Book of the Week

 buck naked is the opposite of hate Sheila Na Gig Editions (2026) by Joe Cottonwood

 

  
 

Comments by Editor Sharon Waller Knutson

It isn’t often that I read a title of a book and instantly know who authored the book without even reading the byline. The minute I read: buck naked is the opposite of hate, I knew it was a Joe Cottonwood poetry collection full of crazy characters we love to love and hate and sympathize with as we read their raw, honest, heartfelt and heartbreaking stories.  Joe has a talent for telling a story that makes me laugh and cry at the same time. Like Hemingway, in language anyone can understand, Joe explores the human condition through the lives of everyday people he meets in his childhood and as a carpenter, neighbor and nature lover. As we frolic through fun redneck country, he introduces us to bullies, barefooted Blue Grass lovers, beer drinkers and blue-collar workers with dirt under their fingernails.  He gives a new perspective on life. It seems the older Joe gets, the wiser he gets. I treasure the book he autographs: To Sister Sharon, even though he is recovering from shoulder surgery and read it cover to cover, feeling like I am with family as I listen to the doves chattering by the pond and imagine Brother Joe doing the same in his house under the Redwoods.


About the book by Joe Cottonwood

Buck naked poems wear the innocence of youth, the wisdom of nature, the experience of craft. They come of a lifetime in the building trades, of sawdust embedded beneath fingernails. Of the questions of children and the adventure of their raising. Of the wisdom of birds, the pawprint of raccoon, the loyalty of dog and the wariness of cat. Of romance, of a lifetime love. Of digging trenches, connecting wires, banging nails. Of a reverence for trees, of the guilt of slicing wood, of the pleasure of providing comfort and shelter. Of ancestors, of ghosts. Of, each day, seeking the humane. 


Praise from fellow poets.

I don’t often envy other writers, but there’s Joe Cottonwood. To read his poems, you’d think he’s lived every life I imagined but never quite got to. It isn’t just that he’s a mesmerizing storyteller, it’s that he shows you in poem after poem what it means to be human, to have a sense of compassion, to be a good person because it’s right. And does it in poetry that says “Stay here a while. See what I see, feel what I feel.” His reverence for nature and for craftsmanship, for the good that is in the people he writes about, is a quality that is too seldom found. My advice? Sit down with this book of poetry and step into a world where even pain can be gentle. Then thank Joe for letting you in.

—j.lewis (Jim Lewis): Editor of Verse-Virtual and author of “all these things are broken.”

I never know where I'll be going when I read a Joe Cottonwood poem. It's as though he pulled up in a pickup truck, shouted "Get in!" and off we barrel down a dirt road chunky with rocks and storm-torn branches, a ragtag assemblage of dogs barking in the back. Joe's poems are fresh and unroasted, like he just thought them up a minute ago, right there in your company. When you join him while he smoothens pine "sweet as sugar" or solders a copper pipe outside a McMansion, you'll share Joe's reverence for bird's-eye maple, the warmth of water, and for the English language itself.

----Shoshauna Shy, author of  Shortcut to Thief River Falls

Like his fellow Californian John Steinbeck, Joe writes of common people with an uncommon grace. Joe's poems are tales of daily life — of his wife and children, his friends and neighbors. He illuminates the elemental truths which connect us all. Reverent and loving. Joe's humanism and strong heart suffuse his work, and through his poems he finds, embraces, and shares with us that bit of the sacred which is woven into the ordinary.

— Roderick Bates, Editor, Rat's Ass Review

 

The 92 pages of poems is divided in four sections: In Muddy Water, Rough Cut, Swallowed by Lions and Let Go Like a Dove. 

 

Some of my favorite poems:

My Song Americana

I come to you barefoot
I chew bluegrass, drink corn
My rain is muddy water

My hands are raw from picking cotton
My lungs are black with coal
My farm is dust

I follow rivers by raft, 
herd longhorns by horseback, 
ride boxcars over endless plain

I killed the native and the buffalo
I regret
I sing of what remains

I am outlaw—I seek justice
I celebrate love—I betray it
I despise the rich—I want riches

I raise children in rags 
They outgrow my front porch, 
my tumbledown shack
I shame them with my twang, 
my holler of blues

My children trade tractors for Teslas
They bring the south north
They take the west east

My children return with fresh children 
who throw off shoes, who paddle kayaks, 
who jump into muddy water 
and come up clean


Lester and Maggie and the 4-Wheel Bed

Gruff gray Lester and Navaho Maggie 
have no offspring but treat me like one. 
For Lester I knock down a wall 
and install fat rubber wheels under 
the walnut monster of a double bed
they've shared 60 years—so he can roll 
Maggie to the dining room and kitchen. 
Magpie of Dawn, Lester says. 
She keeps an eye on me. 
Maggie's delighted, room to room 
joking and chattering sometimes in Navaho 
and you get used to the scent of urine.

Rolling is difficult for Lester who limps 
and later more cumbersome with oxygen tanks 
so I'm replacing cupped floor boards 
when Maggie who is watching me work 
points to a pair of coyotes—
one large wary male, one smaller calm female—
outside the window sitting on haunches 
by the broken-down tractor staring right at us, 
not unusual for a ranch house outside town but
then we hear a gurgling sound like water in a drain. 
Lester a big man leaps to Maggie's side. 
Bends his head to her heart while outside 
in broad daylight those coyotes start to howl. 
The two. Aroo-oo. 
It tingles. 
The air itself seems to glow. 
Lester grabs his rifle from the wall and runs
to the window but those coyotes don't flinch.
Aroo-oo. 
He lowers the gun with shaky hands, says 
They're calling her home.

A couple weeks later after the service 
Lester in his old wedding suit tight and ragged 
hands me a cardboard box containing the wheels 
he's removed and there's a note: 
For the next. 
Help them go home.
Now I'm no coyote but that box is 
on the top shelf in the garage. 
I'm telling you, son, so you'll know.


Walter Johnson fires a fastball,
Elvis Presley crowds the plate

At a tender age you learn to glaze windows 
when you pitch tennis balls to the brick wall 
of your house. You learn curveball and fast, 
you try the knuckle, sweep glass. 

You learn to hate the mulberries 
that squish over the pitching mound. 

You play next door with Mary Anne Morningstar
and you love the Elvis songs blaring 
from her tinny transistor radio
as much as you hate the menacing hillbilly accent 
of her full bourbon father who yodels 
“Love me tay-ender, Love me troo-a-oo-a-oo.” 

You find you can improve your arm 
only as far as your body will allow, 
one fat pitch can erase ten good ones, 
there’s always some batter with a better eye, 
some coach with a mean streak. 

You learn your back yard was formerly 
farmland owned by Walter Johnson, 
one of the greatest pitchers of all time. 
Your mulberries fed his chickens. 
May his spirit feed your arm. 

You develop hair down there
and see Mary Anne burst into tears
when you ask to see hers.
You jump back as she launches 
a stone like a fastball into the radio 
smashing it to jewels of plastic.

You learn she hates Elvis 
and she hates her dad for his pelvis
and she loves God instead, 
and you think maybe you love Mary Anne 
like Elvis loves his momma
in a tender non-icky way.

You learn to cut glass, to curl putty with a knife.
You learn Walter Johnson after baseball 
became an incompetent small time politician 
and Elvis in Vegas turned squishy as mulberry. 

You learn the easy passage from genius to fool.
Constellations fade with the dawn. 
Remember Mary Anne. 
Remember the stars.

……

Note: When Walter Johnson pitched for the Washington Senators he had a farm in Maryland. The house where I grew up was built on that farmland.


Working graveyard shift 

my sleep is nuts
so on nights off I walk the dog at 3 a.m.
hoping a German shepherd normalizes me
except Quinn growls at the cop
who stays in his cruiser
talking through the open window
just letting me know somebody called 
from one of those dark houses
but there’s no law against walking at 3 a.m.
so have a good night.

Sometimes I jog the golf course under quiet stars. 
I let Quinn off the leash.
Together we run over grass. 
Even without a canine nose I love the smell, 
the sound of sleeping snoring chlorophyll.  

One night I’m running when the sprinklers start.
Immediately before I can think better
I pull off my clothes, every stitch.
I run. So free! It’s fantastic, the dog agrees 
until I trip
and roll
but that’s fantastic too
except the bruises
and suddenly the spotlight, the cop.

I have mud on my body, grass in my hair.
The sprinklers keep chug-chug-chugging in circles
splat with cold bullets across my butt
as the cop writes out a ticket 
for an unleashed dog. That’s all, 
because there’s no law against
running through sprinklers 
on graveyard shift
when you’re white.


Nov 22

My brother with dementia 
outside a bakery arrested for peeing 
into a newspaper rack and forgetting 
to refasten his pants which brings him 
not to a police station but a hospital 
where I find him and take custody. 
The nurse asks the standard questions 
to see if he is oriented such as “Who is president?” 
“That asshole.”
“Which asshole?”
“Um—the ugly one.”
“What year is it today?”
[Shrug.] 
“What month is it?”
[Shrug.] 
“Do you know what the day is?”
“No, what?”
“Today is Thursday, November twenty-second.”
“They shot him.” 
“Who?”
“The president. They shot him.”
The young nurse is puzzled. 
“Kennedy,” I explain. 
“Well,” says the nurse, “do you know where you are?”
“Yes,” my brother says, “I’m in the fucking hospital.”
The nurse smiles. “Okay, you may go.”
“They shot him,” he mutters all the way home.
Because some things you never forget.


