“C’mon, Take Down Your Fishin’ Pole and Meet me at the Fishin’ Hole”
My great-uncle twice-removed composed the lyrics to the Andy Griffith show’s theme song, which all of us know has none. Even my son who has never seen the show could whistle it– if he could whistle, something I should have taught him some time or other. Or taken him to the fishin’ hole (those forgotten lyrics) which, when he asked the difference between a hole, a lake, and a creek, I wouldn’t know. My father never took me fishing. Instead I guided my son to The Compleat Angler by Izaak Walton, with its quaint dialogues between the hunter and the fisherman, who’s called Piscator, who makes the case that fishing is meditation, prayer… yet another craft I should’ve bequeathed to my son.
*
Leonard Kress has published poetry and fiction in Missouri Review, Massachusetts Review, Iowa Review, American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, etc. His recent collections are The Orpheus Complex and Walk Like Bo Diddley. Living in the Candy Store and Other Poems and his new verse translation of the Polish Romantic epic, Pan Tadeusz by Adam Mickiewicz were both published in 2018. Craniotomy Sestinas appeared in 2021. He teaches philosophy and religion at Owens College in Ohio. www.leonardkress.com
Henry, my father, was a sweet man, had a smile for everyone.
He loved to sing opera along with Jussi Björling
and the other tenors on the radio though he didn’t know the words.
When I was eighteen, he gave me driving lessons in our grey 1950s Buick Roadmaster.
One day, when we stopped for a light, two young men in tee shirts
and slicked-back hair signaled my dad to roll down the window.
“Your back wheels are going forward,” they laughed.
My father laughed as well, “All right boys,” he said.
Later he said, “I had to answer them or they might have called me dirty Jew.”
I learned that day how vulnerable he was,
how young men might shame him for who he was
how his pain was my pain, too.
*
Joanne Grumet has studied and written about language as a lexicographer and a linguist. More recently, she has been writing poetry and her chapbook Garden of Eve was published by Finishing Line Press in 2020. She has also had poems published in the journals The Poetry Quarterly, The Same, and Jewish Women’s Literary Annual, as well as online at NYCBigCityLit.com, The Vital Sparks, The Closed Eye Open, and in The Bangalore Review.
Hickory nuts shake down from shagbarks onto blacktop, their leather cases cracked
at the seams, releasing the dense center that as a child, I’d try to bust open
for food with a hammer against stone. It never worked out. My first careful blows
revealed an intricate chambered hardness that clenched the meat too tightly for my fingers
to pick out so I’d bring the hammer down hard as Thor, which smashed the halves to mush
shot through with broken shell, impossible to eat. Sometimes, even a truck can’t bust
a hickory nut’s core. Today, they drop and settle atop asphalt, or skitter
into ditches to soften and take root, get storm-washed into creeks to rot, decay,
go round again. For years, I thought that if I really tried, I could discover where
the sweet spot lives between slow patient time and swift obliteration— the perfect
angle, words, or pressure point to crack, precisely to the right degree, the small
hard architectures held so tight inside— but no such place. Instead, I have this late
and quiet thanks for fate or happenstance or maybe even grace, that any one of us
has fallen, broken just enough, onto an earth, or into hands, that give.
*
Hayden Saunier is the author of five books of poetry, including A Cartography of Home, published in 2021. Awards include the Pablo Neruda Prize, Rattle Poetry Prize, Gell Poetry Award, Keystone Prize, and a dozen Pushcart Prize nominations. She directs No River Twice (poetry + improvisation), an interactive, audience-driven poetry reading/performance. More at http://www.haydensaunier.com.
This morning we read haikus. Not just Basho, whose name means “plantain tree,” and Issa, whose name means “cup of tea,” but also Richard Wright, born in Mississippi, who later moved to France and wrote thousands of haikus in his final years. When I said Wright followed the strict syllable count, Leon asked, “What are syllables?” I began to count the sounds on my fingers: The crow flew so fast/ that he left his lonely caw Two people liked this one by Issa – “Once in the box every one of them is equal – the chess pieces.” Eugenia wrote about three women, regulars here, who died from drugs in the past few weeks. “Now in a box,” she wrote, naming each of them in her poem. Alessandro, responding to Basho, wrote about constellations of stars. And for the first time this year Robert, tattooed up and down his arms, was awake and sublimely alert. He liked Issa’s The distant mountains/ are reflected in the eye/of the dragonfly. In his eyes I saw myself reflected too, and over the lonely fields, the crow.
