Cover Art: The Loutky House by Robert Sparrow Jones Oil on Panel
Here
Issue 3
John Bargowski Julia Bonadies Courtney Botteron Daniel P. Carey Jr. Eliza Carey Barbara Crooker Sean Thomas Dougherty Kate Foran Charles Fort Natasha S. Garnett Margaret Gibson Maria Mazziotti Gillan Sitara Gnanaguru Frederick-Douglass Knowles II Alex MacConochie Alec Marsh Paul Martin Robert Morgan Steve Myers Julia Paul Rebecca Rubin Pegi Deitz Shea Joan Seliger Sidney John L. Stanizzi Steve Straight John Surowiecki Kelly Talbot
Here: a poetry journal
Contributors $5
a poetry journal
24” x 24” 2018
2020
ISSN: 2689-7547
Issue 3
2020
Here
a poetry journal
2020
Editor Daniel Donaghy, Professor of English
Here a poetry journal Department of English Eastern Connecticut State University 83 Windham Street 225 Webb Hall Willimantic, CT 06226 herepoetry@easternct.edu www.easternct.edu/herepoetryjournal/ phone: (860) 465-4570 fax: (860) 465-4580
Follow us on social media! Twitter: @here_poetry Instagram: @herepoetry Facebook: @herejournal
Student Editors Allison Brown, Kaitlyn Rasmussen, Victoria Congdon, Sydney Hebert
Cover Art The Loutky House by Robert Sparrow Jones Oil on Panel 24” x 24” 2018 Publication of this issue of Here was funded by The Creative Writing Club at Eastern Connecticut State University. Submissions for the next issue of Here are welcome September 1-October 31, 2020, through our Submittable link: https://herepoetryjournal.submittable.com/submit
ISSN 2689-7547
©2020 Eastern Connecticut State University
• Table of Contents
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Editors Note 4 Margaret Gibson Greed 5 Deliberate and a Little Stern 6 Long Division 8 In the Gathering Heat 9 Robert Morgan Because He'd Lived So Long a Bachelor 14 Cracked 15 Covert The Service of Forever 16 Paul Martin Eternity 17 The Absence Your Painting of the Tree 18 Natasha S. Garnett Deer at Dusk 18 Kate Foran Hartford Climate Strike 19 Alex MacConochie Advent 2016 in Newport News, VA 20 Sitara Gnanaguru Counting Sheep 21 Daniel P. Carey Jr. Omar’s Eyes 22 Eliza Carey A Morning Adagio 23 Alec Marsh “In meiner Heimat…” 23 Steve Myers Night of Wine by the Stone Fountain 24 “I know the joy of fishes in the river,” 25 John L. Stanizzi 7.15.19 26 8.17.19 Joan Seliger Sidney Hit-and-Run 27 John Surowiecki Price Rite's Last Day 28 Charles Fort American Bandstand 29 John Bargowski Heart 30 Tinsel 31 Barbara Crooker Black and Purple Petunias 31 Maria Mazziotti Gillan Ghost Voices 32 My Hand Remembers 33 Courtney Botteron The House without You 34 Rebecca Rubin When I Was A Child 35 Julia Paul Broken Flesh 36 One Summer Day 37 Sean Thomas Dougherty The Women of Dublin 38 Imaginary Death Certificates in 40 Chain-Link Fenced Back Yards Poem for My Wife Younger 41 Julia Bonadies Second shift at the garden center 42 Steve Straight Biopsy 43 Pegi Deitz Shea Autumn Equinox at Valley Falls 44 Kelly Talbot Glistening 45 Frederick-Douglass Knowles II What Happened to Nia Wilson? 46 Contributors Notes 47 2020
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Hello and welcome to the third annual issue of Here: a poetry journal. A guiding thought behind this and every issue of Here comes from Seamus Heaney's distinction, offered in an interview shortly after winning the Nobel Prize, between the words "herd" and "heard." He said "I always like to make a play on two words that sound the same––“h-e-r-d” and “h-e-a-r-d.“ I think in writing poetry, especially in times of crisis, you’ve got to beware of “h-e-r-d” feelings as opposed to individual "h-e-a-r-d.“ The writer is there to be “h-e-ar-d” singularly, not to be part of the tribe, although, at times of crisis, this is a very fine and important distinction." As a country and as a planet, we are, of course, experiencing no shortage of crises at the moment. And we are experiencing so much shouting––in person, on television, and online––so much suffering and silencing, and, in this world that moves fast as a thumb scroll, so little listening. If you're reading this, then you already know how much we need to listen, really listen, to each other's stories to expand our capacity for empathy and to recognize the power of the stories that each of us carries inside. My student editors and I strive to create on these pages a space in which such listening can occur. We keep the journal small so that you might read it all in one sitting and so you might see how we've organized the poems to be in conversation with each other, across pages and ages, across labels that designate difference to celebrate our common humanity. On behalf of this year's Eastern Connecticut State University Creative Writing Club and Here's four exceptional student editors (Allison Brown, Kaitlyn Rasmussen, Victoria Congdon, and Sydney Hebert), I hope that you enjoy this issue and that you'll spread the word about us to anyone you think needs these poems or whose work we need to read. Daniel Donaghy
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Margaret Gibson
Greed Even the fox of legend knows that inside immortal is more Extinction is a fox skin that rots in the ravine behind the house whose foundation is eroding Will you be spared? Will I? What shall we mourn? a river a flower a tongue on the spiral galaxy of the body a peach Add to that, the pain each of us has not acknowledged Were we less churlish and afraid perhaps we might investigate how long it takes to imagine earth without us How long to sever the link between relish and ravish 2020
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Deliberate and a Little Stern Still and bare as a moon you live in my mind, rising there in the evenings sloping down the sky into the oaks by morning I have a sense of your presence that at times feels like a hand touching lightly the small of my back But if you could return to life for a moment and sit near, you’d have questions and they wouldn’t be about me Even late in your illness, you’d watch the hollow-eyed children on the news I hate this, you’d say, but I have to see it So I imagine you sitting beside me deliberate and a little stern You want an accounting. Leaning in close you want to know how many children went hungry in the midst of the famines our government sanctioned. How many crossing to an imagined safe haven were swept from the rafts into the sea. And the flies count them, how many are there Here: a poetry journal
