Storyteller of the Week

Marianne Szlyk

 

Marianne Szlyk with poet husband Ethan Goffman. Photo by Kristin Ferragut.

 

Marianne Szlyk is a professor of English and Reading at Montgomery College. Her poems have appeared in of/with, MacQueen's Quinterly, Setu, Verse-Virtual, Red Eft Poetry Review, Bourgeon, Trouvaille Review, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, the Sligo Journal, and Mad Swirl as well as a few anthologies such as Resurrection of a Sunflower, The Forgotten River, and Pure Slush's anthologies Home and 25 Miles from Home. Recently she published a chapbook Why We Never Visited the Elms with Poetry Pacific Press.  Her books I Dream of Empathy, On the Other Side of the Window, and Poetry en Plein Air are also available from Amazon and Bookshop.

 

She is married to the wry writer and environmentalist Ethan Goffman. They often read together on Zoom and in person, once even at a poetry pop-up near Washington DC's Eastern Market.

 

 

Comments by Editor Sharon Waller Knutson

 

From the moment I met Marianne on Verse-Virtual in 2020, I looked at her as a mentor. Although she is a professor and a poetry teacher from Maryland and I am a retired journalist who writes poetry from the seat of my pants in Arizona, she has never tried to influence or change my style of writing. We exchanged the books we published. She wrote blurbs for two of my books and I wrote a blurb for her latest book, Why We Never Visited the Elms, Poetry Pacific Press, 2022.)

 

While I was recuperating from a fall, I emailed Marianne and asked if I visited her and Ethan, what café would we walk to, what would we eat, where would we hike and what jazz club would we visit. She replied: “When are you coming?”. I wrote “It’s imagination. I am writing a poem.”

 

She told me and my poem “Mind Traveling,” which was published in Inspired included these two stanzas:

 

In a wheelchair with Novocain numb feet,

knees stabbed by knitting needles

and starched stiff legs, I imagine I am:

In, Maryland with Marianne and Ethan 

where their cat Thelma watches 

a crow from the windowsill as we walk

to the Plaza Oaxaca and eat shrimp tacos

beneath the locust trees. board a bus

to Rock Creek Park, listen to the singalong

as colorful cardinals, finch, thrush, sparrows

perch on ash trees, follow the path to DC

where Sonny Rollins plays at the Hamilton

and Danilo Perez stops by. After sax

blaring and piano rocking in a jazz jam,

we somersault to the subway.

 

When I emailed a link to Marianne and Ethan, he replied: “How do you know so much about our life?” and I answered. “Research,” and Marianne wrote, “LOL.”

 

Like the jazz musicians Marianne admires and writes about, she probably has the biggest range and repertoire of any poet I know. I’ve always enjoyed Marianne’s poems whether she is writing about her family, exes, musicians, celebrities, fictional characters, yoga, cats, crows, churches, supermarkets. You name it; she writes about it. I love walking in her shoes because her poetry takes me to places I’ve never been. She loves to “switch it up” as she calls it with fresh imagery, insight and perception.

 

 I am happy to share some of my favorite poems by Marianne from her books...

 

After October 1970

Imagine Janis Joplin’s last motel room:
a cinderblock reef marooned by asphalt,
no palm trees, frangipani, or eucalypt.
Only grocery trucks and tankers of thirty-
cent gas rolled past. Smog hid nearby mountains.

October might have been the end of endless
summer, pitiless blue sky, staring not blink-
ing like the eyes of blond co-eds with bouffants
riding with red-faced young men in that year’s cars.

Or the sky might have been gray, light still too clear,
revealing each splotch on the sidewalk, each crack
in the wall of the room she’d perched in for months.

Nothing to do but sing, nothing to do but
drive, nothing to do but float far, far away

from these skies, from this place where she felt too much

 

He Was a Friend of Hers

 

In November,
first her father died,
then the President,
and her clock kept ticking.
Two years married,
my mother still wasn’t pregnant.

Pulling down the hem of her boxy dress,
she wished it was 1952,
the year she had begun teaching,
the year she and her parents had seen
soon-to-be Senator Kennedy
(not Teddy or Bobby
but Jack)
at a Howard Johnson’s on the Pike.

