Encore

  Rachael Ikins

 
By Rachael Ikins 

For a decade in my life the 1990s I was unable to write poetry. I remember standing in front of the file cabinet with all my collected poems. Wondering how long before someone found out I couldn’t do it any more.

Then I got off of all the psychiatric medications I was being given and rid of the therapist. After a tumultuous year with permanent neurological damage, a bankruptcy and moving, about a year after the last pill was swallowed, I felt it, the sensation of a wanting poem in my solar plexus. I ran up the field and blasted into the house to get to a pen and paper. After that I carried a small pad and pen in my back pocket and often gathered poems on my daily walks in the woods.

I did two things back then. I wrote when inspiration touched me but I also started to force myself to write to prompts. Like homework. I wanted to ensure I never lost that ability again.
Now my iPhone is always nearby ready to receive more poetry. Even in the bath tub.

During the years when poetry was mute, I wrote prose stories. Fairytales and fantasies, regular short fiction as well, which created a safe place for me and my mind to go as my world fell apart around me. Years later I found those stories in a file cabinet in another house and some became the book “Totems” (Log Cabin Books 2017.)

I didn’t go to school for writing just did it since I was 7. Like many in our group I had a gifted 8th grade English teacher who also was an author-poetry and prose. Any time I did take an English course I always showed my poems to whoever the professor was, and in one case got a grade for them in lieu of the literature class I missed due to illness.

By now I have written 15 books, poetry, young reader books, a new one is coming out in 2025. I wrote a novella or novel—publisher tells me the word count it could be a novel. That took ten years. I like Stephen King and so decided to write my own scary story. Title is “Haven” and cautions the reader “be very careful what you plant in your garden.”

In between I have written essays, short stories, articles and social media posts.

What inspired me to write these two pieces is “Composition of a Woman” which is from my poetic memoir “The Woman with Three Elbows” (Raw Earth Ink 2023) is those years when I was unable to write poetry stood like a big block in my head. Around 2021 I was taking poetry class with Craig Czury and one of his poems about his family written from the POV of a young child drawing stick figures triggered this piece.

Composition was nominated for both the Pushcart and Best of the Net, once as prose and once as poetry. I’m not exactly sure which it is, but it came out of me in one massive long surge. To heal I had to write my own history as a victor not a victim.

“Collateral Damage” was inspired when Russia invaded Ukraine and Putin’s Chief propaganda minister’s daughter was killed by a car bomb meant for him. I watched video of him crying on the news and thought “What did you expect?” I wrote one version for homework. My teacher and I worked it one-on-one for the voices of not just the father who’d lost his child. We added his wife’s voice, the daughter’s voice and because I had been watching this, we included my own father and my own voice, too. It was really challenging. By braiding and overlapping all the voices together we made it a universal story about the price of war on humans and families. At the time I was reading Carolyn Forche.

Composition of a Woman

A figure drawing class. I use charcoal sticks, draw a young woman crumpled, on her knees, arms outstretched. Teacher leans over my shoulder “Lovely, but you broke her arm.” Yes. I see now two elbows in one arm. I turn my sheet over onto the next, a man, head downcast, slight smile. Later with torn tissue I collage him into a rumpled brown raincoat. I notice he carries a brown paper bag, his lunch I wonder, in one hand. I flip the page, a girl facing away one breast pointed toward the window one arm facing forward. She doesn’t speak. I draw the man again; this time he brings a geranium plant. They never speak. He comes every day.

Flip. An angry alcoholic a woman who swallowed her dream when she married and mothered in the ‘50s. She is thin all sharp angles. Flip. Same woman leaning to one side as if whispering into someone’s ear “don’t tell anyone she sees a psychiatrist.” Flip. I outline a large soft man lounging back in his recliner, glasses, fleshed out in suit and tie he lets the girl with the broken elbows bring house plants to fill his office window.

Flip, flip, figure groupings more challenging. It’s always difficult to be the only one who isn’t drinking in a room full of drunks, blurs the lines.

My fingers blackened to the second knuckle by now, smudges on my lips and cheek, a girl on the floor, no, wait two girls in a bathroom. They’ve broken a lunch plate and try to carve lines into their arms. Later I will paint the one, a mother who lost her baby to crib death. She and her husband will found an advocacy center, but that is in the distant future.

The second was then kicked out of the nuthouse, she had been too much, you see. I used red paint and purples to emphasize this, glue on some torn tissue that looks like seaweed. She snuck off during a field trip, caught a bus home, went to the bank to get some money, caught a bus back – to the downtown bookstore for a certain volume. Hiked up to the hospital. You could tell she is the kind of person who sneaks by the way I draw her shoulders, the can’t of her head, that tumult of thoughts broiling beneath her hair.

I create hair by splitting twine, feathering it a snip of glue dabbed on. Is this putting Humpty Dumpty back together again? That was only the second time. Is it three times and you’re out or charmed?

Here she is running. I use extra strokes around the figure, her legs and arms to emphasize speed. She has stopped on her walk back from therapy to buy a bottle of
OTC sleeping pills then a Diet Coke at Burger King. Locked in the bathroom she pops the pills, chugs the soda. I draw the swan of her throat.
Went to a payphone hospital staff talked her in. No stomach pump for her, she’d saved the bottle, like a magic charm not because she wanted to die or to do a stunt. She just wanted to be done, you see that in her posture as I showed her on her bed that night. She doesn’t sleep something she finds ironic instead whiles away her splitting headache watching neon green. brilliant orange, and hot pink worms wiggling up a picture frame. 

“Am I hallucinating.” she asks the nurse who does 15-minute bad checks. “Yes.” he says.” I know they aren’t real; it was the Benadryl.”

Group Therapy acne scarred Ken of the eternally bouncing knee, his bushy ‘stashe or Sophie the parent of that mother/daughter duo a shake-n-bake evangelist, that mother fond of mouth frothing and spoken tongues. Everyone knew she’d driven the daughter crazy, an axe splitting a skull their future if they got out together.

It wasn’t worth the freezer full of ice cream sandwiches. Here she is drawn riding in a car. She had a pass to see The Exorcist” with her mom, nobody told them she had to be back by the stroke of midnight, or the coach would turn into a pumpkin. She wanted to keep her hospital bed. I draw a young man; he likes her, and she decides at 19 it is time to lose the cherry. This fellow volunteers.

