Deidra Greenleaf Allan

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Home to Roost

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             In memory of my daughter

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They’re back now, returned like carrier pigeons 

pecking at their cage after a brief journey 

into the world. I’d sent them off to you,

 

all the things I was happy to shed—

soup pots and suitcases, andirons and comforters, 

holiday ornaments, silk orchids in their pots—

 

being at the age when possessions have wearied 

into burdens—things to give or throw away. 

Now they’re piled high in my living room 

 

like tide wrack that life’s inexorable currents 

have deposited—unwanted, unasked for—

on this flooded shore of sorrow.

 

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I first discovered poetry in the rhyming ballads of childhood and composed my first poem at the age of 8 about a “frog who went a courting.” (Who knew about plagiarism then?) Words and sounds have been part of my life ever since, as has been my effort to understand, through the process of writing, life’s blunt blows and precious caresses. Inspiration has come from many diverse sources: T.S. Eliot, Lucille Clifton, Jack Gilbert, Galway Kinnell, Cesar Vallejo, Charles Simic, and so many others. The poem, “Home to Roost,” is one of several that I wrote following the sudden death of my 40-year-old daughter. Facing the impossibility of writing about her death directly, I found myself focusing on objects that I associated with her or my grief. With the tremendous void a loved one’s passing leaves in your life, it is ironic that we are left with having to manage the myriad objects they leave behind—clothes, jewelry, kitchenware, books, furniture. At the time of this poem, I was still unable to think about dispersing them, and so they sat, like a silent doppelganger of my daughter, in a huge patient pile in my living room. 

 

—Deidra Greenleaf Allan

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Lynn Aprill

 

 

The Fruit of the Tree

 

“When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food 

and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, 

she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, 

who was with her, and he ate it.”

                                                           Genesis 3:6

 

To be clear, I was not hungry,

not in the way that you think.

Yes, the fruit was ripe and red and enticing,

but for all that, it wasn’t the fruit--

 

                                      it was the knowledge.

Every trip through the garden, encountering 

fantastical animals and abundant vegetation, I’d say, 

“This is Breeze Floater,” only to be told, “No,

that is a fern,” or “Ah, a Tree Eater,” and hear, 

“I named it woodchuck.” To walk 

through my own world and not name it 

was more than I could bear. 

 

                                      So when the snake said

“Knowledge,” the fruit was in my mouth 

before he hissed another word. In that moment, 

I knew it all--every living thing, every story. 

 

The first sin wasn’t disobedience,

it was envy. Or superciliousness, depending 

on which gender you want to blame.

My struggle with sin was not in taking the fruit--

it was in sharing knowledge with him

because for two seconds

I was the first to know.

 

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I’ve always turned to writing to make sense of my world; however, for nearly 30 years, I spent much more time helping students write than doing it myself. Now that poetry has found me once again, I find Billy Collins’ poem “The Function of Poetry” resonating with me:

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             And that’s when I realized

             that the function of poetry is to remind me

             that there is much more to life

             than what I am usually doing

             when I’m not reading or writing poetry.

Besides Collins, some of my favorite poets to teach and read over the years have included William Shakespeare, Robert Browning, Ted Kooser, James Wright, and Amy Lowell.

 

—Lynn Aprill

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Janet Barry

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In the Parking Lot After a Few Margaritas

 

Do you believe in redemption     I do      but maybe not tonight even though

I want to      even though the woman’s perfume hangs on my scarf hangs on

my arm where she kissed me and called me an angel     which I am not     I

saw what I saw her man pulling her by the hair her man shoving her against

the car which broke her fall      her purse on the pavement     Do you believe

in innocence   the purse with a delicate strap   the purse with silver spangles

and she so very drunk and he so very angry   three baby daddies he hisses at

me    three baby daddies and she threw food at me and why do I even bother

taking her out      I take her towards my car      ask if there is a friend we can

call    she tells me her first baby was at seventeen    her hair is long and dark

nice clothes beautiful makeup    he revs his car and races off shouts Spanish

swears which I have not learned in my Duolingo course I tell her please get 

in the car we will go somewhere safe      her crying    her bracelets clattering

as she clasps her cell phone   Do you believe in sanctuary   she speaks rapid 

Spanish the tears blend into words and then he is back    leaning into my car

saying how sorry he is     declares me a good person     which I am doubting      

but I talk about love and working things out and they both agree     he holds 

her purse in his hands     in the open window    the spangles flash     he says 

it is cold out here baby     let’s go home now

 