Shirtless Dusty 

I first meet Dusty on a beach 
beside the Chesapeake Bay 
in this photo where 
he’s dating my cousin Liz 
who suddenly grew a body. 
Dusty’s the one with chest hair. 
I’m the kid with glasses.

In this photo Vietnam shirtless again 
he’s on a river boat patrolling 
writes Stay in college. 
Stay the hell out of here. 

Next here’s him shirtless and Liz shirted 
in the house he restored on steelworker’s pay 
building war machines that float. 
Bankers stole his pension 
when they looted Bethlehem Steel. 
Combat memories haunt
while Dusty raises goats
until the city shuts him down.

Here’s Dusty an old man on Facebook
with his face peeling off, flesh
flaking under cammo fatigues
posting paranoid gun-rights crap
so I unfriend him.

Here at the Chesapeake Bay again
Liz is dumping Dusty’s ashes 
from a borrowed sailboat.
Agent Orange kills him 
though the doctors won’t admit it. 
His life like firing a rifle at the sky: 
a disturbance the air closes over. 
We open our shirts, 
we feel the bullet strike. 
Here. Right here.


The Opposite of Hate

Singin’ in the shower.  
Peanut butter. Daisies. 
Weathered barn boards
are the opposite of hate.

Playmate. Roller skate. 
Rhyme is the opposite of hate.

Balloons. The only thing 
you should ever blow up 
is a balloon.

Skinny-dips. 
Swimmin’ hole, hot afternoon.
Buck naked is the opposite of hate.


Steak, Well-Done

Selected on the hoof
after peering in the eye, 
how Uncle Merrel shops for beef. 
Walked by rope to an Amish man 
who butchers, loads 500 pounds of meat 
to Merrel’s 2-wheel trailer pulled by 
smoke-popping bare-bones tractor 
to a freezer in town.

A few cuts Merrel brings home and cooks 
special for us, his west coast nephew and family 
who followed the Oregon Trail backwards
for dinner which is mid-afternoon 
on farm country time in Missouri. 
Back home we don’t eat meat
but we don’t mention.

Uncle Merrel is a patched old machine 
pushed too hard for too long, 
threads of flesh bound in scraps of denim. 
Sweats red oil. Shakes when idle, 
then at top speed he groans and grunts.

Steak, says Merrel, oughtn’t be bloody inside, 
you want it cooked but if you order well-done 
in a restaurant they get mad at you 
and flame it too fast so it’s burned outside 
but still bloody in the middle. 

We appreciate we didn’t have to evaluate 
this steak in the eye. Uncle Merrel 
cooks with time, with sizzling fat. 
Well-done, still juicy but not bloody. 
The farm way. And golly it’s good.


The Stranger in the Car Behind

A mighty gust of fog rips 3 bicycles 
from the rope-and-bungee web atop my van
to fly past the rear window as my gut drops
in a center lane on the Golden Gate Bridge 
so I stop. God help me, I stop. 

Jump out. Run back 
to where the stranger in the car behind 
blessedly not a tailgater braked in time 
now has put on his blinkers and hustled forward 
as together under steel cables 
while wet wind howls with diesel smoke 
as cars roar by on both sides 
while an oil tanker glides beneath
he says not one word in the quick desperation
helps gather 3 bent bicycles from the roadway 
which I stuff on top of 3 scared children 
as the stranger to whom I said not one word 
not a thank you not a moment for it
runs back to his car in the mad din of about 30 seconds 
while I hop into the driver’s seat 
and stomp on the gas and — gone. 

And the stranger whoever 
never asked to be a hero 
pumped adrenaline scrambled amid traffic 
where no trucks or busses plowed into us 
survived and drove on and — gone. 

So to you right here right now reading this poem — 
Yes, you —
To all you strangers in all the cars behind 
let me say in advance: 
Thank you. 
Bless you for what without hesitation you will do.
Thank you so much.

Combatting Cancer with Kindness

Elaine Sorrentino

 

 
Elaine Sorrentino at Pink Lemonade presentation

By Elaine Sorrentino

 I was diagnosed with breast cancer in October 2006 and again in October 2019.  I've started dreading the month of October.  I've written a number of poems to help me process what it's been like navigating cancer. Fellow breast cancer survivor/poet Dzvinia Orlowsky and I collaborated to create a program called Pink LemonAid which presents breast cancer-inspired art, mostly poetry and prose, but music as well.  It was ironic that two days after the first presentation of this program, I was diagnosed again.  October of 2026, we'll present our next Pink LemonAid.  Proceeds from books sold at the event will help women needing transportation to chemo.  We've both been there and have experienced kindness from the most surprising places.

These poems show my journey:


Who Doesn’t Love Positive?

They said
be more positive
you’ll be happier
you’ll live longer
you’ll have more friends
you’ll be more successful, confident
you’ll lower your risk of disease
you’ll age slower, more gracefully
you’ll reduce your chances of depression
you’ll inspire others to be more positive.
So, I embraced positive,
became the epitome of positive,
simply oozed positive¬−
as did my cancer biopsy,
my world altered forever by positive,
betraying me the moment
positive became something…different.
This new positive produced 
a scarred and dimpled gland
burnt, useless, wire-like veins
two different cup sizes
unwanted tattoos in intimate places
rejected “organ donor” status
blood now worthless to anyone.
Yet, beyond physical changes,
what made my upbeat heart weep
were glances tinged with unwelcome pity,
and yearly reminders that I could be positive again.


Searching for a Lifeboat 
            during treatment
 
I am the wonder ball
the hot potato 
the short straw
 
as desirable 
as a bruised apple
in a fruit basket,
 
no one volunteers to steer
the ship of my wellbeing,
instead, the medical crew
 
references paragraph three
where it says this is the least 
to which they're obligated;
 
no longer their concern
I am passed on to the next port,
island-hopping for health care.


Buzz off the Buzz Off

Put the razor down.
Ask yourself
Why am I doing this?
If your undertaking is for me,
don’t waste your time;
your gesture,
intended as supportive,
only serves to hurl
me into melancholy
You are my mirror,
my support, my rock,
and your follicle-free
scalp reminds me
of my grueling struggle.
Keep your full head
of hair, and remind me
instead, of my reward
at the end of my journey.
First published in The Writer's Newsletter, 


Alternate Hair
           
It didn’t matter who knew.
I wasn’t attempting to hide my truth.
 
This bouncy, brown, easy-to-wear mop
preserved my freedom to buy groceries
 
without cruel whispers
look at the lady in the cereal aisle

her dome’s smooth as honeydew in produce,
it allowed me it to cling to a smidgeon
 
of normalcy in a stretch
that felt like daily ransacking;
 
scalp enhancement staved off
pity, questioning stares; this patient
 
embraced dinner out with her sweetie,
tossed aside needles and scalpels
 
to step back into the world of the living,
savoring a moment of sweet vanity.

First published in Verse Virtual

 

Uninvited

Cancer comes knocking
once every thirteen years,
and I say no, thank you,
but it heaves itself
into my body anyway
refusing to leave
until I escort it to the exit,
thrust it into the dark,
and nail that door shut.
Don’t come scratching again.


Eye for an Eye
            post radiation
 
After I silently counted
the last “six Mississippi”
under the linear accelerator,
lowered my arms
and rolled off the table,
the technician tossed
a fistful of confetti in the air
and handed me a certificate
of completion.
 
In private that night
after unwrapping
that tender breast
itchy and inflamed,
soothing it with salve,
I folded the beige parchment
once, then once again,
knelt before the fireplace,
threw open the flue,
and struck a match.

First published on The Keeping Room, Minerva Rising


Two Views

cancer
maintenance
drugs
stole
my eyebrows,
thinned
my hair,
weakened
my bones
cancer
maintenance
drugs
lengthened
my life,
restored
my hope,
permitted
more time
to nag
my kids

 

Growing up in Sheffield, England

Lynn White

 
Lynn White as a child

By Lynn White

The first home I remember is the one described in 'Bath Time'. It was in Sheffield inner city, a stone's throw from the house my mother had grown up in and lived in until the death of her mother in 1941. The photo is taken opposite my home and you can clearly see the ringlets described in 'Sore Fingers'. Just before my 6th birthday when we moved to a Council House on the northern outskirts. This was to be my home until I left to go to college and my parents home until their deaths. It was a 10 minute walk from my auntie's where my mother had lived after the death of her mother. Opposite was the rough ground where 'Red Car' is located. Further down the wild area met the 'bottom road' which divides the houses from the countryside. Coming up the other side the street is lower and the wild area forms the 'cliffs' of 'Running Wild'. My school, till the age of 11, was 10 minutes in another direction. I would have been 8 when we had the Student Teacher described in 'Such Nonsense'. Another auntie lived in a village on the south side of Sheffield and the setting for ' School Shoes' is there.


Bath Time

The bath used to hang on the wall
in the scullery.
Not our scullery.
His scullery.
We borrowed it from Mr Neil
who rented us the rooms
at the front of his house.
One down, one up.
My mother would knock on his door
and he would lift it down for her.
But she had to carry it to our 
living room.
It was heavy,
made of zinc she said.
It took a lot of water
which had to be carried from the outside
tap and then heated on our gas ring.
It took a lot of hot water
and had to be filled 
and emptied
with a jug.
Sometimes it was just too much work
for her
and she washed me in a bowl
as I sat on her fat lap.
It was snuggly.
I preferred it 
that way
really.

