Tag: workshop poem

Janet Kolstein

Puffy’s

There were two ways to go,
and he stood to let me pass,
cigarette smoke swirling around
and above our heads
back in the days when it was so.

Should I face him?
Brush up against him missionary-style,
chest and loin,
swish, swish.

Should I politely turn my back on him?
My rear to his fly,
carefully trying not to topple
the glasses of wine and beer
making wet rings on wood
in the darkly-lit bar.
Swish.

The controlled cacophony was a smile,
late night music
of new beginnings.

What songs were played,
and what I heard,
lay chilled as chardonnay.

Zorida Mohammed

The Lost Parents

He rented her out
in the summer,
when no one would notice.

Always to a man,
a man with a car,
one of her father’s friends.

She’d been warned to heed the renter’s bidding.

They lived in the car,
and sometimes in a motel.

She was 13.

Her mother had disappeared early on.
Her siblings were “vipers.”

She searched and found her mother
in a mental hospital.
Or was it a an old folks home?

She forgave her everything.
The visit made her almost high

But the silence that followed
when her mother melted back into her world
plunged her into a wilderness.

Even her forgiveness
was not trick enough.

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Janet Kolstein

For the Jugular

The grinning skull turns to the lady
with the bleeding feet
and bids her mount his yellow bus
as ochre dust conveys the heat
and slipping light.

And swinging on the cusp of night,
the bus’s door shuts tight
against her urgent need
and makes the destined
all-seeing eye of providence
a distant pyramid.

So she battles with the swollen air
like a boxer under water,
and flails her arms
against the bastards
out for blood
and going for the jugular
in a pulsing countdown
to surrender.

Over glass and jagged rocks,
with ragged breath, she stumbles onward
through blackened tree stumps
where wisps of smoke
rise in signals to the sky

and morph into butterflies
whose wings have beaten
37 summers.

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Mark Fogarty

To Ithaca, To Cayuga, To Cornell

Many will see you graduate besides the living
In the sunny field above the world,
Above the waters of the lake, the gorges
Rimming the colleges, the waterfalls:
You will walk to the stage
With your mother’s mother and your cousin, the judge
And your great aunt who finished here in 1904
When women rarely got a degree.

I’m thinking her father found himself,
Whether he came to Ithaca by train or horse-drawn car,
Reminded of home, of Ireland,
In the round rural spaces, the jagged gorges,
The green mats of the grass
Like the unspoiled world of the places we come from.
I think he must have been comforted
On his daughter’s graduation day,
To think of the vast beauty of the place where he was born.

Anna studied Latin to teach high school,
And her Cornell degree helped her keep her job
In the Depression, when there were two families
To feed. And when she lay dying,
Her sister Alice, a fine singer,
Sang her the Cornell alma mater to comfort her:
Far above Cayuga’s waters,
With its waves of blue.

I remember her, Anna, from my earliest days.
I remember her father through the stories Alice told.
You will remember these people too,
And the rock, the cross, the star, Cashel, Jerusalem.
You will remember everything.

Cayuga will look the same
When you return, a ten year adventurer
Along the lakes and shores of the world.
The deep, calm, brilliant
Waters of the lakes will reach to you
To hold you in the bowl of their hands,
With all the power of the armies of Brian Boru,
With all the power of the armies of King David.

I hope it will comfort you
That Cayuga is so hard to spoil.

And the sun beating down on the convocation field today
Is saying hey, the answer is tapping your shoulder.
The earth is battered, it is fragile,
It is scarred and bears the brunt of awful tides.
But it’s not too late to do something epic.
It’s not too late.

For Brendan Fogarty, B.S., Biological and Environmental Engineering Cornell 2015

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John Barrale

The Eye After Death

Bones remain, not the eye:
its parts too soft,
the aqueous humor,
the iris and cornea,
the watery liquid,
and the thick jelly
are soon dissolved.

The images of a lifetime,
freed of obligations,
go nowhere.

One hour after,
the eye’s teacup ocean
is windless.

By cruel design,
it fills with aimless,
drifting things.

Slowly they sink.

Sailors and passengers alike abandon ship.

The optic nerve,
once so vibrant,
stops telegraphing images.

Silent, it lies in a place without light,
a cold stone in a tomb
where all gods are refused,
and no image forms itself
from a spark.

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