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still crawling over the eyelids of children left behind in the camps Closer to home, how much blood is spilled in cop cars, on street corners in school rooms? How many children does it take . . . how many guns how many yachts and oilrigs and earrings to distract us from those without medicine or shelter or food It’s winter. You know all about winter I hear your voice, hoarse and insistent, rise from the bardo of spirits who, like you once intimate with arid despair, still bless us unawares—we who need blessing more than we know Blessed are the poor in spirit, you remind me holding out your hands. How empty they are . . . I watch them fill with light
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Long Division . . . as if grief were commensurable as if it would agree to be reckoned I divide the sum of my life so far by your death And I keep going, I divide mountain by a train whistle tremulous in the night Owl call
River
by the way you used to say my name
by the hymn I haven’t sung for years
Cedars at dusk
by rainlight I locked inside a box then lost the key
The road ahead
And silence
by the number of breaths it will take me to travel it
immeasurable silence
by the loose change my hand finds cool to the touch in the pocket of a coat you left behind in the closet Here: a poetry journal
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In the Gathering Heat . . . in this interval of cool air before the sun flashes its bald stare I lie down in the grass beneath the trees, and it’s so green in the shade, so quiet a stir of barely wind, just breath in the higher branches and a tanager finally here (if late, very late I thought it might not make it back this year) breaks into throaty song, and I exhale gratefully— delay the lover’s strategy and 2020
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the body’s as it rises on a slow crest to ecstasy may be part of the joy in hearing its song its only song I’m here— what used to be simple and also, yes lyrical is endangered now as is for example Argentina where scarlet tanagers go in winter to a checker board of pasture and ruin where once there was rain forest— Argentina, a verdant Here: a poetry journal
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place in a mind that would keep forest alive just by thinking about it— alive just by saying fern, orchid, bromeliad keeping them whole not broken into orchid bromeliad— yes, once there were forests within forests, forests in air where tanagers hung their nests and bred fed and reset their inner compasses flying north thousands of miles, and even now “with minimum warming twenty 2020
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percent or more of all species are headed for extinction by 2050 . . .” even now they manage to return, breaking into chic-burry, I’m here if barely— so tell me, of what use is the pastoral now? a merely human form that’s threatened if not extinct a form invented so that poets could sing, Here I am, me too! and woo women— and there’s no refrain, not now as I look around me and see that as green midsummer leaves Here: a poetry journal
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take in more light, they also darken— well, it’s only natural it’s only rural these patches of green yard that divide us and it’s so quiet really quiet now—Who is able to sing— the heat’s rising, it’s rising fast so that more apt than song is the cairn of stones in the browning grass whose silent epitaph may be and they didn’t see it coming 2020
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Robert Morgan
Because He’d Lived So Long a Bachelor Because he’d lived so long a bachelor before marrying, before begetting us, my father always washed his own work clothes in tubs of suds out on the porch, and sewed the patches on his overalls and faded shirts himself, the needle dwarfed by his enormous work-swelled hands, the fingers bent by age and weathering. My mother never was allowed to clean or mend the soiled and worn apparel. There was something paradoxical about his grasp, more used to axe and cross-cut saw, or hoe and shovel handle, drawing the all but invisible thread in and out of denim or khaki while sitting on the backporch steps to get the brightest sum, and resting from his daylong toil. Because he had remained a bachelor so long my father did not shave till after supper, or comb his hair, a habit from his courting days he liked to joke. With unexpected delicacy he creamed his cheeks and chin and upper lip and then caressed the foam off with a flashing razor, wiped the froth from tender skin. And only then, with hair both wet and groomed, would he sit down beside the stove to turn the pages of his Bible with such care and concentration that it seemed he read oblivious to all around and unconnected to his time and place, in a dispensation unfamiliar, because he’d lived so long a bachelor.
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Cracked The streak that plunges to the base of a tall hemlock looks at first like the bark or even trunk is cracked. But see the line, now partly healed, comes all the way down from the top, where lightning touched the tip and ran the length to ground, exploding phloem with white-hot steam and bursting roots with heat of electricity, so even this giant evergreen is scarred from crown to toe and looks as split or fissured as the house of Usher in Poe’s masterpiece, the wound as natural as the rain and wind, inevitable as time, a lesion just the sign of sky’s excessive energy in love with earth’s carnality.
Covert The crow that sits atop the oak across the road is sentinel for other crows unseen in fields and woods. Its arcane growls and squawks may seem addressed to me but are instead a warning to its kin, as it inspects and monitors my progress past its perch to see what threat I might present and what direction I might take and when, and whether I am armed or seem aggressive with my hands. So as I walk, a network of covert surveillance and intelligence is exchanged in trees and running back and forth is loud, encrypted in the snarls and barks and shouts and cries, a system of security where I am just the enemy. 2020
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The Service of Forever When waters of Lake Lure were first impounded years ago the barns and houses of the valley were submerged just as they’d stood for a full century. The fences still contained the pastures where the bass could graze and trout explore the cribs of corn and poke in cellar holes. The water was so clear that those in boats could see below as through a time machine the orchards drowned and windmills stopped as though enchanted. And some reported sounds like notes from deep within the shivery waves, of church bells pealing out the time to call those buried by the river to the service of forever.
