൪uartet has gone 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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Lora Berg

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Planting this Tree

 

i.

 

Tree of Myth

             (written at 26)

 

Sunday, Margaret brought me a sapling pomegranate in an old tin. Already, the roots were working their stubborn needlepoint through the metal bottom, while up through rusted seams, three slim stems stretched until, waist-high they bent, waif-like as willow. This tree aches with thwarted desire. If the apple’s Eve, pomegranate’s Persephone. Its leaves lisp, and its flesh seems so dented by myth

that touching it, I almost hear a sigh. Once, on a hill I saw such a tree, entirely encircled by a rainbow.  And now, I plant this tree in a rented yard, to watch it for a few brief years unfurl its mighty fruits, or not, longing not to long more.

                                                                                   

ii.

 

 Tree of Memory

             (written at 62)

 

I’m eating fruit from trees I can see in my past: mango and avocado, companions in the courtyard at Meru School; orange trees dotting ridges west of Seville with their za’atar of love; the baby pomegranate I planted on an island, reaching up; coffee in neat lines along misted hills; the apples of our upstate childhoods, in such abundance by the lake; and yes, these pear trees, planted in our adopted states by our spouses for the love of us, dear sisters! Our orchards flourish with the years.

 

൪

 

On my return to writing, I find myself in such a vibrant and adventurous writers’ world. I think this is a fine time to be a writer, and technology has improved my lot, even if I must come to terms with the emergence of AI poets. I’ve Zoomed into poetry workshops across the country, and traveled to workshops abroad. Each community offers unique qualities; for example, Write About Now (WAN) in Houston brings together many young and highly accomplished writers of color. The group is inspiring and welcoming, even to this poet from a different demographic. Through Denver-based Lighthouse, I learned the Pomodoro Technique, and I continue to write simultaneously with Denver writers three days per week. I don’t feel alone. I’ve been able to grow my knowledge of poetry as well through podcasts such as New Yorker Poetry, and Poetry Off the Shelf among others, in addition to taking open courses such as ModPo at University of Pennsylvania. Many of these opportunities are free. Poetry books are easy to obtain online, e-books or hard copies. Submitting is also much easier than in the past when I would wait by the mailbox. Even the physical process of writing is more convenient; here at my laptop, I no longer need to white out, type over. If I require a synonym, seek

a rhyme, or wish to verify information, all are at my fingertips. There is less guessing, but hopefully

no less room for imagination. Foremost, I’ve entered such a supportive network largely of women writers. This beautiful world of learning, possibilities and exploration I am part of now makes me wish for more time, a wish that is of course one of the wellsprings of poetry. 

 

—Lora Berg

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Sarah Browning

 

 

Ukraine

 

The poets read to us

 

war & the Catholic mass

war & tea

war & laundry

war & the pen writing the poet

as war writes the tumble 

            & the picture frame

war writes the kettle & the bell

war is a plover on the shore

war is forgetful, turns to the next sparkly

            war

 

*

 

War makes me hungry

 

war makes me weak-kneed with swoon

war is whiskey in my glass

            & the ice to cool it

war warms itself inside me

all my organs are war

my knuckles

my creaky knees are war

my menopause & its own forgetfulness

            war

 

*

 

We thought we were living

 

we thought we were living

            then war

we thought we were war

we were war

we dreamed war

we became war

we swing for the fences

​

൪

 

As the Russian invasion of Ukraine was looming, in February of 2022, I was fortunate to be introduced to a number of Ukrainian poets. I count myself among the provincial Americans who mostly read U.S. poets – we are so varied and numerous and astonishing, I can’t keep up. Let alone with the rest of the world. (I’m not proud of this; just remarking on it.) But war snaps one to attention. Katie Farris and Ilya Kaminsky published a translation of Lyudmyla Khersonska’s “See the Tail That Wags the Dog” in The Nation. Its lines haunted me and were the original inspiration for

my poem, “Ukraine,” published here: “Look, the shovel is making a hole in the grave digger! / Brushes paint artists into the walls!” Surrealism as a response to horror. A new collection of Khersonska’s, Today is a Different War, translated by Olga Livshin, Andrew Janco, Maya Chhabra, and Lev

Fridman, will be released by Arrowsmith Press May 1, 2023. Highly recommended!

