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Rita Maria Martinez Miami (LD)
I Write for Cyborgs and Shower Chair Users I write to discover why my head thumps on the right but not on the left when the weather plays Russian roulette. I write to elude Lady Depression who pursues me like a tenacious tabloid reporter, to transcend confines of an aching vessel, to venerate this body despite its going on strike over a week following the Covid vax, to honor ribs that felt kicked in after, to praise caregivers like my spouse whose steady hands unspooled a roll of camo-blue kinesio tape over said ribs making me feel like an Olympic swimmer in our blue sheets though I could barely roll over. I humble myself before the majesty of adjustable beds, revere my splendid Tempur-Pedic, its righteous remote that gently raises and positions with a mere button push. This is the closest I've come to living like the Jetsons. I'm holding out for the George Jetson bathing experience: almost sentient motion-detecting shower heads and jets anticipating every need as I’m washed, rinsed, dried, moisturized to perfection. For now I'm content with the underappreciated shower chair, brushing my teeth while seated as my spouse lathers my back and hair. I esteem the shower chair that welcomes and receives me during the post-migraine hangover when I'm unsteady. I write to vent after watching The New Adventures of Old Christine when Christine's ex-hubby and coworker mock her asking if she's going to need a shower chair. Why does society assume only the elderly use shower chairs? I write to vanquish my timid younger self, obliterate her fear of offending elders when mother advised silence, to annihilate the ableist statement disguised as advice. I write for Paula Kamen's Tired Girls, exhausted legions of women inwardly rolling their eyes when asked if they’ve tried yoga or acupuncture, for those with chronic daily headache and migraine living in Florida where it’s humid and hot as fuck. For spoonie sisters who’ve been fed some doozies: You should mow the lawn. You like being sick. Being tired is a state of mind. I write for peace of mind, for those who use MAOIs, CGRPs, NSAIDs. I pay tribute to legions of responsible opioid users-- chronic pain patients deemed suspicious, often treated like drug-seeking addicts in emergency rooms. I write for the modified: cyborgs who loathe metal detectors, borgs boasting internal or external hardware, implanted with neurostimulators combating back pain, incontinence, the never-ending migraine. I write because I'm a cyborg. Originally published by Tupelo Quarterly as part of a Disability Poetry Folio curated by Christopher Salerno. https://www.tupeloquarterly.com/ wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Disability-Folio-for-TQ-AUG-21-1.pdf Mary Block Miami (Rita Maria Martinez) After Rebmann and the Safari Collection Brochure Like a bird in a restaurant I’ve been transformed by the walls around me into a filthy thing, a hovering problem who moves too fast and doesn’t know how to leave. Like the 10-foot alligator caught in a Clearwater kitchen, hissing and thrashing around in a puddle of red wine and glass, I’ve been monstrously wrong. My fury’s gone viral. My body’s been made absurd for its size and its suffering, made available to subscribers. Like the herd of giraffes with their heads through a hotel window I want my beauty back. I want to understand my rights on either side of a given partition. If a window implies permission, turns me into a freaky background for a stranger’s vacation photos I want to know. Caridad Moro-Gronlier Miami (Mary Block) In Defense of My Mother Who Never Bought Me a Barbie Dreamhouse I was too young to understand just how young my mother was when she worked the nightshift at TRW, building spacecrafts with her hands, too young to know how it felt to hand over the whole of her check to my father who gave her an allowance-- ten dollars after 40 hours, ten dollars he’d drop into her palm every pay day. I understood Barbie called the shots. That Dreamhouse was hers, Ken, an accessory sans the authority to tell her what to do. I wrote thirty-one letters to Santa that year, but he wasn’t in charge. My father was. I thought I stood a chance because Mami loved Barbie’s mid-century mod A frame too, how the chalet gleamed up at us from the slick pages of the Sears catalog, the wonder of real jalousie windows and wall-to-wall carpets unfurled on the kitchen table where she calculated just how long she’d have to lay that chalet away, just how much she’d have to beg to convince my father to pay. I watched her turn the page, no dogear to save her place. I’d like to say I was happy with