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Paul Martin
Eternity Trying to explain it to us twelve-year-olds, the young nun told us to picture a beach on the Jersey shore where someone, once a year, came and took away a single grain of sand. The time it would take, she said, to empty the beach, to make it disappear, would not amount to even one second in eternity, which caused me, for a moment, to stop exchanging rubber faces with crazy Joey Malesky and consider the immensity of the eternal, and who that someone was who took away the beach grain by grain, and what age he’d have to live to, and where and why he took the sand, each of which, in succession, I asked the nun whose jaw, I could see, tighten, whose eyes fixed silently on me for what felt like a very long time, an eternity, it seemed.
The Absence Such stillness in the house this winter night I remember an aged teacher calling roll. After “here” and “here” and "here” the boy’s name followed by silence, the teacher raising her eyes above her glasses toward the vacant desk where, for a moment, she stared, then resumed the names, softer and more uncertain. 2020
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Your Painting of the Tree ( for my brother, John )
I’d been no stranger to trees, climbing, by then, the oak in the alley, the back yard maple, trees of the woods, but the first tree I saw was yours, hanging at the bottom of the stairs, slender, its green leaves gleaming in the dim hallway we passed through, the whole family, those years on Lehigh Street, rushing past it, oblivious, or stopping to look more closely. Not knowing what to say or how to say it, we said nothing, carrying silently within ourselves its quiet life, the way it shone in the gloom. ◉ Natasha S. Garnett
Deer at Dusk If it weren’t for the barking I’d have missed six swiveled ears and the flash of white tails disappearing
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Kate Foran
Hartford Climate Strike After the speeches and chanting and rallying cries for action, the climate strike ends with a die-in. I shove the cardboard sign your sister scrawled for you, Old enough to save the planet under my head. You lie down and flip and flop around, engineering a position for your body on my stomach, and then you sit up again and look around at the crowd of kids skipping school and the hobby protestors. In the quiet everyone hears your urgent sotto voce, I’m ready to be all done now. I hush you and say A few more minutes. Eleven to be exact, one for each year 2020
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before the damage becomes irreversible. You will be fourteen then. You busy yourself with the grass on the Capitol lawn. Mom, you hiss, releasing handfuls on my shirt. I pulled the grass out and I can’t get it back in. The easy late September sun glints off the Capitol gold dome. Below the streets runs the Hog River, long ago denied and buried. ◉ Alex MacConochie
Advent 2016 in Newport News, VA Anthracite, piled at the river’s gray blank edge: a mountain’s Form remembered here, at last without complexities and small Enough to comprehend. Dull soldier of a concrete dawn. Self-satisfied demand for value, function—spurting flame An essence rain-wet boulders, darting jays and fungi white On hollow logs cannot obscure—the stalled conception Of our paralyzing now. Death’s legacy, blind power As a promise of light: heavy, still simplicity the living Have no answer for but rising, urgent in decay. Here: a poetry journal
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Sitara Gnanaguru
Counting Sheep I’m haunted by hundreds of sheep committing suicide in Turkey What possessed the first to walk its own plank? Perhaps obsessed with greener grasses, only one domino to ripple into waves— toppling over, then crashing into one another. I imagine clouds condensing and falling into themselves—raindrops into the sea The rest only survived because droves of dead bodies cushioned their fall. Here I am standing tall due to sacrifices of my fallen—versions of myself that plummeted into oblivion so that I will feel the chill of the rain and know I’m still alive
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Daniel P. Carey Jr.
Omar’s Eyes
for my friend
“Aleppo” across the Hartford Courant at the Clark Street gas station where Omar works six days a week. Scratch-off sales help him forget friends he lost the day they protested in Damascus. Omar’s father bought his release, helped him flee to Beirut, then asylum, alone, in America. He’s twenty-two and somewhere between putting my twenty on pump two and a pack of Marlboro Slims, Omar finds out his father died. As he cries, I swear I see in his hazel eyes Syria burning.
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Eliza Carey
A Morning Adagio Piercing alarm Followed by the soothing hum Of my mother’s voice As we sit by the window Coffee steam swirls Itself into circles A rainbow curls Above the brick wall I used to play behind The sun sends the moon Back into orbit Welcomes a new day A symphony plays As it does every morning ◉ Alec Marsh
“In meiner Heimat…” Driving home with Steve after the Phillies game I tried to see the trees of Bucks County speeding past as we drove the turnpike extension the way he would see them––as home I mean–– the right trees, greening at the right time, tossing their new, bright leaves in the mild May wind; what it’d be like to trace each bend of every creek in your mind when drifting off to sleep, the way one can with one’s own home country, each moraine and esker, kettle pond and drumlin, every salt-stained road till you’re groping, picking up leaves and feathers, sniffing the mind’s air, as in a womb. 2020
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Steve Myers
Night of Wine by the Stone Fountain Darkness over South Mountain. Near-full orange moon risen in a sky brushstroked with mare’s tails this first warm night of spring—Karen and I, a fountain, our glasses of cabernet. I’d called up the dawn w/the Li Po poem where he says goodbye to his friend outside Hsuangcheng, both of them on horseback. I’d cut the grass, grown long & thick from weeks of rain & hied off to the university Commencement where, wholly charmed, I’d observed from the stage, at eye-level, the jade-green hovering of a camera drone & after, shared warm embraces with women & men that over 30 years I’d come to love, & in that same spirit of wild & maybe sappy unreason, we’d gone to dinner, where we sipped & laughed & I passed my palm over the soft sporophytes the moss had lifted in its seasonal celebration of mist & sex, then slipped inside that familiar bar to watch the Preakness. How easy, the giving-to & taking-from of strangers in those minutes. How good, cheering together the No. 9 colt who two strong strides out of the gate threw his jockey, drove to the outside, & with no human burden—at last!—powered down stretches & around turns, wide-eyed, careless of all but his great heart’s surging, & when the bartender shouted Run toward the rail!, you knew no way it was going to happen, that the small scraps of manflesh w/whips & irons, the six-plus tons of horseflesh spraying earth from a fast & firm track into straining faces, were locked on a finish in some other place, while one horse, its own splendid engine, its mane streaming, ignored them completely, and one sliver of America, alive again, screaming, had eyes only for the freewheeling chestnut, bearing over loin & hip a skein of blue & perfect sky.
