WINTER 2020 | Dayton, OH

Essential

Ed Davis

He’d rather be home, rather be
taking his twin boys fishing.
But here he is, first responder
for the homeless, driving to work,
praying not to get sick, hoping
that leaving home in the plague
really is essential. 

He calls me; we walk—
at a social distance, of course.
“Fuckin’ oxymoron,” he growls,
lifting a hand mauled by washing
to prevent the fiend’s 
putting us on machines 
that feign breathing to keep
us alive a little longer.

I can imagine Trump in a mask
more easily than my pal
with his loving scowl.
 “If insights saved you,
I’d be God by now,” he told me once—
I’m paraphrasing, a professor’s word
for stealing, he’d maybe say
before punching my arm back
when we touched without fear.

He’d probably say he’s privileged
to leave home for the homeless,
risk infecting his family to serve.
I know he’s not and it hurts me
to realize he’s a slave to himself
as much as to his community,
an insight that doesn’t save
a single soul.

Emergency Verse

Ed Davis

Velvet baggies stuffed with stanzas
you can tear open with your teeth
hanging beside every portal
in all public halls: sonnets,
sestinas, lyrics and odes;
Rumi, Rilke, Dylan, Olds.

Take two poems every hour
without water, food or prose.
Dissolve under tongue and wait
for imagery to flood your soul;
active organic ingredients
to kick-start the heart: simile,
caesura, consonance, lust, love.

You’ll know you’re cured
when the sky becomes an endless
wave of birds, when words
turn to colors
that have no names.

Terminal

Maureen Fry

This is how I see you now:

in a gray station, wandering

among trains. Footsteps echo

down the silver track sliding

into dark.

Engines loom in the dusk. You happen

on an empty car and fling

yourself aboard, red scarf catching

at your throat, your suitcase full

of stones.

Her Right Hand

Debra Williamson

Our mustard yellow phone
would ring three or four times
before my mother put down the iron
or turned off the vacuum
to answer its insistent ring.

The phone sat atop three inches of Yellow Pages
on a dust-free walnut hutch. A beveled oval
mirror witnessed her standing still
looking first at her reflection
before smoothing her wavy brown locks.
She cradled the receiver between
her left shoulder and ear: “Hello”

As she listened, her right hand
felt its way to a nearby blue ballpoint pen.
As she talked, she clicked the pen as if keeping time
and rummaged the Yellow Pages
for a spot where her wild cursive
doodles and mystic curlicues
could join giant rows of conjoined Js:

She had to do something with her right hand
the one that packed lunches
diapered babies’ bottoms
slapped and smacked us
stirred a thousand pots
sprinkled salt
shaped hamburgers
boned chickens
ironed pillowcases and my father’s handkerchiefs
that right hand
wore gnawed fingernails
lifted spoons of pablum
cut up pieces of meat
picked up socks, shoes, and underwear
weekly pulled off and on six sets of sheets
pinched clothes pins while the other hand
held those sheets, socks, and underwear
that right hand steered her
held her on course each day
as it pushed the broom
scrubbed floors and doors and toilets
ferried out the day’s garbage to the trash,
fed the dogs and cats and the neighbors’ lost children
hoed and planted, harvested and mowed:
it rarely stopped moving even in her dreams
where she clenched her young love’s waist from behind
as they road a motorcycle through green Pennsylvania hills
her hand always grasping tightly reaching toward the place
where she could just let go.

Listening to Cicadas

Kathy B. Austin

Last year the cicadas were silent.
I have never heard such an August,
quiet except for the trumpet
playing taps from the old folks’ home.
Perhaps the cicadas’ silence
was a warning of things to come.

Now as I sit on my porch
listening to the trumpet once more,
and church bells that ring the hour
six months in, I am comforted
by the constant hiss of cicadas,
as if last year never happened,
as if this year is the best one ever.

Thrush

Audrey Hackett

Little pieces of ice
slipped like melting letters
through the slot. The only way to drink
these days, when thrush
furs the tongue. Thrush, a bird
so plump and speckled, so soft.
A hush of wings surrounds.
Ease the pain the last words
put down on the chart.
Into white space her face has flown.

Blight Resistant

Esther Rohm

I was born among the skeleton trees;
below their broken boughs
the breath in my own lungs cradled me.