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I have always been motivated towards the poem that carries a narrative, not necessarily a linear one, but a narrative of connection that moves us to ponder our actions or inactions. Most of the time, for me, these moments occur between the animal world and my stumbling upon some place where our trajectories meet. A fox that I almost hit. A skunk that was not so lucky, that I laid out in death, although I was not its killer, and carried to a gentle stream where it could rest. I love poetry that carries us beyond our borders, be it Joy Harjo or Charles Simic or Terrance Hayes. I want to be present in the crossing of boundaries, to the moment where we must place hope that we cannot really believe in, where we see a future that did not happen but that was so enticingly real. Where we wandered in some other soul, if just for a moment.

 

—Janet Barry 

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Lisa Creech Bledsoe

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Parkinson's And I Are At An Impasse But I Have One Idea

 

1. I listened to 8 Dogs 8 Banjos on repeat.

 

It's a 40 minute drive into town so I listened

to it twelve times, best part of my goddam day.

 

Steve Martin said banjo mighta helped Nixon

& it's working for me so long as it's daylight.

I recommend it for anything incurable,

progressive, neurological, & degenerative.

 

 

2. Later we'll talk about later.

 

To combat the dread, rigidity, and akinesia

on good days I use my own combination of herb,

whiskey, and witch doctors to self-medicate

which suits my natural proclivities

and uninsured status.

 

 

3. Fight dirty.

 

Recently my real meetings with Parkinson's

happen at night. Illegal smokers where the opposing

crew has loaded their gloves with plaster

and you're about to go down in the worst way.

 

News crews haven't gotten word, never mind the law

and they've known for years. Suck it up

roll under the ropes and prep for damage.

 

Smokin' Joe told it straight. You'll get your

brain shook, money took, and your name 

in the undertaker's book.

 

 

4. It's not about the boxing.

 

Paraquat, trichloroethylene, carbon disulfide, etc.

 

Agent Orange, mono-agriculture, degreasing, lead,

dry-cleaning, shoe polish, carpet cleaner, you get

the picture. It's been in the Kool-Aid all this time.

 

A Brita filter is not going to help this.

 

 

5. Hard loving, hard times.

 

I haven't quit. Hell I've only started.

 

I know a hard woman who said Well you're going to end up

in a wheelchair, you'll fall and fall and worse.

You'll aspirate, get pneumonia, die sucking for air.

 

This scared woman rents space in my head and I hug her

once in a while and do my best not to listen

to her shitty prophecies.

 

I say Tell me what you need in the whole wide world.

I play her some fucking banjo music.

Hell I've only started.

 

൪

 

My diagnosis isn't a secret, but I don't talk about it, and I haven't figured out yet just why. Parkinson's is so much more than the simple sketch I had in mind before my diagnosis: more than shaking, more than old people. Right now, for me, it means I'm often walking at a tilt, holding on to walls, trees, whatever's in reach. It means most of the muscles on my left side are contracted, hard, most of the day. My hand and leg sometimes move without my permission, then when I need them to move, they might freeze. Because my left side is impaired, I type with difficulty, and drag my foot when walking. The whole thing is infuriating, painful, scary.

 

But what the hell. I bought a dobro and I'm learning to play it. I work. I keep bees, forage for wild foods on my mountain, and talk to crows. I'll do it all until I can't.

 

—Lisa Creech Bledsoe

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Patricia Davis-Muffett

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The Province of Mothers

 

The Uighur mother sits with her preschooler

in front of the camera, in front of the world.

For two years, she resisted re-education,

continued to be who she was.