First published in Visual Verse


Sore Fingers

At night my long hair was wrapped
in rags - pristine strips
of thick white cloth.
Sore fingers, my mother called them.
My unruly curls bandaged
into six stiff sore fingers,
to be unravelled in the morning
to reveal
shiny ringlets
ready
to be tied in bunches
with broad, bright, bias cut ribbons.

I wanted plaits.
All the heroines
in my childhood 
books had plaits
I dreamt about plaits
fantasised about plaits.
No more sore fingers.
I wanted plaits.

Sometimes I untied the ringlets,
to my mothers displeasure,
and made untidy, unsuccessful plaits.
Plaits would ruin my hair, my mother said.
Would spoil it’s natural curl,
destroy it
in some
way
never
specified.

I didn’t care.
I hated ringlets.
I hated sore fingers.
I wanted plaits.

First published in Silver Birch Press


Red Car

The abandoned car stood on the waste ground,
rusting away, doors hanging off, leather seats ripped.
The children played there on warm summer days
but I was not allowed.
The place was dangerous
and the children were rough.
It was the first time I had ever been in a car.
I sat behind the wheel to drive it making
engine noises like a bus.
It was a black car.
In those days all cars were black.
Any colour you like, so long as it’s black.
I thought that a red one would have been nicer.

First published in Blognostics


Running Wild

She had been one of my mothers best friends.
Her daughter was in my class at school
and one of my best friends.
But I was rarely allowed to call on her
to play out.

She lived in a street opposite ‘the cliffs’,
which when I’ve been there since,
weren’t cliffs at all,
just a steep area
overgrown
with bushes 
and small tees
with an overgrown field above.

It was great fun scrambling around there.
“Dangerous”, my mother said,
“and those children
are allowed
to run wild”!

But it was great fun while it lasted!

First published in Mocking Owl Roost


School Shoes

I loved the pond near my auntie’s.
Just a short walk from the village.
I could get right up close 
and peer into the water.
That was how I saw the frogs.

They were not easy to catch but
I managed it eventually, one at a time.
I kissed each carefully
to make sure they were real frogs,
didn’t want one of those prince things.

Then I put them in my shoe and placed
my other shoe on top
so that they couldn’t jump out.
I walked back barefoot 
over the rough ground
and the village street.

I discovered that my mother and auntie
were afraid of frogs.
Perhaps they would have preferred princes.
They didn’t like the barefoot walk either.
My dirty feet would show them up, 
they said.

And worse! They were my school shoes,
which were also my only shoes
and now they were smelly with pond water
and frogs!
But my uncle was cool
said they were good for the garden.
So I watched them leapfrog through his garden.

I hoped they’d be happy there.
He told me they were,
but I never saw them again.

First published in School Shoes, Four Feathers Press


Such Nonsense

We had a new teacher,
a student still in college.
He read us a long poem. 
I listened carefully trying
to make sense of it.
It was funny.
Was it meant to be funny?
or was the laughter of derision,
to what sounded like nonsense.
Laughter seemed allowed
and that was unusual.
School was not a place for fun.
Well, maybe it was nonsense
but I loved the imagery
and the colours of the words.
I asked if 'pea green' was
the colour of mushy peas
from the chip shop,
or was it those in pods
fresh from the garden.
Nothing was clear,
but it was fun.

First published in Medusa’s Kitchen 

Book of the Week

 Orinoco Plains (dancing girl press, 2025) by Lorraine Caputo

 

 
Comments By Editor Sharon Waller Knutson

In Orinoco Plains, Lorraine Caputo, the traveling troubadour, takes
readers on a magical musical tour through the Llanos of Venezuela in this entertaining and exhilarating poetry collection.

About the book:

With her latest collection of travel poetry, Orinoco Plains, Lorraine Caputo invites you on a journey through the Llanos of Venezuela. This region, traversed by the mighty Orinoco River, teems with wildlife. Roseate spoonbills and black ibis, caimans and iguanas, anteaters and capybara are just some of the fauna we shall see. And we will witness the lives of the people of these plains, celebrating feast days, dancing, playing music, going to school, traveling – and those displaced from their ancestral homes. Come and enjoy the adventure!

About the author:

Wandering troubadour Lorraine Caputo is a documentary poet, translator and travel writer. Her works appear internationally in over 500 journals and 24 collections of poetry – including In the Jaguar Valley (dancing girl press, 2023) and Santa Marta Ayres (Origami Poems Project, 2024). She also authors travel narratives, articles and guidebooks. She is a Parliamentary Poet Laureate of Canada honoree (2011), and multiple Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominee. Caputo has done literary readings from Alaska to the Patagonia. She journeys through Latin America with her faithful knapsack Rocinante, listening to the voices of the pueblos and Earth. 

Some of my favorite poems:

LLANO VIGNETTES

I. 
Black-crested, golden-throated large bird sits on a fence post. 
Verdant pasture stretches to forest. 
White egrets stroll amidst white cattle grazing.

II.
Three men stand mid-river. 
Muddied waters hasten past muscular legs. 
The middle hombre reaches to cast a net.

III.
White sun shielded by humid clouds. The water-logged land 
is flat, flat to any horizon & dusted by white long-plumage flowers. 
A flock of garzas swoops over these llanos.

IV.
Three men ride atop a load of sugar cane. The truck-wind whips 
the dried blades & their shirts.

V.
Early afternoon, egrets fill the small-leaf trees edging a plowed field. 
The come-again rainy season swells reborn swamps of lavender-spiked 
flowers & lazy streams.

Perched atop un árbol, a hawk-sized bird, chestnut-colored body, 
cream-colored head.

VI.
The two-lane highway slices across the thick landscape of thick woods, 
thick pastures thick with zebu. Joropos play on the radio, we dance 
around potholes.Trees & lakes thick with waterfowl – herons, scarlet ibis, storks.

VII.
Ay, how can I describe the beauty of this land when I 
don’t know the names of the birds, the trees, the plants …?

VIII.
Beings quickly breach the dirty-mirror surface or duck beneath concentric 
circles forming. In one lakelet, a babo, snout in air, slowly swims
towards a white heron.

IX.
But I can recognize the trees of civilization: mango, palm, banana, flamboyán …
& in the mist is a duo, a trio of houses

X.
Every now & again, in some stretch of the middle of this nowhere, 
we come across a blue truck, a bus or yet another truck broken down.

XI.
Dragonflies dance in the now-mid-afternoon, across the road, around us. 
A breeze ripples the water & grasses. The countless lagunillas with a solitary 
or more babos. On one small island sun three, mouths open. 

& this llano soil, bone-white, blood-red, engraved by these herds of cattle, 
these flocks of birds & iguanas.



MANGO SUNSET

Mango sunset . . . . . full
moon arising high over
the llanos . . . . . balance
 
Mounting clouds veil la
Luna. The air vibrates with
the calls of toads &
cicada. Lightning pulses
profound indigo heavens.
 
Suddenly this world
stills. & then the breeze, stirring
the lance-shaped leaves of
those trees that tower like the
thunderheads. Heavy fruit sway.
 
& steadily the
rains slide throughout the night ‘til
pale mango sunrise.


SONATA FOR A LATE AFTERNOON

Narrow old-city streets lined with rainbow
houses. In the rooms of one, lilac-
colored, youth learn music. Boys tune their
guitars. A boy sits in the window
looking out  to the cobbled street. Chords
of cuatro, bars of French horn, sweet
voices drift through the sultry late day.

GLIMPSING YOUR LIVES

In this port town built by foreign mining companies, not too far from the US-ranch-style former housing of their executives, behind strip mall stores displaying hundreds of styles of shoes, the latest fashions & electronics.

I glimpse your lives
as we speed by

In that treeless lot several dozen indigenous families live in shelters made of sapling posts, perhaps with walls of cloth, plastic sacks, cardboard, with roofs of tied-down plastic sheeting billowing in the wind of deep-grey clouds, with hard-packed dirt floors, with several net hammocks hanging, children resting, women breastfeeding, with clotheslines, stacks of firewood between each home, dark-skinned chamos playing, dogs & cats roaming, a man scraping a pot clean before putting it on the cook fire.

I glimpse your lives...

Out on the medians of broad boulevards, 1970s cars, SUVs racing rapidly past, your young daughters, young mothers, your abuelitas walk, hands outstretched for a few bolívares, fresh-flowered dresses brightening the grey day, the black pavement, the greyed air, thick feet planted into the rust-blood earth.

...as we speed by

You were driven many years ago from your delta lands dried up by the rerouting of the Orinoco to open shipping channels—Ay, where else could you go, except here, homeport of those mineral companies?

I glimpse...

The wind grows harsher, scurrying garbage around the fenced-off lot next door, a flash of thin white lightning, sharp thunder as dusk arrives, your sons rushing home.

...your lives

& when these daily rains come...

...as we...

& when the night comes...

