In this work, I engage with notions of form and beauty that I, as an artist and a social being, have inherited and tacitly acknowledge or actively work against.
Read more at Essay Press
Shira Dentz's "Flounders" from Essay Press
In this work, I engage with notions of form and beauty that I, as an artist and a social being, have inherited and tacitly acknowledge or actively work against.
Read more at Essay Press
“What’s Gone” by Joan Cusack Handler
Is guilt:
Not placing him first
Not visiting more often
Not making soup
Not stopping by on my way to East Hampton
Not joining him for a walk
Not being good enough
Not going to mass
Not believing
Not getting an annulment
Not saying my prayers
Not watching my tongue
Not forgiving my brother
What’s left
is guilt:
Falling back to sleep that morning
Ignoring his DNR that first night,
so he had to fight three more
till his frantic heart convinced us to let him go
My hand slapping his face.
Convincing him to let go of the walker, trust himself & the cane
Escaping to the computer
Dreading the sound of his stick on the floor
announcing the end of his nap & my break
My hand slapping his face
Seeing his pale-boned chest, sad reluctant breasts,
hollowed-out torso
Still avoiding mass
Slapping his face.
Doubting heaven
Losing my faith
Slapping his face.
From Orphans by Joan Cusack Handler
“A Christmas Story “by Robert Cording
This poem is part of CavanKerry’s series for National Poetry Month. Every day in April, we post a poem from our community of writers.
A Christmas Story
by Robert Cording
Sure, I’d had too much wine and not enough
of the Advent hope that candles are lit for;
and I’ll confess up front, I was without charity
for our guest who, glassed in behind those black,
small, rectangular frames, reminded me
of those poems that coldly arrange a puzzle
of non-sequiturs to prove again how language
is defective and life leads to nothing more
than dead-ends. So, after a night of wondering
if our never-more-than-hardly-surprised guest,
a young professor whose field of expertise
seemed to be ironic distance, would give
a moment’s thought, as he took apart everyone’s
unexamined stances, to how and why his own
might be constructed, I blurted out a story
over our Christmas dinner dessert, about
Alexander Wat, how the Polish poet,
taken one day from his Soviet prison
to see a local magistrate, stood in the sun,
reveling in its warmth on his face and arms
and hands; as he took in the beauty
of a woman in a light green dress, he knew
he would soon be back in his prison cell.
He never forgot, he said, the irony of
his freedom, and yet he felt, standing there,
something like a revelation, the autumn day
surging in those silly puffiest white clouds,
and a hardly bearable blue sky, and the bell
of a bicycle ringing, and some people
laughing in a nearby café, and that woman,
her bare languid shoulders turning in the sun—
it was all thrilling, achingly alive, a feast
happening right there on the street between
the prison and a government office, nothing else
mattering, not even the moment he knew
was coming, and arrived, right on schedule,
when he stood woodenly before the magistrate.
And when I had finished, my face flushed,
my guest looked at me with astonishment,
unable to process where so much emotion
had come from, and then asked, calmly as ever,
what I meant when I’d used the word, revelation.
“A Christmas Story” is from Only So Far (CavanKerry Press, 2015).
Robert Cording teaches English and creative writing at College of the Holy Cross where he is Professor of English and Barrett Professor of Creative Writing. He has published seven collections of poems: Life-list (Ohio State University Press/Journal award, 1987); What Binds Us To This World (Copper Beech Press, 1991); Heavy Grace (Alice James, 1996); Against Consolation (CavanKerry, 2002); CommonLife (CavanKerry, 2006); Walking With Ruskin (CavanKerry, 2010); and A Word in My Mouth: Selected Spiritual Poems (Wipf and Stock, 2013).
“Breathing Under Water” and “Standing” by Catherine Doty
This poem is part of CavanKerry’s series for National Poetry Month. Every day in April, we post a poem from our community of writers.
Breathing Under Water
Florida’s just a thumb on a jigsaw puzzle,
but under water the Weeki Watchee Mermaids
pour their tea, cook, exercise, iron clothes, guzzle
with muscular skill their Grapette soda
with only occasional surreptitious sucks
on an air hose hidden in shell-studded scenery.
They grin, open eyes afloat in their blue-lit skulls.
Holding my breath was a skill I practiced, too,
like when I was ten years old and woke to a body
lowering onto my body, and a breath that put me in mind
of a rotten leg, a thing I’d seen in a book once
and which scared me, but not as much as this body
on top of my body, these jabbing fingers. I was wildly aware
that the room I was in was a pigsty, and I was a pig to be sleeping
in my clothes, and I wanted to blame it on someone, which
would have meant speaking, which I could not do—
it would have been too real—and I was too old to blame anyone
anyway. I closed my eyes to make the black world
blacker. The lamp was within my reach, and a railroad spike
I could easily have lifted, and also a bowling ball I’d found
on the tracks, but all I could think of was being ashamed
and dirty, and grateful the whole thing was happening
in black and white, like those mermaids on TV, their lips
and nails a black I knew was red, their long white legs
safely fused in their glistening tails.
Standing, 1964
See her small clothes drop in the blooming weeds—
t-shirt and shorts in the upraised arms of the yarrow.
Her arms are upraised, too—she exults or prays—
she’s narrow and flat, she’s white as Queen Anne’s Lace.
The thatchy back of her head is a patch of knots,
her teeth are rotted, but, then, so are theirs, bared
as the boys reach to touch her, not unkindly.
They are sixteen and she is half their age. Above them
a star goes dark, or many darken—the maple completes
the ring at its very heart. She feels like the pinecone seed
that split the boulder, the bullet exploding the head
of the president: once invisible, once inconsequential,
now singular, at last in her rightful place.
Catherine Doty is the author of a book of poems, Momentum (CavanKerry Press), and a collection of cartoons, Just Kidding (Avocet Press). Her work has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, among them Garrison Keillor’s More Good Poems for Hard Times and Billy Collins’ 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day. She is the recipient of a Marjorie J. Wilson Award, an Academy of American Poets Prize, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Ms. Doty has worked as a visiting artist for the Frost Place, the New York Public Library, and other organizations.
“Ibiza” by Harriet Levin
This poem is part of CavanKerry’s series for National Poetry Month. Every day in April, we post a poem from our community of writers.