It held me higher than the honeysuckle
silence and the clippings of
the words I didn’t need.

When cicadas scrape the air
and the sun grinds leaves to rust, to dust,
I cannot escape unmarked;

the names carved into me could harden
some to granite. Still, my leaves are green
and pulsing, rippling in the autumn wind.

They hold my stories in their veins,
and, in the updraft of a distant rain, my leaves
shake out their words across the sky.

Echoes, Frozen

KB Ballentine

The language of winter speaks– hums through the air on crystals of ice
tinkling like chimes. They linger on brambles, bits of glitter
grabbing the light, flecks sparkling as wind sculpts then erases the horizon.
Evergreens whisper, powder shushing all but the groan of bare limbs tangling
in the wind. Branches cradle each letter, each word frozen in my throat, on the page–
rime of frost shimmering on news, on promises you will not hear.
I’ve strung them from sighs and tears, from a season of silence
that has yet to let grief sound like glasses clinking, shining in the frozen sun waiting for the thaw.
Breath a shapeless vapor. Mid-winter bitter and hungry–spring a long way off.

Enough to Sting

KB Ballentine

Even with a stop at the store circling aisles only for necessaries,
I wind up behind a woman with a full cart. I see her pretend
not to notice my four items, both of us waiting as the elderly man
struggles to put away his wallet.

Muzak challenges my patience at the end of this day with a never-
ending paper pile that leaves me desert-dry of joy. Only 6 p.m.
but holiday lights scatter the road with dappled shadows, and bare branches
scrape the warm glow beyond the curtained windows.

One store, clear glass beckoning, hums its siren song with red neon:
L has me licking my lips, I is the itch I’m still trying to ignore, Q reminds
me of my favorite quart of malt liquor, and U urges my feet toward the door.
O says that one won’t hurt while R rates the warmth I can almost feel
from a swallow of honey-smooth or a mouthful of bitter bite. S is the sip
that will sing through my blood.

Fire escapes rise above the scarlet glare, darkness waiting on either side.
I mistake the burden of bags in my arms for my daughter –
a witness waiting and watching my desire, my (in)decision.

Three-Part Dissonance

Velma Lee Barber

I

Cleo stared out the window at a world filtered through a film of dead bugs, bird poop, and pollution particles. Her uncle stalked to the corner of the front yard. Hands on hips, Uncle Bobby looked up, waved his arms, and yelled at the brown-skinned worker on the utility pole.

The man on the pole cut and moved wires without bothering to look down at her screaming uncle. That impressed Cleo, seeing a man who could take insult and mind his own business. Then she noticed the earbuds and his moving mouth. Maybe the man couldn’t hear her uncle threatening to blow his “stupid fucking head off.”

Cleo grabbed her father’s handgun from the dusty windowsill and ran to hide it under her mattress.

When she returned to the window, she saw Uncle Bobby throw up his hands and yell, “Fuck you!” before turning his back to the man and stalking toward the house.

Dropping into her chair, Cleo whipped her head toward the laptop screen.

Words raced before her eyes. Her heart fluttered. The front door opened and slammed shut. Cleo peered up, keeping her head down.

“Did you hear me giving it to that sonuvabitch out there?” her uncle asked. “I heard him talking on his phone, saying he supported the stay-at-home order.”

He reached into the corner cupboard, his sweaty T-shirt riding up over the bulge growing around his middle. “What a dumbass,” he said. “This Co-Vid shit is a liberal hoax.” He moved around a few cans and muttered, “Damn!”

“What are you looking for?” Cleo asked. She glanced out the window. The cable man descended the pole.

“I’m looking for my damned peas and carrots.”

“I think Daddy ate them,” Cleo said. The man outside climbed into his white van.

Her uncle slammed the cupboard door and trudged to the bathroom. “He knows those are my favorite! He’s been taking my shit since we were kids. I’m gonna kill him when he gets home.” The bathroom door banged shut against its frame.

Outside, taillights lit up and the van moved into the street, diminishing in size as it travelled up the block, shrinking the distraction of warranted worry.

Cleo's breath calmed and she returned to the Civics assignment: Read a news article related to how any level of US government is responding to the current pandemic. Write a one sentence summary of the article. Write three relevant questions related to the article and include answers.

