My Father's Mirror by Penumbra Press

The Penumbra Press Selection Process

For the third year in a row, our team has been fortunate enough to receive a plethora of compelling, captivating, and carefully crafted works. Rather than coming to a quick and unanimous decision, we had many exciting contenders for publication. The viability and printability of these submissions cannot be understated. The selection process process is one of the most exciting aspects about Penumbra, and we are thankful to have had such amazing content made available to us. The poet we selected is a true star of their craft and their poems have earned the respect and admiration of our staff. We are delighted to present their work in the third edition of Penumbra Press.

In addition to being thorough in our selection, we at Penumbra Press also wanted to be sure to curate a beautiful cover that would convey the powerful images and emotions our chapbook author evokes. After considerable time and careful consideration, we selected Kristina Solomita, an art student at our university Stanislaus State, to create DeLarm’s cover. We felt that the message of the author was only highlighted by the artist’s creation and hope to show a blend of both. We hope you agree as you read Jeanne DeLarm’s.

My Father’s Mirror

-inspired by Alex Katz’ “Edwin, Blue Series 1966”

A grey man, thin as corrugated cardboard, emerges from a painted sky of vibrating blue.

He’s not my father, but I recognize him.

With a stretch of shoulder he offers a job, summer employment, then back to school.

A brown string tie clings to his concave chest.

From his balcony, we are overlooking the factory floor where rows of molding machines roar.

Mine waits for me, waits for my hand

to open and close its door three times a minute. I knock hot melted tubes into a bin.

Newborn syringes churn through a duct,

blown to the station of the next workers who slip them, one by one, into vinyl sleeves.

Twenty seconds between injections:

I pick out defective tubes trailing plastic strings and press them together to make stick figures.

When first employed, I threw all the bad ones away.

Now I play, careful not to burn my fingers, setting my giraffes and tube people next to my stool.

My father buys me paint-by-numbers sets.

He thinks I can be just as good as Maurice Utrillo whose Parisian street scene hangs in reds on our wall.

Fumes from the machine penetrate my lungs.

Up on the balcony, the grey man eats his lunch, a turkey sandwich, and I imagine that he rinses it down with a cold cup of coffee.

Prehensile

The capacity of his hands in illness concerned my mother, she told me later.

Long fingers lay on aqua chenille. Tufts of fluffy fabric ran in plow rows of marching doll soldiers and farmers.

Palm to palm, my two-year-old nails stretched to my father’s knuckles and round-edge ring.

Bumpy veins rode the back of his hand. Why are they blue? I asked his face.

A stirring from him, a threat to awaken the traveling blood, the living plasma, fanning to digits, sunrays, tips and bits, capillary ponds. Tissue superimposed in sanguine droplets squeezed between laboratory slides--

I slid my hand to bend his backward. He grabbed - I got you. Trapped my named fingers like twigs.

Voices in the Sand Bank

We walked toward the sandbank, my mother and five-year-old I. She swung a bucket, I clutched a bowl.

We passed through open-treed gates and stopped at the blueberry bush. Overhead, trees waved in a sky parched between branches.

I heard voices. A man’s deep sound, and a woman’s trill, like a radio when the frequency waves in and out.

“Who’s that?” I asked.

“Who’s what?”

My mother meandered.

“Maybe you hear the robbers. Robbers live in the trees— the birds are what you hear.”

Birds sang in the morning and put their babies to sleep smooth, closing a curtain of leaves at night with evening songs.

The voices in the trees, contrarily, scratched the ear.

Robbers there, in the treetops, directing each other, in profile. Just the jaws,

mouths moving.

Vast amounts of sand held up our house.

Town earthmovers chewed it, scooped hunks of grass tufts. Spindly birch and ash trees dug in their roots.

As did the blueberry bush and the juniper.

I mixed an elixir of green berries.

Wrinkly hard balls. Not sweet. Toxic, mixed with dirt for a fine, warding-off brew.

Between the straggly trees, down in the sandbank near the big boulder, a sharp pain hit my skull with a silver blow like the metal handle of a dinner knife.

Like steam shovel faces seen from the side when the bottom releases and sand pours out and over the ledge.

The Family Practice

In the Mush Room, we play mom and dad to stuffed animals Alvin and Mary Lou and Reddy Fox, all of us cartoon stars. The thrum of a television fades in the forest.

Pine needles fall and turn orange, piled crunchy around fleshy toadstools.

Boughs curve inward and shield us from the strange man who rants, up in the humans’ house. He is blaming our mother’s first two offspring.

