NarrativeNortheast

DARK ARTS – Paul LaTorre

March 18 | Poetry, Spoken Word | admininfin8 | 0
TWO POEMS – Mia Willis

on January 10 | in Poetry | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

THE DUKE OF YORK @ 5 PM.

for mickalene thomas

men talk about the weather like they were born for it.
             or it was born for them.
                        whichever.

a bar feels like an unsavory place to write until
             i hear two men talking about the weather like a femme noire they unlearned how to love.                          “i hope she stays this beautiful.”
                         “i hope we get lucky.”

and suddenly, i must write nature an apology.
             make it sound like “ain’t no mountain high enough,”
                        like “give me the night.”

i apologize the way only a fellow femme noire can.
             first.
             often.
             for the men and their climate change conversations.
             aware that forgiveness is buried somewhere in the atlantic
                            and archaeologists are coming for that too.
             familiar with all we will have to surrender before they let us rest.

PARABLE OF THE HIDDEN TREASURE

an aubade for those who are always rising

on the days my sister’s memory is an atrophied muscle
a sax player resurrects the “darkest light” sample / husks “show me what you got”
becomes the pot howling hymns at the kettle on the Q to church avenue.

                                              family honey-roasts niggas over woolen plats in a black girl’s kitchen
                                            stove hot / tongues sorrel sour / kanekalon viands to emaciated hearts
                                metta passes through dap meditation and none of us are tender-headed here.

on the days my sister’s empathy hangs thick / crab boil steam clouds ashlee’s windows
asia laughs under trees in a prospect park sunshower / superb and inevitable
fire envelops the tip of a blunt rolled with lavender the grandest
branching only complemented by heat.

                                                                           we two-step across the floor in maya’s living room
                                                transformed and overripe melody / a trap motet with massed strings
                                                                                                                   movement 1: i forgive her
                                                                                             for singing to me in voices not her own.

                                      thank her for the music anyway.

on the days my sister’s rings are trophies from a living made by hunting
commerce at an end / the green line sinking into the ocean
movement 2: i forgive myself
for marking the change in her tale’s narrator.

                                  thank her for lingering to listen anyway.

Mia S. Willis is a Black performance poet from Charlotte, North Carolina. Their work has been featured by or is forthcoming in The New Southern Fugitives, FreezeRay, Narrative Northeast, Peculiar, Slamfind, and others. Mia’s poem “hecatomb.” won the 2018 Foothill Editors’ Prize, earning nominations for a Pushcart Prize and for inclusion in Best New Poets. In 2019, Mia was named the first two-time Capturing Fire Slam Champion, a Lambda Literary Fellow in Poetry, the Young Artist Fellow at Chashama’s ChaNorth residency, a collaborator in Forward Together’s Transgender Day of Resilience Art Project, and a performing artist on RADAR Productions’ Sister Spit 2020 Tour. Their debut poetry collection, monster house., was the 2018 winner of the Cave Canem Foundation’s Toi Derricotte & Cornelius Eady Chapbook Prize and is available with Jai-Alai Books. Connect with Mia on Facebook/Twitter/Instagram (@poetinthehat).

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TWO POEMS – Marisol Baca

on December 26 | in Poetry | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

IN EIGHTS // Octaves

I: Emergence

Let the moss take you
halfway to origin
a doorway of sticking

Imagine the stone path
a step forward
the terra change before
you press a foot down

2: Interval

who is worthy enough
to create?
the opalescent portrait
the sign of ancient organic
wisdom

a carafe of silver
a wooden spoon
a clay bowl

3: Feed the moon

What vessel is immense
enough
to fill the void?
and what to use?
mitochondrial window plants
crystalline structures
small platelets like moon pies

4: Never-the-less

Never-the-less, the milky way
splashes its way
ever a reminder
our humanness is a malleable textured consciousness
the heart beat and the break
when mother is cut
loose from a star

The Gutiérrez Sisters in Grand Junction Boarding School, Colorado

I would write the lyrics to a song their mama sang to them, but I have no song to write—it is lost

A hundred ribbons
smooth and edged in lace
Ribbons like the sound of songs she sings to them

My great grandmother played the mandolin,
tuning pegs in a dust storm with crooked fingers
outside Grand Junction, Colorado
The other girls do not bother her during her practice
This is stolen time
between writing inky letters home
classes on Anglo customs
and work for white farmers

Her dress was cotton linen, striped, black blouse
and white scalloped collar
no embellishments
because vanity was an extravagance
their hair had been cut away

When they weren’t canning or sewing
their teachers’ smiles
were reflections against icy windows
in winter, she would brace against the cold
A navy woolen sweater sags over her shoulders

And the girls, three sisters,
would sit on bare cots holding their hands
against the warmth of a radiator

It was the oldest who had the duty of writing home
Dear mother, how are you? When will we come home?