Although her captors forced “thank you” from her lips

after the beatings, the electric shock,

She did not allow that thank you 

to penetrate her heart.

 

Here, next to her, her child,

finally. The reporter asks the child,

“For two years, you didn’t see your mom?”

and it is this that breaks her--

not the residual pain

she still feels in her limbs,

not the memory of heart racing

as she tried to comply, 

ward off the rage of her captors.

 

Her tears break free

doing her best to hold onto the mask,

but this girl knows her mother

and though the mother is soundless,

face forward, her daughter turns

(as daughters do)

“Don’t cry mommy.

I told you not to show your tears.”

 

This is how genocide works,

children removed from their mothers,

the thrum of their language erased from their ears--

the Carlisle School forcing English, the cross,

cutting the hair of Arapaho boys.

 

Lying down beside sleepless children,

on floors, on mats, on cots, on beds,

we mothers hold our tears, hold theirs,

do what must be done.

Our voices whisper to sleepy children:

I am using our language

to tell you the stories of my parents

to sing you the lullaby my mother sang me

to pray to the God I ask to protect you

to teach you the names of the long-dead before you.

 

I think of the mothers

at Texas border camps,

Border Patrol doing their best

to comply with the ugly letter of the law,

asking these mothers to sign away rights

so their children can live with their sponsors,

out of this camp, away from the virus.

 

These mothers, approached without translators, lawyers,

knowing if their children are ripped from them now,

there will be no hiding the tears.

Those tears would threaten a torrent

that could stop their voices in throats

might wash away their history.

 

No, they say, stonefaced,

holding the tears,

holding children closer.

This camp, this squalor,

this hell you’ve created:

this the province of mothers.

 

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In late 2019, I left a grueling job that took everything from me. As I was leaving, I made a list of the things I owed myself. Bringing writing back into my life was one of those things. I'm happy to say that 2020, with its many difficulties and heartbreaks, did deliver on that promise I made to myself.

 

My first and lasting poetry loves are Sharon Olds, Lucille Clifton, Mary Oliver, Adrienne Rich and Pablo Neruda. They each taught me something I needed to know about language and agency. Most recently, I have been reading Stacy Nigliazzo's Scissored Moon and Aimee Nezhukumatathil's Oceanic, both of which seem apt in this time of health and environmental crisis.

 

—Patricia Davis-Muffett

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Kathleen Hellen

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daffodils

 

His clues like koans, Alex hosting Jeopardy might answer: 

The roses at Brooklyn’s Botanical. The tulips at Versailles…. 

I am wandering the channels. Truth is, the question is the answer 

that you value. The logic of a shape, for example. For example,  

the champion who’s good at math values algorithm in question 

answering. The Fibonacci Sequence. He values the arrangement. 

For me, it’s like a question answering the grass—or dancing 

in a masterpiece of lilies, rippling underneath the painter’s bridge. 

Truth is, what you get is where you start. I think of Wordsworth. 

I take a stab. What’s joy? I ask.

 

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The first time I read “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” I must have been in Pittsburgh, at Carnegie Mellon, taking a seminar in the “Romantic Revolution.” At that time, I was more infatuated with the sacred “savage places” that informed the landscape of Coleridge’s "Kubla Khan” and the demon forces that inhabited “Christabel." If only I could have conjured then “the bliss of solitude,” at one with daffodils. If only now I could practice practice practice the awareness the Buddha taught, holding up a flower. How to simply and hopelessly delight in the essential nature of things, like Wordsworth’s narrator who sheds his loneliness lying on a couch and vacantly recalling dancing daffodils along the bay? Question-answering was a natural structure for the poem—and yet I do believe that too much thinking is my trouble (We murder to dissect, “The Tables Turned”). Do I contradict myself?

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—Kathleen Hellen

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Sally Rosen Kindred

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The Dark Page  

 

to Denis at fourteen

 

When you were four, the teacher 

handed you a gray model 

of the brain. It was smooth      

and cold like a dead galaxy, seamed  

from a factory’s mold. Where

 

had she found it? Who had decided

it should be made? She lifted it down

from the bright shelf, like God. 

