~ ONE ART’s Top 10 Most-Read Poets of October 2024 ~
Tag: Marianne Szlyk
The Family I Just Met by Marianne Szlyk
The Family I Just Met
Having seen only old country portraits
in the parlor, graduation pictures
without smiles, hectic-colored prints of saints
and martyrs, eyes rolling, hands clasped in prayer,
I thought that Dad’s side of the family
was grim. They came from behind the Curtain,
iron folds falling, about to slam shut.
Left behind, Dad’s uncle Alex was shot.
In the boxes of snapshots to unpack,
I found my grandfather’s laughter. He sat
in his low armchair, roaring at the show
Mom’s card-playing, movie-going folks loved.
It was Christmas. The war was long over.
He didn’t have to open his market,
butcher meat still in short supply, sweep floors
until you could have eaten off of them.
He could sit by the radio and snort
at the show my friends’ families in the Bronx
loved, laugh at the snapshots his children took:
Bobby throwing snowballs, my dad leaning,
taking a smoke break, dark sunglasses on,
Bobby a cowboy on the horsehair couch
while his sister Irene rolls her eyes, smokes,
and Rita sits close to Henry, her beau,
the young Polish man just home from the war.
*
Marianne Szlyk is a professor at Montgomery College. Her poems have appeared in Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Verse-Virtual, Green Elephant, and ONE ART. Her fiction has appeared in Mad Swirl, Impspired, and Storyteller Poetry Review. Her books Why We Never Visited the Elms, On the Other Side of the Window, and I Dream of Empathy are available from Amazon and Bookshop. She and her husband, the writer Ethan Goffman, live with their black cat Tyler who likes to hang out with them while they write.
Two Poems by Marianne Szlyk
The First Time I Rode on Blue Hill Avenue
We were heading back to Boston. You drove.
Monday I’d give my notice to the nursing home.
I watched for streets I knew from people at work:
the residents on the floors I brought mail to,
people not quite the age I am now,
about twice the age I was then.
On long afternoons that smelled of Lysol, lotion,
and cigarettes, boiled greens and bitter, sugary coffee,
men spoke to me of smoking weed at the Hi-Hat,
dropped names and songs I didn’t know. Women spoke
of quiet mothers who wore white gloves in August to shop
for cloth they’d sew into school dresses without patterns,
their new sewing machines shaking house walls as thin as paper.
Men spoke of quarries whose ghosts you could almost glimpse.
Women spoke of elm trees that once shaded their streets. Of
lost children raised by strangers. Of lost years in Mattapan.
Note: Mattapan refers to Boston State Hospital, a facility for individuals with mental illness, which closed in 1987.
*
Last Night
I thought of the desert we drove through that fall.
We could have been happy in a cinderblock
house at sunset, the fat, black cat our child.
We were visiting New York, so I did not
mind the hubbub and crowd in these narrow rooms
an upright piano pushed up against the wall.
I didn’t mind drinking tap water, talking
to that short man, watching you flirt with that girl.
We were tourists. None of this was real. Not to me.
But I thought of the ice-green river, Douglas fir
we sat beneath, metal-blue sky without words
for once, another place we could not belong.
*
Marianne Szlyk is a professor at Montgomery College. Her poems have appeared in Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Verse-Virtual, Poetry X Hunger, and One Art. Her books Why We Never Visited the Elms, On the Other Side of the Window, and I Dream of Empathy are available from Amazon and Bookshop. She and her husband, the writer Ethan Goffman, now live with their black cat Tyler.
Crow on Lincoln Street by Marianne Szlyk
Crow on Lincoln Street
Here no one watches the short, stout crow swagger
past pickups, past brittle trees, past brick houses
where crow-like men work on their yards. Not even
dogs bark from behind screen doors as he passes.
He keeps to the street, does not break into flight.
No cars brave speed bumps, slide past walls of work trucks,
scare or dare the crow who would sense them anyway.
But he avoids the park where box turtles bask,
pitbulls parade on leashes, boys play soccer,
red-winged blackbirds perch one moment on ghost-reeds
before breaking into song, then into flight.
*
Marianne Szlyk is a professor at Montgomery College. Her poems have appeared in of/with, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Setu, Verse-Virtual, Sequoyah Cherokee River Journal, Bourgeon, Muddy River Poetry Review, Writing in a Woman’s Voice, the Sligo Review, and Spectrum as well as the anthologies The Forgotten River and Resurrection of a Sunflower. Her books On the Other Side of the Window and Poetry en Plein Air are available from Amazon and Bookshop. She has also led workshops where poets write tributes to both survivors of COVID-19 and those whom we have lost.