​

Polly Brown

​
 

First Day at the Center

for the Study of War

 

Across the wide room, someone—

a man—says the impact of war

falls heaviest on women, 

 

on wives of men who are 

drinking themselves to sleep. 

Mine is not the only sharp

 

intake of breath. And daughters.

Behind me, a woman’s voice, “But 

we shine the armor, admire

 

the fine postures in the parade.” 

And keep the body of suffering 

buried. The tally of our own 

 

breakage blank. Quick tears 

thicken my throat. None of that 

helped my father much.

 

൪

 

After I retired from teaching, one of my consolations became the summer writing workshops at Boston’s William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences. I wanted help

writing about my father’s war and its shadow, and found that—thunderclap!—from the first day,

from other daughters of veterans, from veterans of more recent wars, from visiting Vietnamese writers. When Fred Marchant, an especially helpful mentor, grinned at us all as he thought about

the pleasure of a new draft, I thought about my own slow, persistent approach to writing. I was

there not only to begin holding in some calm the pain and damage of my father’s war; I was there to honor the search for help from others. To keep writing my way around the corner, into a new

chapter. 

​

—Polly Brown

​

Marilyn Bushman-Carlton

 

 

We Wore Dresses

 

We wore them everywhere. Learned the lay of the land

in them. They reigned in our closets.

Every day to school we wore them. On the tricky bars,

 

stifling the urge to hang from the natural

bend of our knees. 

Scenting starch and cotton, we learned division in them.

 

In sashes and wide hems, diagramed sentences,

driving pencils—

our legs crossed stony tight because of them—

 

down the dead-end streets

where prepositional phrases and adverbs belonged.

In dresses we were careful, won few scars or bruises,

 

collected even fewer tales of swift licks, shattered bones.

No scrabbling to the rescue in a dress,

or scorching to home base.

 

We played jacks with bouquets of skirt bunched

in the V of our legs.

Simple dresses covered complex bodies, dresses

 

with puffed sleeves, gathered skirts, pleats like Japanese fans.

We were gardens of angel trumpets, fuchsia, inverted tulips.

Lithe teenage bodies in baby dolls, twirly skirts, sheaths.

 

They lavished us with long, elegant versions

for balls and proms—

satin and glitter, chiffon and shine.

 

How exquisite we felt—our throats bared and blushed;

the way, with our fingertips, we lifted the skirts like ladies.

How disarmed we were,

 

our soft flesh belted,

an orchid stuck near our made-up faces, perfumed

and pinned carelessly close to our hearts.

 

൪

​

In many ways “We Wore Dresses,” reflects my “boomer” background and illustrates why I didn’t

begin writing until mid-life. I didn’t have the opportunity to go to college earlier, but after marriage when my last child, one of five, began kindergarten, I began. I graduated the year my oldest enrolled at the same university. “We Wore Dresses” is the introductory poem of the manuscript I am

currently completing.

 

My admiration of good poetry and metaphor was awakened in a first writing class when I was introduced to Elizabeth Bishop and her poem “First Death in Nova Scotia” with “little cousin Arthur” and his coffin being “a little frosted cake.” I also admired Sylvia Plath and, in addition to her apt metaphor usage, learned about the personal poem which struck an early and lasting chord.

 

Besides writing about my own life’s experiences, my children and grandchildren are where I find my best inspiration. I have recently discovered Frannie Lindsey, Faith Shearin, Ada Limón, and I especially like Barbara Crooker. From her, I’m also discovering new ways to bring visual art into the personal poem.

​

—Marilyn Bushman-Carlton  

​

Linda Hillman Chayes

​
 

You Two                                        

                                                                                        

Before memory becomes a puzzle, I need to sift through the

mementos on my bulletin board, each photo layered.

 

Bored, I peel photo layered on photo until here—you

two latched to my side like lichen to a tree.

 

I liken a tree to a young mother in a navy polka-dotted dress.

Some islands have rifted from continents though they may share a plate.

 

I should have taught you two to put your plates in the sink.