Manuelita plays her mandolin
Rosita sews
Teresita hides candy in her shoe

*

You see, in this place we have no stories of our own, Mama
We don’t hold our people’s songs
They are untied from us, unspooled and unraveled
not like ribbons at all – like thread.

*

Teresita will never know her mother;
she was so young
when they went away.
The other two remind her
to be courteous.
But Teresita was a decade old
when she saw her mother again.
She said,
You are not my mama.
I never had one.

*

They wrote to Mama
to send something special.
The season has blotted them out
cold reminded them that they have bones

They know she can’t travel the distance from Albuquerque
to Grand Junction.
They won’t see her for years.
They are good—do what they’re told.
Except for letters
there is no connection.

Mama yearns for the softness
of the three.
Manuelita, Rosita, Teresita
In her dreams
it is what it was like
when they hung on her apron,
they hung from her arms,
wrapped themselves around her ankles.
These three, first, cherished, sent away.

*

Ribbons

In between the time she is working
for her husband
feeding the men who come in and out of the fields and orchards—.
She collects yarn and ribbon
green felted velvet ribbon, black satin,
pink satin, red taffeta silk, brown velvet, lace
and egg shell white,
guipure roses hand-stitched on chocolate frosted ribbon
round pearl, oat pearl,
ribbons with sequins, and amethyst silk

A ribbon from every place she could find
Now, she sees them
everywhere
an unraveled mustard yellow
tied to a fence post
two silvery loops are straps holding a dress
Thick and silken in a basket at a thrift store
in rolls at the fabric shop
like dreams waiting to unravel
lace with a thousand eyes
look across the desert to her girls
blue, and peach, and some with stiffened wire
some she would touch
run her thumb nail over
satin weave

A ribbon for their hair,
to pin on a dress,
to wrap around a wrist,
to tie up.
Seam binding ribbon to connect
one to another
across the dusted road, ribbon
the ice and snow,
organdy ribbon
collected from around the legs of chairs,
grosgrain writhing at the feet of mountains,
waving like fingers from pinon tree groves,
wide, dusty lace
entwined in thick creosote
in the outstretched llano— picot edged.
Ribbons under the eaves of houses
satin ribbons tied to horses’ ankles
feathery ribbons in bouquets
twill ribbons taking shape on frosted cakes

*

A box arrives at the school.
A plain brown box from far away.
Amidst the wind and chill.
for Manueltia, Teresita, Rosita
addressed from Mama Gutiérrez
They lay their hands in the nest of it all
ribbons smooth and edged
Ribbons like the sound of songs
collected for them.

Marisol Baca is the author of Tremor from Three Mile Harbor Press. In 2019, she was named Fresno Poet Laureate. She is the first woman and Chicana/Latinx poet to hold this appointment, and her poem, “The Origin of Certain Place Names: for Fresno” was designated Fresno city’s official poem. She has been published in SPF Lit, Casa Libre, Narrative Northeast, Riverlit, Shadowed: An Anthology of Women Writers, Acentos Review, among other publications. Marisol won the Andres Montoya poetry scholarship prize and has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes. She received her Master of Fine Arts from Cornell University where she won the Robert Chasen poetry award for her poem, “Revelato”. Currently, Marisol is an English professor at Fresno City College and she has established a community for women writers of color that seeks to support and uplift their writing endeavors.
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THREE POEMS – Marge Piercy

on December 26 | in Poetry | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

COUNTING EVERY PETAL

The ground is finally bare, the snow
vanished into it as if it had not
smothered the world for months.
It might wrap its shroud around us

again. We celebrated the first snow,
counted ourselves lucky to cower
under blizzards but by the 14th
storm we are simply bored.

Now I search flower beds for green
steeples rising, even for weeds,
anything that grows. Starving
deer nibble rhododendron leaves.

Mother with two fawns at dawn’s
breaking. I stay quiet, watching.
Every day I count birds at feeders.
A pair of robins is an omen.

When I lived a year in San Francisco,
I missed spring, as if without pain
there could be no pleasure. Winter
makes the first crocus a celebration.

THE MONOTONOUS BIRD

High in the green rooms
of the sugar maple a strange
bird calls, calls, calls. Does
he/she seek a mate? Lost,
maybe from the South, since
it’s new to me who all spring
and summer know the words
spoken by bayberry warbler,
tohee, robin, brown thrasher,
catbird, oriole, wren.

What does it want, crying
insistent as a leaky faucet
hidden by the tiers of wide
flat leaves? What good
would identifying do could
I spy it, Peterson in hand?
It would still passionately
want what it’s not getting.
I hear my younger self
in its fierce cry of hunger.

How many years and grey
rooms I haunted seeking
a return of love, affairs
tearing flimsy in my avid
hands. Give me, give
was my cry repetitive
and dismal. How tedious.
How forlorn. I should have
more patience with this
lonely traveler.