*
Bonnie Naradzay’s poems have appeared in New Letters, AGNI, EPOCH, RHINO, American Journal of Poetry, Kenyon Review Online, Florida Review Online, Tampa Review, Tar River Review, The Guardian, and others. For years, she has led poetry salons at a homeless day shelter and a retirement center in Washington, DC.
In the tight, compact storage, there’s room for overflowing love.
Inside love, there’s room for all of us — pearls of star-jewels, asparagus,
stuff we cannot even imagine, objects we cannot even name —
firecrackers of love, the illusion of fire from the arbor lights for returning boats,
stars that witnessed the Cretaceous period, the whole periodical table of love.
*
Martin Willitts Jr. edits the Comstock Review. His 25 chapbooks include the Turtle Island Quarterly Editor’s Choice Award, “The Wire Fence Holding Back the World” (Flowstone Press, 2017), plus 21 full-length collections includes 2019 Blue Light Award “The Temporary World” and “All Wars Are the Same War” (FutureCycle Press, 2022).
The sky’s dun, the roses needing dead-heading gone dull tan, the morning air thin, reluctant, a shy child. There are those who hurry, those who can’t. The woman who tries but is limping, bent. There is a season dying, a season being born.
When the breeze picks up, it carries fear not hope. Only the smallest birds fly, a sabbath silence settles over the grayed street, one butterfly skitters and darts through still air. It does not come to the waiting buddleia, the rich purple offerings
a bee cruises. Dim noise of distant traffic comes to my senses the way a scent of fire does, smoke scent of fires a continent away. Still hope is always apprehension’s underside, what we know and can’t. Sudden grace: a cardinal lands, on the porch
railing first, then hops to the red car roof, perches for a moment, flies down the driveway, vanishes from my sight. Like possibility, sign to pursue, like the flight of the slow gull, the tread of the fat man with a tiny dog who’s pacing the sidewalk.
The cardinal and the gull, the dog and the bee: as always, morning offers what I can and cannot see.
*
Duets
Our beloved dead now come to us as voices
at daybreak, twilight – on the cusps of darkness, light.
We thought we had lost them, their loved tones forgotten,
but liminal times – the hours of waking, sleep
summon them from depths into daylight, their voices still
present, sounding our identities, theirs and ours,
so giving us back others we loved, and old selves.
*
Sandra Kohler’s third collection of poems, Improbable Music, (Word Press) appeared in May, 2011. Earlier collections are The Country of Women (Calyx, 1995) and The Ceremonies of Longing, (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003). Her poems have appeared in journals, including The New Republic, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Prairie Schooner, and many others over the past 45 years. In 2018, a poem of hers was chosen to be part of Jenny Holzer’s permanent installation at the new Comcast Technology Center in Philadelphia.
The email says that they don’t have
any other contact information for her,
that there won’t be a funeral,
that there’s no address to send flowers.
“I wonder if anyone has a photo to help
us put a face with the name,” somebody
writes in the thread.
But what is a face in an age of masks?
What is a name?
*
A Poem Is a Grave
marked by words.
You have to dig deep
to find its bones.
You have to bury
yourself in it.
*
Destroy Unread
I heard that the famous novelist
wrote this on one of his notebooks
before he died.
I guess it’s only natural
to want to sanction the narrative of your life
after you’ve gone,
especially if you’re a writer.
When my father died,
he left no instructions
for a literary executor,
much less for a grieving son.
*
Clint Margrave is the author of the novel Lying Bastard (Run Amok Books, 2020), and the poetry collections, Salute the Wreckage, The Early Death of Men, and Visitor (Forthcoming) all from NYQ Books. His work has appeared in The Threepenny Review, Rattle, and The Moth, among others.
Praise gray skies, wet yellow leaves fall to red edge. I wonder
why dark winter moves voices to fear every day, every night
of the dead. How hard we try to cover fear with wrong things—
hot meat gravy, a fat gold watch, words of wool, light cheer.
November song, empty me out to cloth without paint, barest
branches, a cup without wine. Move me to snow on evergreen pine.
*
Meditation in Winter
I draw an angel halo on paper, believing only in paper
not the gold shape itself. I light candles with a red-hot match.
I sing a bitter song or sweet, peel apples into butter and taste the past.
I write faint words, wash a dish. Enter crying darkness coming at last.
*
Julia Caroline Knowlton is Professor of French at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta and incoming President of the Georgia Poetry Society. She has an MFA in poetry from Antioch University and a PhD in French Literature from UNC-Chapel Hill. The author of four books and an Academy of American Poets prize winner, she was named a Georgia Author of the Year for her 2018 chapbook, The Café of Unintelligible Desire (Alice Greene & Co.). Her second chapbook, Poem at the Edge of the World, will be published by Alice Greene & Co. in 2022. Julia regularly publishes in journals including One Art, Roanoke Review, and Boston Literary Review.