There are countless things I never expected.

 

One never counts on losing track of memory

or having to teach what you were never taught.

 

My mother taught that we are all barrier islands.                                       

My daughter now wears my polka-dotted dress.

 

I wear my age like a dress that no longer fits 

and stand on shifting plates that fit together like puzzles.

 

൪

 

Writing this poem was a playful, joyful experience which is not the case with every poem.  After reading Jericho Brown’s book The Tradition, I was inspired to try the form he invented, the Duplex.

He describes it as a combination of sonnet, ghazal and the blues. The rules of repetition made the poem a type of word puzzle. The images of the islands rifting from continents and the photos on a bulletin board gave me visual metaphors for these “puzzles.” The Duplex allows for both repetition

as well as huge leaps from one end-stopped line to the next. It allowed me to travel across three generations and from kitchen plates to geological plates in fourteen lines. 

 

“You Two” is one of my many poems exploring the complexities of forging an identity in

relationship to family over the generations. As I age, memory has also emerged as a thread in my poems. When I am not writing poetry, I work as a psychoanalyst. The theme of reconciling past and present infuses my work in therapy as well as my poetry. 

 

I have always been drawn to finding the message behind the message, to accessing what is unknown

or at least not conscious. Often the revelations are emotionally powerful and freeing. Both poetry

and psychoanalysis take me to these places, and I feel incredibly lucky to have these two venues for expression and creativity in my life. 

 

Thank you to ൪uartet for requesting these reflections. 

​

—Linda Hillman Chayes

​

Elizabeth Crowell

​
 

JAWS 

 

At the Royal Theater matinee

the J from JAWS hung from the marquee

like a hook all that summer.

 

The balconies were corded off.

The chandelier had only three lit bulbs.

We pawed popcorn in our lip-glossed mouths.

 

The spider-haired, blazered manager would lean

on the ripped, wall-papered walls

to listen to our screams.

 

We got to know the lines 

and shouted with Roy Scheider,

“GET OUT OF THE WATER!”

 

As the stream of film flitted 

over our shoulders, we understood

fear was the blue horizon, everything ahead.

 

On the Cape, my long-legged daughter,

just the age I was that summer,

dives through the waves to get farther out.

 

The whistle blows, the black shark flag is raised.

I never thought how the earth itself might change. 

Now sharks swim across what used to be 

 

a too cold shelf of blue, following 

an amorphous, yearning group of seals, 

who love the thinning shore, who colonize their doom. 

 

At least once a day, the shark horn blows. 

Heated by memory, I scream to my daughter 

“GET OUT OF THE WATER!”

 

She slinks up from farther and underneath 

and glistens in the Wellfleet sun,

flipping her wet hair back, rolling her eyes.  

 

After the movie, on humid Bloomfield Avenue

the girls and I would walk together, 

hoping to see someone who would see us,

 

like an incarnation, really.

Now, my daughter has turned to flesh.

She can’t believe my predatory fears

 

as she has not yet practiced them.

She lies, belly-up, shining wet in the August sun;

she has become part of the food chain,

 

and I am now all the mad men in their small boat,

watching for the beast to surface off the shore 

as she rolls her dazzling eyes. 

 

൪

 

The driving force in my poetry is my tendency to connect what seem like disparate moments.  I am especially interested in how early experiences affect our vision of the present.  We all have a bias because of memory.  I continue to revisit the work of Elizabeth Bishop because she is so precise and because her early life and the places of her early life inhabit her poems in the present.  

 

“JAWS” is a good example of this.  I began to recall that crummy theater and the teenage thrill of being scared by something that could never get you……and I connected it to our recent trips to the beach in Cape Cod and how that small summer moment in the movie theater informed my feeling about the moment and my own child. 

 

I have seen JAWS dozens of times, but it was only in light of the present moment at the beach that I remembered the theater. Secondly, as with all poems, I spent a lot of time hashing it out, drafting on paper and doing multiple drafts, playing with forms, and sometimes re-writing completely. I rarely use the computer first. 

