Mary Jo Balistreri

 

On the Way to Rochester, Minnesota

 

Early Sunday, February cold, we begin our drive

to Mayo Clinic. My husband curls up beside me.

A large white pillow cuddles his head.

Fields flash by patched with snow,

trees bare of leaves, a low hung sky.

 

He’d become so familiar I’d ceased 

to see him. Now everything is changed.

We’re together in a way we’ve never been. 

He was always the driver, the person in charge,

head of our home. Sick, his role had frayed.

 

In the quiet there’s an urgency to memorize him:

his old cotton shirt, the faint smell of sun and air,

an ink stain on the pocket,

his hand wrinkled and veined. The gray curls.

But no—they’ve been cut away.

 

Moving toward uncertainty, my hands clench

the steering wheel, the metal taste of fear in my mouth.

We come with no offerings of frankincense or myrrh,

but only a desperate plea to heal what can be healed

in our long knowing of love.

 

 

​

Reprieve

 

Deep in the forest, a ladder of sunlight appears

as my eyes open in this place of shelter. After the dark

and restful quiet of meditation, its brilliance startles.

 

It reminds me of mother’s dying, rising

to a rapturous light she reached for, then falling

back upon her pillow. In that brief moment of pause

the grief of her life became the grief of her death. 

Like the summer solstice, that irreversible turn:

longest light turns toward shortest night.

 

Leaning back against my favorite cedar, I look

around. Everything that was cool and dark glows—

stream, rocks, lichened logs. 

The forest’s light reminds me of the last blaze

of fire before the sun drops over the edge.

 

I’d made this secluded place my sanctuary even before

the coronavirus.  Now more than ever, I need

nature’s simplicity.

 

As I walk home through the setting sun’s afterglow, 

the forest’s silence tags along. Almost there, I realize

my anxiety has dissipated. A skein of crows winds in and out

between buildings, a flock of egrets 

nudged by impending darkness head home to roost.

 

൪

 

Poetry was not a part of my life when my youngest grandson died, but my lifelong profession of music could not help me transcend his loss. Healing came through the words of poets—Jane Kenyon, Mary Oliver, Linda Pastan. Their poetry became the bridge from music to  the music of words. I still go back to these poets for their simplicity, honesty, and love of the world. Along with Rilke, Levertov, and Hopkins, they are my "go to poets" when I get stuck or forget why I came to poetry in the first place. Right now, I am reading journals,  Poetry East,  Modern Haiku, and  Drifting Sands along with Selected Poems by Hahmoud Darwish. A favorite line that comes back to me time and again, is the last line from the Great Gatsby: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back endlessly into the past.”

 

— Mary Jo Balistreri

 

 

​

Fleda Brown

 

Ode on the Nine Things I Didn’t Understand

 

First, the first black kids in Fayetteville High, 

             who no longer had to be bussed an hour over 

the mountains to the colored school. How could

             I know anything? Second, black poets’ voices: 

thunder out of airlessness. Third, the airlessness 

             behind the courthouse where the blacks lived. 

Fourth, Nikki Giovanni’s hatred of me, not me, but, 

             you know, white people. Fifth, Gwendolyn Brooks, 

and Maya Angelou, their restrained graciousness. 

             What was underneath. Underneath the two black

men on a stone bridge in Hughie Lee Smith’s painting, 

             “Home,” I see the dark caverns of arches. 

I see one man almost losing a big red ball in the wind, 

             multicolored streamers flying like joy, 

the other’s muscular back turned slightly away, 

             gaze slightly down, a wariness, something 

coming, something (sixth) I would never get, under 

             blue sky and clouds. I was walking home 

from school hugging my stack of books, balanced 

             and slipping. Walking home through the tunnel

of my youth along the only route I knew 

             the men animal-wary, somewhere on bridges. 