On my Sunday Morning Walk, I Think of Wallace Stevens
Palm tree frond and heron wing are one, or so it seems to me from where I stand. Palm tree temple, heron priest, and I, a congregant, alone.
*
Mallards Fly In
Soon they will nest. Later, hatchlings will be stranded trying to cross the street. Not everything is solved by walking.
*
Donna Hilbert’s latest book is Gravity: New & Selected Poems, Tebot Bach, 2018. Her new collection, Threnody, is forthcoming from Moon Tide Press. She is a monthly contributing writer to the on-line journal Verse-Virtual. Work has appeared in The Los Angeles Times, Braided Way, Chiron Review, Sheila-Na-Gig, Rattle, Zocalo Public Square, One Art, and numerous anthologies. She writes and leads private workshops in Southern California, where she makes her home. Learn more at www.donnahilbert.com
She drove a block to my backyard, having lost her zest for weighty easels and oils. Chemo drained her
so she brought a thin pad and array of micron pens, said she was reclaiming her old practice of making artists’ books,
which her daughter glued together with archival paper. Pale as paper, she perched on a bench
and mapped the landscape: overgrown hedge and trellis, empty of clematis.
Such elegant blue lines. She wasn’t sure if her strength would last all afternoon.
I asked how she knew where to start her compositions. Plucking green from her bouquet of pens,
she said… one spot that catches the eye, that’s pleasing.
This thermos on the picnic table, this bright woven carry-all shouting to be orange.
That day, she stayed only an hour and now I own this drawing,
filled with grace and elegant lines, with everything we said and didn’t say.
*
Cathleen Cohen was the 2019 Poet Laureate of Montgomery County, PA. A painter and teacher, she founded the We the Poets program at ArtWell, an arts education non-profit in Philadelphia (www.theartwell.org). Her poems appear in Apiary, Baltimore Review, Cagibi, East Coast Ink, North of Oxford, Passager, One Art Poetry, Philadelphia Stories, Rockvale Review, Rogue Agent, Camera Obscura (Moonstone Press, 2017) and Etching the Ghost (Atmosphere Press, 2021).
I’m there that day you send the last away with nipping needle teeth, she may outgrow one day — the half-hearted sobriquet uttered as you latch her last leash then go. She was the favored younger child who never returned, I know, because she growled and made you bleed, transmogrified wild by desperate need. She recedes, uncowed, from your conditioned world where I live on, the educated girl determined, even when disciplined, that my denouement will find me licking at your feet again while you ponder whether you have grown cruel. It is a word unlearned at obedience school.
*
Kristin Garth is a Pushcart, Rhysling nominated sonneteer and a Best of the Net 2020 finalist. Her sonnets have stalked journals like Glass, Yes, Five:2:One, Luna Luna and more. She is the author of 21 books of poetry including Crow Carriage (Sweet Tooth Story Books) and The Stakes (Really Serious Literature) and the editor of seven anthologies. She is the founder of Pink Plastic House a tiny journal and co-founder of Performance Anxiety, an online poetry reading series. Follow her on Twitter: (@lolaandjolie) and her website kristingarth.com
Already the sumac—ripened, rusty red leaves, stark among the greens. Not yet, I say. I say it every August, though leafy lime katydids warn me, chameleoned against the Japanese maples, suddenly out-singing even the cicadas. Stink bugs feast in the garden, a melancholy thistle bends to a rumor of breeze.
*
Power Out on the Mountain
I started out this day elbowing my grandmother’s forget-me-not teacup off the counter beside the sink. Sobbed as I swept a million jagged memories, scattered across the kitchen floor.
Now my feet up, a glass of sweet tea, I watch birds at the feeder. A quarrel of house sparrows peck at the smalls, gorge themselves on seed, as if they deserve to.
I once told my grandmother a rich man hurt me. Her bent head told me to keep that story to myself. I revisit what it means to be ruined over and over in my sleep, imagine ways to dismember him, as if that might help glue my own broken pieces back together.
*
Kari Gunter-Seymour’s poetry collections include A Place So Deep Inside America It Can’t Be Seen, winner of the 2020 Ohio Poet of the Year Award and Serving. Her poems appear in numerous journals and publications including Poem-A-Day, Verse Daily, Rattle, World Literature Today, The NY Times, and on her website: www.karigunterseymourpoet.com. A ninth generation Appalachian, she is the founder/executive director of the Women of Appalachia Project (WOAP) and editor of the WOAP anthology series, Women Speak. She is a recipient of a 2021 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship and Poet Laureate of Ohio.