​

—Elizabeth Crowell

Elizabeth Ehrlich

​

​

HOW MOTHER SAW IT

 

My first day back at work the baby crawled 

across the room–the first of many firsts I failed to see

But only you can show her how to live     she said

 

though later over dry martinis when I quit my job 

confided    even a bad day at home beats a good one in the office.

 

On another matter    buy the clothes in any size

was her advice when I grew fat    and don't begrudge yourself  

 

yet after slimming   love the new you!  how she praised me

as if I had accomplished something grand. 

 

Now nobody will say the like again and mean it

nor remark       the time has come to change your life

 

when I waste an entire day vacuuming the stairs.

 

൪

 

I live in the world as a writer. I write to capture emotion, share experience, and discover truth. Until

I have found the right words, I do not fully know what I believe. 

 

In a non-linear path through life, I have worked in many forms: memoir, journalism, essay, institutional communications, fiction, sermons, poetry. I have loved poetry since before I could

spell, intrigued by its musical power to signify more than the words on the page. Poems reflect the world, but also create worlds, and are space ships for aspiration. 

 

I learned to love poetry from my mother, who found solace and inspiration in the many verses she knew by memory and often recited them aloud. Since her death last year, I have been writing poems for and about her, in a mourning process that lets me stay close to my mother while helping me find

a way to let her go.

​

—Elizabeth Ehrlich

​

Nicole Greaves

​
 

Midlife: Letter to a Daughter 

 

Dearest,

 

In the Interior, I used pantyhose to make coffee:

in the absence of things you improvise.

 

Like when we were young

and made ourselves women in shadows, or a swan.

 

Now in the winter, I conjure la mujer del campo,

the day with the revivalists 

 

who fanned me with elephant leaves:

I was never so anything. 

 

So hot, which made me frigid, like the memory of sex 

30 years later:  loss in its game.

 

I borrow a line from a poet I'm sure she wrote:  

The soul is making its rounds, opening doors to let 

 

the truths/lies out like moths that turn to gold.

Tonight, helicopters overhead look for a kidnapped girl 

 

who was sleeping in the back of a car 

when it was taken. The chattering like aunts.

 

I miss my mother washing my hair, bleaching it like bloody towels, 

teasing out the knots with a thin comb, humming

 

with what she would never amount to. Oh, if you 

need anything I’m here, while I can, like a defining feature.

 

* The Interior refers to the more rural land of Panama. La mujer del campo translates to the country woman. In my family, she is an ancestor family members would conjure as someone of strength, mystery, and great intuition, which is humorous since my mother and her mother and so on also

came from the countryside. This abducted girl was found safe the next morning. 

 

൪

 

Early on, I loved poetry. I remember hearing some of Blake and Wordsworth in school and at home, read from nursery books that were fashionable at the time. My mother also read poetry in Spanish

to me. A terrible singer, she, however, could make writing in both English and Spanish come alive with the intonation of her voice animated by her theatrical gestures, probably partly a result of

being the eldest child living on a remote cattle ranch in Panama. I quickly noticed how well

language captured what she/I felt.

 

As I switched schools throughout my life and dealt with prejudice, I frequently slipped into myself. I would try to rise out of the silence; however, I was often rebuked or labeled for something that felt

to be more about my identity––female, an immigrant’s daughter––than anything else. I was stumbling upon that intersectionality where the personal and public collide. I turned to books to understand it and to writing. When I spoke about writing or produced it, suddenly, people listened.

 

As my daughter comes into young adulthood, I reflect back to the work that meant a lot to me at 19. A few works are Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl,” Adrienne Rich’s “Song,” Carolyn Forché’s “The Morning Baking,” Lorna Dee Cervantes’s “Emplumada,” and Pessoa’s “It is Night. It’s Very Dark. In a House Faraway.” I see, now, how I was teaching myself that I could be strong in the world. A lot of this

comes from women holding each other up. 