In Little Rock our governor held his ground until 

             the troops came; this was our state and this was 

the cracked sidewalk I walked home from school on, 

             I was so small I can’t see myself any more, except 

for the rumbling of change that was me, always me 

             changing, the buds of breasts and all. Come to think 

of it, I cannot find anything that holds still, except 

             the photos. And that painting like a monument,

that wary back turned away, high on the massive 

             stones of the bridge. Seventh, how an arch 

can hold up heavy things. How cathedrals depend

             on them. How before there was steel there were 

stones leaning, one on the next until the central one 

             at the top. The arch will collapse unless there’s 

something to restrain it, like a buttress or a wall. 

             Then you can run a train through, you can sing 

or say poems loudly inside and the sound will push 

             out the ends, you can stand on top and be sentinel 

while all manner of locomotion slides under. 

             The kids lived behind the courthouse.  All manner 

of beings were there then, as all things are contingent 

             (eighth) and the story of me was based 

on location, dependent upon location, Whitham Street, 

             home, where I was walking, that remained 

home only a while. Ninth, separation is only a perception 

             whereas reality is unchanged as stone, 

and changing, as if a camera were moving along 

             the bridge, stealthily, like a drone.

 

൪            

 

After all these years, I have a pretty strong sense of what’s honest and what’s posturing in a poem. There’s a fine line between language gloriously used and language that’s self-conscious. I look for the glorious. I was nurtured on Hopkins, Rilke, Bishop, and Whitman, and I still turn to them. As for contemporary poets, I read Ellen Bass, Ross Gay, Ada Limon, and many others, but I also read poets I don’t particularly like because I learn things from them as well. 

 

I like to write about trees and birds and flowers, yes I do, even in this terrible time when larger world events are at our throats, literally. I like the small, nearly unseen, beings because they are just themselves, and they are in a way the other part of ourselves. They keep us sane. I am all for sanity these days. 

 

—Fleda Brown

 

 

Laura Brylawski-Miller

 

EPITAPH FOR A PAINTER

 

I shall never now gather the stars

you said I resembled in the living

flesh (quoting some poet). And maybe

I did, then: at seventeen, my callow

green unawareness that you were

falling in love could have lent a touch

of astral distance to the space between us,

those winter afternoons in the studio.

 

You would recite Esenin and Eluard,

explain Cezanne -- a tide of words

flowing into an unexplored beach--

while on the canvas an archetypal figure

I vaguely resembled  would emerge,

violet and brown and yellow, an incarnate

totem, familiar and unknown, my much-

praised face slashed by enigmatic lines, your

famous “wounds” as critics called them.

 

I didn’t understand, then. And now

those wounds have come, your fame

somewhat has dimmed, but none of it

really matters, you know: those winter

afternoons, the dead poets, the colors, are

what endures. I can bathe forever in the deep,

mysterious blues of your “Night Fishing”,

that summer you worked with Picasso

at Antibes, circles of lamp-lit waters

luring groupers to death. And your

weighty black-greens still hold the fields

of our Lombard days, my naïve years

and the wisdom of your peasant roots.

 

From my library wall I now look down

at myself through your eyes. We have both

gone outside time, like those distant stars.
 

൪

 

D’Annunzio once said that color is the struggle of matter to become light. I equally believe that poetry is the attempt of words to break out from their everyday meaning, and to reveal themselves for what they can be: doors to subterranean connections of feelings and images, triggers of buried experiences, adventures in a terra incognita. And in the end, poetry to me is the pleasure words give. Pleasure in their sound, in their shape, and most of all in the challenge they present: having to use words to say what we do not know how to say with words.

 

—Laura Brylawski-Miller

 

 

​

Sherry Chappelle

 

Take the Pearl

             Leave the Shell Behind

                                      ~ Rumi

 

She keeps a baton at ready, tabled by her chair

to conduct – as if she was - as if she were –

 

in charge of all the music she hears

while waiting for the Big Crunch

 

when her universe stops expanding

when she no longer can warm in a beam

 

of light the size of a piece of toast or

paint the wilderness of stillborn moments

 

her mind no longer running up and down the chords

of the B minor scale, searching for resolution.