HAND-ME-DOWNS

Mother told me when I was little
that the small depression under
my nose and above my lips
was the fingerprint of an angel.

She said when a baby’s curled
in the womb, it knows every
thing before and after, which
is why babies don’t want

to be born. But the angel makes
us forget. Otherwise we’d never
willingly enter this chaos, this
maelstrom of trouble and pain.

Of course we cried to exit that warm
safe place where all we need
was given us while we rocked,
richer than we’d ever be again.

I wonder what it was I knew
then – I wonder.

Copyright 2019 Marge Piercy
Box 1473, Wellfleet MA 02667
hagolem@c4.net

Marge Piercy has written 17 novels including The New York Times Bestseller Gone To Soldiers; the National Bestsellers Braided Lives and The Longings of Women; the classics Woman on the Edge of Time and He, She and It; and most recently Sex Wars. Among her 19 volumes of poetry the most recently published include The Hunger Moon: New & Selected Poems 1980-2010, and Made in Detroit. Her critically acclaimed memoir is Sleeping with Cats. Born in center city Detroit, educated at the University of Michigan and Northwestern, the recipient of four honorary doctorates, she is active in antiwar, feminist and environmental causes.
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THREE POEMS – M. L. Brown

on December 26 | in Poetry | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

THE MIND-BODY PROBLEM

A woman is housing,
is keeping the darks
from the lights, is splitting

wings from breasts, dividing
one into knives and spoons,
answering: What’s for dinner?
Have you seen my? Why
is the gas bill so high?

A woman
is fragmenting, tectonic plating. A shoe
left on the stair again.

She is stealing to a quiet shade,
trying to save some paradise.

*
No, she answers, there is no more ice cream—
no lick, no trace.

ONLY MEAN BONES

I’m becoming an open honey comb of bone,
a canted weave, a clutch of shells
eroded by the sea. I’m becoming bone

friable as a fender rusted by salt winters.
A pelvis translucent—china cup, too brittle for tea.
Holy relic. My body, its own catacomb.

O sieve of hips, may you sing
like Sappho’s broken poems, while I write
in swirls and curves, wear away my wrist bones.

REQUISITES OF A GOOD LETTER

from Manners for Millions

Try until you
find the stroke you like
They vary

Sit
with plenty of elbow room

Say “ceremony”
you will get more pleasure

The first thing is your

body

(Very truly yours, Yours sincerely, Affectionately yours)

M. L. Brown is the author of Call It Mist, winner of the 2018 Three Mile Harbor Press Book Prize, and Drought, winner of the Claudia Emerson Chapbook award. Her work has appeared in Valparaiso Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, and Blackbird, among other journals and anthologies. When not writing, she devotes her time to raising funds for a nonprofit health care organization. She lives in California.
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3 POEMS – Chelsea Dingman

on December 23 | in Poetry | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

A MEMORY OF WATER

It rains because another body has fled
its wounds. It rains because morning is sick
with drought. It rains because only water
has memory. It rains & someone’s husband
or mother or brother has become the past
participle of love. It rains because we must be present
when the world disappears behind cloud. It rains
because we look for our mothers under clotheslines & beds,
nestled inside the throats of birds, as we mother the rain
that wants to bury itself below ground, as we mother
thought & not deed, our gods pulsing like a murder
of crows at a firing squad ceremony. It rains again,
now, because the trees want to feel anything
new. It rains because blood stirs under the surface
of ash. It rains because sadness wants to be
repealed, as the fires we burn become the future.
It rains because silence is the circus we give our children,
while we pray to sorrow to take away the rain
splitting our throats. It rains because everything
fallen once knew joy. It rains because water wants
to originate anywhere but sky as sky breaks
open inside us. It rains because we can’t stop
becoming this world when we are lonely.

AFTER YOU ALMOST DIED THE FIRST TIME

I called your name to hear
a voice like yours echo
in the rime. I called myself back

from the lure of a man’s hands, the beggar
moon caught in my throat.
I called you mother. Not Mama.

Not Mom. I created distance
in that one word. The hull
& husk of your lung, spooned out.

Lobe by lobe, I called breath
an enemy. I was called orphan
by agencies. My father, already dead,

as you raised us alone. I called you hero
for awhile, then whore. Then leaf
that can’t return to the tree. Or maybe

that was me. I called the days grey
horses. I called it love
when moss overran the pines.

I called you through this animal
loneliness. I called you someone
I didn’t want to be. I called you, yesterday,

to wish you a good day. The sparrows,
forgetting themselves in the glare
of the windows. I called the day

forward to fold over our voices.
I called to say love is evidence
of all that you’ve kept alive.

INDUCTION

Today, a daughter will come,
pale & unprotected,

to make me possible.

I will be ruled by no other god
but time.

