The first of 3 poems published today in the wonderful Voice-Virtual. My thanks to editor Jim Lewis.
Long walks and sunshine. Not the mileage I used to clock nor the speed, but birdsong and daffodils I’d have missed before. An outing with granddaughters, peeking into their lives and loves, their favorite band (loud) and the in spot for burgers and fries. The quiet, driving home. Dinner with friends, repeating tales decades old, tsking at AI, cryptocurrency, Tik Tok, X. Evenings of old sweatshirts and slippers takeout and TV, my dog chasing rabbits in his sleep.
Silver Birch Press published this poem today in their “Mothers” series. My thanks to Melanie, the Silver Birch Editor.
Thirteen Ways of LookIng at My Mother-in-Law After Wallace Stevens
An Arkansas farm woman, Boby loves Sunday drives after church to see what folks are planting and to tidy up the family graves.
In spring, when the fields are ripe with fresh manure, Boby takes a deep breath. “Smells like money,” she says.
Honesty is her virtue. She told me once “You’re not exactly what we hoped for.”
Boby has no use for corsages. “Give me something I can put in the ground.“ She has eight flowerbeds— lilies, gardenias, azaleas, roses.
Each granddaughter and great-grand has a quilt pieced from a lifetime of scraps— prints, plaids, ginghams and a bit of lace. “They look pretty good from the road,” she says.
Her mother lived on the next farm over, her uncles just beyond, ripples of family for a thousand acres, bickering, loving, gossiping, mourning.
Boby buried two husbands. The first was hers for a quarter century. The second just four years, “a bonus” she said after forty years a widow.
We spend fall weekends shelling wash tubs of pecans—300 pounds some years—our fingers raw and stained dark as the delta loam.
Always a stray underfoot—cat or mongrel dog. They show up on her doorstep. She shrugs and takes them in. The cats are all called Katie.
She played piano at church as the congregation dwindled to a half-dozen stooped, gray forms. She never cared much for the preacher.
When she turned 90, Boby announced she’d give up driving October first. Took us awhile to figure out her birthday was the 6th, and she knew she’d flunk the eye test.
She killed a rabid skunk in a neighbor’s driveway with the shotgun she keeps under the bed. “Sorry I can’t stay to visit,” she told her friend. “I’ve got a cake in the oven.”
Now 96, she lives alone, as bent, stubborn and fragile as wisteria, children scattered from acreage bought a century ago. No money in farming these days. “They’ll carry me away from here in a pine box,” she says.
First published in Third Wednesday Poetry Journal.
I’ll be part of a Zoom poetry reading with a grand list of poets on Saturday, July 20 at 2pm MST. I hope you can join us. Details about how to register are at the bottom of the poster.
The third poem published in the wonderful Rusty Truck this week.
Harbor Woman
She takes them in — the peddler, minstrel, gypsy. Townsfolk speak in wanton whispers, how she beds each one. They rebuke their budding daughters who mime her loose-hipped stroll. Addled by her lustered hair, full lips, boys are whipped for where their hands go in the night. But the same wives who beat their sons, go in darkness for her herbs so they will bleed again. Men, lured by musk and breasts that push beneath her shawl, dream her while astride those dowdy wives, conjure her cries in their grinding. Beside her hearth, sojourners tell of war and greed and mutiny, of realms where she could dance for kings, wear silks, call maids to brush her hair. They tempt her to break free, but she knows her place is here, knows she is the wellspring of sweet water for parched village tongues.
Early morning on the wharf, sharing a thermos with Juan Pablo. He’s brown and scuffed as old boots, tough like that too, eyes squinted with age and sun. He knows the ocean like his woman’s face, reads stars, wind, waves, like poems. He’s mending a net, hands stiff and scarred, sorting gnarls and frays, ash falling from a Camel held square between his teeth. A tourist interrupts, though no one’s talking, wants to hire the boat to fish tarpon. Juan Pablo grunts and nods toward a salt-soaked sign with hourly rates. The guy says he’ll be back with his wife and kid. Juan Pablo watches him stride toward a hotel, New York cadence out of step with the lap of water on pilings. He snorts, then gathers up the net, half done, stands with a stumble to favor his bum knee. He jerks his head toward the seamless join of sea and sky. C’mon, he says, taking the stub of Camel and grinding it under his heel. That cabrón can hire another boat.
My thanks to Your Daily Poemfor publishing my poem this morning as part of their Poetry Parade for Poetry Month.
Mother’s Recipe Box
Friday night baked beans with salt pork, molasses, and just enough water to keep them covered, simmering in the bean pot her mother used.
Refrigerator rolls, dusted with flour, punched down, rolled out to rise again as doughnuts, cloverleaf rolls for company, hamburger buns for picnics. The dough
kept a week in a big bowl covered with wax paper that took up most of a shelf in the icebox, its recipe card with Mother’s school teacher penmanship, splotched
from yeasty hands and buttered fingers. And oh my, the Jello concoctions—celery, slivered carrots and pineapple in jiggly lime or orange with a mayo
and sour cream topping. And the congealed Christmas staple of cranberries from the grinder with orange bits and that ubiquitous celery.
Some of the cards have friends’ names—Hilda’s cherry pie, Wilma’s meatloaf. Some have culinary graphics in a corner— wooden spoons, checked aprons, Italian chefs winking.
My daughter asked for the box awhile back. It blesses her kitchen from a high shelf. I doubt she has ever used the recipes, but she knows its legacy, its secrets.
My poem “Inconvenient Cemetery” was just published in a British poetry anthology called Enclosure, exploring how we partition land for the public good or private use. It’s available on Amazon, and has a wonderful selection of poetry. Here’s my contribution, previously published in Red River Review.
InconvenientCemetery
At a corner where two 6-lane highways cross lies a 32-soul cemetery. Bindweed crawls on crooked markers reading Beloved Mother, Cherished Child Too Soon Gone, R.I.P. George Lindstrom 1842-1905. Around it sprawls a shopping mall with Neiman Marcus and Forever 21. Home Depot is across the street and a Landmark 12 Screen Cinema’s nearby.
Once this was a village crossroads where The Church of the Nazarene stood. Gravestones wore flags and geraniums then. Kinfolk came to mourn here, and churchfolk came the day before Palm Sunday with kaiser blades and trowels so it looked nice for Easter.
But the old church burned in ’29, and members gravitated to The Church of Christ. Then the suburbs spread this way, and well, you know the rest.
Developers want the site for Arby’s, but dead Nazarenes need relatives’ permission, archeologists and legal briefs to move. Not worth the effort, shrugged the planning board.
So they’re swapping the rundown Victorian fence— iron with rusty curlicues—for a wood one six feet high. Today they set the posts, and only one guy crossed himself when a marker that said Always In Our Hearts fell over.
A privacy fence they call it. Once it’s up, we can all get on with life.
My thanks again to Corey Cook and Red Eft Review for publishing “Emergence.”
Today I saw a single silky thread from aspen to eaves. I traced it and watched a spider, backlit by the sun, weaving precise gossamer tendrils, interconnected. There’s a new hatch of dragonflies at our pond, the final leg of a year’s journey from egg to nymph to adult. It’s called Emergence—their last, fruitful days. It’s what I feel after 80 years—an emergence of days, of seasons, each one savored, and family—eggs, nymphs, adults—the intricacy of webs and silken threads.
Sarah Russell Poetry 