Here Poetry Journal 2017

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Here a poetry journal

2017

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Editor Daniel Donaghy, Professor of English

Here a poetry journal

Department of English Eastern Connecticut State University 83 Windham Street Follow us on social media!

225 Webb Hall Twitter: @here_poetry Willimantic, CT 06226 Instagram: @herepoetry herepoetry@easternct.edu Facebook: fb.me/here.apoetryjournal phone: (860) 465-4570 fax: (860) 465-4580

Student Readers

Lindsay Baldassare, Zachary Burnett, Bethany Crocker, Kyle Hottin, Emily Johnson, Alyka Lara, Joshua LaBlanc, Flavian LaPorte, Kelsey Marconis, Alan Panciera, Edward Pavliscsak,

Stephen Price, Ashlee Shafer, Elena

Sorrentino, Alexandra Toffolon, Thomas Valencis, Jenna Vinelli Student Editorial Assistant Cassidy Ricciardone Cover Image Dierdre Volk This inaugural issue of Here was published through a Faculty Development Grant provided by Eastern Connecticut State University’s College of Arts and Sciences.

Submissions for the 2018 issue of Here

are welcome January 1-March 15, 2018.

Email 3-5 poems, along with a brief bio note, to herepoetry@easternct.edu

Š2017 Eastern Connecticut State University

Here

• Table of Contents

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Editors Note 4 Maria Mazziotti Gillan In Third Grade I Fell in Love 5

Moll Flanders, Zia Louisa, and Me 6 Paul Martin Abilene 7 Literature 8 The Mulberry Tree 9 Falling Star 9 Amanda DeMaio The Jetty 10 Mom, 2016 11 Charles Fort PathĂŠtique 12 Nothing 13 The Iris 14 Nothing Left to Write 15 John Bargowski The Common Room 16 Crossing the Street 17 Veterans Day, Jersey City 19 Andean Twist 20 Kileen Gilroy Many Lives 21 Chelsea Griffin

To My Jeff Buckley Lover

23 One More Time 25 John L. Stanizzi 'Night 26 Dancing with Myself 27 Pegi Deitz Shea Your Bequest 29 Jonathan Andersen Krymuninlees 30 Bessy Reyna Sunday Afternoon Naps 31 Route 99, Fresno, CA, 32 December 27, 2015 Joan Seliger Sidney Anna Ruaud 33 Patricia Grace Vinsonhaler 35 Barbara Crooker Penny 36 Leonard Kress Bridesburg 37 Amtrak Train Derailment 38 Steven Straight The Future of the World, 39 Part 2: Youth Steve Myers After Reading Pinker, 41 I Walk South Mountain The River Children 42 Harry Humes The River of Eyes 43 My Daughter Among Cows 44 My Mother's Glasses 45 Contributors Notes 46

2017

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Welcome to the inaugural issue of Here!

I am proud to present within these covers poems in conversation with each other and with many poems before them, poems that bear witness to all that one brings to being alive at a particular moment. I thank the writers published in this issue for contributing their poems and, in doing so, offering readers what I have found to be poetry's most valuable, potent, and lasting gift: a reminder that we are not alone in the world.

In preparing this issue, I read through the first issues of many other journals to get a sense of what editors said in notes like this one. Many claimed something along the lines of "we need poetry now more than ever." In these tumultuous, social media-driven times, one could easily make that claim again. My knee-jerk reaction to such a statement would be to agree. With a moment to reflect, however, I would say that poetry is no more or less important now than it ever has been. It has always been essential, especially to those voices who have felt nearly silenced, but have nonetheless found the courage, within themselves and within the voices of writers who came before them, to believe in their own value and power and to sing their songs. It is with that spirit, that history, that charge, that Here begins.

Daniel Donaghy July 19, 2017

Here

Maria Mazziotti Gillan

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In Third Grade I Fell in Love with language. The poems and stories read aloud to us in the dusty classrooms of PS 18 in Paterson, New Jersey, had a music that lifted me up above the scarred desks, names, and hearts carved into them by generations of children bored with what, for many of them, must have been the torture of hours of sitting still.

For me, in my shy skin, the spaces in the school meant for recess or gym were terrifying, but inside the classroom, I loved the books we read and the ones the teachers read to us.

At home, we spoke a southern Italian dialect whose accents brought Italy to 17th Street.

But outside, I was in America.

I was always slightly wary that I wasn’t American enough.

In the classroom, I learned that English had a different kind of music, one I could move to as if I were dancing.

I loved the poems that repeated themselves in my brain.

After I memorized a poem, I could carry it with me, as though I had slipped it in my pocket and could slip it out whenever I was alone and afraid.

My parents could not read to us in English, but those teachers, all the ones I never thought to thank, opened the door into a world removed from my Italian family, its aroma of tomato sauce bubbling on the stove, of rosemary and mint growing outside the back door, bread baking in the oven.

The world those teachers gave me was one I wanted.

In books, I could find the way to leave the skin I was born in, the constraints of my immigrant world, and entered the place where language lifted me up and carried me away.

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2 Moll Flanders, Zia Louisa, and Me

Ah, Moll Flanders, of all the characters in those novels I read when I was still young and in grad school, it’s you I remember, flamboyant, sensual, in love with life.

You always looked for the “Main Chance” and I, who can barely remember a name five minutes after I hear it, remember yours.