Lectured by shrinks and staff alike, see her reaching to pay for the condoms and foam at the nearby pharmacy, her wrists unscarred and delicate.

His crumpled apartment, some intrusive roommates, the act so insignificant I draw her crouched on the toilet sobbing. She never wants to speak with him again. He threatens to take all of his tranquilizers; she doesn’t care she is studying a new religion. Changes her name, converts but no matter how many times she changes the sheets she still feels sick.

I draw the therapist.

An angry woman paid less than her male colleagues, a smiling, soft looking woman, body draped over bones made of PVC flowing with leaded water. How thirsty was that girl, parched. I draw her head rolled back, mouth open oblivious to the poisons in that water and then the multitude of pill bottles her husband saved in a room on the shelf in the basement. If that shrink had told her to jump off the overpass of the interstate, so befuddled was she she would have, and she would’ve said she did it for love.

The next few pages use up a whole box of charcoal black, black that rubs on your clothes-black, bad thoughts, darkness.

Well, eventually that shrink died. Here she is penciled in her coffin lips pursed. The undertaker couldn’t make them any other way. She looks like the kind of woman who would tell a person “you’ll never make it as a writer you aren’t good enough” the kind of woman who would cripple a person for greed and then send her away to a downstate hospital a serious-to-death place, disposed of, a human-shaped bag of trash. See, can you tell there is a body inside the way I did the bag?
But the girl, pen in her teeth scrambled out of the landfill. Almost died from all those chemicals. She is not the same as she would’ve been if someone had just sent her to college for English back in the day, let her be who she is. Instead, she had to learn to fight for it.
And she fought. Anger forged a molten blade of a woman. I paint with metallic silver from Golden paint Co. is that her armor. she’s lying in the snow on the side of a night mountain, sure she is having a nervous break down— whatever that means —as if nerves are some sort of car parts. They had treated her brain that marvelous mysterious organ of 100 billion cells like an engine to tinker with, throwing a little of this, a little of that. Too much tinkering under her hood, hearts break for real that way.

I use pale blue tissue for the snow that holds her like an angel and if I listen I can hear her voice over the wind. She says out loud to the woods “have your nervous breakdown nobody gives a damn, go on, then get up, get firewood and take it in for the wood stove those who depend on you wait.” Scents of wood smoke and snow.

She lost three houses, a husband, a father, mother, two cats, countless dogs, and miscarried twins. See her. I paint a woman sitting in front of a fire, a pen in her hand, pad of paper balanced on the dog between her thighs, and later I ink her in in front of an old iPad. cat curls on her shoulder, two heads sometimes better than one. See her fingers dance, you can almost hear the poetry pouring. Now I have to buy more charcoal.

 

Collateral Damage

The sound of the blast sucked all sounds into itself.
Your father, his dinner napkin still in his left hand,
his glasses on top of his head while he sits at the table
spooning borscht into his mouth,
my father, half-glasses on the tip of his nose, napkin on his knee,
legs crossed at the table, salts his canned tomato soup.
Reporters thrust microphones like weapons into your father’s face.
My father grimacing in front of the television.
All those compelling lies.
****
An IED sowed your molecules across the universe,
small canister snuck under the car.
Cell-phone set to blast at a nano beep
****
Anya asks to borrow the keys, she wants to meet a friend at the library.
I’m sneaking out in my mother’s denim jacket to kiss a girl in the June field
behind the barn.
They suspect by the way we’re dressed, perfume, shining hair that the friend might be a boy.
Soldiers die so easily, too-early flowers in a killing frost. Spring.
****
My husband kneads his head between his hands.
My husband kneaded his shoulders against my breasts.
Two crows bobbing their heads in our linden tree,
fabric scraps flutter on branches like feathers,
a third crow swoops to grab something shiny.
Call it a murder
****
A train whistle blows through an intersection every night at 6:00 p.m.
Papa, what did you think would happen?
Those people cramming trains once had no greater concerns than a forgotten phone charger or whose turn it was to take the clothes out of the dryer, lugging dogs, guinea pigs, cats…
Is it warm enough to plant lettuce yet?
****
Anya insisted on her own patch when she was seven,
I gave her a few jonquil bulbs.
A scarecrow stood guard, skeleton of a broom dressed in my plaid shirt
to protect from looters.
The wren house we bought at Home
Depot hung in the poplar where Uri and Farris buried our beloved hamster,
home to new wrens twenty springs later.
****
You could have said, “take the bus,” that you needed the car to go see your mistress.
I would’ve slapped your arm laughing.
****
These thoughts race like mice in a jar winking.
****
Soup splatters my shoes.
Sirens bleat, neighbors cluster in bouquets, white faces above fists-clutched, heads-turned-away. Eyes hurry back into our locked houses.
****
Nothing can stop the millipede that crawls
behind my eyelids—it should have been you.
****
I am upstairs, earbuds in, the teddy bear from when I was tiny
still keeping me safe,
black button eyes and fur worn off from rubbing against my lips.
We will wake up in a flash.
****
Mama smacks my shoulder, “Uri, Wake up, you’re snoring!”
****
Do you hear?
“Привет, papa.”
bursting through Spring,
the clatter of my gym shoes’ dance in the boot tray,
I steal a piece of cheese from your plate,
my breeze through displaces the air.
What is left behind? I am in love
and soon they will be taken for soldiers.

Super-Sized Series

 Transformation Part 2

 

 

A Seagull Vaguely Remembers by Alarie Tennille 
  
I wake. For a second, 
I wonder
what I have to do today –
the last vestige of being human melting 
away too slowly. I remember a feeling – Monday, 
no longer understand what that is. I dive 
and leave dread behind. My time comes 
in tides of night or day, rest or fly.
 
I hang upon an updraft, look down 
at the people plodding the beach.
I wonder
how I was ever such a one.

first published at Silver Birch Press 


On Finally Learning, Late in Life, that Your Mother Was Jewish by Marilyn L. Taylor
Methuselah something.  Somethingsomething Ezekiel.
—Albert Goldbarth

So that explains it, you say to yourself.
And for one split second, you confront
the mirror like a Gestapo operative—
narrow-eyed, looking for the telltale hint,

a giveaway, a certain calibration
of something visible that could account
for this--a lucid, simple explication
of your life story and its denouement.