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“I know the joy of fishes in the river,”
Zhuangzi insists, his final verbal flourish flashing in Huizi’s face like the diaphanous tailfins of koi roiling below them in the River Hao. All the Master needs to know is his own golden joy, walking along the riverbank, to feel their bliss— this the reason that I, sipping foam from a pint of Golden Citrus, ripple with an ecstasy that is both my own & harmonious with that of the patrons of Funk Brewery’s Emmaus Taproom this February Sunday mid-afternoon, & it seems the only thing missing as we toast our birthdays is two steaming bowls of longevity noodles. It’s true Pennsylvania, I say to myself, the fusion of wu-wei & roughneck chatter of young guys in watch caps & denim jackets, who talk Brady & Belichick, slap down small bets on the Big Game, who for all their swagger speak shyly to the barmaids—still girls, really—thus proving they have mastered happiness, Zhuang sez, by not thinking of happiness, as we, on meeting, would never say, “Let’s tell such stories as will summon happiness,” but plunge into a conversation that flows from Thoreau to the Stones to Freddy Lynn, time being the stream we go a-fishing in, as the former opined in his Walden notebook, he whom the scholar Lin Yutang named most Chinese of American authors, comparing HDT to Zhuang in his “ruggedness,” though neither of them to the fine-boned flyball chaser known as “Fragile Freddy,” & if we in no way resemble those two disciples on the eponymous road, ghosted by a sense of someone absent, yet drafting close behind, still, when two girls manifest from out of nowhere selling Girl Scout cookies, & slide over to us in their luminousness a thank-you note stamped with a turtle shell mandala while their mother makes change,
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& I place a bit of shortbread on my tongue, letting the flavor linger before sloshing it down with that lemony brew, gazing around at it all, shining, warmed by the sun through the window— it’s like the Master stands suddenly among us, saying, “Stillness is joy, free from care, fruitful in long years, perfect Tao,” a sentiment best glossed in our own time by Mick’s floodlit fish face, on stage in Vancouver, June of ‘72, as “fever in the funkhouse now.” (for Alec Marsh)
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John L. Stanizzi
7.15.19
7.23 a.m., 63 degrees
Press of warm sun on my shoulders this morning, watching a gulp of swallows occupy the air along the stream, beyond which the alder buckhorn has berried. Nonesuch as these spectacular notched birds perusing the pond’s stream, daydreaming of a sky full of insects, and a bill full of cool water as they dip and drink.
8.17.19
7.44 a.m., 68 degrees
Plumy stasis, a great blue heron is cloaked in fog, overseer of the shallow pond this morning, nomad, all rafters and poles, becomes still, stiller, detaches from the earth, folds up, and squawks into the gray.
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Joan Seliger Sidney
Hit-and-Run Head held high, Mother Goose leads her brood across the highway, as though they own the road. Speeding round the curve at forty, too late I see this long gray line of goose and goslings marching. Too late I spot the row of cars on the other side stopped, their drivers glued to the show. Do they think Nature’s in charge at showtime? On stage: Make Way for Ducklings, mama and brood. But I know the line of cars behind me will tell another tale if I slam my brakes. No short stops on this road. I pray for goose and goslings to fly, not march, as I drive straight into their parade. What I see: feathers flying, what I hear: THUNK! parting the seaspray of flesh, blood and bones. Unholy shower! Come back, parade of goslings, instinctively marching behind your mama. Now it’s my turn to brood. If only I had picked a different time or road. If only I were returning home, not racing to another doctor’s appointment. I lie on the treatment table, another world, wondering what, if any of this, the therapist will see. She lifts my legs, follows my body’s cranial-sacral roadmap. You’re in a diagonal twist. What else will my body show? Very tight adductors, too. What’s up? Enough brooding. I unspool the cause of my hit-and-run guilt, late March. Slowly her hands release blockages, energy marches cell to cell, muscles relax, my body returns to another healthier state, away from primitive fight or flight. Brooding displaced, we joke about fleeing the crime scene; pursuing deer with bow and arrow, a garden showdown. Your goose is cooked, black humor to distract from a road
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that curved and made me bloody this day. Hours later, I rode home on the other side. No Mother Goose marches to and fro, searching for signs of her goslings. No showtime to amuse then shock, no line of drivers stopped, just another stream of cars. Not one feather to bear witness. I see how speedily highway police sweep death away. Don’t brood, I tell myself, brooding won’t bring them back to cross the road. But when will I stop seeing mother and crew proudly marching, delighting other drivers, until my Toyota closes their show? ◉ John Surowiecki
Price Rite's Last Day What we're seeing is a little glimpse of the end of things. The melon bins are missing and the piles of buckeach avocados are gone, no earthsmelling potatoes or Spanish onions as round and white as softballs: the whole place is a big infinite nothing, an indoor prairie of empty shelves and perches, warm freezers and naked pyramids. All that’s left are cans of pigeon peas, oval tins of sardines, Jamaican kola shockingly yellow. Most of all we miss the light, the abundant never-abandoning brilliance overhead. Now darkness eddies, spirals: everything has a shadow. The cashier—laid off but working, there but not there— waits for us in the express lane and is quick to show us the door.