I knew you were self-serving, but I loved that you never lied about it, that you never made excuses for your behavior, and I imagine you trying to make your way in 17th-Century England, where a woman on her own would have been vulnerable and afraid.

You remind me of my Zia Louisa,

that woman who married four times,

that woman who wore

a tan-colored corset with lace stays

that had to be pulled tight to hold in

her large breasts and belly,

that woman who loved to dance the tarantella,

her whole body exhilarating

in moving and stomping.

And though I know Moll only through a male writer’s portrayal, I know Zia Louisa from my childhood, knew her from watching her move like an iron-sided battleship through life, past three dead husbands and onto a fourth, handsome, elegant Zio Guillermo.

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They lived in the small apartment above us on 17th Street in Paterson, New Jersey.

My mother told me that in the night she’d hear Zia Louisa crying, but in the morning she’d come down the back steps, her cotton dress stiff with starch, her lace handkerchief tucked in her sleeve, and she’d be smiling and laughing.

She never told my mother what sorrow she carried hidden in her sleeve.

The world does not need to know; it only wants to pretend nothing is wrong, nothing is wrong, and you are mistaken if you think you heard wild sobbing in the night. ◉ Paul Martin Abilene Without her knowing, he calls in a request to the station that plays old cowboy tunes each Friday night, so when the DJ says, “Now here’s a song for Marguerite from her husband, Mike,” her confusion turns to surprised delight, and he joins her in laughing and singing along to the radio before he helps her up the steep stairs into bed in the hard country of old age and sickness, so distant from the endless, bright horizons of those early years in Texas, the fiery food and music and colors the song gives back to her as she sings to herself in the dark. for Marguerite and Mike

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2 Literature

Pausing, the dental hygienist hands me water for rinsing, and asks, after I say I taught English, “You didn’t teach literature, did you?” wincing at the word and recalling the teacher who called on her after each poem, asking, “What does it mean?” causing her to throw up her hands in exasperation as she does now, staring at me in disappointment, as if I were the one who embarrassed her in the classroom silence and turned her against poetry.

Before I have a chance to side with her, she’s bending over my open mouth, picking and scraping with what feels like a new determination and distance in place of the easy way we had between us, a warm, olive-skinned woman who told me stories about her early marriage, her way of cooking beans and rice, her difficult, teenage son killed in a car crash, and how, as he left the house, she almost told him she loved him, her voice catching as I lay under that lamp’s bright light with nothing, really, to say, though I offered a few garbled words that spoiled the fullness of silence.

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The Mulberry Tree Scrubbing purple bird shit off the picnic table, I remember Mrs. Matusik cursing the birds that splotched her freshly hung wash, threatening to lop off the limbs above the clothes line as she collapsed a billowing sheet into her arms and carried it back down to the cellar tubs.

Her husband sat in the shade of the glossy leaves, sipping the sweet wine he made from last year’s berries as he waited that June for his son’s next letter from burning Germany, silence widening around him as he studied the bees moving from stain to stain in the grass around his feet. ◉ Falling Star It streaked out of the southern horizon and when it passed above the house we ran from the front porch to the back just in time to see it crossing the field and go dark.

I didn’t dream it, did I––the summer night, a star falling across the sky, you and me, the child, now grown and gone, looking up?

2017

10 Amanda DeMaio

2 The Jetty

Giants Neck Beach, Niantic, CT

Where the jetty Meets the salt water, You and I sat every spring, Watching the last bits of snow melt, Talking about the day ahead, When we’d be back again.

Where the jetty Meets the salt water, You and I sat every summer, Toes dangling off the edge, A bucket of water and seaweed Beside us, soon to hold crabs and shells.

Where the jetty Meets the salt water, You and I sat every fall, Watching Otis doggy-paddle Into the distance, chasing the stick He’d bring back to us.

Where the jetty Meets the salt water, You and I sat every winter, Our eyes watering from wind gusts, Our hair sticking to the cherry Chapstick on our lips, Taking in the silence of everything but the waves.

Where the jetty Meets the salt water, I sit now as often as I can, Looking out into the ocean, knowing you’re there Beside me taking in the salty air, the setting sun, The peace the jetty always brought us, for if I’m Still living, you are, too.

Here

for Mom

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Mom, 2016 “I love you more,” she said as I leaned in to brush the hair from her cheeks, trying to hear her voice, a whisper now, while she held my hand to her chest.

While my washcloth cooled her cheeks, I smelled her perfume, fruity and strong.

She held my hand to her chest while my feet avoided the urine bag below.

I smelled the perfume, told her how beautiful it was, sidestepping the urine bag below that she tried to hide.

I told her how beautiful it was when she smiled her contagious smile.

No matter how hard she tried to hide it, I knew she was ready to fly.

She continued to smile her contagious smile, her voice a whisper now.

I knew she was ready to fly.

“I love you more,” she said.

2017

12 Charles Fort

2 PathĂŠtique

Your late wife entered your dream waking and loving as if she were alive again.

Talking in your sleep turned into conversation between two lovers and the mortal kiss.

You learned a new definition of love once misspelled in the folded hidden note in large letters under a homeroom desk, LUZE ME followed by a slap on the face.

You awakened, inconsolable, weeping, a character at the end of a Russian novel that began in a village, wedding confetti, three-tiered cake and widower’s embrace.