 

—Sarah Browning

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Jacqueline Coleman-Fried

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THE HOME HOSPICE NURSE

 

Before the hospice nurse arrived

to lay her hands on Mom

and pronounce her at peace,

 

Mom lay folded like an embryo,

hands clutched to her chest.

Eyes glazed. A black universe 

spilling from her gaping mouth.

 

I escaped to the toilet 

until murmurs and feet

trembled the foyer.

 

And through the cracked door 

to the death room,

I saw—  

 

Mom’s body, straight as a coffin, 

mouth closed, eyes closed.

Ivory cheeks calm, kissable.                                    

 

Years later, I get the call about Dad.  

Go through my morning stretches slowly. 

 

So the hospice nurse can arrive before me 

to undo the shape 

of his letting go—

 

൪

 

As with many people, I started writing poetry as a child, but stopped after college when I couldn’t reconcile it with the demands of the paycheck world. Decades of silence followed—except for a telltale feeling of panic when, at the start of my education at Columbia University Graduate School

of Journalism, a professor welcoming my class said, “Anyone who wants to sit under a tree and write poetry should leave now, and give their place to someone else.” In retrospect, the panic was my muse waking for a moment, urging me to give up my seat and sit under the ridiculed tree.

​

When I finally stopped working for a living, I ran into the arms of my muse aided by the Writing Institute of Sarah Lawrence College: non-degree workshops offered to any adult who registers.

 

Today, I love poetry by Louise Glück, Jorie Graham, Stanley Kunitz, Ilya Kaminsky, John Murillo, Natalie Diaz, and many others. I recognize my love when I read their work and feel, as Emily Dickinson once wrote, “as if the top of my head were taken off.” 

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In my body of poems so far, I see psychoanalysis (my father was a psychoanalyst), depression and anxiety (both my own and inherited), joy, humor, occasional anger, current events (I worked in journalism for many years), and many dance references (I was an ardent amateur ballet dancer and professional dance critic during my teens and early 20s). 

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As for my process: I know a poem is gestating when something I see or feel or read or think keeps recurring, nagging, stimulating me. I then feel compelled to write my truths. I hope readers can

either resonate with my truths or enjoy their peculiarity. 

 

—Jacqueline Coleman-Fried

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Betsey Cullen

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The Visit                                 

 

Gaunt, you furrow your brow, deflect

affection. Still I’m here – regretting

long absence – guilt being pabulum 

I was raised on. Damn it, Jane, we’re family-close. 

Of my mother’s friends, you’re the last alive,

my visit an offering you can’t rebuff,

our conversation one-way until 

you thank me for coming, a social grace

pulled from an old suitcase.

 

At 104 you shrink to skeleton,

veins exposed like rivulets 

 

                                      a prickly-pear cactus

                                      on the windowsill, shriveled

 

a Scripps’ College Bulletin, limp with fury

at the father who pulled you out after your freshman year

 

                                      your pearl choker 

                                      Talbots’ latest catalog  

                                       old map of Paris

 

Philadelphia Orchestra stub, grubby

birthday card hand made for mom

Le Mutt, stuffed

 

We lay down old dogs, don’t we?

 

Johnny Walker Black winks from the corner. For you, 

scotch is medicine – straight up, four ounces a day.

 

You’ve made peace with your mother

and helped me do the same.  Now

I take your place as elder.

 

I didn’t come for you, Jane. I came for me.

 

൪

 

I wrote “The Visit” to a prompt on imagery from Diane Lockward’s latest, The Strategic Poet:

Honing the Craft. Sure, I had thought about W.C. Williams’ famous line, “no ideas but in things”

but I never before gave images their own breathing room, finding a strong tool to define a friend.  In an essay on Williams (online) in Triggerfish Critical Review, Ed Wickliffe summarizes: “Treat the

thing directly. Make a concrete image with everyday language, rather than a vague, lengthy notion of it.” Yes. Strong images. Tangible, like a Talbot’s catalog, or perhaps a spate of dialog.  Images led me

to the last line of this poem: two strong statements, but more accurately a set-up that opens an ongoing dialectic between obligation, motivation and reward, and by extension, between you and

me.