She opened a fresh document and tapped the keyboard with efficiency, accuracy.

The first lady of Maryland has been instrumental in securing coronavirus tests for her state.

Q: What is the first lady’s profession? A: Artist

Q: Could this first lady become governor someday? A: Yes

Q: If a girl who grew up on a chicken farm in South Korea can become the first lady of Maryland, is there hope for someone like me?

Cleo had no answer for that.

The toilet flushed.

She ran to collect the gun and put it back on the windowsill.

By the time the bathroom door opened, she was back in her chair, smiling.

With any luck, when her father returned from work to face his brother’s wrath, one of them would take a bullet and the other would end up back in jail.

Didn’t matter who shot who, as long as they were both out of her life.

II

Bobby walked out of the bathroom whipping his hands back and forth over the worn denim covering his thighs. Even though he didn’t really believe in all that coronavirus crap, he’d started dabbing a bit of soap into his palms a couple of times a day and running them under water, just in case.

His niece sat at the kitchen table, her head bent over the computer provided by her school. Kids these days were coddled. He’d never received more than a lifetime’s worth of suspension notes when he was in high school. He quit in tenth grade. Fuck ‘em. Teachers were worthless anyway.

Plopping into the chair opposite Cleo, Bobby picked up the butter knife, wiped both sides across his jeans, and tapped it against the edge of the table. “Whatcha studying there, Cleo-ba-dio?”

She didn’t laugh at singsong versions of her name anymore, but he couldn’t stop himself.

“Civics,” she answered, without looking up.

“Civics,” he echoed and blew out his breath audibly between pressed lips. “They make you read the newspaper and learn about politics, right?”

“Something like that,” Cleo answered, monotone.

“Politics are for the rich,” Bobby said.

The knife slipped from his fingers and clattered to the floor.

Cleo’s shoulders jumped visibly.

Bobby pushed his chair onto its two back legs and balanced there.

“So what are they teaching you?” He asked.

“How the government works,” his niece answered.

“As if,” Bobby said. “Our government is set up to help the people in government and that’s about as far as it goes.”

Cleo looked up. “I thought you liked the president.”

The puzzled look on her face warmed Bobby inside. She hadn’t looked at him with anything but disdain for so long.

He spread his elbows wide and moved his hands to cradle the back of his head. “Well, I like a lot of what he says, but he is a rich guy, and rich guys can’t be trusted, if you know what I mean. He’d screw us all for a wad of cash. That’s just the way rich guys are.”

The way Cleo looked at him, interested-like, was sunshine to a seed. Ideas he hadn’t known lay beneath the surface of his skull began to sprout, breaking past clods of boredom and underutilized brain matter to struggle to the surface.

“The way I see it—” Bobby said, pausing for effect “—the president is a pawn in a huge machine driven by the people with the most power and the most money. He’s basically a douche, thinking he’s the big kahuna, but he’s really a puppet. Nobody and nothing but money is in charge of the government. Always has been that way; always will be.”

“Really?” Cleo looked genuinely engaged now.

Something let go in the top of Bobby’s belly and he felt a rush of heat there followed by a sense of panic in his chest.

He let the front chair legs slam to the floor as he slapped the table. Cleo’s eyes flew open. Bobby turned away, unable to bear the fear he saw there. He pushed to his feet and walked out the front door, letting it slam shut behind him.

Alone he could calm the force strangling his throat, squeezing his jaw. Any kind of real human contact made him cry. His feelings were monstrous to him. He’d walked away from every job he’d ever had to avoid the possibility that he might not be able to control himself.

“Jesus.” Bobby swiped his forearm across his eyes.

His mother had always called him “her baby, the sensitive one.”

Her words were pure torture.

III

One more delivery. One more box on a porch, climb back into the van, punch in the info, check it twice.

Work soothed him. The routine. The regular paychecks. Sanctioned by law, creditors, and family obligations, this was the first job he’d ever had that didn’t include the threat of arrest. His mother would have been proud. His father would have called him a “pussy.”

Stomach growling, he remembered he hadn’t eaten since breakfast. No time for a lunch break. No worries. Cleo would have a late supper ready.

His daughter had become the woman of the house after her mother died.

Damn that kid had been through too much.