I had a neighbor once who was a psychologist. His office was in his house. It faced the road, so it was easy for his neighbors like me to see through the window. Whenever he had a new patient, the very first thing he did was ask if the patient wanted the shade up or down. He said this immediately gave him the first glimpse into the patient’s psyche. If the patient wanted the shade up, he was probably dealing with an extrovert, an exhibitionist of some kind. If the patient wanted the shade down, he knew he had an introvert, or worse, on his hands. In any case, a patient with something to hide. I started to tell him something. That when I walk on the road at night, all the shades are up. Except the office shade, which is down. I changed my mind and didn’t mention it. No need to complicate matters.
*
Professor Emeritus of English at SUNY Orange, J.R. Solonche has published poetry in more than 500 magazines, journals, and anthologies since the early 70s, including The New Criterion, The New York Times, The American Scholar, The Progressive, Poetry Northwest, Salmagundi, The Literary Review, The Sun, The American Journal of Poetry, Poet Lore, Poetry East, The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, The Journal of the American Medical Association, and Free Verse. He is the author of Beautiful Day (Deerbrook Editions), Won’t Be Long (Deerbrook Editions), Heart’s Content (Five Oaks Press), Invisible (nominated for the Pulitzer Prize by Five Oaks Press), The Black Birch (Kelsay Books), I, Emily Dickinson & Other Found Poems (Deerbrook Editions), In Short Order (Kelsay Books), Tomorrow, Today and Yesterday (Deerbrook Editions), True Enough (Dos Madres Press), The Jewish Dancing Master (Ravenna Press), If You Should See Me Walking on the Road (Kelsay Books), In a Public Place (Dos Madres Press), To Say the Least (Dos Madres Press), The Time of Your Life (Adelaide Books), The Porch Poems (Deerbrook Editions , 2020 Shelf Unbound Notable Indie Book), Enjoy Yourself (Serving House Books), Piano Music (nominated for the Pulitzer Prize by Serving House Books), For All I Know (Kelsay Books), A Guide of the Perplexed (Serving House Books), The Moon Is the Capital of the World (WordTech Communications), Years Later (Adelaide Books), The Dust (Dos Madres Press), Selected Poems 2002-2021 (nominated for the National Book Award by Serving House Books), and coauthor with his wife Joan I. Siegel of Peach Girl:Poems for a Chinese Daughter (Grayson Books). He lives in the Hudson Valley.
Mother. Weimar-style hat, face veil. Grandfather, moustache, cigarette, papillon tie.
They pose like silent movie stars, radiant in noir, golden-age lighting, sepia portraits on large cotton rag sheets, frosted silk flaps on top. Life will never end, right?
Mother derides nostalgia: Want the photos? Cousin David, the cardiologist, took them.
She digs out a snapshot on smaller, matte paper: Mother, laughing, in a Tel Aviv café, white shirt, khakis, sunglasses. David. On a visit, 1936.
Flat, he complained, no contrast, no chiaroscuro. Middle Eastern sun. Unforgiving blaze.
She puts them back in the worn leather folder: Here, take them.
Cousin David is gone, she says: Gone back home, to Berlin.
Gone back home, to Berlin, he couldn’t find himself here. Gone back home, to Berlin, he loved so much. Gone back home to Berlin and hanged himself.
*
Nathaniel Gutman is a filmmaker who has directed and/or written over 30 theatrical/TV movies and documentaries internationally, including award-winning Children’s Island (BBC, Nickelodeon, Disney Channel), Witness in the Warzone (with Christopher Walken), Linda (from the novella by John D. MacDonald; with Virginia Madsen). His poetry has appeared in The New York Quarterly, Tiferet Journal, Pangyrus, LitMag, Constellations, The American Journal of Poetry.
Some spouses enjoy the fast break and then a three-point shot in basketball; mine loves to watch antique restoration shows. Today, we endure the disassembling, cleaning, and rebuilding of a vintage grape press. Skill marries patience to unscrew each odd piece from the rusted hulk, soak in chemicals, inspect, then scrape and peel off specs of rust like culling extra words or stanzas. Arduous, yet delicate, we whittle, then build again, grease the pieces, oil the joints, shine the exposed. We work at what we love until it feels whole, glistens, and moves anew.
*
Danielle Lemay is a poet and scientist. Her poetry has been nominated for Best of the Net in 2021 and has appeared or is forthcoming in Limp Wrist Magazine, Lavender Review, and elsewhere. She lives in central California with her wife, two children, and six chickens.
This morning, a crippled fox, by parasite or car impact, I don’t know, pulled its hindquarters to the center of the east pasture.