Claims they poison his mind. In our lean-to household, our kids sometimes get into the whiskey. We mix up spoons full of dew and push the pointed pine sticks into mouths, poking vinyl skin, the grey smiles of our own children.

The TV Repairman’s Kids

From inside a box on legs, framed in chrome, I grinned and winked at my audience of one, my brother in his Freedomland t-shirt, cheek smooth, still unscarred from our dog Amigo’s teeth.

Outside, our father rattled an aluminum ladder, mounted the roof, our roof, customers’ roofs, perched there, knees out, spindly antennas.

He tightened screws and trapped copper wires. Walk around the cathode tube, he advised.

One day, the celebrity Ranger Andy appeared in our den. Windowed in razor-thin glass, he pronounced my name, looked right at me.

I reported the incident. My father, born in a house reeking of usable petroleum, denied any wizardry but warned, Don’t sit too close.

On our cracked vinyl car seat, we played checkers, waited for him in other peoples’ driveways

and we wondered; what he was doing in there?

Night of the Skunk

Our flea-bitten beagle chased fat yellow tabby cats. Hunted in other people’s full garbage cans. Howled outside the neighbors’ paned windows.

On the night of the skunk, this beagle leaped and bounded forest haunts and ran through the back door. My yelling father herded and imprisoned him in the hall where our coats hung on cast iron hooks. The nostril-piercing odor permeated its way into the woolen fibers of my sister’s Hudson Bay white striped jacket. She allowed me to wear it, stinking up the school bus where I usually sat by myself, anyway. That day, definitely.

Toughened me up, a northern woods girl. In the brick building I hung up the coat. It screamed its outcast vapors loud in the pink third-grade cloakroom.

Before Seat Belts

The radio played in our Nash. The cigarette lighter glowed a fresh red cylinder.

My father drove low to the wheel, fedora pulled to his forehead. He fixed broken sewing machines for a living.

Maybe he’d just picked a Singer up in Winsted, on the city’s side streets.

I kneeled backward on the back seat, vinyl stretched tight as a tablecloth, and watched the road go by, the flowery yards and fire hydrants.

If I’d been in the front, my father’s arm would have swooped like a train bar across my chest as it did to block

and protect my two-year-old brother when our car collided with a Studebaker. Instead, I fell on my spine.

A ponytailed nurse in the emergency room assured my mother that my back, strong and elastic, survived unbroken.

They looked over their shoulders at my crying father, who gripped us, his kids, his only allies in a world set against him, voices driving him onward.

Summer Without Sun, 1816

You get used to anything. At first the ash floats in the sky.

Next day, it blocks the sun, and those particles make you sneeze.

The religious lady down the road insists horsemen are nigh.

Our life’s end gallops close on four tokens of doom.

Your grandmother’s gravestone feels gritty under your lips, because ash brings to mind pulverized bits of bone.

A pit tickles your belly. Leaves of a beech droop.

The third day, you put on a hat from the straw market.

Black dust settles and dirties your clean white marble steps.

Tomorrow hooks you ragged on its finger.

Behind The Sofa

Abandoned by the yellow bus, you and I stepped free of children’s chatter. We walked a dirt driveway past a two-toned turquoise Plymouth.

Birch trees striped the walkway. Finches called out from canvas. I wore a puff-sleeved cotton dress. Your short sleeves flared on thin arms as you opened the door and we stopped behind the sofa, its slipcover printed with bark-cloth Fords and Chevies. I’d lain on these cars in fever dreams.

Now our sister pushed to escape my father’s shoulders as he rolled her over a littered teal carpet and wiped his mouth across her gritted teeth.

She grabbed her schoolbooks and ran, tears dripping down her temples, pounding upstairs to our attic rooms. I crept up after her, and you walked outside to the Plymouth and its streaked, rolled-up windows. There, you hid. I wondered, years later, if the voices found you there, leaning on the glass.

The Lion House in Central Park, 1895

Seven men wear narrow-brimmed hats and hot jackets on a summer day. A solitary woman’s white mutton sleeves flare over a long skirt, her coiffure twisted into a tasty bun.

The lion lies down in his cage, on a board, the Sphinx on sand. Metal bars and gingerbread columns shade his bulk, soft and matted. He smells hidden flesh behind linen.

While people watch him from safety behind a metal fence, he’d like to swipe a paw and knock off those smug bowler hats and rip a claw through a peplum.

Chew up a flowery bonnet.

Humans gather at his feet to pretend that such a one, such a wild heart, can be constrained by two dimensions when in fact, he’d like to pull us deep into his own meat-eating dream.

No Soup for Diane

Skinny as a drug addict, ex-groupie, Diane regaled me with her tales. New York Dolls, Thin Lizzy.