 

൪

 

Poetry combines all the things I love best. There’s the way words can tell stories in so many ways. There is the gorgeous feel of them in your mouth – round and jagged, sweet and sour. And the way poems can be thunderstorms lighting up your inner and outer worlds. This Garden of Earthly Delights can be explored endlessly and returned to again and again.

 

—Sherry Chappelle

 

 

Anne Colwell

 

This is a travel poem

 

Because as it begins, I’m driving.

             Two hours ‘til daybreak.

             Full moon in the rearview –

             Bright coin, blank eye –

             Balanced on two spit-shine clouds

             That dip and rise – like a check-mark

             Bird drawn by the four-year-old boy

             Who had feather blonde hair, bad headaches

             Who would have been nine this year.

 

Because as it goes on, I’ve turned

             On to Route 9 past the Methodist 

             Graveyard headed toward the sleepless ocean.

             To my right, in the dark,

             Is the stone that squares his name, and the two

             Numbers that add up to eighteen years.

 

Because when I finally turn onto the highway, 

             Venus, the morning star, ghosts beside me. 

             My lights fading as last night’s neon 

             Winks out, and Venus whispers

             In the voice of my mother and grandmother

             That this is a travel poem. 

 

Because although it is hemmed by loss,

             The trajectory is plain. Trouble

             Stays tangled in the margins. “There’s no way

             To stand firm on both feet and slip trouble,”

             Homer says. But there’s nowhere to go either.

 

 

* In memory of my student, Cory Burton.

​

൪

 

One of the many things that keeps me writing poetry is the way poems connect me to the here and now, to my own senses and experiences. What keeps me reading is the transcendence beyond my own experience that those words bring. Reading poems connects me to the senses and experiences in some other writer's world even as it heightens my awareness of my own. This fall, I've been reciting Denise Levertov's poem "The Avowal" over and over to myself, wishing I could live in the effortless and grace-filled way that she calls forth in this poem: 

   As swimmers dare

to lie face to the sky
and water bears them,
as hawks rest upon air
and air sustains them.

 

— Anne Colwell

 

 

 

​

Molly Fisk

 

August

 

Smoke makes the air true, gruesome,

hangs thick between trees, curdles 

noon light to a pink-orange-otherworldly 

 

hue as if doom were visible and not just 

a grinding in the solar plexus.

We can taste the pines, the ceanothus,

 

on our tongues, every incendiary twig 

and sap-filled branch that has exploded

into ravenous flame. It's only our blaze 

 

now in the river canyon boiling up but 

a north wind is due that will lift fumes 

from valley fires, spin them with those 

 

beside the salt bay and bring new weather 

to sear our throats. The whole state 

is lightning-stunned, lit up and burning — 

 

eucalyptus oils, laurel, black oak, coast 

redwood, apricot and prune-plum, garlic 

stems, cypress, artichokes charred 

 

in their silver-green leaves, the heavy, staked 

grapevines, harvest-laden. All ash 

and memory. Mandarins, lemon groves.

 

 

൪

 

It’s a cliché now, but I began writing in 1990 having read, a few years before, Mary Oliver’s poem “Wild Geese,” which someone handed me as a conciliatory measure after we’d had a fight. I wasn’t a writer at the time. The poem moved from one icebox door in Cambridge, MA to another in Stinson Beach, CA, and someone gave me Oliver’s American Primitive for Christmas, which I read, and promptly thought, “Oh, I could do that.” Which is of course not true in any way. But it got me writing, and Oliver’s undeclared at the time history of child abuse, which was evident in the poems, kept me going through my own traumatic amnesia recovery. I can return to Oliver to jumpstart myself when I’m really stalled, but I also turn to Carolyn Forché, Jack Gilbert, Frank X. Gaspar, Sharon Olds, Robert Frost, Robert Hass, Dorianne Laux, and any number of others for inspiration and to continue the conversation poets have had with each other for centuries, which I am so grateful to be a part of.