The last chapter had two worn initials, CF-WS, engraved inside a solitaire ring.

You realized it was her thin body, half-awake, half-alive, mattress of thorns.

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Nothing You taught your first class after your wife’s memorial service as if nothing happened, nothing, your graduate students, grieving too, alive, for their professor and his two daughters, nothing like they imagined, images and phrases, buried lines, something rare, a living thing, No living thing and nothing in your hands, nothing in your coffee on the screened porch, anything for a melody, magic bag of rouge sixpence, needle lowered on the turntable, no living thing stirred, one love song, "Nothing Takes the Place of You," skipped, played six times in a row. You made nothing of it.

Your students thought you placed a hex on things, puzzled over a thing called sestina, a circular descent, riddle of the sixes, water spout that lifted her urn and dropped it. Nothing landed.

Toussaint McCall sang "Nothing Takes the Place of You." Nothing in the toy store moved on its own.

There was something they learned about the blues.

Do not touch a fallen live wire in the street, its twelve-bar phrases and three-line stanzas, about lost things and better days ahead, things in the second line at times repeat moans of the first line, something half-alive.

You started writing things down at 3:00 a.m. about all the living things in the world.

You fell asleep in a toy store. Nothing on the shelves.

Things had been torn down with a bent crowbar except for the first draft of your sestina, titled "Nothing," found torn into six pieces. Nothing but tape saved it.

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You placed your sestina on the lectern, held up the sestina as a living thing to your students who grieved with you and young daughters who wrote poems, a calling out, echo-blight, curse, wail, something held back inside a six-sided urn.

There was nothing sufficient in your hands, heaven-blot, horizon, blink, hexagon, rogue past, nothing alive, and future stalled. ◉ The Iris You replanted the neighbor’s iris in a narrow garden on the side of our house.

They bloomed in spring and the bedeviled bee rubbed its legs and expelled the sweet dust.

Thunderclouds paused over a row of grain bins.

Their volley of hail left welts on the front lawn, small meteors in a night-storm firefight.

It was your flower and last song played to you in the front seat of our car, hard candy found by our young daughter one week after you died in a hospital room.

Our daughter picked up the candy. She said This was Mommy’s last gift to me.

We held each other, arms attending arms, knowing what was given was taken away.

In a small town, I found widower’s alms, iris, prairie dust, candy wrapper, and carried them outside in a wooden cart.

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Nothing Left to Write There was nothing left to write. She loved me.

The last hour too late for a living will, to reopen gifts drizzled in tinsel.

The limousine at a railroad crossing brushed against the guardrail and heart’s timbre.

May, her wedding veil, and the lilac wild, courted, gold ring, a bouquet of ember.

The pastor held the Bible like a wand, epithalamion into curtsy, a fancy butterfly two-step first dance.

The sea mist, wedding vow, love’s apparel, triple waltz and our last bedside kiss.

Who knew death’s carriage was made of glass?

She loved me. There was nothing left to write.

2017

16 John Bargowski

2 The Common Room

By the time I found out where the nurses parked her, my mother was slumped across the side rail of her wheelchair, her silver-haired bob tucked behind both ears as she tried to follow the small talk of a candy striper who’d rolled her over to watch the caged finches steal strips of paper and bits of colored yarn from each other’s nests, and I could see my mother, who never in all her years kept a furred or feathered thing, trying to make her stroke-locked hand unlatch the brake on the wheelchair and get as far away from the scattered husks and swinging perches as her mind would let her, past me and the framed picture of my father I’d brought for her room, past the line of patients being wheeled through the one-way door to doze for an hour in the dust-flecked shafts of January sun passing through the safety-glassed windows, miles past the shit-crusted bars of that bird cage, where some of them had paused for a minute to preen and tap their sharp beaks against whatever it was they saw in their smudged little mirrors.

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Crossing the Street I’m staring at the beer man on the sidewalk belly rolling a keg over to his truck while my wife’s tugging at me to get off the curb and across Fourteenth before another screeching taxi rounds the block and takes us both out.

She can’t see that I’m back in Jersey City, the corner of Franklin and Ogden, a kid hidden in the shadows, slinking along watching Worm and Wild Joey Choffe, a couple of punk teenagers on the trail of a drunk who’s stumbled out of Ralph’s Bar, staggered between some parked cars toward the Hundred Steps.

The Worm running up ahead to get away from the streetlight flicker into the dark of the burnedout shell of The Grotto to ask the mark for a light while Joey sneaks up then clocks him from behind, the guy dropping

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to his knees, crumpled over in a daze as the two thugs rifle through his pockets, yank out a pack of smokes and wallet that they’ll share later, whip-rip the gold watch off his wrist and from his throat the saint’s medal of Christopher carrying the Child through the flood’s wreck, drag him by the neck of his jacket then roll him over, leave him retching in the gutter.

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Veterans Day, Jersey City The caretaker chained the rust-pocked gates at dusk after a scout troop roamed the day’s drizzle fixing miniature flags into memorial holders VFW volunteers had pounded into each vet’s plot, old glories flapping only till the night thieves scaled the eight-foot black-spiked fence, jerked the bronzed markers from over the uniformed bones of long-gone soldiers and sailors to cash in at an out-of-town scrap yard then roved the spangled aisles havocking what stones they could.

