stand-up comedian Stephen Wright and his philosophical one-liners. I am also a huge fan of haiku and ekphrasis.   

 

—Elaine Sorrentino

​​

Alison Stone

​

​

The Moon Explains Her Conduct Toward Endymion

 

He’s hot, I wanted him, 

I took him. I was lonely 

 

in my canyon of sky.

Pulled from the drudge of sheep tending,

 

he got a good deal – forever firm-skinned, 

muscles never losing tone.

 

You blather on about consent, but 

by the way he gazed, he craved me.

 

No one else could love him like I do.

Besides, he asked for it, strolling alone

 

at night in his thin shepherd’s robe,

tossing blond curls. Everyone has needs.

 

I need to see beauty. My milky

eye can never shut.

 

I’m too old for flirty, 

take-it-slow courtship. 

 

Doesn’t love always 

cast a spell?

 

That coy smile 

never leaves his lips,

 

his hands open to receive

my offering of silver.

 

൪

 

I’ve been writing for as long as I can remember. My first poem, written at age six, was to my beagle, “Your nose is wet and you’re my pet. You’re brown and white, you never bite…”

 

For a change I’m reading mostly fiction. I’m a quarter of the way through Middlemarch, which I read freshman year of college. I’m also re-reading Rita Dove and have just discovered Nancy Miller Gomez.

 

I’m helping my dog rehab after knee-replacement surgery, so during our long, slow walks I listen to poetry on YouTube. I just found a recording of the Forward Prizes from 2020.

 

I just published a book of formal poetry, Informed. Now I’m working on edits for my next manuscript.

​

—Alison Stone

​

S. K. Tatiner

​

​

Mundus Novus 

 

A gutter is unmoored. The hairy fingers 

of a tree root ball are exposed to the sky. 

Wind-blown leaf debris obliterates

the distinction between street and sidewalk.

I move carefully on top of my memory 

of the path and stumble at the forgotten

curb, but my daughters run ahead,

tossing their arms and legs and heads

like ponies released into the wild after

the hurricane. I follow their shrieks

as closely as I can because the old world

has been destroyed by rain and wind.

We venture into the new. We pass what was

the Lester place, long in foreclosure; 

the banker in no hurry to end it all. Now 

the storm has taken half the garage.

Across the street, Mrs. Berman’s perfect 

ranch looks too disheveled to be out

in public without shame. The girls love it. 

They run lines up and down the retired 

geometry teacher’s lawn, pulling branches

and small logs into piles to stake a claim

with their labor. Next they find a new

shortcut to Johnson Park, but the park

is gone, swallowed by the river, dotted 

with oaks ripped in half and a red slate 

restroom roof skimming the top beside

a drowned dugout. The girls move 

to the muddy river edge to study the surface

and yell sighting reports back to me

on the grass. I see Ric Lester walking 

his fluffy mutt toward me from downriver. 

I start to offer sympathy about the garage, 

but Ric waves me off, whispers: “I’ve been 

all the way down to the stables.” If we keep

going, he tells me, we will find nine drowned

horses, floating on the track where I used to 

watch them trot grandly, faster, faster, 

faster, their blinded heads straining forward

to win nothing they could ever have really 

wanted for themselves. I won’t scan the river

for their bloated bodies. I have seen too much

already. I tell my daughters it is time to turn back 

but they dance ahead of me in their rain slicks

of invincibility seeking out grisly details.

I call out to them again and again, but they are

too far away now, with too much glee, moving fast.

​

൪

 

I wasn’t raised among poetry lovers. I remember dutifully memorizing a poem (“The Duel” by Eugene Field) in 2nd grade by reciting out loud: “The gingham dog and the calico cat line break Side by side on the table sat semicolon …” No one even suggested to me this might not be the best way to approach a work of literature. I did well on the test that week, and my solid, lower-middle-class folks were proud of me, then and when I went on all the way to graduate school.

 

The first poem I remember loving was W.H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Art”: “About suffering they were never wrong, / The Old Masters …” Auden tells us in late 1938. Without directly mentioning the growing Nazi threat, he connects the cruelty of everyday life to the cruelty of war through hundreds of years of human history. The ability of poetry to make associations and lead us on imaginative and emotional journeys is still a miracle to me, and an aspiration.

 

“Mundus Novus” has its origin in the 1999 Hurricane Floyd, when the cruelty of climate change hit my New Jersey neighborhood very hard. Basements flooded along with parks and roads. Food rotted in useless refrigerators. Schools and offices shut down for weeks. And, yes, nine drowned horses were found in a public stable. This last horror seemed to capture our grief and helplessness spinning on a changing planet. 

​

—S. K. Tatiner

​

Libby VanBuskirk

​

​

Invisible                                              

 

Lights out. Clocks stopped.

