POETSWEDNESDAY & More

Rain on a Tin Roof by Susan Lembo Balik

Rain on a Tin Roof

 

by Susan Lembo Balik

 

I can still hear the sound of rain

on a tin roof, the one my dad put up

fifty years ago, even though

it’s been months since it collapsed

in the winter storm, even though

the mangled metal

has been carted away.

 

I can still hear the drumming

that lulls like white noise, hear

the pinging that pelts the canopy,

so melancholy, so relentless,

it can wrap me in grey, pull me

to my center, like a good book,

a meditation,

a prayer.

 

I can still hear the sparrows’ sweet

song, the ones that nested

in the corner eaves, see

the babies that didn’t make it

all those springs when I was young

how I’d avoid their broken

bodies splayed on the brick patio,

 

I can still see the one that survived

that February night, how he

hopped among snow drifts

and sharp tin, confused,

wondering

what had happened

to his home.

 

 

 

La Secheresse by Donna Baier Stein

La Secheresse

 

One woman, one tree.​​​​​​​​​​​​

Anonymous

​​​When Sengalese women
​​​tend their communal garden,
​​​they water vegetables
​​​from a hand-dug well
​​​one bucket at a time.

​​​Their animatrice, their leader, has seven children
​​​but only half a harvest.
​​​As she bends dry dun hands
​​​to cracked ground, the Harmattan wind
​​​peels topsoil and carries
​​​her continent’s cast-off skin,
​​​weightless, many kilometers south.

​​​When the women are given buckets
​​​from their leader to water soil,
​​​plant trees,
​​​feed their children,
​​​they draw a garden,
​​​full, green and fertile
​​​from parched earth.

​​​The animatrice, blowing life
​​​into her sapped disciples,
​​​reminds them their tribe has a riddle:

​​​Where does the dry season go in rainy season,
​​​and where does the rainy season go in dry?

​​​She answers, Into the acacia tree,
​​​evergreen, with pendulous leaves
​​​and silver wattle.
​​​From you, she tells them,
​​​dusting her pinched breasts,
​​​the tree comes; even to him—
​​​our tribe’s chief —the tree is a riddle.

                            by Donna Baier Stein

                            Published in Phoebe, from George Mason University

Atlas Apothecary by Tom Plante

Atlas Apothecary

Where did I put the geography
the wholeness of this place?
Each piece compartmentalized:
air   direction   velocity   humor
feathers   oils   ribs   groins
top shelf farther left
up above the plateau
beyond the sink hole
meadow   moraine
where sand grains loiter
seeds fall and wait for rain
back wall near the window
where mornings are kept
alphabetical by month
miles from here on maps
rolled under beds
near closets of cotton
and woolen wharves asleep
by restless rivers running past
igneous ridges and crystalline
columns near the corner
by the bank
where the post office stood
before BlackBerries.

                                    by Tom Plante

My Crooked House by Teresa Carson

My Crooked House

 

John wants to put a metal frame around our house as a way of correcting its lean.

 

He already put metal beams under the floor in the first-floor kitchen in an attempt to reverse its sagging.

 

He points out how the straight edge of the new built-in bookcase in the first-floor living room calls attention to the ceiling slant.

 

The space between wall and frame of the back door changes from 2 ¾ inches at the base to 4 ¼ inches at the top.

 

The second floor has its own set of problems: Much carpentry had to be done to the kitchen window to square it on the wall and objects that fall on the dining room floor roll from north to south.

 

This morning he, while sitting in the yard, noticed how the stairs are off-center from the door.

 

Yes, I say to him, all over there are signs of the leans, slants, settles, sags and cracks underneath.

 

But, I add, this house has survived a century; it does not need to be straightened out.

 

(used by permission of CavanKerry Press)

 

Clementines by Maria Mazziotti Gillan

Clementines

 

The pungent aroma of clementines lingers on my hands
long after I have peeled the skin off them. The perfume
of the fruit carries me back to my mother’s kitchen
in the apartment on 17th Street when my mother
peeled a tangerine for me, encouraging me,
her sickly, skinny seven-year-old daughter to eat. 
My mother, hands quick and efficient, peeled
the fruit and fed me one section at a time. 

 

When I was a grown woman with children of my own,
my mother sat with me at her kitchen table and sliced
an apple for me, passing me one slice at a time,
and my daughter, grown up now too, remembers
her grandmother cutting up an orange or an apple
and feeding it to her when she was a child.  My mother
never learned how to read and write English. 
When she wanted to go to night school, my father said,
“No, women don’t need to go to school,” but my mother
knew by instinct how to love, knew how to nurture plants
and children so they’d thrive, knew how to offer
the right word of comfort, the words to give us courage
even when we were most afraid.  No school could have
taught her what she knew. She taught us how to
reach out to others and feed them
one slice of comfort at a time.