She was tall like God. She bent              

to you in this room where I’d left 

 

your tender head, touching you      

at the door from the wool coat 

that warmed the blood

inside my skin, laced lonely 

to the walls of my body. I left you

 

here: your second mother, I’d first gathered

your small weight years before

in a green lobby, a distant city. Your hair 

soft on my cheek: I was not              

the first to leave you, though I feared

 

I’d be the first leaving you’d  

remember, gone three hours 

so you could feel the air cool around you,

feel your fingers thrill

in puddles of blue paint, and hear   

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your own spine ring when you’d lift 

a heavy book. On the dark page a girl                            

called to you from inside a wolf. 

Later you‘d stand in the corner, turning                        

the storm of strange plastic, the gray  

 

matter of a another’s fear

in your hand. When you were four

you dreamed your birthmother 

came to your bed in her moon-veil and you                                         

weren’t there. No, I dreamed

 

you woke and told me this, 

but you never did. Long mornings 

when you missed me the teacher said       

Write her a letter. And you kneeled 

on the rug and told her pen Dear Mama

 

I was sad and held the brain.

You did not pretend it was mine

but I dreamed you did. I came back for you. 

Now that’s all I want you to hold 

in your head. I came back.

 

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             I’m both a poet and the daughter of a poet, and that’s no accident. My mother read me poems early on, I think because they’d helped her survive. I remember how her reading Theodore Roethke’s “The Meadow Mouse” aloud—“his feet like small leaves,” “the whole body of him trembling”—opened a door inside me. The way the music of language and image could recognize grief and awe, embody it, make it something one of us could give the other, something to hold in my hands and mouth!

            That handing-over of Roethke’s words made a background hum as I wrote “The Dark Page.” A poem is not exactly a plastic brain in the hand, but I like to think that some gifts my son received when he was small will do for him what poems have done for me. “Worm, be with me,” Roethke wrote in “The Lost Son”:“This is my hard time.” I love poems for what they let us give each other, and what they let us hold in the dark. 

 

—Sally Rosen Kindred

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J. I. Kleinberg

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Ornament

 

The word dangles in front of my eyes 

unprompted, a shiny earring: Ornament.

 

Here again, the thing seen, the decoration

grabs my attention: the feather not the bird;

 

the cloud not the storm; the sound

not the story. What neuronal misfire

 

produced this word, ornament, with its heart

a command: name. Is this the work

 

of our brief tenure, this naming? 

To chip away at the mystery, to reveal

 

the gemstone in the matrix: the light in flight,

the see in beseech, the reluctant yes in goodbyes.

 

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My poetry is driven by two parallel but mostly unconnected daily practices: one a combination of reading and writing, the other a slow slog through magazines to build found poems. The reading is eclectic. On my current pile of eight books, three ask why: Why Poetry by Matthew Zapruder, Why Horses by Anita K. Boyle, and Why Does the World Exist by Jim Holt. I read, write, and assemble found poems each morning before my mind gets too cluttered with the day. Occasionally, at the intersection of these practices, something both lexical and visual happens: words show up uninvited and then blow apart to display their unintended components. Thus, “Ornament.”

 

—J.I. Kleinberg

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Erin Murphy

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Taxonomies: Intimacy

 

I. Overheard Conversations

 

Couple at the next table on a blind date, 

the high-pitched screech of chair legs on tile 

when he stands to leave. Mother and daughter 

in a dressing room, the mother saying 

You could cover your arm fat with a shawl. 

Teenage girl at my gynecologist’s office, 

her muffled sobs through the thin wall.

 

 

II. Physical Markings

Dimples, those adorable genetic defects.
Grandmother puckering a newborn’s 

toes to check for lucky stars on his feet. 

Some people wait their whole lives 

to learn from lovers they’re harboring

birthmarks on intimate parts. Some never

find out what it’s like to be seen.

 

 

III. In-Between

Dawn/dusk. Myth/faith. Love/lust. 
Yesterday the two of you were picking 
crabs on the back deck. Today, post-stroke, 

his brain has liquified,the doctors said. 