Ibiza
by Harriet Levin
I wish I could bumble and buzz
transfer honey to the tongue
of the stranger gyrating his hips,
his drink in his hand,
and lick off the salt rim
encrusting his tongue stud
with the unsullied swagger
of honeybee daggers in captivity
for three thousand miles
when their crate doors swing open
on almond blossoms.
When I sashay up, he recognizes me
as if after 18 years, an event more momentous
than the honeybee release, because at that moment
someone bumps my elbow
and my drink spills and his drink spills
and as he reaches over
to help assemble
the ghostly broken vessels
his knuckles brush the crotch on my too tight jeans
I’d like to hurriedly remove.
Is it just the clinging material
or my soul cleaving
or the solely material
weave of airways
collapsing the dark caves
beneath my eyes?
My fingers let go
stinging with ardor
as if into the bower
of each open flower.
“Ibiza” first appeared in Connotation Press.
Harriet Levin was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to first-generation Eastern European Jewish immigrants. She received her BA in English and Russian at Temple University and her MFA from the University of Iowa, where she also translated works for writers in the International Writing Program.
She is the author of two books of poetry: Girl in Cap and Gown (Mammoth Books, 2010), which was a National Poetry Series finalist, and The Christmas Show (Beacon Press, 1997), which was chosen by Eavan Boland for the Barnard New Women Poets Prize. She is also co-editor of Creativity and Writing Pedagogy: Linking Creative Writers, Researchers and Teachers (Equinox Books, 2014). How Fast Can You Run, a novel based on the life of Lost Boy of Sudan Michael Majok Kuch, (Harvard Square Editions) is forthcoming October 28, 2016.
“Letter from Limbo” by Jeanne Marie Beaumont
This poem is part of CavanKerry’s series for National Poetry Month. Every day in April, we post a poem from our community of writers.
Letter from Limbo
by Jeanne Marie Beaumont
If it proves possible, could you please send replacement
Victrola needles (tungsten), an atlas of your world (recent),
and a box of tailor’s chalk? Also, bishops for chess sets
(light and dark); they disappear at an alarming rate.
And, if it’s not imposing too much, some small
thing salvaged from the sea, even a piece of shell
or driftwood, that retains a scent of salt and scales.
Don’t think me monstrous for mentioning it, but
might you enclose a so-called rabbit’s foot?—
not for luck of course, that issue’s long moot—
it’s just that I so miss something soft at hand to pet.
I wouldn’t inconvenience you for all of heaven’s grails;
any item that’s too much bother above, I beg you forget.
From the forthcoming Letters from Limbo (Cavan Kerry Press, 2016). Originally published in New Letters.
Jeanne Marie Beaumont grew up in the Philadelphia area and moved to New York City in 1983. She holds an MFA in Writing from Columbia University and is the author of four books of poetry. Her first, Placebo Effects, was selected by William Matthews as a winner in the National Poetry Series and published by W.W. Norton in 1997. This was followed by Curious Conduct, published by BOA Editions, Ltd. in 2004, and Burning of the Three Fires, published by BOA in 2010. Her fourth book, Letters from Limbo, is forthcoming from CavanKerry Press in fall 2016. With Claudia Carlson, she co-edited the anthology The Poets’ Grimm: Twentieth Century Poems from Grimm Fairy Tales (Story Line Press, 2003).
“Fantaisie” by Donald Platt
This poem is part of CavanKerry’s series for National Poetry Month. Every day in April, we post a poem from our community of writers.
Fantaisie
by Donald Platt
Each person is
a solar system, the bits of birth’s Big Bang orbiting
some sun that both attracts
and repels. Elliptically, my mother orbits her own death,
that great shining
ball of fire I cannot look directly at. She draws closer to it,
then pulls away. She rotates
as she revolves. Together we write her obituary. Born.
Schooled. Worked as.
Married to. Gave birth. Resided. Retired. Is survived by.
The old story
we all get to write if we’re lucky, or one that will willy-nilly
get written for us.
I leave the day she’ll die blank. She gives me the notes
she wrote last night:
“Funeral in Christ Church and Bill Eakins to preach.
Ask Women’s Guild
to serve a simple refreshment. Give $100 to organist.
Give $5,000
to church. Give $500 to Bill Eakins. Give $1,000 to women.
Give $250
to soloist. No calling hours. Only the church service.
Nobody
getting up and saying nice things about me. Everyone
has their own
memories—good, bad, and indifferent. Chief purpose
of a funeral
is to pray for the departed. Also to give comfort
to those who grieve.
Call Hickey Funeral Home.” As an after-thought, she added
“Ask Charlene
to play Saint-Saëns’ Fantaisie for violin and harp.
You’ll need to find
a harpist.” Everyone needs a harpist to accompany her living
and her dying.
No one to turn to but the seated, marble harp player
at the Metropolitan Museum
of Art, early Cycladic, eleven and a half inches high.
He embraces
the D-shaped instrument, whose top is ornamented
with the head
of a waterfowl. Against his right thigh and stone shoulder, he rests
the weight
of the instrument. It has no strings. His raised right thumb plucks
five thousand years of silence.
“Fantaisie” was originally published in the New Ohio Review, Spring 2016.
Donald Platt has published four previous books of poetry, Dirt Angels, My Father Says Grace, Cloud Atlas, and Fresh Peaches, Fireworks, & Guns. He has been awarded two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and three Pushcart Prizes. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, New Republic, Poetry, Paris Review, Kenyon Review, Georgia Review, Southwest Review, Ploughshares, Iowa Review, and Southern Review, as well as in three editions of The Best American Poetry. He teaches in the MFA program at Purdue University.
“Abloom & Awry” by Tina Kelley
This poem is part of CavanKerry’s series for National Poetry Month. Every day in April, we post a poem from our community of writers.
Abloom & Awry
by Tina Kelley
God lurks in the story of stethoscope,
kaleidoscope, microscope, but also in the punched
ache of falling apart: accidents, insanities, plot twists
surpassing human imagination. God’s the sparrow
in the convention center, the skateboard akimbo
on the freeway shoulder, the perfect paw
reaching out of the long-flat roadkill, and somehow
the father shooting his two daughters, third wife
and self, leaving the baby son safe asleep.