​

—Nicole Greaves

​

Stacy Milbouer

​

​

COMMUNITY BULLETIN BOARD: 10 Comments 1 share

 

If anyone sees a yellow love bird

flying. PLEASE IM me 

or try to grab her. 

 

She’s not an outside bird.

I’m afraid she’ll freeze. 

 

Put your fingers against her chest -

under her legs. She will climb on them. 

She’s friendly.

 

There’s a small chance.

But please

keep an eye out, 

it’s my daughter’s bird. 

 

Be kind 

 

It was an accident.

 

൪

 

Now more than ever, I believe words count, words comfort and words are our salvation.

I’ve been lucky enough to spend my entire adult life as a writer and a teacher of writing. I’ve had a career in newspaper and magazine journalism and published a non-fiction book, a variety of short stories and poetry. But it’s been the poetry I keep returning to as comfort and to satisfy my

obsession with imagery and words. 

 

These past two years I’ve kept in touch with old friends, but the lockdown has prevented me from making new connections in the new community to which I’ve moved. I found myself reading and commenting on social media community bulletin boards to get a feeling for what my unmet neighbors are worried about, happy about and looking for. Their honesty, humor and in some cases, cries for help, inspired this poem and others I hope to include in a poetry collection.

 

As for my literary influences, so many poets are my favorite, but I’m a sucker for a prose poem and adore the work Pulitzer-Prize winner (and fellow New Hampshire resident) Charles Simic.  His are word photographs which don’t so such much tell a story, but rather capture seemingly random

images and feelings, much like the hazy recollections of dreams.

 

My poetry is also influenced by novelists, especially Toni Morrison, and Alice Hoffman, whose

latest, The Book of Magic, I just finished. These novelists are masters of imagery and paint sentences which resonate through time and through me. 

​

—Stacy Milbouer

​

Frances Skennion

​

​

Blue

 

The final time my lover and I

met at the station before

 

departing on different trains,

I stopped to buy

 

Iris blossoms

the color of his eyes,

 

from a woman who sat

on a wooden stool behind

 

the counter, reading.

She placed the book

 

pages down

next to the register

 

where it lay

splayed open like

 

a bird in flight,

then took the bundle from me,

 

that delicate blue, 

cut green stems

 

weeping.

 

൪

 

I am drawn to narrative poetry—Phillip Levine’s “The Simple Truth,” Gary Soto’s “Oranges” –

perhaps because my primary genre is non-fiction. Poetry is a new form that I am grateful to have found later in life. I find the writing of prose and poetry go hand in hand. “Blue” is a poem I worked on over a long period of time, coming back to every few months, relishing in the process of each

word appearing, guided by an image in my mind, and the painful feeling of love’s loss. While writing it, I came across the poem “Iris” by David St John, and was transported through the eye of the iris. Recently I read the poem “Blue” by Carl Phillips, which is a powerful, beautiful poem that I’ve added to a small pile of poems I keep on my desk, close at hand. Poetry books currently in that pile

include, Fast Animal by Tim Seibles, and Alabanza by Martín Espada. 

​

—Frances Skennion

​

Ellen Skilton

​

​

Gravity

 

Gravity is a force.

Rocks fall off the mountain

without effort, without intention.

 

I nearly failed geology class in college

because I had fallen so hard into love

with a handsome asshole on a motorcycle. 

 

We rode by stone quarries where layers of rock laughed

at our short liaison and bore witness to the past, like churches

in Sicily whose current layers were built over mosques, over centuries.

 

Grief is a gritty tiramisu of soil and healed over histories. New

eruptions, like pimples and volcanoes, build with heat 

and remembrance over old fissures, embers and ash.

 

Misshapen piles of snapshots, sleepless miles, and 

crumpled Kleenex, these layers of losses hurt

more, echo and seep into canyons beneath.

 

This morning, on the sidewalk, I tripped 

and fell onto my face, bruising it, 

breaking my glasses. At once,

the too many jacketsontherack, 

shampoobottlesnearthetub,

piles of envelopes, 

dishes, phone 

calls, emails, 

regrets,

next 

steps                                                                      

                                                                                           triumphed fully.