 

                                                                                     --Maria Mazziotti Gillan,

                                                                                       Ancestors’ Song (Bordighera Press, 2013).  

Everything Leaves by Tara Betts

 

Everything Leaves

 

There should be symmetry in the body of living.

Uneven in places, not scooped hollow,whistling

its winter clear through inside outward.  Some

eager collapse waits to cave in and scheme my

gait into stumbling.  Not the skin scraped clean

no fat and blood rinsed away, not lopsided or cold.

Sleep became an open tunnel with crooked turns.

Waking life numbs sits as plated white rice.

Every grain dull as serrations on butterknives.

Tiny points fantasize about zigzags of brutality.

 

When you want to explain missing pieces, hands

holding hungry knives seem to appear more often.

When you want to find what has been carved down,

Decomposition has no mercy or autumn colors,

everything leaves.  Whittled down, mined to watch

the canaries chirp their last songs just before lanterns

and bones are crushed with the veins of ore untapped —

inky carbon in the lost and found that no one checks.

The fragments flaked into chips and blades drawn

remind me there is so much more that could be taken.

 

                                                                                                               --by Tara Betts,

                                                                                      Previously Published by Ragazine.CC (July-                                    

                                                                                                                   August 2014)

Beginnings by Emily Vogel

Beginnings

 

 

I have been witness to the beginning of the world---

how it reeled and railed out of the darkest ambiguities,

wailing like an infant, desperate as a seed.

 

It arose as life made by way of sacrifice,

straight from the barrel of a impetuous gun.

 

It cried Christ---as if to be saved once again

by the gentle to and fro

of a rocking cradle,

 

amid the hard air of winter,

summer---not referential, not even a mere dream.

 

It withstood noise, the junk of language and voices.

 

Also, there were slight questions

upon visions of light, upon ceilings, and people

that passed like blurry shapes

through rooms.           

 

                                                                                 --Emily Vogel

Your Brother Was a Collateral Baby by Joe Weil

 

 

 

Your Brother was a collateral baby 

Your brother was a collateral baby
with fine high cheeks, and a ho ho ho,
his limbs went south, his head went north
ah that was long ago.

and the photo won a Pulitzer
a president wept, so a Noble he won,
their grief was but a moment's meme,
your mother's for her son,

and it grew until his absence
became the whole of her morning sky,
and the bread was stone, the stones they whispered
vengeance with a lullaby.

Oh you were raised on stones of memory
hard and bitter, you were raised
buried under your dead brother
where the dark suits graze--

Prize beasts of the Global village,
bankers, burghers, big shots all
all their children born of privilege
all earth's weapons at their call.

Your finger dreams it pulls a trigger
and, bang! their babies have to die,
but child, its not theirs who suffer,
never theirs who cry.

And if you kill one, they'll a thousand
blast into a photo op
where some liar sheds a fat tear
(to watch the Dow Jones drop).

Give up vengeance, it won't ever
free you. Love? Forget that word.
it's been scoured of all meaning.
Give up speaking. It's absurd.

Give up thinking heroes matter
Give up villains,feel the dust
pouring silken through your fingers
in that flowing trust.

Then go seek your little brother
head blown north and body south,
eat the dirt he has become, 
gather his song into your mouth.

Turn it all into a nursery
rhyme the little ones recite:
"Tum Tum was a collateral baby!
He went all winds Boom! Good night."

 

                                                                                                 --Joe Weil

 

A Handmade Heart by Gregg G. Brown

From the poem: A Handmade Heart

I slimed and shaped my raw thumbed cup
In a fever-fervor, glazing runnels of water
Over twining layers of aorta and vena cava.
I rushed to paint my heart alive and leave it
To be made glossy by fire in a silver kiln
Warm as a giant can of Sterno
Until I carry it home another day
To lay before you, waiting for you
To fill my handmade heart
With honey.

The Trouble with Talking by Carrie Pedersen Hudak

The Trouble with Talking

by Carrie Pedersen Hudak

 

When Saturn knocks

Time a hungry mist begins

Feeding afresh

Your heart in your flesh

A faraway star

Sweeps entropy under the rug

 

You understand

 

The trouble with talking:

You’re a double

The shine this side of the glass

Blurs the sight of you

An anomaly astir

An ankh swathed in meat.

 

And yet daring to hold

Your own angot tile up

To the Rosetta stone,

 

Your candor robed in fruit

With juice enough for the simpler senses.

With that you deal

One more day

With the trouble

And you trouble the trouble with talking

Until you can learn how to sing.