God is all those lost, up in the God world
being nothing, stuck between the notes.
I worship the grape molding in the bunch’s depths,
our neighbors’ ruttings and fights our baby monitor
picks up, the metastasis of laughter, cauterization
of grief, that maroon bog-shininess of ancient remains,
the magnificat of dew on lady’s mantel leaf, the cousin
born with fetus in fetu, her twin parasitizing her ovary,
the first caveman to huck a rock at his chum’s skull,
the walk Joe took, alone, to spread his arm’s ashes,
the cruelty young boys show to turtles, the suicidality
of child molesters, even pustard, that liquid dripping
from the bottle when all you really want is mustard.
I worship weird domestic ways to die,
electrocution by lovesong falling in bathtub,
infant decapitation by ceiling fan, while I praise
ways to create, painting with menstrual blood
on cave walls, zen sand art by kitty in litter,
painted toddler feet tromping on the ceiling.
I worship every reason I cried this year,
slow songs, missing Dad, children refusing
to come downstairs for their special pancakes,
adoptive mother heartbroken at a son’s sins,
also every new song I loved this year, but
most of all, if I may see, the many years to come.
“Abloom & Awry” is the title poem of her third collection, which CavanKerry is printing next year. It previously won the New Jersey Poets Prize from the Journal of New Jersey Poets in 2014.
Tina Kelley’s third poetry collection, Abloom & Awry, is coming out next spring from CavanKerry Press. She also wrote Precise and The Gospel of Galore, which won the Washington State Book Award, and co-authored Almost Home: Helping Kids Move from Homelessness to Hope. She was a reporter at The New York Times for a decade.
Two poems from Shira Dentz
This poem is part of CavanKerry’s series for National Poetry Month. Every day in April, we post a poem from our community of writers.
Palm trees blowing, feathers
evening’s husk, palm
trees black.
can see
nothing
against
evening’s husk
but light
of after.
palm
trees
lolling light
of after. my sister, my sister, my
sister,
my
sister,
my sis
bird black
birds, pockets of air.
breeze sloping cotton. birds sloping calm. breeze alone percussive. alone more cotton. clouds lawn the luminous noon. field shadow.
a tittering, quite pretty
outside, rushing interior. luminous green cover, percussive. it’s the rushing feels beautiful
luminous distance, green time like clouds of solitude, the well interior. the air. calm. percussive. birds that’s air.,
clouds, being of the past, tittering
Both poems were previously published in 32 Poems
Shira Dentz is the author of three full-length books, black seeds on a white dish (Shearsman), door of thin skins (CavanKerry), and how do i net thee (forthcoming) and two chapbooks, Leaf Weather (Shearsman), and Flounders (Essay Press, released this month).
Her writing has appeared widely in journals including The American Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, New American Writing, Lana Turner, jubilat, and Western Humanities Review, and featured at The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, NPR, OmniVerse, Poetry Daily, and Verse Daily. My awards include an Academy of American Poets’ Prize, the Poetry Society of America’s Lyric Poem and Cecil Hemley Memorial Awards, Electronic Poetry Review’s Discovery Award, and Painted Bride Quarterly’s Poetry Prize. Her poem-video, “Saidst,” is featured this month (April) at PoetrySeen. A graduate of the Iowa Writers‘ Workshop,she has a doctorate in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Utah. Shira was Drunken Boat‘s Reviews Editor from 2011-2016, and curates DB blog’s feature, “What I’m Reading Now…,” as well as reviews for Tarpaulin Sky. She teaches creative writing at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. More about my writing can be found at shiradentz.com.
“French Seams” by Cindy Veach
This poem is part of CavanKerry’s series for National Poetry Month. Every day in April, we post a poem from our community of writers.
French Seams
By Cindy Veach
This little useless seam/this idle patch/this pretty futile seam.
—Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson
From Nanny Paquereau
I learned to sew French seams—
seams that hide raw edges
within the seam itself.
Seams that won’t unravel,
that are neat,
even on the wrong side—
finished she’d say.
Seams that take planning, accurate
estimating, extra fabric—
each one folded over twice—
making allowances she called it.
Hers were meticulous, unrivaled.
They could be counted on
to hold. They never ripped or frayed.
Still, the marriage unraveled early.
She had to stitch shoes
at McElwin’s in Nashua
and raise a latch key kid.
When social security
could not sustain her
she came to live with us.
Garter stitch dishrags all she could manage
when senility set in.
From Nanny Paquereau
I learned to hide raw edges
within the seam itself
each one folded over twice—
making allowances she called it.
Even on the wrong side
I would not rip or fray.
I would be counted on
to hold. I would be neat,
meticulous, unrivaled.
It would take planning, accurate
estimating, extra fabric—
Still, the marriage raveled
I had to stitch and stitch
fold and fold and fold
all that extra yardage
I could not salvage us—
finished she’d say.
French Seams, which first appeared in The Journal and is included in the manuscript, Gloved Against Blood, which CavanKerry recently accepted for publication.
Cindy Veach’s debut poetry collection is forthcoming from CavanKerry Press. Her poems have appeared most recently inMichigan Quarterly Review, The Journal, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Poet Lore, North American Review, Chiron and The Human Journal. She was a finalist for the Ann Stanford Prize, and the recipient of honorable mentions in the Ratner-Ferber-Poet Lore Prize and Crab Creek Review Poetry Prize. She manages fundraising programs for nonprofit organizations and serves as a volunteer formasspoetry.org. She lives in Manchester, MA.
“Against Elegies” by Jack Ridl
This poem is part of CavanKerry’s series for National Poetry Month. Every day in April, we post a poem from our community of writers.
Against Elegies
By Jack Ridl
I’m tired of Death’s allure,
of how the old beggar
makes me think that
rowing across the river is
somehow richer, more serious, than
the center of a pomegranate or my
dog’s way of sleeping on his paws.
I’m tired of ”the beauty of the elegy,”
the tone deaf lyricism of it all. I
want Death to listen for awhile
to Bud Powell or Art Blakey,
to have to stare for seven hours
at Matisse. I want him to do
standup and play the banjo, to
have to tap-dance and juggle, to
play Trivial Pursuit and weed
my garden. I’m tired of how Death
throws his voice, gets us
to judge a begonia, a song
in the shower, a voice, old dog.