You picture juice, pulverized fruit and kale,

sloshing within the walls of a travelmug. 

Minute/year. Grief/relief. Here/not here.

 

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Each section of this poem is a demi-sonnet, a seven-line form I devised. The series is from my manuscript in progress, Taxonomies, which will be my third book of demi-sonnets. There are only two rules: a demi-sonnet must be seven lines and must end with a full or slant rhyme. I like the challenge of the form, as it forces me to distill an idea or story to its essence. I have long admired Rae Armentrout for her mastery of brevity. More recently, I have admired Terrance Hayes for his fresh take on the sonnet (American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin) and Victoria Chang for her brilliant approach to the book-length series (Obit). 

 

—Erin Murphy

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Marianne Peel

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Confession

 

I’m going to miss the trees 

the most, she tells me.  On the sand,

in our anti-gravity chairs. We float

toward and away from each other.  

She’s let her hair grow grey, working

its way from root to shoulders.  

 

Last year she turned fifty. Cleaned out

her closet.  Donated everything.  Including

her fuck-me spiked heels. Purged anything

sensual.  Off the shoulder sweaters.  Spandex

skirts.  Anything that snugged the curves. 

 

She has runner’s legs. Marathons.  Stamina

for the distance.  But still envies

the muscles in my calves. Dancer’s legs.   

I tell her I once performed forty-two relevés

on point shoes.  Won the competition at the studio.

Nothing is as it seems beneath the tulle

 

and the sequined bodice. I chose to pad my toes 

with lamb’s wool. Rejected the synthetic pad.  Wanted

nothing manufactured or artificial.  Wanted to feel the softness 

on my toes as I manipulated them into steel toed 

shoes two sizes too small. Soft pink ribbons 

up the ankles.  After the barre work, after the floorwork,

 

after the forty-two relevés, the lamb’s wool was crusted

with blood. Sacrificial lamb.  

Lamb for slaughter. She tells me she lost

one toenail at a time in Greece.  Running 

the same marathon path naked boys ran 

generations ago.   

 

She looks out onto an alley. Bougainvillea 

emerging from the cracks in the rocks.  From the cracks 

in the bricks.   There is a name for the emergence 

of stems and flowers and vines from stone.  But

she has forgotten it. 

​

A mustached man serenaded her 

with a Klezmer tune on his clarinet.  Lured her in

to his restaurant with a song. They shared 

the same cigarette.  Fire passed between them.  

He promised to meet her at the finish line.  

With an Effes beer from Turkey, a lit cigarette.  

But today, she tells me she will miss the trees the most.

 

She imagines herself erased.  Just gone. 

She is a shroud of open weave mesh and light.

Sitting in a wicker rocker.  Listening to her daughter

play Moonlight Sonata.  Beethoven on an autumn 

afternoon.  She imagines Beethoven sawing the legs

off his piano.  Hearing the vibrations through floorboards.

 

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I thrive as a poet both in solitude and in community.  The pandemic era actually enabled me to connect with writing communities, via Zoom, all over the globe.  I feel most alive as a writer when I am working in community or in collaboration.  Currently, I am in a year-long project entitled "Coming of Age" out of Lexington, KY.  There are thirty women over the age of 60 in this project, and we meet in small groups twice a month and in full large group once a month.  We also have weekly Open Mic sessions where we share our evolving work.  We've become a wonderfully supportive writer's circle and plan to continue meeting as a small group even after the year concludes.  

 

I return to favorite poets all the time, for inspiration and for a reminder to take risks in my writing.  Currently, I am reading Kim Addonizio's Tell Me, after taking an online workshop from Kim.  I'm also reading Harvest Time by Martin Willits Jr., who I was recently in a Master Class with out of Carnegie Center in Lexington.  The phrase I return to constantly is actually out of Peter Shaffer's Equus: "Only you can shrink your own life."  This is a perpetual reminder to me to stretch, to dare, to risk -- to refuse to settle for a small or shrunken life.  Professor Arthur Athanason introduced me to Equus when I was a sophomore at Michigan State University, and the entire play has been a touchstone for me in both my personal and writing life.  I also read Tennessee Williams over and over, as I believe his plays contain some of the most poetic, genuine language I have ever encountered.   Mostly, I read everything I can to stretch myself as a writer and as a human being.