Chelsea Dingman is the author of Thaw (University of Georgia Press, 2017),

What Bodies Have I Moved (Madhouse Press, 2018) and a forthcoming book of poems, Through a Small Ghost (University of Georgia Press, 2020)
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TWO POEMS – Paul LaTorre

on December 22 | in Poetry | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

THE PRESTIGE

Boys desire to be
desired, too.
Boys move
out of single
parent homes &
into double occupant
condos of unwilling to fix
foundations so they never fill              the vacant rooms.

Men make tombs offill              their defects,
erecting
monuments
to conquest &
mislabel it company.

Boys can also be whores, you know.

Boys ignore knocks on doors
& keep pleading.

Boys use fingers as
tongue depressors when
depressed & hit eject.

Boys look into mirrors
at shapes that aren’t there
& also want not to be there.

Boys become assistants
to magicians willing
to help them
learn
to disappear
& then reappear
each evening withfill            the flick
of an ‘Abra-cadaver’fill              wrist.

Boys become men            who vanish altogether.

ONE SIZE FITS

All of us have a type:
Schindler’s list thin,
starvation Ghandi thin,
ungodly thin like Paris Hilton
after purging six big macs,
Tom Hanks Philadelphia,
Jared Leto in Dallas gaunt
ribs could play xylophone
like my withhold of protein
led to Ethiopian days of near
fainting on stair masters
after chugging a sugar-free
Red Bull with taurine
(which is actually bile)
scorching eyes as chlorine
crotch touches during first
summer swim, Angelina Jolie
cheekbone thin, won’t even eat
a wafer thin, paper doll thin,
Kate moss thin, chemo treatment
patient thin as pre-Easter Jesus
apocryphal thin
& all these                          idols               fit
on the altar
which we kneel to              nightly
& make our sacrifice.

Paul LaTorre is a poet, activist and educator who teaches at Bloomfield College in NJ. Blending pop culture with advocacy for various forms of trauma including abuse, disorder, and mental health issues, his aim is to create dark poems with a sense of levity. Paul’s work has been published in Zeitgeist, Drunk Monkeys, Narrative Northeast, BLINK and has been featured on the DREAM Act’s ‘voices’ portal. His chapbook of poetry, Disappearing Boy, was recently published by the 3 Mile Harbor Press.
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TWO POEMS – Lauren Sartor

on December 11 | in Haiku, Poetry | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

1. Using This Booklet

“This booklet does not offer a plan for recovery from alcoholism” (Living Sober, Intro)

There is no chronology in addiction.
It is always where it is. Love too
can be like that; young love, especially.
This booklet is not a plan, it is more
like a body with bruises; the poems
connect the contusions in an attempt
to remember what was erased by force.
This booklet is full of accidents
with pages like carrier pigeons –
in hopes to reach out to the dead,
to coerce the grave to grow roots.

Fending Off Loneliness

“When we have only ourselves to talk to, the conversation gets kind of circular” (Living Sober, Section 14)

There’s always
a cliché to cling to.
Hair of dog and keep scratching.
Tie one on and get loose.
Off the wagon and hit your head.
I put a record on the player;
the grooves deepen.
I crack one open.
The singing comes first –
that I understand.
The reading aloud
is reasonable enough.
But this talking to walls?
I don’t know when it happened,
but it’s happened.
Each night my feet paces the distance
from Binghamton to Syracuse.
The floor’s wood is testimony
of this delirium, of this trek, of my tongue
moving like a train full of philosophers.
I’ve answered questions put forth by phantoms,
reminisced at length about my childhood to the face in the window,
drank until I became incoherent.
I’ve sat on the rocking chair to make it nod,
strained my voice at the curtains to make them clap.
Each night is a compulsion for company,
an argument to be put to sleep.

Lauren Sartor has an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. Her work has appeared in publications, such as Black Fox Literary Review, Broad! Magazine, Calyx Journal, Literary Juice, Easy Street, The Former People’s Journal and others. Her work takes an earnest look at the conflicted, and often misrepresented, facets of ordinary livelihood. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate at SUNY Binghamton.
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TWO POEMS – Irene Mitchell

on December 3 | in Poetry | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

NIGHT

Autumn to Winter hastens
like a goat that will eat anything
from a can to kidney pie.

My inscrutable design
for a good night’s sleep
is not to dwell on such images
but to leave the compass behind.

I rely on the sanity of the day
for my night’s rest,
the blue quilt
a citadel of comfort.
I do not bring papers to bed
or identification
as they are obvious interference
and may yield contradictory interpretation
at a later date.

The night is better than the day,
more eloquent, intangible.
Night has me in its maw.

VISIT FROM A RAPTOR OF INTEREST

Let me not waste myself on impossible flights….
William Everson

A hawk presents nearby,
the elm’s limb so close
to the window I think
it has come to visit me in camaraderie.