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2 Andean Twist

You can see them strumming their armadillo-shell charangos and baby-step marching at every Musik-Fest, May Fair, or block party in the contiguous forty-eight, pounding their monstrous leopard-skin drums, garbed in brightly striped ponchos no matter what the weather, piping hand-carved pan flutes, every half hour parading their silky black hair and indigenous smiles up and down Main at the head of a conga line of passersby who hypnotically shuffle behind the band to a cut from their latest CD, “Yesterday” or “Smells Like Teen Spirit” played with an Andean twist, leading the crowd to the blue plastic tent they’ve set up overnight between Karl’s Bratwurst and Kielbasa and the Deep Fried Oreo stand, long wooden tables with mountains of striped woolen blankets, bulky sweaters, and itchy socks, dozens of lizard and monkey-face hats hanging from the tent struts, rainsticks, bird whistles, gourd rattles with stickers promising imported and authentic, something here for everyone, the signs say, like this carved wooden frog, hand painted in exquisite detail, with jeweled eyes and a tiny bat-shaped stick you can drag along its spike-ridged back, a little trifle that’s guaranteed to call in songs from every spring you’ve ever let pass you by.

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Kileen Gilroy

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Many Lives My boss, who was once the best at what I do, with a jean jacket, long ponytail and metal bracelets stacked up strong arms that flip bottles and pour shots of Maker’s Mark to fishermen coming from the Point with their pockets full of cash from dragging scup and squid below the ocean’s belly, tells me, between a drag from his cigarette sticking to his bottom lip, that people like us, who do what we do, live many lives.

After I ride my horse, take my dog for a walk along the ocean shore, and finish applying for another teaching job, I step behind the bar at 5 o’clock with ripped jeans just grazing the tops of my thighs and a ribbed tank top showing just enough of my belly button ring–– a dangling arrowhead hanging between trouble and desire.

I see the way you look at me, thinking you might want to stay for another, get to know me better, kiss my soft mouth, or ask me to dance because you like the way I move as I shuffle between steps and your salty words, knowing how your wife would kill you if she knew who you really were.

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You ask me for a shot of Wild Turkey Honey, and I step to the left, reach the top shelf on my tippy toes, spin, drop the shot glass on the bar top, pour with my right hand, take your money with my left, let my fingers move free on the computer screen.

Maybe, just maybe, I'll pull back my hair and wink at you.

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Chelsea Griffin

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To My Jeff Buckley Lover I came over naked, wanting.

I came over infused with alcohol.

I came over to see if love could ease stretch marks, angry and purple from sudden growth.

I came over and stood outside your white door, waiting as fluorescent hallway lights dimmed beside the sound of your voice crooning brightly.

I leaned my cheek against the cool, pebbled surface, becoming numb.

It’s never over until the splinters of your vocal chords litter my skin with droplets of blood.

It’s never over until our voices entwine, reaching a crescendo of blame and contempt.

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24 It still isn’t over.

My body heaves like tired waves over the memory of your voice behind that white door.

Lover, I came over, but never knocked.

I stood outside and let the chill of a broken melody keep me still hovering between the burning neediness in your voice and a way out.

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One More Time a girl pale skin top lip a little fuller than the bottom stretching over crooked teeth canines sharp there is a tilt to her hazel eyes one moment lazy the next alight with mischief a beautiful girl in the right light a sad girl in the dark clutching her glass of red wine singing off-key ballads to her empty room the red walls draw poetry out of her skin create artwork from her blood when her veins feel too tight cramped like she can’t draw a breath the art breaks upon her body 2017

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then light in the cracks a new day shining through her blinds a girl pale skin gets out of bed one more time ◉ John L. Stanizzi ‘Night for Mildred “Biggy” Cafferella Circa 1956

Big Millie bends to kiss my forehead in the room lit by one votive shadow-light tugging gently toward the high place on the wall where darkness is, and when her lips touch my skin, I close my eyes for a moment and when I open them, she is fading into the coppery light and I can tell that she is certain that I’m sleeping and not watching her leave the room, the glow of candlelight revealing in her eyes her love for me, but also subtle fear, the candle burning down and going out, hard wax, the morning’s harsh light, and the sounds of the street rattling in the window panes.

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Dancing with Myself

So let’s sink another drink ‘Cause it’ll give me time to think ––Billy Idol, “Dancing With Myself ”

In front of the mirror, oh Lord, just long enough to see that I’m dancing with my grandfather, papery-skinned Gramps, hunchbacked, rumpled, whiskey-smelling Gramps, hair thin as air, tears in his eyes, the two of us dancing, our bad backs, twisted knees, half-pint of Black Velvet cupped in one of his hand, bottle of Percodan in the other, and it’s shocking enough to almost make me stop.

But I don’t.

I slide sideways, feigning nonchalance, stocking feet not exactly gliding across the floor, out of view of the mirror and that crazy Santeria scene there, Lazarus Orisha dancing with St. Francis.

But he comes with me, inhabits me!

And when he does my iron knee resounds 2017

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like a gong shuddering up my thigh, radiating to the spondylolisthesis at L-5, and he whispers sweetly in my ear, leathery hand along my cheek–– Take two of these.

Wash them down with this, handing me his half-pint.

And if there’s a more comfortable object to hold in the hand than a half-pint of cheap whiskey, I’ll be damned if I know what it is, and so I take the bottle flashing in the moonlight overflowing on everything and I dance, chucking and skanking, bass rumping in my chest, and I turn up the sound and leap for the mirror, strutting like I might never strut again, the two of us dancing into the oblivion reflected everywhere.