I want life’s ragged way
of getting along, the wasted
afternoon and empty morning, the
sloppy kiss. I want to stagger
along between innings. I want
the burnt toast, the forgotten note,
and the lost pillow case, the dime
novel, and the Silly Putty of it all.
“Against Elegies” was first published in Poetry
JACK RIDL is the author of several collections of poetry — including Broken Symmetry, Outside the Center Ring and Against Elegies — and several literature textbooks. He taught poetry and literature for thirty-six years, was named one of the 100 most influential educators in the world of sport by the Institute for International Sport, and awarded Michigan Professor of the Year by the CASE/Carnegies foundation. He learned about basketball from his father, Hall of Fame basketball coach C.G. “Buzz” Ridl.
“The Spear-Danes Thank Beowulf for Killing the Monsters” by Dawn Potter
This poem is part of CavanKerry’s series for National Poetry Month. Every day in April, we post a poem from our community of writers.
The Spear-Danes Thank Beowulf for Killing the Monsters
by Dawn Potter
Eight horses—
heads tossing throats pulsing with sweat
bridles glinting a streak of sun black grey
pied chestnut hooves thudding clattering
a lurch quick shiver of mane
forelock tail cascade of muscle
trembled nose trembled lip
and the hot breath the wild almond eyes—
For you, says the king.
All for you.
Dawn Potter directs the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching, held each summer at Robert Frost’s home in Franconia, New Hampshire. She works as a visiting writer in the schools and as a freelance editor for literary and academic presses.
Dawn is the author or editor of seven books of prose and poetry. Same Old Story, her most recent poetry collection, was a nominee for the 2014 Los Angeles Times Book Award for Poetry. Her memoir, Tracing Paradise: Two Years in Harmony with John Milton, won the 2010 Maine Literary Award in Nonfiction, and she has also received grants and fellowships from the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Writer’s Center, and the Maine Arts Commission. Her poems and essays have appeared in the Beloit Poetry Journal, the Sewanee Review, the Threepenny Review, and many other journals in the United States and abroad.
“Climate” by Baron Wormser
This poem is part of CavanKerry’s series for National Poetry Month. Every day in April, we post a poem from our community of writers.
Climate
by Baron Wormser
Elyse, aged nine, worries about the ice
And polar bears with no place to go.
She lies in bed, alert to her fraught life;
Downstairs her mother weeps. The words wife,
Unfair, too long, elongate and explode.
Elyse, aged nine, worries about the ice.
Her father tries to soothe this endless strife.
He talks like that, full of what he calls woe.
She lies in bed, alert to her fraught life
Where no beautiful animals entice
Little girls to live in homes of snow.
Elyse, aged nine, worries about the ice.
Igloos melt, mothers mutter, knife
The empty kitchen air, pace to and fro.
She lies in bed, alert to her fraught life.
What’s been done is done not so much in spite
As fear—love marooned on a floe.
Elyse, aged nine, worries about the ice.
She lies in bed, alert to her fraught life.
Baron Wormser is the author/co-author of fourteen books and a poetry chapbook. Wormser has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Bread Loaf, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. From 2000 to 2006 he served as poet laureate of the state of Maine. The founding director of the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching, he teaches in the Fairfield University MFA Program and at his home in Montpelier, Vermont.
“A Woman’s Face” by Carole Stone
This poem is part of CavanKerry’s series for National Poetry Month. Every day in April, we post a poem from our community of writers.
A Woman’s Face
by Carole Stone
I look into the mirror to see who’s there.
Is this a trick a magician plays?
She looks like me but with wrinkles and gray hair.
I hardly recognize this woman who stares
back but I’m not ready to give up the ways
I look into the mirror to see who’s there.
Have I reached the stage where I prepare
to live with whoever I am these days?
She looks like me but with wrinkles and gray hair.
I search for my former self everywhere,
on the dance floor where she sways.
I look into the mirror to see who’s there.
Not the woman I was with my fashion flair,
so young and ready for nightly soirées.
She looks like me but with wrinkles and gray hair.
I won’t let myself fall into despair.
It’s tough when, like desire, your face decays.
I look into the mirror; I see who’s there.
She looks like me with wrinkles and gray hair.
CAROLE STONE is the author of two books of poetry and seven chapbooks as well as many critical essays on writers, among them George Eliot, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Sylvia Plath. A recipient of fellowships from The NJ State Council on the Arts and residencies at Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for Writers in Scotland and Chateau de Lavigny in Switzerland, she is Professor of English Emerita, Montclair State University. She divides her time between New Jersey and East Hampton, N.Y.
“The Great Blue Heron” by Wanda S. Praisner
This poem is part of CavanKerry’s series for National Poetry Month. Every day in April, we post a poem from our community of writers.
The Great Blue Heron
by Wanda S. Praisner
A heavy downpour, no one in the park,
not even the heron, as raindrops pock
the glass pond into one of those bubbled
& rippled windows you see
but can’t see through, but it clears
as I leave, when I spot the heron
in the distance, statue-like in water,
only an inch or so in size,
its ghostly silhouette the color of low clouds
in tall trees, its neck like the crook
of my brother’s cane he can’t use now
in the nursing home—six months since he
could stand—the bird still & patient,
waiting to strike, like death,
with us from first inhale to last,
like the smell of our bodies
without benefit of powder, lotion, cologne—
& sensing my presence, the Great Blue lifts up
& beyond where I can see.
Wanda S. Praisner, a recipient of Poetry Fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, is the author of Sometimes When Something Is Singing (Antrim House, 2014), Where the Dead Are (CavanKerry), A Fine and Bitter Snow (Palanquin Press, UCSA, 2003) and On the Bittersweet Avenues of Pomona (winner of the Spire Press Poetry Chapbook Competition, 2005). Winner of The Devil’s Millhopper Kudzu Prize, The Maryland Poetry Review’s Egan Memorial Award, and First Prize in Poetry at the College of New Jersey’s Writers’ Conference, she has been nominated ten times for a Pushcart Prize. A retired educator, she is a Poet in Residence for the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. She lives with her husband in Bedminster, New Jersey.