...speed by


SONG TO THE ORINOCO
    —multi-voice, sung chorus

Ever since I was a child I
have dreamed of mounting you &
sailing far away to the sea
on the slow-flowing waters

Sail away
    Sail away
        Sail away

A muddy snake serpentining
almost fifteen-hundred miles
past high mountains, through dense jungles
& across the llano plains

Sail away
    Sail away
        Sail away

I want to reach down & gather
your many bouldered islands
into a garland ‘round my neck
bronzéd by your humid sun

Sail away
    Sail away
        Sail away

I want to drape myself with your
golden dry-season beaches
& with those verdant-fringed shores
of your many months of rain

Sail away
    Sail away
        Sail away

We’ll watch caimans & piranhas,
the manatees swimming past
jaguars come to the water’s edge
& the birds flying o’erhead

Sail away
    Sail away
        Sail away

Let us float the wide waters past
Caicara, through the narrows
of Angostura, down downstream
to dark River Caroní

Sail away
    Sail away
        Sail away

Then into the many channels
lacing through fertile delta
lands until we reach the calm blue-
silver Caribbean Sea

Sail away
    Sail away
        Sail away

Ever since I was a child I
have dreamed of sailing with you
but the boats have long since ceased &
I will still have to dream of …

Sailing away
    Sailing away
        Sailing away

To Buy the Book:

https://dulcetshop.myshopify.com/products/orinoco-plains-lorraine-caputo

After I Lose the Love of My Life

 Sharon Waller Knutson 

 

   
Shannon, Sharon and Linsi

By Sharon Waller Knutson

The most traumatic event of my life was June 30, 2025, when I found my husband/soulmate/best friend/caregiver dead on the floor. I was devastated because I loved being part of the team of Al and Sharon for thirty years. Now I was totally alone or so I thought until neighbors, most of them strangers, started showing up to help and some are still here. As the first anniversary of his death approaches, I share their stories.

After Paramedics Tell Me My Husband is Gone

Kathleen is the first neighbor to show up.
All six feet of her. Silver pony-tail
swinging like the tails of the mules
she rides past our house before
her husband got dementia,
and they gave up the livestock
and now she walks an old dog
and feeds an aging cat 
on forty acres, three miles from us.

She hugs me, murmurs sorry,
and then heads for the bathroom
to say goodbye to my husband
who lies on the floor like a mannequin.
She sits by my side when the medical
examiner, a tiny doll like woman, arrives
and asks me in the voice of an accuser
why it took me so long to call 911.

“I couldn’t get a dial tone,” I say
“So I kept shaking his arm and telling
him to please wake up. I thought he fainted
like he did three times before.” When
the medical examiner looks skeptical,
Kathleen puts her arm around my shoulder
as if to shield me from being arrested
since my home is swarming with cops.
“Phone service is terrible out here,” she says.

She is still by my side when I say “Goodbye
Sweetheart I love you” and kiss him on the forehead
as he lies on the stretcher like he is sleeping.
 “He looks so handsome, just like when I first met him,”
I say and the medical examiner leaves with my husband.

As does Kathleen, but she is back banging on the window
as I field phone calls from family with her husband
and a bowl of cantaloupe and cottage cheese 
which he spoon feeds me as food and fork
flies from my shaky hand while she fries up
the lamb chops my husband had defrosted for dinner.

I feel faint in the shower the next day. “Panic Attack,”
my son says. I tell him to call Kathleen, who is a nurse.
“You look so pale,” she says as she takes my pulse.
“You might be anemic.” She exchanges nurse’s cap
for angel wings. “There is an Afterlife. I’ve seen it  
when I was seventeen and survived a car accident,”
she says, confirming that I will see my husband again.

She says a prayer for me and then gives me a bed bath
and promises she will be back on her day off
from her job at the hospital and her husband
would check on me every day. After six weeks,
she returns the key and says she is sorry
but at seventy she is too exhausted from working
12-hour shifts at the hospital to help me.

“Hi Luv,” says Sylvia as she sashays into my house
at five foot two. She brings me spinach, tomatoes,
a dozen eggs and fig biscuits she baked with oats.
As she helps me shower and shampoo, 
she tells me her German grandfather built
a brick house when he was her age - eighty.

.

Sylvia

After My Sons Return to their Lives and I am Alone

I answer the doorbell and there stands a seventy-
year-old short stout sumo warrior dead ringer
and I sniff the scent of baked fish and chicken,
vegetables and mashed potatoes. He introduces
himself as Bobby, the owner of the men’s retreat
a few acres away and says he brings free food
his partner, Rick, prepares at the bed and breakfast.

Every Tuesday and Friday afternoon he shows up
with food and advice, “Take it one day at a time”
as he does at the 12 step meetings he runs at the retreat.
Our hands and feet chop the air as we do Tai Chi
to build up my strength and solve balance problems.
He sings songs he wrote himself or covers in a band
and strums the guitar as I clap and compliment.

On some Fridays he brings pictures of his dearly
departed wife and mother and says he still talks
to their photos every day and advises me to speak
to my late husband. “It’s okay for you to be angry
at him if you feel abandoned,” he says.  “Get it all
out.  Scream and cry,” he says.  I sit there numb.
I never cry until Bobby says goodbye
and moves his retreat 100 miles from here.


After I Take too much Benadryl in the Middle of the Night

I am lying on my back 
on the cold, hard tile
in my shorts and top, frigid air
freezing bare skin, scooting
towards my Life Alert button
dangling on the bedpost
and walker desperately to reach
the phone that shrieks nonstop
like a May Day Signal

when I hear a familiar voice calling
“Miss Sharon” and see the blonde
in the ponytail, thinking she stumbled
upon me while delivering free meals
from the café she runs with her husband.
She takes my outstretched hands and lifts
me to my feet and puts me back in bed.

Weeks later as Robbin feeds me roast chicken,
mashed potatoes, broccoli and baby carrots,
she tells me my son had called and asked her
to check on me after I didn’t answer the phone.

Driving the three and a half miles on the dirt road,
she worries what she would do if she finds my dead
body. When she leaves, she says, “See you in a day or so.”
“What if I die?” I ask. “Well, I’ll see you in heaven,” she says
hugging me tight as she does every time she leaves.

I find myself on my back on the floor again.
But I think it’s morning and when a painting falls
on my head, I think I’m back in bed until I see Sylvia
with her short gray hair teetering on wedgie sandals
and a strange man standing over me. They each take
one hand and pull me to my feet and get me back
in bed. “I brought my husband since I can’t lift
more than 70 pounds,” says Sylvia. “It’s nighttime. 
Your son will be here in the morning.”

I pick up the phone in my hospital room.
It is Robbin saying she called every hospital
in the area to find me and she will take me
home. But it is Sylvia in her trusty truck
who pulls up the curb and helps a nurse
get me out of the wheelchair and lift
me into the passenger seat and drive
me forty miles home as my back aches.
It is Sylvia who checks my vitals and gives
me oxygen as she helps my sons nurse
my bruised bones back to health 
so I can walk without pain.

Hank and his wife, Jeannette

After the Holidays, and my Sons Leave Again

“Do you know my name?” asks the six-foot tall 
sixty something muscular man, his mop of white
hair flopping, as he stands holding a carton 
full of bowls of omelets, salads and meals of mashed
potatoes, roast chicken and vegetables. “George,” I say.
 “I’m a chef and I own the café,” he says.
“I know. You’re Robbin’s husband,” I say.

I figure he’s testing to see if I am senile
and I fear I’ve failed when I remember Robbin
calls him Scott. I apologize and he says both names
are correct. He’s George Scott the second. 

Sometimes he delivers food with his wife Robbin,
a beautiful blonde who refuses any money for the food.
Robbin says she wants to help me because she cooked
for her mother and grandmother when they couldn’t
cook for themselves. “God will reward me,” she says.

George and Robbin give me updates on the orange
tabby they rescued from my courtyard and adopted.

“Survivor almost let me pet him today,” Robbin says.

“I roll around on the floor with him twice a day,”
George says. “But he hisses at Robbin.”

One day George says he just found out I was a famous
published writer and wants to be my manager
and sell my books in the café.  As he leaves 
with a handful of books, he says. “If the paparazzi
contact you, send them to me, your manager.”

When it is cold, windy and rainy, George shows up
with a hatchet and his buddy, Hank, a short, slim
sixty something man with gray hair and heart trouble
and they chop wood and light a fire in the wood stove.

When the wind blows over my satellite dish and I lose
internet service, my son messages Hank, who helped
him repair the leaks in the roof. Hank calls me 
and says he is on his way and is bringing George
in case he gets dizzy from the heart medicine.
I am so tired I fall asleep and awaken to George 
waving a bowl under my nose as if it contains smelling salts.

“We’ve been on your roof,” he says. “I brought you a shrimp salad.
Where do you want it?”  As I go to the table to eat, I hear
Hank say, “Try the internet now. I bolted down your satellite dish.”
I tell Hank to take care of his heart and not worry about me.
“I think of you like a mother figure. Like it or not, you’re part
of my family now and I will help you,” Hank says. 

“By the way, the wife is baking you some banana bread
since you loved the last batch. She bought organic bananas
just for you.” The doorbell rings and Hank introduces me
to Jeannette and she visits with me as I eat a slice of her banana
bread and murmur, “Delicious.” I’m addicted and eat another
slice. “That’s why we brought you two loaves.” Hank says 
as he splits wood. “We’ll be back with more banana bread 
when you run out. Just call me.” They lock the door behind them.

Shannon and her niece, Lindsi, bring salad, sour dough bread
and chocolates in the fall. “The last time I called your husband 
from Wal-Mart in the spring, he said he was fine,”
Shannon says. “When I emailed him in the summer, your son
emailed me back that he was gone.” We didn’t know them
when we lived in Idaho, where they still summer. but Shannon
knew us for a decade when she and I hosted church potlucks.
I meet Lindsi for the first time, tell her I went to high school
with her Aunt Sue, who died shortly after my husband died.
Lindsey recognizes my husband from the photos on the wall.
“He used to come into my father’s Ace Hardware store in Idaho.”