the Barbie Dream Plane she placed under the tree, but I blamed her. It would take years to understand she didn’t want me to dream of staying put, she wanted me to dream of flying away. Originally published in https://www.limpwristmagazine.com/lw6 Jen Karetnick Miami Shores (Caridad Moro-Gronlier) Insects are extra food, we local women post every chance we get, a shroud of swallows and thrushes around us as we jog around the block at dusk. Sprays equal death. We would make every tanager and grosbeak a gazpacho of flea and mosquito if we could, force-feed them a ubiquitous saveur of midges to go with beakfuls of extracted berries. We judge, we jury those who hold biohazardous bottles over grapefruit or key limes, we pluck the caterpillars from trees too juvenile to meet the appetite of a hoard in order to recolonize another inadequate backyard, though we know it can be difficult to identify, exactly, what you’re encouraged to cultivate when you’re both weight and gauge. Nurture the butterfly. Egg on on a dragonfly, buoy up ladybugs. But plant-juicing thrips? Jovial swarms of gnats? Quintuplicating ants? All sacrificial, whiz-banging into flocks murmurating with such abrupt, judicious turns you can’t do anything but watch, struck by axial snacks taken on the wing. The passerine head to points south, south even of here where hundreds of thousands of Texans and New Yorkers journeyed to find real estate with a water view during quarantine. Life-size migration, a steady V, hardly as quaint as dark-eyed juncos choosing our lawns for a meal of army worms and wasps, a chorus of approval, and a doze. Snowbirds place feeders on live oak limbs, surprised when colossal iguanas gulp every goody and crawl Biscayne’s bisque-like bay, when foxes jump out from the undergrowth to eat the kibble left for the cat, when even an acequia can hold an alligator. Amazing, they murmur, then fertilize the yard and buy an extended warranty. We warn them: We are bellyful, we are melody-ready, we are equipped for the haul. Originally published in The Dodge Mia Leonin Miami. (Caridad Moro-Gronlier) Creation Story At age nineteen men translated my body for me: You. Can’t. Be. White. You who got some extra lovin’ on you. You, ham hock booty. On Troost Avenue, men rubbernecked and crashed, a five-car pile up from looking at my ass. And me – head down, eyes glued to cracked sidewalk face hot with shame. And me – wearing a red, A-line skirt that hit mid calf. Years later, my husband explains, You can’t cover that up. A year after, a lover explains, Men know what’s there, even if they can’t see it. That’s their second sight, their sixth sense. Southern folk translated my body for me. Then Cubans did. Criollita original! Negra vestido de blanco! Gracias a la virgin por este culo. From construction hangars, convertibles, and solares, they hissed and whined and moaned. I took a good, long look at my face: my honey-splattered face, my cowrie-shell face, my calculus-meets-physics face, my Neptune-trined-with-Saturn face, my split-second, gut-instinct, don’t-go-with-him face, my Venus-in-Cancer face, my wanna-burn-every-war-monger-at-the-stake face, my wanna-nurse-every-baby-ever-racked-with-hunger face, my Yeah, I’m-buying-condoms. What-the-fuck-are-you-staring-at? face, my Uh huh, I-wanna-have-sex-and-I’m-not-interested-in-reproduction-so-dispense-with-the-dirty-looks-and-write-the-prescription face, my wanna-put-every-war-monger-on-trial face, my wanna-strip-down-naked-and-stand-in-front-of-a-military tank face, my ven-pa’ca-porque-te-quiero-comer face, my abandonment-issues-for-days face, my inner-child-before-it-was-a-pop-psychology-term face, my cowardly face, my fear-of-retribution face, my please-don’t-take-this-little-piece-of-mountain-I’ve-managed-to-molehill-into-a-beautiful-windowsill-garden face, my I’m-through-with-molehilling face, my turns-out-I-am-the-mountain face. I took a long, long look at my face and I decided that it was good. So I tossed that that mug, that kisser, that visage, I tossed her to the horizon for safe keeping. I fixed my gaze on her and I started walking. This was the beginning of resting bitch face. Catherine Esposito Prescott Miami (Jen Karetnick) 6 am Our electric car hums. My boys drape their eyelids over unfinished dreams. The sun is a rumor. The sky blinks with hunters, warriors, and every human's fate, ancient mappings of this world, which my boys would never accept as truth unless it were proven in a Ted Talk or a self-appointed scholar's YouTube video. My boys are a ram and a twin, one thinks the other is his mate, the other is stubborn and solitary. I would tell them as much, but they're not listening; their eyes turn