Storyteller of the Week

Joanne Durham

 

 

 Photo of Joanne Durham and her mother in 1959

Joanne Durham is a retired educator lucky to live on the North Carolina coast, with the ocean as her backyard and muse. She fell in love with poetry as a child, shared it every day with students as a teacher, and amassed journals full of unfinished poems over the years. She finally began studying poetry in earnest and publishing her work during the pandemic. She is the author of To Drink from a Wider Bowl, winner of the Sinclair Poetry Prize (Evening Street Press 2022) and the chapbook, On Shifting Shoals (Kelsay Books 2023). Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in Poetry South (Pushcart nomination), CALYX, NC Literary Review, Poetry East, Whale Road Review, Gyroscope and many other journals and anthologies. She won Third Wednesday’s 2023 Annual Poetry Contest and the 2023 Mary Ruffin Poole Award from the NC Poetry Society. When she's not immersed in poetry, Joanne practices yoga, plays tennis, delights in her grandchildren, and works for a better world for them to grow up in.  Learn more about her work at https://www.joannedurham.com/.

Comments by Editor Sharon Waller Knutson

When I read both of Joanne’s poetry books, I was impressed with how she skillfully crafted her poignant poems and could understand how she is a prize-winning poet. As a result, I am a fan and proud to publish her poems.

 Because her profile fell in Father’s Day month, I asked her to send me some poems about fathers. I was impressed with her observation skills and her vision as she presents a unique perspective on fathers.

My Father, The Poet  

He thought emotions beyond Hallmark greetings
floated in a magnetic field only entered
by women. When I wrote him a love poem
days before he died, he responded, Your mother
will like that. But he was the one who taught me
to play with words, who said char-acter
for character, pronouncing the ch as in child,
who named the rolled donut I was afraid to eat
borushnuck –made it silly enough I tried it.
He encircled me with secret syllables
every night at bedtime, began with Here’s
the biggest baddest bear hug, and grew
alliterative lines year after year to celebrate
my deep daring dives, proud pinochle player.
He learned to say hello and thank you
in the mother tongue of every waitress and store clerk,
kept index cards in his jacket pocket to guide
his pronunciation. At work he spoke the language
of equations, radar signals, mathematical models,
linear transformations. From him I learned that a line
is the shortest way to connect two points,
a line of poetry, two people.

 
December                        
    For My Father

You shrink happiness
to fit inside the possibilities.
Attached to three tubes and an IV,
eating jello and consommé for dinner,
the sound of your wife’s voice
is the width of pleasure.

We crowd into this new definition,
gathering close
to your flickering fire,
which, barely moving,
casts giant shadows
against the hospital walls.

Wedged between
the sliding curtains
and memories of easier times,
your spirit clings
to each remaining crevice
of your diminishing room.

A Father Teaches His Daughter to Ride the Waves

He carries her on his shoulders,
her fingers clasping the boogie board
he’s taught her to steady over her head.
He wades out past the first foam
to where the blue deepens,
where she’ll feel the thrill of the challenge
when she coasts back to shore.
He carried her
cradled in his quivering arms
when she was still wet
with vernix from the womb, carried her
when she cried, bewildered by her new world,
carried her in a backpack to the park
and the first time she saw the sea, carried her
with one arm, juggling groceries
  in the other, carried the tunes she loved
  when he put her to bed,
carried her picture in his wallet
and her dreams on his chest, carried them
in his breath as he slept. He carries
all that still
as he lifts her onto the board,
gives a gentle push,
and releases her to the waves.

Interference  

I can still trace the crinkles around the wise eyes
of Robert Young, the father in Father Knows Best,
who never lost his temper, arrived home after work

eager to settle each family crisis. Wednesday nights,
late 1950s, Mom, Dad, my sister and I watched
on our black and white TV with its stiff rabbit ears.

Almost every scene took place inside the home,
teenage daughter flung across her bed in tears,
mother aproned in the kitchen. If the camera strayed

as far as the malt shop, we only saw vanilla
faces, able bodies, pony-tailed girls in shirtwaist
dresses. No shadow of polio or the hydrogen bomb.

Jim Crow held the camera steady, not even
a glimpse of Black kids playing tag on the other
side of town. Those images hovered behind

horizontal lines called interference
that would suddenly distort our view. My father
fiddled with the antenna, unscrewed the pressboard

back and tightened tubes, until Father and son Bud
came strolling out of the garage, wiped grease
off their hands and smiled. Relieved, we all settled

back on the couch. It took me years to learn
to adjust the signals I received, to clear the static,
the white noise, to listen with open ears.

Superpowers
    After a photograph in the New York Times   

Formed from a torn tablecloth, his checkered cape
floats freely behind him, arms spread,
one foot suspended in air, ready to leap

from the kitchen shelf into his father’s arms.
He has his balance. A five-year-old boy with
superpowers. A boy ready for flight
.
The boy will take flight soon with his father.
But they will not fly, they will walk, perhaps more
than a hundred shadeless days. They will leave

behind the tablecloth, the kitchen,
the brilliant hues of the quetzal bird
flying across a woven blanket. The father  

has surveyed his coffee fields, once fertile,  
leaves now consumed in brown fungus,
no sooner rotting than passing their poison

to the next plant, leaving the belly of the boy
almost as empty as the belly of the father.
I wish him superpowers

to move safely across borders
he knows they are not welcomed to cross,
spurned by a power as unyielding as his land.

 “My Father, the Poet” and “December” were first published in her collection, To Drink from a Wider Bowl, “A Father Teaches His Daughter to Ride the Waves” in Poetry East, “Interference,” in North Carolina Literary Review, James Applewhite Semi-Finalist, and “Superpowers” in Ocotillo Review.