“Justice” by Kevin Carey
This poem is part of CavanKerry’s series for National Poetry Month. Every day in April, we post a poem from our community of writers.
Justice
By Kevin Carey
For Jack Highberger
We sit in his van, art supplies
and partially scraped palettes
on the floor, my back pack
of poems next to me on the seat.
We drink coffee and tea
looking over the salt water river
behind Starbucks,
a seagull on a rotted raft,
a sailboat sitting on a mud bank.
He wants to know what’s fair
about how America has sold out
to Wall Street and made the middle class
foot the bonus bill. I tell him
nothing is fair, those are the rules.
I tell him I’ve surrendered.
The problem is too big I say
the monster too strong.
I think of it stomping tiny buildings,
villagers running for the hills.
He’s not satisfied with my answer
and I know why, the idea
of not setting it right makes no sense to him.
He wants what we all want – justice.
I sip some more tea,
look at the water, the way the dirty
river winds to nowhere,
to the promise of open ocean,
and I think the only way to beat them
is too live in spite of them.
I can help a kid to maybe write
a poem he didn’t know he had in him.
He can show that clumsy little girl
how to make a painting
that will change her life,
there’s real joy in that, I say.
The other universe operates on its own,
the rich live in a different climate,
all we can do is hope
they don’t notice us,
hope they read poetry,
hope they buy art,
hope someday it makes sense to them.
“Justice” is part of new book coming in October (Jesus Was a Homeboy, CavanKerry) and was previously published in the journal Juked .
Kevin Carey teaches in the English Department at Salem State University. He writes poetry, fiction, plays, and the occasional film script. His work can be found in several literary journals, among them: The Apple Valley Review, The Literary Review, The Comstock Review, and The Paterson Literary Review. Kevin is currently at work on a documentary film about Salem poet Malcom Miller. His book of poetry, The One Fifteen to Penn Station, is available from CavanKerry Press.
“OMI” by Joan Seliger Sidney
This poem is part of CavanKerry’s series for National Poetry Month. Every day in April, we post a poem from our community of writers.
OMI,
the name you called your grandma
became your name for JoJo, Amelia,
Ruby and Benjamin. Knit one row,
turn and purl the next, you showed
them. Impossible to count the lifetime
of sweaters, baby gifts you knit in no-time.
Impossible to count the number
of pregnant teenagers you mothered
for almost three decades at the Corner
Health Center you co-founded, directed.
For them, you ignored days of migraines,
living on ibuprofen to dull your pain.
Who knew then those pills would kill
your kidneys? First your blood pressure
spiked, sending you again and again to the ER.
Three times a week you began dialysis.
For many, this treatment’s miraculous.
Three weeks ago you called, your voice
as always cheerful, chattering joyfully
about our grandchildren, both of us
anxious to see them back on the school bus
in Wisconsin after your daughter’s sabbatical
in Israel. Who would have guessed the radical
change? Two days later, you in the ICU,
fighting four infections. How bitter this adieu!
for Joan Eleanor Schloessinger Chesler
Joan Seliger Sidney is a writer of poetry and children’s books 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.
“Bottom Land” by Margo Taft Stever
This poem is part of CavanKerry’s series for National Poetry Month. Every day in April, we post a poem from our community of writers.
Bottom Land
by Margo Taft Stever
Evening tidings, the preparations,
each nestle, each cheep, like chicks calling,
the winnowing anomie, all
come to call too late, come
to call for sleep.
How a mother can change from angel
to sour mudqueen of all decay
by those who feel the sting, by those
who cry out.
Flail my heart upon the stone
in the grove near the riverbank,
rushing water to the river break.
Even the known becomes unknowable.
Their small eyes look at me like chicks
gathered against rain, staved.
Thin rivulets of fear, running-away-
with-itself fear, fearful fear.
No one can talk to you, no one
can listen, no one can touch you.
This is not stillness, this is not the keeper
of the estuary of the deep.
Don’t forget me, don’t forget that hill
the horses cantered you down
to the bottom land.
From this stone, ageless,
remember your mother,
a mother who loved her children.
“Bottom Land” was first published by Prairie Schooner and also included in Margo’s manuscript, CRACKED PIANO, which was recently accepted by CavanKerry Press.
Margo Taft Stever is an award-winning poet whose readings include the internationally acclaimed Troubadour Café, London; Cornelius Street Cafe, New York; Geraldine Dodge Poetry Festival, Newark; and the Shanghai International Studies University, Shanghai. Her first book, Frozen Spring (2002), was the winner of the Mid-List Press First Series Award for Poetry, and her first chapbook, Reading the Night Sky (Introduction by Denise Levertov), won the 1996 Riverstone Poetry Chapbook Competition.
“A Man Lies at my Feet” by Jean Churchill
This poem is part of CavanKerry’s series for National Poetry Month. Every day in April, we post a poem from our community of writers.
A Man Lies at my Feet
by Jean Churchill
A man lies at my feet
and a woman, and another over there.
I glide between bodies. Hovering,
Maybe to touch, where?
and what to say?
My hand on his inner thigh
likely to frighten him away,
self conscious, shy,
in tense predicament,
he has detached his shell.
He tries to move a ligament
under my professional spell;
My gaze investigates the body
of this person by my feet.
I know his muscles ache.
I swoop deep,
I touch above his calf to make
my point.
Talon, forceps or cradle.
Hazardous, the profile of my power
With which instructors earn their fees
the wide world over,
who presume, preside with an expertise
over beginners’ obedient bodies on a floor,
four fragile yielding limbs,
uncertain tendons, try to explore
We can disfigure with our reach—
We can wound far more
easily than teach
“Facing It” by Judith Sornberger
This poem is part of CavanKerry’s series for National Poetry Month. Every day in April, we post a poem from our community of writers.
Facing It
by Judith Sornberger
How many poets does it take
to change the world?
All the elegies ever written
for creatures killed on roads
can’t bring back a single one.
Today I still live in the world
where goldfinches gorge
on dandelion fluff in morning sun.
When I open the window
they still rise in multitudes—
a fountain bright, I tell myself,
as forgiveness.
Yesterday, driving faster
than anyone needs to, I felt a bump,
a loud clunk against my tire.
In the mirror, the snapping turtle rocked
in the highway on its carapace.