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Charles Fort
American Bandstand It's got a good beat and you can dance to it.
You live near the ocean and sea coves and use your long and weary arms to steady your hands as you paddle in a call for mermaids to rise and sing Motown, country, and rock 'n roll in your thin canoe into narrow passages and caves using a handmade fishing net capturing gold coins spinning to earth. You live landlocked in a large city wearing hush puppies to church and Beatle boots to the school dance matching a short boy with a tall girl. You hold subway tickets for a slow ride looking for a phone booth at each stop into the undertow of the underworld. You saw the excommunicated angel on your windowsill playing the banjo. You live in the green, blue, smoky mountains in a small town wearing pat n’ leather tap shoes at the school prom with the homecoming queen who learned to square dance on the playground slide rule, homemaking, or industrial arts. You walk to school, alone, your transistor radio: Roll Over Beethoven. I Can’t Stop Loving You. Your typing teacher stood in front of the class and hit the keys like he was playing a saxophone.
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John Bargowski
Heart My mother likes to point to her zippered chest and talk about the right and left ventricle, posterior vena cava, words she never learned in the high school classes she missed helping her own mother put food on the table for six kid brothers. Fifteen and sewing piecework at the Perfect Brassiere, fussing with the tiny hooks and clasps and pairs of silky cups dressed in lace she held under the needle to pedal together while her father did hard time a thousand miles away during the years of chain gangs, bread and water. She'll tell you how the surgeon held it in his gloved hand, about the times the machines thrummed her back to life, the two platinum stents planted inside her left atrium worth more than that flashy necklace, splayed across a square of black velvet in a jeweler's window, she eyed every day on her way to work downtown.
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Tinsel "But, at the center: I am shaking; I am flashing like tinsel." ––Mary Oliver
When I found the nest in a crutch of viburnum near the foundation, I wanted to call my wife outside, show her the grass cup lined with down the mother plucked from her own breast, the single strand of tinsel woven between twigs and bits of carpet moss bound with dabs of dried mud, tell her I thought our youngest––gone so long I'm afraid I've forgotten the sound of her caroling by the tree–– was the only one with the patience to drape it, strand by strand, across the needles until our fir glittered. ◉ Barbara Crooker
Black and Purple Petunias
Walking down the rows of my local farm stand, I think of the faith of the gardener, who stuck something infinitesimal in the ground, waited for the emergence of the first pale leaves, then the recognizable form. Who pricked them into peat pots, transplanted them in flats, hauled them to this nursery, where, needing some beauty in my life, I brought them home, tucked them in my perennial border. Which is not guarded by a wall or men with guns. Instead, it pours its extravagant perfume, its color, for the passers-by, the joggers, the neighbors walking dogs. I sit in the garden at twilight, when the colors start shifting; the dark ones, like these petunias, receding; the light ones, like phlox, coming into the foreground. It's the solstice, darkness and light in equal measure. And here I am, trying to keep my ears open to every body's song.
Georgia O'Keeffe
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Maria Mazziotti Gillan
Ghost Voices Ghost voices trail behind me like silk scarves, all my dead still live inside me even years after they have passed over to that other world. My mother’s voice, sardonic and practical, my mother, who spent a lot of time criticizing everything I did, although she said if she didn’t tell me, who would? My mother, who held me at her round kitchen table, patting my back, saying, Cry, cry. It will do you good, though she told me she had forgotten how to cry. My father‘s voice telling stories of his younger days after he arrived from Italy at 16, stories of how he met my mother, stories of the heroes he’d so admired— JFK and FDR, my political, radical father sitting with me every night after my mother died until he, himself, passed at 92. My sister, her voice wobbly, calling me at 7 PM, asking when I was going to be at her house, my sister, who was ill and frightened, so much so, she needed me to just sit and hold her fragile hand every night while she talked about her life and all she remembered. My husband, so athletic and strong, beset by illness that robbed him of everything he cherished— swimming, running, riding his bike, driving a car, even his mind, and his voice, softer and softer, almost a whisper, his voice saying I love you into my ear, his world populated by ghosts who came to visit him in the months before he died, ghosts, who told him they were saving a place for him. The others that I have lost now wait their turn to speak, but my ancestors’ voices I can only imagine since I never met them, left behind in Italy, Here: a poetry journal
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where the only words they had for me were blue air mail letters that made my mother’s heart ache. They too, have become ghosts. Is that the fate of all of us? All we can hope is that our own voices will remain inside those who loved us and comfort them for as long as they need to hear us.