Here

Pegi Deitz Shea

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Your Bequest We say ourselves in syllables that rise From the floor, rising in speech we do not speak.

––Wallace Stevens, “The Creations of Sound”

Daddy, you could whistle a frown off a face.

Listen now to your grandson, whistling alone in the cellar, playing guitar so leisurely that each string speaks in awe of the other.

His notes reverberate like seedlings of grass ascending through your ashes on the bottom of the sea.

No wonder birds rest on ocean waves, inspired by breath from below.

2017

30 Jonathan Andersen

2 Krymuninlees

Two mornings after declaring, glass of wine raised in firelight, that I would not write any more poems about my father, I slide open the barn door, squat down to replace the three-decade-worn tines of the Troy-Bilt M8, the eight-for-eight horsepower he bought with I still don’t know what money. I tilt the tiller forward.

It looks bowed in prayer. Each tine, hardened steel, hooked right or left like the business end of a scythe, comes off with the loosening of two bolts, falls and clatters, ringing briefly on the ground. I think I’ll remember, but quickly lose the tricky offset pattern—sixteen blades in four opposing gangs of four, pointing toward and away from each other by turns: by the time I have them all replaced, locknuts cranked down hard, anticipating years, the stall is filled with sun and the new tines' gleam. I groan to stand and exclaim, unthinkingly, krymuninlees, startling myself with a word my father used to say, its exact meaning I never thought to ask.

Here

Bessy Reyna

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Sunday Afternoon Naps Sunday afternoons while my parents slept I waited crouching outside their bedroom door for that moment when Mom would stop speaking softly, the bed springs coils stopped squeaking, and the snoring began.

I spent hours studying Dad’s habits: I knew I was in real trouble when he took his glasses off and placed them on the dining room table before he scolded me.

I also knew that on Sundays before their nap, he hung his pants by the belt loop on the left ear of the chair closest to bedroom’s door.

I would open that door just enough for my hand to reach into the pants’ pocket and gently, quietly remove the car keys.

Outside the building the red and white Chevy Bel-Air convertible was like a magical vision among other cars parked on the street.

It was my chariot, My Pegasus.

It was freedom, It was rock and roll blasting from the speakers.

It was daring life to meet death at the Boulevard Balboa.

It was what I waited for all week.

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2 Route 99, Fresno, CA, December 27, 2015

He was alone at 6:30 that morning, when the cold forced him to keep one hand inside his pocket, the other tightly holding his lunch bag.

He was alone while waiting for his ride to work.

He was alone hours later when he woke up at the hospital, not knowing how he got there.

Not knowing why that car with white men inside slowed down when they saw him.

Not knowing why they started shouting obscenities and yelling “Why are you here?�

Not knowing why, as he tried to cross the street, the car accelerated towards him, the front bumper hitting him, making him fall on the pavement.

Not knowing why those men rushed out to punch him, Not knowing why those men rushed out to kick him, Not knowing why those men rushed out to spit on him.

Earlier that morning, before he left his house, he had kissed his children and his wife, combed and rolled his beard, carefully coiled his hair, then, reverently, tied his turban on his head.

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Joan Seliger Sidney

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Anne Ruaud Fourteen.

Anne stops eating.

She pushes plates away.

Refuses soup, fruit, juice, bread, pies.

Her hair Lacks life.

Her skin yellows.

Her skirt, shirts, slacks, sweaters Balloon round her disappearing Body.

Fifteen, Sixteen, sevenTeen. Eighteen, nineteen, twenTy, twenty-one. Anne sees Psychologists, psychiatrists.

No one Knows where To find the key To unlock the secret That keeps her sleepless.

She goes from clinic to clinic, Grenoble, Paris.

Anne stops caring.

Doesn’t want to get well.

Tells a doctor she’s leaving France, Needs drugs

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For six Months of treatment.

He prescribes. Pharmacy Fills six bottles. Anne swallows all These pills.

Never Wakes. Her mother Finds Anne in bed: purple Waxy skin, hands and feet blue-cold.

Brown eyes Sinking Into her skull.

Hands, fingers, toenails white.

After unsuccessful tries, this One works.

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Patricia Grace Vinsonhaler A burst of red outside my study window, a cardinal flits from branch to branch, the gingko still short enough to welcome birds and squirrels.

In the yard next door, a mother fox circles her den of babies. Yesterday, a white-tailed doe birthed two fawns as I watched from my window.

Patty, last spring, we kissed in the community center corridor, you rushing to teach yoga, me to swim like a mariner.

Your anorexic body all bone, you’d taped your legs as if drugstore tape could hold your transparent skin together.

Patty, today’s Easter, the City’s parade of bonnets.

A devout Christian, did you believe in the promised resurrection? Your husband and grown children sit at your sister’s table, remembering a million ways you graced their lives. In Judaism, our message to mourners: May her memory be a blessing.

