Storyteller of the Week

 Arlene Gay Levine

  

Arlene Gay Levine

 Arlene Gay Levine is the author of 39 Ways to Open Your Heart: An Illuminated Meditation (Conari Press) and Movie Life (Finishing Line Press). Her prose and poetry have found a home in The New York Times, numerous anthologies, and journals including Chiron Review, The MacGuffin, Art/Life, Quest, and frogpond. She has served as a judge for The Illinois State and Virginia State Poetry Society Contests and is the creator /facilitator of Logos Therapy™, a transformational writing process. Arlene lives with her husband in NYC tending a garden of herbs, roses and words.

Comments by Editor Sharon Waller Knutson

Although I didn’t start corresponding with Arlene until 2020, I fell in love with this poem, when I read it in Your Daily Poem in 2016:

Coattails

Handsome, tall, wrapped in a worn but still snappy cashmere coat,
the man quicksteps around the shoe department testing
a pair of oxfords. Dancing tentatively in his wake
is an elegant miniature, around five,
her dark hair, high forehead and lanky frame,
a mirror of him.

Rosebud lips, aquiline nose and emerald eyes belong
to a missing piece of the triad: some pretty woman, possibly home
cutting crusts from sandwiches they will devour
when the duo returns, ravenous from their morning at the mall,
or perhaps their lady was lost giving birth
or vanished with whatever wind
blows families apart; I don’t know.

I do know I watch them, momentarily ignoring
my recently retired husband, as he grumpily tries on
casual footwear to match his new lifestyle.  I observe how
this little gem of a girl silently keeps pace with the man,
her small hand outstretched as if to catch his coattail,
but never quite grabbing hold; he doesn’t seem to notice.

The pair whisks past our seats, her with arm extended, him
waltzing just out of reach. I return my attention to
my beloved, busy now untying shoes he will not buy
because the current styles do not suit him. I remember
all those years, him leaving for work, coattails flapping
in the wind, and I reaching out to wave goodbye.

Now, my hand touches his, we smile at each other
and I want to call out to this other man: “Time
moves too fast!” but when I turn, all I catch
is a glimpse of his coattail
as he lopes out of the store,
his tiny shadow
floating behind.

Since then we have formed a mutual admiration society., I was impressed by her haiku and another poem published at different times in The New York Times.

Never visited
The Statue of Liberty
Lived here my whole life

Ode to a Vandal

When the rock that shattered my stained-glass window
into a thousand tiny shards of rainbow hit the ground,
I wondered if the boy whose slingshot thrust it
felt so hated that the love I sent back would not
be enough to stop him from hurting himself.

Kneeling to retrieve his weapon, I slice my finger
and watch two drops of blood cross his ebony stone;
a decoration from my heart to his--
brave soul, to live in such a
violent
sad
world.

I’m proud to publish these other poems Arlene sent me.

Playing Catch with John Lennon

The field is dark…

The pitcher prepares to throw
A crowd of catchers crouches, the only
audience invited to this dream game

Something soars; we all
run to receive, yet it is me
who captures, not a ball but a heart

And the pitcher is John,
of the words and the songs
Repeatedly he tosses; I reach
and clasp each heart to mine, my soul

opening in awe and joy
while I wonder:
now that I have caught
to whom must I throw?

I wake with a peaceful feeling
I grab my pen
Words begin

The field is dark...

This poem

lolled topless on Caribbean beaches in February,
taught in ghettoes, danced in private
Carnaby Street clubs and chugged along
funky unpaved roads, happily meandering
through Pennsylvania coal country.

It has painted its toes bright red, guzzled champagne
and scraped the last crusty noodles from a tuna casserole.
It grew basil from seed, landed big bass, and saw
the moon rise over a pristine mountain lake
in the company of its soul mate.

It has partied with rock stars, hung out
with the homeless, sat alone and wondered
where a true friend could be found, been lied to,
loved, confused, abused, and elated. Never a day
passed that it didn’t learn something new.

This poem has been around the block
and sometimes lost sight of what might
ever make it feel like life was worth living.
It experienced mystical epiphanies, won
awards, prayed, meditated, got analyzed

and even stood, briefly, on its head in search
of a way to be right with the world. Until one day
this poem woke up, realized nothing mattered a lick
unless it felt right with itself, in touch
with its personal rhythm and rhyme.

Then it could create each line in its own time,
words pouring, a great waterfall from its heart.
This is how this poem came to be here, on this page,
talking to you about the Light that shines whether
the sun’s out or not, and always will.

The Risk of Growing Up

The bludgeoned body of a
four-year-old boy is discovered
in an upstate village park.
The perpetrator is a thirteen-year-old
Tom Sawyer look-a-like, an eighty pound
killing machine, friendless reader
of Stephen King.

Four years earlier, he’d strangled
a neighbor’s cat, silently slipped
a metal laundry hose clamp over
the head of that Siamese
and squeezed until dead.

The cat’s owner recounts how
the boy’s father stalked out
of his house and booted the boy
so hard in the butt... “it lifted
him off the ground.”

When asked by the press why
the bike-riding butcher/TV addict
had attacked, the head of the Bureau
of Criminal Investigation said the
killer, a bright underachiever, had
made a halting explanation but...
“the real reason might be better left
to experts to determine.”

“Playing Catch with John Lennon” won Honorable Mention in the 2016 Queens Library Competition among hundreds of entries from all over NY state. “Coattails” and “This poem… appeared in Movie Life (Finishing Line Press, 2011) and “The Risk of Growing Up” appeared in Medicinal Purposes: A Literary Review (Winter,1997)