Tag: memory

Five Poems by Andrea Potos

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THE FRIENDSHIP

The week
when she wrote:

You and I will
explore Truth together,

my heart
signed on instantly:

Yes,
though nothing followed–

they were words
only, after all;

I who am one who believes
in words, words

have rescued my life, after all.
Some say words are cheap;

I say, they
are costlier than you know.

*

SADNESS IS ON ITS WAY

I can hear the foghorns,
skies a drizzled mist,
clouds sodden
with grey weight
as if with so much
to let go of,
so much to say.

*

THE MOMENT I SENSED MY MOTHER WAS LEAVING

Standing in the mist-
drizzled green of Connemara,
the Wild Atlantic Way thousands of miles
from my mother in the rehab home,
I called to make sure she knew
I’d be back in four days.
I needed to ask her
how she was that morning– her voice
weakened and crackling across the vastness–
Just fair, she said,
Unable, for the first time in my life,
to offer the reassurance
for the daughter she loved so well-
it was then I knew.

*

WHEN MY WIDOWER NEIGHBOR INVITES ME
TO COME AND TAKE WHATEVER I WANT
FROM HIS WIFE’S WARDROBE

Three dressing rooms of voluminous wonder,
ballroom gowns, brocaded jackets
and scarves, leather purses and shoes,
and dressers filled with nightwear and tops.
I browsed and lingered, stayed for nearly an hour.
When I opened the deepest mahogany drawer, I found
a pale pink sweater, cloud-soft,
patterned all over with lipstick prints.
I thought of my mother, all the years
of her beloved Revlon shades.
I might have felt her then
tap my shoulder: Here is some love
from me honey–take it–
and I did.

*

WHEN OUR FAVORITE RESTAURANT CLOSES
         for Mom

Though you’ve been gone
nearly ten years now,
I’d drive the eighty miles
to go there–the glass doors still
opening for both of us.
I’d order our coffee
in their thick ceramic mugs,
then slices of their legendary
blueberry pie for take-home–
heaping with plump berries,
no crust on top, cold, with clouds
of whipped cream for later.
Each bite would remind me.
Now I must find
another place for us–
I want a location to point to,
to say, here, Mom, let’s go together,
I’ll pick you up at noon.

*

Andrea Potos is the author of several collections of poetry, most recently Two Emilys (Kelsay Books) and Her Joy Becomes (Fernwood Press). A new collection entitled The Presence of One Word is forthcoming later in 2025. Recent poems can be found in CALYX Journal, Presence, New York Times Book Review, Earth’s Daughters, and Poem. You can find her at andreapotos.com

Three Poems by Jeanne Wagner

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Because My Memory Began Too Soon

        Adults rarely remember events from before the age of three.
        It’s a phenomenon known as ‘infantile amnesia.’

                ―Queensland Brain Institute

I’m the one who’s cursed with remembering it all.
My first sight, the light bleeding through the blinds.

What I felt, what she felt, in the moments after birth.
We were a woman in pain, turning towards the wall.

Memory, the attic that enters you, is never cleaned.
Memory is like furniture you can’t take back.

The light, when it flowed, was like milk for the eyes.
I knew myself only as the seer then, and not the seen.

*

Birthstone

When I was thirteen, everything was a metaphor―maybe
half a metaphor, the other half still a riddle in the heart.

Money, another metaphor, was everywhere in our house.
Scattered in kitchen drawers and on countertops.

In discarded dishes where we kept those unwanted coins
we call change. “Take what you need,” my mother said.

Who knew what I needed the day I went to the neighbor’s
auction and found, displayed, a pair of amethyst geodes.

Stones with smaller stones gestating inside of them.
I thought it must be what they meant by a motherlode.

Stones sliced open like soft Anjou pears, exposing their litter
of lilac crystals. Shards of purple light rising like stalagmites,

or like the glistening booty tumbling from pirate chests
in comic books, their lids agape, their gems laid bare.

Someone at the auction must have driven up the price
that day. Must have loved them as much as I did.

How eagerly I shelled out my two dollars and fifty cents,
innocent of whole new anxieties heading my way.

