Tag: kindness

Four Poems by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

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On the Street in Lancaster, Ohio

I like your costume,
the woman said, and I said,
Thank you. Thing was,
I wasn’t wearing a costume.
I was dressed as me,
a middle-aged woman
in tall black boots,
black yoga pants,
a long gray sweater
and my dad’s gray hat.

It wasn’t till after she left
I laughed, delighted
to be called out
for dressing up as myself,
a person I’ve been
trying to be my whole life.

And where, I wondered,
does the costume end?
Does it include my hair?
My skin? My name?
My stories? My resume?
My voice? All of it,
a costume of self
worn by whatever
is most alive inside.

I’m thinking this human frame
is just some get-up the infinite
has slipped into for a time,
even as it slips into other
costumes, including one
that looks exactly like you.
And hey, I like your costume.

*

Fact Checking

When a gator is chasing you,
he said, you run away,
but zig zag. They can scent you,
and they’re fast, but they aren’t
agile enough to turn well. And
this is how I might have become
a gator bite. His advice sounded good,
and it was echoed by others I met,
but fact is, the best bet to survive
a gator attack is to back up slow
with the hands in the air to look big.
If it charges, then run. Fast.
In a straight line. No zagging.
They’re quick, but tire easily on land.
How many other stories do I trust
every day, not thinking to look them up?
How many people have I fed to the gators?
The world has never been swampier.
The need to check what we’re told is great.
Look friend, here comes a gator even now.
Face him. Raise your arms. Back away slow.
Don’t turn your back if you can help it.
They look more like people than you’d think.

*

Today’s Headline

And then one day, while I read
aloud to my husband the news
and felt the widening hole in my heart,
he raised his hand to quiet me.
I followed his gaze out the window
to see in the yard a small fluffy thing
with black and white eyespots on its head.
A northern pygmy owl beside our door,
stout body slightly smaller than my fist.
It turned its neck a full half circle
to look at me with bright yellow eyes.
In an instant, I shifted from disgust
with the world to awe. Awe for this
fierce bespeckled miracle, this wonder
of feather and beak and claw, this
small being in the grass looking back
at me as if to say, Here is also the news.
How surprising the world can be.
How quickly, when I let it, amazement
overwrites my fear and makes
of the hole in my heart a home.

*

When They Asked Me, “What Is Your Current Hyperfixation”

I could have said potato chips. Always true. Plain ones. No flavors. Potato. Oil. Salt. I could have said black licorice from Finland, also always true. Or long flowy pants with no front pockets. That’s new. Tending my eight aloe babies still recovering from their transplant. Counting orchid buds about to bloom. How many grams of protein in a serving of anything. The insane softness of my daughter’s inner arm. How baby swifts can fly ten months without stopping. Imagining Rodin and Rilke watching sunsets together. But I said the only words I could—I am starved for all stories of kindness. The young man delivering diapers to immigrant families in Maine. The woman sending socks to my friend with cancer. The stranger who walked a labyrinth with me. My husband offering me the last egg in the carton. Anyone who smiles and says hello in the grocery store aisles. Anyone who says hello back.

*

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer is a poet, teacher, speaker and writing facilitator who co-hosts Emerging Form, a podcast on creative process. Her daily audio series, The Poetic Path, is on the Ritual app. Her poems have appeared on A Prairie Home Companion, PBS News Hour, O Magazine, Washington Post’s Book Club, and Carnegie Hall stage. Her recent collections are All the Honey and The Unfolding. In 2024, she became poet laureate for Evermore, helping others explore grief and love through poetry. Since 2006, she’s written a poem a day, sharing them on her blog, A Hundred Falling Veils. One-word mantra: Adjust.

INSOMNIA by Mary Donnelly

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INSOMNIA

As a child, I was
not strong enough
to be kind.
Fear made me
cruel. Made me lazy.

And so I said
things—not often,
though frequent
enough—that now
keep me up at night

as I slowly age
on a long blue couch.
Things I can’t
take back. Un-
breakable things.