in and out of sleep. As we approach the bus stop, the car is stone-quiet. Before they walk away, I want to say something like carpe diem but wittier, like This moment is all we have, but less alarmist, like Be both the lion and the lamb. I want to speak in metaphors and aphorisms that will bloom in their minds during third period, to singe them with grace. This morning, I'm searching for a phrase that's both spark and amulet, but the silence between us insists on staying empty like a bowl of air carrying the gentle charges of neutrons, electrons, and protons, deeper quarks and nucleons, atomic and subatomic strata pulsing inside layered atoms, every particle moving in its own orbit, maintaining an essential distance so the entirety doesn't collapse. These are distances we have yet to measure-- the boys and I and the world outside, the invisible threads of all I must leave unsaid. From the book Accidental Garden (Gunpowder Press, February 2023), winner of the 2022 Barry Spacks Prize Originally published in Nelle Journal. Reprinted in Verse Daily. Rick Campbell Alligator Point (LD) A Thousand Miles from Della Rose When little I remember survives this life will at last be mine. As I stand in the valley, I know now I’ll have to tell you of our loss. Your grandmother, the Rose of your name, is gone. This valley that made me has gone to another life. The dark cold mills, singing of our lost gods and their slaughter block of dreams, line the river like pallbearers. You’ll think I made too much of this, and I’ll tell you all too often of things you’ll never see--forge, foundry, furnace, the black smoke and slag. Your land is loblolly and magnolia. No coal barges crawl through your dreams. We trade steel for flowers. You are my new river. Don Morrill Tampa (Rick Campbell) Blue Star Home The blue star displayed in a house window means knock on this door if you’re chased by a bully or shadowed from school by a stranger in a car; someone will answer, will know what to do; the world as you’ve felt it will remain so; you’re welcome, don’t forget. But we do forget even as we pound furiously for help, or stroll past, imitating, on a plastic recorder, a mourning dove. Or living too deep in the back rooms, out for the day, we don’t hear. What was that? When we answer and discover that child in the frightened eyes of a colleague, or our reflection, we may bid it enter. Before closing the door behind it, we peer out for the threat, for veracity (we’ve been tricked before, we showing the star). And there’s our street. There’s a maple leaf, fallen, wide as a breastplate. "Blue Star Home” was first published in Morrill's first collection At The Bottom of the Sky, which is now out of print. Brook Sadler Tampa (Don Morrill) White Horse Running Loose I want to turn a white horse running loose on a highway overpass in the south of France— its white mane streaking against the blue sky like a mythic messenger loosed from Olympus and sent with the full intent of a rankled Zeus or jealous Athena to speed the course of human events toward conclusions we unwitting mortals would drive right by-- I want to turn a white horse running loose on a highway overpass in the south of France— its white gallop against the traffic like a medieval ghost charging forth, its rider fallen, emerging from the centuries as from battle, clouds rising behind it like the smoke of a burned village, bearing its noble purpose to fulfill some troubadour’s forgotten promise-- I want to turn a white horse running loose on a highway overpass in the south of France— its dark nostrils like two coals, legs and hooves like pistons, eyes glossy as volcanic glass, muscled motion fluid as a wave’s crest, curl, and final unfurl, rolling toward shore, momentum that exhausts and renews itself without pause-- I want to turn a white horse running loose on a highway overpass in the south of France into a symbol in a poem, but I cannot get a fix on it. We were driving at 90 km/h, when it appeared above us, a momentary flash, and it was gone. A rift in the universe had opened and quickly sealed, leaving only this recollection, wild, unbridled. Sean Sexton Vero Beach (Rick Campbell) Revelation and Memory: Winter I Does the subject run out? Is everything over one day like a war one never believed would end, working, living, dying here, where you’re held in the same confine—with herds of cattle: six hundred fenced acres, only the weedy, tree-lined hedgerows barely conceal your captivity but you’re affixed by land and sky. Clouds gather from distance by season, weather, and hour, bright, tinted, or dismal. At some moment, levity comes to your imagining. Has it not all been spoken of at times grandiloquently—to