It seems the script that you were handed
long ago, with all its blue-eyed implications,
can now be seen as something less than candid—
a laundry list of whoppers and omissions.

It’s time for something else to float
back in from theology’s deep end: the strains,
perhaps, of A-don o-lam, drowning out
the peals of Jesus the Conqueror Reigns,

inundating the lily and the rose,
stifling the saints (whose dogged piety
never did come close, God knows,
to causing many ripples of anxiety)

and you’re waiting for the revelations
on their way this minute, probably—
the prelude to your divine conversion,
backlit with ritual and pageantry. 
                                    
But nothing happens.  Not a thing.  No song,
no shofar, no compelling Shabbat call
to prayer— no signal that your heart belongs
to David rather than your old familiar, Paul.

Where does a faithless virgin go from here,
after being compromised by two    
competing testimonies to thin air—
when both of them are absolutely true?

First published in Measure, Volume III, Issue 1 (2008)


Asking Permission from a Muse by Marianne Szlyk

A friend tells me we dream of what we want back:
spicy, hot chocolate in a blue delft cup;
return of lost friends, lost loves; a stroll through
places we miss: midnight sun, plane trees’ shade
beside rivers I once dreamed of walking past.

Tonight, in Queens, old factory buildings
loom against darkening sky. Grease stained clouds
hide the new moon, the old stars that sometimes shine,
planes taking off for where I’d rather be.

I walk with my mother and my ex-husband.
We try to find the way back to places
we can eat, drink coffee, ride the subway
back to where we live. My ex keeps talking;
my mom keeps talking. I look for bus stops,

look for phone booths. I wonder why I return
to a place and time that hated me. Mom
and my ex talk past each other. They find
nothing. We wander. I find nothing. I want
to wake up, find myself somewhere, not here,

with someone else, with (I imagine) you.


I Was Not Like Her by Lynn White

I was not like her,
the girl in the picture
looking out
scowling
defiant
rebellious.
No I was not like her
not me
not then.

I wore the gloves in summer 
that my mother bought me
the classic cut clothes 
that she had always 
wanted to wear
even allowed my hair to curl
as it wanted to
as she wanted it to.
No I was not like her,
the one in the picture
not then.

But when I broke free
made myself up
wore minis
or long skirts
controlled my curls
with an iron in hand
yes
I think
I became her
then.

First published in Visual Verse


if i had stayed by j.lewis
 
you posted another photo today
of snow and red-rock hills
 
it might have been from south of town
i couldn't really say
 
but i imagined the paths
through the icy white powder
 
as being yours, and maybe those
of another friend whose face
 
has grown old like mine
old, and hard, and wintery
 
you seem so content in a place
i couldn't wait to leave
 
happy to be there, pleased
with your choice to linger
 
it was home, it was mine
but it was never enough
 
i replay faulty memories
from half a century ago
 
all of them tinged with
various shades of loss
 
of love that sputtered and died
in the high desert winds
 
i contemplate this latest scene
and wonder, as i sometimes do
 
who i would be today
if i had stayed
 

AGING by Wilda Morris

Envious 
I watch them fly down the walk
on in-line skates.
Who will make an eight-wheeled shoe
for those of us
who fear breaking hips
but long for speed,
excitement,
the rush of wind
against our cheeks?


Marriage Moments by Kavita Ezekiel Mendonca

Seated at opposite ends of the couch
Both peering into our sunset years
forty-six years between us, two children numerous cats
and one delightful grandchild
we seem surprised at the presence of each other.

Then we remember what brought us together
we saw the stars promised each other the moon
we knew it was love almost at first sight
confident we could brave our differences.

Now it’s the mundane things that keep us apart
yet together in all seasons in all circumstances
our once passionate love is a steady harmony
we acknowledge the belief
“Marriages are made in heaven.” 

And every so often we see new stars
While the moon looks on approvingly. 


Properties of Sound by Gary Grossman

October 17th 1982, the Mojave night 
winked twice, and my transistor radio, 
tuned to light rock, was suddenly interrupted 
by the shot-glass chants of Wolfman Jack, 
dropping the needle on the Kingsmen's 
Louie, Louie — a ghost show floating in space
since the late Sixties. Then it's the Ronette's 
Be My Baby, all coming from the specter 
of XERB, border-blaster station from 
Rosarito Beach, just over the Baja line. 
The zombie broadcast, what physics calls
a long-delayed echo, shows sounds last a lifetime, 
or three — which is how I learn 
to stop yelling at my kids.

Eclectica Magazine


Haiku by Arlene Gay Levine

Whiff of warmth tonight
Bare branch cradles crescent moon
Rock-a-bye, winter


Leonard will beat you up by Joe Cottonwood

just to pass the time. Big beefy arms, 
red hair, from the Baptist Home 
where they store orphans who tell stories 
about yanking your balls off
in the old stone building that looks so cold
even on the hottest day.

In the schoolyard Leonard smashes a brick 
on my head displacing a bloody divot. 
Kindly principal Ms Cook asks why.
Leonard shrugs. No reason. 
She expels him but she tells me: Forgive.
I say: Why?

Scalp like a roadmap of scar tissue, 
the occasional headache forty years later 
and then I see a homeless man 
with thick eyeglasses, a black cowboy hat 
over curly red hair 
trundling a shopping cart of crap, 
leaning on the push-bar like it’s a walker. 
Leonard?

Yep. Leonard. A mouth with few teeth, 
a crumpled voice says he just got out of rehab. 
With a grin he says: Lemme see the divot 
that sent me on my road to ruin.
I say: So it’s all my fault?
Not grinning, he says: Gimme ten dollars.
Ms Cook would say: Give.
I still wonder: Why? 


During Viral Outbreak by Rachael Ikins

Mother River 
washes clothes,
rearranges cabinets.
Mighty Mother Maple extrudes sap 
from dark security rooted,
to fly flags in spring’s 
blue winds.

Awash in seeds, buds, viruses, bacteria, fungi, body parts of others’ nocturnal meals, life flows.

I fall to my knees at Mother Maple’s trunk, 
on the bank of Mother River. 
I say, “ I am afraid. I 
don’t want to die.” 
Bark scrapes my cheek. 