I left the city for the night air here,
the hawks and hilarious jumping rabbits,
the cricket concerts,
the black of the berry.
Here, there isn’t much to be distressed about.
One day there is algae in the pond,
gone the next day and the water lively again.

I have named the hawk Ted
for its poetic input, the language
of its muscles, the holding at the back
of a few grey feathers,
the wingspan huge
even, I suppose, in the rain.
Goodbye, Ted.

Heeding cautions and riptides,
where this bird goes, there go I
into the wind
and overwhelming sky.

Irene Mitchell’s fifth poetry collection, Fever, has been published (2019) by Dos Madres Press. Equal Parts Sun and Shade: An Almanac of Precarious Days, was published in 2017 by Kelsay Books/Aldrich Press. Mitchell is the author of three other collections: Minding the Spectrum’s Business (FutureCycle Press, 2015), A Study of Extremes in Six Suites (Cherry Grove Collections, 2012), and Sea Wind on the White Pillow (Axes Mundi Press, 2009). A long-time teacher of writing in New York, and former poetry editor of Hudson River Art Journal, she conducts an ad hoc series of workshops on how to write better poetry. Mitchell has been featured reader of her work at Poets’ Walk, Bard College’s Institute of Writing and Thinking, William and Mary College, Marianne Courville Gallery,The Albany Institute of History and Art, Melville’s Arrowhead, Lichtenstein Center for the Arts, Woodstock Colony Cafe, Hudson Opera House,as well as regional libraries and bookstores. Mitchell is known for her collaborations with visual artists and composers. She is a 2019 Associate Artist in Residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts.
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Two Poems – Kika Dorsey

on November 26 | in Poetry | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

THE GENETIAN

She told the three Russian soldiers
she would gather snails that day,
and she picks their brown and white shells
from the dew-drenched land,
and in her satchel she had three,
and Mutti said to try to find a dozen,
to feed her and her sister and the three soldiers
who track mud in their home, setting Mutti’s face
into grim lines.

The gentian is in bloom,
deep blue petals curling, surrounding yellow stamen
like a fallen sun,
like the hole inside of her
where her older brother and father disappeared,
hole like the caves where the ibex live
high near tundra, young ones with velvet horns
soft like her before the war,
the hunger and the blood that came now
every month and the soldiers with their laundry
and tobacco and vodka and thirsty eyes.

She comes to a meadow with a snow gum
surviving from a fire,
its new sprouts reaching from the blackened old trunk
like a womb, bulbous.
She thinks how out of every death sprouts an insistence
to live, despite the ashes, despite the eaten valley,
and she thinks of a day when maybe she will stretch herself
like Alpine tundra’s five petals—
her brother with his mucous breath,
her Vati of yellow nicotine hands,
her Mutti of yellow yarn for socks
her breasts aching like sunset when the moon bulges,
her sister the petal that finishes the cross with the hungry body,
and all the petals
will drink in the sun as if never losing it,
never burying itself in the winter frost.

LULLABY

She lived in a makeshift camp
in front of Vienna’s ruined Bahnhof.
Her feet were bare, and the filth on her skin
itched as she wiped the lice descending into her eyes
from her dirty, dark bows.
Her brother hopped around the American canteen clapping,
and the soldier threw him half of his sandwich,
but the older boy Hans wrestled with him
and took it way.

Yesterday was a better day.
A soldier threw her two cigarettes,
and she bartered them for two apples,
one for her and one for her brother.

At night she sometimes dreamed of her mother,
dead from an air raid in Essen,
her mother kneading the potato dough to make Knoedel,
her mother polishing their black shoes,
darning their socks.
Of Vati she remembered little.
He disappeared in Russia and never came back.
She remembered his shoulders were broad and strong
like a castle’s stone.

In one dream her mother was a small bird
perched on the rubble.
Her hair was crow-black,
she had no wings, just a coat of feathers,
and she sang to her daughter the lullaby
about the moon emerging blurred from the clouds
and the stars coming out,
and when the daughter awoke,
it was the middle of the night
and the soldiers were drinking
on the broken steps of the station,
speaking in a language she couldn’t understand,
and she could see the moon.

It was a sickle,
like a scythe threshing the sky for a song.

Kika Dorsey is a poet, educator, writing coach and tutor in Boulder, Colorado. While finishing her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature in Seattle, Washington, she performed her poetry with musicians and artists and wrote about German and Italian modern and postmodern writers. Her poems have been published in The Denver Quarterly, KYSO Flash, The Comstock Review, Narrative Northeast, The Columbia Review, among numerous other journals and books. Her chapbook, Beside Herself , was published by Flutter Press in 2010. Her full-length collection, Rust, came out with Word Tech Editions in 2016. Her forthcoming book, Coming Up For Air, comes out in 2018. She is an adjunct instructor of English at Front Range Community College and has tutored in their writing center since 2008. She is also the poetry editor of Plains Paradox.