others in name of stewardship, or to oneself—wresting away the impulse to harbor regret once again in your life. We inadvertently turned the cows on the ditchbank this morning, mis- remembering yet perhaps knowing all the while the left-open gate; rushed ahead to bring them back. Only grudgingly did they acquiesce. We’re out of grass—need somewhere to go—maybe this always inmost to us. We’re essentially poor—our circumstances small and never been otherwise—bringing three hundred cows and their calves along in certain poverty, presently fashioned upon a season that equals the stupidity of man. II I remember Tampa one February, stiff wind skirling off the Bay, ravaging the State Fairgrounds. Everyone in down vests, freezing their asses off, ducking into the main pavilion to get out of it for a moment—that tense, quiet, concentrated air of the livestock show, class after class sequencing hours. Then back out into that gale where speech itself—frozen—doesn’t quite catch in the ear amid wind-torn diesel clatter of the midway mixing with aromas of candy and grease. The Brahman Association meeting was kept till after the final class: “Get of Sire”—whole cow families lined up—bull, dam, yearlings, and sucklings, together like entries on a pedigree certificate as in proof of something. The handlers, mostly farm-raised kids, lead ropes and show sticks, feverishly stroking dewlaps and navels—all watching as they cow-towed determinedly the circulating, dispassionate judge. Old Boss walked the midway hunting for a vendor to sell us Cuban sandwiches he remembered from years ago at the fair. Yet only funnel cakes, colored ices of every radioactive hue, gewgaws, and worthless ephemera to be found. This is the outer pocket emptying world we pass through, coming to understand the invernal chill of Hell—not Dante’s—nor from sudden loss and derision, but the unnamable thing that can spawn and grow within your life—malevolent cousin of hope—like a weak calf born every year and for whatever reason, sickens and dies on your watch. III We conceded to hamburgers the elephant stepped on at a stand, and joined the meeting destined to mire in pettiness--formality: the thinking-man’s whore. President, Joe Barthle at last interrupted the hour’s long inanity to say, “Gentlemen—what’s your pleasure?” Old Boss had had enough, whispered audibly, “Let’s bug out of here!” and up and gone, we were soon crossing along dusk-laden strawberry fields of Valrico and Dover, obliterating massifs of phosphate at Mulberry, Bartow’s reclamations and equipment yards and the brown, frozen expanses of prairie between podunk boiled-peanut and fruit-stand settlements along the way. The Kissimmee was somnolent, hyacinthine from the bridge; Blanket Bay, Peavine Trail, the Desert Inn at the crossroads, Ossawa, cut-off to Blue Cypress and Twenty-mile Bend all dissolved into a gloaming folded upon memory. How many times this trip taken before and since in my life’s journey, soon melded into the days til conjuring comes from a westward glance to coloring finale or this sullen evening as the chime rings a brisk air, seeming to possess the world’s breath. There will be no last glimpse of the orb, no crack in the western firmament where light has already begun to slip out of the sky into oncoming darkness. C.M. Clark Sebastian (Sean Sexton) Next to Last Chance Saloon Halfway between cow and cormorant Lake Wales appears. Your perfect excuse to quit driving. To quit the keener purpose of driving between what is boundless and the finite. Always the ground between. An off-road shoulder like some old woman’s bed growing colder with years and indifferent. Can you imagine the sheer acreage of exfoliating skin? The body scent that fades with each day’s exhalation? Or are you called instead inside a virtual elsewhere, the echoed jackhammer of feet up dizzying hexagons of tiled stairways? Migraine-blind you rise six flights. But the back bedroom stays hidden-- just waiting behind dry cleaning and winter coats cocooned and swaddled in plastic. These are the places that joust, that beckon east to west, taking refuge and a lunch where avoidance is most likely preferred offering either chicken fried steak or breakfast all day. Or just the jazz of numbing hours and miles, just for the lust of soft Gulf water. There is a dead spot I like between points on the map. Still too close to the town receding as only a vague blur of slow traffic and low buildings fixed in the rearview mirror. Yet not yet near enough the next county line -- not yet my destination -- yet a welcome relief from the monotony of brush and flat field. In this dead spot I spin the dial. Still a younger sister to radio