The fentanyl-laced dose that killed her mother probably knocked Sheryl out before she knew what was happening. By the time Cleo found her, Sheryl was cold. Cleo called 911 and administered CPR until help arrived. He could only imagine what his daughter had witnessed from what he found when he finally made it home that night. Furniture shoved against walls with such force it knocked pictures askew. The floor was littered with plastic tubes and paper wrappings from medical supplies. Muddy tracks from the gurney they used to wheel his wife away.

Damn.

The last delivery site had a sign in the yard thanking frontline workers.

Is that what he was? He felt like the back end of a donkey, good for nothing but getting kicked in the rear. If he and the other warehouse workers and drivers were truly valued, why were they paid like they came in last? If this were a battlefield— which it wasn’t no matter what the people on TV said— he and the other workers would be the first to cross the field and take bullets. Shit. He should have just gone ahead and joined the military when he graduated from high school. He’d have twenty years in by now. At least the expendability of life was no secret there.

Done for the day, he drove back to the warehouse, parked the van, finished the paperwork, and headed home. The inside of his car smelled like gas and mildew, but the old, blue Ford ran. If it crapped out for good, maybe he’d get a bike. Every extra penny went into a savings account for Cleo’s college bills. He planned to surprise her on graduation day. Maybe she’d finally forgive him for not being there when she most needed him. If she could, maybe he could forgive himself.

The car’s tires crunched over gravel leading to the only house he could afford in a neighborhood with fewer muggings and murders.

After scraping his boots on the rough outdoor mat, he opened the front door and stepped inside. He shut the door behind him, left the lights off, and removed his boots in silence to place them in the taped-off area he’d labeled “Possibly Contaminated.”

The cool, hard floor pressed every ache in his sock-clad feet as he walked to the refrigerator. A note inside read: Here’s your lasagna and salad. Bobby went to bed early, said he’s not feeling well. I’m studying. Cleo

That girl was always studying and Bobby never felt well. No chance Bobby had the virus, though. The house rule was: Stay home, period. Bobby had been warned that if he broke the rule, he’d be on his own. With nowhere else to go, his brother would never risk that.

He closed the refrigerator, satisfied.

Padding to the laundry area tucked into an alcove in the hallway, he stripped down to nothing but his boxers. He left his clothes in the washer with the lid up, then straight to the bathroom for his ritual sanitizing shower.

The water beat against his shoulders, against the pain of knowing that no matter how many days he did the right thing, he would never make up for the past. Evil done, remained. There was no redemption for him. His mind was set on one thing and one thing only, helping Cleo not make the same mistakes.

Buffed dry, he put on the fresh clothes he’d stowed under the sink before work. If Cleo happened to see him in his underwear between the washer and the bathroom, so be it, but he aimed to minimize that kind of exposure between them. She was a young lady now. He respected that.

After depositing the boxers into the washing machine, he padded back in the darkness to gather his food from the refrigerator, heat the lasagna in the microwave, put some dressing on his salad, take a clean fork from the drainer, and walk the ten steps that separated the kitchen from the living room.

Plate in one hand, television remote in the other, he sank into the corner of the gray couch. Even before he settled on what program to watch, Bobby wandered in and sat on the opposite end of the couch.

“How was work?” Bobby asked.

“Work,” he answered.

They sat without further conversation in the flickering light and sound of the television, he eating his food and Bobby crossing his arms, uncrossing his legs, stretching, sighing. Bobby never sat still.

The lights of a passing car glinted on something metal lying on the windowsill by the kitchen table. What the hell was that doing out?

“Did you put Sheryl’s gun over there?” he asked.

“Yeah, I was going to ask if you had any bullets,” Bobby said. “Thought I might set up a target in the backyard for practice.”

“You can’t shoot a gun in the city, Bobby,” he said. “What the hell!”

He kept eating, not tasting any more, thinking once again about how to dispose of the gun. He’d told Sheryl not to buy it, but she’d never listened to him. Maybe he could drop it off at the police station tomorrow before work. Tonight he’d hide it again, somewhere nobody would look, maybe just inside the access panel to the attic. He swallowed hard, the food hitting his stomach like a fist.

Cleo rounded the corner, her quiet footsteps stopping at the recliner where she lowered herself cat-like, her long thin legs curled under her.

“Thanks for dinner,” he said.