 

— Molly Fisk

 

 

​

Diana Goetsch

 

POINTILLISM

 

Eating shredded wheat, I see my brother

on the back of the milk carton. Not 

the clearest picture, but here’s his name 

beneath. That’s fairly strange because 

he’s also sitting at the table next to me 

eating Peanut Butter Captain Crunch, 

crunching like a slob with his mouth open, 

milk dribbling, holding his spoon like a club. 

(Grandma worries he’ll never find a wife,

eating like that.) In the picture he looks 

to be about fifty-five, eyes half-lidded, 

shirtless, reclining in a hot tub in California, 

bald and fat, and apparently “Lost.”

If I look closely all I see is dots, like 

the Seurat painting we studied in art class. 

“It’s okay I guess,” I said to Mrs. Rowe, 

“but who cares about random Parisians 

in a park, stiff guys in silly hats, and women 

with parasols and porch-like derrieres?” 

I guess you could say the same for a fifty-five

-year-old fat guy in a hot tub—who cares? 

We don’t mind the smell of peanut butter 

on our own breath, but it reeks on others, 

and he was my first other, the prototype 

of everyone who will steal the last slice, 

steal my work and claim it for his own, 

steal my life. Purple nurple, deadleg, punch 

on the nose, and that wet flash of nausea—

smell of pure hate. He taught me hate 

and my parents called it love, which is as weird 

as a ghost eating breakfast next to you, a ghost 

on a milk carton, red dots in blue shadow.  

​

൪

 

I’ve been largely absent from Poetryland for a couple of years, ensconced in a memoir, though the memoir includes how I began to write poetry, in the 1980s, at a time when I was addicted to shooting pool. After playing straight pool all night in Manhattan, while waiting in a deserted subway station, lines of poetry would float up to me. They weren’t lines of Frost or Eliot or anyone else, so they must have been mine. I’d get home to Brooklyn just before dawn, sit in my tiny kitchen, and write down those lines. The lyric phrases would start to take on the flesh of a narrative, and these would become my first published poems. It’s a strange way to begin a life of writing poetry, but I think something needed to be discharged, or otherwise exhausted, clearing the way for words. I also think I needed the feeling of being the only one awake among millions of sleeping people—giving me a strange and elevated privacy, as though I were standing guard over consciousness, or treading the afterlife—in order to write.

 

— Diana Goetsch

 

(Both of Diana Goetsch’s poems in this issue of ൪uartet appear in different form in her chapbook, In America, a Rattle Chapbook Prize selection.)

 

​

​

Meredith Davies Hadaway

 

LEAVES

 

             Marcescent leaves may be retained indefinitely…

 

The way we hold on to the dead through 

long months of winter. We keep a jacket 

 

and a pair of shoes, a scarf that wears 

their scent. An empty envelope slips from 

 

a book. Your name is on it, but you don’t 

remember what the letter said. 

 

Torn edge along the top, flattened by the press 

of pages, nearly dust, your name 

 

in a familiar looping script. The ink 

has blurred into the paper now a waxy sheen. 

 

A vein. A stem. A name—

with no return address.

 

൪

 

“My life in poetry began with the narrative poems of my childhood and the Highway Man and has been tapping at my shutters ever since. My own writing carries me deeper into a daily discovery of birds, tides, trees—the watery landscape of Maryland’s Eastern Shore.  As far as inspiration, I read Rumi every day for some spiritual caffeine. I turn to Elizabeth Bishop for resonant description, to Lorine Neidecker for floating imagery, and to Jane Hirshfield for lessons in the zen of paradox.  And, oh yes, who doesn’t love Mary Oliver?”

 

— Meredith Davies Hadaway

 

​

​

Luisa A. Igloria

 

Shaker

 

You knew as soon as we climbed 

into the mezzanine’s upturned 

square of yellow light—

 

Mostly because a chair had been left there 

in the middle of the floor: accoutrement of blond

wood, upright back, the kind that might be hung

by one rung along with others of the same

make on a wall.

 

                                Evidence, you said, 

of another idea of pioneer. Could this be 

a place to let down baggage, allow the head 

to tilt toward the trees and their barges

filled with powdered snow?