days, knowing the place by the cellphone towers. Better than the billboards, the come-to-Jesus vowels crooning the oldies, the country quick nod to God and Sunday. But here in the dead spot I snag only fragments of a place already distant, and even fewer half sentences anticipating the next exit still out beyond my windshield. Straining to hear the transmissions of forgettable voices straining to assemble some meaningful message, although every third word is swallowed within the blur of road noise and wind shear. From here to your front door due west pavement plumbs the numbing miles. The succinct limits of my very human vision – my old tired eyes – the tired blue – succumbing to cataract fog and still straining west, the still unseen outpost on your coast beyond my best attempt to conjure you in your kitchen, closing lower cupboards, with a brisk hip move. The drawer with flatware juddered in closing, hiding coupons, and lyrics to songs that frame the stanzas of every evening’s lullaby, these late days left unsung. But I hear it. Between waves. Unseen like the air. Unflinching like the sea. |
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Lola Haskins Gainesville (C.M. Clark)
The Discovery On walking, in my seventies, down a leafy street behind two women in their early forties who are chatting to each other as companionably as birds on a limb, and having thought, with happy anticipation, ah, I'll be their age soon! it occurs to me that I've lost my mind-- but just then the clouds evanesce and light pours through the oaks and ash, to form lace on the pavement lovely enough to be sewn into dresses, and I see that time is as random as the patterns the sun makes on any given day as it filters through leaves, and as illusory as a baby being born, and as strange as the years of our lives that go by without returning, and as equal as the one friend's auburn hair and the red leaf she steps over, which the wind has abandoned for love of her. And now, having finally seen that the world is every minute new, I realize that I'm only a little younger than those women after all, and I step between them, and we speak as we walk, and by the time we part, each of us in her own way has told the others how lucky she is, to have been alive in such a beautiful place. Originally published in Rattle Included in Homelight (Charlotte Lit Press), September 2023 Silvia Curbelo Tampa (Lola Haskins) Read This In the place where sad is a verb she holds the window open as if light were a book she could live in. Over and over her small hands the fragile, brimming cup, the bluest page. Love’s tender necessary grammar. A flower pressed into the flesh of a reminder. Words twisted into feathers. Tiny arrows. Her broken origami bird. This poem first appeared in SWWIM Every Day. Rhonda J. Nelson Tampa (Silvia Curbelo) Dorothy Hale In a Madame X Dress after Frida Kahlo’s painting, The Suicide of Dorothy Hale Six a.m. is a solstice between a woman’s seasons Between her music and a wrecking ball. The longest night Between traffic and a top story suite. The shortest day Between centuries and circumstance. Beauty is an avalanche between work of art and housecoat. After folly, plummeting, frayed as a hem. Plain is never a woman’s proverb. Every man’s rationale a storm: Better a cardinal than a crow. What other option? Beauty fades, blood stains. Windowsill, the equator -- Inside the rubber sole Grips her to the ground, outside, the dark rope pulling The stiletto heel releasing footloose into the sky’s Cool embrace on her bare shoulders above the scandalous dress. The difference between hummingbird and dragonfly. Between lips and whisper. She falls like a half-muttered phrase. Then falls like black fruit from the tallest branch. Lands heavy as thunder. Pamela Epps Tampa. (Rhonda J Nelson) Forecast 1 The Great Blue Heron stands on the bank, its feathers like a long cloak or tanned hide worn in ceremony. His neck translucent in the sun is a question mark turned upside down. What does the river hold today? 