“Mmm.” She leaned her head back, directing her eyes to the television and circling her arms around her middle.

He held his breath, softly set the plate on the end table, and turned toward the television.

Had he selected a show that would keep her there?

Dare he ask?

Too many questions and she would skitter back to her room.

Every second she stayed echoed his secret longing for what had been lost when Sheryl died: a troubled family, but a family nonetheless.

An Unrhymed Sonnet In Iambics

Herbert Woodward Martin

What a remarkable sadness one sees in their faces;
it was solemn thought and pity for those who were denied
advancement which said they were men born to succeed.
No one saw anything gifted about them, except the prices
they could be sold for. Fortunes for those who owned them.
Those men who saw no reason to relinquish that power or joy
which brought them more and sometimes even more wealth
than that which they had dreamed or imagined was possible,
for these strange shapes that walked and thought like the men
they knew and sometimes admired, who sang invisible tones
that immigrated in the bodies they brought with them in the
hearth and soul, which they patently denied others that they with
intensity and irony they came to swear they heard the niggras mumblin’:
“Go tell ole Marse Lincoln to take his freedom back.”

Realizing Truth Is Freedom

Herbert Woodward Martin

My second granddaughter knows that slavery was not for her;
she has even calculated that segregation pales in comparison to
the life she has grown accustomed to, and that she owns.
How did anyone survive slavery? This is an additional horror,
her brain refuses to entertain the necessities it also took to
survive segregation? She cannot reconcile them with any habitual
love. My barber who swears that his generation is older, thinks,
confidently that, “Old Master would have awakened with flames
biting at his feet while the entire plantation was going up in flames
all around him,” if he had anything to say about their survival.
I laugh uncomfortably, because like many others who survived
those decades, I want to live, and know how to love life, by
keeping silent, in spite of human afflictions, for knowing absolutely
nothing allows me to lock up my tongue and throw away the master key.

The Visit

Betsy Hughes

So We must meet apart —
You there — I— here —
With just the Door ajar
That Oceans are — and Prayer —
And that White Sustenance —
Despair

Emily Dickinson

A nurse's aide stands sentry by your chair
while we're permitted minutes for a talk.
You stay inside the Home, your puzzled stare
inquires why I am not allowed to walk
from outside through the entrance to enfold
you in my arms' now quarantined embrace;
instead our brief reunion is controlled,
this threshold not a portal's welcome place.
You point to something on my sleeve — a leaf
which dangles from my jacket like the tear
which hangs and lengthens from your eye, our grief
thus shared by autumn's seasonal nadir.
The distance at the door is wide and deep.
We keep our date, appointed time. We weep.

Horse Play

Kerry Trautman

Our friends’ Florida guest room had been
their nursery—wallpapered in split rail fences

and horses of every color like her back-
home Kentucky. They made it look

easy to gallop away. Daylong our
friends lead us to water, flies caught in hair,

eyeing gators with sense to slink
from airboats. We eat from shells like

in-landers, wander Thomas Edison’s summer
home. Your legs stride further

than mine even when headed to the same place.
Two a.m. I straddle you like a hobby horse

shush shush rocking slow, steady friction enough
but avoiding bed-frame creaks, like the

difference between an electric arc
and a sinus rhythm. Horses leap fences in dark,

manes moon-brushed in vertical blind stripes.
I blink apology for not being newborn here in this

grown-up feather bed, black eyes startled staring,
the way the Seminole must nightmare

strings of plastic flamingo lights along patio
overhangs and sequin bikini tops in the sea oats.

One day they will strip the wallpaper,
the horse legs and the Everglade runs will be over,

beachside daiquiri bars sparked dark in
no-longer-named hurricanes,

and my thighs will cramp when I try to
hold my weight high above you.

Fear Factor

MJ White

I've been thinking about five dogs— five over the course of fifty years
— maybe a little overlap here and there, each one afraid of something,

bees, for example, or the ceiling fan in the kitchen— turn that sucker on,
the shepherd mix hit the floor, crawled on her belly right out of the room.