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—Betsey Cullen

Mary Alice Dixon

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​

The Sorrow of Onion Skins

 

Forgive me, Lord, for I have sinned.

I stole a loaf of bread, a cup of wine, 

and a priest.

 

This I find after my mother died.

Her words in curvy cursive 

on a holy card tucked between pages 

of Burnt Offerings: A Cookbook 

by the Ladies of Mount Moriah.

I also find letters. His.

 

He wrote to her on onion skin paper

in short sentences sprinkled with

something like Morse code dots 

and dashes, a private language 

only they knew.

 

This Father was not the man I called 

Dad. This one was a Jesuit. A chaplain 

in the good war. The war against Hitler. 

Killed in Normandy, said the obituary. 

 

Before she died my mother told me

a holy ghost spoke to her in flashes 

of light, in songs of dots and dashes. 

She was not well.  

 

Tonight I place Burnt Offerings

by a lit candle in my kitchen. 

I peel onions, unwrapping flesh 

from skin, trying to understand

why peeling onions makes me cry.

​

൪

 

“Every poem breaks a silence that had to be overcome,” writes Adrienne Rich. When I first read

those words I heard lightning. 

 

Adrienne Rich, Maya Angelou, Elizabeth Bishop. These are the mothers to whom I turn for the strength to break a silence. I turn, also, to the memory of my own mother, whose name I bear.

            

My mother, born in the hollers of West Virginia in 1921, wrote poetry. She wrote in the margins of

her stenographer’s fine-lined notebooks. Showed her poems to no one. Throughout the Great Depression and WWII, she, like many women, did a job called “taking dictation.” The dictators were men. 

            

My mother’s job supported my grandmother, a blind seamstress, and my grandfather, an

unemployed newspaper man. My mother worked long days and slept short nights, dreaming silent poems.

            

I inherited her dreams. 

            

Born with synesthesia, I see letters in color and hear music in sunrise. I dream in painted words. Words that beg to be spoken, like remembered kisses that beg to be tasted again.

            

Beside my desk I keep love letters sent to my mother from a man I never knew. He died in WWII.     

            

Beside my bed I keep an open notebook and a pen. In the dark I sometimes take dictation from my dreams. Those broken silences are my poems. 

 

—Mary Alice Dixon

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Sara Eddy

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Garlic Mustard

            for Rebecca

 

                                      In early summer 

my friend as a favor to us both pulled up 

the garlic mustard spreading 

like jellyfish tide in the garden.  

 

                                      She was mourning.

Her partner, my friend, had suddenly died,

and this was a gift I could give her,

the way mustard roots release from the earth.

 

                                      This year in a few spots 

laid bare by her work, burdock 

appears, choking out better things.

It will spread if unchecked, gain deeper hold.  

 

                                      We’ll need knives 

and spades, sweat and a gardener’s rage

to dig it up.  This is the way we carry 

grief—in seasons, always a new and deeper ache.

​

൪

 

I wrote quite a lot as a young woman, in college.  I was enthralled by Sharon Olds, Philip Levine, Frank O’Hara, Galway Kinnell. I gave readings and published in campus magazines, and felt poetry

in my bones.  But then I graduated, and life tumbled over me, and bit by bit I let grad school and marriage and kids and career take poetry away from me.

 

In 2015, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. Late at night, I would lie awake with mortality and Ativan, and it finally occurred to me that it would help to be writing poems. And so I began again, after 30 years, at the age of 49.

It feels quite different now. I’m both more and less confident in my writerly abilities–but I also care much much less about what anyone thinks. I read differently now, too: I’m less daunted by poets, more inclined to see what legerdemain I can learn from them. I’ve been reading a lot of Ellen Bass, lately, and Ada Limón, and Chen Chen. I’m inspired by the beauty these poets find in the everyday voice. And I’ve been delighted that my poems found an audience almost immediately: I’ve published in many print and online magazines, I’ve published two chapbooks, and I have a full-length manuscript getting nibbles from presses. I like life post-50.