Over dinner, my father told me I was an easy mark. A girl
who’s taken advantage of―who splurges on the first

garish rocks that come her way― unpolished and raw.
The day after the auction, I had to knock on our neighbor’s

door and beg for my money back. I had to learn even
beauty can be a commodity: can be mounted,
carved into facets, twisted around a finger or delicately
broached, those little gold prongs pinning it down.

*

A Thousand Doors

Who said, The day opens with a thousand doors?
An image conceived by some compulsive smiler who
springs from her bed each morning like a startled doe.

Someone who doesn’t wake slowly, as I do,
a half-forgotten dream roving up my shins.
The door a stage mother ready to steer a sleeper

like me into the troubled world. Tell me the image
of a thousand doors isn’t the nightmare you’d get
from being forced to watch that old game show,

the one with three doors, repeating in a perpetual loop,
or those scenes from old movies where the Nazis
or the Stasi are beating down doors.

Or that photo of a bombed-out building,
its one remaining door opening onto empty air.
And then there’s the door I almost overlooked,

the one in the Velázquez’s painting, Las Meninas,
The way it reveals a lone courtier standing
in a slender flag of light, the only one seeing

the room from the rear, as if in freeze-frame,
because we know time stops for a second
whenever you open a door. Or close it.

That man in the back of the room reminding me
of my father in those sweet childhood goodnights
of ours. How he stood in the door light

as it framed a silhouette of a round head,
ears with small, furled tips, his slender form
familiar yet otherworldly in the dark,

lingering there long enough to show me
that there is only one safe door in the world.
And I left it long ago.

*

Jeanne Wagner’s book, One Needful Song, was the winner of the 2024 Catamaran Prize. She is also the author of four chapbooks and three previous full-length collections. Her work has appeared in North American Review, Cincinnati Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Shenandoah and The Southern Review. A retired tax accountant, she lives in Kensington, California.

Anniversary Song by Pauli Dutton

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Anniversary Song

Here’s to the man who shudders in staccato at the new sun.
A bandaged man, of 90 years, who soon after hip surgery,
carried his walker down the front steps and took out the garbage.
A man, who on our third date, handed me his Mensa card,
now asks the names of our grandchildren.
Before the wedding, I believed he could pen
an encyclopedia. A decade ago, his brain began its seep.
How he shook in the market deciding on ice cream,
shrieked at a dropped cup of coffee,
scolded a yellowed leaf on the rose tree.
Last year he screamed at line 54 of the 1040,
slapped the table again and again, roaring my name.
He thundered when I told him I’d made a date with a taxman,
then cried as he said, Thank you and asked,
Will you still be my wife? I touched his shoulder,
answered, Will you marry me?

*

Pauli Dutton is a former librarian. Her poems have appeared in ONE ART, Writing in A Woman’s Voice; Verse Virtual, Quill & Parchment, The Pangolin Review, Altadena Poetry Review; and Spectrum Anthology. Her poem While Teaching Line Dancing was nominated by ONE ART for Orison Book’s Best Spiritual Literature 2022. She was the featured poet in Quill and Parchment, December 2024.

Four Poems by Robbi Nester

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Grass

That spring, my parents were trying to mend the lawn,
all crabgrass, wild garlic, and dandelion, tangled stalks
that came up on their own. The neighbors had complained,
saying that our lawn made the block seem shabby,
attracted rats. I helped my father choose from a catalog,
containing bluegrass, fescue, rye. He chose Zoysia, hoping
it would, as promised, reduce the need for weeding, but he
never weeded, loving whatever came up, whether from
scattered seeds or slips of root or of unknown origin.
He didn’t know that much about his ancestors, but you
could tell he came from farmers by the way he held each
seedling, tucked it into the ground. I watched the workmen
roll out the new green lawn, like an ancient tapestry, roots
dangling in loose threads below each heavy strip. Still,
what was underneath thrived—those twisted stems,
hardy and resilient—like the past you know and the one
you don’t, neither of which will ever go away.

*

In my memory my mother speaks again

about the loquat tree that grew outside her window
in Capetown, at the very tip of Africa. She wanted me
to spread the seeds of her lost life, to make them grow.
She fed me all the fruits she used to know, the alligator pear
(AKA the avocado). She would breakfast daily on it, and
in season, pomegranates, bright with ruby seeds, bursting
like a hive. She was Persephone, at least in her own mind,
dragged to the underworld by that dark man, my father.