She chuckles, 
“Death is transformation.  All growing things outstrip their spans to burst
toward the pull 
of hereafter”


A respectable mother by Rose Mary Boehm

I
A lesser Amsterdam canal. Nina is leaving home.
The type of nose for which celebrities—
and those who would like to be—pay thousands,
big hair, mini coat, medium heels, small case. 

Lace covers a third-floor window, a bony hand
moves the curtain, a tired face with black-rimmed glasses
follows Nina on the cobbled street along the canal.
Nina doesn’t look back.

II
A leafy London suburb. Her cigarette’s smoke curls
upward, disappears between two Japanese cherry trees.
She remembers having once prayed, “Jesus, just look
the other way. Get lost. I enjoy sinning.”

Shame and regrets. Nina stayed away from Amsterdam.
There was a letter. After her mother’s funeral Nina
and her aunt Hetty go back to that lesser Amsterdam 
canal, to the lace curtains covering third-floor windows.

They sit quietly, open the old photo album. Mum, Hetty
and Aunt Tina lifting frilly skirts and silk-stockinged legs,
all in black & white, heads thrown back, dancing
(a little out of focus) in what once was Amsterdam’s
 most famous music hall. Aunt Hetty whispers,
'We promised ourselves to become respectable.'


from my poetry collection DO OCEAN’ HAVE UNDERWATER BORDERS, (Kelsay, 2022)


Poets Are Allowed to Be Hopeful by Judith Waller Carroll

Title from a quote by Nikki Giovani

Transform a frigid March into spring
with a burst of tulips and sweet-smelling lilacs.
Even a graveyard can be cheerier
with big pots of lilies, long fingers of sun
reaching through shadows..
On a withered branch of the oak
place a red-breasted robin, singing.


I Morph from a Strong Sycamore to a Weeping Willow by Sharon Waller Knutson

After my soulmate’s sudden death, 
I can’t eat and all I do is sleep.
I am the bony coyote with the dull coat.
I go from silky skin to alligator arms and turkey neck.
The one man who saw me as an ageless beauty is gone.
So I chop off my waist long hair to chin length
and hide in the house in my pajamas and socks.
Don’t conceal my age spots or brighten naked lips.
Then my nineteen-year-old grandson convinces
me to go out to dinner at the local café. 
And his girlfriend applies makeup and lipstick
and helps me slip into the long burgundy dress I bought
as a birthday gift for my mother-in-law before
she died at the age of ninety-eight. I feel invisible
until the beautiful blonde bartender says:
“Well, look at you out and about, Miss Sharon. 
Can I get you a Marguerita?”


Changes to the House Across the Street by Mary Ellen Talley

Bernice’s niece sold
the two organs Bernice used
to practice hymns for services
at her Ballard church.
Once she played Rock of Ages
for a plumber who came to the house
to repair a leaky faucet.
The family posted a For Sale sign
when Bernice and sister Ruth
couldn’t manage any longer.
Now their one-story house 
is in the middle of transformation 
into top and bottom apartments,
with a new sidewalk poured
leading to a smaller taller house
where the garage once stood. 
When Bernice visits, she’ll utter Uffda, 
but smile to see orange roses 
still beside her porch.

Book of the Week

 “Woof Worthy” by Marilyn Zelke Windau (Kelsay Books Oct. 2025)
  

 



By Editor Sharon Waller Knutson

Marilyn Zelke Windau’s “Wolf Worthy” poetry collection is poignant, powerful, charming and relatable as she reminds us that dogs are a necessary part of our lives, that we learn from them, they become a part of our family and when they die, we grieve as deeply as we do for our human relatives. Having grown up with dogs, it was like déjà vu to me as she writes about the new puppy, the old dog falling down the stairs, the big dog moving next door, the diagnosis that your dog is dying and you bury your beloved four-legged best friend knowing at your age, you will not adopt another canine leaving you to realize as Marilyn ends her closing poem, “Life. Death./Together. Apart./Alone. Alone./Alone.” The book brings joy, heartbreak and hope.


Marilyn Zelke Windau, of Sheboygan Falls, Wisconsin, started writing poems at age thirteen. A former art teacher, she has had six books of poetry published: Adventures in Paradise (Finishing Line Press), Momentary Ordinary (Pebblebrook Press), Owning Shadows and Hiccups Haunt Wilson Avenue (Kelsay Books), Beneath the Southern Crux (Water’s Edge Press), and Northwoods Recollections (Bottlecap Press). A Pushcart prize nominee and an award-winning author, she has work published in many journals and anthologies. Marilyn includes her maiden name to honor her father, who was also a writer. When she’s not writing, Marilyn works at restoring her 1891 house, travels to Pembine, WI to the family cabin, and creates mosaics, paintings, and books made with tea papers. A Master Gardener volunteer and an art center docent, she is married to a retired environmental engineer, has three daughters, three grandchildren, and three grand dogs.

Corky

He got old, Mom.
He fell down the basement stairs.
He couldn’t climb anymore.
Corky was your sister Elsie’s dog.
You missed her.
He missed her. 
When she died, her husband, John,
said, “I can’t keep him.
He was her dog. It’s too hard
to see those brown eyes sad.”
So Corky came to live with us,
away from the farm in Adell,
away from big fields 
and broad lie down and look skies.
His not of choice home became
a backyard on Wilson Avenue 
in Jefferson Park in Chicago.
With three small children whining,
he had too many borders.
He remembered Elsie
rounding up chickens,
chopping their necks.
He had chased them 
around the dirt drive, 
they without thoughts
in their heads.
She scooped them up,
plucked their feathers,
and brought them to Chicago
as Sunday dinner gifts.
With no chicken scent reckoning
in Chicago alleyways, 
Corky’s legs went old.
Step falling to the basement
signaled his time of earth completed.
We cried, pull-patted his triangle ears,
rubbed childhood cheeks
 on his German Shepherd fur,
remembered him as our first dog friend,
and took the stairs two at a time upward.

For My Jenny

Oh, my dog girl, I miss you.
The apple tree is shedding white blossom tears
which fall softly—as soft as your fur—
upon the mound of earth which is now your home.

Wrapped in your pink binky you came to me
at four weeks old.
Wrapped in your pink binky you leave me
after fourteen years.

Lie down, my Jenny, and rest now. Rest.
Those back stiff legs can be still.
It hurt me so to see you fall—
wobbly like a newborn foal—
to see you look with fear, not knowing
why your body couldn’t function.
Those big brown eyes, lately clouded, reached out to my heart
as they always could, and told me,
“It must be nearly over now.
Help me, hold me, and yet I must try to rise.”