 

—Sara Eddy

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Ann Fisher-Wirth

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Quail in Fog 

 

Pairing off these past two weeks,  

they scutter through the fields outside the barn,  

topknots bobbing against the horizon.  

Often I’ve sat in the warm wood chairs  

and watched them, listened to their whistling  

Chi-ca-go, Chi-ca-go. Today it’s silent.  

Fog has rolled up from the Pacific.  

How could they not be cold, feathers draggled,  

as they shelter beneath wet grasses?  

They huddle, peer out, wait for the sun  

to come again. Think of their kindle  

and whirr. Of their hearts, fiery berries. 

​

൪

 

The title of my new book, Paradise Is Jagged, pretty well expresses my sense of life and my sense of poetry. The suffering of the world seems overwhelming, and I have less and less hope that we

humans will turn back from destroying the planet. So in our lives and creative practices we must

look for a way forward, in terms of meaningful action. Love is still love and beauty is still beauty,

and poetry can speak of it all.  

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—Ann Fisher-Wirth

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Barbara Hill

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Poem for Joey who Doesn’t Know he Became a Bird

 

 

The cardinal’s word is

                                     mercury,

                               is old mirrors, is

                                     icicle.

 

But his dress

                                    is flame, is

                                         opium,

                                    is    blood.

 

I was so in love with Joey Iacobucci.

When I slept with him,

                   I couldn’t sleep.

                                     I kissed his hair.

 

His mouth was wide and curved

like an archer’s bow.

His voice

                  light

               a stutter.

It didn’t matter

what he said.

I just wanted to look at his mouth.

 

More than once

I pushed his car

from a Boston snowbank

that one winter

when he was mine.

 

More than once

                          I watched

                     snow fall

on his dark hair.

​

൪

 

How I got from a cardinal to a lover named Joey I can’t remember, but I love this kind of turn.

When it happens, the writer must trust that it works, and yet how do you know? In this instance, there was a sense of delight that Joey and the cardinal met. There was a feeling that this leap from

one form of beauty and enchantment to another was intuitively right. 

 

I’m a poet living in Connecticut, close to my childhood home.  I’ve written poetry since I was in

grade school. I started off imitating the Romantic poets with metered rhyming verse, but when I found the grittiness of Carl Sandburg and the spareness of the old Chinese poets, I began to decide how I wanted to sound. 

 

These days my poetry icons are Mary Oliver, Gerald Stern, Marie Howe, Tony Hoagland. Marie Howe’s book, What the Living Do, is my lifeline back to this world. These poems about her brother

who died of AIDS helped me write about my brother and his illness, probably the most emotionally intense and satisfying work I’ve done.

 

I write about everyday encounters with animals and people, my family, childhood, lovers, rock stars, rivers. I have one child, a daughter, born when I was 40. She’s the great joy of my life but so far she

has shown up only briefly in my poems. I can’t seem to get enough distance from the tenderness I

feel about being her mother. 

 

I like the camaraderie of poetry workshops. Mostly I find writing to be lonely and hard. Once I quit for five years but I never stopped finding poetry all around me. Words and phrases would come into my head until I gave in and started putting them on paper again. 

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—Barbara Hill

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Kathleen Kirk

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​

Slippage

 

At Christmas, I was trying to tell my kids
how lately I seem to be two people, one

living inside the other. I said I felt
detached from my former self, but still

present, watching. It was a little much,
and silence hovered over the wooden table.

Fog, the obvious metaphor, helped
dawn come gently to the windows

as I tried to write it down later, here.
Night had slipped away, its own thief.

Morning was the way forward. 
The two worlds shifted, night into day

or day into night, however you see it.
I remembered the festive tablecloth.

I almost felt it under my fingertips.
My children taught me how to make my face

turn on my phone, since my fingerprints
are fading, but in the morning, after hours

of mutual sleep, I must still enter
the code, still prove an identity

to a machine with a camera
that can’t quite see me.

You see the ongoing conundrum.
The slippage, logical and lateral,

actual and metaphorical…
foggy, in a not quite solid world.

