Journal

To My Great-Grandmother

Hattie Burton Harris (1865-1922)

You, whose first words are Yiddish,
who travels as a toddler from the Pale
across the ocean, grasping the fabric
of your mother’s skirt
as the swells make you both sick
for six long weeks that seem forever.

You, at 19, in the front parlor
of your parents’ house on Lafayette Street
surrounded by fluff and feathers
on the hats you and your sisters make
for the fancy women who seek your art.

You, in a long dress, dark hair a crown,
ushering the ladies in
and back out to waiting carriages,
discreetly taking their money
as long shadows make their way
across the overstuffed chairs
and antimassacars.

You, widowed for many years,
your grandson (my father) just five,
tell me–what rage causes you to
pick up the match,
rasp its sulfur head to flame,
set it against the hem of your dress?
What rage
or what terrible sorrow?

 

October in Hood River

Wooden bins filled with apples,
crimson pears,
so many types of jam from the berry harvest–
we walk among the baskets of pumpkins,
shelves of honey, my sister and I,
awash in all this sweet sticky life,
captured in a photo that we will look at later,
noticing the squint in our eyes,
our hands around each other’s waist.

In the car, conversation
turns to our shared bits of genetic memory
hiding deep within flesh and blood.
For a moment, our mother and grandmother
sit with us, bones lighter than air
–we hold their papery hands,
feel the gentle press of their shoulders against ours.

Who are these People?

There’s no bringing these
great grandparents back,
not Neil, not Margaret,
immigrants from Scotland,
married at the turn of the 20^th century,
dead before my parents ever met.

Their existence is the sole responsibility
of this wedding photo,
buried among obscure aunts and uncles,
second cousins and primary school class photos.
Their features are barely clear enough to be human.
But his height is there
and a little of his hard muscle.
Likewise, her steadfastness,
or maybe that’s just something I invest in her,
as if she’s strong-willed enough
to be still posing for the camera,
without a twitch, a blink, even into my time.

I’m old enough
that my curiosity has finally abandoned
all that I can see and touch.
Now it’s transfixed by what it can never know,
I can only imagine how hard this man worked,
how stoically she kept the tiny house,
how unfailingly she wore white gloves to church on Sunday.
I envisage good years on the land and bad,
many children, some who lived long lives,
others who died young.

Try as it might, my mind can’t recreate real passion.
Because this is family.
But, I’m sure, a hand wrapped around a waist from time to time
or a sun-hardened face pressed itself to cheeks of tarnished leather
and whispered, “Don’t let anyone tell you
these haven’t been good years.”

I have little in common with these people.
I’ve no idea what it’s like to live off the land.
The wheat, the flies, the flatness,
the deathless watch kept on a solitary cloud–
nothing to do with my suburbs.
And sure, I’ve known heartache
but it was never once the weather’s doing.

But these are immigrant lives,
great-grandparent lives,
the deep that murmurs in my shallows,
that waters me, which I draw upon night and day,
So congratulations on your wedding, Neil and Margaret.
May you enjoy many years of bliss.

 

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident. Recently published in That, Dunes Review, Poetry East and North Dakota Quarterly with work upcoming in Haight-Ashbury Literary Journal, Thin Air, Dalhousie Review and failbetter.

I thought it was only me feeling empathy

(for Mishka and Stuart Hoosen-Lewis)

The sea’s green eyes watch me with care.
I have to get my soul out of here, the river is here
now swallowing me whole, meta lost in translation.
Then there are the difficulties of being a young
mother, eating liver. I go under the water of the
river, I drown in despair, hardship, tumult, the
romantic earth thinking of what truth sounds like. It is lit, cause
or something beautiful, something divine. Leaf
falls and the tall man catches it. The lonely woman
kisses his cheek, but he refuses to be drawn into
her shadow, her inner music, she must look for a
new home, men in suits despise her for her lack of
sexual expertise, women in clothes don’t want to
be her friend. The lonely woman looks bad in a
dress, in a skirt she looks as if she’s trying too hard,
as if she’s making waves, but no one looks at her.
Not the tall man, not the thin man, not the dark
man, and not the sad man. Like a machine, she is
half-formed by the virgin sea, by sex, by dirt, by grace.
The lonely woman is in search of tenderness,
love, a first love, some bright energy that can
heal her pain and suffering, the sorrow in her eyes,
and she thinks of leaves falling, and the tall man
catching those leaves in his hat, with a smile on
his face, a smile that doesn’t meet his eyes. The
men don’t care anymore. The men don’t love her
anymore. And now, she must become death, and life,
change perspective, become cultured and love
the sea creatures that surround her on her educated
island. They have no more conversation for her, the
men, the men, the men dazzle her, but there’s no
room for her in their mansions to grow, to consider,
to laugh, and smile, and play, and all she knows
is running away, and all she knows is to be laughter,
and fragile, and chef. Her voice never sounds like
that with me, declares one man, the fattened ghost
with his multiculturalism quotes, his isms, his museum,
his ephemera. And the clock in the wall is an
animal, and the windows are Rwandan, her poetry
is an elixir, but all the men, all the men do not
care for her, or love her anymore. They have shut
the door on her minority. She is an accident waiting
to happen, waiting to be kissed. There was
something pure about the day, but when bad mothers
happen, bad mothers happen, and daughters who
have bad mothers do not become lovers, do not
call Romeo, and prose is food for thought, food
for the soul, and the title of her novel is in gold lettering
but she doesn’t care, because the men are like air.

