POETS OF THE DAY: Helen Losse & John Amen

Helen Losse is a Winston-Salem poet, the author of two full length books, Seriously Dangerous (Main Street Rag, 2011) andBetter With Friends (Rank Stranger Press, 2009) and two chapbooks,Gathering the Broken Pieces andPaper Snowflakes. Her recentpoetry publications and acceptances include The Wild Goose Poetry Review, Main Street Rag, Iodine Poetry Review, Blue Fifth Review, The Pedestal Magazine, ken*again, and Literary Trails of the North Carolina Piedmont. Helen’s poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and twice for a Best of the Net award, one of which was a finalist. She is the Poetry Editor for online literary magazine The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature.

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Songs of War

Perhaps, the adage believed by children is true.

It concerns the way they view the world,

line blasted streets.

The men will die for those who govern,

singing songs of war and trumped-up creeds,

pitting brother against brother, maiming for life.

The sucking babes who cannot cry

have parched throats—throats that swell

amid the rubble. Have those children no homes,

no mothers?

first published in Poets Against the War (February 2003)

**

Bridge

—for Troy

The gulf had deepened

among the members of the band,

as quarrelling turned to fury

like any nonsense where

all the M&Ms must be red

or all the nuts come from Brazil.

When spanning the distance between

entities became impossible,

the guitar-playing poet,

who’d said all along, “Bridge:

Ices Before Road” was somehow

funny, signed his song-rights away.

And though it’s not provable,

I’d say, he marched sanely over two brothers’

egos, without looking back.

first published in Right Hand Pointing

**

John Amen is the author of three collections of poetry: Christening the Dancer (Uccelli Press 2003), More of Me Disappears(Cross-Cultural Communications 2005), and At the Threshold of Alchemy (Presa 2009), and has released two folk/folk rock CDs, All I’ll Never Need and Ridiculous Empire (Cool Midget 2004, 2008). His poetry has appeared in various journals and anthologies, including, most recently, Rattle, The New York Quarterly, The International Poetry Review, Gargoyle, andBlood to Remember. He is also an artist, working primarily with acrylics on canvas. Amen travels widely giving readings, doing musical performances, and conducting workshops. He founded and continues to edit the award-winning literary bimonthly,The Pedestal Magazine (www.thepedestalmagazine.com).

History

i.

The detective whispers to the nun,

seven girl scouts held hostage in a library.

Poodles are snarling in the boxwood maze.

I spent the morning sharpening knives, filing

family photographs, tried on my grandfather’s wingtips.

I am still channeling, sweetheart.

ii.

This is the second time I have

swallowed my tongue during a meditation.

If you were here, I would show you my teeth.

Yellow stain on the confession gown.

An owl beating its wings in the belfry.

The composer shreds his tablature.

Fire in the wheat. The farmer signs the contract.

iii.

A faint ticking sound in the tunnel;

again my guts on the rotisserie of blame.

Our ambition

is what the minotaur really wants.

My love, somehow you are always

two or three steps ahead of me, so well

you wield the plane, hammer, balance.

iv.

The jester is squatting by the hydrant.

He brings old news to the gateway of awe.

There is a crack in the chandelier.

I’m made of fairy tales, thorns, grapes as ripe as justice.

Must there always be an interpreter?

I hereby attest to

the malevolence of the atom.

v.

Ironweed spreads.

Azalea, crimson dragon, snorting in its trench.

I forget, are the clocks racing or lagging?

What story unfolds behind the opaque window?

Who is inside, patching meaning

onto the holey rags of illusion?

Performing communion in the television glow?

Gorging to keep cruel hours at bay?

vi.

I denied my roots a dozen times. A pro

gave me a valentine and wished me well.

The renderer stepped away from his churn.

A process of elimination began.

Surgeons. Stickmen whistling in the rain.

Your children turning over our birdbaths.

So many hawks frozen in the pines.

In the end, everything seems like theater.

In a Room

for Mary

i.

Today

your mother

with her magnolia voice

thanked me for the pineapple,

said she could almost

hear the ukuleles.

ii.

Years from now,

waiting in some apricot room

as my bones collapse,

I feel the shadow encroaching,

sweet but stern age arrived.

iii.

Simply your profile

as you sit in the eggplant dusk

on the edge of the bed.

That I could somehow touch

your future lives with my love.

