z
Passager
Reading
June 12, 2013 at the
Pratt
copyright Š 2013 by Passager. All rights reserved. Designed by Pantea Tofangchi Edited by Saralyn Lyons
z On a gorgeous June evening in Baltimore, Kendra Kopelke and Mary Azrael invited their favorite local authors to read poems in the Enoch Pratt Free Library Central Branch. What began as a celebration of Hot Flash Sonnets author Moira Egan quickly became a real Passager party! Kendra and Mary are very grateful to the readers who participated and to those who made it out to show their support. Download the podcast to follow along with the reading!
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Shirley J. Brewer
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Steve Matanle
11 Marianna Busching 12 Jim Smith
Song of Limburger Mysteries of the Night We Are Eating Us Up Life in Prison
14 Elisavietta Ritchie Tiger Upstairs on Connecticut Avenue 17 Rossme Taylor Goblin Story 20 Carol Peck 21 24 26 30 32 35 37 40 41
Now, Voyager Matthew Petti Sestina Pantea Tofangchi Do Bombs Visit All the Floors? MiMi Zannino Great-Grandmother Jenny Ciattei Oh My God; She is Serious Sylvia Fischbach-Braden Imprecation Art Cohen The Myth Lennett Nef’faahtiti Myrick My Mother Gave Me Music Pat Valdata Her General Theory of Relativity Ellen Hartley Dilemma
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Ann Kolakowski
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Joseph Hann
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Deborah Arnold
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Kathy Mangan
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Christine Higgins
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Clarinda Harriss
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Joyce La Mers
Guru Toll Free Continental Divide Fugue for a Student The Fortune Seven Veil Song Gumming Up the Future
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z Shirley J. Brewer, Song of Limburger Honorable Mention 2013, Issue 55
Stinky cheese curdled my childhood. On Thursdays—rehearsal nights—my dad prepared snacks in our kitchen for his pals at the Liederkranz Choral Society. My siblings and I retreated to the attic, trailed by the appalling scent of Limburger. It pummeled our noses, lingered for hours like a rancid horror flick. How could sweet music radiate from vocal cords fouled by cheese? Years later, at my dad’s funeral, his Liederkranz buddies in dark blue suits stood three-deep in front of the altar, singing their farewells—notes inscribed in the lining of their hearts. Harmony filled the air. I thought I smelled vanilla, bakery bread, Dad’s aftershave, Limburger. Music, this fierce fragrance, a melody strong in the absence of light.
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z Steve Matanle, Mysteries of the Night I love the mysteries of the night, the mystery of sleeping houses, their dreams emblazoned beneath old wallpaper, I love the mystery of shadows scattered on the ground as if the trees had been undressed by the moon, and the blossoming cherry tree like a bride sipping wine moments before the wedding,
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I love the mystery of things I can’t see, the torque of roots, writhing and thrusting in the dark ground, and the harpstrings of starlight, the wind like the thoughts of someone unable to sleep, the mystery of the highway droning, the silvery sound of driving. I love the mystery
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of my heart, like a red horse. I love the mystery of night’s vanishings, the moon sinking under the weight of its own light, the last star left in the sky like a kiss that wants only to last forever, darkness awaiting the soft flirtatious light of dawn.
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zMarianna Busching, We Are Eating Us Up Every fish is the shape of a mouth, every bird has succulent thighs. Sweet oily flesh lies on beds of dill and deep gouts of rock blood yield to the drill or smoke in black lakes. Our lungs are beaded with dark specks. You can see the air like pale powdered cocoa afloat; cities groan upward through it. Stars are drowned in streetlights, remote. The seas grow quietly vacant, sidewalks crush the corn. Which generation will be the last to be born? We are eating us up.
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zJim Smith, Life in Prison Is this a great country or what? Look at this terrific meal and all I had to do was kill someone. Said the long-time resident of the Roxbury Correctional Institution as he dug into his lunch: turk/ham, soggy beans, white bread, same as the meal last night. What happened was I found my wife in bed with some young stud and I proceeded to shoot him dead. I accept the consequences, been here more than 32 years. Back in the day he was a soldier, did his duty for this great country, killed anything that moved
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when that sort of thing was condoned. Now he walks with a limp, keeps the diabetes under control. Hard to believe but my wife said she wouldn’t divorce me. In fact, she still writes every month. She tells me that she loves me. And the writer of those letters sits alone at her kitchen table, eating her same old lunch, and passively serves her sentence: life in prison, no chance of parole.
