Photo of Angela Hoffman in front of her childhood home at age seven, wearing her first communion shoes.
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Angela Hoffman’s retirement
from teaching coincided with the pandemic. In the midst of isolation and
searching for meaning in this new chapter of her life, she took to writing
poetry. She placed third in the WFOP Kay Saunders Memorial Emerging Poet in
2022 and was a runner up in the 2023 Wisconsin Sijo competition. Her poems
have been published in Agape Review, Amethyst Review, As Surely As the
Sun, Blue Heron Review, Braided Way, Bramble, Cosmic Daffodil Journal, Moss
Piglet, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Muleskinner Journal, Of Rust and Glass,
One Art, Poetica Review, Silver Birch Press, Solitary Plover, Sparks of
Calliope, The Enchanted Circle Newsletter, The Orchards Poetry Journal, The
Poet Magazine, Verse-Virtual, Visual Verse, Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets’
Museletter and Calendar, Whispers and Echoes, Wilda Morris’s Poetry
Challenge, Writing In A Woman’s Voice, and Your Daily Poem. Her
poems have also appeared in Amethyst Review Poetry Anthology: All Shall Be
Well and The Poet Anthology: Our Changing Earth. Her poetry
collections include Hold the Contraries, forthcoming, 2024, Olly
Olly Oxen Free, 2023, and Resurrection Lily, 2022 (Kelsay Books).
She is from Wisconsin.
Comments by Editor Sharon Waller Knutson
I have been a fan of Angela Hoffman ever since reading her poem, “Grandmother” on Your Daily Poem and am proud to publish these strong stellar poems which show Angela as a person.
Grandmother My hands now remind me of my grandmother’s. Knuckles, veins protruding under soft crepe. With them, she prayed the rosary, sewed slippers out of borgana, played the organ in her never used living room where horse-head bookends sat on the table in front of the red-velvet sofa on which her bible lay. I miss her sweet voice that would call out my name, her gentle words, never used against another, her quiet manner, so much like my father’s, her sweet pickles served with rye bread and hard butter, Life she served in the opaque white cereal bowls. In her basement, Liberace albums, high heels for dress up, a ring toss game made from rubber canning seals. I miss our visits to the cemetery to visit my grandfather. Mostly I miss her hands folded in the front pew storming heaven with her prayers.
Where Are You From? I’m from a ranch-lined street
of three bedroom homes
with barns, pastures pinched in between. Everyone was known, accounted for. We shared a party line, taking full advantage of listening in on Dee. Our driveway housed just one car. Mother was always home, making dinner, ratting her hair up high, getting gussied for the return of Father at five. She served dinner at our assigned places at the table. We took turns sweeping the floor, drying the dishes in exchange for a stack of nickels, dimes, rarely quarters. Cows wandered into our yard under the clothesline billowing with sheets. There were block parties with casseroles and jello salads, Moonlight Starlight and Annie-Annie-Over. There were no vacations, bedrooms were barren of toys. No one stood out as richer or poorer. We were all the same on Wisconsin Drive— everyone satisfied, just getting by.
Purple Shoes They were the sought-after pair in grandmother’s basement, the fought-over pair with rounded toes, heels for a dancer, the color of grape gumballs, just-ripe plums. The shoes, oozing the sweetness of a lovely life, were chosen over the black, red, even the mint-green pair from the deep insides of a cardboard box filled with play things. They deserved better; to be delicately wrapped in tissue paper to preserve the luxury and royalty they exuded. The leather had worn with time like the binding of a well-loved book, so once feet slipped inside you walked precariously but always assuredly with your head high. They were so out of character for our saintly grandmother who sat daily in the front pew with her rosary. It's hard to imagine a time she would have worn the shoes with five children in tow, her feet crooked with bunions. How my sister ended up with the purple shoes is still a mystery, as each and every one of her granddaughters were her favorite. I have her kitchen table and would trade it in a heartbeat for the grace and dignity she carried inside those shoes.