I was her audience until one day I carried a blue enamel pot of soup toward her, south down First Avenue.

I dropped it. Orange butternut splashed a cracked-up sidewalk. Diane covered her eyes with her stick-like fingers.

I cried. My eyes blurred. That day, my therapist had questioned a dream memory of a peachy tree growing in a childhood front yard.

The spade-shaped leaves triggered shooters, stabbers. All I wanted was for someone to let my sliced skin heal.

Forty years later, I trash the enamel pot’s chipped edges and broken handle. So it has been for my friendships.

Kerosene I sit on a pine bench, the sticky pitch blackening my cotton pants.

Oil greased the gears in the New England factory where my father’s father made the machinery to cut out felt hats.

Today a July breeze skims four thousand miles distant from the bedroom where a hundred years ago, my father entered a world redolent of kerosene, where a jar was screwed shut and screwed open to clean his father’s overalls. A swipe of a rag rubbed a cheek.

The same substance burned in our basement one winter half a century ago when snow knocked down the wires.

We lived in the cellar for days, the beagles restless and hungry. My father lit his cigarettes and snuffed them out on shiny crystal coal, another combustible element so black I could see my eye on it.

He Departs from The Lake

This photo, taken by my aunt, sat fifty years parked in a desk, a solitary color photo flat beneath a scalloped pile of black-and-whites.

My mother poses, pale thighs shadowed. Frizzy tresses puff around her face. My hair’s a snarly apricot against her cherry sun-suit plaid.

I wear white. My scabby leg in ankle sock and cloddish shoe swings on her belly, my arms waving to an open car, a turquoise Nash with door ajar, its corner wedged against a hill. Its window frames a fire plug, Not red, but yellow. Ivy vines

twine around its base. My aunt will pull them up. Wash her arms clean of oil, with ochre soap: She reigns behind the lens, as hidden as the lake I knew by way of its ozone scent. My fingers curl to reach the photo margin, and my dad,

who’s launched himself to cross the bright medallion of my mother’s skin. He aims the arrow of his nose, home, along the grey macadam.

Abandoned Homestead

A town of houses roofed with plywood. An iron bed thrown out back. A car painted white, green and rust; a peeling silver motorhome. Ours is a town of no fine-worked flesh.

One telegraph pole thrusts a cross to diagonal sky. Coned trees and spruce hem us in. Our mountainside slides red as the planet Mars, and just as naked.

One at a time, we climb down a path under grey mist and pass by our Mercury, torn apart, its burgundy tone flaked and its insides strewn in a stubbed circle, a ritual sacrifice, a reminder of some past conversation.

Back Bedroom I stayed overnight in the Colebrook house and listened to my father moan on a folding cot set up by my brother on the teal-blue carpet while a jaguar stalked the woods outside, growling,

In my vigil, I lay in the back bedroom. Years ago, he’d stacked metal shelves thick with glass radio tubes and tools and gauges. A television blared. One was always being tested.

Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald in this room. “Make Room for Daddy” featured a little girl in braids and a flocked-nylon dress. My father tinkered here till my mother claimed it, their marriage just about dead, her back muscles frozen with bursitis, her stomach lining raw with ulcers. I called the doctors from the kitchen.

Dialed the black metal telephone, pained by the chrome finger-stop’s crescent moon. I called doctors and got no doctor on the line. Sunlight fell through the window, the mullions slashing it into squares.

Audrey Hepburn’s Face

from Alejandro Vigilante’s silkscreen based on her quote, “The best thing to hold onto in life is each other”

A sharp line divides eye from nose. The chin leaps to blue. The sun is blocked as though by a border masked by tape pushed against a wall. That line’s been crossed. What lies beneath, throbs.

Round kliegs remind us that the act of really looking, not just a shifty glance, is a study too deep. It shatters a person into squares.

How to integrate surfaces: do the lilac and crimson lines throbbing with heat or cool in shadow make a person one of a kind or does the study of a person’s colors violate her covering, and is it any person’s right to do so?

The separation of a face. Cool lilac jumps the line to pulsing crimson and together they live.

Ghost Soldiers Find Picnic Children

Children watch us, road dust misting ether. They scoot, make room. Bone-hard concrete benches shine with rain, a dump of early snow.

We sing the chemists’ tales of Ypres, thrice destroyed when mustard gas and good old bullets took our heads.

Shall we unpack our canvas bags, set down our ringing helmets? Empty cans.

The tombstones sit beyond the roadside hedge. The children speak. They offer crumbled cups of salted lemonade.