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zElisavietta Ritchie, Tiger Upstairs on Connecticut Avenue for Taj, at Tai Chi
“He is crouching here, pat him.” We swirl our intricate patterns over invisible white-tufted ears. Any feline leaps at fluttering hands for his diversion and ours, aware fingers aren’t genuine butterflies. My mind flutters back to orange-and‑ brown butterflies clustered on mud by the jungle river in Taman Negara. Nights, a Malay tiger encircled our hut, might have leapt through windows not screened, shutters imperfectly hinged, One swipe of his paw could rip the mosquito netting over our bunks— Every morning we found tiger prints.
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Our palms stroke air, aware this tiger could snatch our fingers, five at a bite. Taj switches venues. “Imagine we’re now in a cell, fire in the pit, a pot of water is boiling, vapor—” “Where’s the tiger?” I ask. “Forget the tiger,” he says. You can’t just dismiss a tiger. The tiger is here, in the steam, grooms orange-black-white fur, cleans his whiskers, claws, teeth. He tips the pot. The water cools. His tongue furls to a funnel, laps— Belly-up, he rolls in the puddle. Tigers don’t mind being wet: one paddled behind our raft as we poled that brown river.
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Hard to focus on ritual patterns, a tiger patrolling the premises. I recall that envoy from Okinawa nabbed as a spy in China, thrown in a cell with a tiger unfed a week. Guards peered through the bars stunned to observe their captive perform Tai Chi while the tiger watched, soon fell asleep. The prisoner shared rations of rice and tea with the beast, practiced his martial dances. At week’s end they released him. His tiger? Your tiger trails me down the stairs to the avenue, the whole way home, leaves prints on my Ningxia carpet, orange-and-black hairs on my bed.
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zRossme Taylor, Goblin Story There once was a lonely goblin, With a large and knobbly nose, Who said, “The wind does puzzle me! Can any other goblin see Where the wind goes? And would he please tell me?” “From my little home in the hollow bole of the old oak tree, I’ve tried and tried to follow The wind as it runs with a whistle, A boisterous laugh and a whistle, A roistering rush and a whistle, But it will not wait for me.” “P’rhaps some night, deep in winter, When I’m snug in my forest house, And the snowflakes swoop like crazy owls
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Through tangled roots and rabbit holes And the tiny pines wear copes and cowls Of snow, and beads of ice— “I will hear a voice in my chimney crying, all faint and thin— ‘Oh, lonely goblin with knobbly nose, Would you learn at last where the old wind goes? I am cold, so cold, and I have no clothes—’ And I’ll say, “Poor wind, come in!” “Then the wind shall sit by my fireside, And toast his tired toes; And he will tell me rollicking tales Of tropical ports and ocean gales, And islands Where only the wide wind sails—
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“And I shall never be lonely again, For he’ll tell me to follow my knobbly nose, My very own nose, wherever it goes, Come calm or storm, Come rain, come snows, And always I’ll know Where the wise wind goes— “But now, goodbye! For my nose and I Are away with the wind to the wonderful World Where the Wind Blows!”
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zCarol Peck, Now, Voyager Honorable Mention 2013, Issue 55
Blazing through the darkness, set to probe The singing planets and deep space, you hold, Within your loaded capsule, time out of mind: Exuberance bound up in spiral gold; Your vector thrusts you toward infinity, Safely past the blackest holes in space; Your victory: survive, endure and find Receivers for this light from the human race; Built to last at least one million years, You push beyond the Music of the Spheres. But if you should explode, a brilliant shower Setting those magnetic pulses free, That golden song of joy will feather out, Spiral past each brimming galaxy, Float serene among the dusty stars, And then soar high on pure electric wings To bend around the wrinkled edge of time, Back to the Mind from which all music springs, Charging all the universe unbound With ringing holy silence, wholly sound.
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zMatthew Petti, Sestina Honorable Mention 2013, Issue 55
When you finally figure it out, keep your dark wisdom silent so she won’t guess which mountain it’s hidden behind. Don’t untie the knot, but worry it with your fingers – come to know its tight twist. She won’t realize her tells – the hair twist, the brief, shifting glances, the running out when her cell phone rings – fingers itching to answer are silent later as she fixes the knot in your tie; church becomes a mountain of hypocrisy. Driving down the mountain, the road home’s familiar twist feels strange – it does not seem to lead you in or out. Behind the wheel you’re silent as she twists the ring on her finger.
