Storyteller of the Week

 Tamara Madison

 

Tamara Madison grew up on a citrus farm in the southern California desert, near the San Andreas Fault. She began writing poems as soon as she could hold a pen, and says her earliest literary influence was Margaret Wise Brown (the author of the wonderful book, Pussy Willow). The youngest of three, she spent a lot of time alone, rambling through the desert and writing in her treehouse.

Always keenly interested in language, she studied French and Russian (and later Japanese and Italian). During her sophomore year of college, she met her first serious boyfriend. When he graduated from college, he was hired to work on a guide on an exhibit in the USSR through the United States Information Agency (an arm of the State Department). In order to accompany him, she married him and they spent the next 15 months traveling and working in the Soviet Union. (Her memoir in verse of that time, entitled Russian Honeymoon, is looking for a home.) Upon returning from her travels, she eventually wound up living and working in Washington D.C., where she graduated from Georgetown University with a Bachelor of Science in Linguistics.

Tamara is retired from a career of teaching first English as a Second Language to adults and later English and French in a high school in Los Angeles. The mother of two grown children and three grandchildren, Tamara is a swimmer, a dog lover, a student of classical guitar and an avid dancer in her living room. She is the author of the chapbooks “The Belly Remembers” (Pearl Editions) and "Along the Fault Line" (Picture Show Press), and three full-length volumes of poetry: “Wild Domestic” and “Moraine” (Pearl Editions) and "Morpheus Dips His Oar" (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions). Her work has appeared in Chiron Review, Your Daily Poem, the Writer’s Almanac, Sheila-Na-Gig, Worcester Review and many other publications. 

More about Tamara can be found at tamaramadisonpoetry.com.

Comments by Editor Sharon Waller Knutson

 I have been a fan of Tamara Madison’s poetry for years. because of her signature style and strong feminine voice. Whether she is writing about nature, family or growing up female, she is telling my stories and I am walking in her sensible stable shoes and getting a panoramic view of the wonderous world through wise eyes. She laces irony with wisdom and casts her net for bigger fish. I am proud to publish her powerful poetry.

 

Learning Make-Up

 My best friend’s dad was in cosmetics;
she loaned me her makeup to put on
during the morning bus ride.
I was careful to save the eyeliner,
the mascara wand, for the longer stops.
Coming home at the end of the day
I rushed to the bathroom before Mother
could see my smudgy eyes and tarted
cheeks. Once before dinner, I slathered
green eye shadow, black mascara,
lots of blush and silver-white lipstick.
At the table, my father said What
happened to you? and I burst
like a water balloon. I just want to be
like everybody else!  My parents stared,
wordless. I couldn’t stop sobbing.
Let her cry, he said. This must have been
building for a long time. In a few months
I would be 14, old enough for make-up.
But by then, I wanted to be a hippie,
leaving behind my newly-shaved legs,
nipple-hiding bra, and all those colorful
shiny tubes that used to dazzle me so.

When the Owl Speaks

By Tamara Madison

After all has shaken down
and our words of anger
have lost their use,
we walk out
into cool night air
to the scent of soil
and moss, and because

we are not speaking,
the soft voice of an owl
comes to us from over
the fence, from high
in the gum tree — once,
twice, then silence
as our footsteps near.

My father spoke only
one language and used
few words, the right ones,
though they were at times
profane and often uttered
in anger.

The owl speaks only
one word — unlike the grackle
that squeaks and bubbles
or the mockingbird that speaks
so many tongues, or us
with our volumes of words.

When the owl speaks
its one rare word
sounding night’s fathoms,
all are well to listen.

I like to think of owls —
each individual owl
in this world — as my father:
calm in death,
and wise at last.

 

Banko 

They’d be at it when I got up,
Mother and her aunt, crowing “Banko!”,
the game’s “gotcha” term.
You have to be sharp to play this game.
Molly’s gone a quarter century,
Mom’s lived even longer. Now
I have to remind her how many cards
go in the Banko pile, which ones
belong in the draw stack, and which
get dropped on the dead pile.
She remembers the color alternation bit,
how to thwart my advance by piling
cards on me. You may have the jack,
she tells me because she can’t reach.
The unusable cards pile up as we
pronounce each one dead. I notice
she doesn’t crow the term anymore.
When she runs out of cards
I remind her to turn over her dead pile;
you can always give cards a new life.

 

Chrysalis

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

 

A Room Full of Flowers

At his apartment he arranges
the flowers in vases: deep
red tulips, gladiolas in salmon
and yellow, magenta stock,
daisies, stargazer lilies.

I can’t help but reflect
that I have never had a lover
so dedicated in his adoration
as my son is for his beloved.
It pains me to think
that he will someday learn
about the all that love
does not conquer.

I help him place the flowers
around the two small rooms;
the lilies gaze across the floor
toward the window but
the daisies smile up at me,
confident and pleased,
existing only, as they do,
in the resplendent optimism
of Now.
 

The Tyranny of Photographs

My mother kept our childhoods enshrined
in framed collages on her walls. She was there,
too, skinny dark-haired girl with a pair
of baby-faced brothers. But most of the photos
showed us as children, teenagers, young adults,
parents with toddlers.

It’s been so long since we were those versions
of ourselves. We recall those times, not
as we would remember them, but as the tyranny
of each photograph insists. And according
to that tyranny we are at our best: smiling,
healthy, surrounded by and full of love.

What the photographs don’t show is how
we’ve struggled for money, marriage and health,
how my brother and I stand on opposite banks
of our parents’ philosophy, how our sister’s reality
is gradually losing facts and details.

When Mother died, we divided the collages
among ourselves and our children. Now
our younger faces gaze from where they lean
against the walls, and from my own dresser --  
my son’s and daughter’s childhood selves
preserved in frames, little ants in amber.

The poem, Learning Makeup was in Making Up Poems, anthology by Picture Show Press. Banko was on Danny Earl Simmons' "Poems I Admire" series on Galley winter. Moraine appeared first in Moraine (Pearl Editions). The Tyranny of Photographs was first published in Morpheus Dips His Oar.