 

൪

 

Not all of my poems are autobiographical, but “Slippage” is, coming from the recent experience of visiting my grown children for Christmas, both now living in Portland, Oregon. The fog is

Portland’s fog as well as the ongoing metaphorical fog of the poem. I do feel like two people these days, one held in suspension, watching with a kind of amazement as the other keeps getting the necessary things done. Those things include helping my parents make end-of-life choices and move from the family home into a retirement community. We are all simultaneously grieving and living in joy and relief after time apart in the pandemic. My father has the brain fog of long Covid, and my mother has Alzheimer’s. They, too, are doubled people. Sometimes I barely recognize myself; how

can the phone recognize me? Poetry has always seemed to me the way to express the inexpressible,

and that becomes explicit in this poem, a grappling with inexplicable shiftings in reality. But reality isn’t hard or fixed, anyway, is it? It is molecules in motion, atoms whirling with their even tinier components, not to mention memory and its unreliability. 

 

I grew up on poetry, my mother reading it to us at bedtime. I read it now slowly and steadily, for comfort and wisdom, or all at once, greedily, in great gulps in August for the Seeley Challenge. I

read it professionally, as an editor and reviewer, and unprofessionally, as a wild lover. I write it in

my head, while walking or swimming, and in various notebooks near at hand, or on grocery lists or envelopes or scraps, like Emily Dickinson. Poetry is still my way to say what can and can’t be said. 

 

—Kathleen Kirk

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Grace Massey

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​

The Sightings of Birds

 

I

My child is the boy in the green

hat with stegosaurus plates felting

down his back. 

As I watch him drag his sled up the hill, 

I can’t feel my feet. It doesn’t matter. 

He is the boy with the grin

showing off all his teeth. 

 

II

Let’s say

my child becomes a doctor, 

a psychiatrist. Sometimes

when he recognizes the absence

of light in someone’s eyes

he remembers how he almost

gave up but stopped himself. 

How he wanted to live.

 

III

Let’s say my child marries a lovely 

woman who cooks dumplings light 

as pillows. They have two children

whom I tuck into my wings,

nuzzle my face into wisps 

of their hair. Their perfume

of earth and air follows me

everywhere. 

 

IV

Tonight, my child perches 

on the edge of my bed.

I can feel his weight 

sinking into the mattress,

his breath in the air. 

He tells me that the hawk 

I see on October evenings is him 

flying home.

 

൪

 

I wrote poetry as a graduate student in literature and always thought of myself as a writer.  But I didn’t return to writing seriously for almost 40 years when I was winding down a career as an editor in educational publishing. I read Ellen Bass, Marie Howe, so many amazing women that inspired me to sign up for some workshops and go back to writing. Several years after that, I began writing

about the death of my son, a subject too painful to tackle yet impossible not to. Over the past months, I’ve written several poems about him—how hard it is to drive past his favorite places, how I imagine chatting with him over a glass of gin, how he once guided me down a ski slope when I was paralyzed with fear, how angry I was with him for leaving us. This poem was in the back of my mind for a long time, and writing and revising it has given me a sense of closure, a feeling that I’ve written

a poem about him that feels right. In some mysterious way, it has also helped liberate me to write about other parts of my life. I’m currently working on a chapbook about my parents. 

 

—Grace Massey

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Julie Paul

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DICE

 

Five times around the golf course, fresh cedar trail soft as tears, and the rufous-sided towhees rummaging for leaves make a sound more mammal than bird. Five times and then I go deeper 

into the unmanicured woods, pass a lone man with a dog, and though I don’t know where they lead,

I descend graffitied steps to a narrow creekside trail. The shush of water washes away the traffic

from above and a whippet appears on the little ivy-skirted path, and we talk in hushed tones before an older woman follows, head down. She jumps when she sees me, then smiles in relief. You’re a

black shadow, she says, and it’s true, I’m decked out in dark shorts and fleece. Every time we head

into the woods we throw dice, hoping we come up with woman / woman. I’m so tired of this game. The man I passed had a small poodle—a good sign, I tell myself. I tell myself lots of things. When my husband texts me his usual Good day? what can I say except Great? I’ve gone five times around the

golf course, where a robin quarreled with a squirrel and people laughed as they tapped tiny balls

into holes in the earth. 

