Tag: Christmas

Four Poems by Barbara Crooker

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THE O IN WIDOW

is empty, a room with no windows.
The lifeless moon in a bleak sky.
The hollow in your throat I used to kiss.
A deep well, without a wish.
Without.
Where there used to be a couple,
the deep division of negative numbers.
The unused chair at the kitchen table.
The vast Sahara of one side of the bed.
The air in my hand as I reach out for yours.
The shape of my mouth when grief
sneaks up and takes me unaware.
The heartless dawn with you still gone.

*

AVOID THE IMPOSSIBLE QUESTION
It takes the form of ‘How are you?’ or “How are you doing?’
        Dr. Joyce Brothers

Pretend you have hearing loss.
Bend down and tie your double-knotted
shoes. Ignore the question; instead, ask one—
people love to talk about themselves.
Don’t even think about how you really are,
which is lost. Bereft. Adrift. A shell
tumbling in the tide. A crust of bread,
not the whole loaf. An empty glass,
the residue of wine. The real answer:
still here, though I wish I was gone.

*

CHRISTMAS WITHOUT YOU

I no longer make fruitcake—those garish
cherries, sticky chunks of glacéed pineapple,
candied peel—snug in their bed of dark spiced
cake. No one but you ever liked it. And I’m not
capable of walking in the ice-crusted woods
to chop down (really, saw) a fragrant tree,
wrestle it on top of the car, then lug it inside,
water it daily on hands and knees. Instead,
an artificial tree, pre-lit with tiny lights,
does its best to brighten these dark nights.
Where I sit in front of the fire, alone,
with my solitary glass of wine. The stocking
you sewed for me the first year we were
together hangs empty. As does yours,
felt cut-outs sewn by your mother when you
were two. There are no presents to wrap
or gifts to hide. The cookies are unbaked.
Roasts untrimmed. Just the silence of the snow,
the flame from a single candle. The longest
night of the year.

*

MAY YOUR MEMORIES BRING YOU COMFORT

Those were the words I’d often used when writing condolence
cards. But when I lost you, my beloved, I found I’d also lost
my memories. Not all of them, but the order of things:
when we met for dancing that night at the bar, was it before or after
the spaghetti dinner? What was the name of the restaurant in Lyon
that brought us a bowl of mousse au chocolat big enough to swim in,
and said, “Help yourself?” In which park in Paris did we find the horse
chestnut now resting in the shadow box? We used to joke, on our travels,
that together we made up a five-year-old. Who am I now, as I try
to traverse this difficult world without you?

*

Barbara Crooker is author of twelve chapbooks and nine full-length books of poetry. Some Glad Morning, Pitt Poetry Series, University of Pittsburgh Poetry Press, longlisted for the Julie Suk award from Jacar Press, is her latest. Her previous collection, The Book of Kells, won the Best Poetry Book of 2019 Award from Poetry by the Sea. Her other awards include: Grammy Spoken Word Finalist, the WB Yeats Society of New York Award, the Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, and three Pennsylvania Council fellowships in literature. Her work appears in literary journals and anthologies, including The Bedford Introduction to Literature.

Two Poems by Barbara Eknoian

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Gift

He sits on the edge
of the couch
hoping his niece
will like the gift
purchased
at the thrift store.
She smiles,
makes a fuss
over the watercolors
in tarnished frames,
showing houses
on a street strewn
with orange leaves.
At the bottom
of the Christmas tree,
she props the prints up
to rest against gifts
bought with Visa
and Mastercard,
and the lovely shades
of autumn outshine
the tinsel and lights.

*

Sentimental

In a lucid moment,
I wonder why I keep
the black steamer trunk
in the corner of my room
crammed with letters
from girl scout camp
and high school friends,
who have forgotten me
like an old sneaker
hanging from a wire,
along with every letter
from former neighbors,
who meant a lot to me.
I revere the correspondence
as though they’re prayers,
but realize I’m too sentimental
valuing the friendships
for more than what they were.
I contemplate a huge bonfire
and see the letters burning up,
yet I need to hold on to them
like artifacts in a museum
to prove that I was here,
and we were once.

*

Barbara Eknoian’s work has appeared in Pearl, Chiron Review, Cadence Collective, Redshift, and Silver Birch Press’s anthologies. Her recent collection of short stories published by Amazon is Romance is Not Too Far From Here. She lives in La Mirada, CA with daughter, grandson, one cat and a kitten. The kitten is full of mischief and keeps the whole family on their toes.

Maeve by William Palmer

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Maeve

She is wrapped
in a blanket with a blue glow
under her

to reduce her jaundice,
backlit like a small bough
on a Christmas tree.

