Author: Wayne L. Miller

Poem of the Week 2/14/2017

Zorida Mohammed

Vegetable Anyone?

Sumaria settles her tray on her head calmly
like one of her cows swishing flies
off her hind quarters and heads out to sell.

In the carefree quiet after school hour,
when the day is turing in on itself
morning glory like,
my sister and I are dawdling on Back Street
on our way to Mactab
when we run into her.

We ask to see what is on her tray.
When she resists,
we tug
until she lowers it.

Something about her with that tray
on her head, a girl my own age,
bare feet like me,
with old tomatoes, squingy eggplants,
and other bruised things
caused such a mixed-up primal feeling
to rise up in me
I didn’t know if to cry or hit her.

Instead, I said something mean
and ran off with my sister.

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Poem of the Week 1/31/2017

Claudia Serea

You won’t know this love

You won’t know this love
until you’ll know each mole,
each constellation
on her skin,

until you’ll recognize her skin scent
and crave it at night.

You’ll feel the need to touch,
to carry
your little monkey
on your back.

The urge of milk,
eyes closed.

You won’t know this love
until you’ll feel your rib
missing her rib,

the ocean of your blood
seeking her ship.

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Red Wheelbarrow Poets
Poem of the Week 1/24/2017

Arthur Russell

The Third River In the Rain

I love the rain when the rain fills the river,
when the rain fills the river, and the river starts to run,
and the willow branches read the braille of raindrops on the surface,
and ducks, defying type, hide underneath the roadway bridge,
and silent geese glide slantwise to their landing on the river,
and the island in the river sits down lower in the water,
and the tree roots hold the riverbanks,
and the empty branches lift the lowered sky
whose thickened clouds glow weirdly in the nearby city lights.

I love the rain when the rain fills the river,
and the river swells with meaning, and its meaning is to run
past the dam at Kingsland Manor, past the strip mall
on the highway that was once a marsh,
but now has a Chipotle, and the river that would fill that marsh
runs black behind the cars that park for dinner,
in a concrete quarantine that drains the rain that falls on Garret Mountain
through Essex towns and golf courses
to broaden where it joins the fouled Passaic.

I love the rain when I walk beside the river,
when I walk beside the river on my way home from the city,
from the bus stop on the highway, on a pathway
through the darkened park, my raincoat soaked,
my wide-brimmed hat with raindrops dripping from the brim,
whose felt I smell, whose smell I feel, whose beaver eaves
I walk beneath like the ducks beneath the roadway bridge
who see me walking past them to my house a few blocks further,
a man between his job and home, a home between its innocence

and what is yet to come.

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Red Wheelbarrow Poets
Poem of the Week 1/17/2017

Janet Kolstein

Can It Be the Weekend, Again?

The trash-filled rush to question
my pedestrian
escape plan
mocked the force of life’s
bite wounds.

Am I tough enough for the marathon?

Each narrative in my head has a terminal
with a thousand disappointments pulling in,
and phrases, winking with praises,
pulling out.

A full-length masterpiece seems more fictional,
than not,
and a vanishing point puts perspective
in storytelling
that goes above and beyond arithmetic.

Now, each day I wake to a lot of pressure
to flip the hourglass by my bed.

There is no substitute for an amulet
to deceive yourself.

In the waiting booth
with two black suitcases
smelling of cough syrup and bleach,
I search for safety
when my face gets hot —

high tech, low voltage,
visible light heavier than helium —
something, anything,
to fill the spectered lot.

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Red Wheelbarrow Poets
Poem of the Week 1/10/2017

Mark Fogarty

My Younger/Older Sister

My sister was two years younger than I, but she was also older, wiser, smarter, tougher.

She was determined, always. When her college roommate died of cancer, she said, “I’ll live for her.”

She battled depression as I did but hers was worse. She nearly died of it after she gave up her baby and found it impossible to turn off that new love the way the doctors could turn off her milk. But she got up, went on, kicked the thing in the teeth until it walked away as all bullies do. In Alaska she found medicine that kept it away for many years.

She traveled to the wildest places on earth, jumped into the cold North Pacific (survival time, about one minute), found a cache of mummified human remains, tried to sleep where the sun shone all 24 hours, visited prisoners to encourage them to get their lives back on track. She walked into Native villages and astounded the people there by not telling them what to do, like all the other white people who came. They ended by inviting her to their weddings.

After seeing the lousy health care those people had, she told me, even though she was turning 40, “I’m going to become a doctor.”

She hated guns, and had a job where she had to carry one in case of bears. She never took it out of her pack, instead made a deal with the bears, that she wouldn’t bother them if they wouldn’t bother her. “And they never have,” she said. I have asked for the same deal.

She was perpetually thoughtful. She asked my forgiveness for things I didn’t hold against her. When she said “I’ll pray for you,” I believed in those prayers, was willing to conceive there might be somebody to pray to.

She was special, but she longed for the ordinary. “I want to have the same things other people have,” she said. A family, a partner. She lived in a place where men far outnumbered women. The problem was, she told me, “The odds are good but the goods are odd.”

When I visited her in Alaska, she said, “Don’t I have a beautiful place to live?” And it was, a place of rock cathedrals, a sleeping woman who lies on her side along the tops of mountains, a place with the tiniest Arctic roses whose colors were as dense as the black in black holes. We both took Dramamine before the ride on the ocean, where we saw a golden eagle by the shore, an ice sheet filled by otters, barking sea lions, diving sea birds, orcas that dove under our boat, a calving glacier.

“You should always smile in pictures,” she said, “because that’s the way people will remember you.” And I do remember her smiling, standing next to people beaming to be in her presence.

She had a talent for friendship. She had ten funerals, more or less. A Yu’pik group sang to release her soul, to go with the moon, the borealis. That was the best one.

She did things to show she wasn’t afraid. She went scuba diving off Indonesia. She signed up for a class in mountain climbing. But she wasn’t frightened of much. Looking at the glacier ice cascading into the cold water she told me, “The only thing I’m scared of is ice.”

She died after someone she was roped to slipped on a patch of ice.

She visits me in dreams, and I never remember she’s dead. Once we made spaghetti together, but she didn’t stay for the meal. Once she showed me how to find the black pearls hidden in the dark sand of a cold Alaska beach. And once she was sitting under a tree, like Buddha, like Gandhi, eyes closed. She was going to sit there as long as it took, even a thousand years, to figure it out.

I’d live for her if I had a clue. Maybe I will smile in pictures, but I haven’t yet. I want to have the same things other people have. I want to believe God has his eye on the ordinary.

I remember her, of course, around the holidays. When I was maybe seven and she was five, she broke it to me that there is no Santa Claus.

Thanksgiving, 2016

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