I would reach for you, my love

if you were here

          but alone

in darkness I fumble

chair to chair     chair to 

table

looking for the always that is not you

but should be.

How smooth the table’s top     comforting

lamppost cool and slim

how strong I am at grabbing.

 

Door knob     door jamb.

Kitchen’s cold dark water.

I drink the dark delicious     my insides 

chilled. 

I feel the counter,

            place     

my invisible glass.

 

The nothing that exists

removes all I would rush to salvage

notebooks     poems     papers

dark unseen laptop lost in nowhere

          and you.

 

In this blackout

our soft couch receives me.

No     I won’t try each switch.      

When light returns

with its fine vigor

what will still be here?

​

൪

​

Writing has long been central to my life, a forever-friend. I began writing seriously in college. After graduating from Wheaton, I won a national contest from Mademoiselle magazine which influenced my life. I interviewed T. S. Eliot. I was chosen to serve for a month as guest managing editor of Mademoiselle in New York, the position held by Sylvia Plath two years earlier. To have such experience when young gave me the confidence to fully follow my writing. This included many seminars and workshops, a source of experimentation, new skills, the learning of different forms, and growth through meeting other writers.

 

My writing has always been closely entwined with the natural world. Though I lived in the city, summers meant vacations with family at a remote northern lake in New England. This served as my special look-out where poems emerged, a number of which have been published; many are now central to my poetry book, Living with Time, ready to send out. I love living close to the wild world, looking for new ways to interact with nature. When my husband suddenly died several years ago, my time seemed shattered. But, in searching for a new life, I could, at least, exist full time as a poet. Poetry saved my life. Some of my strongest recent poems may be those letting loose reactions to loss, the dire reaction of feeling halved.

 

Afterwards, I plunged into intense weekly seminars with the Vermont poet, Rebecca Starks—which has felt like a mini-master’s program. “Otter Creek Poets,” my weekly critique group, gives time to muse and expand ideas, along with “Line Tamers,” another writing group—both have provided inspiration for some twenty years. I’ve been connecting, often via the internet, with poets in my state, out of state, and out of the country. Such is the depth and reach of poetry.

​

—Libby VanBuskirk

​

Susanne von Rennenkampff

​

​​​

Horses Coming for the Morning’s Feeding

 

Brightness seeps in through the blinds,

not the moon that kept me awake last night

but first light. The morning star hangs

big, like a lantern, the only one 

still visible in this hour before sunrise.

 

From my window, I watch the horses

make their way along the fence line 

I walked the day before. 

The red one first, scruffy coat and sagging back

speaking of age, the privilege

and responsibility of leading, followed by

the beautiful tall black, shiny, in the prime

of his years. Some minutes later,

the pony, head low as if reading

the other ones’ tracks, Hansel 

trying to find the crumbs. 

I start the kettle, after a while

look out again: there comes one more, a gallant

dappled grey, exquisite. She sets her feet

carefully, stops here and there as if

in contemplation, the sage who would 

walk alone. 

 

I think of them, walking to and from 

their feeding like this, every day.

The order of their lives.

Where is mine? Who walks ahead of me,

who behind? Who leads, who is looking 

for crumbs? Who is the sage?

 

In a moment the sun will break open 

the dark row of trees. 

​

൪

​

I grew up in the forested hills and mystical valleys of Hesse in Germany. On long Sunday walks in this lovely landscape with my parents and brothers, my mother often recited poems by the German Romantics – Eichendorff, Mörike, Goethe, Bettina, and Achim von Arnim – which felt totally natural to me even as a child. I browsed through the slim volumes of poetry on my parents' book shelves, understanding the poems with my being before my mind could grasp them fully: they were part of the landscape not only of my surroundings but of life as I knew it.

 

I married and emigrated to Canada in my early twenties, and for many years poetry took a back seat to raising a family and the demanding work on a grain farm. Still, it was all around me, in the rise and fall of a year's breath, be it in the fields or in my garden. The death of my horse prompted me to write the first poem since my high school years: it felt like the only means I had to deal with my emotions.

 

By chance I met a group of people with a strong interest in poetry who introduced me to poets like Mary Oliver and Wendell Berry. I started to write more, now in English rather than my mother language, German, supported by the generous help of poet friends, and I studied in workshops with the wonderful poets and teachers Jan Zwicky, Ellen Bass, James Crews, and Danusha Laméris. Mary Oliver remains one of my favourites, joined by many others, from Li Po, Rilke and Hesse to Neruda, Galway Kinnell, Tom Hennen, Lorna Crozier, and Gregory Orr, poets whose words speak to my heart rather than my head and continue to inform my own writing.

​

—Susanne von Rennenkampff

​

Ann Weil

​

​

Who Shall Name the World?