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SURVIVORS – Amy Barone

on November 26 | in Poetry | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

The piping plover, hailed one day each summer
for its resurgence in the Rockaways, Queens,
lives protected in camouflaged nests on the beach.

Tangier Island in the middle of Chesapeake Bay,
the world’s prime supplier of soft-shell crab.
Home to four-hundred-sixty residents, where

water defines life, where home and religion matter.
The cahow re-emerged on Bermuda’s Nonsuch Island
after a three-hundred-year absence. It thrives amid

native flora, wildlife and limited access to man.
Shadowboxing Arctic hares, clinging jellyfish, bonebeds
and badlands on Fossil Freeway in South Dakota.

Me—I’m the woman with medicine in her voice,
a forest bather mating like a corpse plant, melting into time,
floating toward a twelfth life like a trumpeter swan.

Amy Barone’s poetry collection, We Became Summer, from New York Quarterly Books, was released in early 2018. She wrote chapbooks Kamikaze Dance (Finishing Line Press) and Views from the Driveway (Foothills Publishing.) Barone’s poetry appears in Café Review, Paterson Literary Review, Sensitive Skin, and Standpoint (UK.) She lives in NYC.
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De Halve Moon – Pamela Kallimanis

on November 25 | in Poetry | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

Henry Hudson’s boat. September 2, 1609

The actual founding of New York City occurred in 1615 when the New Netherland Company, a subsidiary of the Dutch East India Company chartered to make four voyages within a three-year limit, built a stone house on the lower tip of Manhattan Island. Around this stone house, the huts of traders sprang up. This was the inconspicuous beginning of the city and for some years there was no change in the scene. There was just the storehouse and the rude huts of a few hardy men who bartered with the Indians for furs. (Kieran 3)

One.
Everything about New York is a barter.
Every single moment that one stands on the lower tip of Manhattan,
the traders begin to spring into their rudeness, small claims on the biggest places
and all the while, someone is pushed out of the way –
the beautiful creatures that fly in the air,
the creeping critters on the sands below the ice in March.
And, at some point, in May or June, when the grasses are about to spring
from their seeds, stones are place over them by the companies.

Nobody thought much about progress in the beginning.
None were able to conserve the birds, and for some years –
the harbor was still prolific and engorged with the natural.
It was only when the grease from the skins began to slink into the mud
that the locals began to question the new habitants’ storehouses.
At first, they simply looked into the buildings – to see the skins,
and the fat, but the blood would streak into the streets and hasn’t stopped.

THE PEOPLE

“By 1500, Lenapes have lived in the area of Greater New York City for 1,500 years. They call their homeland Lenapehoking.” (Mushabac and Wigan)
“Land is the gift of the creator.”

Which creator makes the land in New York?
Which party is responsible for the area the people called Lenapehoking –
because there is a new land being made in ways that don’t resemble the first waves,
sandy marsh, soils and glacial deposits.
The newest construction is more angular and less ruddy.

The buildings going up are blue in color, more like steel than copper.
The brick and mortar are a darkness, a blacker brick
than the local soils reddish and golden points.

1626. Construction of Fort Amsterdam begins
at the southern tip of Manhattan. (Mushabac and Wigan 7)

The lightness begins to shift, shadows fall in places where there had been sun streaks.
The birds lift off the tops of the workhouse.
1626. Eleven African men, probably captured from Spanish or Portuguese ships, are brought to New Amsterdam to labor as slaves for the Dutch West India Company. (Mushabac and Wigan 7)
And the labor force arrives
at the same time the rookeries are emptied out.
Birds seeking life somewhere beyond the shore
and the feathered inhabitants leave the coast of the islands
moving across the Hudson to New Jersey
so many species of shorebirds and crows vacated
to greener shores leaving the gulls to their trash.

Imagine the walls of Fort Amsterdam which rose
from the rocks and sewage
and all the while – in some new formed rule –
the strong backs of slave labor began in the galleries
and moved into the corners of the streets
as the sand became hard and dense from footprints
and the water blackening and slick with human bondage
and waste and wear, headbands tied up the hair
and metal clanking chains remanded and maintain order.

Whose bright idea was it to push some of us down?
Who gave the orders to cast stones against the tree?

Their eyes were fixed on the blue sky, the lushness of the waters,
open air and whole vistas of movement in the clouds
while the narrowness of their oppressors began to skim off
the humanness, eyes no longer met with respect,
bodies no longer equitable – who determined the price to be paid?

Whose best thinking put a price tag on another?