2017

36 Barbara Crooker

2 Penny

She wasn’t a good cat. Wouldn’t let us pick her up or cuddle on the bed. Sometimes she’d permit petting, but only if she was in the mood, and on her own terms. If she was perched on a chair, perhaps you might approach. But now, at fifteen, she’s stopped eating and drinking, sleeps all day. Instead of wrestling the white Christmas teddy, taking him down to the bottom of the stairs, she’s huddled next to him on the landing. Will even let me sit with her and stroke her fur. I think she’ll slip from us peacefully, but she’s starting to stagger, can’t use the litter box, and her cries are terrible to hear. So I take her to the vet—the place she hates most in this world—because what else is there to do?

There’ll be no return trip. I hold her in my arms, a fur-wrapped bag of bones. She’s gone beyond fear.

It’s not like I’m saying goodbye to a beloved friend— she’s been peeing outside the box for months, and “Aloof ” is her middle name. But she’s purring under my hand, as the vet slips the needle in, murmurs appropriate clichés. I’m not sure what kind of loss this is— how can you love what doesn’t love you back?—but for the rest of the day, I wander through the empty rooms, looking for a trace of orange, glimpse of whisker. For she Here

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was beautiful and she knew it. No wonder the Egyptians thought cats were gods. And now, we’re left, not bereft, exactly, but stranded, washed up on some strange shore, wandering, in the country of the merely ordinary. ◉ Leonard Kress Bridesburg The neighborhood reeks of T-bone. Alleyways are not wide enough for two to pass unbrushed and doves the size of bowling balls coo behind their mesh. The Legion Post door is propped open. Inside the twin-spired Polish church, unpierced by shafts of jeweled light, a couple rehearses upcoming vows. At the rec center, little girls crowd the stage. They are learning how to isolate each hip, how to shake each ponytail and how to sell each smile.

Chatting between dribbles, young mothers watch from the court as basketballs fly up from arched fingers. Barechested boys leap and elbow after rebounds like Titian’s shoving figures, reaching for the hoop-high hem of the Virgin’s spiraling heavenward Assumption.

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2 Amtrak Train Derailment

I lived in that same Philly neighborhood, boarding the train twice weekly to New York for grad school.

The cheaper commuter line, whose station was a tiny cement pad in the middle of desolate mills and charred warehouses, overtaken by wild weed forests and toxic rivulets that teemed through treacherous gullies.

I was the only passenger to disembark the train never coming to a halt, the conductor tossing down my backpack.

Rabid raccoons, scavenging rat-birds until I reached my house at Jasper and Venango. And my wife, who grew up on that same corner, recalling when kids from the neighborhood headed over to the tracks to fling stones at passing trains, pissing down on them from the trestle, huff glue, and down six-packs.

One was killed by a speeding train.

Another lost his arm and leg and later hung out on the corner all night, sleeve and pant leg flapping in the hot breeze, blasting Led Zeppelin and The Doors.

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Steve Straight

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The Future of the World, Part 2: Youth On the way in from the parking lot, I see a student with a big Bruins shirt over shorts on a cold day in March, headphones, backpack slung over one shoulder, gangling toward class.

Almost past a trash can whose plastic lid with swinging door has blown off in the stiff wind, to my astonishment, he stops and then replaces it, fitting the lid securely all around the circumference.

As I approach the main entrance, I hang back and study the behavior of the students: Six in a row hold the door for the next person, who lets it close behind her just as another gets to it; he holds it for the next, who then totally ignores the heavy-set woman carrying two bags, a pocketbook, and holding the hand of a toddler. I race for the door, she thanks me heartily, and I hold it for the next student, who says nothing.

Like the binary foretelling of daisy petals in my youth, I think: There is hope. There is no hope.

There is hope. There is no hope.

Intro to Lit, opening day prompt: “Talk about yourself and reading, perhaps a favorite book.”

Three of twenty-five begin, the ones who’ve brought books they’re reading: a Stephen King, a sci-fi series I don’t know, and one––god bless him–– Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

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Then, about six in, a young man, with tie, admits, “I don’t really like to read.”

As if a giant permission switch were flipped, hands shoot up around the room.

“Yeah, I hate reading.” “Oh, me, too.”

Too many nods to count.

There is hope. There is no hope.

There is hope. There is no hope.

After a morning when I discover most of my students don’t know how many senators New York has, can’t tell me one thing about Gandhi, cannot name the date of the Declaration of Independence–– “1876?” “1920s?” and one belligerent shrug, between classes I see a young woman swinging her red-tipped cane down the hall approach a giant clot of young students she may not sense how dense, lost in their cells or shouting random things to each other–– but all at once they part and give her a wide berth.

All eyes follow her down the hall and I hear someone say, hushed: “She’s memorized the school, man.”

These days, pianissimo, under my breath, I can’t stop counting my rosary: There is hope. There is no hope.

There is hope. There is no hope.

There is hope. . . .

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Steve Myers

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After Reading Pinker, I Walk South Mountain He’d urge me to Lean into it!, and so I did, where Holicong Road bobbled over the washboard New Hope & Lahaska tracks at the base of Buckingham Mountain and began to climb, as I do now up South, 30 miles as the crow flies toward Kittatinny Ridge, a lifetime later.

Again June calls the rhododendron to its red vocation. The wild rose devotes itself to gold, white, thorn. The same freestanding fieldstone columns by dirt-and-gravel driveways, same smell of tar, spoor, creosote, dust-to-duff, the dry settling.

Between two ashes that survived the borer, twin strands of barbed wire, one at the Adam’s apple, one at the ankle, entrance to a rough-cut access road through woods thick with purple flowers.