*

Traces

It’s been two decades since I’ve been in my old neighborhood,
once the haunt of Jewish families not quite middle class.
They built a quasi-suburban enclave, with schools and shops
and synagogues, a library, public transportation, even its own
newspaper. When we moved in, the ground was raw, unplanted.
I remember stores opening on Castor Ave: the Gingham House,
where everybody’s mom shmoozed with groups of friends, the delis
and the kosher bakeries, two movie theaters. Gone, the last time
I was there, to empty out my parents’ house and sell it. Was I still
the child netting fireflies in the high grass, riding my bike around
the block? I didn’t recognize any of the people. Where was
Mr. Moskewitz, the blind man, with his guide dog? The kind librarian?
The trolley, shooting sparks as it jolted down the track? Gutted.
In their place, empty storefronts, overflowing garbage cans.

*

Explorer

In 1980, I came to California as a transplant, stunned
by the brightness, spiky palm trees, brown hills.
It surprised me that everything came from somewhere else,
like me, exotic backdrop to some movie scene I could not
identify. Busloads of gawking tourists, squawking parrots,
escapees, in motley flocks, picking dark fruits from the
olive trees, bright lemons. So much to see—the blue of sky
and sea. White line of beach, offering an opportunity to fill
each space with words, to take root in the arid soil and grow,
set seed among orange groves, twisted eucalyptus, The desert,
which reminded me of an abandoned parking lot, with its
tumbleweed and Joshua trees, starved moon. But California
had another face, a place of redwood and sequoias. Standing
in their damp half-light, I became a child again, distracted
by the distant sky’s bright mirror, the sun’s familiar face.
Now I’ve settled in, my explorations mostly limited to plate
and page, I’m still trying new ideas, cuisines, sniffing spices
at the Farmer’s market, taking on a shape I didn’t have before.

*

Robbi Nester is the author of four books of poetry and editor of three anthologies. She is a retired college educator and elected member of the Academy of American Poets. Her website is at RobbiNester.net

Two Poems by Jesse Breite

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After the Tulip Sale at the North Carolina Arboretum

Soon they’ll be undressed,
petal-shriveled, disappearing—
as light or smoke, shaped
and potted as they were
to dollar decimals, sold.
We’ll forget how—flashing
pictures—we tried to join them
as if we were the same—
our bulbed heads rising
like snakes from a slumber,
how we too were top-heavy,
falling apart, as laughter
dangled out our throats,
how we sent them to our
mothers, fathers as gestures
of devotion—we yearned
to give back our origins
to our origins with this flung
constellation of fluorescence,
how we never knew if
such spectacular whispers
would come back.

*

Arabesque Orb Weaver

October comes like a call to arms.
And they crawl out of the woods—
what you most wanted to forget.
They lace a lucent architecture
on every right angle available,
and their dreamcatchers wake
in windows. Invisible parachutes
arrive at dawn around the knot,
ornamental and fine-furred, endless
weaver and spool of silver thread.

Suddenly, I’ve walked through
the strung fabric—tangled up
in the elastic and winding rope.
I brush it off, but it’s never gone.
Memory’s like that—you can be
rapt in its quivering strands—
what you tried to erase then escape.
And this webbed edifice has you,
dazzles you, envelops every move,
spins your limbs with light, reminds
again—how fugitive is human skin.

*

Jesse Breite’s recent poetry has appeared in Tinderbox Poetry Journal, River Heron Review, Tar River Poetry, and Rhino. His first full-length poetry collection is forthcoming from Fernwood Press. Jesse teaches high school in Atlanta, Georgia, where he lives with his wife and two kids. More at jessebreite.com.

It Rains Memory by Martin Willitts Jr

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It Rains Memory

Rain pours grief among the silhouette length of trees,
hammers or tap-dances on my roof,
or sending Morse code for help.

Both yesterday and tomorrow are dreams.
Yesterday reminds me about missed opportunities,
bad decisions, screwed-tight angry faces.
Tomorrow whispers promises. Today, rains
makes piano chords of sorrow in my heart.
My face drenches on a window.

It rains body bags.
Rain never falls twice the same way
sounds of gunfire, collateral damage reports.

I keep reminding myself
about the commonness of rain.
No flashback lightnings. No burials.
A normal rain Gene Kelly danced in,
kicking street puddles,
tossing away a broken umbrella.