 

There are those who cultivate 

a certain look as soon as they feel they’ve fled

their moorings— 

 

Their appraisal washes over you 

when elevator doors slide open 

and you step in. 

 

But you don’t know

how to be that kind of sleek

animal or machine; 

 

                                       where to put

your carved idol face, your brass

inlays, each hand-pressed layer

of mahogany veneer. 

 

 

൪

 

In my work, I write about recurring themes: place, displacement, my (our) place in and connection to histories that precede us and that determine experience as well as possibility in the current moment. And for many years now, before I became aware of the term, I’ve been writing ecopoetry— Not merely because of the importance of preserving the natural world which is in precarity from climate change effects, among other things, but because growing up in Baguio City in the Philippines, I was raised with the awareness of the interconnectedness of all forms of life. My identities as an immigrant writer, a woman, a poet of color, have an influence on my writing as well as my pedagogy and art-making. www.luisaigloria.com

 

— Luisa A. Igloria

 

​

​

Mary Ann Larkin

 

THE STORY

 

Each year, the nuns

unfolded the story anew for us,

a holiday cloth they’d hidden away

at the bottom of a drawer.

They showed us

how hard it is to be born,

hung the tale like a star

in those sooty Pittsburgh skies.

 

In our cavernous schoolroom, smelling 

of chalk dust, paste and chocolate milk

the sisters assembled their cast:

the mean king

the humble working man

the acquiescent girl,

and the animals, of course.

The Babe still unborn.

No one yet forsaken.

 

Rubber boots stood in puddles

in the steamy cloakroom,

as the donkey jolted along,

and the camels unfolded

first one leg then another.

The innkeepers were cruel

but the lambs and the ox made room 

in the sweet-smelling straw

that banished all the odors

from our starless classroom.

 

Though we know many stories now

the nuns were the first to tell us 

of betrayal and cruelty

stars and love

the adoration of the flesh

the warm close breath of the dumb.

​

൪

 

Though I wrote my first poem as a freshman in high school, I began writing poetry seriously in my thirties after the sorrow of a divorce set free the sorrow I had buried when my mother died. I have been writing regularly ever since--for more than forty years. It's what I do and can't stop doing. Some of my favorite poets are Jack Gilbert, Muriel Rukeyser, Adam Zagajewski, and Wislawa Symborska.

 

— Mary Ann Larkin

 

​

​

Franetta McMillian

 

Cosmonaut

for my father

 

I remember when we used

to take the telescope out on the Green.

Lots of folks were staring

at the moon back then.

Some men even landed on it --

dug around, played golf,

planted a flag.

One giant leap for humankind.

 

Later, armed with a cheap mic

and an old cassette recorder,

I would plot my own fantastic voyages.

And me, Spock, Scotty, 

and Josie and the Pussycats,

didn’t just settle for the moon.

We zoomed right past Saturn’s rings

beyond Pluto

columbusing the final frontier.

 

We are fallen stars

staring up at the sky,

billion year old flecks of light,

mired in gravity,

who spend our whole lives

aching for home.

 

Well, you’ve made it, Cosmonaut.

Cut the silver cord

and spread your wings.

Take one final bow

and boldly go.

 

​

​

Euthanasia

​

My sister called to say Mom

was seriously considering the feeding tube.

Dad had been in hospital for three days.

The prognosis wasn’t good.

“What’s his fever?” I asked.

“104.7,” she said. “What should we do?”

 

Dad hadn’t spoken for a week.

Even if he survived this,

he was never really coming back.

During lunch I sent a text:

“Treat 12 more hours.

If no improvement, hospice.”

With those eight words,

I sealed my father’s fate.

 

I was reminded of that time

I was stuck in traffic

and there was a deer

on the side of the road, 

legs mangled and bleeding,

stubbornly clinging to life.

A dapper gray-haired stranger

left his car to do

what needed to be done:

two shots -- head and heart -- pop! pop!

And it was over.

 

Sometimes an act of mercy

leaves a yawning silence

and a hole in your heart

deeper than time.