 

In Pétra

the black shadows of women
pass. I cannot tell
if they are the shadows of ancestors
or the women who live in the small
white-washed houses along
the village road that runs
down the coast and then branches
off through the square to
scurry up the mountain. The
houses rise up like houseplants
slowly growing and extending
their reach up and down the path
to spread out over its dirt
or cobblestone, houses that cast
shadows, long, hard shadows,
deliberate and unforgiving. I peer around
their corners and catch a glimpse
of a woman lowering the latch
of her gate, wild flowers weedily
growing along her path,
and then she is gone. The road
is empty of people. A stray
cat scurries across the path.
I hear goat bells in the distance
as though the past were living
in the silence of my trespassing.

 

A Look at Moving

At first, it is only a place to visit, far
wilder than the place you live—cliff, beach,
and secret coves teeming with fish and silver

octopi, roads high into the mountains,
where few expect to see you, except in passing,
but your heart has found a vessel for wandering,

a land with its hand out, its men roughed and sexy,
its women welcoming and warm, at first. Seems
even the shepherd can find a greeting for you,

even the priest, if you’re lucky. Who wouldn’t
want to live where the fishermen pull up to the dock
each morning with buckets of barboúnia,

where the reef holds silken waves of sea urchins;
and the groves, thousands of pungent olive trees?
Why would anyone not want to stay?

When winter curls up in a wave in September and
roars down the beach, you’re aware of what may be
coming. The dogs hurry in packs under the faint moon,

and the half-deserted taverna serves only to the men
in the village. The women in black move from window
to window, hall to hall, checking that the latch on the door

is up, that the supper left early on is waiting for someone
to come home hungry. Their own hunger is a secret gnaw
on the bone of night, with a hole in the sky, with a witness

to what goes on outside, before the unwelcome season
comes, before the last tourists leave, except for one—
and you are looking at moving again.

 

Donna J. Gelagotis Lee is the author of Intersection on Neptune (The Poetry Press of Press Americana, 2019), winner of Prize Americana, and On the Altar of Greece (Gival Press, 2006), winner of the Gival Press Poetry Award and recipient of a 2007 Eric Hoffer Book Award: Notable for Art Category. Her poetry has appeared in publications internationally, including The Bitter Oleander, Cimarron Review, Feminist Studies, and The Massachusetts Review. She lives in New Jersey.

“She”–9″x7″ oil and acrylic on discarded paper

Merlin Flower is an independent artist and writer from India. Find her on twitter: @merlinflower

Artist statement

Once done, the paintings are out in the open. Independent and strong, they seem to live in a different world. To call it the artist’s own would be far from the truth. Often, a stranger arrives in the painting to stay. The paintings may or may not get sold immediately; they may reach a friend or stay with me or linger a bit more on social media…

Containers

Roots form trees.
Trees form leaves.
Leaves form shadows
that hold memories
I wade through
with no path out.
Sunlight dapples
and rays blind.
I thrash through
brush to awaken
at grove’s edge,
look out across
a hay field, at pond’s
calm surface,
another pool
of secrets to wade into
when I reach
water’s edge.

 

Between Secrets

A short walk from
tree’s darkness to
pond’s shore, I stand
a giant at water’s
edge.  Waves slap
a furious rhythm,
my toes barely
damp, my body
a tower that throws
a long shadow
back toward woods.
I contemplate
another deep mystery,
wait for water
to calm and reflect
my own countenance
toward an empty sky.

 

Richard Dinges earned an MA in literary studies from University of Iowa, and manages information systems risk at an insurance company.  Home Planet News, Oddball Magazine, Studio One, North Dakota Quarterly, and Gravel hold his most recently published poems.