2 Sun rises pink then orange over the river. An owl’s last call before she rests. Later sun peeks her head from behind cloud’s chest. Lessons in awe written on the cerulean sky. 3 The week begins on the heels of unconsummated dreams. I wake to heat and wind. The day thrums with the cicada's call for mates while the palm fronds swish their long hair and the old rusty bell still swings her feeble song. 4 No wind today. The only movement whistling ducks winging in dawn’s muted light. Later warblers hide in leaves occasionally dropping down to feed. The earth holds vigil for rain. 5 Rain crackles on the aluminum roof. You wake chilled and achy. I bring a cup of peppermint tea and elderberry syrup for healing. I swim in your blue eyes glassy with fever. Sarah Carleton Tampa (Pamela Epps) Flood Zone Back porch, black sky, bugs as big as tadpoles fly close to one light bulb, flick and bap to the pulse of pond frogs. We lounge one step from underwater in this sub-sand altitude where alligators stumble drunk into backyards led by primordial memories of submerged land and baffled to be breathing pure sodden oxygen so let’s acclimate ourselves to this place from the inside out, get soused on margaritas and tea till our heads swim-- let’s drink and dream until the walls bend, until catfish weave through louver windows until we grow gills. - first published in Valparaiso Poetry Review (Spring/Summer 2021 (Vol. XXII, No. 2) Susan R. Williamson Boca Raton (LD) Trimming The Robellini Palm Tree in Front of My Condo I never notice I need to bring out the clippers until one day it rains and a palm frond slaps me in the face as I try to cross into the entrance to my front doorway. It’s not a grand residence, our Florida condo. When we arranged for landscaping out front. I chose this tree. It was a lot younger, three separate trunks growing together, knee high because I thought my husband would like that and he did. Symbols of Florida at the doorway, swaying in the breeze. Palms out front would be a miniature nod to Palm Beach, the grand avenues or the public gardens and guarded entrances to private communities, their Royal Palms towering above gates. As I reach up with the clippers, I try to avoid the spines, sharp and visible near the base of the branch. I never knew they were there until the first time I was stabbed. Until the light changed I couldn’t see what hit me. Not a spider or a mosquito but a palm thorn, heavy like a rug needle and sharp. I’ve learned a thing or two about this palm as it now stands alone. It’s grown taller than the railing of the stairs to the apartment above. Squirrels like to take the thatch for their nests by stripping the bark, stealing what’s left after a frond is cut before it spikes the next frond. It’s alone now, the two others that lived with it are gone. Squirrel damage, or maybe this one was the strongest. I’ve had it for just about fifteen years now. I can see it from my desk, through the window. A solo act, withstanding the sieges of the squirrels, hurricane winds, the bluejay that comes to hide a peanut, wedging it between the bark, the little anole lizards that rest there, red throats puffing out to attract mosquitoes and gnats. The black snake curled at its base, the Cuban Anole, foot-long green lizard with the yellow and red stripe under its eyes. Every year around this time, I trim it back hard, only a tuft of fronds left at the top. In this hurricane season the branches are so tall and lush they whip around in the wind and throw water on my window. Sometimes I think it’s my husband about to come through the door. But it’s just the palm tree, throwing its weight around with the waving green fronds. Standing out there alone now, like me. Nobody is in the other room, or coming home later. It will have to weather more storms alone. And so will I. Jennifer Litt Fort Lauderdale (Susan Williamson) March I’d like to revise the weather proverb to this--March comes in like a twice-thawed iguana & out like a Key deer; I’d like to rewrite Act 3, Scene 1 of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, so Caesar eats himself to death on Little Caesar’s Italian Sausage Pizza, because March is not about murder, but about suicide; I’d like to say to every Pisces embellisher of truth — the fault is in your stars & the lies you tell yourself. I’d like to clear the sidewalks of St. Patrick’s Day drunks lying in their puke after the parade, give them the evil ides. Uber me to a sanctuary where the healer exorcises green iguanas digging burrows inside of me, wreaking havoc on my infrastructure & infecting me with lethargy. I’d like to protect my solitude, as the nearly extinct Key deer found its niche on the endangered species list. David Colodney Boynton Beach (LD) Letter to Michael Pare After Finding Streets of Fire on Hulu Michael, tell me why life does this. Why I stop to notice raindrops that plop to the pavement outside the shell of the old Surf Theater & each drop sounds like a phone call from my past, faint echoes of the lost voices of FM radio deejays as their smooth growls fade to static. Of course, I stop to consider each one, try to configure their story, and mine, narrator of my own plot. And the old theatre, marquee now splashing CVS instead of the name of some Hollywood blockbuster, once hangout now metaphor. On the screen I can see you when Eddie and