Rain raising new flower shoots.
No gunshots. No identified bodies,
matching them with dog tags during war.
No messages for rescue; rescue arriving too late.

In the deluge, sparrows chatter.
I tell myself this is normal. They’re excited.
I tell myself, I’m home,
not sending bodies back from Vietnam.
I repeat, I’m home, not believing it,
pinching myself.

No. It’s rain on my arms.
This is normal.
I made it home.

*

Martin Willitts Jr is an editor of Comstock Review. He won 2014 Dylan Thomas International Poetry Contest; Stephen A. DiBiase Poetry Prize, 2018; Editor’s Choice, Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge, December, 2020; 17th Annual Sejong Writing Competition, 2022. His 21 full-length collections include the Blue Light Award 2019, “The Temporary World”. His recent books are “Harvest Time” (Deerbrook Editions, 2021); “All Wars Are the Same War” (FutureCycle Press, 2022); “Not Only the Extraordinary are Exiting the Dream World (Flowstone Press, 2022); “Ethereal Flowers” (Shanti Press, 2023); “Rain Followed Me Home” (Glass Lyre Press, 2023); and “Leaving Nothing Behind” (Fernwood Press, 2023). Forthcoming is “The Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji” with colored pictures (Shanti Press, 2024).

Four Poems by Luke Johnson

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Memory

of my dad
on the deck

with a blunt
& bottle of rum.

watch him
bop his

skinny hips
to Patsy Cline

then smile
when he sees

me staring
from my

bedroom window,
a loon

in the foreground
lifting.

*

Memory

of my nana
holding

a single pearl
in lavender light,

then spinning
it over and over,

as if somewhere
inside it

a whisper
is trapped,

the voice
of her stillborn son.

*

Memory

when my
sister was a pig

and the next
a snake,

and no matter
what the pastor

prayed,
would switch

each week
to a new animalia,

and sneak
out into the dark.

*

Memory

of dad
threshing brush
with a sickle

and the first
spark first snarl,

when smoke
would rise
like twisting

columns
from tinder

and carry his
baritone,
each dumb joke,

over
neighboring oaks

and once,
after his
brother died

of heart disease,
when both of us

wandered
acres deep
for chantarelles

and the chill
in the air a bouquet

of scalpels,
the way he’d reach
then I’d reach back,

the rain
our ritual song.

*

Luke Johnson is the author of Quiver (Texas Review Press), a finalist for The Jake Adam York Prize, The Levis Award, The Vassar Miller Prize and the Brittingham. His second book A Slow Indwelling, a call and response with the poet Megan Merchant, is forthcoming from Harbor Editions Fall 2024. You can find more of his work at Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Narrative Magazine, Poetry Northwest and elsewhere. Connect on Twitter at @Lukesrant or through email: writerswharfmb@gmail.com

Four Poems by Luke Johnson

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Memory

of my mother
with a sponge

and a bucket
of a bleach.

How she’d
weep

while scrubbing
words

from white tile
my mute

sister scrawled
in crayon

and ask
for a melody,

the pitch
of a bird,

to rise
from my lips

and lead
her out,

into the
radiant snow.

*

Memory

of my sister
losing

words
like miniature

combs
and my

mother
behind

her
picking up

pieces.
But never

the right
color

right comb,
always

the wrong
word:

happy instead
of help

wither
instead

of water,
the not

of her
tongue

turned
to know.

*

Memory

of my ear against
the ground
& my mother
above me
begging for answers.
How the nest
began
with a crack
in the concrete
then moved
up the walls,
like fears
in the form
of a question.

*

Memory

of the ghostly
croon of Emmylou

while my mom
clipped mint

and pruned bovine
and collected

peas so sweet
I thought

of the fair
and cold coke

and cotton candy
shared between

my sister’s
hands and mine,

while we circled
sky in summer

and saw nothing
but blue

nothing but birds,
weaving

their blurred
calligraphy.

*

Luke Johnson’s poems can be found at Kenyon Review, Narrative Magazine, Florida Review, Frontier, Cortland Review, Poetry Northwest and elsewhere. His manuscript in progress was recently named a finalist for the Jake Adam York Prize, The Levis through Four Way Press, The Vassar Miller Award and is forthcoming fall 2023 from Texas Review Press. You can find more of his poetry at lukethepoet.com or connect at Twitter at @Lukesrant.

four ‘Memory’ poems by Luke Johnson

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Memory

of my mother
with a sponge

and a bucket
of a bleach.