I herded the dying creature, with my pickup, out of the field into its natal forest where it curled under a tree.
It staggered and I could have (or should have?) crushed it with the truck’s tires or beaten it with the flat back of a shovel head,
but elected to leave it to the comfort of familiarity. I turned the truck and drove away; released the horses to gallop circles on this ground now changed.
A man I know who farms the next field over, would have cursed the fox, would have drawn pistol and bullet. But I choose the word stewardship for what I do. What I have done. (What have I done?)
At the table, the rest of the house sleeping, I shave off a curl of bitter cheese, eat a cold plum.
Cassiopeia in her chair, doomed for her eternity to contemplate her mistakes, hovers over the woods.
Deeper still, in space, the small constellation attached to no myth will pulse briefly tonight with added lumens
though no one will see its effort for over 300 light years and then only through the mirrored assist of an astronomer’s scope.
*
Killing Horses
We choose words more comfortable.
Euthanize. Put down. Put to sleep.
But kill is the word. Single syllabic. Hard.
A slug of phenobarb plunged into the vein nestled in the jugular’s groove.
Sometimes if they are down when the bolus hits their heart, they stand.
Those magnificent muscles full of memory bring them to their feet.
Then the collapse, the vet saying stand back, stand back.
Kill: Etymology: Old English cwellan (to murder, execute).
The vet draws up the syringe, says it’s hard to lose the good ones.
I stroke the familiar of his chestnut coat, then walk away.
Abandon: Etymology: Middle English forleven (to leave behind).
This is too large a death to witness.
*
Linda Blaskey (she/her) is the recipient of two Fellowship Grants in Literature from Delaware Division of the Arts. She is poetry/interview editor emerita for Broadkill Review, is coordinator for the Dogfish Head Poetry Prize, and current editor at Quartet. Her work has been selected for inclusion in Best New Poets, and for the North Carolina Poetry on the Bus project. She is author of the chapbook, Farm, the full-length collection, White Horses, and co-author of Walking the Sunken Boards.
She grew up in Kansas and Arkansas and now lives in Delaware.
A sunny afternoon with Aimless Love on the patio and a shepherd pup whining through the backyard fence. She’s not amused I boarded up the slats she wiggled through all week. The divots in the lawn, the pawed-through flower beds, the fur caught on jagged wood annoyed. Anyway, I was about to say before the dog butted in, it only takes one Collins poem to set me off. Yesterday, “The Revenant.” Today, “More Than a Woman” and I’m back to the NJ night my Polish aunt slapped my twelve-year-old face. A reminder, she said. Of what? I raged as she grabbed her cigarette and flicked its growing ash. To be a woman, she inhaled my eyes, means a life of pain. From across the dining room, Our first-blood ritual: my mother’s only words as she wiped her hands of violence I needed rescue from. I slammed my bedroom door and flung red-spotted underwear across the room. And this was it: the start of years plowing through closets and drawers, disavowing dresses/stockings/girdles/make-up/heat-curled hair and facing off taunting boys who couldn’t beat me on baseball fields; of decades redefining cycles borne down centuries, composing I’m more than a woman to me. I snap the book shut and shout this anthem to the slanting sun.
*
From associate professor of English to management trainer to retiree, Carolyn Martin is a lover of gardening and snorkeling, feral cats and backyard birds, writing and photography. Her poems have appeared in more than 135 journals and anthologies throughout North America, Australia, and the UK. Her fifth collection, The Catalog of Small Contentments, was released in 2021. Currently, she is the poetry editor of Kosmos Quarterly: journal for global transformation. More at www.carolynmartinpoet.com.
Night comes faster in September when the bank is on the phone & I’m explaining again how
my New York Sports Club closed, how I stopped leaving home, how hard I tried to end my membership.
By now I’m yelling across the world at an associate who says I understand, so sorry to hear, like all HSBC
associates before & after her. In sleep I grind my teeth to fine powder, dreaming of bodies in the towers,
pulverized as each floor fell on the one below. I watch it all crumble on hold while
my associate contacts Disputes, the narrow downtown streets, survivors fleeing like ghosts
through clouds, even the leggy mannequins in Wall Street shops hip deep in it.
*
Cuddlebuddy
You tested positive: we live in separate rooms.
My mother emails shit about her OurTime date
who wants a cuddlebuddy. Sprawled on the damp
loveseat with brain fog, you take calls from Scam
Likely, watch a spotted ocelot catch river rats, say
It’s unfair, you get the bed, but you have the remote.