My Father Had a Large Heart My father would drive me to the edge of town to Pottersfield, a former poor farm, sanitarium, graveyard for the indigent, pauper, destitute. He’d park on the side of the road, place sugar cubes in the palm of my hand, the very ones from the pink box at home which he muddled into his old fashioneds. Without exchanging any words, we would hike up the hill, overgrown with tall grasses, weeds, wait in anticipation for the deer to approach on the other side of the wire fence, as if they were quarantined there. One by one the deer accepted our sweet offerings extended from my open hand and my father’s too large heart from his bout with rheumatic fever.
Everything Belongs
As children, we played church in our basement. With a towel on my head like the habit of a nun, I assumed the role reserved for white males, handing out chalky, pastel Necco candy wafers— holy communion, from the dish of our kitchen set into the palm of my brother’s hands.
A longing had taken up home inside of me that over decades would beget a recognition of the God for whom I yearned. The One found in simplicity, in the awkwardness of the ordinary, the One who refused to reject those whom society had deemed unfit, the One found in a dank basement upon a plastic dish.
Buttercups for Karen On my hike through the field I recognized the yellow blossoms. The memories of so long ago flooded like the marshes. My best friends, an unlikely bunch of five, were thrown together simply because our houses sat on the same street. We would inch our way on our bellies under the barbed-wire fence in the spot that had been hollowed out, trying desperately to avoid the inevitable rusty shock that would be tasted in our mouths, felt in our teeth. Once under, the entire day was ours, all golden with buttercups for picking. Our mothers were unaware of our whereabouts until our return at dinnertime— dirty, exhausted, hungry. Nature offered all we needed: pastures, fields of grasses, leaves, downed limbs for forts, trees for climbing, cows for taunting and avoiding. Oh Karen, it was just a few years ago that I heard you had taken your life. I wish you had known the buttercups were waiting for you!
Tulip “Begin again the story of your life.” –Jane Hirshfield Buried in the dark beneath, embodied in only a paper thin coat like old parchment I feel like I have died. But I still hear hooves above the layers of this stiffening winter feel the breath of the deer like an unspoken prayer asking forgiveness for once devouring me. He couldn’t resist my beauty. I barely remember who I used to be broken down now by the cold. The sugar in my blood, I’m saving for building strength, surviving. There is a greening going on inside. I’m listening to the silence. This is the hard part. Waiting. I’m tired. But I remember the familiar landscape of spring the gradual thaw, the softening of the soil the gentle rains, the warmth. What seems dead will emerge from the messy, muddy circumstances of living bloom pink, new again and again and again.
Coats
We all have that old coat shoved in the back of the closet kept out of nostalgia. The one you wear to cut down the Christmas tree. It’s threadbare, perhaps plaid, missing a button, has a hole, but it's warm, familiar. Out of sight, over time, you forget it’s even there.
I’ve pleaded for us to reconnect. and we text for bit, promise to try harder, but you know where that goes— in the back of the closet,
so you know nothing of the days I had to put on my green slicker when grief poured in buckets, nor the glorious days I wore my blue shawl. You don’t know about the winter coat I got at the second-hand store with the fur on the collar that I wore to church alone on Christmas, that cold, cold day. I want us to be coats for each other, left out on the hook.
Clam After Mary Oliver, Clam It's a meeting of friends, a chance to reconnect on a lake with those I haven’t seen in years. I consider those who will gather on her shores: those with wide travels on seas, those with found treasures of success, the beautiful self-assured shells, and then I consider the simple clam living her small life pulled down in the safe sand, trying to hold her cracked self together, forming a rind of protection against the tumblings and irritants that enter, telling herself she is content with the little satisfactions, while hungry to be fed the answers to the big questions. She’s late in forming her pearl, adding love to the layers of her worthiness. Her knowing is thickening. She has that muscle that wants more than survival. I hope my friends recognize the preciousness of the ordinary, the potential within the rough mollusk.
Tulip and Clam are from Hold the Contraries. Everything Belongs from Olly Olly Oxen Free.
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