~ ONE ART’s Top 10 Most-Read Poets of November 2023 ~
Accompanying My Friend to Chemo
She shows me how she draws in her missing eyebrows
with the little make-up kit they give out–
two umber arches
over wide, dark, expressive eyes;
then sparkly earrings, some lip gloss,
a soft fleece cap over her bald head,
and bunny socks.
In Oncology, hooked into her port-o-cath,
blue chemicals dripping from a bag,
she asks the nurse how she’s doing,
how’s the situation with her car.
Across the room a radiant woman in a headscarf
sits smiling, surrounded by daughters.
This is what’s happening
all over the world,
bald, beloved women minus their breasts
holding faith together in the chemo den.
And it’s not good literary technique to say
that women’s bodies are battlegrounds
in a war we did not start.
It’s not artful and it doesn’t begin to tell
this intimacy. Here we are, sipping tea,
flipping through People,
letting the hours slip by like slow honey.
*
Alison Luterman has published four previous collections of poetry, most recently In the Time of Great Fires (Catamaran Press,) and Desire Zoo (Tia Chucha Press.) Her poems have appeared in The New York Times Sunday Magazine, The Sun, Rattle, and elsewhere. She writes and teaches in Oakland, California. www.alisonluterman.net
~ ONE ART’s Top 10 Most-Read Poets of July 2023 ~
My Vibrato
My singing teacher says uncontrolled vibrato
is insecurity wearing a frilly blouse,
like the upspeak of a nervous student
peppering everything she says with kind of and you know.
He says commit to each note like you mean it,
and I agree, I want to make a pure tone
without apology or wavering,
or bleating like a nanny goat, but oh,
as I ascend past F and then G into the attic
of my upper register I feel things begin to throb
and not in a good way.
Here comes my vibrato
like a teetering pile of red Jell-O,
or a drunken ex-girlfriend at the wedding,
smeared lipstick and too much perfume.
And yes, I’m embarrassed to be wobbling around
like a little girl wearing her mother’s high heels,
but doesn’t everything on earth
vibrate with a mortal shudder?
Candle flickers, moonlight shivers the pond,
and even long-dead stars
pulsate in their inky firmament.
It’s only the angels who do not sweat or bleed,
whose pudenda are smooth as Barbie dolls,
whom you’ll find singing hosannas forever
each note steady as a laser beam,
never trembling or flinching.
*
Alison Luterman has published four previous collections of poetry, most recently In the Time of Great Fires (Catamaran Press,) and Desire Zoo (Tia Chucha Press.) Her poems have appeared in The New York Times Sunday Magazine, The Sun, Rattle, and elsewhere. She writes and teaches in Oakland, California. www.alisonluterman.net
Love Warrior
In the hard months after I’d split from my first husband
there were times when I could not bear
to listen to music at all and especially not
to Tuck & Patti
and my favorite album of theirs, Love Warrior,
with its refrain: “We give up on Love
so easily…” because Patti Cathcart’s voice always sounded
like it had been soaked in the dark rum
of requited passion for a thousand years,
whereas I’d been stripped down to the bones
of myself, and they were bare, honey,
they were dry as unbuttered toast,
so whenever I heard that song
I’d find myself in a sodden heap on the floor.
Patti’s voice was an infusion,
almost unbearable in its potency, a womanly call to rise
and face life’s entwined and ever-shifting harmonies,
syncopation of the sublime against a backbeat
of the real; the tune I needed to hear
with my whole shattered heart.
You can’t put that kind of art
on a staff with notes and a treble clef.
Who knows where it came from, what battlefield
she had to stagger through to sing it
with that kind of conviction, blood-streaked,
smoke haloing her curls,
yet clothed in a faith I let enter me
through osmosis, praying that someday its sweet echo
might find me on my feet again.
*
Alison Luterman’s books of poems include The Largest Possible Life (Cleveland State University press), See How We Almost Fly (Pearl Editions), Desire Zoo (Tia Chucha Press), and In the Time of Great Fires (Catamaran Press). She has published poems in The New York Times Magazine, The Sun Magazine, Prairie Schooner, Nimrod, Rattle, The Atlanta Review, and many other journals and anthologies. Two of her poems are included in Billy Collins Poetry 180 project at the Library of Congress. Five of her personal essays have been collected in the e-book Feral City, published at http://www.shebooks.net. She has also written half a dozen plays, including several musicals. She has taught and/or been poet-in-residence at California Poets in the Schools, New College in San Francisco, Holy Names College in Oakland, The Writing Salon in Berkeley, at Esalen and Omega Institutes, at the Great Mother Conference, and at various writing retreats all over the country. Check out her website http://www.alisonluterman.net for more information.