She must have been crossing
on her way to lay eggs.
I could have turned around
several times, but why go back?
I was late, and there might be worse
to see than claws raking the air.
But finally I did what people sometimes do—
turned around to face the damage.
Though other cars had passed,
they must have swerved, for she lay there
as I’d left her. One leg trembled
when I picked her up, and scarlet drops
dripped from her beak.
I set her in deep grass well off the asphalt,
pretending, I suppose, that she might make it
to wherever she was going
to bury her leathery globes.
What do other people do after
they see what they’ve destroyed?
What do they do if they don’t write poems?
How many snappers crossing the road
does it take for a nest of eggs to hatch,
for a single hatchling to scramble
to water before it’s munched
by snake, raccoon or skunk?
What would it take for the world
to keep crawling forward,
scraping its egg-laden belly,
toward a place ancient
as the dream of going on?
Judith Sornberger is the author of one full-length poetry collection, Open Heart (Calyx Books), and five chapbooks, most recently Wal-Mart Orchid, winner of the 2012 Helen Kay Chapbook Prize. The Hard Grammar of Gratitude won the 2010 Tennessee Chapbook Competition. Her other three chapbooks are: Judith Beheading Holofernes (winner of the Talent House Press chapbook contest), Bifocals Barbie: A Midlife Pantheon (Talent House Press), and Bones of Light(Parallel Press).
“Penitentiary Easter” by Celia Bland
This poem is part of CavanKerry’s series for National Poetry Month. Every day in April, we post a poem from our community of writers.
Penitentiary Easter
by Celia Bland
In prison, it struck you:
it wasn’t Daddy’s chickens you hated
but their numbers — the scores
scratching sawdust with spurred claws
in the barn,
sequins pinned for eyes.
Just like those lash-lined
hog-eyes watching you shit
between the roots of the oak, then
wade into the creek to sluice off
chicken creosote.
Prison mess is the scratch and caw
of roosters at the feeders.
And here’s you again
scooping into troughs stinking of saltpeter and
potato goop.
They say a cock
crew when Peter denied our Saviour,
comb like chawed meat, skull
full of beans.
But even Jesus knew:
chickens just gotta doodle-doo.
CELIA BLAND is the author of thirteen books for young readers, including the historical novel, The Conspiracy of the Secret Nine, which was a finalist for the Heckin Award for Children’s Fiction. Her poetry has been collected in anthologies published by CavanKerry, Persea and Faber & Faber, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She is a contributing editor to The New York Public Library Desk Reference, and has published articles in Poets & Writers, Forbes Best of the Web, Art & Antiques and other magazines. She lives in New York’s Hudson Valley and is Director of College Writing at Bard College.
“More Than the Weight of its Laden Branches” by Sarah Sousa
This poem is part of CavanKerry’s series for National Poetry Month. Every day in April, we post a poem from our community of writers.
More Than the Weight of its Laden Branches
by Sarah Sousa
The cottage has an apple tree and textbooks
in the attic, a couch slashed by bars of sun
where I lay tragic as a wine spill.
Because I fear discovery by the man
who mows the lawn, I keep my routine
simple: wake early with the birds,
wash in the stream, harvest water and apples.
Keep out of sight, conserve energy.
Three apples a day times twenty years equals…
When I stand too quickly the room goes
dim. In autumn I pick the tree
clean, store the apples in a pillowcase
for winter. I move like a ghost
behind faded curtains, ration my reading,
ration the apples, and make lists
in a black address book: embolism, sharp
cheddar, rhizome, cell division, linguini and clams.
I write: I know I will die of starvation
and should leave here. I stay.
I write: God is sending a husband
and wishes me to wait for Christmas.
Three apples a day times three months
equals…I wait. Christmas comes,
the new year, clumps of hair in the bed.
I believe the remedy to be profuse
sunshine and love. I believe I will
die of starvation. Thirty days ago
I ate the last apple. It’s cold
but the chickadees will sing me
(nobody-nobody-nobody) through winter.
I stop reading. I follow, on hands and knees,
the sun as it moves through the rooms,
lie down in its patches. The heater’s breath
grows shallower every day.
I know I should leave but don’t.
For one: I can no longer stand,
two: it’s so peaceful here. I have everything
I ever wanted—an apple tree equals
more than the weight of its laden branches.
When my husband arrives we’ll add
a garden and a smokehouse. My heart-
beat slows to an icicle’s thin drip. I write:
whomever finds my body should know
this was a case of domestic violence.
Sarah Sousa’s poems have appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Fugue, Passages North, Barn Owl Review, and Fourteen Hills, among others. She has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize, is the 2015 recipient of the Anne Halley Poetry Prize from The Massachusetts Review and a 2016 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow.
CavanKerry is publishing Sarah’s next collection in 2018. To learn more about Sarah visit sarahasousa.com
Loren Graham and Brent Newsom: 2016 Oklahoma Book Award Finalists
Congrats to Loren Graham (Places I Was Dreaming) and Brent Newsom (Love’s Labors) on being named 2016 Oklahoma Book Award Finalists in poetry!
Finalists will be announced at the 27th Annual Oklahoma Book Awards on Saturday, April 9th.
Adriana Páramo’s “My Mother’s Funeral” awarded 2015 Whirling Prize
“The memoir My Mother’s Funeral by Adriana Páramo and the poetry collection Sad Math by Sarah Freligh are winners of the latest contest, which invited writers across the nation to submit examples of the Bildungsroman, or coming-of-age, literary genre.”
Read more at University of Indianapolis
Baron Wormser’s “The Irony and the Ecstasy: On the Nature of Poetry”
Check out Baron Wormser’s lecture, part of Sundog Poetry Center’s Poets & Their Craft series.
Vermont PBS is currently making a series of the lectures and sit down interviews with the featured poets. It will air later this winter.
[vimeo 143393760 w=500 h=281]
Poets & Their Craft: Ep10 – Baron Wormser at Misty Valley Books in Chester from Mt. Mansfield Community TV on Vimeo.
“Ars Poetica” by Robin Silbergleid
As the world awakens you sit straightbacked at your desk. Coffee
brews, and breakfast. The smell wafts up the stairs.