How she’d
weep

while scrubbing
words

from white tile
my mute

sister scrawled
in crayon

and ask
for a melody,

the pitch
of a bird,

to rise
from my lips

and lead
her out,

into the
radiant snow.

*

Memory

of my sister
losing

words
like miniature

combs
and my

mother
behind

her
picking up

pieces.
But never

the right
color

right comb,
always

the wrong
word:

happy instead
of help

wither
instead

of water,
the not

of her
tongue

turned
to know.

*

Memory

of my ear against
the ground
& my mother
above me
begging for answers.
How the nest
began
with a crack
in the concrete
then moved
up the walls,
like fears
in the form
of a question.

*

Memory

of the ghostly
croon of Emmylou

while my mom
clipped mint

and pruned bovine
and collected

peas so sweet
I thought

of the fair
and cold coke

and cotton candy
shared between

my sister’s
hands and mine,

while we circled
sky in summer

and saw nothing
but blue

nothing but birds,
weaving

their blurred
calligraphy.

*

Luke Johnson’s poems can be found at Kenyon Review, Narrative Magazine, Florida Review, Frontier, Cortland Review, Poetry Northwest and elsewhere. His manuscript in progress was recently named a finalist for the Jake Adam York Prize, The Levis through Four Way Press, The Vassar Miller Award and is forthcoming fall 2023 from Texas Review Press. You can find more of his poetry at lukethepoet.com or connect at Twitter at @Lukesrant.

Six Poems by Luke Johnson

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Memory

of my nana
rocking

with an afghan
on her lap

and asking
if I see the boy,

the one she lost,
standing

by her bed
and begging

for water,
Sinatra

quietly singing.

*

Memory

of my sister
swinging

both her arms
in summer air

and squeezing
sunlight

like an orange
in her teeth,

the bees
still busy then,

flowers.

*

Memory

of the rotted oak
I’d climb inside

to calm on days
when daddy

found his rifle’s
acoustics

pleasing,
how I’d fall asleep

to flies vibrations
and wake

at night
to my name

being called—
my mother

flicking a match.

*

Memory

is a pill my
mother lost

in the drain
and her

desperate
for more.

A blue kite
blurred

into yellow—

*

Memory

of a bag of quails
dragged through gravel

and my dad
above them smiling

as he plucked
the feathers

then slit
each belly open

so the heart
could splash

inside a bucket
and darken

as the hours
fell like aphids

from the apple blossoms
and gathered

around my feet.

*

Memory

of my dad
too sick

to stand
on New Year’s Eve,

how he
reached

to find
my fingers

and asked,
if ever, I

think of cardinals
thrown

through
a window

in the dark,
a deep whistle

torn
through sky.

*

Luke Johnson lives on the California coast with his wife and three kids. His poems can be found at Kenyon Review, Narrative Magazine, Florida Review, Frontier, Cortland Review, Nimrod, Thrush and elsewhere. His manuscript in progress was recently named a finalist for the Jake Adam York Prize, The Levis through Four Way Press, The Vassar Miller Award and is forthcoming fall 2023 from Texas Review Press. You can find more of his poetry at lukethepoet.com or connect at Twitter at @Lukesrant.

Two Poems by Seth Jani

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Dance

Like everyone,
haunted by the past,
I hear the slipshod music
of a distant summer
loosening its bloodred grip,
easing-up, not on the heart,
but on the memory of itself,
until I’m left with the blur
of vanished faces
and the glittering, indistinct desires
prowling the fabled hall.

*

Hunger

Even with time passing through
the jeweled carcass of summer
I still find myself
climbing the dim hillside
to take the moon into my hands,
that dark bread, which all my life,
has fed my longing,
has made my hunger shine.

*

Seth Jani lives in Seattle, WA and is the founder of Seven CirclePress (www.sevencirclepress.com). Their work has appeared in The American Poetry Journal, Chiron Review, Ghost City Review, Rust+Moth and Pretty Owl Poetry, among others. Their full-length collection, Night Fable, was published by FutureCycle Press in 2018. Visit them at http://www.sethjani.com.