Our Heinz 57 mutt found rural mailboxes on road walks suspicious
and candle-lit jack-o-lanterns terrifying. Depending on the animal,

objects of fear included thunder, lightning, Christmas trees, and a tiny strobe
light on the smoke alarm. Seeing a pattern? Every single fear is of something,

some thing in the present moment, not one dog feared the possibility of bees,
that a bee might appear; it was always no worries until the actual little bugger

buzzed into the picture. Not a single dog ever worried about a concept—
death, the future, aging, illness, loss, each in her or his own way a roshi,

illuminating and repeating for my benefit the mantra be here now.

Travels in Italy’s Other World

Rita Coleman

Rome I
In the waft of togas and tunics ghostly figures mill around fractured columns alongside modern macadam, a soft roll down from the Palatine, in a lazy search in the open market for pastries, for wine, able to navigate the gaps in the floor where stones have dropped onto the floor of training quarters for gladiators, stones that have disintegrated in two thousand years of fast time, disappeared by today’s calendar, where the thud of body on body, the grunts and grimaces are willing to win, willing to think it.

Rome II
Caesar proclaimed Veni, vidi, vici.
I want to tell the emperor that my state bird, the cardinal, a flash of red in the woods, sings that same phrase all summer. Veni, vidi, vici, the notes C D, C D,
C D in less than two seconds. But he would not be among the plebeians to hear my knowing.

Pompeii I
Cardinal red flowed down Vesuvius on a once-upon day, for dogs, for children, for men and women, all of them caught in the grimace of hell that boiled blood and exploded skulls, that, were the heat, ardor would have wisped into the finery of all-beauty and numerous cocks and balls designs on outer house walls, a sign of fertility.

Pompeii II
Yet if the light is just right and the eye-squint edges toward closed, togas and tunics flutter in the brief breeze and apparitious echos find their way to the amphitheaters where body slams against body, sword against shield, and the audiences trail out after the condemnation, stop at the soupery, first, and then bakery for a loaf of bread for sopping.

Rome III
When he and I hand over a twenty lire note, then a fifty, to a truffatore for leather bling, carved totems, and bright beads–not Italian, probably Tunisian–foggy figures disappear into the sunset’s glow.

Village News

Anne Randolph

Lately, at any given glance of the newspaper,
the shock, kick in the stomach, at who we
have suddenly lost. Last week, Annemone
from Germany, who died while watering
her garden, who liked to bake cherry
and plum tortes with fruit from her trees.

Now Brian, a sculptor of renown, who never
knew a stranger, famous for his glittering
blue eyes, easy, wide smile, always entreating
me when downtown with let's all get together
for dinner. Once his outrageous flirtation
with the pretty postal clerk made me laugh
inside, as I stood in line.

He and Marie loved shaking their booties
to Friday night music at the cafe.
Like a hungry thief, death devoured him
before he completed a sculpture of a former slave
turned landowner, giver of property
for our village park.

A greeting from a friend or acquaintance
in a theater or grocery line, a conversation across
a restaurant table, or on the street, could be the last,
each fleeting moment of interaction
dusted with gold.

Boom! The End of a Mother’s World

Vera Grace Menafee

for Breonna Taylor and Tamika Palmer

No knock
Hand on glock

12 o’clock
They round the block.

Training ain't’ what they lack
But thought beyond

Skin black
As if they can relax

Once they pull the trigger
Seeing only my back.

Slaughtered into a bloody flag,
Chained for the white I lack.

Breonna lay on her back
Before being awakened from the

No knock no knock
There was no knock!

Just the sound of seven bullets heard round the block
Ringing from the apartment complex

As deadly as the noose that wrapped around the necks
Of blue Black babies burned without regrets

then plastered on postcards that rode on horseback
Towards Louisville, Ken tuck glock fuck y

where slave patrols arrived at Breonna's front door.
White men with plastic badges in place of hearts

Firing at what they could not see
Or refused to. Or chose to perceive.

Laying beside her man,
Kenneth watched her die in the handcuffs they clasped around his hands.

She relinquished herself to the offerings of a new year
dreaming Mother, only to be taken from her own and

when Tamika cried out for justice, cried to the spirits of death
for her baby back

the mob of white men
who lynched her daughter and laughed

found a way to police her pain
the fall of her tears, the gall of her fears, the shrill of her shouts —

I WANT TO SEE MY DAUGHTER
I WANT TO SEE MY DAUGHTER BABY GIRL DARLING LOVE

BREONNA.

And the moment I hear her name,
I want to shout too.

