Author: Wayne L. Miller

Poem of the Week 7/31/18

Francisco and Eva

Bobbie O’Connor

Francisco and Eva
just left the U.S.
for the third and last time.

After growing some friendships
and getting
needed treatments and meds
here,
they had to go home
to Honduras
where Eva can’t get those meds.

We became quite close,
in spite of the fact
that they can’t speak English,
and I can’t speak Spanish.

Now I hope,
with the help
of bi-lingual friends,
we can email each other.

They insisted I visit them
in Honduras,
and I hope it can happen.

And, most of all, I hope
Eva’s cancer
will be healed.

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Poem of the Week 6/19/18

Grand Canyon

Mary Ma

You’re in the Grand Canyon,
you always said you’d go.

You try to absorb
what is before you,
but the vastness overwhelms.

Instead,
the words are left alone in your head,
“Grand Canyon, Grand Canyon, Grand Canyon.”

You’re interrupted by
the sound of your childhood nickname.

Hearing this, you think
“Who is here that I love?”
because only the people you love
call you this.

Because hearing this name
means you are seen.

For this, you turn away from the vastness,
to find the voice
and embrace.

I’m at the grocery store.
I always pick a basket instead of a cart,
so I’m shifting the weight
from arm to arm,
relieved to arrive at checkout.

The clerk calls me “sir”
when he hands me my change.

Suddenly I am
you
hearing your name
in the Grand Canyon.

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Poem of the Week 6/12/18

The Third Day
(for Neil and Blair)

Mark Fogarty

Tipperary is inland a bit, off the beaten track
Of the tourbas, that ancient Gaelic word.
West of Thurles a few miles there are no cars,
No houses, no telephone poles, no sign of man
But the road. We stopped for our bearings,
And I smelled a flavor I never had before—
The absence of any trace of humans.

If I had to guess, I’d say that air
Was the same as it was on the third day,
When the land was separated from the water.

There was a hall of trees, and wide brushes of green
Squeezed from the greenest tube in the palette.
The green ran up a hill to a meadow above.
Ireland is full of flowers. It rains most of the time,
And there are long lawns of land they never use.

There was a sun that day like the one on your finer days.

We couldn’t find the place we’re from.
A woman walked by with a pram,
Eva and her fussing son Conor.
“Oh, you’re heading in the wrong direction entirely!” she said.

Eventually, we found the spot, in a ruined church,
Sat on the groundstone my ancestors are buried under.
Hundreds of years beneath a common stone,
But they were not thrown in willy nilly.
Each was in his place. Each was in her place.

I’m thinking my asthma would do well
In that spot west of Thurles, if I could find it again.

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Poem of the Week 06/05/18

Lolo

Janet Kolstein

She told me she was attracted to a boy on our blanket,
a solid, dark-haired, dark-eyed, easy-going Armenian-American,

but my eyes would drift
over to her blanket
which held the dreamy Lolo.

Just for the sake of this poem,
try to remember a crush on the beach
and see him again
in my mind’s corrupt eye.

And try to hear the cawing of seagulls
muffled by waves
and a breeze that dried sea-wet skin,
and attempt to re-create Lolo
lolling like a minor Apollo
with his slender torso,
his insouciant smile.

Sand on concrete sidewalks
ending in the ocean,
dull thud of bare feet on wooden boardwalks,
a hazy horizon seen through sunglasses
filmy with salt,
friends frozen in time as teens,
no great opinions about life in general,
no judgments;
the past, in summer,
polished to perfidy.

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Poems of the Week 5/22/18

The bone music maker

Claudia Serea

The dumpsters overflow with X-rays. And banned music is nowhere to be found.
The bone music maker is a bootlegger of jazz and rock and roll. His name is Sasha, and he lives on Resurrection Street. Each week, he looks for X-rays in the hospital dumpsters and takes them home to turn them into records.

Sasha presses the music into the X-rays with a machine, then cuts the disks with scissors. He burns a hole in the center with his cigarette, then holds up the result to the light: Elvis’s Heartbreak Hotel on the ribs. Johnny Cash’s I Walk the Line on metatarsals and phalange. Miles Davis on pneumonia. Chuck Berry on the broken hip. Dizzy Gillespie on Uncle Misha’s brain tumor. Ready for the turntable for just one ruble.

They sound like voices through torrential rain, ghosts singing through static. Like music in fog, light years away. Piano and trumpets played by the bees. Rontgenizdat is criminal, and everyone knows it. But students donate blood to get the money to buy bone music.

Someone must have ratted on Sasha. One day, the Komsomol music patrol raided the apartment and confiscated everything: the piles of X-rays, the records still unsold, even the manicure scissors and the cigarettes he smoked, and used to burn the record holes. Some say Sasha hid in the empty coffin waiting for Uncle Misha in the dining room. Others say he went to prison, and another bone music maker took his place.

In any case, on Resurrection Street, on skulls, vertebrae, and femurs, the banned bone music lives on. And the bones shake, rattle, and roll.

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God’s Doberman

Milton P. Ehrlich

At noon, on the fasting day
of Yom Kippur in ’38, father asked me
to run home from Shul and walk our dog.

I was so hungry I forgot about fasting
when I found a stick of Wrigley’s Juicy-Fruit
in my back pocket. Uncle Willy gave it to me
when he returned from a flight to Pittsburgh.
Airlines provided gum to stop ears from popping.

I walked by a barking Doberman wearing a swastika collar.
I had seen dogs like that in newsreels about the march towards war—
loading Jews on trains heading for Auschwitz and Buchenwald.

The dog lunged for me and sank his teeth into the calf of my leg.
How did the dog know I was a Jew? I wasn’t even wearing a yarmulka.

Police escorted me to Saint John’s Hospital
and ordered the dog, who had not been vaccinated,
tested for rabies. The results were positive.

I underwent painful medical treatments.
What kind of God would punish me
for chewing one lousy stick of gum?

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Poem of the Week 05/8/18

A Train That Turned to Stone

Janet Kolstein

Eros and Psyche
rolled in late one night
and took a seat beside me
to help in counting shades.

We’d had a threesome
years before
when my blood pulsed brightly
and my senses, ripely, hung,
burning in the sun.

I was known
for playing cameos
as myself,
and on a train
that turned to stone,
a man in a bowler hat
bombarded me
with the filmy lights
of people left behind.

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