She did not see the grimace in his grin,
the automatic nature of his wave.
Besides everyone was a little stiff in those days.
Every girl wore a hat, wore gloves,
buttoned the top button of her dress.
She herself wore a girdle
beneath crinoline petticoats, then
a navy blue polka dot dress and matching coat.
A patent leather belt nipped in her waist.

Always she remembered Jack’s vigor,
the way he livened up the dull buzz and clatter
of a restaurant on a rainy night,
making it seem
like the center of the world.

 She remembered
even when she no longer
believed.

 

For My Ex-Husband’s Twin Sons (1)

 

Summer 1996

 

 

That summer we still believed in astrology.
Anything could happen.  I could learn to drive
stick shift.  The Indian astrologer predicted that
my soon-to-be ex-husband would father twin sons,
mother unknown. 

 

All summer stringy-haired women wandered
in and out of the apartment.  The hems
of their long skirts were as frayed
as my marriage was.  The women brought
bruised fruit and scotch-taped paperbacks of esoteric
philosophy stinking of patchouli.  Home from work,
I drank Café Bustelo with whole milk. 
One woman stood barefoot in the backyard,
warning me about the man I liked. 
All she needed to know was his
birth date.  

 

I imagined driving away with Balzac’s novels
in my trunk.  I popped the clutch
and went nowhere.

 

The Music of Her Life

Julie London quit her day job today.
No more half-sunny, half-smoggy mornings
standing around the set,
holding a clipboard, sipping coffee
from a vending machine,
nursing a sore throat, fighting with the brass.
No more smoking in the break room with Bobby Troup.

Back in their high-rise apartment,
with the view of rush hour,
she shucks off her nurse’s cap;
 her white lace-up shoes;
her matching uniform,
that knee-length, zip up carapace;
her powder-white opaque hose;
all onto the white shag carpet.
She keeps on her pink girdle.

Tonight she will sing “Cry Me a River”
once more on stage.
She will wear black sequins again. 
She will glitter
while Bobby leads the band.
The audience’s drinks will sparkle,
the colors of her eyes and hair.

 

The Continuing Adventures of the Polka Dot Girls

 

Last evening at the carnival next door,
the polka dot girls were running,
shrieking,
waving
cotton candy
and pink balloons
on their way to all the rides
that they were much too old for.

Yet they still fit
in red and yellow toy cars,
airplanes, and pink tea cups,
escaping the brave boys
who cruised the midway
and rode the Zipper.

 

This morning, the polka dot girls dance,
long, white skirts swishing.
They are waiting for the van to church,

singing hymns in Amharic,
their language,
the one that looks like
a secret code for Nancy Drew.

The brave boys are sleeping in.

 

The girls
clap their hands
and sing.

 

Sophia, What Might Have Been

 

She tends her lawn of rocks and cacti,
the grass and flowers long since dead,
the fruit and avocado trees brittle sticks
cut down, bundled, and left at the curb.

 

On the other side of a magnifying glass,
the sun scrutinizes her.
She sniffs.  She coughs.  She scans
the mountains for smoke. 
It is always creeping into her poems,
her dreams, her hair, her clothes

although she tells herself that
what she sees is just haze.
She will not have to leave home.
She will not have to sleep
among strangers.

Still she tastes her fears,
the black that bitters,
the hiss in the garden.

There is nothing more to burn,
nothing more.
All of her writing hides in the cloud
with the books and music
she loves most.
She has long since lived alone.
There is nothing left to burn.

Sipping bottled water
from Minnesota, a package
a college friend has sent her,
she remembers his letter,
her house, herself.

There is always something left to burn.

 

The poems published above originally appeared in the following journals, blog-zines, and  anthologies:

 

After October 1970 – as “After Full Tilt Boogie Band, ‘Buried Alive in the Blues’ (1970)” in Seppuku Quarterly

“He Was a Friend of Hers” – in Tic-Toc (Kind of a Hurricane Press, 2014)
“For My Ex-Husband’s Twin Sons (1), Summer 1996” – in Mad Swirl
“The Music of Her Life” and “Sophia, What Might Have Been” – in Of/with

“The Continuing Adventures of the Polka Dot Girls” – in Life is a Roller Coaster (Kind of a Hurricane Press, 2014).