Coffee, the computer, maybe a pen. If you were Billy Collins
details like these would unfurl into something magical
each blue Bic pen entering the realm of the symbolic:
French croissants and the curve of the moon. For now
greatness is as far off as the moon in the sky. The question
how to write a poem. Consult Donald Hall, Mary Oliver
interrogate all the authorities and still, here you are,
just a young poet struggling, a handful of syllables.
K sticks in your throat. Kestrel, kingfisher.
Line by pathetic line, the poem limps along, a hard labor. This
metaphor comes from the only place that matters, the baby
nestled in its mother’s pelvis, the midwife urging the body to
open. You can hear her moaning oh-oh-oh-oooh,
perineum stretching, the push splitting her in two. No
quest here, no Cantos, no Paterson, not even a Prelude, or
Richard Hugo’s Triggering Town. Reproduction, not
sex or romance. It’s embryos in petri dishes,
trigger shots of gonadotropin, test after test after test.
Ultimately maybe that’s all we can ever ask for, some
vials of blood, dark tubes rolled in the nurse’s hands.
When you’re stuck—like now—you go back to conception
x meets x and nine months later, a girl is born.
Your hands are greedy, you want to hold her, the camera
zooms in on the young mother’s face and stops
zooms out to the hospital room, the snow on the windows,
yellow balloons, vases flush with daffodils. You haven’t had s-ex
in so long you’ve forgotten how the body moves, the creamy
white of your skin against your lover’s. Wordsworth writes of the
vale, the river, the mountain, nature as the source of the sublime—
under the poet’s spell the world becomes metaphor
tenor humming against vehicle like a bird ready to take flight.
Still, you sit here, pecking out words, letting the syllables
roll in your mouth like stones. It’s that flat gray of winter
quiet when nothing ever happens, when you wait
patiently, for a delivery truck, for the stick to turn blue, ping of
ovulation when anything is possible, a spark in the ovary,
nestling embryo, nights when you dream of possibility,
menses marked on the calendar in pink, your wait
longer than you ever dreamed. You fiddle, try your hand at
kyrielle, villanelle, sonnet, sestina, you’ll try anything.
Just start. Jump right in. Don’t think too hard.
Infertility begets infertility. Remember this in the
Harmony Room, where the doctor
guides your legs into the stirrups, says you’ll
feel my touch, and she is so tender
every nerve in your body begins to hum and
despite everything, despite months of failure and rejection, this
could work. In two weeks the stick could turn
blue, in nine months, a baby, a book
a single-celled wish. Amen.
From The Baby Book by Robin Silbergleid
“Patchwork” by Baron Wormser
The remnants of love come down to
An old calico cat sitting in the early morning
Before our bedroom door croaking
Feed me
You fed me yesterday
And whatever came before yesterday
And the Boy Scout knife I carry
Though it is not a knife, file, letter opener,
Scissors, or can opener but
An ugly faded green plastic and metal
Relic of something I never cared for anyway
But thought I should.
And your sleeping face
One of countless, present-yet-absent masks,
A breathy flower,
Eyes closed, sedate, sightlessly staring
Into the heights of nothingness
Until some memory spooks your soul—
The fourth-grade cloakroom,
Two bigger girls who have it in for you.
And the patchwork quilt on our bed—
Our saving genius.
Frayed and lumpy
Assembled by patient hands
From the unnoticeable, from cloth
That started out sunny as sight,
Confident matter ending with a wince—
Cat whining, knife dull,
Your face mortally still, slandered by oblivion—
Yet become a whole:
Something larger, if not grander.
From Unidentified Flying Objects
By Baron Wormser
“I Wonder” by Sarah Bracey White
Sarah Bracey White’s ekphrastic poem, “I Wonder,” was selected for inclusion in WARC’s “Poetry and Outsider Art Celebration!” The event explored visual and spoken works of art between individuals with disabilities, community artists and local poets. The event took place in April at “Gallery 265″in Hawthorn, NY.
Sarah’s poem, a reflection on “Wonder Woman” by G.G. Kopliak, was displayed and published side-by-side with the artwork in the gallery book and at the festival.
I Wonder
by Sarah Bracey White
I am a girl-child.
Possibilities were tucked
into the pink folds of my baby blanket
and woven into my lullabies.
Under loving eyes, I grew.
Now, I watch everything:
Grandma in high heeled sandals
Mother in yoga pants
Auntie in business suits.
But, it’s the super-heroes who mesmerize me.
Their costumes seem to transform them
from ordinary mortals into wonderous beings
able to do incredible things.
I wear WonderWoman’s color-coded outfit
hoping its lively symbols will speak for me
as I play at being who I’m not,
in a suit that I’m quickly outgrowing.
Somehow, I know that what I now wear
does not define me.
I wonder who I really am? Where I’m going?
And what shall I wear?
A selection from “Esther: A Novel in Verse”
Her horse was the closest thing to a friend
Esther had in those mountains.
They rode one morning along the hogback,
then moved west where the escarpment
leveled off, higher into the foothills.
Esther halted to rest,
let the paint drink from spring runoff meandering
through a meadow of greasewood and sage.
She tied him to a sapling, stroked
his long neck and withers, the base of his ear,
and down his silky cheek, all the while
crooning, Good horse. There’s a good horse.
At the edge of the stream, Esther cupped water
and drank greedily, her reflection
rippling outward in perfect circles. Then something
moved on the opposite bank.
She stood up in surprise, shielding her eyes
from the sun to see what was there.
A man took shape in the haze.
Behind him a wide fringe of ponderosa pine
spread like enormous wings.
Raymond had been there first, had watched
Esther ride up to the stream and dismount, her paint
bow his head and nicker as Esther gentled him.
He’d wanted to shout hello when she first appeared
riding slowly through the sage, but thought
better of it. What if she didn’t remember him?
But Esther did remember him—the delicious
startle and confusion that day in the kitchen,
a young man approaching her without|
warning, wanting nothing from her.
When he’d stumbled out, she had quickly
refastened her smock and sat for a bit in the stillness.
She could feel his presence in the room,
closed her eyes and breathed him in.
Now, from across the stream she felt it—
and before she realized, she’d raised her hand
in greeting, and Raymond did the same.