Sometimes love

can feel like murder --

or is that what

they mean by letting go?

 

൪

 

Probably my biggest poetic influences have been song lyrics: Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Peter Sinfield (of King Crimson), Michael Timmins (of the Cowboy Junkies.) I also like rap lyrics when they actually have something coherent to say.

 

I like reading or listening to writers for whom English is not their first language because they transform English in interesting ways. (Examples: Bjork, Gabriel Okara)

 

I believe in the poetic value of everyday speech. If you listen to people, they say the damndest things. A couple of days ago a little girl yelled in the parking lot, “I’m so bored, I wish a bear would kiss me!” I thought: “That’s going in a poem one day.”

 

Most poetry I read is either not revised enough or revised to death. You want the proper balance between emotional resonance and technique. 

 

— Franetta McMillian 
 

 

​

Kristina Morgan

 

Alberta of Sandia Unit B, Behavioral Health

 

I cry myself awake to the florescent bulbs

in the room, Alberta’s booming voice

from the hall—raw, brassy, authentic,

saying don’t you despair.

I am pulled from my bed.

 

She is a large woman heavy on her feet

preferring the ride of a wheelchair

to the movement of her own brown legs.

 

Alberta asked for peanut M & M’s. 

They settled her, acting 

as hands to a clock and breeze to a bird.

 

I dreamt of revolution to be a step toward peace.

Thought that it would ignite in me, tear me down,

allow me to rebuild--my body tall and reed like, 

my mind a platter of beads, a kaleidoscope of God.

 

Alberta did not need a revolution.  She was one

who blazed outside herself, kindled fire in others, 

her mouth filled with fierce words and sad pleas,

Help me. I hate it here. Won’t you all fuck off.

Prison is filled with stained toilets and broken showers.

This. Is. Prison.

 

Medication did not tame her belligerence.  

She was the iron ball of a catapult 

who would launch herself onto the patio of smokers,

smelling of rancid unwashed people,

interfering with their chatter,

asking for a cigarette, being offered none.

 

Staff brushed her corn rows out 

and washed her house coat

the morning the Marshall and two security guards 

came from the State Hospital.

They were unprepared for her size. 

​

She was not able to fit into the back

of the police car.  Even thin

she would not have been able to fit into the seat.

She was no criminal.  She was a suffering woman 

whose rage stole the best of her

and scared other patients into wishing 

she would be taken away.

 

I could spend hours watching Alberta 

with a glance from my chair

in front of the staff’s station. We don’t interact.

She is truth without language.

Getting to know her would strip the mystery

I’ve come to dwell in like a detective searching

for a missing woman, a dog leaving muddy 

paw prints in a home that is not his,

then disappearing, unnoticed, 

back through the doggy door.

 

Alberta is in me.  I too see with the unbroken gaze   

of psychosis. I too dialogue with people 

no one else sees.  

Medication helps. Brings me back  

to palm trees and swimming pools, 

conversation and chicken, the smell

of barbeque making itself known.

I like washing dishes

and returning to a bed dressed 

in flowered sheets, sleeping in dreams

of eating chocolate, 

reading mail sent to my home.

 

Alberta doesn’t know that I am in her.  

I am in her like dust in a tornado,

night in a star, ice in a glacier.  

Too small to be felt by her heart. Too small 

to pull her out of illness.

​

Staff gives her a chocolate bar 

she eats while she waits for the van.

She will live at the State Hospital for at least a year.

I watch her delight over the candy.

Her mouth carves its way into a smile.

I wonder if the moment is as significant to her

as it is to me. I taste her pleasure.

 

I will go grocery shopping with my boyfriend,

will pick from many chocolate bars, thank God for the quiet

that comes after the revolution where people like Alberta

can storm if they like, blowing fire into rivers,

their revolt safe. The pavement is hot.

I have shoes that prevent me from blistering

as I walk easily to our car.

 

 

​

The Snow Cone Machine is Large

 

its size forces the family to stand one at a time in the kitchen.