My son changes her,
then lays her tenderly
in the curve of my arm.

She wears only a diaper,
her cord above it
hardened dark.

As I speak to her, her eyes move
on me, her tiny lips pushing out
in perfect circles, as if kissing air.

I touch her ruddy feet,
skim the soft skin
of her chest and cheeks.

I have forgotten
how my son felt newborn,
as if that part of me had fallen off.

Just a year ago,
my darkness black,
I thought of leaving.

And here, now,
I am holding Maeve,
her name Irish for joy.

*

William Palmer’s poetry has appeared recently in Braided Way, Innisfree, JAMA, J Journal, One Art, On the Seawall, Poetry East, Sheila-Na-Gig, and The Westchester Review. A retired professor of English at Alma College, he lives in Traverse City, Michigan.

Lost Cove Wildfire by Beth Copeland

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Lost Cove Wildfire

After weeks without rain in the Blue Ridge,
a fire spreads on Christmas Eve, then smolders
under snow but snags and smoke remain

as firefighters in California find ghost trees
on the forest floor, scorched imprints
of fallen trunks, branches, and twigs.

Meanwhile, my sister builds a fire in her house,
tosses kindling on logs and, in lieu of a bellows,
blows on the blue blaze to keep it burning.

How thin is the wire between the flaring flame
in the hearth —the heat, the heart!—and the wildfire
that starts with a single spark?

*

Beth Copeland is the author of Blue Honey, 2017 Dogfish Head Poetry Prize winner; Transcendental Telemarketer (BlazeVOX, 2012); and Traveling through Glass, 1999 Bright Hill Press Poetry Book Award winner. Her chapbook Selfie with Cherry is forthcoming from Glass Lyre Press. She owns Tiny Cabin, Big Ideas™, a retreat for writers in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Dreidel, Dreidel, Dreidel by Howie Good

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Dreidel, Dreidel, Dreidel

After 30 minutes of Christmas music, the high school choir broke into the Hanukkah song “Dreidel, Dreidel, Dreidel” at the holiday concert. The person seated beside me began to complain under her breath. Jesus Fucking Christ! I thought. I examined her out of the corner of my eye. She wasn’t an obvious Nazi. Somewhere in her fifties, she was trying hard to look younger, a frosted blonde with the sharp features of the obsessive dieter. I didn’t say anything, though I might have let out a sigh. The song changed to something Christmassy. I focused on my daughter up on stage. She was heedlessly singing, her face all alight.

*

Howie Good’s latest poetry books are The Horse Were Beautiful, available from Grey Book Press, and Swimming in Oblivion: New and Selected Poems from Redhawk Publications.

The Night Before Prozac by Susan Cossette

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The Night Before Prozac

The amber bottle of green and white capsules
waits in the plastic pharmacy bin,
for three days now.

The strap of muscles clenched around my ribs,
The nausea and stomach churn tell me it is time.
My pulse pounds
go, go, go.

At 3 am, I will think of the perfect things I should have said at work but didn’t.
I will regret the things I said but said anyway.
I will imagine every way I could possibly die.

CNN reports a 50% increase in the number of liver transplants needed
due to pandemic binge drinking.
I cringe at the dozen empty wine bottles
in the kitchen trash.
So many colors, each with its own mood.
The good pinot grigios remind me I overspend.
The cheap ones scream of bored desperation.

In 1999, I crawled into bed for a month.
Nothing existed but the lace curtains, the damp sheets,
a toddler and his grandmother in the next room.
All it took was a pill to wind me up again–
a blank-gazed cipher in pink gingham,
contorted limbs, stiff painted smile.

At 3 am, I will worry I won’t write another poem again.
But I need to sleep and smile and do my job,
the one I waited my whole life for.
I have bills to pay.

The amber plastic bottle waits.

*

Susan Cossette lives and writes in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The Author of Peggy Sue Messed Up, she is a recipient of the University of Connecticut’s Wallace Stevens Poetry Prize. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rust and Moth, Vita Brevis, ONE ART, As it Ought to Be, Anti-Heroin Chic, The Amethyst Review, Crow & Cross Keys, Loch Raven Review, and in the anthologies Tuesdays at Curley’s and After the Equinox.

Two Poems by Ralph James Savarese

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KISS

Putting up a Christmas tree
when you’ll be gone
for Christmas is a bit like
taking your sister to
the prom. The ornamental
satisfaction is the same
or nearly the same.
Your house, a gangly
teenage boy, is all dressed up
and presenting its corsage—
the lights a kind of doorbell
for the eyes. But the tree
pities you, or you pity it.
With no gifts below, it’s
like the man ringing a bell
outside Walmart. (If
salvation’s an army,
there are many deserters…)
You and the tree both know
that, after some dancing
and some punch, absolutely
nothing will happen.
Every dream is platonic,
and every prayer, a wise guy.
No heart can ever be king.