They touch our pewter sleeves and laugh at tingled, clock-broke bullet time, their fingers wrapped in smoke.

No Photograph No photograph will bring back this day, nor any soundtrack.

The pond crackles with frogs’ croaking. Their reptile voices drown us out.

The healthy swim. The half-dead hide under reeds.

In my mind, when I replay the scene, your straw-hat perches on your long grey hair, while my strands drift loose in the May breeze.

We chat on this bench together, your arm in its thrift-store Hawaiian shirt held up by the wooden rail and my shoulder.

The silver pond this day mirrors the sky framing naked trees tender with plump buds while fish interweave the watery weeds.

The pond is dotted with the eyes of frogs. Maybe for the last time, two knobby amphibians line up

spoon-like in the scum.

Your breath emanates the sweet scent of booze, that poison which marks your day.

The blare hides our shared past. I cannot pick out our voices.

The past lies on a green bench and has already blown away.

A Visit with My Brother at The Golden Arches

Fell on his face last night. His bike chain released its grip.

The wind pushed him along. He tried to navigate the gamut,

hemmed in, speared by ice. Across his skin, scabs march in line.

A blob at the nose bridge meets a gash in his complexion.

He’s not crying. His mouth turns up its smiley edges.

His cheeks are creases with lifelines. Heart lines detach from his palm.

His bald head reminds me of our Dad’s. Unlike Dad, he gets out in nature.

He lives outdoors, in fact, outside those burned rooms and bridges.

Wraps his neck up, and sleeps When he can, in a webbed beach chair.

We talk Christmas across a fast-food table. Reindeer weave black across his chest.

He hugs paper bags of chicken and beans, dried milk to reconstitute later on,

and a fragile bottle of bourbon sneaked after I paid for the groceries.

He laughs as we celebrate sitting together, symbiotic siblings.

Brother Released He scrabbles the jailhouse dirt for butts, choked by the first fresh air in months.

Picks plastic-wrapped donuts parked on a sill by owners required to check their snacks while in court. When I tell him to put them back, he yells “This is the way I’ve always lived my life.”

I retreat to my car and watch from my windshield. The silver screen stars him as he taps a stranger’s shoulder, who unwraps the sweatshirt off his own back. In my mind’s eye, he steps on a road over some concrete culvert. A Pinto stops for his curved thumb, and the driver, who smokes a home-rolled drag, hands it over, carries him anywhere a breath can float in crisp air.

Last Dose of Fentanyl

They carried him down his apartment stairs on a stretcher, feet first, his squatter roommate nowhere to be found.

Only a pair of alligator shoes and a thrift-store transistor radio remained.

Last spring, I left my brother for Dublin Castle’s exhibition, a look into stories kept fresh although the flesh that made them has long expired.

Gilt humans shimmer vergaut, vermilion, lapis lazuli.

Their individual stories, their vellum pages were cut out, lifted from the Coetivy Book of Hours made in Paris circa 1442.

A woman sits in white lilies. Her crimped coif cascades under a halo. She reads a book proclaiming early days when angels scampered at her feet plucking posies, when a crowned dove flittered at her robed knee.

John of Patmos writes the book

Revelation under a many-headed dragon hovering light as a thought balancing above a ruined city.

The tarnished silver bird holds the scribe’s bottle of black ink. A wooden archangel spreads carved red wings and in knight’s armor stabs a long lance. Drives the sword deep through a demon’s chin to pinion to earth those webbed feet and pointed tail.

God looks down at the executioner and with His gigantic fingers makes a circle, an A-OK sign.

In the Book of Hours, it is so.

So I think I’m not imagining things when I see claws grip my brother’s kitchen table edge, the roommate having stepped over that prone body before oozing into the night.

But I was not there. Maybe I have it all wrong.

Maybe my brother, companion of childhood, of shared imaginings, handed himself the pill to cease a sword, to shatter a mirror before he escaped over a windowsill crusted with chipped paint and joined the winged dead.

Montreal Regret

When the traffic light turned red, he, pale head cropped like Eminem, stepped into the street.

Dancing in a black shirt, the back emblazoned with a white cross, something gold dangled from his chain. He pulled it up and over and down to his lips for a kiss. Tapped it on a Lexus’ hood. The driver waved him away.

Between lights, he took a break, bit a bagel, drank a cola stored on the seat of a bus shelter. I clicked his picture with my phone. He peered into our car and asked in French and then in English, “Have you a dime?” I didn’t want to open my wallet or search the car’s cluttered well. Later I took a walk and spotted a hard quarter fallen from a stranger’s pocket and thought, I should give it to the cross guy, who works the corner along Boulevard Saint-Joseph-Est and only asks for ten.