For the daughter I can never hold again
The hair I can never braid again and twelve hours later

to see my baby’s blood crusting, staining, gracing the carpet
That pressed space where her body stopped fighting.

I picture my own bloodied body, seeping out in
the home where I laid my head to rest and

the angels of sleep were grumbled by
the no knock, grumbled by

The fired glock that missed the wall and hit a woman, hit
me.

Slavery been gone, but the news will tell me
My right to live is a presidential debate topic

A welfare business meeting,
A matter of Wall Street’s stock

A K-9 unit snack
A father on death row

as though my beaming black body is

Capital
Chattel
Property
Money
In the Land of white freedom and
yellow taped misery.

And when I disobey the law and become an EMT and sing in the car with friends and walk in the middle
of the road and love hard and love my black man more than I love myself,

It is their right to take my life
Whether the phone in my hand is a knife or the

Gift I will give to my daughter
on my final night

when the streetlights burst and cities burn and
the revolution comes.

MLK Day

Vera Grace Menafee

At the museum, there was a painting on the wall
they called art and I called a blank canvas.
The tour guide told me never to question the artist,
/The artist/ meaning straight-haired God whose teeth
couldn’t wait to devour my blackness and
condemn me from white heaven.

He looked at me so hard my skin crawled from my bones/
naked
in the prosecution of His gaze,
my world became a poppy seed.
Black earth, red earth, yellow earth, brown earth:
Histories,
pulverized like tobacco in white Jesus’s smoking pipe.

Whispered in the light, I almost missed it.
All I knew was wanting to hide from everyone, and
/Black God/ oh God!
Please let everyone be me.

No one ever said that I would only matter on MLK Day
That if I ain’t willing to stay in the house and
speak when spoken to
I only matter

Dead.

Instead/ring around the reading room,
the teacher rested her eyes on the gumball clips
in my twisted kinks.
My eyes were glued to the red border of the magazine and
the sight of His daughters dressed in Sunday best to
hide the end of their world,

Wearing the same
shiny
little Mary Jane slippers
slewn in the rusted brick rubble,
legs mauled from the explosive
inferno
that ravaged a
church and with it
four mothers.

The class’s eyes moved as one and landed on my body
Trembling terribly towards
/Forgiveness/, what they never had to ask for, but I
knew was
the price of my body.

White folks love to talk about how much they love Martin,
But they were the same ones who locked him up —

Praise sit-ins /after/ the hoses have run dry
Uplift neoliberalism and monoliths of Brown v. Bourgeoisie.
Truth is don’t matter how we protest,
White liberals only want to see us in

/Chains/.
Auction blocked, redlined, police brutalized,
burned
like crosses.
Eons of lustful hate thrusting their white bodies at the
falsification that only

a little white girl’s skin is precious
and mine is made to rot.

In mirrors, it was no longer my nose I hated or
the curve of my jaw,
but
the skeleton that replaced my face as I had

forgotten what it meant to hear /a heart/ beat.

To all My Rosie's with Love

Amelia Danielle Bailey

I am not free while any woman is unfree,
even when her shackles are very different from my own.
Audre Lorde, “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism”

Somewhere in the desert
is a shrine of Frida

wrapped in vines and sweet berries

that lingers on the tongue like wine.

While steeped in the red clay

how Georgia does sing of

the blooming lotus in its
baptism of fire that breathes

walk with me Augusta

for no whip
will take the
art out of us.

Take my hand

Anida

and wade in fabric
with me in the waving sun

rise where the breeze knows our name.

The Laureate of Loss

A Review of Jared Carter’s The Land Itself

David Lee Garrison

Jared Carter, The Land Itself
(Monongahela Books, 2019)

It has been nearly forty years since Indiana poet Jared Carter's first book, Work, for the Night Is Coming, was selected by Galway Kinnell as the winner of the 1980 Walt Whitman Award. Always at the center of Carter’s work, forming its geopolitical myth, is his imaginary Mississinewa County. It is a place somewhere in the American Middlewest, where migrations from the land and from rural ways of life began over two centuries ago, and continue to this day. His new book, The Land Itself, offers a selection of sixteen of the Mississinewa poems, eleven of them heretofore uncollected.