In the Month of March: My First Birthday Without My Beloved

Hank builds a fire and turns up the space heaters 
when I shiver as Sylvia suds my body and hair 
in the shower. The phone goes dead as it rains
slow and steady. I hear my son’s voice 
from a thousand miles away talking 
through the Ring camera speaker in my kitchen
telling me he has scheduled a repair but when
the rain stops, the phone rings and I hear Hank 
and Sylvia’s voice on the line loud and clear.

Outside temperatures climb from 50 to 95
as the refrigerator door warns in red letters 
to change the air and water filter.
I stand at the sink shaking as Sylvia simmers
salmon in a skillet and George shows up
with salads and entrees and holds me 
in his strong arms. “You’re okay,” he says.

Fire ants march in the kitchen like soldiers
and I drown the army in the sink. The skin
on my arm stings and itches and I see a burn mark
left by an ant that escaped the massacre
and soothe it with gel from the aloe vera plant
growing in the courtyard. When Sylvia
shows up, she pours cinnamon on the heads
of ants and traps them in the plastic garbage sack.

Shannon and Lindsi are back with salad fixings
and sour dough bread. Shannon washes dishes
while Lindsi empties the garbage cans.
They say they will return in April with food
and friendship and do household chores.

One of Robbin’s meals goes rancid and I dump
the chicken, mashed potatoes and broccoli
in the front yard for the birds. Hank delivers
new meals for Robbin and George and after
he leaves I find a box of new filters on my doorstep.

George shows up with food and his friend Donnie 
and shows him the house and furniture my husband
built with clay and cactus and says he will bring smoked
salmon, salads and sour dough bread for my birthday dinner.
Donnie buys my poetry book dedicated to my husband
and says his 80-year-old widowed mother would love
to see the house and meet me. I tell him to come anytime.

A voice on the computer shouts “Severe heat
Warning” as the thermometer soars to 105 degrees
two days in a row and 84 degrees when I wake up
at sunrise on my birthday to the shrill voices of quail.
For supper, I dine on smoked salmon, spinach salad
and sour dough bread at the table my soulmate built
with saguaro cactus and imagine him sitting on the chair
across from me smiling and singing Happy Birthday, 
glowing as bright as 84 candles and a full moon.

Book of the Week

 Balance (Moonstone Arts Press 2025) by Laurie Kuntz 


 

Comments by Editor Sharon Waller Knutson

Wise and skillfully crafted is the best way to describe Laurie Kuntz’s new poetry collection, Balance, in which she opens up her life to us and gives us insight into how to balance marriage, motherhood and aging and learn how to live with the curve balls life throws us.

I think the life lessons she teaches us are best summed up in the last stanza of the title poem,

Balance:

We need that balance 
to embrace an endless summer state of mind
while dancing in the eye of a storm.

This is how Laurie Kuntz describes the book:

“Balance contains poems about my expatriate existence, cross-cultural experiences, and assimilating back into my own American culture as an aging woman, parent, and partner to the person with whom I share my adult life.  Balance is a collection of poems, which reflects upon finding a place of safety and acceptance while grappling with societal and personal issues of dissension, alienation, and assimilating into one's personal strength and identity.”

Praise from the Poet’s Peers: 

Laurie Kuntz’s Balance is filled with rare insights into interstitial moments, those in-between times when love is neither new nor exhausted, when we are aware of our lives as works in progress, moving toward an unknowable future. Kuntz tells us, “We know we live on a brink, / brink of storm, brink of heartache, brink of all that breaks.” It takes courage for a poet to explore that brink, to live in it, and to allow us to live there with her, in a place without posturing, guarantees, or false promises, but if there is value to our lives, it comes from noticing the flashes of meaning we can find there, such as “A screen door held open or gently shut / after shared cups of chamomile tea on a rainy day.” As Kuntz reminds us, “Between the landing and next jump / are the daily interactions that prove us human.”

– George Franklin, author of A Man Made of Stories.

"There is much wisdom in this book. The voice that holds these poems together is one of experience, insights, and empathy. Laurie Kuntz writes beautifully and truthfully, and in her we trust. Balance contains the still point that we need to get us through these tumultuous times."

 – Bunkong Tuon, author of Koan Khmer and What Is Left


“In this deeply moving collection of 25 poems, the quiet rhythms of marriage, the slow arc of aging, and the ache of grief are brought into focus.  The verses in Balance are simultaneously tender and unflinching.  They explore moments in life that place one squarely on a fulcrum, striving for balance and perspective.  The world and its continual wars also bring a personal and collective need for reckoning. One leaves the pages of this book with “an astonished and renewed light” (“Solstice), and a new respect for Laurie Kuntz’s resonant poetic voice.

 – Judy Ireland, poet & author of Cement Shoes (2013) 


Some of my favorite poems:

Options

In the beginning,
we had time to tally
who spited, who hurt,
who forgave first.

We could nurse our anger
for weeks turning it into a game,
until one of us cried "Uncle."

We bullied time thinking 
it would never fight back,
but now time wins and winds
around us with an aging wisdom.
 
It hardly matters who dirtied  
the new white towels,
forgot to turn off the lights,  
lock the back gate,
ate the last poppy seed muffin, 
broke the porcelain coffee mug, 
or refused to kill the spider.

One of us will always be left  
hungry, in the dark, afraid 
of things that crawl into open entryways.

In our waning days together,
we can no longer waste 
the time that stretches between us.

Our history is branded by the flames we create.
We can choose to stay in the pan, or jump into the fire.


While My Husband Forgets Our Anniversary

He is making tomato sauce on a rainy Sunday
he grows tomatoes , good for the prostate, 
which I do not have, but I like his tomato sauce, nonetheless.
I offer to help him cut the soft overripe batch of ruby Comparis,
my hand nervous on the knife, after all he is oblivious
to this day, 55 years ago that we met, 37 wedded legal ones,
somewhere I have the paper to prove it. 
Later, he calls me back into the kitchen, asks me to taste--
questions the flavor, the saltiness.
Perhaps a dab of sugar is needed.
Don't burn your tongue he says, as I lift
the spoon to my lips, and tell him it is perfect.


Long Division

In the framed photo 
that sits on a dusty sill, 
the two of us draped
in a landscape of wildflowers,
flowers only you could name:

larkspur, foxglove, yarrow.

We were envied
for our spirit and the grace 
in which we walked, talked, and loved.

You believed in the overall 
goodness of every gesture,
I fixated on details, 
dissecting all we  shared:

larkspur, foxglove, yarrow.

I was the worst of us,
You had the more genuine smile,
the thicker hair, the thinner frame,
the floating gait, the accepting heart.

This kind of  love between opposites
 can only remain intact
when put in a gilded frame:

larkspur, foxglove, yarrow.

We parted in summer, 
when the lavender bushes were in full scent.
Now, approaching another bloom
you come back to me, but only in this photo 
where we walk those blooming paths:

larkspur, foxglove, yarrow.

 Once, in an uninterrupted dream,
I saw you in a crowded bar--
a place you would never enter... 
far from rural hideouts.

(continued with stanza break)


You were surrounded by friends, 
the kind I have now that you are gone
they loved you, not me. 
In this dream, you were the best of us. 

I am foolish to ignore the years falling 
like rusty coins from a frayed pocket.

When I stare at the photo,
engraving your weak smile into memory,
I still try to do the math of forgiveness,
but you are bent on long division.

Sister, sharer of secrets, maker of plans
until the plans never ripened 

Unlike, larkspur, foxglove, yarrow.

 

 Between

If our lives were lived in a straight line
like holding ends of a jump rope--
one turner madness, the other magic,
we would learn to rise in rhythm
with each arc of the rope and all that happens
in a moment of becoming airborne.

Between the landing and next jump
are the daily interactions that prove us human:

The nod of passing hikers scaling an uphill trail.
The placing of coins in a palm by the shopkeeper
after asking how your elderly mother is doing.
A screen door held open or gently shut
after shared cups of chamomile tea on a rainy day.
The manicurist who shapes your nails into a spring color palette.
A pitanga bush overhanging the bridge
never failing to drop its red dappled berries into the lap of April.

Each handshake, hug, and embrace
is a life in the telling, stories that will end
in a skip, jump, and final landing
between madness and magic.


Balance

I could write endlessly 
about all things foreboding--
hurricanes and turbulence
more likely due to  warmer air 
that carries us to  a season 
we hope to thrive in.

From June's blossoms come 
a life in harvest,  
dark soil blankets the roots 
of all that green:
a pasture, cross haired vines, 
meadows abundant with wild petals 
upon petals, every bloom opens 
to summer's endless embrace, 
and we live as if nothing will ever end.

But, an end always comes,
hurricanes and turbulence takeover
a country's spirit, a body's betrayal,
an erosion of simple kindness.

Yet, somewhere a child 
is learning to ride a wave,
someone's mother is picking lilacs and lavender,
a father holds the seat of a two wheel bike
promising not to let go. 

We need that balance 
to embrace an endless summer state of mind
while dancing in the eye of a storm.

Can’t Let Go of Being Let Go

Shoshauna Shy

 

 
Shoshauna Shy

By Shoshauna Shy

This series of poems involves the finale of my 28-year administrative assistant career which ended in 2021 during the pandemic.