*
Hilary Sideris’s poems have appeared in recent issues of The American Journal of Poetry, Barrow Street, Bellevue Literary Review, Free State Review, Poetry Daily, Rhino, Room, Salamander, and Sixth Finch, among others. She is the author most recently of Un Amore Veloce (Kelsay Books 2019), The Silent B (Dos Madres Press 2019), and Animals in English, poems after Temple Grandin (Dos Madres Press 2020).
As a teacher and a part-time art dealer, I am an avid patron of art museums who typically visits museums throughout the Midwest and Appalachia several times a year. Due to the stay-at-home mandates in Ohio during 2020, however, I was limited to either conducting my museum visits virtually or thumbing through my own collection of art books to satisfy my cravings. I found myself returning again and again to The Helga Pictures by Andrew Wyeth. The story of Wyeth’s and Helga Testorf’s self-imposed isolation from the prying eyes of the public for nearly 15 years so that he could produce more than 240 portraits of her really struck a chord with me. The poems that make up the Andrew and Helga sequence were all written during that stay-at-home period and reflect the sense of isolation that many people felt at the height of the pandemic. In a very real sense, these poems could not have been written in the same way under “normal” writing conditions.
When Mark Danowsky accepted the sequence “Andrew and Helga, Lost and Found” for ONE ART, he challenged me to write a series of poems based on the paintings of Jamie Wyeth, Andrew’s son. I accepted the challenge and immediately began an in-depth exploration of Jamie’s paintings. I found myself particularly drawn to his many excellent portraits of people and animals, portraits that did more than merely replicate the appearance of his subjects. Just as his father’s portraits of Helga reveal a startling intimacy between the artist and his subject, Jamie’s portraits convey a similar intimacy that pulls the viewer into the worlds and emotions of his subjects, be they pigs or people. In just two months, I had written three poetry sequences based on eight of Jamie’s paintings. When read together, the poems based on Andrew’s paintings and the poems based on Jamie’s paintings coalesce into conversation between a father and his son about intimacy, love, family, and—above all else—art.
*
Andrew and Helga, Lost and Found
I’m a secretive bastard. I would never let anybody watch me painting. It would be like somebody watching you have sex—painting is that personal to me.
— Andrew Wyeth
I’m supposed to be the mystery woman, something lost and found.
— Helga Testorf
I. Black Velvet, 1972
I have completed God’s work, creating you as a constellation with the empty spaces between stars
filled in and fully realized. I have made you whole yet weightless, luminous in the perfect darkness
of the universe, God-like in your own right. Or, more truthfully, a Goddess reclining
on the backs of prayers that slip silently from the lips of supplicants. Every night, believers look up
to you for guidance before being pulled down into sleep, the only world where we exist
alone with nothing, or no one, to hold onto.
II. Sheepskin, 1973
There is something you’re not telling me, something I try to conjure out of you with a tempera potion
born out of rabbit-skin glue, distilled water, crushed marble, honey, egg yolks, and beeswax.
You don’t keep the secret in your eyes, as a layman would believe. Nor can it be found like the remnants
of a whispered prayer in the creases surrounding your enigmatic mouth.
A mouth that refuses to betray a smile or a frown. A mouth that once formed the word yes
when I asked if I could capture them—and you—in ink and paint. You keep your secret in your hands,
not as one might protect the delicate papier-mâché of a robin’s egg found abandoned beneath a hedgerow,
but as one cups a firefly, its tiny, otherworldly light just barely illuminating the narrow gaps
that never fully seal between closed fingers.
III. Easter Sunday, 1975
Runnels of stubborn snow shroud the muddy ground surrounding you and, by extension, me.
When I found you four Easters ago, I knew I had found the hollow place where the desire that I feared
had died was actually hiding, very much alive, thrumming like a hive: the desire to be divorced from all
expectations and preconceptions of the artist, the father, and the husband I had to be.
You gave me permission to paint for myself, to personify in you every secret I keep,
to finally release my soul from gray barnboard and brown barley grass and live in the world again
as flesh, blood, and bone. Now, on this Easter Sunday, in an otherwise barren landscape,
you are my one promise of green.
IV. Drawn Shade, 1977
I am a witness to your aging in a light of my own making, and I will I carefully catalogue
every new silver strand that appears like a shiny trinket pilfered by a magpie and woven into
the tasseled cornsilk of your hair. Already your downy temples have begun their transformation.
Soon, your mossy brows will glint like cattails gone to seed. Even the gosling fuzz softly covering
your cheeks will pale from amber to the white of milkweed silk. And eventually, naturally,
the perfect nest resting between your thighs will glitter and shine as if gilded by winter
with jewels of snowflakes and hoarfrost.
