Happy New Year
San Miguel de Allende
New Year’s Day, El Centro
San Miguel de Allende, GTO Mexico
by Wilda Morris
Four young men, college age,
eat pizza and drink
cola. They laugh loudly
at each other’s jokes,
ignore the greyed
barefoot woman
who shuffles to their table,
wrinkled hand out
as do the couples
with eyes only for each other,
and everyone else she approaches.
I wonder how it feels
to be so desperate,
so invisible.
I wonder if anyone wished her
Prospero año nuevo.
Four poems by Sharon Waller Knutson
Happy New Year
you say with a happy face.
But the prune face scowling at me
from the mirror says:
Who would be happy
about getting another year older?
I could swear just last year
I was that fresh faced school girl
in the picture on the mantel.
The girl so tall the boys rested
their heads on my shoulder
as we danced. So tall my head
touched the mark on the wall.
Now I reach the mark with my hands.
Did I take my calcium with breakfast?
I can’t remember. But I do recall the name
of the boy I asked to dance in sixth grade
and was surprised when Doug said yes
and put his head on my shoulder
then forgot my name as he grew
beyond my reach. Now he is gone,
a heart attack right before our 50th
High School Reunion.
I wish I could have been
that fresh faced school girl forever
until she waltzes in the room
and says in her school girl voice:
Happy New Year Grandma.
I smile and the prune smiles back.
Happy New Year, I say.
White Out
From Christmas Eve
to New Year’s Eve
the blizzard rages
like an angry animal
flinging the snow against
the garage and house
piling it up knee high
keeping us captive inside,
until the white powder
and pale sky become one.
On New Year’s Day
we split our last log
and burn it in the stove
and eat our last slice
of bread as the temperatures
drop and the snow ceases.
The sky turns blue and sunny
as a figure in a dark snow suit
and cap appears in the yard.
Stiff as the icicles hanging
on the house, the woman stands
on a black ATV and zips
up and down our driveway
pushing the snow against
the trailer and the trees
plowing a path for us
to drive to the store
for gas and groceries.
I think back to the 1950s
as machines carved a road
and built snow walls
so we could walk two miles
to school, our faces chafing,
our fingers and toes frozen
in cheap boots and mittens
in the frigid Montana air.
Portrait in Black and White
In his white wool sweater
and black slacks, mittens
and boots, Mr. Magpie
marches to the roof
of the garage and flaps
his wings like a conductor
in an orchestra. The warm
wind whistles like a clarinet
as it tosses Mr. Magpie
face first against the facia.
Singing soprano, he summersaults
to the roof of the house
where he toots the trombone
as the chinook creates
an ice sculpture
in the shade of the pine.
.
Absolution by Jayne Jaudon Ferrer
Like a kindly priest come to absolve us of our sins,
January arrives with arms spread wide,
chill winds blasting clean the blighted slates
of our dozen months just passed.
The new year’s a benevolent savior with
blind eye turned to failures and foibles,
deaf ear to grumbles and whines,
full cup firmly grasped in a hand
extended and offering hope.
As frosted breaths drift and dissipate
into a winter night,
so go our trials and transgressions
as we face, innocuous virgins once more,
whatever fate and our own stupidity
hold in store.
Three poems by Rachael Ikins
Solstice When Nobody Turned Off the Christmas Tree
The night my Mother began her work of final dying. Sound of Music on CBS.
Teeth rattling sound-blitz for a woman who loved silence. Upstairs, bedroom door shut I couldn’t escape doe-a-deer-a-female-deer
Never again, my eyes slide past its TV guide title, nervous as deer exposed in a winter thicket. Uneasiness follows me into sleep.
Purple and yellow, my mom, a pair of mating barn owls in a spruce tree, sky so clear it ached, teeth-cracking cold. A minute after midnight or two, when the long slow climb for light scrabbled horizon, those birds grabbed her. My eyes stung, knife to throat, I squinted.
Blue-black dark crunching with glitter. Her body spread in a recliner in the living room. I can’t explain it, but there it was, poured like batter. I touched her shoulder, her hair, kissed her face, gently slid her rings, wedding and one for her children. Each palm cupped an egg of warmth.
Heart alive in my throat, battering a path to my mouth.
Car coughed after such Solstice temperatures, Dogs and I climbed out after a three-day country weekend. Nobody turned off her Christmas lights. Katie meowed, carrier banged my thigh. Strange bird called from the hedge, bent me over, pain a spew in the stillness, those liquid notes.
Such pictures jostle against my eyes’ backs, force my lids open. It doesn’t matter I haven’t looked at the calendar or counted the 12 days of Christmas wrong- the puppy still has three toys waiting in her canine advent tree from Chewy.
Seven years have marched into the sun. I string deaths on a popcorn garland,
Flag’s remnants shredded in winter winds. If a brother’s Christmas table has no room for a sister two days after their mother died, that’s divorce.
Those years I gasped,
pain worse than death I thought,
and kept walking.
New Years Day Looking over the Valley
The clouds pause in their endless rush
and tearing their hair to rest on my mountain
this late year’s morning.
They ease the belly down.
Sigh like a pregnant woman
in her last months.
The fabrics from her dress drift and
fold in layers around each branch
and pine needle.
Everywhere, look!
It is a crowd of heavy women
dressed in white.
My back aches for them.
Previously published in my chapbook “Slideshow in the Woods” (Foothills Publishing)
First prize winner NLAPW writing contest CNY branch
New Year’s Eve on Faith
Snow shot through with spears of sunlight
Cloudy gusts that sparkle and dismay. We complain.
Just inside a thin grass barrier that protects
their pores from freezing, plants ignore us. Aware,
as we are not,
each day lasts longer. Perhaps only by no more than seconds
but enough for one phaleonopsis to extend a green spike,
a finger to touch a snowflake.
Fat geranium buds swell where yesterday
there were none.
Someone told me last fall to uproot them, to shake the dirt,
hang them upside down from a rafter or to throw them in the trash.
Next year you can buy new.
It is almost
next year.
Clouds shred like torn tissue. We see the same sun with
which plants have been conversing all these gray December days,
all the overcast afternoons when we doubted, when we complained
of lack of colors, plants ignored us, yes, in silent conversations
with light prepared
to reveal it.
Previously published in “I Scrub My Eyes” Benevolent Bird Press