Inviolate. Our age is less violent, so Pinker claims, but I don’t know— the Memorial Day weekend bringing massacre in Syria, a hundred dead, video of corpses of a dozen children, flesh pits in place of faces, skulls ripped back…

Back then we’d double-time up the mountain’s shoulder, then drop to the grass winded, in the burial ground of Mount Gilead African Methodist Episcopal Church gaze out on the loam-blessed valley, where runaways once hid their whip-scarred bodies, sleeping in feed troughs, or root cellars, or limestone caves in the mountainside, history the reason— the day I scattered his ashes there with repeated, palms-up backsweeps of my arm—I pictured a black-clad evangelist’s familiar gesture, imagined his words: Before us, Canaan…the Promised Land…neither sorrow, nor fear….

I said inviolate. Said as the crow flies… said as the crow…I’m struggling here —in memorium, the dead of Mother Emanuel, 6/17/15

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2 The River Children

In my America, he was the one to drive the car, a window-down, piss-&vinegar young veteran of the late Good War,

who loved undulating farmland.

Dutiful son of his southern father, he’d shipped for Hawaii & Wakayama Bay, then to Nara. He’d seen the Japanese squatting in their fields to fertilize them & walked in wonder at the feet of the Grand Daibutsu Buddha; had shouldered home a vision of suffering & a kimono for Mother; wed; moved to Bucks County; a man on his own,

who loved the demos & Emerson’s essays; Christ Jesus & Christy Mathewson; Thurber & Harpo; the U.S. Army & the violin; his work & wife,

& who loved, madly, me, jabbering in the shotgun seat that Indiansummery morning, the fourth Friday in November, a school holiday!, winding over Buckingham Mountain to Lower Mountain Road & the dairy farm my friend lived on, the harvested farmscape calling him till he pulled over & we took it all in––the smell of phone-pole creosote & a stand of mint the frost hadn’t killed, the pale sun on corn stubble, full-throated crows scavenging what had fallen.

Freedom.

Forest. Love. Field. Our farm kids’ pick-up football, & later, before a neighbor blurted out the news we saw the farmer plop a kitten on his knee & loose a jet of milk from a Holstein’s udder at its kitten mouth. Saw it, blissful, lap & lap.

Here

Looking back, I imagine her sitting at the gray formica kitchen table.

She’s lit a Salem, splashed an asterisk of cream into her coffee, stirred it in.

Is staring out the window, the pale sun settling on the brown weeds across the road, genuflecting to winter.

Is waiting for my sister, six, who’s slept in. Or not waiting. Listening. The radiator pings and groans; the LP on the plastic record player turns, and that nice Negro with his cigarette and neat tuxedo sings “The Twelfth of Never.”

A long, long time since her mother died in the sleepy town by the winding river; the war; high school; since her dream of a teardrop, sapphire pool, high sky, lapping, glitter on the water; her handsome baby Christopher with his full head of hair, his heart already broken— “irreparable,” said the awful doctor— born on the morning the country was off making Kennedy president, & gone in three days.

Three years pass. A new baby barrels in in August, “has not quit screaming bloody murder since.” Unforgettable, her exact words.

The record keeps spinning, unswerving, its 33 1/3, the needle following its narrow groove.

Soon the baby, who’d finally surrendered at 4 a.m., as Ralph Jones was rolling the great barn door open. Chances are our marmalade cat is snugged in the corner.

Soon my sister. Soon Thanksgiving, turkey, & the Packers game. Ghosts move about me.

That morning I was sure as an American boy could be I’d see glory flaring, even as twilight lowered on 1963, on all my heroes, on Starr, on Wood...

Harry Humes

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The River of Eyes Why this morning sitting by a muddy river should I have remembered the way my sister dabbed with a white tissue at the corner of her left eye, that caused it to water, to feel as if it were merely a speck of dirt, the eye that in a year would be gone, and in another year my sister gone after great pain, this muddy river I sit by, thinking of how it winds fifty miles through these mountains and comes roaring through the stone arches of a trestle, the river I hope will run clear by evening, and into it I will wade with my sister, her blue eye healthy again, and me warning her about slick rock and drop-offs with no bottom, showing her the seven kinds of casts I know, as I wipe her eye, as she slips away again.

first published in the chapbook All Waters Are One Adastra Press, 2014

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2 My Daughter Among Cows

Small and delicate, she has ducked under the electric fence and among the hulking shapes, tails swishing flies, great square heads and eyes in which something seems always about to surface. She slips past pink teats and thick legs, her hands sometimes up on rumbling bellies for balance or just to touch such deep places, keeping her distance from muddy hooves lifted and stomped down at odd times.

Fifty or more, side by side this June evening, pale tongues rasping over cut alfalfa, sweeping it in through nose drool and mouth drool, jaws circling and grinding, shudders over the black and white skin like the slow drift of continents.

Then she is gone and I do not see her until at the far end of the herd she stands as serenely as the heron we see each morning below the bridge.

She waves and, as I wait for her to walk back, I recognize once again what I often come upon at odd times, suddenly and by accident: an easiness, a sureness of what will happen next in this huge darkening place poised so delicately around us.

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My Mother’s Glasses Pale blue ones she wore until she died, even though she could not see much at all, refusing to have the cataracts removed, and not wanting to know what else was wrong, leaning toward the television, fingers spread upward over her chin, chair pulled close, husband and daughter dead for years, and having outlived all her old friends.

