Tag: Minneapolis

Two Poems by Rebecca Aronson

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On Working in My Son’s Room After He Has Moved Out

What does it mean that the only art you’d allow in your room is a tiny painting that blends with the blue walls, a portal through which to see two silver-haloed planets and a droplet of a moon in a star-splattered, velvety sky? They are not like earth, nor unlike earth exactly, just as the blue of this room is nothing like and very like a certain kind of sky. It’s not, I don’t think, that you dislike art in general, but you don’t like to be pinned to a single idea. There’s a book of logic puzzles on the shelf we always used to wonder at. Planets are to identity as paint is to fish. No. Space is to color as the roses blooming outside your window are to the tiny eye of a praying mantis. No? I always use wrapping paper printed with stars for your gifts. I’ve given you cards that unfold to reveal a three-dimensional paper ship, a bedspread that looks like an unmown field. That is to say, I have wanted to give you the world, but since it has never been mine to give I bought you a small portrait of imaginary planets someone else’s child painted, and hung it on your blue walls, which were not the neon green you said you wanted, but this other color, different than either of us would have chosen, but beautiful, it turns out, in all the kinds of light we have here in this little room on earth.

*

Halloween snowstorm, Minneapolis, 1991

I remember that I didn’t know my neighbors
except the man across the hall with a kitten
he let wander our hallway. On the morning D called
at dawn muttering nonsense about angels and windows
I saw the city buried in snow, white sky, white mounds,
the streets whited out and everything as still
as a held breath. The kitten man and I went from floor
to floor and at every door asked what was needed
then took a wagon that someone had and struggled
into the new white-out world where everyone lived
now to help another. We worked in pairs and coteries
to dig out cars from beneath snowbanks, to carve paths
wide enough for one person to pass
between piles which were already starting to lose their brilliant shine,
we sculpted streets where memory said streets should be,
took turns following the shovelers with bags of sand
and cannisters of coarse salt. We took turns shoveling,
throwing the heavy stuff into mounds
that fattened and grew and sweated and froze slick again.
We dragged the wagon a few blocks that took all morning
to a store that was somehow open and bought whatever we could find
that was anything like what our neighbors wanted
and heaved the wagon back another hour along our own furrows
and up the mountain where the front steps used to be
and knocked again at all the doors on all the floors
to hand out all the not-quite-what-was-asked-for sundries
and went to our own doors exhausted, as happy
as I had ever been.

*

Rebecca Aronson is the author of three books of poetry, Anchor, Ghost Child of the Atalanta Bloom, and Creature, Creature. She has been a recipient of a Prairie Schooner Strousse Award, the Loft’s Speakeasy Poetry Prize, a Yetzirah poetry fellowship, and a Tennessee Williams Scholarship to the Sewanee writers conference. She is host of Bad Mouth, a series of words and music. She lives in Albuquerque, where she teaches writing. Her website is rebeccaaronsonpoetry.com

Outpouring by Alison Luterman

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Outpouring

A bucket of water tossed on the frozen streets of Minneapolis
for the ICE agent to slip on while running at the crowd of protesters;

a river of souls streaming through the avenues
chanting Renee Good’s name, waving posters of her sunflower face;

a tsunami of people all over the world sending money and encouraging notes
to the ones buying groceries for the ones who are hiding,

afraid to go to work, or school, or the store;
everyone marching together in zero degree weather, scared

and defiant, weathered activists arm-in-arm with new-to-this Gen Z kids–
those with nothing to lose, those with everything,

blowing their whistles, following the black SUVs,
banging pots and pans outside the Hilton where the agents are trying to sleep,

saying No, not in my neighborhood, saying MacBeth
shall sleep no more, crying Murder most foul, sleep no more;

What is this outpouring? Where’s the source? Will it be enough?
Today, we’re all Minnesotans, from California to Maine: we’re tired,

hoarse, footsore, at the ragged edge of endurance from getting up before dawn
to protect our schools, our neighbors; still, there’s no stopping this

outpouring of people, in all the states and every weather while the sky itself
pours snow and sleet all over the blasted heath they are trying to make

of our country. Outpouring of disgust at the mad king and his masked army,
a united swell, an upsurge, a tsunami of courage and outrage

flooding the streets and highways and byways
with humanity declaring itself human in the face of the faceless,

singing Hold On in four-part harmony, testimony rising up
and pouring forth in faith; a cascade, a deluge, a torrent of love.

*

Alison Luterman’s five books of poetry are The Largest Possible Life, See How We Almost Fly, Desire Zoo, In the Time of Great Fires, and Hard Listening. She also writes plays, song lyrics, and personal essays. She has taught at New College, The Writing Salon, Catamaran, Esalen and Omega Institutes and writing workshops around the country, as well as working as a California poet in the schools for many years.

One Poem by Patricia Davis-Muffett

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What to do with your grief
       for Dionne, June 2020

Butter. Sugar. Flour. Salt.
I am doing what I know.

Nineteen, I call my mother crying:
“I can’t make the pie crust work,”
“Come home,” she says. “We’ll fix it.”
The ice in the water,
the fork used to mix,
the way she floured the board.
It’s chemistry, yes–
but also this:
the things you pass
from hand to hand.

9/11. Child dropped at preschool.
Traffic grinds near the White House.
A plane overhead. The Pentagon burns.
The long trek home to reclaim our child.
We are told to stay in. I venture out.
Blueberries to make a pie.

My mother, so sick. Not hungry.
For a time, she is tempted by pies.
I bring them long after taste flees.

New baby. Death. Any crisis.
I do what my mother taught me.
Butter. Sugar. Flour. Salt.
I bring this to you–this work of my hands,
this piece of my day, this sweetness,
all I can offer.

Today, Minneapolis burns
And sparks catch fire in New York,
Atlanta, here in DC.
My friend’s voice says
what I know but can’t know:
“This is my fear every time they leave me.”
Three beautiful sons, brilliant, alive.
I have little to offer. I do what I know.

*

Patricia Davis-Muffett (she/her) holds an MFA from the University of Minnesota. She was a 2020 Julia Darling Poetry Prize finalist and received First Honorable Mention in the 2021 Joe Gouveia OuterMost Poetry Contest. Her work has appeared in Limestone, Coal City Review, Neologism, The Orchards, One Art, Pretty Owl Poetry, di-verse-city (anthology of the Austin International Poetry Festival), The Blue Nib and Amethyst Review, among others. She lives in Rockville, Maryland, with her husband and three children and makes her living in technology marketing.