*

CHRISTMAS PEAS

Here are sweet peas, on tip-toe for a flight…
–John Keats, “I Stood Tiptoe upon a Little Hill”

Peas make carbonara divine: a little sweetness,
a little green, a little pre-masticated mush.
Yet alone, like bachelorettes flirting nakedly
with a bowl—no, thank you. I’d rather eat pebbles….

Well, tonight they arrived by frozen ambulance:
a kind of Santa, though not for the mouth,
that ridiculous chimney, but for the hand or arm.
A coldness so kind it can pull you from the past

and its roiling riptide, deliver you by nerve-ending
to the shore, to certain sand. Years ago,
at Christmas, in foster care, a much older boy
who’d been sodomized by his father brutally

attacked our son. Ever since, it’s been a season
of infected needles—the tree a hospital all lit up,
the whiteness of oblivion calling and calling…
(When the sky dissociates, Humpty Dumpty

accumulates on the ground.) Although I loathe
the boy for what he did, I know that the attack
was nothing more than paying for the meal of the car
behind at a drive-through in hell. Happy Holidays!

As our son flailed on the couch, threatening to put
his head through a phantom window, the peas
arrived on their sleigh and beat back the demon
with their one and only gift: the present. Our son

looked up at us and smiled, then looked down
at his hands in wonder—none of us can ever quite
believe this tactile trick. Once as a boy, coming
out of anesthesia, he typed on his computer

(he doesn’t speak), Easy breathing forever.
We were at the dentist. For years, he couldn’t
tolerate anything human in his mouth. Now,
opening the door to his bedroom and watching

his chest rise and fall, angry at myself for becoming
angry with him, tired as spent tinsel, I think
of my friend’s mother who insisted that the last line
of “Silent Night” is sleep in heavenly peas.

*

Ralph James Savarese is the author of three books of poetry: Republican Fathers (Nine Mile Books); When This Is Over (Ice Cube Press); and, with Stephen Kuusisto, Someone Falls Overboard: Talking through Poems (Nine Mile Books).

What I Want for Christmas by Luke Stromberg

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What I Want for Christmas

One of those women who jump out of cakes.

She would be scandalously young, preferably—
twenty-one or twenty-two—
And—what the hell—let’s make her a blond,
one that looks good
in a white bikini bottom
and has a flat tummy.
That’d work.

Nah. Not really.

I wouldn’t know what to do with her.
We’d probably end up friends.
She would look up to me.
Later, she’d introduce me to her boyfriend, Kyle.
He’d be a guy in a sleeveless t-shirt
who likes to call me ‘Bro.’
Most likely he’d look up to me, too.

How about a swordfish, then,
or one of those big, goofy moose heads
to mount on the wall above my fireplace?
But I actually don’t have a fireplace—
so one of those, too.
And some logs to burn in my fireplace.
And a velvet jacket and a mug of grog.
And a high-backed leather chair to drink my grog in.

A Model-T Ford.
A scarf, a pair of gloves, some goggles.
A submarine.
A fleet of bicyclists.
A typewriter
possessed by the soul of an alcoholic playwright.

Or someone I could talk to.
(The nights are long and dark this time of year.)

Someone who makes me laugh, who finds
something debonair about a man in glasses.
She could have red hair and smooth skin, too,
the whitest teeth,
a way of sighing to herself
she probably doesn’t even know about.

There’s a good movie playing downtown.
Maybe she’d like to go.

*

Luke Stromberg’s debut poetry collection, The Elephant’s Mouth, is forthcoming from Kelsay Books. His poetry and criticism have appeared in Smartish Pace, The Hopkins Review, The New Criterion, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Golidad Review, Think Journal, The Raintown Review, The Dark Horse, Cassandra Voices, and several other venues. He also serves as the Associate Poetry Editor of E-Verse Radio. Luke works as an adjunct professor at Eastern University and La Salle University and lives in Upper Darby, PA.