the Cruisers hit theaters. I was clueless, wandering like teens do, 19 and stuck in between, not child, not ripe, an unfolding libertine. When Streets of Fire debuted the next year, I saw it here too, and was sure you shared my obsessions with Springsteen, Morrison, too, holding shadows of both in your shaman walk and Seventeen-approved hair. I guess two years on top are more than most get. Warhol dished out 15 minutes, not enough time to find a rerun of Houston Knights on Netflix. Life does this, but I don’t know why. Back to 19: it’s a bloody age. That summer a kid who graduated with me rode his motorcycle into a tree and flung slingshot until he landed on the hood of a passing car right after we’d seen The Philadelphia Experiment, a different role for you. We killed a summer here, drifting through the cigarette-smoke glossed movie screens of Saturday matinees unraveling Eddie Wilson’s mystery before drowning our futures in convenience store wine. How does anyone die at 19? Speed our Kryptonite, I guess, once invincible turned invisible. Tell me why life does this. Tell me why when Eddie and the Cruisers II: Eddie Lives! came out six years later, I’d forgotten you. Your cool side-mouth mumble still punctuated your stone-faced monotone, but Eddie was still running wild in sweaty Jersey nights, and I had a degree and a job and left bloody 19 behind like the silver slow roll of movie-ending credits. Tell me why your filmography is long, but your tally of awards is short. Tell me why life does this. Tell me why the rain seems to fall harder when the plot thickens, each drop a story with narration and plot, and tell me why one day the phone stops ringing with offers. Just wondering if you could let me know and w/b/s. Gianna Russo Tampa (David Colodney) Beautyberry Callicarpa americana How I come back to you, Florida girl, reaching up now from my sandy yard with your couplets and trios of green spades, your splayed stems like the start of magic. In fall, your limbs make a yellow-green sprawl, each branch wearing garnets in duplicate. They hang on until the Long Night’s Moon. Then you turn naked and wan. Bush and not bush, chlorophyll, oxygen, suddenly you’re my very own blood, child and not child, lolling in her swing, her laugh flitting up like a goldfinch. I don’t want to walk out of this wonderland—someday I’ll have to. I’ll join the long-gone bobwhites, the cicadas in your shadow. Florida girl, as your breath skims the world, I’ll hover a while in the sandspur lawn, retelling the ways I adore you: the way no-see-ums love moss and dark seeds adore the earth. Susan Lilley Winter Park (Gianna Russo) Permission First you learn that after a certain age you should no longer suck your thumb in public. Nor should you wear yard pants with no shirt or answer the phone “who is it?” Later, if becomes clear you should not beat soda machines or eat all the peppermint ice cream or make out on the carpet until you edges shriek with burning. Then comes a time you should not untie the top of your bathing suit while lying in the sun. The sun! A star that once lavished its lovelight upon you. The sun, that stole your beauty one day and moved on, like a lover changing the locks while you’re at the grocery store. There is an age past which you much not flirt with anyone except babies. Not bartenders, musicians, nor fellow travelers. You don’t need to ask for directions; the future is deforested. But now you can roll down the car windows, listen to Etta James or Cat Power as loud as you want, love without losing the hard jewel under your ribs. Your scent is the honey of loyalty. You can lie on a picnic blanket with your girlfriends at an art festival, drink wine from a Solo cup, command the air to turn from clear to sapphire. You may dance in a pool of shade by a darkening lake and smoke pot with your oldest friend. Because finally, no one is paying any attention to you. Originally published in American Poetry Review Terry Godbey Orlando (Susan Lilley) Finding Love at 66 Maybe there is nothing, ever, that can equal the recollection of having been young together. – Michael Cunningham I opened the Facebook message and out came an old friend I opened the old friend and out came a man who fell for me decades ago I opened the man who fancied me without my noticing and out came someone who knew me better at 22 than I knew myself I opened the confidante with whom I had been young — out came a rugged photographer who listened and radiated a quiet kindness I opened that kindness and attention and out came a supercharged version of myself whose skin began to dance I opened my skin to his and we became a spray of sparks, starflash and second chances |