He paused, then waded across the shallow water,
leading his own horse behind him. His shadow
reached her before him, and the fragrant
complexity of leather and horse, a man’s clean
sweat, meadow of wild onion and prickly pear.
I’m sorry if I frightened you, ma’am, Raymond said,
stepping carefully toward her.
Perhaps it was improper for her to speak.
But how pleased she was to encounter him
here—how beautiful she felt
in the dazzle of morning.
Pam Bernard, a poet, painter, editor, and adjunct professor, received her MFA in Creative Writing from Warren Wilson College and BA from Harvard University. Her awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry and a MacDowell Fellowship. Ms. Bernard lives in Walpole, New Hampshire, and teaches at the New Hampshire Institute of Art and Franklin Pierce University.
Cooking Fried Rice by Brent Newsom
My wife’s white-socked feet
polish the gray vinyl tile of our kitchen.
She spins from fridge to stove
while I stand at the cutting board,
cilantro on the altar, a sacrifice
to the tiny tongue-throned gods
of our taste buds
who, later, will convene in a kiss
like the pantheon on Olympus
or fallen angels in the lake of fire.
Maybe it’s the garlic,
the pungent onion, the ginger singed
in hot oil spreading itself
over the base of the wok,
or else the cilantro’s scent
wafting its message, I am green,
I am the essence of freshness,
like wisps of smoke from a censer,
this choir of fragrance chanting praise
in harmony amid the stained-glass hues
of carrot, tomato, spinach,
whatever progeny of earth and seed
she’s found in the crisper,
while rice simmers on the back burner,
white bubbles pressed together,
rising, lifting the glass lid till it rattles
and, senses buzzing, she breaks
into motion, some jaunty bounce,
knees bent, arms raised, the dance
of a child who has not learned
to fear, of a priestess
enthralled, of a woman in love.
She stays the knife beneath my hand,
pulls me into her movements,
and—two bubbles conjoined—
our bodies make a single swaying temple.
From Love’s Labors
By Brent Newsom
Return by Loren Graham
Return
Suddenly I craved recess from that noisy
house, from that pack, from much older cousins
and all those aunts and uncles, half a dozen
at a time who laughed at my teasing stories.
Their voices seemed to multiply and push me
outside somehow. I didn’t know the reason
exactly: it was not some new aversion
to them—I loved them—but to any company
at all. And so I learned to disappear
into the space beneath the ball-like bush
out front, to part its thick soft leaves and sheer
white flowers and rest in its green womb, to push
my spine against its barky spine, to peer
at my dog Elvis smiling in that hushed
cool world until a fresh
strange little tune made itself in my mind
and spilled out whispered on my lips, a kind
of story bound to steer
itself by song, a story I would tell
them all when I went back, whenever I fell
to wanting them, the spell
of silence undone by a little wash
of loneliness I knew would push me, force
me back to that packed house.
From Places I Was Dreaming
By Loren Graham
“A Mother’s Tale” by January Gill O’Neil
A Mother’s Tale
I tell my son
that the best poems
are written in the sand
and washed away with the tide.
I say the moon controls the waves,
uses the wind to rake the shore.
It is an open invitation to fill
the world with words
because like seashells
you can never have too many.
I tell him to wade into the water.
Start a conversation with
the tiniest grain on the beach,
the one that catches his eye with its glint.
It will tell him everything he needs to know
about this moment, about how to stay in it
a little longer. It will tell him how to be,
for an instant, the thing he most wants
to become.
From Misery Islands
by January Gill O’Neil
For Florenz: “Goya’s Instructions” by Baron Wormser
Before the stench is vicious
Sketch the corpses
Where the bomb has visited,
Where limbs and torsos roost
Obediently
And the vitals lie open
To frank but harmless light.
Resist the impulse of simile.
Art instructs us
To linger in the present.
Human hands assembled
These deaths. Stained
Fingers remain beautiful.
Blame God for dexterity.
Resist too the camera’s
Encompassing wisdom.
Mark by eager mark
Ferret this disaster—
The hand’s best work
Is to feel like the blind
Through the fog of suffering.
Do not fret. Do not turn
Away. Later there
Will be the valedictions
Of flowers and creeds.
Cries and wails will shred
The air but loss cannot
Be summed. Draw, then,
So lines can fashion
Feeling. What is blank
Can be contoured in black.
No priest can undo
Such persistent vision.
On that half face there—
The effigy of a grin.
“At Our Feet” by Annie Boutelle
And how was it to be eighteen
and innocent as hell, and who
wasn’t disguised then, in the grey
medieval town, red gown wrapped
tight around each one. Flying
down Hepburn gardens on a bike,
shillings in the meter, sherry (dry)
with Kay McIver before Sunday
lunch. We didn’t have a clue—
babies spouting politics, downing
wine, sucking menthol cigarettes,
I tell you, we knew to pretend. And
how beautiful, like apples, we were,
polished, shining, intact still, skin
glistening, each heart beating out
its own fierce tattoo. Yet how ugly
when threatened. And how silly
to think the masks could hold.
But sweet—let’s not discount
the sweetness—one windblown
afternoon, Johnny and me
on top of Saint Rule’s tower, dark
beer, sharp cheese, pristine sky
above, tiny world at our feet
(buses, Market Street, graves,
cobbles), and nothing to stop us.
From How They Fell
By Annie Boutelle
"At Our Feet" by Annie Boutelle
And how was it to be eighteen
and innocent as hell, and who
wasn’t disguised then, in the grey
medieval town, red gown wrapped
tight around each one. Flying
down Hepburn gardens on a bike,
shillings in the meter, sherry (dry)
with Kay McIver before Sunday
lunch. We didn’t have a clue—
babies spouting politics, downing
wine, sucking menthol cigarettes,
I tell you, we knew to pretend. And
how beautiful, like apples, we were,
polished, shining, intact still, skin
glistening, each heart beating out
its own fierce tattoo. Yet how ugly
when threatened. And how silly
to think the masks could hold.
But sweet—let’s not discount
the sweetness—one windblown
afternoon, Johnny and me
on top of Saint Rule’s tower, dark
beer, sharp cheese, pristine sky
above, tiny world at our feet
(buses, Market Street, graves,
cobbles), and nothing to stop us.
From How They Fell
By Annie Boutelle