 

                                                                                                      Defeated,

                                                                                                        deflated,

                                                                                                       depleted,

                                                                                                      I wrestled

                                                                                                   with gravity 

                                                                                                    to stand up  

                                                                                          and limp forward

                                                                                                              again.

 

 

൪

 

I have been a language person for most of my life. Initially, it was other languages – French, then Spanish, and a bit of Khmer. Pretty quickly, I shifted toward educational anthropology and applied linguistics. My early career focused on teaching English to speakers of other languages and then teaching teachers who want to teach people who arrive in the US needing to add English to their repertoires. Much of this work was with Cambodian families in Philadelphia. Always, I found myself interested in more than the language itself – language policies in schools, linguistic ideologies and identities, multilingual and multicultural intersections. The sounds and words were intrinsically

much more than the sum of their parts. And then I had an artistic turn in my work that led to engagement with Theatre of the Oppressed (see Skilton, 2021), a one-woman show in the

Philadelphia Fringe Fest, and a deep dive into creative nonfiction. I was no longer satisfied with documenting and analyzing what could be seen and heard. I wanted and needed to attempt to

capture what was felt and imagined.  

 

Becoming a poet didn’t happen overnight, but it surprised and delighted me when it happened. I

have been teaching new teachers how to teach poetry writing for a long time (and writing poetry along with them that only my students ever saw or heard). Reading poetry has been a central part of my spiritual practice for the past 20 years and I regularly return to a few poems I’ve memorized – on the subway, in the middle of a sleepless night, while swimming laps, or during unprogrammed

Quaker meeting. This central set of poems were written by Denise Levertov (“The Avowal”), Rumi (“The Guesthouse”), Mary Oliver (“Mindful”), Kenneth Boulding (“There Is a Spirit Which I Feel”). One key line I return to over and over is Mary Oliver’s final one in “Mindful”: “how can you 

help // but grow wise / with such teachings / as these – /the untrimmable light // of the world, / the ocean’s shine, / the prayers that are made / out of grass?” Ada Limón is a poet I return to as often as possible. (You must read her if you haven’t already). Currently, I’m reading an amazing collection called I Was a Bell by M. Soledad Caballero as part of my final semester in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Arcadia University. It is wonderfully full of both pain and love (as well as bittersweet stories of learning English as a new language in a new country). 

 

Skilton, E. (2021). Being, seeing, and hearing White: When theater arts interrogate and make visible                    the power of the elephant in the room. In D. Warriner & E. Miller (Eds). Extending applied

               linguistics for social impact: Cross-disciplinary collaborations in diverse spaces of public

               inquiry. Bloomsbury.

​

—Ellen Skilton

​

Angela Sorby

​

​

Push 

 

“He has a right to live though he's 

Ill, ill, ill, ill-shaped.” 

            —Shonen Knife, “Bear Up Bison” 

 

It’s too early for bikes, 

but here I am pedaling North 

 

towards a rails-to-trails path  

that terminates at a wire bison. 

 

A man who says he loves me 

bikes, so now I bike.   

 

Last week, I learned to switch  

gears on a hill— 

 

to switch gears on a hill 

during a Pandemic, a late- 

 

life skill which makes me  

inappropriately happy,  

 

clicking from first to fifth 

as the death toll mounts. 

 

Muscle up, glide down.  Weeds  

wave inside the wire bison,  

 

a thing (street art?) that exists  

for no discernable reason, 

 

 and yet we aim for it, 

our bike wheels moving against  

 

the hot resistant wind,  

because by now we know no day 

​

is ever human-shaped.   

We have to force our way in.

​

൪

​

I began "Push" as a way to mark the joyful experience of re-learning to ride a bike, but the poem surprised me--as poems can do--by ending with a meditation on defiant aging:  if you can't find a

place for yourself, make a place for yourself.  As the poem's epigraph suggests, "Push" was also

inspired by the all-female Japanese punk band Shonen Knife. Shonen Knife never broke into the mainstream, but they've been around since 1981 and they're still touring, "forcing their way in" and making their own loud and unusual music.

