Tag: Stroke

Two Poems by Claudia Gary

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Elegy for Our Own Words

Our words would tumble heavily onto the page
but get up, walk across and back, remembering
our days—unlike the words spelled out by an AI,

their artifice purporting to be human. Ours
contained deep memories of beauty, ugliness,
sensation of all kinds—however awkward—not

the pseudo-elegance proffered by the AI.
We were allowed to fail, revise, begin again,
elucidate, restate quirky humanity.

One day our words no longer dared to walk across
the page, since an AI could always dance around them.
It had soundly sabotaged, then conquered us.

Oh little words, large words, our own words spinning off
into the ether: let’s regenerate our words,
in memory of our selves fashioned out of words.

*

On Being Asked to Pray for You After Your Stroke

“Base 3 [as used in ternary computing] offers the most economical way of representing numbers.”

I told them I would. Will I follow through?
Maybe is not a brokenness
between Yes and No, you’ve said, but a blue

haze that surrounds them. No and Yes
emerge from it, float. So I’ll pray to Maybe,
ask it my questions, ask it to guess

where you are now, what you will see
when the prayer’s over. Leave it to you
to complicate things. Yes/No would agree.

*

Claudia Gary teaches workshops on the Villanelle, the Sonnet, Natural Meter, Freedom With Forms, Poetry vs. Trauma, etc., at The Writer’s Center and elsewhere. Author of Humor Me (David Robert Books, 2006) and several chapbooks—most recently Genetic Revisionism (2019)—her poems are internationally published and anthologized. She has been a semifinalist for the Anthony Hecht Prize (Waywiser), a Pushcart Prize nominee, an Honorable Mentionee in the Able Muse book contest, and a three-time finalist in the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Contest. Claudia has chaired panels on Poetry and Music, Poetry and Science, and The Sonnet in 2016, at the West Chester University (Pa.) poetry conference; and on Poetry and Music at the Frost Farm poetry conference. She is also a health journalist, visual artist, and composer of tonal songs and chamber music. Her 2022 article on setting poems to music, based on her presentation at the 2022 ALSCW conference. For more information, see Claudia’s P&W profile; you can follow her at @claudiagary or @claudiagarypoet.

Three Poems by E. Laura Golberg

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“The Terrible Man on the Plane”

My mother on the phone, complaining,
voice thick with cold, nasal passages thick,
resonating. “I should be in Hawaii,” she said.
“But I’m too ill. Flying back from Indiana,
last week, I sat next to this terrible man
on the plane who coughed and sneezed
all over me. He should not have been flying.
Now he’s ruined my holiday.”

I hung up, went to York Florist, ordered
a summer bouquet, signed it:
“Feel better soon, with many apologies,
The Terrible Man on the Plane.”

Two hours later, the phone rings.
She sounds like a young girl being courted,
coy, voice light and airy.
“I got flowers.” she said. “I looked at the note
and thought ‘How did he know?’”

*

Why I Didn’t Talk in the On-Line Class

The poetry class, sixteen of us,
was unusually silent–long pauses
where the teacher would ask
a question and no-one would answer.

I, myself, didn’t talk because out of one
of the little windows, peered the marriage
counselor I fired while my husband
and I were having terrible troubles.

That was ten years’ ago this summer.
We’d met with four different shrinks,
either he liked one or I did, but
we couldn’t agree. So, we stopped

looking. Now, still married and happy,
I was silent in class. I wonder
how many of the silent others
were former clients, too.

*

Stroke

Two different meanings, one: loving
caress over skin or fur; the other:

a blood clot somewhere in the brain.
Mine is in my occipital lobe. No soft

cuddle for me, just a harsh blind spot.
I thought I’d get used to it but three

weeks later, it’s just getting me down.
I tell myself ‘Getting used to it.’ will

take months, if not several years.
In my mind, I gently stroke my eyes.

*

E. Laura Golberg is a poet, originally from England, who has lived in Washington DC for over 50 years. Her work has appeared in Rattle, Poet Lore, Barrow Street, Birmingham Poetry Review, Spillway, RHINO, and the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, among other places.