*

Mary Donnelly is a Brooklyn-based educator and video producer whose poems have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Hanging Loose, Prairie Schooner, The Literary Review, and The Yale Review, and in the chapbook Mad World Colored Oil (Dancing Girl Press). She teaches through Gotham Writers Workshop and is a senior editor for DMQ Review.

Savoring Grace by Betsy Mars

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Savoring Grace
— for JKH

“We have not yet encountered any god who is as merciful as a man who flicks a beetle over on its feet.”
— Annie Dillard

John carries wasps in cups
one by one, releases them
to the outside
where they will do no harm
or be harmed by curious cats.
He comes by it naturally.

His father before him
was a legendary skunk re-locater;

spotting a skunk one day
in the Little League outfield,
he took the creature by the tail,
deposited it on the fence
away from fly balls
and curious boys.

If John could save the ants,
he would. He tries to corral
or redirect them. Like herding
cats, they follow their own path.
Meanwhile, fruit flies drown
in the temptation of the kitchen jar

Sometimes you have to sacrifice
for the greater good.

Holes in the siding are left unplugged
until the fledglings have flown.
Some spring, walls patched,
he will begin to build his nest.

*

Betsy Mars is a prize-winning poet, photographer, and an editor at Gyroscope Review. Her writing has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net. Betsy’s poems are widely available online and in print, most recently in ONE ART, Calul, Book of Matches, and the anthology Signed, Sealed, Delivered The Motown Poetry Review (Madville Press). Her photos have appeared in various journals, including Spank the Carp and Rattle. Betsy has had two chapbooks published, Alinea, and In the Muddle of the Night, co-authored with Alan Walowitz. Additionally, through her publishing venture (Kingly Street Press) she released two anthologies, Unsheathed: 24 Contemporary Poets Take Up the Knife and Floored. A full-length book, Rue Obscure, is forthcoming from Sheila-Na-Gig Editions.

Two Poems by Jennifer L Freed

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Heavy Clouds

On the morning radio, our nation
breaks softly on the news.
Upstairs, the tile guy is singing
off-key as he works on the bathroom floor.
He warned us before he started, “Hope
you don’t mind my old songs.
It’s how I get through the days.”
Snatches of his voice float down to my desk, lift
my mood.

When I go for a walk, I stop to watch
a robin perched atop a hedge. He lets me get close
enough to see his chest move when he chirps,
close enough to see him pluck a red berry,
lift up his chin, let it roll down his throat.
A bent, leathery man in a MAGA cap
stops beside me, and the robin turns an onyx eye
to watch us watching, and the man and I smile
at each other. He says, “Such little things
brighten my day.”

I want to believe this is a good sign.
But I don’t believe in signs.
Lately, I find in myself a new impulse
to guard my tongue, my text messages.
Years ago, in Prague, I met a woman
who turned on her kitchen tap before whispering
her opinions. I met a man
who’d been jailed in his youth
for performing “degenerate” songs.

I wish I could still hear Tile Guy
singing his way through the day.
But he’s clumping down the stairs now,
going out to his battered truck for a smoke.
He leans against the hood, takes a long drag,
gazes up at the empty blue sky.

*

Geometry 350: Questions of Repair

          for Alessandra

If the January light is cold and clear, and the man
with the cardboard sign at the intersection
of Pleasant and Main seems close
to tears when you hand him the twenty
your mother just gave you,
what is the volume of his words
when he says he’s been waiting
for something good to happen
since his boots were stolen while he slept?

And what is the measure of your gaze
greeting his, staying long enough
for him to tell you he borrowed
a pair of size sevens, but his feet
are size nine, and he couldn’t
keep walking, so thank you, thank you, this
makes his day.

And if you now see his stocking feet,
how he lifts them in turns
off the concrete as he speaks,
what is the circumference of the afternoon
yawning wide and idle ahead of you?

If, an hour later, the man is still there, still working
his way down the street in his socks
as the sun withdraws and the ice
tightens its grip on the sidewalks,
what will be the trajectory of your voice
calling, Sir! Sir! till he turns, and you say,
You’re size nine, right?
and his eyes take in the bag
you are holding out toward him.