Little licks on my bare, hair-matted leg
with your nose pressed to me as we rode,
rode to meet our last farewell.
“It’s ok. It’s ok, my Jen,” I said, knowing it wasn’t.
Why do we lie to comfort those we love?

Your last protection, those narrow, hard to find veins, couldn’t win.
“She’s gone already,” he said. “No pain.”
What is no pain? There is pain. I have pain,
and longing and memories.

No plastic bag, no box.
Spread out the blanket in the trunk, your first tomb.
I must dig. It’s something I have to do. In a blur of disbelief.
Keep the dirt off her blanket.
You were so heavy and still as I laid you down.
A little groan came from your mouth and I looked—
hoping beyond hope that you were coming back to me.
But no.

I tried to make you comfortable, placing each foot just so
and putting your ears down                                                                               
Oh, how they used to flop when you’d run.                                                                                  
I made sure your binky covered you 
before I gave you your earth blanket,
telling you I loved you with each rush of dirt.

You weren’t at the bottom of the stairs this morning,
clicking your nails on the hardwood floor.
No more signals to me upstairs that you were waiting for me.
I held your food dish and cried.

Your brush is in the basement. Your hair is on the car seat.
Your corner is empty.
I’m empty.
You won’t curl up at my feet for comfort anymore,
warming me with gentle love.
The love is still here, the warmth—
only to be shared now in thought and memory.
My cub dog.


New Routine

Oh, my grandmother, I have been up 
since the early morning light awakened me.
Not just the light, but the mournful cry 
of a golden kitchen puppy seeking company.
She is up with the sun, to bed with the sun,
having been born in a barn,
nurtured on a farm, and now displaced.
I scoop her up, place her big dog to come paws
out on the rainy driveway.
Immediately, she runs.
She chews wood chips.
She yanks Hosta leaves.
She digs wet earth, then pauses,
nose knowing the breeze.
It brings an air of bread, baking.
Brown, warm, like her mother,
missed, almost forgotten.
It is enough, with a slip of milk,
to regain the energy of the day,
to waddle inside for kibble,
accepting furless hands,
and a pressed embrace
on this new morning.

Electric Dog

It’s late November.
You come bounding in
from the cold-winded air
of the yard, the porch,
smiling and smelling 
of rabbit turds and bird seed
gobbled from under the feeder.

You had looked for apples,
fallen, discarded next door 
by the neighbor’s tree.
Rewarded by one, 
though spotty,
you clenched it 
sweetly, in your jaws,
savoring juice. 

Winter approaches
with its cold coat.
You are invigorated,
come in dancing.
Your fur gleams,
stands up when rubbed.
What a good dog!

Sparks fly.
You, electric dog,
gift energy.


,                                                                                                                                              
Ring Fear

It’s the signal of despair.
It’s the signal of warning
that bad news is imminent.

Our phone rings at 7:30 AM.
Awakened daily by our golden retriever,
thumping on the side of the bed,
we are up with kitchen lights on,
the back door unlocked,
our dog out sniffing her way 
through fog and rabbit smells in the yard.

I give questioning looks to answering
the phone call.
Our daughter? Which one?
What? Is everything okay?
In these desperate days of the coronavirus,
I imagine dreaded scenarios.

Instead, the caller tells me he’s our next-door neighbor,
the one we like to send cake and fruit bread,
because I bake too much and love to share.

He’s at the grocery store at this hour.
What do we need that he can get for us?

Such kindness is a relief this morning,
a blessing.
Sequestered as we are,
this reaching out extends not only hand,
but heart.

He gets us dog yummies.
We are so thankful.


Stuck in the Driveway

Sometimes you’re stuck
in your driveway.
You want to run
down through the back,
through the yards,
open, free.
You want to sniff 
smells from today, 
from yesterday.
You want to seek
critters as friends,
as hunt, as playmates.
You’re a dog.
You have these instincts—
these off-leash goals,
these dreams.

Funny, my girl, my pet,
I have them, too.
I want to be off-leash,
traveling to New Zealand,
to the Great Wall.
I want to meet 
capybaras, those big, furry
rodent creatures 
with inquisitive faces 
in Peru.
I want those sniffs.
I want to recognize
life friends in nature.
I want to feel free 
to toss dreams
into the air,
to pull to my being
life-couplings,
adventures of the day
in the world’s backyard.

When the Big Dog Moves in Next Door

All I saw was the harp-arc of a tail
moving inside their front door.
Our golden retriever heard the bark.
It was a BIG dog bark,
a bark unfamiliar 
in this small dog shared environment.

This was not a Chihuahua bark.
This was not shiatsu talk!
This was an Italian German shepherd.

We knew he was coming.
His owner, sick with cancer,
couldn’t care for him anymore.
His wife said perhaps
she’d take him back after,
but that was iffy.

His name, Tedesco,
gives his origin:
Italian for German.
He probably likes pasta fritta,
and a side of fettuccini with his sups!

Tomorrow, our golden will meet the shepherd.
They may eventually run Europe together—
or at least, the walking trail to Sheboygan.


Sock Babies

Sneaking in the night,
she would confiscate socks,
pairs of them, not singles.

She’d salivate them, 
chew them, tote them
downstairs to her bed,
where she’d curl-cozy them
as her babies until morning.

We’d say, “Where are our socks?”
She’d look up in ignorance
with those big brown innocent eyes.

After we found the socks, she’d smile,
knowing that tonight
there’d be delight in another hunt.



Tom and Peme

He loves this dog.
She’s his dog.
He hasn’t had a dog
who followed him
since Bounce, 
a long-eared spaniel,
who trailed him as a child
through muck and mire,
through woods and stream.
This one, a golden retriever,
just now tells him no.
What? No?
Peme* returns to sit by the car
when he free-legs it 
cross country on skis.
She learned the day before
that this journey’s not fair.
She got her female lib up.
Twice called, twice obeyed,
she then sits and watches
the woods go by his eyes,
not hers.
She sits in the powder 
of snowdrift,
waits for the sweat of him
to return.


My Golden Pup

I await the news, the test results
of heightened creatinine levels,
that you are dying of kidney disease.