Two Poems by Gerry LaFemina

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It’s Christmas. The turkey vultures
             – For Michael and Barbara

It’s Christmas. The turkey vultures
have climbed into the choir loft of a nearby tree,
seven, twelve, fifteen of them ready for carols
we are too far to hear. They look sharp
backlit in their black frocks, their monastic heads
bowed & serious. Their songs all in minor keys.
Across the street another five have alighted
like Santa’s reindeer on a neighbor’s roof.
Some omen. Some harbinger. They remain
unfazed by flashing lights, by inflatable snowmen
suddenly resuscitated, by the old world
curses of a grandfather worried about
evil eyes & wives tales. These are beaks that know
carrion, talons that carry death over
backyards, patios, children pointing them out.
Winged, ferocious, hideous & full of grace
they could be seraphim. We are
miles from steeple or cemetery.
The community’s lone lake remains ice-scabbed.
The gazebo overlooking it frowns despite
its crown of holiday lights, each bulb a blazing
scarab. There are no crows or pigeons,
only the vultures. Already,
the remains of gift giving burn in fireplaces—
hearth smoke & kitchen scents mingling.
My brother wants to know what can be done
about the buzzards, talks about shooting them
with garden hose spray or shaking that tree
viciously, for they are awful & ugly & blessed all
at once, & like any of us, clutching carnage &
redemption both, our redundant lists
of naughty & nice. How radiant
the afternoon sky in the bay window, even
as occasional shadows darken the welcome mat.

*

Night Walk

Three bats scrape the undercarriage of dusk,
circle concentrically then swoop for summer’s
remaining insects. They are scraps of darkness
against the darkening sky, the way certain notes
in a nocturne’s melody resonate more,
cables vibrating from hammer strikes, sustained
almost a visible shiver, even as being played
by an unknown neighbor. E minor. Chopin.
The whole thing unsteady, uncertain, almost
unrecognizable, like the self in distant memory. Smoke
from a leaf fire a worn scarf against windsweep.
I didn’t use to believe in ghosts despite a childhood
watching Chiller films Saturdays past midnight.
I didn’t believe in mad scientists & undead.
Then I learned about the Bomb in class,
imagined being trapped in a basement shelter
with girls I had no courage to speak with
outside fantasy; the yellow & black fallout signs
that were everywhere it seemed, announced the inevitable.
Yet here we are nearly 40 years later, in Appalachia,
in an America that continues to advertise
custard cones, holiday parades, & Elvis impersonators
appearing at Autumn Glory band shells. For years
people kept seeing the King or his ghost—
the past unrelenting. Its soundtrack all nocturnes &
Return to Sender, the occasional riff of swing
or bebop. The junior high kids, instead, fall in love
on the school bus or in Math class or during
active shooter drills, teacher saying any one of you
might be a victim, so follow directions. This is how
we learn heartache, how even a name can be haunted
because a name can be a house we live in for years
walking in the empty rooms of its syllables.
We open the windows just to hear the beloved
breathing until that breath becomes the very back-beat
of our evenings. The properties of heartbreak & loss
all so similar, their overgrown lawns, their one lit rooms
behind curtains, envelopes uncollected in mailboxes.
No one knows what happened, though kids walking past
invent narratives, each one more horrific until
all that remains are the rumors themselves—
the plots like that of thrillers, all sadness or else
the threat of tragedy, & even this is American.
The piano appears again, this time Gershwin, more
furtive, further away. A feral cat rushes from wild fescue
a field mouse, metronomic tail swinging, clamped
in its fangs. Years ago this might have been an omen.
To the distant west strobe lightning flashes without thunder.

*

Gerry LaFemina is the author of numerous collections of poetry, fiction, and criticism. In 2022 he’ll have two new books released: The Pursuit: A Meditation on Happiness (creative nonfiction) and The American Ruse (poems). He is a Professor of English at Frostburg State University, serves as a mentor in Carlow University’s MFA program, is a Fulbright specialist in Writing and American Culture, and fronts the punk rock band The Downstrokes.

Winter’s Toll by Melanie Figg

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Winter’s Toll

The deer are starving.
Summer was too dry and snow came too soon
and too thick. They usually don’t come out
of the woods until February. It’s almost Christmas
and they’re in the trailer park by ten.

My mother died a week ago.
We cleaned out her refrigerator,
found two bins of apples
she had no energy to can
and left them for the deer.

After bar close I drive in slow: two doe and a fawn.
For a minute I feel lucky—to see animals so hungry
they’re at front doors eating
Christmas wreaths. One doe swings her head,
watches me park and go inside
my mother’s house. They keep walking,
looking for apples on the snow-covered lawns.

*

Melanie Figg’s debut poetry collection, Trace (New Rivers Press) was named one of the 100 Best Indie Books of 2020 by Kirkus Reviews. Melanie has won grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, The McKnight and Jerome Foundations, the Maryland State Arts Council, and others. Her poems, personal essays, and book reviews can be found in dozens of literary journals including The Iowa Review, Nimrod, and The Rumpus. As a certified professional coach, Melanie teaches creative writing, offers women’s writing retreats, and works one-on-one with writers and others. http://www.melaniefigg.net