Tag: ballet

Three Poems by Terri Kirby Erickson

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Ballet Class

I tried not to envy the ponytailed waifs
in my ballet class whose ten-year-old bodies
weighed less than dandelions.

I was as thin as they were, but my limbs
were like lead weights compared
to the willow branches of their arms, the bird-

like bones in legs that seemed stronger,
lighter—able to pirouette and plié
with so much ease. At least I make good grades

in school, I’d say to myself while holding
on to the barre like a ship’s mainmast
in a roiling sea. But I knew the ballet teachers

expected better of me—the only daughter
of a Prima Ballerina. It didn’t take long,
however, to see I had none of my mother’s talent.

I would never leap into the air and land like a swan
on the water, dip and sway like a sapling
in the wind. Though I liked wearing the black

leotard and pink tights, my soft, peony-colored
shoes, I couldn’t bend and touch
my toes, let alone twirl on them. So I shed

the ballet slippers and took up writing—
hoping to pen one day, a pirouetting poem,
a pas de chat of words that danced across a page.

*

Woman on the Beach

The woman pacing the rocky beach is no ghost
but a mother whose little boy rose
from his bed and wandered down to the water

while his parents were sleeping. Not quite three,
her only child was red-cheeked and plump
as a baby penguin, with black curls and a winning

smile that made his mother’s heart thump
in her thin chest just to think of it. She knew
he was gone but year after year she rented the same

cottage on the same shore on the same day her boy
disappeared—presumed drowned they said—
and now she is old. Widowed, white-headed

and frail, her body is blown this way and that by
the wind, but still she walks and sometimes
calls his name as if any minute, he’ll come running,

his flushed skin hot against her own cool flesh,
wriggling like a puppy that wants down but she will
not put him down. She will hold him

in her arms and keep him safe like she didn’t do
before, though nothing she says or does
or prays for will ever wake her from a sleep so deep

she never heard his feet hit the floor or the screen
door slam or his cries for help, her beautiful
boy whose mother failed him.

* 

How to Shop with Your Mother

Never make her feel like she’s slowing
you down. Even when she meanders

into the shoe department, running her
hands over the soft leather, admiring

one pair or another for what seems like
forever, you do have time to wait. Then,

when the funeral director tells you they
need clothes for her to wear, a pair of

shoes, you will not open your mother’s
closet door and find, jumbled into a pile,

her worn out sandals, dress shoes with
dented heels, her faded thin-soled flats—

and feel such a wave of sorrow you can’t
catch your breath. You won’t be the one

who hurried her mother along, who kept
on sighing because she was holding you

up when there were so many places you
needed to go and things you needed to do.

*

Terri Kirby Erickson is the author of seven full-length collections of poetry, including Night Talks: New & Selected Poems (Press 53), which was a finalist for (general) poetry in the International Book Awards and the Best Book Awards. Her work has appeared in a wide variety of literary journals, anthologies, magazines, and newspapers, including “American Life in Poetry,” Asheville Poetry Review, Atlanta Review, JAMA, Poetry Foundation, Rattle, The SUN, The Writer’s Almanac, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Verse Daily, and many more. Among her numerous awards are the Joy Harjo Poetry Prize, Nautilus Silver Book Award, Tennessee Williams Poetry Prize, and the Annals of Internal Medicine Poetry Prize. She lives in North Carolina.

Two Poems by Stefanie Leigh

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The Stilling of Movement

After your class ended, and all the dancers bled
into gossip, fouettés, stretches,
and Band-Aids, you sauntered over to the corner,
lifted my fingertips and pulled, so my hips slid
further, further, further over
the box of my pointe shoe, and I hovered

over an abyss. My back
leg extended long, high, quivering. If you let
go, I would fall. So, your words
held my waist like a corset and sweat
pooled at my neck as I gulped down the echo
of the now-empty studio—

How eighty dancers evaporated—my mind
and eyes laid down on the Marley. I lowered
my leg, came off pointe, and you released
my hand, but not my presence, and my knees
knocked together beneath your breathing
and I wondered what else you expected me to do.

*

My Therapist Said, No Amount of Healing Will Make a Toxic Environment Safe

Sixteen years after leaving my ballet career—my soul
and bones no longer bleeding—I was back at the barre

three times, then four, then five times a week, angled in,
balancing in passé. Now forty, my chest eventually

remembered how to stack above my pelvis, arms
extended, my left ankle anchoring me to the Marley.

I was perfectly still, the piano pedaling through my
intestines, when a fog I didn’t know was covering

my gaze dissipated. I breathed forward,
not even an inch, expanded from the inside, into

a world I had only ever watched from behind
a scrim. After barre, one of the elderly ladies came over,

Dear, you always look gorgeous, but something
is different. Like you have a full outline—for the first time.

*

Stefanie Leigh is a poet and ballet dancer based in Toronto. She was a dancer with American Ballet Theatre and is currently working on her first poetry collection, Swan Arms. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Rust & Moth, SWWIM, Frozen Sea, Thimble Lit and elsewhere.

Three Poems by Richard Bloom

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Dear Larry Levis

Every forty minutes, the baby birds cry out for food.
Their beaks wide open,
Their throats, pink and red, like the throats of flowers.

If a berry drops from their beak, they can’t pick it up.
They’re just like the old people at the Hamilton Senior Center.
They can’t feed themselves, either.

And when the baby birds are satisfied, they no longer cry.
The flower of their desert colored throats close.
They puff out their scanty feathers.

What happened to their parents? They’re always better off with their parents.
Now I guess, I’m their mother.
Dear Larry Levis, my spine remembers wings.

*

Ballet in the trees

The sky is a washed-out blue.
The grass, a sickly brown.
The un-raked leaves crumple
like first drafts tossed in a waste basket.
I sit on the porch steps and watch a spider
pull one long strand of silk from
gutter to rainspout.
The soil in the field sleeps,
wanting warmth for the coming winter.

The trees are but half bare. Beside
the golden sycamore in my neighbor’s yard
stands a red maple. Its’ scarlet leaves
diminish the frail gold.
The sycamore is Diaghilev.
The maple is Nijinsky.
One says to the other: “Astonish me.”

*

Dust and baseball

I am eating a chicken burrito in Sonora when two
outfielders from the Mexican Baseball League stop
in for a beer.

I ask them to autograph the glove I’ve carried with me
since childhood. It’s a Rawlings,
soiled, oiled, and blackened
by the plays of a thousand games.

The fields of Sonora are dry as a prisoner’s throat.
The buses from West Texas
roll past the supermercado
and the dinner plate of the moon.

The bus depot/luncheonette is open
all night for passengers, police, and traffickers.
It is the only place I ever saw a man kick a dog.

The two great institutions of Sonora are dust and baseball.

Paul, my best friend growing up, came to Mexico to play ball.
The Diablos Rojos signed him.
They called him Kid. He played catcher.
One day, in mirage inducing heat, a girl named Rosa came to see him play.
They had met at a bar somewhere in town.
He didn’t play well that day. He never played well again.

He and Rosa got married.
She took him to Guadalajara to work for her father.
He was a businessman.
He ran one brothel and seven funeral parlors.

A year later, his head was found in a ditch.
In his catcher’s mitt.

*

Richard Bloom has published in various magazines, including Seneca Review, New York Quarterly, Barnwood International, and Eunoia Review. He has attended Breadloaf, and studied poetry writing with several accomplished poets at the 92nd Street Y. He worked in advertising for many years. Currently, he is a substitute teacher in the NYC public schools.