Tired, she’d say, and If I could only not wake up, be with all of them again.

Believing in God, believing in a reunion, like the picnics we had at Lakewood or the Higher Ups Park in Ashland, her sisters Tink and Helen there, friends from the Methodist Church, her daughter Alice, her husband Eddie, the blue mine scars faded from his face, and my mother laughing, wiping away tears, cleaning the glasses, tapping them back into place.

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2 Contributors

Jonathan Andersen is the author of the poetry collection Stomp and Sing (Curbstone/Northwestern UP, 2005) . Editor of the anthology Seeds of Fire: Contemporary Poetry from the Other U.S.A. (Smokestack Books, 2008), he is a professor of English at Quinebaug Valley Community College.

John Bargowski has received fellowships from the NEA and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and Poetry Northwest's Theodore Roethke Prize. His book of poetry, Driving West on the Pulaski Skyway, won the Bordighera Prize and was published in a bilingual English/Italian edition in 2012.

Barbara Crooker is the author of eight books of poetry, including The Book of Kells (Cascade Books, 2019) and Les Fauves (C&R Press, 2017).

Amanda DeMaio recently graduated from Eastern Connecticut State University with a B.A. in English with a concentration in creative writing.

Raised on the Connecticut shoreline, she enjoys traveling and taking photos.

Charles Fort’s many books include Mrs. Belladonna’s Supper Club Waltz, New and Selected Prose Poems, Volumes 1 and 2 (Backwaters Press, 2013) and We Did Not Fear The Father: New and Selected Poems (Red Hen Press, 2012). His poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry 2000, 2003, and 2016 anthologies. He is Distinguished Emeritus Professor at the University of Nebraska at Kearney and Founder of the Wendy Fort Foundation and Theater of Fine Arts.

Maria Mazziotti Gillan is the Director of the Creative Writing Program at The Binghamton Center for Writers and a Professor of Poetry at Binghamton University-SUNY. She is also the Founder/Executive Director of the Poetry Center at Passaic County (NJ) Community College. She has published twentytwo books, inclusing Paterson Light and Shadow (Serving House Books, 2017), What Blooms in Winter (NYQ Books, 2016), and The Girls in the Chartreuse Jackets (Cat in the Sun Books, 2014).

Kileen Gilroy is a 7th-grade English teacher at Lincoln Public Schools (RI).

She teaches mindfulness techniques, creative writing, and experiential learning opportunities that advocate for students finding their own voices in traditional classrooms. She recently earned an M.A. in Holistic Leadership from Salve Regina University.

Chelsea Griffin earned a B.A. in English from Eastern Connecticut State University. She currently lives in Kansas City, MO. Harry Humes's many poetry collections include August Evening with Trumpet, The Bottomland, The Way Winter Works, and Ridge Music (all published by the

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University of Arkansas Press), Butterfly Effect (Milkweed Editions/National Poetry Series), and Winter Weeds (U of Missouri Press/Devins Award). His most recent collection is All Waters Are One (Adastra Press, 2014).

Leonard Kress is the author, most recently, of the poetry collections The Orpheus Complex, Thirteens, Braids & Other Sestinas, and Walk Like Bo Diddley. He teaches at Owens College in Ohio and edits creative non-fiction for Artful Dodge.

Paul Martin’s is the author of Closing Distances (The Backwaters Press, 2009).

Floating on the Lehigh won Grayson Books' 2015 Chapbook Contest. His poem “The Radish” won Prairie Schooner’s Glenna Luschei Award.

Steve Myers is the author of the poetry collections Last Look at Joburg (2015 Tusculum Review Poetry Chapbook Prize winner), Memory's Dog (FootHills, 2004), and Work Site (FootHills, 2003). He is a Professor of English at DeSales University.

Bessy Reyna's poetry and short stories can be found in numerous anthologies. Born in Cuba and raised in Panama, she has been honored by the State of Connecticut Latino and Puerto Rican Affairs Commission, the CT Women's Hall of Fame, and the Immigrant and Refugee Association of CT. Her website is www.bessyreyna.com Two-time Connecticut Book Award winner Pegi Deitz Shea has published more than four hundred works for both adult and young readers. She teaches creative writing at UConn and at the Mark Twain House in Hartford, CT. Joan Seliger Sidney is a writer of poetry and children's books who lives in Storrs, Connecticut. She has written three books of poetry and her work has appeared in numerous publications and anthologies. Her poems often bear witness to the Holocaust and her experiences with multiple sclerosis.

John L. Stanizzi is the author of the collections Ecstasy Among Ghosts, Sleepwalking, Dance Against the Wall, After the Bell, Hallalujah Time!, and High Tide~Ebb Tide.

Cervena Barva Press will publish his next full-length collection, Chants, in 2018.

Steve Straight, professor of English and director of the poetry program at Manchester Community College, is the author of Some Assembly Required (2017), The Almanac (Curbstone/Northwestern UP, 2012), and The Water Carrier (Curbstone, 2002).

Photographer and cover artist Deirdre Volk, from Windsor, CT, is an Eastern Connecticut State University student majoring in pre-early childhood education and sociology. She studied commercial photography at Mount Ida College. To see more of her artwork, visit www.deirdrevolkphotography.com.

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2 Readers Notes