PANIC

They say we don’t remember 
what others tell us as much as how 
they make us feel

and so it’s a raw November wind 
at a picnic table in this wooded park 
where my office mates and I once
gathered in photo-ready outfits 
for pizza on workdays.
My boss is seated there 
waiting for me.
The wind is strong enough to blow
her black hair straight off her shoulders

hair at a length dictated by the pandemic 
that has kept us out of hair salons.
Her black mask covers the scars 
around her mouth that her dog left 
when he bit her.
She says she is cutting my hours—

which means I will lose my health 
insurance while my husband undergoes
a needed surgery, and if I retire, I’ll draw
a higher income from my pension.
Of course she doesn’t spell it out that way—

but the cold water splashing 
down my windpipe does
               

OUSTED

A coworker tries
to help me weather
a forced transition
to retirement.
Remaining in the workplace,
she is estranged from her daughter,
has a son out-of-state,
and a husband lying captive
in Memory Care.
Mine is young enough to tour
Japanese gardens, lay flooring tile,
trim a honey locust.
Savor what you have
she pleads with me

while I yearn for the office
with its calendar pages
and klickitat keyboards,
the duties rotating
on their biweekly cycles.
Four clerical decades,
and no need that it end.
In my banishment, 
I imagine the staff
lounging in the sunshine
of paid vacations,
feathering nest eggs
with the skimmed cream
of paychecks, gathering
at abundant potlucks
to discuss new projects,
new schemes.
Those days I played lighthouse
greeting their arrivals
frayed to bits by a long pandemic year;
I, gray-haired in my ankle hems,
blown away like dandelion fluff.

You have a husband, a brother,
your kids, your mother–the rest
is just bullshit! 
my coworker claims.
And yet I have yet
to let that all go:

the lather-rinse-repeat 
of working weekdays,
somewhere to show up and belong,
the chance to begin all over again
once a new Monday rolls around.


STUCK IN TRAFFIC
EN ROUTE AN INTERVIEW
FOR A JOB I DO NOT WANT

I’m a Tonka truck
on remote surging
in vain to cross
a threshold; roadkill
on the shoulder that
a crow pecks with
its beak; incoherent
garble between radio
stations; the pink fabric
in the other lane flattened
by oily tires; the fly
banging itself against
the windshield miles
from all it knows;
that bumper sticker
half shredded ahead
in which the only 
remaining word is
FUCK



THREE YEARS INTO RETIREMENT

Like a boot heel meeting
the aid of a shoehorn, I renew
residency at the job from which
I was fired during the stay-at-home
lockdown because somewhere in
my subcortical region, denial surges 
at 3 AM and I dream I am winging 
up Glenway Hill to update the database 
with donations, write a descriptive eval-
uation, arrange a board luncheon 
with pecan pie because that clipboard 
and calendar are still mine along with 
the mail to open and sort.
I go incognito when my boss appears

sheathed in black rayon shiny as a crow
or I ghost-float away as the woman 
who replaced me arrives to begin her day.
My coworkers don’t hiss What are you
doing here? but clutch me in relief 
I’m back.

Book of the Week

About to Disappear (Shanti Arts, 2025) by Robbi Nester

 


Comments by Sharon Waller Knutson

Magical and musical are the two words that best describe Robbi Nester’s poetry collection, About to Disappear. Stunning our senses, she showcases her talent for vivid imagery and skillful craftsmanship by painting poetic portraits of people, creatures and landscapes as beautiful as the artists whose work she interprets.

About the book by Robbi Nester

My book, About to Disappear (Shanti Arts, 2025), is an ekphrastic collection with images for many of the poems. Ekphrastic poems respond to other works of art, whether they are other poems, visual art, film, dance, music, or other art form. In this case, all the poems were inspired by visual artworks, many of them famous. I either collaborated with the contemporary artists or the images were in the common domain.

About to Disappear is a poetry collection that explores the limits of ekphrasis; that is, descriptions and reflections on works of art in order to expand their meaning. The book is separated into four sections: Ex Nihilo, Adaptation, Law of Attraction, and Ad Nihilum. The first and final sections-translated as "from nothing, returning to nothing"-act as bookends. Ex Nihilo includes poems about imagination, optics, creation, and and development; while poems in the final section, Ad Nihilum, are about trauma, unmaking, climate change, and catastrophe. Poems in the middle sections are about artistic, psychological, and physical transformations, and natural history and community. Artworks included are from contemporary artists-as well as such artists as Vermeer, Grant Wood, John Singer Sargent, and Edward Hopper.

Praise from other poets:

According to Leonardo da Vinci, 'Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.' However, in Robbi Nester's fabulous new collection, About to Disappear, nothing vanishes. We see poems, art, the poet, and the world. Nester's lyrical conversations with artists as diverse as Joseph Cornell, Robert Rhodes, Beth Moon, Edward Hopper, Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Sally Gall, and even da Vinci himself chart new territories for ekphrasis. Indeed, About to Disappear functions like a gallery in which every poem could be on a wall, talking to everything else in the room. In one of her poems to van Gogh, Nester writes, 'I feel blessed just to be here.' I couldn't agree more."

-Dean Rader, professor, University of San Francisco; author of Before the Borderless: Dialogues with the Art of Cy Twombly

"'The mind is always brewing something . . . ' begins the mesmerizing collection About to Disappear. Part magic trick, part treatise on the imagination, Robbi Nester's ekphrastic poems lure and transform. 'Any plain ingredients, ' the poet explains, 'can rise to the occasion, becoming / a new thing.' Gathering memories, art, science, myth, history-even furniture, sea stars, and aliens-Nester delves deeper into and far beyond our own lives. Like the octopus Nester describes in one poem, each ekphrastic response is 'exactly the shape of whatever / it needs to be.'"

-Marjorie Maddox, author of In the Museum of My Daughter's Mind and Small Earthly Space

"As expansive and magical as the worlds it describes, Robbi Nester's poetry collection, About to Disappear, is a luminous, shape-shifting exploration of perception, transformation, and the alchemy of time. By the light of ekphrastic inspiration and with the deep attention of philosophical inquiry, Nester's poems transmute the ordinary into the extraordinary as clouds reform, light shifts, and unseen 'roots and tubers chart their path through darkness' beneath cold earth. 'Subject only to the weather, we / sail above you, understand solidity / as an illusion. In time, / wire rusts. Wood grows porous, / stone swells and contracts / so often it reverts / to sand, ' Nester writes, reminding us that nothing is so permanently wrought into form that it will not eventually dissolve and reclaim its wild potential, becoming, once more, the possibility of a new becoming." 

-Melissa Studdard, librettist / lyricist, podcaster, and poet; author of Dear Selection Committee and I Ate the Cosmos for Breakfast

"In About to Disappear Robbi Nester takes inspiration from many different artists and perspectives, but one thing remains true: the poet is the paintbrush . . . and more. Each poem stands on its own and does not require the reader to see or know the inspirational piece. You may want to check out the art later, but there is no need to see the pieces to understand the poems." 

-J. P. Dancing Bear, writing consultant and editor of Verse Daily


American Gothic

  After Grant Wood’s portrait
Weathered as the barn behind them,
hard-eyed and narrow, this pair
has a history that never needs to be spoken—
all the bad harvests, floods, ill fortune. 
A few sparks shielded between their palms.
What little they own they built themselves.
No patience for roses. When they look
at the golden fields, they see only
what those sheaves will buy—a new roof,
some boots, a mule. They teach this
bitter wisdom: we must wrestle
this angel, the earth, until it yields, 
must take what we can
before the storm comes, 
before we return to dust. 

Evolving Sirenian
   After a painting by Sallie Swift

Everything in the ocean becomes something else.
Colonies of coral, once a soft carpet of color, 
become brittle and white, the stuff of island sand.
The octopus embodies this quality of change. 
Exactly the shape of whatever it needs to be, 
the octopus pours itself between two rocks. 
Its tentacles curl like breakers, tangled kelp fronds.

Caught in the act of transformation, the octopus 
takes on the blue and orange of a large carcass, 
flesh peeling in flakes from its side. Then, it 
disappears, skin puckering in mock putrescence, 
eye gaping like a wound.  No wonder sailors 

wandering at sea once mistook this creature for 
a woman, hair trailing behind her in the green-blue 
surf, singing the most beautiful song.


Flamingo in Lake Natron, Northern Tanzania
  After a photograph by Nick Brandt

From above, the lake seems a kind of paradise, 
the breeding ground of many migratory birds. 
Already, flocks dot the shore. Yet the water teems 
with hundreds of fallen birds looking for a place 
to stretch and preen.

Those lured by the mirror of the lake’s red water, 
so bright it’s visible from space, will die in this
runoff from the volcano, Ol Doinyo Lengai. 
Their feathers harden into clumps of brittle string, 
flattened winter weeds. Their wings lie heavy, 
will never feel the touch of air again.

The hollow reeds that were their legs stuck fast 
in silt, the boiling water thick as blood, 
a bitter brew that turned them all to salt.


On Adaptation 

  Inspired by After the Rain (1879), Arkhip Kuindzhi, Solaris (1972), 
      Andrei Tarkovsky, and Solaris (1961), a novel by Stanislaw Lem

I peer from the portal, afraid to find
some portion of my past projected
on the mirror surface of this alien 
world. The field beside the barn 
takes shape as I watch, wrenched 
whole from its foundation in memory, 
dropped like a seed onto what had been 
bare rock between two continents. 
In this incarnation, the rain has just 
ended, will soon begin again. 
Dark clouds brood over the fields, 
flashing, phosphorescent,
like deep-sea jellyfish. I suppose 
at home we’d call this night,
and yet it isn’t quite, something other 
than the ordinary. Cows still browse, 
yet the sky, spent by the storm, 
has at last left off illuminating 
the surface of the planet, 
a task taken up by this bright meadow, 
this farm, simulacrum of our green island, Earth.