POETs OF THE DAY: Ruth Moose and Jeff Davis

Ruth Moose has taught creative writing at UNC-Chapel Hill since l996. She received a McDowell Colony Fellowship and most recently, in 2008, a Chapman Fellowship for teaching. Ruth is the author of two books of short stories, The Wreath Ribbon Quilt (St. Andrews Press) and Dreaming in Color (August House) as well as five other poetry collections. TEA and other assorted poems is a follow up to her extremely successful book The Librarian and other poems, published in 2009 by Main Street Rag. Her poems and stories have appeared in Atlantic Monthly, Redbook, Prairie Schooner, Yankee, The Nation,Christian Science Monitor among other places. Her stories have been published in England, Holland, South Africa, and Denmark.

Fiddleheads

soft gray

numb, dumb thumbs

poking from brown leaves

uncurling like baby's fingers

unfurling plumes of green

biology. My class drew

the life cycle of a fern.

At fifteen

what did I know of wonder?

Dahlias

My mother

arms loaded

with their scrolled

petals magenta, fuschia, purple

bent in a vase doily laced table

cradle stroked them

staked their heavy heads

cool as taffeta

button buds

fringed

green thumbs

white vase flaring

out like a trumpet

her hand, her hands

now twisted like welks.

Jeff Davis and I were in graduate school together back in the '60s, sitting in the same poetry workshop in the graduate writing program at UNC-Greensboro. Jeff hosts and produces Wordplay, a program featuring poets and other writers. It now airs at 6:00 p.m Sundays via www.AshevilleFM.org. A catalog of shows is at www.naturespoetry.blogspot.com. A chapbook, Transits of Venus, appeared in 1005 and Natures in 2006.

The Cotyledon

_

Two lovers lie

together, like two

leaves

inside the finished seed

bound asleep

to the root

the long tunnels

& subway

paths

that end nowhere:

a door

through which each day

drop by drop

a river seeps from the rock

and rises

through their

flesh into morning.

The Bridge

The syntax of a magnolia

unravels in the dream

each flower passes into

a trajectory

through forms

a long bridge

leads from the earth

through these limbs

all built

by the eye of the seed

turned in the root's spiral

from veil to

veil

a bridge cast

from the ash of

the flower

grateful

dead charred

petals channel the air.

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POETS OF THE DAY: Marianne Boruch and Mary Adams

While at the Flannery O'Connor conference in Milledgeville, Ga. two weeks ago, I had the great good luck of meeting Marianne Boruch, one of the featured readers. I liked her immediately. We were standing in the Andalucia farmhouse kitchen, remarking on how it reminded us of our grandmothers' kitchens. Later in the week we talked about all sorts of things. Her reading was memorable, her talk on Flannery O'Connor and Elizabeth Bishop brilliant, to use an overworked description. In so many ways she reminded me of my friend Mary Adams, herself a brilliant poet and essayist, and although their poetic styles are not that much alike, the ways their imaginations work seem to me to be in sync. I'm pairing them today to show how writers connect without even knowing each other. Marianne and Mary seem sisters in poetic spirit to me. I hope you enjoy reading their poems.

(Phacelia in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, April 2009)

Poet and essayist Marianne Boruch grew up in Chicago and received a BS from the University of Illinois and an MFA from the University of Massachusetts. She is the author of several collections of poetry, including Grace, Fallen from (2008); Poems New & Selected (2004), which was a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; and Moss Burning(1993). Her essay collections include In the Blue Pharmacy: Essays on Poetry and Other Transformations (2005) and Poetry’s Old Air (1995). In an interview with Brooke Horvath for the Denver Quarterly, Boruch noted, “Both poetry and the essay come from the same impulse—to think about something and at the same time, see it closely, carefully, and enact it.”

Boruch’s lyric poems often shake an ordinary moment from its shell, separating strands of thought and habit with a gaze at once wry, self-conscious, and unblinking. As poet and Oberlin College Press editor David Young observes, “Her poems are contained, steady, and exceptionally precise. They build toward blazing insights with the utmost honesty and care.”

Boruch has taught at Purdue University since the inception of their MFA program, and was honored with their College of Liberal Arts Teaching Excellence Award. She also teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Warren Wilson College.

Nest

I walked out, and the nest

was already there by the step. Woven basket

of a saint

sent back to life as a bird

who proceeded to make

a mess of things. Wind

right through it, and any eggs

long vanished. But in my hand it was

intricate pleasure, even the thorny reeds

softened in the weave. And the fading

leaf mold, hardly

itself anymore, merely a trick

of light, if light

can be tricked. Deep in a life

is another life. I walked out, the nest

already by the step.

The Body

has its little hobbies. The lung

likes its air best after supper,

goes deeper there to trade up

for oxygen, give everything else

away. (And before supper, yes,

during too, but there’s

something about evening, that

slow breath of the day noticed: oh good,

still coming, still going ... ) As for

bones—femur, spine,

the tribe of them in there—they harden

with use. The body would like

a small mile or two. Thank you.