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Thinking has your throat in its fingers; you want to vomit this mountain of knowing and become as dumb as her silence. But every marriage has its twist: A young woman finds you out, she stings, and her spidery arms knot your grief into her web; green eyes knot with yours as she touches with light fingers the wick and winks the candle out. Sex, she says, is your glad mountain – you slide, dip, twist until sated, and both your smiles are silent as Cheshire Cats are silent. You don’t want to unspool this knot – you inhabit a lie carelessly twisted by newly deceiving fingers. No one’s prepared you for this mountain’s grave arrangement with no simple way out.
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And once silence has secured its fingers in the knot of your longing, this mountain of twisted connection will never see itself out.
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zPantea Tofangchi, Do Bombs Visit All the Floors? We lived on the second floor (eye level with the tops of acacia trees) sometimes we would go to the basement (close to the roots) when we would hear the red siren somehow it felt safer there at least for a while my dad believed it made no difference in our apartment
(the life of many flowering acacias have grown inside me like a fear that grew inside one’s bone)
one of our neighbors in one of our bomb expecting gatherings in the basement
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mentioned that she always feared being buried alive if we were hit and I was a mockingbird mimicking only everybody else’s fear being buried alive, started my “I want to die in my own room” campaign my friend at school hated it too they lived in a very tall high-rise (too far from any tree) traveling all the way to the basement, often barefoot and in the middle of the night in candlelight with no elevator due to the power outage was no fun for a little girl
(do the trees have memory? do they remember?)
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zMiMi Zannino, Great-Grandmother for Maria Santa Alcarese Barranco, 1890-1970
Nonna, I stared by your deathbed in an old Guildford home built stone upon stone by the hands of a mason. Yours, like the fragile bones of a mourning dove’s wing, rested in mine, twelve-years-old, as Mother sat near, cradling her eighth infant, Domenico, named after your husband, a mustachioed Sicilian barber.
You passed on the story, fresh with each telling, of how the men carried a plaster saint on their shoulders through the streets of Cefalu. How his eyes reached out to yours with such knowing that he couldn’t wait for the procession to be over
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to rush home and quiz his mama about the girl who had watched from the wrought-iron balcony.
At nineteen, you wore a feather-swept hat that bade the Old Country farewell from a ship crossing the Atlantic, your hope chest filled with hand-sewn lace linens, your new husband by your side.
I did not understand the irony then, my tiny brother bearing the name of the man who brought you to Baltimore in 1909. The same angel who carried this newborn in would circle back out of this realm with you in its sure grasp, traveling toward yet a new unknown. I only knew what I saw—the transition from flesh to
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ash—your cheeks no longer circled with rose-petal rouge, your lips no longer bowed in holly berry lipstick. Instead, a withered smile was all and a shrunken frame, frail as a fossil. Decades after your funeral, I discovered childhood poems I’d written for you, rhymes inspired by backyard sightings of fleeting cardinals and wide-eyed rabbits— still there in a box on the top shelf of the playroom closet—in the same sanctuary where I spent weekends visiting you, holding conversations with doll babies, calling them by American names— Sean, Pamela, Shannon. Nonna, I couldn’t have known what to say when I looked at you, frozen as a plaster icon
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in the casket. I couldn’t have known that the praise you gave in English, broken and sweet as brittle candy, would be a prized heirloom resonating through my lifetime. Now, with a vision that spans homelands, this legacy is all that is left: the gift of sight and insight. I am wearing your eyes— I never take them off.
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zJenny Ciattei, Oh My God; She is Serious Sharp elbow! Heads up from the iced tea and lawn, the glass door swings open, invites everyone. A ring dance, a blessing, a twirl of good cheer. See now, coming forward from kitchen and parlor: It’s clever, transcending its genre—its gender! You will love it and honor it, cherish forever this one like the ones you remember, but smaller, cuter and sweeter, much nicer, petite-er, the bite-size of meat that will never taste vulgar. With modesty, nursery, nunnery time— the Barbie Barbarian’s trying to rhyme. Now into the shadow she’s turning her head. She is serious. She will be one to regard, hanging sheet after sheet on a line in the yard laundered clean of the writing once clear on the wall—
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something small as a doll shoe, once artfully lost in a tangled-up carpet of haves and have-nots, The secret you won’t torture out with a rack: this serious thing. When the world turns its back, it is small as a virus, as quiet as time, concealed like a pistol in sensible purses, acquiring a pulse of their own, are these verses, divorced and unmannered, a chaos of dreaming, born sudden and knowing, with blood, and with screaming.