Still Standing

After Ivy and Winslow, David Graeme Baker

At first glance, I think she is a teacher
drawing on the chalkboard. One finger
rests on the crevice where the chalk is kept.
The other arm sweeps wide, into an arc
on the board’s murky green surface,
where transparent moon-jellies swarm:
words poorly erased. She drafts a magic
circle to protect her. Yet her feet are bare,
standing in a pool of long-dried paint,
as in a spotlight. I decide this is an abandoned
school, site of a shooting, now her studio,
where she can drop the line of her imagination,
netting the unexpected, lost voices of a thousand
children and their teachers. She probes a past
she doesn’t really know, like a scientist who
studies creatures making their own cold light
in the deepest ocean, dreams and dreams again
about this ruined room, its light and shadows,
settled dust, compelled to paint it in bright hues,
to return and make this place a kind of shrine,
left standing to remind us of all that has been lost.

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The Traumas of My Life

 Rose Mary Boehm

 
Rose Mary with her parents and brother in 1945 right after the war ended.


By Rose Mary Boehm

The first poem is about the day of my rebirth. I suddenly fell very, very ill. The doctors suspected meningitis, until one doctor decided to do a brain scan, when they discovered a benign tumour of about three centimeters in diameter. On 26 December, during an operation of approximately ten hours, it was extirpated. Almost all of it, except for the hard core. My ex-husband was there, my new husband, my kids, my boss, his friend… and everyone else rooted for me, I was buoyed by love. And I flatlined. And it was glorious.

The second poem touches on the same subject, but muses about the past I left behind, wondering whether—if I survived the operation— I would still be able to remember it all. Also: I had left my already quite grown-up children in London and moved to Spain because my marriage went south and things, for a while, became rather unpleasant. Leaving my kids—even though they were already 20 and 22—had made me feel exceedingly guilty.

The others are about me during WWII in Germany. I was born in 1938 and was one year old when the War started. It’s amazing how much of a traumatic time a child remembers.

All poems are from my collection, LIFE STUFF (Kelsay Books.)


Menginioma

Perhaps I should have felt
something akin to gratitude,
as in “Uff, I am still here…
so glad to be alive!” 
Instead, I took it as mine by right.
With indifference.
I existed before and I do now. However,
something important happened between. 
And where was I?

You were my steely walker. 
Both arms around my waist, my feet on yours,
you took me for our daily slow waltz
along the corridors of that place
where I was birthed again. 

When you danced me to the bathroom,
when that steamed-up mirror showed me
this alien drooping, drooling mouth,
your eyes still loved me. 

How did I get there? How 
did I fall into a gap filled with fragments 
of someone I remember still? 
I do recall 10 million termites feeding 
in my skull; eating into carmine 
and sharp yellow, swimming 
in poison green across the ocean
on the inside of my eyes. 
My cranium - too small for armies 
of that magnitude - pushed out 
my eyeballs. Fever shook me. 
Was that how it was? 
I saw you there. 

The surgeon’s face leaned over me:
“Señora, it’ll be the day after Christmas.”
and took my husband for a man-to-man.
They brought a wheelchair.
Curiously, I was grateful.

At the appointed time
someone wheeled me into cold. 

Eleven hours, I was told, they sliced 
and hunted spidery extensions 
that had invaded furtively a territory 
I had believed inviolate. 

Locked into a choreography
of life and death, a part of me
remained awake.

We consign our bodies to oblivion
until some of it goes missing,
or perhaps plays host
to 10 million hungry insects.

I may have laughed.

The surgeons don’t speak English. 
Could someone in my present situation 
manage foreign tongues? Perhaps I ought 
to be more solemn. After all, this is about MY life. 
Isn’t it funny? 

Some bad footage of my film
was left behind in that cutting-room.
Will there ever be an uncut version?


I Find the Healing Fairy in An Old Suitcase

It grew for 14 years, he said.
14 years of sleepless nights, pain, love, laughter, good health,
the time in a woman’s life when so many delete
us from the records. 

Fusili frutti di mare in our favourite Italian,
the critics’ screening of ‘Midnight Express’,
the première of ‘Superman’, 
seeing and being seen in ‘San Lorenzo’s
in London’s Beauchamps Place,
hanging up the washing in the garden,
picking the kids up from school,
the other mums worried about lice,
something not meant for the well-heeled.

Dad lunching with a young woman
whose long, dark, curly hair hid her face.
He didn’t see me sitting a couple of tables to the right.
He only had eyes for HER…

My son wants his birth certificate. He is 16, 
his latest girlfriend is 24. She suggested they get married.
My daughter’s first boyfriend, she sneaked him in for the night.

It’s been eight years since Dad’s lover
broke through the magic circle I’d had painted
around all of us with imaginary chalk.

Many MacDonald’s and Pizza Hut’s later,
we have supper in the same favourite Italian restaurant.
I explain why I must leave for a while.
It’s hard to find the words,
and we grow silent.
Look at our plates.

Many miles from what had been home,
the headaches start. The fever. 
Meningioma, he says. Benign. But the operation
may seriously affect your motor skills.
‘Then again, she may not make it’,
he says, almost to himself.

They all rally around. Fly in. The ones I left,
the new friends, my old love, my new love. My daughter
gives me a healing fairy: long stripey legs, big grin, small, floppy wings.
The kind of wings that don’t get you off the ground.
The surgeon hangs it on the bedpost 
when they wheel me into the operating theatre.

12 hours later I can hear their laughter and know
that I’ve been forgiven.


Another Spring

In those last days, boys in uniform
came past the house where mothers
would fit them out with their own son’s trousers
and shirts —the weather had turned mild.

In those last days I didn’t sleep a child’s
sleep. We'd shuffle to the shelter
that smelled of cool earth, moisture
and things growing on wet walls, settle

into the night counting the seconds, minutes
from the first droning. We waited
for deafening obliteration. I shivered
and crept further into my blanket

when we heard the bombs make contact,
the staccato of strafing fighter planes—
the Flak had long since made a vow of silence--
and boys using bazookas

on anything that moved.
On one of those last days my brother
pushed his teddy between my praying hands
and I found solace in worn tufts of wool.


The Moment a Lightbulb Goes off in Your Head
  
I remember that long, long road on which I walked
to the train station. Thoughtful and elated.
A road I knew so well but this time it was endless.
Every time I looked ahead, the station
seemed as far away as it had been
before I set out.
 
The last time I’d seen him and felt his arms
lifting me up was eons ago. I had been little then.
Now I was grown up. I was eight!
Would he recognize me?
Would I recognize him?
 
In the station yard, some people were sitting, waiting.
Mother had given me some Pfennige (pennies)
for a platform ticket. 
More people were milling there.
The train was not due for another ten minutes,
but trains just came when they could.
 
I saw the steam before the train.
People hanging from doors, sitting
on any available little platform or footplate.
Some on the roof. 
 
As people streamed off the train and filled the tiny platform
I felt very lost and near to tears. I had never scanned faces
so thoroughly and quickly. One last old man walked out
to the other side of the barrier.
There was no one else.
 
And I stood there and grew up.
The train slowly puffed away,
forcing itself onto the long climb up into the hills.
As the last carriage passed, I looked across the railway lines. 
And he was there.
His trench coat, his hat, suitcase in hand,
smiling at me and walking across the rails.
He jumped onto the platform and looked at me.
 
I did not move. I stared in shock—and then it was easy.
It no longer mattered.
What had just happened was irreversible.
 
When my father died, I was far away.
I managed to be at the funeral.
I managed a tear or two.
I felt loss and the loneliness
of being shoved onto the front lines.
I wondered why I was empty.
 
Just now I understood:
I had done my mourning when I was eight.


Crossing Illegally from Germany into Germany

At seven I walked that long road
past farmer Bauer’s geese, left at the church,
left again at the brook, over the small bridge,
past the school caretaker with his scary grin
to take my seat
with the local kids. 
I, the refugee. 
I, the one with the strange accent.
‘Heil Hitler’!

My teacher had hairy legs
and big calf muscles that went in and out,
up and down as she biked along the school path.
I stared.

Under the bridge, by the brook, 
I found my friend the frog and stroked
his slimy head, his whole little body seeming
to breathe in and out fast and in panic,
but it stayed, hypnotized
by my gentle finger.

The cockerel waited by the shed. I tucked him
in under the tiny blanket of my dolls’ pram. 
I covered his comb with a little blue hat
my mother had crocheted
for my doll,
his wattles fell to one side,
his protective membrane closed.

The street names changed
to Marx, Engels, Lenin…
I received the coveted blue scarf,
became a Young Pioneer.
The teacher with the big, yellow teeth 
taught me Russian.
Mother decided that this was enough.

In the train chugging towards the border
my attention was on Mother.
I looked at my brother.
In the wooded copse I rested my head
on the backpack I’d dropped
onto a patch of woodruff.
It also smelled of ceps.
I thought of Grandpa.
I sensed danger when Mother said
to wait for darkness.

The soldiers unfolded from the night,
standing on the higher ground, silhouetted against
the starry night sky.
The clicks of their safety catches.
Even though my brother had finally
given me his Teddy, I peed myself.