V. Braids, 1979
There are moments when you won’t even tell me what you see when you look away
as I pull your gaze out of the darkness surrounding you. I want you to reveal everything to me
freely so that I may capture in the contours of your face the shadows of your thoughts,
the full truth of you. When you look into the distance, look for me. Stand behind me
as I paint you. I want you to see your face as I do, a wolf moon rising
out of a January wheat field not yet blanketed by snow, gradually eclipsed
by the penumbra of your auburn hair.
VI. Night Shadow, 1979
Beneath my hand, you exist in both darkness and light. I hover above
you, the form of my shadow diaphanous and dissipating, a storm cloud releasing
everything it holds: water, ice, lightning, thunder. I rain down upon your body
and baptize you.
VII. In the Doorway, 1981
This is our house, a place for our prying eyes and ours alone: yours trying to see in me
the way that I see you; my own studying every particle of your being as an astronomer studies
the depths of the universe hoping to find the beginning of all creation. You stand naked,
filling the entrance both with the white light of stars and the dark matter that fills
the emptiness between them all. You and the doorway have become one and the same.
To enter our house means entering you.
VIII. Helga’s Words
quotes by Helga taken from the short documentary film Helga (Running Stag Productions, 2018)
He said I was his silent sounding board. He said there must be silence to realize what is behind the world.
He said I was starved. He said he gave me what I wanted and got what he wanted from me.
He said our time together was a dream. He said he was afraid of the dream disappearing if we talked about it.
I dreamed that I had fallen in love, and when I woke, I knelt
at the end of my bed and said, “Let it be true. Please
let it be true.” But how do you explain a dream? I knew
he was always painting himself in me. I knew I was a figment of his imagination.
Like a leaf blowing in the wind, I was there, but not there.
*
Three Portraits of a Sow
. . . if you get to know pigs, they’re very moody. They’re not sweet little animals at all. That’s what I like about them. They get depressed . . . — Jamie Wyeth
I. Portrait of Pig, 1970
Her teats dangle, flaccid and empty.
Her corkscrew tail has come unwound.
The eye we see remains screwed shut tight
as bristly fur and hay needle her skin.
Withered cobs at her feet bear
no sign of a mother’s appetite or desire
now that her suckling litter is off to slaughter.
II. Night Pigs, 1979
The cockerel will wait until sunrise to crow its condolences.
There’s nothing more for the boar to do tonight but sleep.
They leave the sow to sit litterless in golden lamplight
(continued, new stanza) beneath her own growing shadow blackening the wall above them all.
III. Winter Pig, 1975
She knows what can be found at the heart
of a whiteout because she stares into one kind of abyss
or another with every sunrise. She knows the cold, too,
the way its emptiness stings like frostbite
in the wind that blows across her empty teats.
And she knows just four hoof-steps
over the splintered threshold will deliver her into
a world of her own making at a time of her own choosing.
*
Surrounded by the Sea
Islands intrigue me. You can see the perimeters of your world. —Jamie Wyeth
I. Orca, 1990
I have painted your hands as pointed and sharp
as any harpoon that pierced a leviathan’s heart.
Now you must choose for yourself: Ishmael or Ahab?
Will you live to tell your own story? Or will you doom yourself
to a slow death floating among the flotsam of a ship
shattered by the mortal sin some god demands we fight?
There is nothing more I can do. I have given you all the knives
you need to flay this life to the bone.
II. Screen Door to the Sea, 1994
You clearly want to leave. The door stands ajar.
What is keeping you from disappearing into the sea-spray
and salt air? What is keeping you from slipping out
before the clock strikes twelve? What is keeping your eyes
locked on mine, your hands fidgeting like gulls near the surf line?
Why do I make you stay? What is keeping me
from painting the doorway empty like an open mouth crying out for you
after you have walked away?
III. Other Voices, 1995
Your fingertips caress the locked door, feel the pulse
of a muffled conversation like some version of Braille
you have not learned how to decipher. The voices on the other side
could be inviting you to enter, to walk on through without turning back
and lock the door behind you. Or they could be telling you to stay patient
with the world in which you live, to just turn around and go back home.
And then again, there might not be any voices at all; it might just be the sea.
All I know is that there is still time enough for you to live your life
on this side of the threshold. Whenever you feel the need to leave,
I swear to you I will paint the key.
*
Every Portrait Is a Self-Portrait
“I’m not just interested in fascinating faces or trees. I want to bore in deeper.” — Jamie Wyeth
I. Portrait of Andrew Wyeth, 1969
All fathers are oak trees to their sons, massive and domineering, casting a broad shadow across whatever field they claim. Though their roots run shallow, they run wide, rippling out and out from their thick trunk in search of water to feed their leaves and drink the world dry. It only takes a tiny injury—a broken branch, a redheaded woodpecker’s jackhammer bill, a passing bear claw scratch—to seed a burl that will keep expanding until the tree dies. What wound did you inflict to make the burl of your father’s face grow?