 

 —Marianne Peel

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Sarah Dickenson Snyder

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FORGIVENESS ATTIRE

 

I have started laying out my clothes for the day 

on the just-made bed: jeans, t-shirt, sweater, 

underwear, and the warm socks, two commas 

on top of the comforter. I’m amused, 

this channeling of my middle school self: 

that perfect gray V-neck sweater, the plaid skirt, 

and white knee socks.   

                                      But a meeting with you, God, 

I’m not sure what I’d wear, not sure I would forgive you—

I’m thinking of genocides, how many there’ve been; 

and these past four years and this last endless one— 

too many taken, how much of me 

was built on joy and has collapsed. I doubt 

I’ll show up—it was in a cathedral, right?

Why such a big house and so much light?

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I like to memorize poems that I love, learn them ‘by heart’ (I also love this cliché because it feels so true, that the words reside somewhere in the most tender, the most essential part to me). I write poetry because I am compelled, have been since I knew there was a form of writing with line breaks. I think that need comes from how beautiful the world is and the reality that I will leave it. Death has always been a close partner to life for me; I’m sure it’s why I am hospice volunteer. Lucille Clifton’s poem “Blessing the Boats” is about blessing boats of course, but it has always been a poem to me blessing those whom we love who have died. It swims in me, gives me solace as well as gives me inspiration to become a better writer: may the tide/that is entering even now/carry you out/beyond the face of fear and may you in your innocence/sail through this to that. How perfect to focus life and death into this and that. Lucille Clifton, Eavan Boland, Ellen Bass, Marie Howe, Monica Sok, Gwendolyn Brooks, Kay Ryan and many others inspire me with their words on a page and inside of me.

 

—Sarah Dickenson Snyder

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Kelleen Zubick

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Mother Hums Mazzy Star

 

Long after the hotel stay, mother keeps humming

that song from the bar, the slow one with slurred

words that I doubt she ever knew. Humming

just the melody and not the whole song, a loose

refrain that’s around her now like scenery out of focus.

 

It’s a song popular with my college crowd 

and nothing she should know, unlike what it means 

when a man at the bar with stained pits

suggests a game in his room upstairs 

and his two oil-men friends agree,

like it’s a trip to the World’s Fair. The laughs

are too reedy in the ride up to his room, 

which looks like our double but smells bad.

 

Mother is more unsteady than drunk—there’s

a quiver that I know in her TV-styled voice

calling for music and dancing, while that one 

sloshes alcohol in plastic cups. I find I can refuse.

I won’t be sent for ice. I won’t be dealt-in.

And no one grabs my middle; I don’t dance.

I wait out the first round of this fun, with the men 

hooting like it’s just pastime, this fumble,

yank and pin on someone you’ll never see again. 

 

I take her back. I lead her to our room, carrying

her open shoes frayed around the buckles.

I can’t be reached by what she’s saying 

when I tuck her in. I can’t become her is all 

I’m thinking, even though I do know the words: 

Fade into you. I know the song I was born into.

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൪

 

Currently, I am taken with Kevin Young’s poetry and his poem, “Hive."  In this short poem, Young recognizes the impossibility of reclamation—the honey bees’ exile, the gods that “look away as always”—but he still imagines a deliverance where we arrive “buzzing, unstung.”  I love the courage of the poet to both witness and to see beyond or at least see alternatively. Kevin Young describes “Hive” as a kind of winged benediction—a song that summons suffering but does not succumb. As a poetic endeavor, this resonates with me. On a much smaller scale, I am trying to approach this quality in “Mother Hums Mazzy Star” by depicting a painful familial relationship and incident that both traps and releases the speaker.

 

—Kelleen Zubick

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