Author: Wayne L. Miller

Poem of the Week 4/4/2017

Arthur Russell

Flood

This is how the blood swept through the village
of my mother’s brain when she woke
at the start of the hemorrhagic stroke
that shoved aside her loves and prejudice
together with her subtle fashion sense,
and every index of the orderliness that she professed.

Feeling hot alarm behind her ear,
she pushed the button on the life-alert lanyard,
and the nurse’s voice came louder than expected
from the nightstand terminal. I wonder
whether my mother tried to joke with her,
as if to shield the nurse from worry,
as she might have done if my sister had called
on a plain Wednesday;
or whether the flood of blood
had announced its bad intention so doubtlessly
that pleasantries she otherwise insisted on
gave way to frank admission of intimate fear.

The terminal nurse would have stayed with her
until the ambulance arrived, encouraged her
to drink some water, put her keys in her purse,
and unlock the front door now in case,
as it did, it got worse.

And worse, as who she was, and where,
blew black across her mind:
the pantry cans and boxes, row on row
that marked her place, her library of linens;
handbag hooks behind the bedroom door;
perfume bottles bottled up and senseless,
utility bills and annuity statements
in colored files in the lower, left-hand drawer
of the desk that faced the Intercoastal Waterway
blew black across her mind;

the boy with the cleft palette who called her Tulip,
the cigarette ashes they tipped in her girlfriend’s shoes,
the green and black tiles in Sylvia’s bathroom;
laughing at a comic in the Catskills with her sister,
and the fake fox fur that her husband banished from his car,
and the bitter refrain of marriage blew black;
the part of her that liked butter cookies and hot black coffee
and crossword puzzles blew black across her mind.

When we arrived that afternoon
like three un-Magi,
children, grown, with failures of our own to tend,
to find her washed up on that hospital bed,
with breathing tubes and a wedding ring,
and monitors creating the illusion of the life
that had already tumbled from her body,

my sister at the bedside held her hand,
IV and all. I took pictures of the names
of drugs written in marker on the velvet bags;
and my little brother, in a folded forward slump,
sat in a chair, further from the curtain, and cried.

And so we attended till the hospice lady came,
and then, we were ourselves again.

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Poem of the Week 3/28/2017

Janet Kolstein

The Bright and Shadow Years

When The City was new to me,
I swung Chagall-like through the streets,
coffee shops, nightclubs,
and one-of-a-kind boutiques,
as if strangers were accessories
to my fantasy.

Sometimes, I was a lonely mouse
in a Twinkie factory,
hustling around the pine floors
for crumbs and a foothold
in the post-industrial door.

I had to find a job, a new job,
a society of apple-picking experts,
a hand-painted company of cards,
an historic date, fleshy and ripe.

Dirty pay phones reached their pinnacle.
Go-sees and meet me’s
with cherry-red canticles,
the libertine’s sewer breath
perfumed as ambition.

Invaders flashing smiles
were unsure of what to do,
leaning into the gilded lanes
on the oily fluid of rapid change.

How is it after years spent running
for a bus, a taxi, a subway,
a dollar, a dime, a dream,
I finally became concerned
with the pace of my slow ascent,
and barely even made a dent
in the vaulted ceiling.

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Poem of the Week 3/21/2017

Stuart Leonard

Rite of Passage

The day after my Bar Mitzah, my father took me
to the Sunday morning meeting of the men’s club
at our temple, Shomrei Torah.

I was a man. A short, skinny, squeaky-voiced man
who joined the jovial wise-cracking elders
in a feast of bagels, lox, smoked whitefish,
and pickled herring in cream.

We stuffed our faces while they discussed
the spring trip to a Yankees’ game,
which turned into a debate over who
was the greatest Yankee ever.

I stole away to the synagogue,
where, the day before, I chanted Kings 3:16
in Hebrew, without screwing up.
The great rite of passage fulfilled,
the rest of life seemed to wait
for me to stroll on through.

The big wooden doors
opened into the dark sanctuary.
Daniel Abramowitz, the liquor salesman
who lived around the corner from us,
came out of the shadows.

He walked up to the bema, his head bowed, whispering.
The glow from the eternal flame
flickered around him.

I was glad he did not see me,
and ashamed that I was glad.

He was one of those my parents talked about
with a hushed reverence, a survivor
of that terrible thing I was just coming to understand.

I was afraid of them, these survivors,
whose presence seemed immense and holy,
the Holocaust alive inside them.

He turned and walked down the aisle,
saw me there, and my eyes met his.
Sitting down beside me, he smiled,
and patted my cheek.

That was the first time I realized
a smile could be sad.
So you are a man today – he said
– Do you feel like a man?
I looked down, and shook my head.
Nothing had really changed, except
I could read from the Torah,
which, as it turned out,
I never did again.

I was surprised that he replied
– Good. It’s too soon to be a man.
Be a boy. Manhood will find you soon enough.

His voice sounded kind and very serious,
I felt the distant moans of some chained horror
beneath his words.

He patted my head and left.
His expression never changed.
I went back downstairs to the men’s club.
Apparently, DiMaggio had won again.

II

I went to his grandson’s Bar Mitzah
thirty years later, five years after
Daniel had died.

The breaking voice of the nervous boy
chanted a passage from the holy scroll.
As his parents beamed with pride,
he became a man.

The reception was at the best of halls,
music played, liquor flowed, the shrimp ran out.
The boy and his friends were in their own world
of laughter and dancing and fumbling flirtation.

I sat beside Barry, the Bar Mitzvah boy’s father,
not quite an old friend.
We had the table to ourselves,
everyone else was doing the Electric Slide.
Maybe it was the drink,
the memories of my own passage;
I told Barry about the encounter
with his father so many years ago.

We clicked glasses and drank to the man.

Then the son of the survivor told me,
with the same sad smile as his father,
that Daniel was in Treblinka
the day he became a man.

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Poem of the Week 2/28/2017

Michael Mandzik

Molten Pools

World peace contested, every place infested, clichés amiss,
armed forces distracted, filthy masses disinfected.
Welcome to Hideous City, home of the Most Heinous Anus,
whose elemental wholeness and eye weakness news
draw uncrossed vision to interpret the Lost Keys.

Place the SKELETON under the overpass
next to the CHURCH.
Open the GARAGE
without the CODE.
Wander amidst the mangrove swamps.
Wait for, then watch, the sunset.

Move, then remove, your collected phone books.
List numeric landlines as they cloud supremely
the world’s lost judgment.

Seriously, cloth is not clothes.
Close is not closed.
Tree shadows on Garret Mountain
drip silkworms into paddies east
of eaten at the Hot Grill.

Ingot we trust.

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Poem of the Week 2/21/2017

Jennifer Poteet

Flame

—– What makes the engine go? Desire, desire, desire. “Touch Me” – Stanley Kunitz

I don’t remember the name of the first boy I kissed
in the year of our nation’s bicentennial—
just his sour smell—like firewood,
and that he lived in North Arlington, New Jersey,
a town I had never seen, but thought was beneath me.
He was available, eager
and, indeed, a faint spark passed between us
as I met the tinder of his lips.
I was at summer camp, and twelve.

Later that night, Eric Gruber strolled his way
down to me, past a line of girls,
white tee shirt sleeves rolled.
Eric smoked. He was from many towns.
We kissed and caressed
on the assenting grass by the lake
until our lips and hands burned.
We were thirsty with lust; it was late August.

And now, October, some forty years later.
In my backyard, blanketed under the elms.
I don’t know what happened
to either of those boys, but I am still
that open-mouthed girl.
The leaves careen; I listen as the wind picks up.
It teases; it promises: Yes.

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