​

൪

​

I write with a motto in mind, one I adopted when I decided to take my writing career more

seriously, decades ago: “There is room for everyone.” When I facilitate writing classes, I share this maxim on the first day. It’s my way of welcoming all voices and outlooks—a generosity I did not receive in the first University creative writing classes I took at nineteen, where an all-male trio of embittered instructors offered only assurances that most of us would fail. I also try to live with this motto as my guiding principle, and as a woman, claim the space that is mine to claim. This poem addresses the challenge that this can pose.

 

Alongside poetry, I also write and publish fiction and personal essays, and my work is fueled by oddities in human behaviour as well as the splendour and ruin of the wider world. My poetry tends

to be personal and true; my first collection, The Rules of the Kingdom (MQUP 2017), mines my own history and the roles I’ve played. I’m continuing this process in my work-in-progress, which seeks to identify place as a defining factor and influence on my outlook and artistic practice. I grew up in a village of 800 people (Lanark ON, Canada), and perhaps my motto of “there is room for everyone” resonates because I come from such a small community. I currently reside on Vancouver Island, BC, Canada, where I’ve taken up a daily visual art practice as a form of meditative play. 

 

—Julie Paul

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Amy Ralston Seife

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​

Continuing Education 

 

I’m taking an earthworm appreciation class 

where we learn all about those little bastards,

 

their gizzards, crops, and castings, how they 

churn and nourish the soil. We’re each given

 

a tray of dirt, urged to probe with our fingers, 

make our own discoveries — if we dare. 

 

My mother loved, when she chose to love, her 

garden: the melon that burst from her compost heap, 

 

the pumpkin vine that twirled its way out 

of a mound of coffee grounds, the creatures 

 

that seethed beneath the surface. Come here, 

she demanded, but I balked­. I never trusted her 

 

sudden changes of weather. Now, when the sun 

threatens to bake those naked strings of life, 

 

I whisper them back to their moist homes 

with the stems of tender leaves. On other days, 

 

when rain has flushed them out into the open, 
I trample their pink bodies with booted feet.

​

൪

 

The idea for “Continuing Education” came from a line that occurred to me almost fifteen years ago when I was exclusively a writer of fiction. The poem has undergone more revisions than anything

else I’ve written: each time I returned to it, I discovered something new about myself and my relationship with my mother, who was alive at the time of the first draft but has since died. There

are some lines that were non-negotiable (not surprisingly, the one that sparked the idea for the

poem no longer appears), some metaphors that seemed painful but accurate, and some details that were autobiographical, but the ending always felt disappointing and contrived. It was only once I came to terms with ambivalence that the poem could assume its final shape. Learning to think like a poet has enabled me — as a writer and as a woman — to become more comfortable about living

with questions rather than pressing for answers. 

 

—Amy Ralston Seife

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Dana Sonnenschein

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​

The Old Wolf

            

            Wolf Conservation Center

 

When he drinks, 

     he ignores the frog 

          in the pond.

 

He lets the catbird

     land on a stump

          nearby and hop up

 

and down, rustling in leaves, 

     head tilted,

          dark tail flirting 

 

with death.  

     He remembers

          his lunge and snap—

 

that fast, yes,

     but now he prefers

          to rest, drowsing

 

in pine-shade,

     listening to ravens

          through the afternoon.

 

It’s summer.  He’s cached 

     a deer foreleg,          

           and at dusk

 

he paws it up 

     and stretches out,

          gnawing meditatively.

 

He could shear 

     the long bone 

            with a single bite 

          

and grind it to dust,

     but he wants it

          to last.  He knows 

 

that life is hard 

     but it is also good.  

          Even the gristle.

 

൪

 

A friend once explained the difference between herself and her husband as “We think there’s a

church of art and a church of nature, and I need to spend more time in the church of art, and he

needs to spend more time in the church of nature.” Like them, sometimes I need to spend time in

the church of art (drawing, painting, writing poems), and sometimes I need to spend time in the church of nature (camping, hiking, meditating). And sometimes I am able to be in both simultaneously, painting en plein air or making notes for a poem in the woods or at the Wolf Conservation Center. I hope the paintings and poems that begin outdoors in some sense transport viewers and readers into that place and time—as they do me, when I look at the finished works later. Yet, even for me, the place one goes is never quite the place one was; artwork is ritual and altar, not experience. 