*

Jennifer L Freed’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Atlanta Review, Writers Resist, Bellevue Literary Review, ONE ART, and other journals. Her collection When Light Shifts (finalist, 2022 Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize) explores themes of identity, health, care-giving and parent-care in the aftermath of her mother’s cerebral hemorrhage. She teaches writing programs from Massachusetts. Please visit jfreed.weebly.com

The Smallest Kindness by James Crews

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The Smallest Kindness

After I showered and dressed—
my one shining accomplishment
for the day—though every step felt like
wading through molasses, some pair
of merciless hands clamping down
on my temples, squeezing out every
drop of hope, still I noticed the sliver
of soap I’d left dissolving in its dish,
and decided to unwrap a brand-new
bar of sweet almond, which I know
is my husband’s favorite, and I held it
to my nose, breathing in the scent
of sugary croissants baking in an oven
before placing it face-up in the dish—
unmarred, untouched, unlike so much
in this life, now waiting for him to slide
the creamy silk of its lather across his skin.

*

James Crews is the editor of the best-selling anthology, How to Love the World, which has been featured on NPR’s Morning Edition, as well as in The Boston Globe, and The Washington Post. He is the author of four prize-winning collections of poetry: The Book of What Stays, Telling My Father, Bluebird, and Every Waking Moment, and his poems have been reprinted in the New York Times Magazine, Ploughshares, The New Republic, and The Christian Century. Crews teaches poetry at the University at Albany and lives with his husband in Shaftsbury, Vermont.

Two Poems by Courtney LeBlanc

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POEM FOR NEW YEAR’S DAY

I’m lucky to have good neighbors, the kind
who pull your garbage bins in when you’re out
of town or gather your mail. This summer
I exchanged cucumbers from my garden
for mint from hers. And to have the kind
of neighbors who deliver a bouquet
of bright yellow buttercups when my dad
died, with a note filled with such kindness
I started crying all over again. And isn’t
that what the world needs right now, a little
more kindness? Because last night the ball
dropped and everyone held their breath
and made a wish, the world collectively hoping
that this year will be better than the last.
I started the first day of this new year with
a long walk with my dog, her anxiety
non-existent on these empty country roads.
And the few cars that passed contained
people who raised their palms in hello,
greeting me as if we were old friends, as if
they would happily accept cucumbers
from my garden, grab the package
at my front door, and deliver compassion
in the face of grief. They waved and I waved
back, this small act of kindness between
strangers, this small bit of hope carrying
us into the new year.

*

FOR MY SISTER, WHO TURNED 40 ELEVEN DAYS AFTER OUR FATHER DIED

We planned on Ireland, a week of lush
green and rolling hills, castles and seductive,
indecipherable accents. I would drive
and you would navigate. We’d hike and drink
Guinness, laugh and sleep late. Instead
we took turns holding our father’s hand,
the hum of the hospital and piped-in
Muzak, the soundtrack. After a week, we
brought him home, moved him close
to the picture window in the living room,
let the sun shine onto his skin as he gulped
for air and I pushed morphine into his cheek.
When he died we circled around his bed,
touched his cooling skin, wiped our tears
on the white sheets. Our father never left
the country, never had a passport, never
graduated high school. He left
the adventuring to us, his two youngest
daughters, the ones who flew farthest
from the nest. Let’s pull out calendars
and make plans. We’ll go next year,
or in five. We’ll explore the whole damn
world, we’ll see everything he never did.

*

Courtney LeBlanc is the author of Beautiful & Full of Monsters (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press), chapbooks All in the Family (Bottlecap Press) and The Violence Within (Flutter Press). She is also the founder and Editor-in-Chief of Riot in Your Throat, an independent poetry press. She loves nail polish, tattoos, and a soy latte each morning. Read her publications on her blog: www.wordperv.com. Follow her on twitter: @wordperv, and IG: @wordperv79.