It would like it on a bike

or a run. Or in the water. Blue.

And food. A habit that involves

a larger circumference where a garden’s

involved, beer is brewed, cows

wake the farmer with their fullness,

a field surrenders its wheat, and wheat

understands I will be crushed

into flour and starry-dust

the whole room, the baker

sweating, opening a window

to acknowledge such remarkable

confetti. And the brain,

locked in its strange

dual citizenship, idles there in the body,

neatly terraced and landscaped.

Or left to ruin, such a brain,

wild roses growing

next to the sea. The body is

gracious about that. Oh, their

scent sometimes. Their

tangle. In truth, in secret,

the first thing

in morning the eye longs to see.

Mary Adams grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, and attended Smith College, after which she received her MFA in writing from the University of Iowa Workshop, where she studied with Jorie Graham. She later took a PhD from the University of Houston graduate writing program. For the past decade she has taught poetry, Shakespeare, Modern Poetry, and Web Design at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, NC. Her first book, Epistles from the Planet Photosynthesis, was published in the University of Florida Press poetry series. She has won a number of awards for her work, including a fellowship fromthe National Endowment for the Arts. Her chapbook Commandment appeared last year from Spring Street Editions. The following two poems are from that collection.

Valediction in March

Today she accidentally broke the gentle

specter of joy. Just yesterday his splayed

body slender as an insect, as a foal

had urged her awake.

Her bed remembered his breath. But now the earth

was brown again. Four birds’ beneficent

notes, sheer and far away, threaded

the mud with red:

a stop sign, a cardinal, maybe a raisin box.

She tried to make the black fronds of trees

uttering up from the hill like radio

towers made out of birds

lie down. She tried to gray the sky until

the light was gone. It was the same day every year.

Four notes dwindled into two, and a wreath

of mud-soaked dogs

crushed a flower’s promise into brown.

It was the same day, starker and longer.

These were the same birds, the same

splinters of grace.

Tame

It's when your house erupts

with animals, dogs on the roof, dogs

hassling joggers, dogs helping themselves

from the icebox, that you know

the man will leave. Why exactly's

harder. A man undaunted by a cat's

flaunted asshole surely knows

love works the wrong end

sometimes. Nor should squalor

scare a man who eats mayonnaise

every morning. Maybe it's

a fear of ghosts, you think.

In a movie once, you saw the hero

tame a wolf and then an Indian.

You’d hoped for such a man,

gentle hands, gold

hair like prairie grass.

Even the wolf trusted him, blithely

standing on his groin

or wagging hopefully for days.

Nothing's worth that kind of wait.

Not you who cannot give the wolf back

to the dog, not he

whose kindness kills the wolf

and Indian before he rides away

at movie's end.

Love makes the wrong promises.

Above you, dogs are crooning from the roof

as from the wild.

POET OF THE DAY: doris davenport

Doris Davenport has been a friend for many years. We've shared our stories and poems, as well as photos of cabbages, clouds, vistas, trees, and each other. Doris never fails to delight with her poems. Here are some new ones from her 8th book of poetry, sometimes i wonder, to wake you up on a Monday morning.

some mornings

these feet have to learn

how to walk

all over again

(i have to learn how

to walk again.)

the feet teach each

other the basic step

step move up to

the ankles, the

legs & knees then to

these recalcitrant thighs

thick lazy things supple in

supinity & slow they learn:

move. now. like. this.

and then some mornings

poems walk

all over me

i agree with the Universe

3-4000 years ago what

did Native Inhabitants

of this place do on

a wet rainy Friday

mountain morning with

no cars in which

to rush off to

jobs, errands and

urgent must-do’s

in tepees, tents,

caves did they

slowly wake and

stretch, thank a

Higher Power, feed

children, themselves

then - sleep more? Meditate

the world into being? Allow

the world to be?

poems outside the window

already across the

street trees

gone from

bud to leaf

from whitish

yellow to glistening bright

new green the air

softly drifts yellow

i long,

now, to read

classic Chinese women

poets in the original.

Copyright 2010 by doris davenport

POET OF THE DAY: Heather Ross Miller

Heather Ross Miller is one of the divas 
of Southern literature. Shortly after 
her graduation from UNC-Greensboro, 
where she studied with Randall Jarrell,
her first novel was published to critical
acclaim, and she soon became one of 
the leading voices in Southern writing.
Her memoir Crusoe's Island remains
one of my favorite books. She has written
poetry for years, with several collections
to her credit. Her new collection
titled Lumina, will be published in May.
 