I ask my sister, Emily, why she keeps it.  She says the kids

want to remember snow cones with their father in the summer

how the syrup painted their tongue and made their smile bright blue.

 

There is a magnet of Bob on the refrigerator

his shaved head sitting on a thick neck and strong shoulders

that promised not to buckle under heavy flannel

at least this is how the picture reads.

 

*

​

It is Tuesday at 2 am. 

My sister, nephew and niece are wakened by the pounding on the door,

a noise much louder than the traffic they can hear driving past their apartment.

Emily knows it is the police.  She knows this just as she knows

there is no butter in the house.

 

She opens the door to the officer who in turn asks if she is Emily Brown-Smith,

the length of her name steady like an alarm clock when it is time.

Her reply is slow, is yes, is seconds long.  “Do you know a Robert J. Smith?”

She does not say yes, but closes her eyes in a pause much longer than a blink.

The officer informs her that he was found dead in his home. The dead final like ice   

left on the counter to melt.

 

 

Bob had stabbed himself repeatedly and then hung himself.  It was said he died slowly.  

             The noose had worked only in the end. The details mattered

              like a monogram on the pocket of a shirt for sale at a secondhand store.

 

*

​

My nephew and niece fold and unfold that single morning

            like they do origami swans left on their window sills to fade by the sun.

They are 13 and 11.  The chest of drawers they share does not allow them to tuck

            the weight of their father in beside the sweaters.

They wear him to Thanksgiving dinner.  It is obvious.  They can not lift their chin,

            nor are they asked to.  

 

Come summer, there will be snow cones again.  This is what they talk about.

 

൪

 

Writing is breath. I wrote as a kid, illustrating stories of Batman and Robin getting the bad guy. Writing is Freeing. Worries don’t follow me into the zone. I am largely an intuitive writer with my writing coming from some source I don’t understand. People’s comments about my writing teach me much about my writing. A couple of my favorite poets include Norman Dubie and Beckian Fritz Goldberg. Norman Dubie’s poetry I don’t understand but his use of language is startling and brilliant. Beckian’s The Book of Accident is an amazing post-apocalyptic collection with lines that a critic pulled out which describe desire like a “live rat sewed up inside us.” Exciting!

 

— Kristina Morgan

 

 

Susan Rich

 

The Night Clerk of Almeria During the Evacuation 

 

In the half-empty hourglass of midsummer

she kneels to the grasshopper, 

 

to its wings smeared with rain and laced

with pollen, flabbergasted 

 

by the collaboration of heat and air.

The woman sees the wolf moon sonata 

 

she will compose. Inspects the insect’s legs

investigating the way string music 

 

derives from its body, how the head 

shines like a streetlamp in a small city.

 

This will become the core of her 

debut composition: a note offered 

 

to the orchestra conductor; the patrons 

applauding like so many pairs of wings—

​

​

​

 

I Never Tired of Talking About the Dress

 

which was designed by the neighborhood tailor,

Alhaji, who became friend, became lover

of my black coffee and fragmented conversation

 

in French; of the width, the cut, the strength

of the wraparound sash of The Most 

Rapturous fit—soft tint of a Saharan sky—

 

of the dress. Photographed here against 

a sandstone wall. Against the past, against the body 

I live in now, there lives this promise: 

 

the West African wedding wrap

sequestered in the back of the closet. 

The cloth now spiritual, sized extra small,

 

with seams hand-sewn by elongated fingers. 

Who was the girl locked inside the alchemical stitch—

about to create such a symphonic mess of it.

 

൪

 

I need to continually surprise myself and I seek poets that give me permission to go beyond my self-imposed limitations. My go-to poet of the moment, actually, the last four years is Terrance Hayes. To keep him company I read Aracelis Girmay and Kelli Russell Agodon. When I reach back into the poets that nurtured me as a younger writer I visit Elizabeth Bishop, Denise Levertov, and Adrienne Rich. From these latter poets I did my best to learn precision, music, and the essential core of an ethical lyric. I hope I'm still learning, still finding new mentors on the bookshelves and in the ether of the worldwide web.

 

— Susan Rich