The black and white photographs within the book and on its cover, taken by the poet himself, have no human figures in them. They have the lonely look of Andrew Wyeth paintings—abandoned houses, a closed-up church, cemetery figurines, an old mill, spirea flowing over a wall and casting shadows. And yet, the poems are about people and their struggles, people and their wanderings across Midwestern landscapes. Jared Carter tells us their stories.

The poems are as stark, uncluttered, and unassuming as the photographs. The poet does not moralize or generalize or draw abstract conclusions. He lets the people and the land and the structures that remain on it speak for themselves. He draws back a curtain on the past and shows us birds in the rafters of a covered bridge, gas street lamps it was thought would never go out, and a coffin filled with rock salt. Then he offers us a glimpse of the human context of such things.

What we hear in these poems are primordial echoes of the land and reverberations from little Midwestern towns. What we see and experience are defining moments in lives now mostly forgotten. In the words of essayist R.P. Burnham, Carter “knows that a lived human life is made up of moments, that in the lives of even the most commonplace farmer or druggist or carpenter some of those moments are magical and the very stuff the human spirit is made of.”

In “Journey,” for example, the speaker describes being in a train pulling away from the hometown station after the family goodbyes have been said. Suddenly he sees everything that was formerly familiar in a new way:

I looked back at the tracks running
through the middle of town, tracks I had
walked many times on the way to school,
with my friends, but never seen from this
height, this angle, with rooftops and
backyards and blank windows flashing by—
and in another moment it was all gone …

What the speaker sees from the train mixes with a childhood memory of a woman standing in darkness, in the midst of a swirl of cecropia moths, and then “that too dwindled / and disappeared as the train picked up speed.” We do not know who the speaker is or where he is going or why, but we know what is happening. A young man’s family, hometown, and memories are drifting away.

Almost all the poems tell or at least hint at a narrative of some kind, but they often begin with description. “Prophet Township” opens with the enigmatic phrase, “Only that it was a place where snow / and ice could seal off whole sections / for half the winter…” The phrase “Only that” suggests that what’s ahead is not of great significance, but ironically, it precedes some serious considerations of death and life. We learn that in the dead of winter, the dead could not be buried because the ground was too hard, so bodies were stored in coffins filled with rock salt. The poem goes on to describe the burial of the community, so to speak:

With no heat, no money
for seed, they knew they had no choice
but to pack up and leave—head back
to town, try to get a stake together,
go somewhere else. They brought along
what they could carry. Everything else
was left behind: piles of old clothes,
root cellar full of empty Mason jars,
strings of peppers tied to the rafters.

The speaker in the poem occasionally drives through the old township, discovers a boarded-up home, and stops to reflect:

Sometimes I sit there
in the driveway for a few minutes,
thinking about it, knowing that if I
step up to the front porch, or find
my way through the weeds to the pump,
there will be a slight breath of wind
just ahead of me, something rustling
through the timothy grass.

This is all that is left—an abandoned farm house surrounded by weeds, the sound of wind blowing through—but the poet preserves it, shares it with us.

Whole towns drift away. A real-estate appraiser, using an old map, finds the place where a little town called Summit was once a stop on the railroad line and

…figured out exactly where it had been,
right at the top of a long rise you could see
stretching for miles across the countryside.
Nothing out there now but lots of beans and corn,
blue sky and clouds. Not even fence rows anymore.

The appraiser looks around for some evidence of the people who lived there, but finds “Not a trace. / Only the land itself, and the way it still rose up.” The poem brings to mind Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” in which the words of a long dead, once mighty king enjoin a traveler to look out on and admire his great kingdom, where now “boundless and bare / The lone and level sands stretch far away.” The residents of Summit would surely have made no claim to any special renown as Ozymandias did, but Carter considers their loss and the loss of the places where they lived important, and he mourns them with this elegy.

Even though the poet eulogizes a past that we know only from parents and grandparents and books, he articulates the experience of generations of people, most of whom never gave a thought to writing about their lives. Jared Carter’s haunting and beautiful poems reach deep into our past, deep inside us.

Authors & Artists 

Sponsors

Miami Valley Folk Dancers

Every Thursday
Beginners’ Class | 7-8 pm
Easy Dance You Can Do | 8-9 pm

Michael Solomon Pavilion at Community Golf Course
2917 Berkeley St.
Kettering, OH 45409