~ ONE ART’s Top 10 Most-Read Poets of September 2023 ~
Betrayal
After strokes corroded synapses, sent neurons flaring into nothingness.
After her body’s right side became unwilling.
Once, my mother clothed herself in ruby and obsidian,
harnessed the spinning world, drank scotch in a heavy glass.
After existing in assisted living, refusing to dress, to eat,
to sleep in the hospital bed, her own bed too big, too high off the ground.
Once, my mother begged me not to hate her, confessed
affairs with married men, her loneliness a halo.
After language decamped until only no remained.
Her frenetic heart, her stuttering lungs pinned me to earth.
Once, in the week before she died, my mother said
dying isn’t like it is in the movies.
Riddle: Who can laugh and cry at exactly the same time?
A daughter.
*
Valerie Bacharach’s writing has appeared or will appear in: Vox Populi, The Blue Mountain Review, EcoTheo Review, Minyon Magazine, One Art, The Ilanot Review, and Poetica. Her chapbook After/Life will be published by Finishing Line Press. Her book Ghost Recipe will be published by Broadstone Books.
The Kintsugi Artist
I’m with Ginny, hiking a trail in the Adirondack mountains,
feet cushioned by pine needles and moss, our husbands far ahead,
everything late-summer green against birch bark and granite boulders,
we’re talking about the importance of crystals and massage,
but really, I just want to be quiet in this space of moss and trees,
simply walk and listen to birds and the creaking of branches.
If I stare hard enough I can imagine Daniel Day-Lewis running through
these woods. Remember, when he played Hawkeye in “The Last of the Mohicans,”
clutching his musket, leaping over undergrowth and rocks, and that line he says
to his love “I will find you,” and Ginny grows silent,
she’s looking at me, a broken vessel webbed with fault lines
and she the Kintsugi artist who will seam me
with tree-sap lacquer and powdered gold, make my fissures beautiful
and I remember ten years ago, when we lived in a small town
and I called her, told her our younger son had died, alone in a sleazy motel room.
Opioid addiction unchecked, his story unique, and not, our grief unique, and not.
She and Brian were in the Adirondacks, they got in their car and drove
ten hours to us. Her face is the one I saw in my frenzied brain
as I spoke at his funeral, her eyes locked on mine, words forced
from my mouth. But now we’re on this trail, the air feels like a living thing,
winds ring through leaves, the sky a pattern of blue and clouds and we arrive
at an overlook, our husbands waiting in a wide open space, mountains arrayed
before us, a dawn of creation. And isn’t time a bitch, the way it slogs along
or races too fast like my mother’s heart right before she died,
wild beats pounding below fragile skin and weakened bones,
body collapsing like a deflated balloon. It’s been two years but she haunts me
like a crazed Jewish mother (which she was, even though she’d shredded her faith
years earlier), and now my leg begins to ache, the right one, sciatica sending
a fist gripping thigh muscles, foot numb. My dad had sciatica,
retreated to his couch, then his bed, high on 40 years of hydrocodone,
and I wish I knew more about genetics, did I doom my boy before he drew his first breath?
My ghosts are with me everywhere, even here in this northern corner of New York,
and all around are cairns, piles of rocks built by other hikers, mementos of loss.
My husband talks to Ginny and Brian, they all take photos.
I am intent on gathering the right stones to build my own monument.
The wind pulses a foreshadow of autumn.
*
Valerie Bacharach’s writing has appeared or will appear in: Vox Populi, Blue Mountain Review, EcoTheo Review, Ilanot Review, Minyon Magazine, and One Art, among others. Her chapbook Fireweed was published by Main Street Rag. Her chapbook Ghost-Mother was published by Finishing Line Press. She has been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize.
Summer
for Paul
Suppose I said summer, wrote “heat” on a notecard,
slipped it into your pocket.
Would you think of Rome?
Frozen bottles of water from street vendors
held against foreheads, the back of our necks,
a shield against wet, thick air as we wandered
among ruins and gardens.
We stopped at any store with air-conditioning,
took three showers a day, never again so clean.
And oh, that restaurant in Trastevere,
zucchini flowers stuffed with cheese, one salty anchovy,
fried to crisp decadence.
You bought me a necklace in the old Jewish ghetto
so intricate it was like holding liquid silver.
We kissed as clerks and customers applauded.
Sometimes life is so hard it seems made of stone.
But think of our last evening in that ancient city.
We strolled cobbled streets in warm night air,
the two of us slipping into each other’s heat.
*
Valerie Bacharach’s writing has appeared or will appear in: Vox Populi, Whale Road Review, The Blue Mountain Review, EcoTheo Review, Kosmos Quarterly Journal, Amethyst Review, On the Seawall, Poetica. Minyon Magazine, One Art, and Writer’s Foundry Review. Her chapbook Fireweed was published by Main Street Rag in 2018 and her chapbook Ghost-Mother was published by Finishing Line Press in 2021. She has been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize.
Estuary
Where river currents meet sea’s tide,
where salt and fresh water mingle,
where grief and joy blur edges,
a weaving of what the soul desires.
Plums and apricots, leftover bread,
the sounds of your laugh.
*
Valerie Bacharach received her MFA from Carlow University in poetry and is a member of the Madwomen in the Attic writing workshops. Her writing has appeared or will appear in: Vox Viola, Vox Populi, Whale Road Review, The Blue Mountain Review, EcoTheo Review, Kosmos Quarterly Journal, Amethyst Review, On the Seawall, Poetica, and Minyon Magazine. Her chapbook, Fireweed, was published in August 2018 by Main Street Rag. Her chapbook Ghost-Mother was published by Finishing Line Press in July, 2021. Her poem Self-Portrait with Origin Story was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