Peme, my girl, my golden pup,
you are only ten years old.
I want you to stay with me forever.

At my age, we will not seek
another canine to love.
We will never again home another pup.
You are our last hug dog.

Your ears are silken, so soft.
I close my eyes to feel their blessing.

You love to have me knuckle them,
rub and rub and…
No, don’t stop.
Your nose under my hand
lifts the joy for yet another wrist turn.

You snore at me upstairs on the floor
from your alternate bed, next to me.
You compete with Dad on the other side.
I admit that I hum sometimes in cadence.

In these days of the pandemic, it seems too cruel
that you must be a victim.
The world is crying death.
I don’t want your death.
I want to curl up with you and hug your life.

I cry even now and I haven’t been given
your death sentence.
I don’t want you in memory.
I want you in golden fur.


Grief

Overnight, a winter snowstorm has covered 
your last paw prints.

I imagine I see you from my bathroom window
prowling backyard trees, sniffing for bunnies.
Tom has let you out after you thumped
his side of the bed in early morning.
Thankfully you didn’t wake me,
although I was awake and listening
to your breath hum-moans.
They were in conjunction with mine.
We shared inhalations and exhalations
of sleep and dream time.

I dream of you now, my golden girl.
I can’t let you go,

I pat the staircase landing
where you always waited for me
to pet you and knuckle-knead your ears.

I don’t want the vacuum cleaner to rob me
of our dining room carpet retriever fur.
Yellow strands curl and bind the navy-blue rug,
curl and bind my heart.

Outside, squirrels are joyous.
They leap the snow banks to trees with joy,
with no encumbrances, and
no beloved dog to chase them for fun.

Life. Death.
Together. Apart.
Alone. Alone.
Alone.

Buy book at

https://kelsaybooks.com/products/woof-worthy















                                                                                                                                                      

Super-Sized Series

 Transformation Part 1

 

 

That’s not my Survivor, I tell the Animal Whisperer by Sharon Waller Knutson

The cat in the photo on his phone
resembles a plush stuffed animal 
with a bright orange coat,
a fluffy white beard and booties
and a white streak on his nose.
and the tip of his tail.

My Survivor is a tiger striped
tabby with a scruffy coat 
from scrounging for birds 
and rats in the heat and cold.
My husband feeds the feral feline.
But he will only eat raw meat.
When my husband leaves earth
I can’t take care of the tabby.

“That’s the same cat I rescued 
from your property,” says the sixty
something big man squinting
like he did when he hauled
away a squalling Survivor
out to his car and held him 
on his lap as his wife
drove the 3 ½ miles to town 
on the bumpy dirt road.

“Survivor has his own apartment 
and two meals a day of salmon
and sardines as well as wet
and dry cat food,” he reports.
“He’s so heavy I can’t lift him,” 
he says. Still I cannot
find the scrawny skinny 
Survivor in this fat cat.

I worry Survivor is dead 
or roaming and might turn
up again starving and scratching 
on my glass. Then in our photos, 
I see a flash of white on orange.

But what convinces me
is when he meows 
and does the Dippity Do Da dance  
when he sees me. 
“That’s My Survivor,” I say.


Anna Christina by Terri Kirby Erickson

After Andrew Wyeth’s “Anna Christina,” 1967

They could sit for hours without the need
for words in the ancient rooms of the Olson 
house with its crumbling plaster, peeling 
wallpaper, and layer after layer of dust and 
soot. Here, Christina lived with her brother, 
Al, a landlocked sailor who yearned for the 

sea he left behind to manage his father’s farm. 
She could not walk but refused a wheelchair,
preferring to pull her body across the floor 
with sticklike arms. But Wyeth did not judge 

them. Alvaro was as much a part of the New 
England landscape as the rocks, the hills. And 
his sister was a monument to self-reliance, 
an icon, a queen. So Wyeth painted his friend’s 
face with all its crags and hollows, her stern 

and unwavering gaze, the lidless eyes that stare
at the viewer with such defiance, as if daring 
people to pity her unkempt hair that falls like 
splintering timbers to her shoulders, her faded

dress the color of moss and mold, her useless 
legs that dangle off-panel like the limbs of 
a marionette. But she was still a formidable 
woman, carved from the stone of her ancestors. 
Wyeth would not insult her with lies, mixed his 
medium with yolks, water, pigment, and truth.


Chrysalis by Tamara Madison
 
Newly freed from high school
my daughter spends her evenings
alone in the living room 
with Grey’s Anatomy. Life 
is so different now, classes 
at odd times, friends scattered 
like jacks. Opaque as ever, 
a deep well, she rests on the sofa 
in blue TV light. I can almost see 
her wings developing, intricate, 
folded like an origami moth 
within her close cocoon.


Then by Lynn White

She’s standing still 
pale as England, 
slim and serious
as I stood 
then.
Hair chopped 
above her shoulders
with a little curl allowed
as mine was 
then.
A little curl allowed,
in memory of it’s ringlets
earlier than
then.
Then it grew longer 
and we pulled it straight.
So now, it’s more like it was 
before then.
Before then, 
when
it was longer still,
and ironed straight
under thick brown paper.
It had been shorter still before
then
it’s feminine length curtailed, but
with a little curl allowed,
a reminder of it’s ringlets earlier than
then.
Of it’s earlier hated ringlets
grown  from loose curls.
Ringlets cut 
when 
father died.
Not until
then.

First published in Silver Birch Press, Looks Like Me series December 2015


A Champagne Headscarf by Abha Das Sarma
 
succeeds thirty years
of my white-
beads set in silver,
the colours
rose, black and turquoise-
oh, the danglers I so loved
help me fight.
 
Now when the dreams combine,
the window besides
shines the sun inside, a flight
to my rooftop holds the time-
a kite high on the coconut tree,
yellow bunting on a mango branch tip
and the squirrel carving its path in between. 