 

I have dozens of leafy crotons in my yard, each a riot of color against a dense green backdrop.

The Sloppy Painter with its splatters of sunny yellow, the Freckles Croton, showing off its

ruddy-red speckles. Think Dale Chihuly’s blown glass come to life.  Today, my eye is drawn

to the Joseph’s Coat, with its wild bursts of orange, chartreuse, and crimson. If I had named

this croton varietal, I may have called it Fingerpaint after my granddaughter’s artwork that is

always a joyful mess. Or perhaps I’d name it Fourth of July…

 

fireworks in the garden

sparking and spiraling

yet no one loses an eye

 

I know from where the Joseph’s Coat croton gets its moniker, though I’m not a believer.  

When women name the world, I’ll choose another appellation for this showy shrub. Maybe

Mother’s Apron, after that glorious mayhem of stripes and splotches— a rainbow of puréed

peas, the baby’s formula, pb & j, apple juice, Ovaltine.

​

൪

​

I am currently obsessed with Jenny Xie's Eye Level: Poems. Xie is a genius at metaphor! Here are some doozies from her poem entitled "Zuihitsu": "The / warmed-over bones of January," "My attention elastic," "The dark cherries of eyes," "Let there be no more braiding of words," "Leather of daybreak." I confess some of her comparisons are hard for me to make sense of, but oh, the lush playground of language Xie offers! Hers is the only book of poetry I have ever used a highlighter on—just wanting to study and emulate her fresh and vibrant phrasing. Another aspect of Xie’s work I find intriguing is her koan-like style. Her poems present like a series of riddles, each a delicious bon-bon to be tasted only after careful unwrapping. This requires the reader to be fully engaged as an active participant in the poem, which in turn, gives the poem staying power—you’ll be thinking about Xie’s poetry long after its reading. I know I can learn a great deal by reading and emulating Xie’s craft, and for me, acquiring new techniques to make my poetry stronger is what truly excites me. What fun!

​

—Ann Weil

​

Linda Mills Woolsey

​

​

A Grief, Observed

 

My breakfast tea grows cold as I watch

a pair of Hooded Mergansers dallying

in the shallows, their forms blurred

by thickly falling snow. The dapper male

is a patchwork of bold color blocks—

black, white, cinnamon. I think of how

you would have loved to catch them

with your telephoto lens. I want to walk

down to the water, kneel, draw them 

close. But I know they’d flee at the rasp

of the opening door. 

 

The morning you died, bleeding, drowned

by choice, face down in another creek—

it was midsummer, mists lifting, as I sat

here, sipping tea, watching a muskrat 

feed on something in the knee-deep water 

by the rock bar where you loved to fish. 

He was like a critter from a kid’s book—

water-matted fur, wide eyes—I smiled

as his whiskery muzzle disappeared, as

he tugged, rump up, again and again, 

before the phone rang.

 

The mergansers linger, resisting a current

they’ve been riding gleefully all morning. 

Circling, they bob side by side, inseparable. 

Through my binoculars they look close enough

to touch. Why do I always find myself loving

the world at a distance, learning each loss

over the phone, as if I were a stranger? 

Today the memory of you is so close, I want 

to kneel in snow, be blurred by it, know 

I’m touching you still. 

​

൪

 

As a child, I found reading a means of emotional survival in a world where I was the odd child out—at once “backward” and “high strung.” Hearing impaired since birth, I’ve always lived on the ragged edge of silence, straining to hear the music of ordinary conversation. 

 

Poetry embodied that music, making it fully accessible, even as it slowed my racing mind and taught me to pay attention to the world around me and within.  Metaphor pointed to the interconnectedness of all things—galaxies, ecosystems, human lives—even as it held the inherent tension of the world’s divisions, estrangements, gaps, and losses. 

 

So I write to reconnect—with myself, others, the world. And I read to see how it’s done. Among the many poets who have nurtured me, I find myself returning to George Herbert, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Emily Dickinson, Jane Kenyon, Amy Clampitt, W.S. Merwin, and Louis Glück. 

 

Age, of course, brings both a deepening and loss of connections. When I was in my sixties a younger cousin went off his meds and committed suicide. Suddenly my love for him had nowhere to go. Draft after draft of elegies for Jeff landed in the bin. 

 

While I usually find myself paralyzed by poetry prompts, I found the key to “A Grief, Observed” in David Hassler’s online workshop “The Alchemy of Poetry: Transforming Grief into Gift,” sponsored by the Washington National Cathedral Center for Prayer and Pilgrimage. In the poem, a creekside place Jeff and I both loved becomes a ground for exploring the baffled desire for connection I think we all experience in a world in which we are always strangers and yet strangely at home. 

 

—Linda Mills Woolsey

​

Editor's Choice