Pamela Kallimanis, M.F.A. in English Writing and Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College. She is an Instructor in the English Department at Hunter College and a student of International Migration Studies at CUNY Graduate Center. Her work explores questions of identity, ethnicity, migration, loss and trauma. She teaches a wide range of courses from Literature, Creative Writing and Poetry. She is the author of “The Zero Elegies” published by Three Mile Harbor Press. http://cuny.is/professorwrite2
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THE SPRINGSTEEN SENTENCES – Barbara Berman

on November 23 | in Poetry | by admininfin8 | with No Comments
For Debra Alessandra

1.
I was in Mimi’s garage apartment, three blocks from our high school and packed floor to ceiling with her kinetic collages and black and white photos, with Deb who said we had to hear this record, the first album by this guy up in Freehold who didn’t smoke pot, maybe had a beer once a week and was always getting rid of band members for not working hard enough, and that made sense to me because Stanley said drugs interfered with the creative process, which is how some teens within 50 miles of Manhattan talked when trying to sound profound.

2.
We sat in silence on a pile of colorful pillows and got blasted to another planet, except it was a few miles north of where we lived but didn’t want to.

3.
After Stanley killed himself I came home from work in D.C. and played “The Price You Pay, “ over and over every night for a year and then it took me two decades to hear it again without weeping.

4.
When I discovered that Springsteen read Flannery O’Connor before I did I worried too long that I was losing my edge.

5.
When I learned he was helping veterans I thought of my hometown neighbor Don Seigwarth, always fixing things, who enlisted in the Air Force, was shot down, never found, declared dead, was as nice as his parents, and is every soldier who won’t be remembered by enough people.

6.
When LIVE 75-85 was released , an acquaintance with a better stereo let me play it for the first time at his place, and he was as lonely as I was and he talked a little during each cut, and as I got up to leave I thanked him when I really wanted to scream HOW COULD YOU?

7.
I was never much of a screamer but I didn’t take it well when a bunch of men got up to get more beer at the Oakland Arena during “This Hard Land.”

8.
How can you be from Jersey and not need THE RISING? I said to a friend from Hackensack.

9.
When I heard the CD of Springsteen on Broadway I understood why a friend from LA spoke with force about the BORN TO RUN audio book, as opposed to the print version I’d devoured, because it was him reading, which is like he’s right next to you, and of course what we were talking about was Communion.

10.
The night I met my husband, who was born in Stockton , California and helped pay for his Berkeley degree by working in a cannery, we talked for three hours, and about fifty minutes in I learned that he didn’t believe in God so I quickly steered the conversation to the deal breaker.

11.
WESTERN STARS doesn’t do as much for me as I’d wanted it to, but I will be wrecked when Springsteen stops stretching.

POST-SANDY SHORE

There was a time when storm was storm,
not cause for great alarm. It isn’t so now.
Each storm brings a fear that can’t be erased.

Waves pound blame into places where blame
never settled before. There was a time
when storm meant adventure and sailing
was gentle , and homes stood their ground.

It isn’t the same at the shore anymore.

Barbara Berman’s first full-length collection of poems, Currents, was published by 3 Mile Harbor Press in 2018. Her poetry has appeared over the years such literary magazines as: Coracle, Gargoyle; Lilith; 99 Poems for the 99 Per Cent; Poetica; OffCourse;100 Poets Against the War and other publications. Her chapbook, The Generosity of Stars, was published by Finishing Line Press. She has been active in the literary and publishing community since 1979, when she organized the first independent press book festivals in the country. Her poem “SAY NO” was published in the Village Voice Special Issue on Nuclear Disarmament. It was then set to music by Australian composer Vincent Plush who was in residence at Yale that year. The piece was performed in the United States and in Australia and elsewhere. Barbara’s essays and book reviews have appeared in The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, The San Francisco Examiner, and other journals. She has served on the jury of the California Book Awards and lives in San Francisco with her husband, Clifford Lee, an environmental lawyer. Her book reviews appear regularly in The Rumpus.
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THREE POEMS – Toni Mergentime Levi

on November 23 | in Poetry | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

MILK

Milk arrives like a blessing in my dreams—
blue-white as a glacial waterfall from a far-off thaw.
In my most joyous dream, a precious rare appearance,
I am old—old as I am now. But suddenly, my breasts
are filled with milk again and waking I remember

the neonatal ward, where my full-term bilirubin baby
looked like some blue-ribboned, beefy best-in-show.
In reality, of normal size, my jaundiced giantess
dwarfed the pink wrinkled heartbreaking preemies
riddled with tubes and sensors in their Isolettes.

They sent me home in tears, bereft, without my baby—
blindfolded in her fish tank under therapeutic light,
without me (impossible!)—her only known universe.
For two unrelenting days at home, my milk dripped,
useless as my love. For two years after, she drank her fill.

Milk courses through my dappled world of dream.
My breasts are swollen, tender, nipples tipped in red.
My milk is a river flowing to the land of tiny babies.
All—now all can emerge from their boxes, alive.
Those who said I wouldn’t have enough were wrong.