All the Names I’d Like to Give Myself by Arlene Levine
 
Call me what you will
but I have names for myself
wishes of who I want to be
dreams of an open face dancing whole person
able to take the heat
Call me Luna, call me Sol
I’ll answer to either or both
because they are me in its entirety
Call me resilient ground cover, murky tide pool,
encouraging firmament, fiery diadem
spinner and spun in the cosmic maze
There is always a world for me, of me, by me
from the words I chose, from the singing
syllables of sound strung together into thought
I imagine myself: a velvet rain forest
in the Amazon at dawn with a dozen squawking
lime-sherbet parrots dining on mango flesh
ripe as the morning
Call me crazy, call me shadow, call me
the beginning of an idea stirring
on the tip of your medulla oblongata
as succulent as fresh bee whiskey
capable of stinging senses
jolting the overgrown glade of your
sleepy life back into existence
Call me what you will

Transformation by j.lewis
 
when dreams are better
than waking to a day
where every task
is a nightmare
when those who know you
know you not at all
and loneliness multiples
with every person
who crowds around
crying save me -
there is a single answer:
cocoon
 
i watched your focused feedings
saw your depression devour
everything green
until all you thought good was gone
the lines you wrote
wrapped around you
thicker, harder
you escaped
inside your poetry
 
i waited
and i watched
 
emergence has its price
demands remolding of mind and body
old forms and feelings abandoned
as you climb up into sunlight
fan blue-gold wings uncertainly
then fly
free from past notions
of who and what you are
finally aware
of the beauty you bring
to those who sit quietly waiting
 

The Oracle Speaks by Gary D. Grossman

At the back of the thrift store a clerk is feather dusting a Magic Eight Ball. With the fourth swish over this 20th century party prophet, a pop-up squall sweeps me back to 1972 and LA, couched in Jules living room, her parents weekending at their Malibu beach house. Linda, her sister, stands and cools in front of the open refrigerator in black lace panties and bra. She asks is there any pie left, I could eat a horse? Her blood sugar at ebb tide, an aftereffect of the three bowls of Cambodian weed we’ve just finished smoking. Jules brings out her Magic Eight Ball, our Pythia of Delphi, with its score of foretellings ranging from: reply hazy, without a doubt, to simply, NO. It is our Einstein when befuddled and baked, and I am befuddled on whether to transfer to university at Berkeley, leaving Jules, the current owner of my heart, behind. I query, shake the Eight Ball, turn it over, only to read a definitive NO.  The left and right corners of Jules mouth slowly slide upwards. Facing the girls I say The last time I used the Eight Ball, it told me not to go to college. And bang, like a power line transformer exploding in Georgia's August heat, I rematerialize in the store, shake my head left and right to clear it from my thirty-year old abandonment of Jules and the oracle, and then recall the Wednesday in 1987 when I was granted tenure at the university down the street. 
 
From Objects in Mirror May Be Closer Than They Appear


Peter Pan by Rose Mary Boehm

It was after he set the CEO’s hair on fire
when he was ‘let go’ for the first time.

He'd wanted to stay forever young,
but slowly the surgery failed
and he was going south in a big way.
He knew why he’d been so reluctant
to leave Never-Never. 

Wendy broadened at the hips and needed
glasses. Her hearing wasn’t so hot anymore.
She got a bit upset when he took up
with the fairies. He knew his particular
game was up when even they giggled
behind those busy hands which fluttered
like large butterfly wings. And they whispered.

So he looked among the mothballs for his
suit, but he’d forgotten how
to fly. When he got to the place, the hinges
had rusted and nobody was in.

from DO OCEAN’ HAVE UNDERWATER BORDERS


Illuminated  Places  by Martha Ellen

The night she died 
I had a dream.
I saw her walking 
in a pleasant landscape
on an uphill footpath
toward an illuminated place.
Her back was to me.
She turned and saw me 
watching her leave 
for the last time.

Thrilled to see me,
she smiled and
waved with the familiar 
excited anticipation 
I had seen so many times 
before when I arrived
at her sheltered home
and we would go for coffee.
There were days I thought
this a chore, a boring task
that subtracted
from my important life.
But, in that moment, 
in her joyful smile, clarity.
She knew I feared 
to carry on without her.
“You will be OK. 
I will wait here for you.”

Everyone had believed
I was the stronger sister.


Transformation by Rachael Ikins

I worried as the paper stack grew, all the faces with earnest instructions while my mind lifted off like a helicopter. Bewildered. Home in 24 hrs. Glued, taped, stapled and stitched.


Paper doll. 
Art project? 

He said it was “really bad in there” 
that he was glad I let him in,
him and the glue gun, the saw, titanium and plastic. Did he invite the robot after all. 

He reminds me of a teddy bear for all the brutality of what surgeons do, there is softness 

After all the thousands of instructions, 
white noise, at home 

I remember who I am. 
Pain another word for fear 
drains away, just one night. 

Today I let the dogs out. 
Step in my garden 
we watch the sun rise. 

not the same woman who limped
out of the house last Friday morning,
nothing stays the same does it? 

I wish he  had given me the pieces 
a decorative urn to bury in the garden 

what carried me
so far, so long until it wore 
its own heart out. 


Coming Out of Retirement, Age 70 by Joe Cottonwood

A milestone 
like re-losing my virginity 
as I crawl under a deck
among spore-puffing dirt, 
as duff prickles my navel 
as I jack up a beam, then pound and pry 
with unsure muscles to remove a rotten post, 
install another, then lower the jack again. 

Humping toward me over curling fern, 
a wooly bear caterpillar who knows inborn 
of construction, of transformation, 
who seems to say —

Welcome back to funky earth, 
to sawdust in nostrils, 
to splinters under fingernails, 
to blood-seeping scratches 
discovered in the shower. 

Welcome back to a world 
built better by your body.

Verse-Virtual 


Biscuit Love by Joan Leotta

Biscuits transubstantiate 
from buttermilk, Lily brand flour, 
Clabber Girl baking powder
into a heavenly delight.
First food passed
following prandial prayer
communion of love 
between baker and diner.

Plucking one, still warm
from the colored woven basket,
my fingers tingle.

Slowly I separate a
lightly crisp top half
from soft layers below 
on this bread of perfection.
Then tamp down a pat of 
real butter, swirl honey 
on each cloud-like half.
I sample, slowly, 
savor honey's thick
sweetness aided, 
indeed, abetted by the salty, 
creamy, butter beneath,
let my tongue capture each
tender biscuit crumb.
Edible perfection.

In a slightly different form it was selected for the Poetry in Public Places a few years ago in North Carolina and appeared on posters all over Winston Salem.