My Hand Remembers When I speak to my daughter on the phone, when she calls me on the way to the university, I ask about the children, ask about Stephen, the house. I say Do you think the upstairs will be finished soon? And she tells me that Stephen says it’s the closest it’s ever been; and she cracks back and I’m as close as I’ve ever been to death, too. I love her sense of humor, her quick wit, the easy way she’s taken on cherishing his children, caring for them as if they were her own. She tells me she tries to get Indigo to practice her spelling. Indigo asks her, Do you want me to be Clara (the smartest girl in her class)? I’m not Clara. I am Indigo. Jennifer says, Well, Indigo needs to learn how to spell. Jennifer looks over the eight-page essay that the child has written. Almost every word is misspelled. Jennifer carefully writes the words out on 3 x 5 cards for her and then she teaches her to spell them. Indigo is going to be a brilliant mathematician or scientist and words are not magical to her or sacred as they are to Jennifer. But Indigo always has an argument ready and never gives up. Jennifer finds books she loved when she was a girl and reads them to Indigo just as I had read them to Jennifer. How grateful I am to have this daughter with her open heart; her stepdaughter reminds me of Jennifer as a girl. This child loves art as much as I do. When I ask what subjects she loves in school, she asks if she has to choose only one. No, I tell her, you could choose more than one. “Well, I would choose math and science and art.” 2020
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When I think of my daughter, I can still feel her hand in mine as I read to her in the canopy bed I bought for her, which may have been more for the poor child who still resided inside me. What gratitude I feel towards her because of this child that she’s brought into my life, so much gratitude for those moments in my memory, Jennifer with her gorgeous hair freshly washed, smelling of vanilla shampoo, the two of us, close under the lamp light, while I read to her and I want those memories to be as vivid for her, as I hope Indigo will remember Jennifer‘s voice reading to her, Jennifer’s arms around her shoulders, her hands stroking her hair. ◉ Courtney Botteron
The House without You The day you moved out, rain beat on our thin roof like the crinkling of aluminum foil. I walked outside and thunder rolled across the sky. The scent of cut grass lingered. You told me once a story about the steady downpour on your wedding day. I painted a picture and wrote “I love you” on a piece of paper and hid it in your suitcase for you to find after you were gone. Two weekends later, the picture was taped outside your door of your temporary home. The house without you was a fridge with no seltzer water a table with empty plates. Here: a poetry journal
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Rebecca Rubin
When I Was A Child I scooped sparrows from their intricate nests–– swollen, pink heads fragile bodies weighted in my palms and hid them in an old camper, too expensive to fix, that sat in our yard. I made homes of cotton balls, answered small chirps with worms I found in the garden. Yellow beaks in the air, helpless, hungry, they needed me, I told myself, as much as I needed them.
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Julia Paul
Broken Flesh Among the wandering and lingering on this street of boarded-up bodegas and discarded nips, a young man descends Broad near Madison. Long strawberry blond hair tags him not from this neighborhood. Not lost, though, he stops to chat with that trio of men he knows. Closer now, his face broadcasts the distinct scabs of an addict. He gestures with a hand pocked with track marks, some fresh, still glistening, almost pretty, like dew caught by sunlight. Somewhere else, his mother clutches a coffee cup as morning stabs through her window blinds. Notice the remnants of a manicure, still glossy but chipping, chipping. Notice also her palms. How their lines arc and tangle like tree branches felled by a storm. And her face, trace its map to the heart that beats like a fist against a locked door.
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One Summer Day Before the needle shuddered in his arm. Before the bent spoon, bent back, the strap. Before complaining veins. Before a procession of scabs jeweled his flesh. Before his half-lidded chase for what couldn’t be caught. Before sepsis and Hep C. Before the trampled path into the woods behind Sav-A-Lot. Before unforgiving rain, endless snow, blistering heat. Before donated blankets and gloves, shoplifted sunblock. Before the cardboard sign held up to passing cars. Before waiting for someone to toss their cigarette as they entered a store so he could snatch it, bring it to his lips and dry hump it back to life. Before long sleeves in summer and pawn tickets stashed under football trophies. Before the oxy parties. Before the root canal. The script. The refills. Before ashes, ashes, we all fall down. There was a boy who loved his skateboard, how it took him where he wanted to go, to all that might have been.
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Sean Thomas Dougherty
The Women of Dublin I will not write of Joyce or Yeats or Behan’s bar but of this young Polish prostitute I passed in Arbour Hill nearly nodding out in a doorway just out of the rain. She reached out & touched the sleeve of my jacket. Her eyes were green as bitter almonds that leave a taste of arsenic on the tongue. The young junkies gathered on a bench by the Liffey & throughout Temple Bar. The drunks lunged & laughed over nothing but their own falling bodies, falling forward through the dark; I paused before a closed book shop to read the latest titles, then threw a few Euros in the case Here: a poetry journal
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of a red-headed girl playing guitar & singing Leonard Cohen. Months later, I’d see her on YouTube with a hundred thousand views & the doves that flew down from the cathedrals gathered at the feet of an old woman tossing out day old bread. The rain from the Irish sea fell the next morning on my hat & all about were Dublin women walking with their scarfed heads looking down to or from jobs as cleaners or barristers or tour guides— the rain from the Irish sea fell like a great transparency we passed through as a great voice— unconsolably rose from these cobblestoned streets worn by centuries of human soles traveling towards where something might just bloom.
