Author: Sarah Russell

Retired professor and editor, now writing poetry and short fiction.

Tia Lucia Enters the Nursing Home

“…She is reduced to another being.”

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I love this poem not only for the humanity it shows, but also for its many layers of meaning.  Deborah Paradez teaches at Columbia University.  You can read more about her and more of her poetry here.

All morning my daughter pleading, outside
outside. By noon I kneel to button her
coat, tie the scarf to keep her hood in place.
This is her first snow so she strains against
the ritual, spooked silent then whining,
restless under each buffeting layer,
uncertain how to settle into this
leashing. I manage at last to tunnel
her hands into mittens and she barks and
won’t stop barking, her hands suddenly paws.
She is reduced to another being,
barking, barking all day in these restraints.
For days after, she howls into her hands,
the only way she tells me she wants out.

– Deborah Paredez
First published in Poetry Magazine

Good Bones

“…This place could be beautiful, right?”

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“Good Bones” went viral in 2016 when it was published in Waxwing.  It seemed to sum up all of our hopes and fears for our children.  Maggie Smith, who wrote “Good Bones,” has several award winning books and chapbooks.  You can read more about her here.

Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.

– Maggie Smith
  First published in Waxwing

P.S.  New Prompts are up on the Prompts page.

 

If I Die First

“. . . Store me beside the poetry.”

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No one could give better instructions than Wendy DeGroat does in this poem.  Her chapbook Beautiful Machinery was published last year.  You can read more about Wendy here.

After the burning’s done, pour
what’s left in a Mason jar—nothing new,

but one washed clean of applesauce or pickled beets,
the clear kind that kids keep fireflies inside.

Let my cinders rest there
like sand art in jelly jars carried home from the fair.

If the small or gray of me unsettles you,
pin flannel or fleece around the glass,

leaving a gap, thumb-wide, under the rim, enough
to let sun and moonlight in. Store me beside the poetry.

When it feels right, talk to me, sing, or sit by quietly.
For a wheel of seasons, take me down. Hold me open—

to campfires, fallen leaves, a lilac’s laden bough.
Press me deep in moss and snow.

When my birthday comes, add a pinch of salt,
toast to us with good bourbon or dark rum.

And when you’re ready to move on, release me somewhere
we once were. As dust blurs through your fingers,

quick or slow, know I miss your touch, and let me go.

– Wendy DeGroat
  First published in Rust + Moth

Humoresque

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One more from Edna St. Vincent Millay before moving back to modern poets.  As a teenager, when I read (and memorized) many of her poems, I loved her dark side.  Here’s one of my favorites.

“Heaven bless the babe,” they said.
“What queer books she must have read!”
(Love, by whom I was beguiled,
Grant I may not bear a child!)

“Little does she guess today
What the world may be,” they say.
(Snow, drift deep and cover
Till the spring my murdered lover!)

– Edna St. Vincent Millay
Published in The Dial, 1918

Recuerdo

“… the sun rose dripping, a bucketful of gold.”

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When I started writing poems in high school, I discovered and fell in love with the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay.  I still have the book of her collected poems I received from my folks one Christmas.  Here is an early poem of hers, and one my favorites,  Ah, young love…

We were very tired, we were very merry—
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
It was bare and bright, and smelled like a stable—
But we looked into a fire, we leaned across a table,
We lay on a hill-top underneath the moon;
And the whistles kept blowing, and the dawn came soon.

We were very tired, we were very merry—
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry;
And you ate an apple, and I ate a pear,
From a dozen of each we had bought somewhere;
And the sky went wan, and the wind came cold,
And the sun rose dripping, a bucketful of gold.

We were very tired, we were very merry,
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
We hailed, “Good morrow, mother!” to a shawl-covered head,
And bought a morning paper, which neither of us read;
And she wept, “God bless you!” for the apples and pears,
And we gave her all our money but our subway fares.

– Edna St, Vincent Millay
From  A Few Figs From Thistles 

First Cigarette

Teddy strikes a Bogart pose…

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My friend John Ziegler doesn’t publish much poetry, but he should.  Maybe this will give him a shove.  His ability to capture a moment in time is so fine.  Some atta boys from readers might help.

Skinny bare legs over
the edge of the garage roof,
Measle takes a drag
on the unfiltered Pall Mall,
coughs like a clogged lawnmower.
Teddy strikes a Bogart pose,
heavy eyelids,
cig between thumb and forefinger.
Chippy lets a smoke feather
trail from her delicious lips,
Detective Magazine,
the guy looming, fedora
the woman dreamy.
Reverend Cartwright hollers from the window,
shakes a dust mop.  “Calling the cops!”
We walk Chippy under the linden trees,
sit on her porch,
no one ready to go home
to Dad parking the Plymouth,
the dog shivering with joy,
ham and boiled cabbage,
Grandma calling in the dark
for a half a glass of water.