 

Wordsworth famously said that poetry begins with “emotion recollected in tranquility,” which I

take to mean in a peaceful place that allows for intense concentration and focus, not as a statement that the process of writing is tranquil. So it’s not surprising that the poets I return to—Mary Oliver, Ellen Bass—have spoken about the challenges of honing language into a state of apparent simplicity

as well as about their experiences in the church of nature. For them, too, writing seems to be both sacral and hard work. But sometimes there are gifts! Poems that come into one’s mind needing only

a little shaping and trimming. Moments like seeing an ambassador wolf whom one has known for years dig up a cached bone and settle down, a little stiffly, to chewing on it.

 

—Dana Sonnenschein

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Whitney Vale

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HULLABALOO BOOTS

 

Grandpa suggests the old magnolia—

I am 13 and lean back against its bark, rough

 

scales pushing through my pink shell. My pants

are purple, my boots are pure white.

 

He proposes propping one foot against the trunk.

Leg muscles strain for balance, hippie hair loose, catching

 

in my dangling earrings, cheap alloys mixing 

with my hormones. My arms made of swallow’s wings,

 

my dance classes echo in leather as my propped foot

holds a hard point. I hate standing here, soul claimed

in the old box camera and unwelcome gaze.

 

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I love the musicality of language, especially woven through narrative. Every poem for me begins as a lyric impulse and a desire to share a story. This very morning, I saw three Canada geese standing on

a roof! Waddling sentries, quite stately— and loud.

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I have a deep appreciation for sound. As a non-musician, I use words to make up for that lack of training. I think sound carries the emotive self into a field of understanding that circumvents the intellect. I am hooked on sonics! I love alliteration, assonance and consonance.

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Even though I mostly write in free verse, the form of black notes on white space is very important to me. How is tension created by word choice and placement?  The visual component is part of how

the poem is experienced—the line crossing the page is breathed by the body/mind. 

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This poem is part of a larger collection of memory poems that reference the body and the feminine experience through time. A fragmented memoir.

 

A favorite poem is “How to Triumph Like a Girl,” by current Poet Laureate, Ada Limón. I adore

the line, “I like the lady horses best.” And it reminds me, I like the lady poets best! Let us “swagger,” lady poets, with our “great hearts.” Poets such as Sharon Olds, Mary Oliver, Joy Harjo and Muriel Rukeyser have all influenced me with their attentive witness. Harjo’s “She Had Some Horses” breaks me apart. Its incantatory language is so beautiful. Sharon Olds’ fierce voice and profound intimacy unlocked the little box in which I nestled my voice. Rukeyser reminds me “the universe is made of stories, not atoms.”

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What are the stories? Tell me a story. Let me tell you a story.

 

—Whitney Vale

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Martine van Bijlert

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I too want to stand in a meadow

                        with echoes of “Downhearted” by Ada Limón

 

I read how other people have already 

poured the mercury of their hearts into their hands

rolling it around to see it gather

 

I’ve spent so much time in my house 

I’ve forgotten you can go anywhere without invitation

 

I’ve spent so much time in my house I will need to divorce 

my spot at the dining room table if I want to be 

windswept again

 

I have a guitar with three strings 

that has forgotten how to hold a tune

 

I have a paper bag full of little books 

that look like they’ve been rescued from a fire 

 

and as I was leaving the gym I glimpsed on a television screen 

a close-up of a red and orange macaroni dish 

being stirred and I thought: 

 

everywhere people are being taught 

things I already know 

 

and I remember a village with slender trees 

in the timid colours of dust 

 

and I remember being bone-shaken

 

and six horses died in a tractor trailer fire 

but that was in somebody else’s poem

 

and I too want those horses back

 

and I too want to stand in a meadow where they’re still running 

because someone decided at the last minute

 

to leave them where they were

 

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I recently realised I never stopped writing poetry. Even during the years when my mind was

wrapped in political analysis, I still aimed to pay homage to the rhythms and lilts of the

conversations that undergirded it. The intricacy of the networks I was studying. The flavour and hue of the landscapes that towered over us as we travelled in swaying cars on bumpy roads. 