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Imaginary Death Certificates in Chain-Link Fenced Back Yards For the corner shrines & the Schuylkill fisherman lures lured that girl who looked like Susan at the Arcade asking for just enough to buy a cheesesteak hoagie ~
Rain on the Liberty Bell pierced punk boys smoking menthols outside Zipperhead she scored a bag an elegy in a chain-link fenced back yard she was glass light morphine’s lost fugue her mouth rouged & rough as a refinery forgive me the Susquehanna & Scranton Susan at the bus station on her way to Camden to visit Walt Whitman’s grave decades you tried to believe she was not ~
sold to a pimp in West Philly she was pale as peonies she in her cutoff jeans green halter top she with her spiral notebooks her knapsack of pens her gear ~
She was white as aspirin she nodded the way a lamb bends its neck to drink water she was sipping glass light at the all-night laundromat sipping some ghost language the color of chrysanthemums some witness somebody to blame she was never hungry as her eyelids fluttered blue butterflies her only pallbearers some name pawn shopped in plain sight Walt Whitman ~
how many have disappeared in your beard? Here: a poetry journal
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Poem for My Wife Younger Your father the union steward just starting to weld, your mother working the 2nd shift at the plastics plant. They had not even met when I was born in Bellevue a few floors from the lunatics decades later I almost envy for to live this life is to cage the hurt we carry to give it shape the scars in our skin unseen as the rain falls and you are asleep and the roof ’s music the snore of the dark in your slight breathing saws me. When you first saw me you said you wanted me to never be unseen and then the years of wreckage the empty bottles and the booze the fitful alterations of the rain restitching the dark’s fabric wind bowing the dogwoods and the pines creaking in the storm shaking the rusted steel shed where we still keep your father’s tools sharp enough to cut the dark the steady downpour of the dead. There is nothing more to say except when I was born there was a vacancy like an empty room inside my chest like the spaces between the rain. For years when I was falling forward I could feel you there in the absence of the air. 2020
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Julia Bonadies
Second shift at the garden center the Wednesday before school starts and summer has been so shitty, I almost ask Sean for a cigarette as he rants about his ex-girlfriend. I’d probably be dead by now if I’d stayed he says as he shifts his head between slumped shoulders clothed in neon-safety yellow, faded and stained from motor oil, metal polish, and freshly cut grass. His hands punctuate the air as he gestures to the downpour outside the greenhouse, tells me how he uses barometric pressure, air temps, and wind speed to predict weather. I think I’d like to audit classes one day. You know, like, Philosophy or Psychology. I love learning. Always did better when I learned something, just never did good in school. I listen to the soundtrack of Sean’s dreams drift up from the yard, take shape from behind the wheel of the skid-steer loader while he chain smokes and wonder who let him believe he couldn’t be more than a chimney sweep, an air vent vacuumer, mower mechanic, warehouse worker, hardscaper with a bent back and chafed hands.
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Steve Straight
Biopsy Before the oncologist calls with the results, and we hear whether my wife will have to endure another two years of surgery, radiation, and chemo sickness, her hair falling out in clumps, white cell count dropping precipitously––or worse or not we pretend to vacation by the lake, and I notice the lone maple turning orange and red prematurely, the dark clot of cloud moving over us, and down in the middle of the lake, someone’s unmoored raft drifting with the current. After the call and the tears and the hugs and more tears only then do I see the pair of loons circling each other across the lake, the newly opened waterlilies by the shore, sunlight replacing shade as the cloud moves north and when my wife flings the ice cubes from her drink over her shoulder into the lake, the tiny rings spread out in perfect concentricity until eventually the surface returns to glass.
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Pegi Deitz Shea
Autumn Equinox at Valley Falls Late September, summer’s final sigh: I pick them up from the nursing home, Bob and Shirley and Rosemary, buckle them in, pack their walkers with the picnic basket in the trunk. They can’t manage the grass or the sand on the beach, so I line up lawn chairs in front of the lavs, as if the Memorial Day parade might come drumming up the drive. Lunch is nothing fancy— just things they never get— rich cheeses, crisp crackers, and fruits so fresh they crunch. grape soda for Bob, O’Doul’s for Shirley, and for Rosemary, a martini in a sippy cup. Oh, we know the rules: Alcohol Prohibited in Parks. But at 95, she can’t be denied. I’m their Jack Nicholson, and they’re flying over the Cuckoo’s Nest. It’s not the food that delights them most, nor the thrum of reawakened locusts, nor the rippling reflections of first yellow leaves upon the pond’s cold springs, nor the husky sweet aroma of reeds drying in spikes. No. It’s the toddlers squealing as minnows tickle knees, dogs leaping for Frisbees, and birds swooping, swooning to mate before the sun, all too soon, falls into the valley.
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Kelly Talbot
Glistening Nectarine canyon walls glisten in the afternoon sun, auburn strata, layers of eons of fossils sinking. Lizard crawling, cotton clinging to back, collar rubbing against neck— delineations of amber and mahogany, honey and burnt sierra, whiskey and bar top— breathing ragged, fingers trembling. It has been three days since my last shot— solar fire and hard stone. Keep walking. Each breath, a generation, each step, a mutation, burying my reptile brain under mammalian silt in my slow evolution into a stronger species.
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Frederick-Douglass Knowles II
What Happened to Nia Wilson?
9/23/74 -10/24/99
An autumn moon shone over the path behind the plaza parking lot. I'd cut through the hollow complex sprinkled in abandoned carts, ascend the hill and slip through your window to unwrap tongue-tied kisses. We knew not why teenage sweethearts produced bitter men crushing beer cans like eye socket bone. We believed '89 would last forever, sedated in gin, til '97 when we parted secret love but kept unseemly close. Investigation remained silent when you floated like driftwood, naked, down the Thames. Kinfolk (still) gossip the plot of an (ex) Love, an unreliable narrator who snatched you out the party. Police-heads derogated him then ruled you a suicide. Every year for two days my eyes swell like autumn dew in September when your birthday melds into mine. A salt-soaked river carves a beaten path past sullen cheeks pooling into a reservoir of what could have been if our Librans would have tipped the scale back toward a moonlit path unveiling an act of injustice that crushed your tongue-tied kisses into stardust.