Super-Sized Series

The Soundtrack of Our Lives

 

 
Sharon and Al Knutson

Waltzing with my Walker by Sharon Waller Knutson

Chris Stapleton sings: “You are smooth
as Tennessee Whiskey and sweet
as Strawberry Wine” to me like you did
in your cowboy hat and red shirt

with your dark hair slicked back
in Fritz’s Café while wildlife
you photographed stared
at us from the walls.

Your bearded best friend and bandmate 
batted his blue eyes at me behind
your back while the racoon tail
swung on his lead guitar.

None of us dreamed that in a decade
you’d both be dust in the desert
and I’d be waltzing with my walker
while wildlife watch through the windows.

“Go rest high on that mountain,”
Vince Gill sings. “I wish I could see 
the angels faces when they hear 
your sweet voice sing.”


Don't Think Twice It's Alright by Laurie Kuntz

Some things I will never do well:
So when you picked up your guitar,
  and asked me to sing, 
after a slight hesitation,
 unsure if the air was riddled, 
I followed you into song--
Dylan being our captain, 
certain that the chorus 
was a metaphor for our lives,
“we both gave our hearts by sacrificing a bit of our souls,”
but perhaps it is time to ignore the words,
and relish the cadence, 
the moment --
we are both carrying the tune.


Eighteen Wheeler by Judith Waller Carroll

That old song’s running through my head again,
the one whose title I can never remember

about the trucker driving through a snowstorm 
to his waiting wife and kids. 

The song that made me have to pull over
every time I heard it

those endless weeks before the birth of my son
my emotions so close to the surface 

anything would set me off.
Even now, as my brain plays a loop 

of the only lines I remember
I’m back in the Stop-N-Go parking lot

my enormous belly grazing the steering wheel
tears streaming down my cheeks 

as Mama gets the news that the Man Upstairs
was listening and Daddy is coming home

joyfully singing, “Roll on...Roll on… Roll on”  
as I pull back onto the freeway

and drive the rest of the way
to wherever it was I was going. 
 

 
Phillip and Rachael Ikins


I Want You to Stay by Rachael Ikins

“I have died every day waiting for you” Christina Perri’s song “A Thousand Years”, my twenty-something self falling into your brown eyes, steady pools over your mask, your hand’s warmth around mine before sleep.

“I have loved you for a thousand years” speaks my heart, yet how could I know this on an operating table in this OR.

A silver curl escapes the neck of your scrub suit, Hozier’s lyrics “Take me to Church” my truth, “good God, I give you my life.”  “You sharpen your knife,” and yes, “this is hungry work.”

This saving me. Your name scrawled beneath my armpit forever, where you cut, touched my heart as you removed what was damaged.

Six months later we healed, together, 
that first visit your magic pocket produced eggs, cream, butter, omelets for my empty cupboard.  Your eyes invited with Rhianna, “Stay”
“If you dare, come a little closer.” 
My refrain took up the verse,
“There’s something in the way you move,
I want you to stay.”

Now I wonder if that was real, 
some memories, visions more solid than reality, the colors, scents, lyrics singing from an iPhone not yet invented when you saved my life; records, cassettes, CDs and you, gone, 
the way my chin fit into your collarbone’s hollow, like an egg in a nest we were 
once that close.


Spring by Tamara Madison
 
Someone loans me her cassette 
of Paul Simon’s latest album. 
I listen to it as I watch snow fall 
through the pines outside the window. 
“Four in the morning/crapped out/yawning.”
 
I listen to it as I watch snow whiten the river. 
“In my little town I grew up believing”
Listen to it as the ice begins to soften
“God keeps his eye on us all.”
 
We are nearing the end. Grass and mud 
begin to show through the ski paths. 
Soon kayakers glide down the river, 
finding channels through the ice. 
“Step out the back, Jack.”
“Make a new plan, Stan.”
 
People were nice to us here. 
We didn’t mind being sequestered. 
It was a long 15 months, felt
four times as long. Decades later
my mind returns to the icy river,
the snow-bound woods,
whenever I hear these songs:
“Still crazy after all these years.”

Poet’s Note: This poem is from my upcoming collection, Russian Honeymoon, a memoir about the 15 months I spent in the USSR as a young bride. This poem is set near the end of the tour, after 15 long months of the hard work of being young Americans in the USSR, tasked by the U.S. Department of State with "telling America's story to the world."


Long Play Records by Mary Ellen Talley
Dedicated to the One I Love

Sure, we sang along with Leslie Gore’s
“Sunshine, Lollipops, and Raindrops”
but our ideal was Simon and Garfunkel’s
“Bridge Over Troubled Water,” even as we swooned
at Paul McCartney singing “All My Loving.”
Time scratched our grooves. We replaced LPs 
with cassettes we had to rewind with pencils.

James Taylor, then with full head of hair 
contemplated “Fire and Rain” but romanced us 
with “How sweet it is,” and every time I felt 
“You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman,” 
I slid Carole King’s music in the cassette slot
even though I was struggling
to be my own version of Gloria Steinem.

Mama Cass sang us into “California Dreamin’”
and the Beach Boys revved up 
“Good Vibrations.” 
Every song dove deep
into angst and joy. We knew “Don’t Worry Baby” 
meant more than just a car race 
back when scarcity of birth control
could scare the crap out of any couple.

Now new cars aren’t sold with CD players.
Our kids grew up with iPods
and I was too busy to make playlists.
Everybody’s streaming onto cell phones
while we play retro stacks of CDs.
Our son who values vinyl
knows despair is still “Blowin’ in the Wind.”

We’ve stopped buying new paraphernalia.
Our son gave us a turntable for Christmas
so we can play old vinyl 
As the stylus descends, we listen to Elvis sing
“Are You Lonesome Tonight?”
then The Righteous Brothers “Soul and Inspiration”
as we move about the living room in a slow dance.


Sweet Betsy by Joe Cottonwood

Happened in a grocery store, 
I was fondling a can labeled 
Betsy’s Sweet Peas, reminded of 
“Oh do you remember 
Sweet Betsy from Pike
Who crossed the wide prairie 
with her lover Ike”
which made me wonder if 
Ike and Betsy were, like, 
making whoopee out of wedlock
all over the wide prairie 
before finally they marry 
at the end of the song, 
a song they taught us in 
grade school for Pete’s sake 
when a stranger with infant swaddled 
to her chest blocks the Safeway aisle 
and sings soprano:
“With two yoke of oxen, 
a big yellow dog, 
A tall Shanghai rooster 
and one spotted hog.”
“Excuse me?” I say. “Was I singing? Out loud?”
“Better,” she says, “than the crap they’re playing.” 
Harmony, you know, is intimacy. Instantly.
We, strangers pushing carts. 
The baby wide-eyed, silent. 
A minute later from the next aisle 
I hear her soprano: 
“One evening quite early 
they camped on the Platte.
'Twas near by the road 
on a green shady flat.”
But she falters. Over the shelves I offer:
“Where Betsy, sore-footed, 
lay down to repose
With wonder Ike gazed 
on that Pike County rose.”
Ah, love, and the day is plenty. 
The infant wails. 



Plastic Pipeline by Lynn White

“He’s got a plastic heart, plastic teeth and toes,
plastic knees and a perfect plastic nose.
He’s got plastic lips that hide his plastic teeth and gums,”
so sang the Kinks then about their plastic man in 1969.

Now in the twenty-first century it seems he’s here
as plastic gushes everywhere
over land,
over sea
and into our very being
as plastics ingested from our food,
and inhaled in from the air we breath
become part of our bodies,
part of ourselves
to be inherited 
by our children.

We fill every hole in the ground
and soon the sea will be transformed into plastic land.
We re-cycle it by the shipload from rich places to poor,
places where the people don’t matter,
where “plastic man don’t feel no pain”.
There we dump it on the newly plasticised people 
in the plastic land we’ve created for them.

First published in Ekphrastic Review challenge for Benjamin Von Wong


A Car That Could Fly

By Joan Leotta

Domenico Modugno sold me my first car when I was twenty-seven. Although a Northern Virginia Chrysler Plymouth salesman pocketed the commission, Modugno's award winning song, Volare convinced me to buy. The rolling lyrics of this ballad about love, achieving one's dreams, and the simple freedom of dreaming one's way into the sky, were stamped on my psyche. 

I duly wrote it down my Dad’s advice but…. when the salesman showed me a blue, two door model of the car inspired by the song, the words "Nel blu dipinto di blu (in the blue sky, painted blue)" filled my brain. 

Distracted by the car's beauty, I didn’t notice any problems, bought it and named it, "Victor." At first, Victor seemed to be all I had dreamed. Then, came the problems that made me a regular at the repair bay. Worked fine there but as soon as I got home, Victor would refuse to start without ten minutes of engine warming. Victor's good nature was only paint deep.

When my job offered me a two-month assignment in Dallas Texas, I accepted with alacrity and opted to make the three-day drive. Once arrived, Victor’s starting problems continued so I took him to a Dallas Plymouth Dealer. They healed him! Together we flew along Dallas highways and explored Texas byways with nary another starting issues.

Just before Dallas assignment was finished, I sent a postcard to a guy back in DC who had laughed when I told him I’d bought a Volare. A few months after my return to DC, fall 1977, I married Joe, the laughing guy. 

Yes, a car is really nothing more than transportation from point A to point B, but there are days when I swing onto the highway in my current vehicle and gasp for joy at the  wide expanse of blue across my windshield, a sky so big that the road seems to disappear into it and I sing," Blu dipinto di blu”,  as I escape happily piu in alto, (higher) than the sun,  My everyday self disappears lassu (up there) and my dreams take over. Volare!