October - Poem 1 / Day 1
Joanne / Lilly Frank
I come from a generation of women, as we all do. Mothers, who are daughters, and inside of them, little girls. I come from a generation of women who experienced heartbreak, as we all do. Adolescence, kindling a warmth that will become a fire, which evolves into the deep passion and love they hold closely to their chest, bellies, and fists, for their daughters. My mother, arguably, the bravest girl of them all. I recall during my teenage years, my lack of acknowledgement for her triumph, for her strife. While I was wrangling my girlhood experience, I regretted to remember that my mother, yes, growing older, and yes, older than me, was still in her heart, wrangling her own experience with girlhood. Because the little girl you once were never leaves you. She is your home; her undertakings live inside of you. While many of the stories are silent, and she remains stoic, there is a young version inside of her who is still, in a scrambling attempt to understand how life could become so much bigger than yourself, attempting to survive. My mother has always been beautiful, radiant, and tenderhearted. I often reflect on the sliver of experiences in which she has shared with me in times of weakening – they serve as a reminder to show your teeth when backed into a corner, but never bite. My mother, to me, is still a girl. She is just as human as I am. My mother, my mother. The little girl who lives in me, will always see her as her mommy. The little girl who lives, the young woman who lives in me, the grown woman I am, all in a synchronist rhythm, have grown to understand that my mother is not only the woman who raised me, but she too, is just a girl. And she too, will carry that young girl inside of her for the rest of her life. Motherhood, while a responsibility, is also a choice. My mother chose motherhood in every instance, selflessly, thanklessly, and bravely. Her mother chose motherhood in a different way from her, and her mother, I’m certain the same. There are no guarantees, there are no handbooks or wishes. How lucky I am to experience girlhood with her, my mother, the girl she once was, and still is.
A Mentor, a Mirror / Anna Ojascastro Guzon
I want to go in the back yard now
This game is foul,
How it picks you up and drops you back down
Even swans got boxing gloves for heads
I am everything classic and true
How dreary - to be - Somebody!
Performances, assortments, resumes -
Vulnerable how my fire sways
Boy wonder becomes Boy Wanderer
A new life is a mirror, it is a pair of glasses.
A cento made from lines of poems from The Oxford Anthology of Poetry (2006), poetryfoundation.org,diodepoetry.com, and Brick by Brick: Dreams We Build, Volume 5, written by some of my former students. Authors in order: Gwendolyn Brooks, Allen Worth, Cathy Park Hong, Sch’erica Wilson, Emily Dickinson, Hart Crane, Patick Gutierrez, Gerald Burton, Apollo Chastain.
speleothems / Kathryn Johnson
When you close your eyes,
is it dark? Dark like night,
with little sequin stars reflecting
in the sky of your eyelids? Or
like a movie theater, lights dimmed
before the film rolls, unspooling a story
in the glow of carefully-lit exit signs?
Or is it dark like a cave is dark?
The first time I spent a weekend caving,
and the guide told us to turn off all our lights,
I waited for fear to tap me on my shoulder
and whisper little stories of death and other dangers
in the dark. Imagine my surprise when it never
took a seat on the rock beside me.
And instead of feeling a shrinking, sucking dread,
I felt my heart, my head, my whole self,
expand to fill the dark. I became the cave,
holding bats, spiders, rocks, water,
and even people. Those tiny spelunkers
crawling downdowndown
past my cave-mouth,
using little lights to show the way.
Lights that flicker like stars in the sky,
that lead them to the exit and out again
into the woods, with eyes wide open and
blinking in the sun. When our guide
switched his headlamp back on,
I was predictably disoriented.
Was I still the cave? Was I now afraid?
Was I still home to little flying and crawling thoughts?
Do I still hold the lights inside me? Or
must I now crawl my own way up and out?
Remember Him Before / Kimberly McElhatten
Remember him with his hair tied at the nape and it falling forward over his shoulder in dense, black waves over his hospital gown. Remember you, just after you exhaled from the womb, held in the heft of his hay-heaving arms and his hospital gown. Remember his wide, white-toothed smile.
Remember him before he wrote the captions for a comic that got him fired just ahead of the plant closure, how there wasn’t a severance or another job at another plant, and how when you started kindergarten, he was there every morning to make soft-boiled eggs;
Before the attic bedroom smelled like the dog after a good skunking, his friends making quick and frequent visits, the day a cop car turned into our driveway, and he escaped through a back window and into the woods before the police noticed;
Before the welfare checks and the line for rice and cheese and powdered milk, the seventeen percent interest mortgage, the whiskey and beer and Anbesol on his breath, and the fury he carried in his fists and feet;
Before he stopped brushing his teeth and holding your mother’s hand and kissing you and your brother good night, and before he spent evenings and weekends in the basement smoking Marlboros in front of a twelve-inch TV watching Roseanne and Rush Limbaugh;
Before the joke he liked to tell, the one where he said, when he found out you were a girl, he had wanted to throw you like a kitten into a sack with rocks and then toss you into French Creek, and how this joke seemed funnier to him the more he told it and how it started with throw and ended with toss and the care and carelessness of these words;
Remember him through the memory of photographs, the way they track memories before you have memories, and remember, he had wanted you once before.
ARE WE SURE THIS IS DEATH / H.T. Reynolds
@ Lhasa De Sela “Soon This Place Will Be too Small”
Submerge yourself back into that slick
existence of wrinkled skin and blooming bones—
if you were to experience that again—
your birth in reverse,
a dehydrating vocabulary
weeping from your pours,
your stories mother will mourn,
nursing you back at her breast
her palms clutching the sun’s sickling
grief
—be still, mother
he will become again
that blister
consuming your golden locker
draw him back
like a cigarette,
open your purse,
tuck him at the bottom—
be whole, again.
Small mush.
dwindling boy.
This is death—
You are stardust becoming
diamond—a nucleus of someday I will—
can you hear her speaking,
cradling your wilting body,
her hand palming you flat
—someday I will…
Would your last memory be
the chill of the world receding,
submerging into weightlessness,
an imploding body