​

—Angela Sorby

​

Erin Newton Wells

​

​

Melisma, with Samba

 

Past the beginning of the year and partway

to the loosening of sky—

 

one could say almost warm—someone sings

as she walks in the street

 

for no reason except it is daylight, nothing

in her way, and no one

 

tells her not to sing real words loud enough

to hear this far

 

on my porch, not as I would do embarrassed

and meek, a soft hum

 

so as not to bother others, but something red

in her words the color

 

of a dress the last time she danced the samba,

a frill on the side, how the frill

 

sambas out when she smooths it into honey,

how she holds a word until it

 

ripples in a river down the street, bare trees

consider they might bud

 

and bloom, and I consider how to keep this

red gold honey in the shoulders

 

moving with it, everything a river, I consider

I would like to be a river.

 

൪

 

Early morning is when the best writing happens for me, whether searching for something new or continuing what is underway. The house is quiet, the mind refreshed by sleep. Before I begin, I often think about what might catch and hold my attention through the day if I were reading the work of another poet. Would I want to return to it for what inspires me in the sound, flow, and content of

the words? At least for a time does it become a part of me? A poem begins as a private thing, but ultimately it needs to reach out to others to give it the fullness of its life.

 

There are so many frustrating, seemingly hopeless things to think about now. As a writer I must face them. But I also feel an obligation to find words that help to lift above them, not to make light of

but to give strength. I always keep other poets near, and the ones I turn to most often do exactly

this. They confront the hard subjects yet leave me refreshed and inspired by the very strength of

their unusual use of images and words. Poets currently on hand are Carolyn Forché, Louise Glück, Claudia Emerson, Jorie Graham, Ada Limón, Robin Coste Lewis, Mary Szybist, Brenda Hillman, Lucie Brock-Broido, and, of course, Elizabeth Bishop. And so many more. I am always adding new ones and rediscovering ones from the past. Their words have life. They nourish me. I would like to write words that do this for others.

​

—Erin Newton Wells

​

Marilyn Westfall

​

​

Laundry

 

Babka said that laundry was like snow

thawing and falling from the roof

the same way sodden towels tumbled down 

the chute to land with muffled thuds.

Underclothes followed, a dusting of flurries.

 

Five, I helped by searching bedrooms,

finding Dad’s and Dedko’s grimy work socks,

plain blouses Mom wore as a bookkeeper

which fluttered to the basement like trapped doves.

Is that everything? The metal duct amplified 

 

the rasp of her voice weakened by asthma.

In that brick-and-mortar cellar she breathed

a miasma of bleach while soaking my brother’s

soiled diapers; treated grease stains with lye soap,

scrubbed them out on her washboard.

 

She filled her Maytag washer from a hose,

added scalding water she’d boiled. The agitator

splashed suds. She lifted sopping terrycloth

heavy as pelts and fed it through the wringer. 

The window of block glass, blue and wavy,

 

dripped with steam as if melting.

Did she imagine—that morning—

sinking through spring-softened ice, fighting 

to catch her breath, knowing she’d left 

her inhaler upstairs?

 

൪

 

I am grateful for my liberal arts education that led to my eventually earning a Ph.D., for I read broadly and learned to appreciate the echoes of centuries-old literature in poetry created by

Adrienne Rich, Denise Levertov, Sylvia Plath, C.P. Cavafy and many others. I still return

consistently to poems by John Keats and the studies of his life cut short by the disease of

tuberculosis; his story remains relevant to our times. I often revisit the poems of Ira Sadoff which

are rooted in personal memory and flower with delicate lyricism that's remarkable to me. I admire Eavan Boland for her poetry emphasizing "ordinary life" as a "powerful lens" capable of merging the private and public. I am fortunate to chair a local writers group, and each member's submissions and publications inspire me, as do the poems and books, published or as yet unpublished, of my network of friends.

​

—Marilyn Westfall

​

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