– John Ziegler

 

 

 

Brazilian Telephone

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This poem by Miriam Bird Greenberg. . . well, when you read it you’ll know why I am at a loss for words.  You can learn more about this gifted writer and read more of her poetry here.

In the peach orchard in an old bathtub
the children are standing someone
in a bath of salt water, and one
gently attaches electrodes
to the nipples of the one
in the bath. Out of the weeds runs one
with a rescued battery from the old
motor home, which they had gotten
to rev its engine like the sad bleating
of a goat. If, later, anyone asks
how they learned to do this, in a striped shirt one
will say, Oh, I was looking for science
experiments in those old textbooks someone
got from the library book sale last year.
I have been baking all day,
and in a few minutes will start to wonder
what happened to that box of coarse kosher salt
I got just last week.
The children are all singing
some ditty from a musical
we saw at the community theater
a few days ago, and, in the tub the one
with electrodes affixed so gently
to his chest is calling
out little mews of uncertainty,
is calling and calling into the sundown
past the knotted trees with their hairy
fruits, green and hard. Hush,
hush, don’t worry, another one
is saying, fingernail following a line of text
in a complicated book. I think this one
is called the Brazilian Telephone, one
says, connecting finally,
after all this build-up, the ends of two
wires to the battery terminals
which, with steel wool stolen from the kitchen,
they had cleaned so carefully
earlier in the day.

– Miriam Bird Greenberg
  First published in Poetry Magazine
  Republished in her book, Pact-Blood, Fever Grass

 

I lost summer somewhere

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Sorry.  Gotta take a “me” moment in this month of celebrating mostly other people’s poetry.  Poetry Breakfast is one of my favorite online journals, and they honored me by publishing one of my poems this morning.  You can read it on their site along with other fine poems (and follow their site to get a poem for breakfast every morning) or read it here.

I lost summer somewhere
in the wildflowers, woke
to trees blushing at my disregard,
wind hurrying the clouds along.
I should have seen the signs.
I watched geese abandon their twigged
April nests, pin-feathered goslings
ripple ponds listless with July. Now they rise
gray against the gray sky, skeining south
before first snows.

I’ll stay here, I tell them. I’ll air out
cedared cardigans, chop carrots
for the soup tonight, cross
the threshold of the equinox,
try not to stumble.

Sarah Russell
First published in Poetry Breakfast

 

Old Photographs

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Gabeba Baderoon is a South African poet who teaches at Penn State in Women’s Studies and African Studies.  I love to go to her readings.  They are always evenings of insight and passion.  This poem is from her newest book of poetry.  You can learn more about Gabeba through this great article about her.

Old Photographs

On my desk is a photograph of you
taken by the woman who loved you then.

In some photos her shadow falls
in the foreground.  In this one,
her body is not that far from yours.

Did you hold your head that way
because she loved it?

She is not invisible, not
my enemy, nor even the past.
I think I love the things she loved.

Of all your old photographs, I wanted
this one for its becoming.  I think
you were starting to turn your head a little,
your eyes looking slightly to the side.

Was this the beginning of leaving?

– Gabeba Baderoon
  Previously published in A Hundred Silences

 

The Quilters of Gee’s Bend

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I first found Alarie Tennille’s work when I read her poem “The Quilters of Gee’s Bend” in Goodreads.  “Quilters” won the Goodreads contest that month and also received a Pushcart nomination.  Although I’ve read many of Alarie’s poems now, “Quilters” remains one of my favorites.  More information about Alarie’s poetry is on her website.

The Quilters of Gee’s Bend

Seems like that old river tied
itself in a knot just to keep
black folks there at Gee’s
Bend while time and fortune
swept on by.

And Master Pettway gave
those folks his name, but stripped
everything else he could. Left
just scraps, but they were used to that.

So those hands that hardly
needed something else to do
unraveled their worn-out
world. Pieced together
remnants of Africa
and raggedy dreams
to make something new.

Let dress tails dance
with britches—heat from
the cotton fields pressed
deep in their seams.
So tired of plowed furrows,
they let their stitches bend
now and then just like
that river. Nothing perfect,
yet God was in the details.
And the quilters called that
making do and visiting
and keeping warm and pulling
up memories each night,
till one day they were told—
we call that art.

— Alarie Tennille
     First published in Poetry East
     Republished in Running Counterclockwise