On My Mother’s 106th Birthday

A heavy rain taps at an outcrop of windowsill. I’ve retired from humanity for the most part. Will you send me a reverse birthday card, Mom? Send it to me at one of my addresses.

The rain’s terrific today, sweeping up from the South. Trees down the hill cloud over with mist. Thunder rumbles. Reminds me of the day your ashes were buried.

I’m too old now to cry about it. I’ve outlived the number of years you took as your own in this life of ours and I’ve outlived my headache.

You’ve rested under your marble stone ever since I dropped a silver earring and heard it hit your wooden casket.

We buried my brother at your feet in a pine-tree printed cardboard box No funeral.

At your house I stormed into my bedroom and tore up the old letters. I’ve forgotten who sent them to me. Every single one.

Candy Cigarettes

Most objects will not lead you to the well where memory drinks.

Daughter and nieces smoked candy cigarettes and clutched Cabbage Patch dolls.

Erin, Vanessa and Emily blew bubbles, new mothers, sulky in puff-sleeve dresses.

On my desk, a photograph taken by Sally Mann clicks a switch on in my thoughts against the smile of Mr. Rogers decorating a pad of sticky notes.

Melts away. My mind slips. Robin and Julian tucked into the corners

of our long couch with its shabby blue upholstery, later sawed in half.

And at the other corner, me, their mother, stroking their dirty feet.

I was there, covered in sand and brush, hiding from a voice calling to me.

Most objects leave you there. Most objects stop at the end of sight.

Colebrooks Cold Brook

Green shoots of skunk cabbage pierced the brown leaves of winter carpet layered and weighted down.

On my throne of spongy moss I waited on a slippery rock to see them, their black and white stripes.

Instead, bugs as light as filament ran on water. The touch of their feet flashed as they scooted through sun rays between shadows of deciduous limbs, ash and birch and poplar. Yellow maple hands fell from a higher realm, a sunny meadow set above the rotting tree-trunk hollow.

The brook streamed to my rock’s either side, dampened my hand-sewn shorts. My father called my elfin name and I

scraped my naked wrinkled feet free of ferns, said goodbye to magic bugs and climbed the hard uphill.

A Dinosaur Life

My brain houses bits of past seconds: a living room floored in teal wool flecked with lint.

The built-in wall shelf held a set of Time-Life books. A bald thin man wielded a cigarette,

but I don’t see him in the flesh, only a black and grey photograph stored in a box.

In another container, dinosaurs parade in a brochure, 1964, from one of eight visits to the World’s Fair.

One time, Lucille Ball climbed the stage steps near me, rasping, cigarette clamped between fingers.

Grandpa’s house sat a mile from the Unisphere. Back in 1930, my mother walked to high school

over that site. Won her first job at the 1939 fair and saw Tarzan swim in a heated tank.

On the glossy leaf, a T-Rex snaps its jaws. Humans, not yet invented, hide on the next page.

Luca’s dinosaurs play on his pajama sleeves, juice-colored monsters sweet as candied jelly.

In this soup, in Earth’s tiny spin in the universe, he and his Gram-mama inhabit the same millisecond, a blink of the cosmos. I swirl blue pen storms on paper, in the shield of my skull.

Sit in a kitchen in a warm climate watching a silver refrigerator. A gas stove cooks up string that ties it all together.

Author Biography

Jeanne DeLarm was born in a remote corner of Connecticut and grew up in a small house near a brook. She still lives in that state, restoring and selling old dolls for a living. Her husband of 43 years often makes dinner, specializing in his Neri pasta sauce. A threetime Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference contributor, Jeanne earned an MFA in poetry and fiction from Fairfield University. Her poems have been published in Gyroscope, The Light Ekphrastic, Zingera Poet, Slipstream and Shenandoah, among others. A few poems plus essays in Christian Century and Connecticut Maple Leaf have won prizes.

Acknowledgments

The following poems were previously published in these journals:

“Colebrook’s Cold Brook” Cardinal Flower Journal, September 2015

“Ghost Soldiers Find Picnic Children” Slipstream, Fall 2013 (Pushcart Prize nominee)

“The TV Repairman’s Kids” Lightning Key, 2016

The poems in My Father’s Mirror detail the memories, and the repercussions, of moving through childhood under the care of a mentally ill parent. From a young age, the poet was aware of her family’s history of mental disease but would soon learn that her father’s schizophrenia could be passed down through the generations—a realization that haunted her and her young brother as they strove to forge lives free from the curse of a patrilineal psychological disorder.