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Contributors
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John Bargowski is the author of Driving West on the Pulaski Skyway, which won the Bordighera Prize and was published in an English/Italian edition in 2012. By day, Julia Bonadies is an 8th-grade English teacher at Greater Hartford Academy of the Arts Middle, and by night she is a professional writing tutor at Manchester Community College. Her most recent work can be found in Halfway Down the Stairs, NEATE’s The Leaflet, and The Amethyst Review. Courtney Botteron is a quadruplet and one of seven children. She is a recent graduate of Eastern Connecticut State University. Daniel P. Carey Jr. studied English and Poetry at Eastern Connecticut State University. He contributed work to the second issue of Here. Eliza Carey was born and raised in Bozrah, CT. She spent her spare time growing up on the docks of New Haven and the beaches of Niantic. Barbara Crooker is a poetry editor for Italian Americana, and author of nine fulllength books of poetry. The Book of Kells won the Best Poetry Book 2018 Award from Poetry by the Sea. Some Glad Morning was published in 2019 in the Pitt Poetry Series. Sean Thomas Dougherty is the author or editor of eighteen books. He works as a care giver and Med Tech for various disabled populations and lives with the poet Lisa M. Dougherty and their two daughters in Erie, Pennsylvania. More info on Sean can be found at seanthomasdoughertypoet.com Kate Foran is from the Connecticut River Watershed, where she was formed by bluecollar poets, walkers, tobacco pickers, and Catholic Workers. Charles Fort is the author of six books of poetry and ten chapbooks including The Town Clock Burning and We Did Not Fear the Father: New and Selected Poems. Natasha S. Garnett lives in Connecticut and writes fiction and poetry for adults and children. Her poems have appeared in River Walk Journal, Oak Bend Review, The McNeese Review, Dash, and the previous edition of Here: a poetry journal. Margaret Gibson is the author of twelve books of poems, most recently, Not Hearing the Wood Thrush (Finalist, 2019 Poets’ Prize), as well as a memoir, The Prodigal Daughter: Reclaiming an Unfinished Childhood. Her debut poetry volume, Long Walks in the Afternoon, was awarded the Lamont Selection from the Academy of American Poets. She is the Poet Laureate of Connecticut. Maria Mazziotti Gillan, American Book Award recipient for All That Lies Between Us and author of twenty-three books, founded the Poetry Center in Paterson, NJ, is Editor of the Paterson Literary Review, and has been appointed a Bartle Professor and Professor Emerita of English and Creative Writing at Binghamton University-SUNY. Sitara Gnanaguru is an Indian-American writer and a proud alumna of the University of Connecticut. Robert Sparrow Jones received his BFA from Kutztown University and MFA from the Hoffberger School of Painting at Maryland Institute College of Art. His work has been reviewed in Oxford American Magazine, Athens Food and Culture, Seattle Magazine, and Baltimore Magazine, featured in New American Paintings, and exhibited from New York City to Hong Kong. https://robertsparrowjones.com Frederick-Douglass Knowles II is the inaugural Poet Laureate for the City of Hartford
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and author of a poetry collection, BlackRoseCity. He is an Associate Professor of English at Three Rivers Community College. Alex MacConochie's poems have appeared in Tar River Poetry, The Summerset Review, Constellations, and elsewhere. Alec Marsh is a Professor of English at Muhlenberg College and the author of Ezra Pound and Money and Modernity: Pound, Williams, and The Spirit of Jefferson. Paul Martin is the author of two poetry collections, River Scar and Closing Distances, and three award-winning chapbooks. Robert Morgan is an award-winning author of over twenty books of poetry, fiction, history, and biography. His poetry titles include October Crossing, Topsoil Road, and The Strange Attractor: New and Selected Poems. Winner of the James G. Hanes Poetry Prize from the Fellowship of Southern Writers and the Eunice Tietjens Prize from Poetry, he has also received the Southern Book Award for his best-selling novel Gap Creek and the Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His nonfiction book Boone: A Biography was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award and winner of the Kentucky Book Award. A native of western North Carolina, he is a 2010 inductee into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame. Since 1971, he has taught at Cornell University, where is he Kappa Alpha Professor of English. His most recent novel is Chasing the North Star. Steve Myers has published a full-length collection, Memory’s Dog, and two chapbooks. A Pushcart Prize winner, he recently has had poems published in Callaloo, Hotel Amerika, Kestrel, Penn Review, The Southern Review, Stone Canoe, and Tar River Poetry. He heads the poetry track for the MFA in Creative Writing at DeSales University. Julia Paul, an elder law attorney in Manchester, was named that city's first poet laureate in 2014. She is a the author of the poetry collection Shook and the forthcoming Staring Down the Tracks. Rebecca Rubin is an MFA candidate in Creative Writing (Poetry) at Emerson College. Her work appeared in the previous issue of Here. Pegi Deitz Shea teaches in the Creative Writing program at UCONN, is Poet Laureate of Vernon, CT, and has published hundreds of poems, essays and articles for adults as well as numerous books for young readers. Joan Seliger Sidney is a writer of poetry and children's books who lives in Storrs, Connecticut. She has written three books of poetry and her work has appeared in numerous publications and anthologies. Her poems often bear witness to the Holocaust and her experiences with multiple sclerosis. John L. Stanizzi is author of the collections Ecstasy Among Ghosts, Sleepwalking, Dance Against the Wall, After the Bell, Hallelujah Time!, High Tide–Ebb Tide, Four Bits, Chants, and Sundowning. Steve Straight’s books include The Almanac and The Water Carrier. He is a professor of English and the poetry program director at Manchester (CT) Community College. John Surowiecki is the author of five books of poetry and seven chapbooks, including Missing Persons. He has received the Poetry Foundation Pegasus Award for verse drama, the Nimrod Pablo Neruda Prize, the Washington Prize, and a Connecticut Poetry Fellowship. His Pie Man won the 2017 Nilson Prize for a First Novel. Kelly Talbot has edited books and digital content for more than twenty years for Wiley, Macmillan, Oxford, O’Reilly, Pearson Education, and other publishers. He divides his time between Timisoara, Romania, and Indianapolis, Indiana. Here: a poetry journal