ROUNDUP

I walked through a field just sprayed with herbicide.
Found out later, didn’t know at the time.
A pregnant neighbor, alerted early, got out of town.
But I didn’t sense the stealthy carcinogens
suffusing my system, still don’t know their insidious plans.

I’ve tried so hard to suss out where the mugger lurks,
the track of the careening truck, the cracks
in concrete. How I’ve wished for a well-trained rat
to sniff out all potential minefields in my life.
I scrub melons, wear subway gloves.

Who could imagine that three days after 9/11,
when shifting winds blew the awful ashes
of the fallen towers and the dust of the dead
northwards to the aerie I call home, that I would
(and did) throw open my windows to let my brethren in.

Note: Roundup ™ is a Monsanto herbicide.

_______________________________________________________________________

TIME STRETCHED OUT…

that August when my father died −
like the summer I turned twelve
and my knee started to go soft,
to pull apart, until the doctor
braced it straight for seven weeks,
while pulp knit into bone.

When my father’s legs gave way,
as he trudged to buy the paper,
the pavement cracked his jaw and watch.
In the cancer ward, I wound the stem each day,
as mornings and evenings fused in pain,
and he hid his hands beneath the sheets.

As Father’s life thinned and dimmed,
Mother screamed at the cicadas
whirring and ticking in the endless heat,
like invisible clocks from another planet
with multiple suns and
years of a thousand days.

Time unwound that summer −
returned me to the weeks of nightmares
that my knee had turned to flour and water.
And Father came to soothe me into calmer sleep.
When I kissed him hours before he died,
he whispered he was not afraid.

As old age courteously extends
its clichéd bony hand to me,
I’ve replayed this farewell
like fingers fraying and fraying
the silky edging of a baby blanket
when the lights go out.

Toni Mergentime Levi is a poet and librettist. She is the author of three full-length poetry collections: White Food (2016) and Watching Mother Disappear (2009), both from Mayapple Press, and For A Dancing Bear (1995) from Three Mile Harbor. Her work has appeared in numerous journals including Prairie Schooner, Crosscurrents, Confrontation, Kansas Quarterly, California Quarterly and Apalachee Quarterly, as well as online, on radio (WBAI-FM) and in anthologies. Toni has been awarded residencies at VCCA, Schloss Wiepersdorf (Germany), Konstepidemin (Sweden), MacDowell, Djerassi, Ucross, Millay and Saltonstall. Thanksgiving, one of two operas and several other collaborations with composer Paul Alan Levi, won a Grand Prize for New Opera from the National Music Theater Network. A collaboration with composer Charles Fussell premiered at the Tanglewood Music Center and will be released on a recording by the Boston Modern Opera Project. A native New Yorker, Toni lives in Manhattan. Her website is www.tonilevi.com. The poem “Milk” has been previously published in her collection, White Food.
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TWO POEMS – Patricia Carragon

on November 23 | in Poetry | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

SPIRITUAL

Real estate
plants another tombstone—
“For Sale” signs
on every block

Like the rest of the city,
a lifestyle is under siege
by an urban plague.

The Village is dying,
taking the slow,
cancerous exit.

Below my feet,
apparition vibes
from artists, writers, singers,
musicians, and dancers.

John Coltrane’s “Spiritual”
says prayers
for the living
and the dead.

Jazz
celebrates death,
New Orleans style.

It’s raining
cool Lenten drops
on my umbrella.

SPEAK LOW

The breeze “speaks low,
speaks loud”
of the ocean’s love
for the bay—
cools the summer heat
on my head.

On the bay—
a diamond galaxy,
a sun’s reflection.

Nature in love
with herself.

A ship sails
under the bridge—
my mind wanders
in the opposite direction,
thinks of what was
and what should have been.

Love picks her favorites,
“plays hard to get.”

Time is old,
hides her age,
but young enough
to steal my happiness.

The sun will shine
on the moon tonight,
but her mood
swings in cycles.

I’m not like the moon—
my cycles bleed,
eggs lost in darkness.

What I thought was love,
blew out at dusk.

The tide rises—
clockwise jazz
beats on the terrain.

In my head,
I hear Lady Day sing:

Love is a spark,
lost in the dark too soon,
too soon . . .

Patricia Carragon’s recent publications include Bear Creek Haiku, First Literary Review-East, A Gathering of the Tribes, Jerry Jazz Musician, The Café Review, Muddy River Poetry Review, Krytyka Literacka, Panoplyzine, Poetrybay, and Sensitive Skin. Her latest books from Poets Wear Prada are Meowku and The Cupcake Chronicles, and Innocence from Finishing Line Press. Her first novel, “Angel Fire,” is forthcoming from Alien Buddha Press. Patricia hosts Brownstone Poets and is the editor-in-chief of its annual anthology. She is an executive editor for Home Planet News Online.
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