Encore Series

 Luanne Castle 

 

Every Object a Story

by Luanne Castle

Personal heirlooms speak to me, reminding me of memories that, while never gone, have floated to the bottom of the deep ocean of memory. Family heirlooms have their stories—stories which originated with other family members or ancestors. Every object can generate a poem, story, or essay. If you are interested in writing about objects with meaning to you and have not already discovered it, you will want to read Dawn Raffel’s The Secret Life of Objects.

I had a poem in my first book, Doll God, called “YouTube Interview of the Life-Sized Toddler Doll,” about a personal heirloom, the life-sized walking doll that my grandmother bought me with her store discount at Marshall Field’s flagstaff store at State and Washington in Chicago. I have kept the doll to this day. When my kids were young they believed she was alive. 

For this project, I decided to write about my aunt’s pearls, which arrived for my wedding when I hadn’t seen or heard from my aunt since I was five years old. I started this poem almost forty years ago, but never finished it until now. I wrote three new poems--about the snack bowls we used when I was a kid, the glass pitcher my grandmother poured potato pancake batter from, and the antique doll and rocker that belonged to this same grandmother. I write frequently about my maternal grandparents, but the grandmother in this batch of poems is my paternal Chicago-based grandmother. Clarification note: “Grandma’s Kestner Doll in the Oak Rocking Chair” is the doll Grandma bought for herself, whereas the doll in the YouTube poem is the one she bought for me.

Grandma’s Kestner Doll in the Oak Rocking Chair

I remember back so far 
my daddy plunked down
the little caned oak rocker
and the old-fashioned doll
with yellow hair sitting in it
in the corner by our couch.
Don’t touch. It’s Grandma’s.

I remember beginning school
and Daddy moved the chair
with the doll into my room
after I picked up my books
and tucked them on the shelf.
Be careful. The chair and doll
are very old and fragile.

I remember coming home 
for Christmas from college.
The doll in the chair back in
my parents’ larger living room.
She’ll be yours one day, Lu.
“One day” was never, at least
that’s how I felt at the time.

I remember years later 
opening a large UPS package
and pulling out the bubble-
wrapped chair. A box held
the doll in her hand-sewn dress.
The note in dad’s handwriting
said, They are yours now.

The doll had other outfits, all 
sewn by my grandmother. Long-
distance, Dad explained: growing
up, Grandma didn’t have a doll.
She bought her with her first pay.
This would have been in 1907,
living in a boarding house.

The sturdy little chair came from
the farmhouse. My baby grandson
rocks himself as if to blast off.
I tuck the doll into her tissue paper, 
overwhelmed with responsibility. 
Who will care for her as I can
when they never met Grandma.
 
Trying to Connect with Grandma Fifty Years Later
My grandmother cooked my favorite,
potato pancakes, crispy, not too thick.
She poured the batter from a bowl
I thought necessary for the process.
The milky green glass swirled
into a lip where the concoction slid
onto the sparking oil-sheened griddle.

I suspect my parents sold the bowl
when Grandma moved into a “home.”
What I recall is seeing her sad little
belongings—crocheted potholders
and scratched pans--on long tables 
in our garage for Saturday’s sale.
But I don’t think the bowl was there.
Or did I just not realize its importance?

Grandma was born next to a vineyard
in Rhineland and learned a potato batter
more like flour pancakes than latkes.
I pressed the memory of that green bowl
far down in my mind, along with many
from those days—until one day I didn’t.
Could I find that piece of my childhood?
There was my bowl online: a vintage 
Anchor Hocking jadeite Fire King
batter bowl. It’s in my cupboard now,
but I wish I had the recipe to go with it.

 
I Haven’t Seen Aunt Marge Since I was Five and Now I’m Thirty

Her patent leather eyes 
reflect me with visual acuity,
as if she can read my thoughts.
The puffs of white hair,
are the same we brushed
back five years before from 
Grandma's deathbed forehead.

Even her hands are her mother's--
small and round with tapered,
shiny fingers, dressed
up with rows of rings.
They pull and fuss at each other
like malcontented siblings.
They separate from her,
pale birds chattering in the air.

Why now? Why is she here
after a quarter century of silence?
For so long she was a silence
in our house, my father’s silence.
Cousin Leah whispered how Grandma
met her at the train station, 
but I had to keep it secret,
like a raw egg rattling in my mind.
My father’s anger might’ve cracked 
him and all around him into fragments.

The only sign she had sent me
during the reign of secrecy
was the strand of bridal pearls,
pallor-white, her mother gave to her 
years ago, now shared for my wedding.
Memories repeat out of order,
but we are not stringing them.
Rather we let them light as bubbles
on our shoulders, watch them dissolve. 


 
Estate Bowls

My husband calls to me in the kitchen
When you come this way, bring me 
popcorn in one of those estate bowls.
Someone who overhears might imagine
a Royal Doulton sprouting rosy roses.
Or perhaps pewter from the sixties.

Our estate bowls are faded melamine
speckled like our old kitchen linoleum.
They feature little melamine handles
to ease snacking for small fingers.
When my parents moved to a senior
community, Mom tossed them away.

To her they signified a time of her life
long past, but as I plucked them out, 
memories flooded me: fresh popped
corn or ice cream gooped with syrup,
the chocolate chips and baking walnuts
I snuck to my room and under my bed.

I also remembered shaking out BeMo 
potato chips for my first serious boyfriend, 
dabbing in a dollop of French onion dip.
The same “boy” now calls out to me
to pour him some low-cal Skinny Pop, 
the bowl a reminder of our shared history.


 
YouTube Interview of the Life-Sized Toddler Doll

Do I entrance you?
Do you think I'm adorable?
Watch these lids pop like shades over
my round baby blues.
Feel the spring of my mohair curl.

I belong to her but I own
her children.  When she's downstairs
I pop my lids just for them.
The little one laughs
with terror; her brother
bothered, retreats down
to his mother

who refuses to believe
I who once was her darling
would harm her darlings.

She dressed me in flower-
edged socks, and when she bent me
over to spank me,  a bouquet of lace
ruffles sprang from my seat.
Her granny sewed us matching
dresses--my kneeless legs
stiff under the crisp pink sateen,
her legs marred by red scabs
at the knees, her pink cotton
diminished with washes.  I held her
beauty, a flawless twin.

Now I sit on the rocking chair
in the guest room
signaling those who can see me,
forcing them to look into
the stones that are my eyes.
Look into my eyes.
See how it was for me, my history.