A Comet at Easter           
Contrails in the sky, condensed water
fine as angel hair, white as the tails of comets.
I remember such a comet over the row houses
where everybody lived the same destiny upstairs,
downstairs, animals in a three-meal zoo.
My warm pie face and pink Easter coat,
a braided straw bonnet tied under chin,
my skin thinner than pink shells,
the eggs boiled hard so the yolks
showed bitter coronas, dark
to my tongue.
The comet showed fiery showers
I thought looked better from the side,
like thin hairs caught on eyelashes.
And while I hunted eggs in the yard,
hard-boiled pink and grass-stained,
the comet, boiling hard
through years of hairy fire,
evading eyelashes and lens,
trailed where I bent there,
young, insignificant, female,
finding another shell dyed
thin and hopeful as Easter.
Easter Dress
Floating these foamy rich skirts
smooth as a breeze in pearl stitch, a marcasite-weave,
I smell oranges, sweet bruising spices in my sleeve,
pleasing the air as this dress carries me off
the way I carry off men I love.
I made it myself, you know, cut into long soft yards
ripe as plums. Sweetened my hopes to stitch
deeper toward older flavors,
and bring forth the dress,
purple upon me, a perfect fit.
And I knew as I drew inside its welcome,
the things I'd done right, more than right.
Bathed my children, fed them, watched them
sleep the night until they'd grown to sleep
without me, until they watched beside their own.
So, mornings now, I smooth my lap full of plums,
glad to sit back softly alone, waiting for them
to call, to ask, You got on your purple dress?

EASTER: FOR JIM ON SILER'S BALD

(Photo credit: www.hikingthesmokys.blogspot.com)

Today is my husband's birthday. We have been married 41 years, which is hard to believe. I wrote this poem shortly after we were married. I think it's a perfect Easter poem, as well as a birthday celebration.

For Jim On Siler's Bald

Dizzy with you on the edge,
after what seemed like hours of climbing
toward sunlight, I stepped
back and studied a hawk floating
over the valley like a kite

somebody let go of. Why speak
of life changing its seasons
again? How the hardwoods
bore leaves into view or
the bears brushed off sleep
like a cobweb to follow the light
growing long on the leafmold
where earthworms fished,
busy as fingers? That happened

as always. But wind?
I remember the hawk riding
on it to nowhere I knew
when we lay down in thin air
to sleep with the rest of the creatures
the earth was about to awaken.

"For Jim On Siler's Bald" appeared in The Girl In the Midst of the Harvest (Texas Tech University Press, 1986).

POET OF THE DAY: Diana Pinckney

My friend Diana has a gorgeous new book out from Lorimer Press, located in Davidson, NC. If you are looking for some poetry to help you celebrate the greening up of our April world, this is it. Today is "Greening Up the Mountains," here in western North Carolina, so I have green, verde, vert on my mind!

Diana Pinckney is the award-winning author of three previous books of poetry. Her work has been widely published in literary journals and anthologies, including Atlanta Review, Calyx, Cave Wall, Green Mountains Review, Kalliope, RHINO, Tar River Poetry. She is the 2010 winner of the Ekphrasis prize.

A five-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Pinckney has been a featured reader in the Sundown Series for the Piccolo Spoleto Arts Festival, The Blumenthal Writers and Readers Series, the Sensoria Literary Festival and the Charleston Public Library Literary Series. She lives in Charlotte, North Carolina where she teaches poetry at the Cornwell Center.

THE MERMAID WONDERS
WHERE HER DAUGHTER GOES


Tall on this rock, she gives
me a See ya and dives

for longer and longer swims,
leaving me to wonder whose sails

spread before or under her
on those hard slick boats she loves.

Whose sand oozes
between her toes, sticks to her legs

after a throw-down with beach bums.

Total party hounds, she sneers

when I ask. Gives me an O.K. sure
or worse, a None’ ya biz when I warn.

Besides me, who waits for those white
arms rolling in the foam of midnight,

those bright streamers of hair tangled
with moonlight, lifted by a tide

that measures my days, that returns
each night, refusing to give up my daughter.



THE MERMAID’S DAUGHTER WONDERS
WHO HER MOTHER IS


I floated by in a basket?
Like wood storks bring babies out
of the marsh. Oh, please.
So she sang and played her flute,
combed my hair with coral and, whoa,
gave me manatee’s milk meant
for those fat pups
under mangrove roots, wrapped me
in greasy sealskins, yuck,
fed me fish roe – no way this was caviar –
tern eggs. Whatever.

Like how
did I end up with her?
Maybe some beach beauty
does a total meltdown at two a.m.,
can’t take the crying.
Who knows. Hello? No one
drops her baby in a grass basket –
wouldn’t that leak -- then shoves it out to sea.
Mothers don’t do that.
Do they?