Journal

Poem with No Clouds

Through a window
washed just yesterday
a half-hidden sea-color
glows in the needles
of an evergreen,

a city tree on a busy corner,
a tree large and dense enough
to shade me – blinds wide open,
breasts and thighs bare – while I scribble
through an endless June afternoon

and my blue spruce luxuriates in sunlight.

Earlier today at a different window,
one that calls for clothing,
I glanced across the street
and saw an ambulance.
It sat gleaming a long time.

On the arm of a paramedic
a woman emerged from her apartment.
Ice pack held to one eye, she stepped
into the gleam. This took a long time.
The vehicle stayed put, all doors shut

then moved forward.

 

Marjorie Power’s newest poetry collection is Oncoming Halos, Kelsay Books, 2018.
Her chapbook, Refuses to Suffocate, is forthcoming in the Delphi Series at Blue Lyra
Press. She lives with her husband in Denver, Colorado after many years in the
Northwest. She will be reading in Corvallis and Waldport in early April. For details,
go to MarjoriePowerPoet.com

First Memory

I asked a friend, What is the earliest memory of your childhood?
She said it was a clear winter day in the city. Said she was dressed
in a flamingo pink snowsuit with appliqued flowers. She wore little
white boots. Her mother and her aunt held each hand as she toddled
down the sidewalk. She asked me, What is the earliest memory of
your childhood? I said, I was in my highchair in the kitchen. My mother
put a powdered sugar donut on the tray, which I promptly picked up
and threw to the floor. I remember wanting to do this. . . .   I clearly
remember wondering, Is this arm mine?  Does this hand belong to me?
I liked the pasty ooze on my fingers squishing the greasy donut, the
act of tossing it without a notion of why, the little puff of sugar smoke
when it hit the floor. I remember the soft sound of the donut exploding
on the tiles, little pieces of pastry breaking away. I remember it was my
left hand that did the throwing. It was the hand that eventually learned
to write. I remember my mother laughed.

 

Maria Rouphail is the author of Apertures (Finishing Line Press, New Women’s Voices) and Second Skin (Main Street Rag). Senior Lecturer Emerita from the English Department at North Carolina State University, Rouphail has published widely, and is the 2019 second place winner in the Nazim Hikmet International Poetry Contest. She is currently at work on her third collection. She lives in Raleigh, NC.

Trying to Show You

 

The horizon makes a perfect circle
with bumps for the mountains.
From up here I can see my house,
two states, and parts of seven counties.
These high wheat fields are golden
even if it sounds like a cliché to say so.
I could use ochre or yellow madder
but really the wheat is intensely golden
and while I’m giving you color words
a red combine comes carving a pattern
through the high ripe wheat,
its red a red between brick and maroon.
Now the combine is headed right at me.
I want to snap a photo with my phone
but the sunlight is so damn brilliant
that I can’t see which symbol to press.
That’s why I have to write this down.
You, reader, aren’t standing with me
so no use shouting Look at this.
I wish I could show it to my dead father
but what good is wishing? Look, I’d say,
how wheat dust rises to float and settle
over headless stubble. Here’s the truth:
I ache to share it with everyone I love.

 

Penelope Scambly Schott is a past recipient of the Oregon Book Award for Poetry. Her most recent book is NOVEMBER QUILT. This poem is from a manuscript in progress about a small wheat-growing town in central Oregon.

Parenthood, Unplanned

When a jasmine-scented
teenager (not yet my mother)

came up pregnant
with me, my father

stepped up.
They did what teenagers did

in 1951. Married.
Mismatched

spectacularly–
fifteen years of yelling and beer.

Four kids and two
miscarriages

before she turned
twenty-four.

No education
past high school.

So after the divorce,
crap jobs,

crappier men,
government cheese,

no sleep.
Haunted, her eyes.

There are men
making decisions

right now
about lives of girls

and women.
Some do not want

children to know
how their bodies work.

Some do not trust
women to make

decisions. As if
women were people,

as if women
know what’s best

for their lives,
for the lives

of their children.
That broken teen

who carried me, who
pushed me out

into this world,
that brilliant

ragged girl
died young, worn down

in her thirties.
One small life,

I know. The only life
she had. I speak for her

when I say
Let women live.

Let women be.

 

First printed in Cutthroat:  Truth to Power Special Issue (2017), this poem opens the author’s new collection, Cairn, from Red Hen Press (2018).

Like An Easter Basket Filled with Candy Eggs

Or a stocking stuffed and hanging—
I want you to know if you are reading this
that I looked forward

to speech class, cutting out pictures
in magazines—station wagons, cigarettes,
signs, and sand—creating a field guide

of “S” sounds to say aloud. I loved
this time because you also had a speech
impediment. I can’t remember

what you were cutting out and gluing
to a sheet of cardboard, but I remember
the sound of slicing scissors and the nearness of you.

 

In the Blood

We are all grave diggers,
searching for the bottom,
seeking the clink and clang
of a metal shovel on rock
so that we can stop.
No one knows. Nine out of ten
days camouflage works—
we don’t remember, just go along
our merry way buying glazed donuts
for the poetry workshop, finding
the salmon, lime, and cilantro
for dinner that night. But one day
we wander—long for the light
we hope is there at the end,
hold on, hope to breathe in
another day of not knowing
where we end.

 

Sarah Dickenson Snyder has three poetry collections: The Human Contract; Notes from a Nomad (nominated for the Massachusetts Book Awards 2018); and With a Polaroid Camera, forthcoming in 2019. Recently, her poems have appeared in Artemis, The Sewanee Review, and RHINO.