At some point I needed more spaciousness and started writing fiction, which grew into a novel.

Then, when the sprawling draft needed so much revising that it became heavy too, I turned to

poetry. Now I divide my days between the three, trying to keep them from fighting each other,

trying to weave them together so they become part of the same cloth.

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Many of the poets I'm reading are hybrid like me – writing in the space between genres and cultures, moving between worlds. Recently I’ve loved Customs by Solmaz Sharif and I’m grateful for how she reminded me of the joy and puzzle of transcribing Farsi poems and transposing them into my own words: Hafez, Mowlana, Khayyam, but most of all Forough Farrokhzad, the famous modernist

Iranian poet who died too young, just blocks away from where I lived in Tehran when 9/11

happened. 

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I’ve been reading Peter Dale Scott, a poet, researcher and former diplomat, like me. I’ve been fascinated by his book-length poem Coming to Jakarta, how it blends research, mémoire and

analysis into poetry. Wondering what a similar exercise would look like for our own time, my own life. 

 

—Martine van Bijlert

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Ruth Weinstein

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The Magnetism of Bodies in the Night

 

My body disbelieves the mildness of the night,                                                                                             persisting in the memory of winters when water froze                                                                                 in the bowl left on the floor for our pets.

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My toes, tunneling blind through the burrows                                                                                           of blankets, seek the warmth of your feet, feet                                                                                             large as a small terrier shoveling for voles.

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We begin the night curled toward each other,                                                                                               as if to speak all the words unsaid in the busy day,                                                                                       as if finally ready to tell things long-kept 

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In the sepulchers of our muffled hearts.                                                                                                   And though no one ever really knows anyone,                                                                                             sometimes we plumb the other’s deep-harbored secrets

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With synchronicity of alto saxophone and bass,                                                                                           wailing and throbbing, rhythm and melody,                                                                                                 joys and pains layered upon layer for eons.

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As you begin to drift into sleep, the oncoming train                                                                                   of your snore shakes the bed, slashes my drowsing web.                                                                               A light push on your chest rolls your bones and the

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Sound of your snoring—Doppler Effected—                                                                                                 slows into a bar of metered clicking breath. I turn                                                                                       towards the comma of the cat touching my ribs and rest

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My back against the shape of yours, a kite to sail me                                                                                   into the moonlit sky and sleep, which will fly too                                                                                       short a time before we wake to hungry cats and dog.

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These days I am reading a potpourri of poets from different periods with vastly different styles. The one collection I am currently reading is Dorianne Laux’s Only As The Day Is Long, from which I recently shared “Pearl,” a poem about Janis Joplin, with my 11th grade home-school student. I’m reading poets whose passion and love for nature display equal intensities. I’ve always loved Gerard Manley Hopkins, not for the religious aspects of his poetry, but for his lush, almost over-the-top language. Despite some archaic elements, “Binsey Poplars” is a perfect example of his ecstatic,

musical writing with sentiments as contemporary as the ethos of the modern environmental movement. I am reduced to the same grief Hopkins experienced when I witness vast areas of clearcutting in my beloved Ozark forests. Although Hopkins and Laux couldn’t be more different as people, their fervors and richness of language have so much in common.                                                                                                                                                    

As a small landowner-gardener and environmentalist, I have always loved Wendell Berry’s poetry

and want to teach some of it to my student. And then there is Gary Snyder, whose poetry combines

a realistic toughness with his love and awe for the natural world. That is something I aspire to in my own nature writing, especially since my husband and I have a (mostly) healthy co-dependency as we live our lives on the land with a logical division of labor. I’ve recently discovered the work of Pascale Petit, whose poetry combines elements of all the above poets in her own wildly passionate style. I’ve also been rereading a lot of Emily Dickinson. What keeps me writing are the obvious motivators: giving voice to the images, sounds and meaning in my head and sharing with other poets and

readers.

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—Ruth Weinstein

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