II. Pumpkin Head (Self-Portrait), 1972
Pumpkins grow best atop the ground rather than below, unburdened by the weight of earth and the tangle of roots. Every autumn we cut them and gut them and stuff them with candles until they smile brightly in spite of their own defilement. The Jack-O-Lantern that hides your own face stares at the world with empty eyes and a jagged, maniacal smile. You are the sole sign of life rising out of this fallow winter field. Unable to overcome the cold, your pumpkin head hangs in a blank canvas sky like a wan and sallow sun.
*
Kip Knott’s most recent full-length collection of poetry, Clean Coal Burn, is available from Kelsay Books. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Barren, Drunk Monkeys, Harpy Hybrid Review, HAD, La Piccioletta Barca, (mac)ro(mic), and New World Writing. More of his writing may be accessed at kipknott.com.
houses and roads collapsing. Siberia is scribbling notes to the world, teaching rising temperatures.
My aunt once said she thought I couldn’t have children. Those years watching me without issue, deciding there was something wrong.
Foreign to her, my choosing not to place one more human in the arms of a world clumsy with people, heavy with nearly eight billion bodies.
In Antarctica, warming seas press kisses on glacial bellies, old ice releases, water levels lift. In oceanfront towns, residents slosh down rivulet streets, mourn
what was.
*
When Light Became Brushstroke
In Knoxville’s art museum, who can remember the artist, we lean in
for a closer look, startle when a guard growls, don’t touch the painting.
Hands resting behind backs, we laugh, whisper, bet he’s waited forever
to say that. From then on, in hard or easy moments, we tell each
other, don’t touch the painting, snicker. When cancer overtakes you, I
become helpless guard pleading for cooperation, circumstance giving me the side-eye, grinning.
On the last morning, shades of who you were shimmer and blink, your horizon and sky
dimming, blending into an unending line I cannot follow. And just before
you leave this life we spun into gold, I murmur permission, go ahead,
touch the painting.
*
Peggy Hammond’s recent poems appear or are forthcoming in Pangyrus Literary Magazine, The Comstock Review, Crosswinds Poetry Journal, For Women Who Roar, Fragmented Voices, Scissortail Quarterly, The Sandy River Review, Moonstone Arts Center’s anthology Protest 2021, and elsewhere. She is a Best of the Net nominee, and her chapbook TheFifth House Tilts is due out fall 2022 (Kelsay Books).
The only thing I ever stole was a tube of lipstick from K-Mart. All my friends were doing it—so easy, they said. And there it was— in my pocket, little flame of a crime, burning next to the dollar I could’ve used to pay for it, the money I was saving to buy the new Beatles 45. The lipstick grew hot in my pocket. When I got home and tried it, the color turned greasy on my lips, a greenish shade of guilt. My lips were thick with it. So I wrapped the tube in tissue and buried it deep in the trash my father would soon burn. Every time I stirred the ash: little glints of melted plastic and gold, a color that never looked good on me.
*
Karla Huston, Wisconsin Poet Laureate (2017-2018) and the author of A Theory of Lipstick (Main Street Rag: 2013) as well as 8 chapbooks of poetry including Grief Bone, (Five-Oaks Press: 2017).
It’s not pain, exactly, what I feel as mild Dr. Hou scrapes at the membrane on my cornea, just
something wrong like a gentle finger brushing my pancreas or liver. No need for anesthetic.
The hard part is to stare, fighting the urge to blink, straight ahead at a well-lit version, of the usual nothing.
*
Dead Nature with Hamburger and Pencil
Yeats wanted to come back as nothing natural—instead a metal bird, a metal singing bird.
I felt sorry, as a kid, for homemade hamburgers. White Castle sliders were machined like car parts, neat and square with holes punched out, it seemed, by drill press.
Into a hot vat of red Jell-O we’d lower a half-gallon of vanilla ice cream; it made a springy foam like the padding in a torn sofa cushion.
I loved pencils, loved to feel my teeth break through the smooth paint into the vulnerable wood, loved the gritty resilience of chewed eraser between my molars.
When Pop died and we had to move, we just papered over the wall where somebody shoved Mary so hard she left a hole in the rotting plaster.
*
Roy White is a blind person who has worked as a software engineer and ESL teacher. He lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota. His poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, Copper Nickel, Diagram, and elsewhere.