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zSylvia Fischbach-Braden, Imprecation
Honorable Mention 2013, Issue 55
Death, you thief, you villain you tore from me the ones who cared for me leaving me alone with my proximal mate and distant daughter my boxes of photos and my grandmother's trunk from India May you choke and drown eternally in the rivers of India I'll toast you on a spit, you villain who shredded child photos of my sister and me You'll never lay your wormy hands on the curved body of my daughter I'll gut you with a dull knife if you try to touch my mate I'll come after you with an army of barbarians and my mate skilled in the military arts of the hills of India I'll pickle you in lime before I let you probe my daughter's tender heart, grab her thin fingers, cruel villain
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look instead on me I'll slash your eyes with the serrated knives of my photos Beast, unmoved by family photos you'll never have a mate who loves unlucky you like mine loves me. I'll drive you to the ends of India, my mother's first harbor, and grill you, villain, like a stinking mango. You'll never know the sweet scent of my daughter. God-up-there, reclining on Your radiant throne: will You protect my daughter? I have no reason to believe so. I'd rather worship photos. If You made all, You made the villain who shadows my mate. My mother, trained by missionary parents in India said bedtime prayers -- not me!
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Death, get the hell away from me. You can't have my daughter. By all the gods in India, the goods inside my trunk, the broad back of my mate, I swear I'll see you drip in melted threads, you cheesecloth villain. Villain, are you part of me? How can I preserve my aging mate, rescue my endangered daughter? Wet photos from the British Raj float home in a trunk to India.
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zArt Cohen, The Myth I. His sole task is to roll the rock up to the top of the high hill this is first, all else must wait this focus repeated eternally, a punishment worthy of hell. II. Yet Sisyphus smiles, content about the several lives he has lived
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sporting with Death fooling him well returning from Hades to earthly pleasures, a unique reprieve from the Devil's clutch. III. What others lament as awful frustration propels him upward behind his boulder our favorite workaholic forever toiling on, who on the way back down stays sane by doing the absurd work of chiseling self from Chaos.
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zLennett Nef’faahtiti Myrick, My Mother Gave Me Music Initially the drum, the bridge between two worlds, her womb and the one waiting to receive me with extended hands. She would sing me lullabies learned from her mother who learned them from her mother who learned them from church, play me 45s on the box with little colored disks that made the Platters and the Drifters fit around the spinning sound of doo-wops, and albums on the new hi-fi that she would buy to teach me jazz by sight and sound the names and notes of Ramsey’s wading, Nancy’s guessing Cannonball’s Mercy, Ray’s gotta woman; and the only white woman in the stacks made me smile inside whenever she sang about People.
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She would pretty me up with ribbons and bows and take me to the dinner shows, first at a club called Venus where I first saw a man on silver crutches and wondered if he was a prince or a duke ‘cause they called him “Sir Walter Jackson,” and nobody ate when he sang. Later downtown at the Playboy Club, we would laugh at all the bunny butts switchin’ around as Lionel Hampton made these sounds I never heard before on the xylophone/chimes (not like they taught us in school), and I learned from Billy Eckstein how different music could feel when you listened with your eyes closed. Down the road she would turn me onto
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radio stations playing serious jazz, late night TV music shows, news of who was coming to town, and the latest addition to her CD collection, all the while listening for what was good about folk like Seal, Yoni, Bonnie Rait, and George Michael’s latest, blowing me away every time with her perfect sense of perception. But that was all to come. You see, my mother gave me music, initially the drum, her heart to which I cling now listening for her breathing me a wind song Sweetie, don’t cry as the doctor stands with extended hands waiting to weigh me in at birth.
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zPat Valdata, Her General Theory of Relativity He’s watching Star Trek again, that episode where Einstein, Newton, and Hawking play poker with Data. He’s eating a tomato, lets its sweet flesh compress between his teeth, squirt juice down his stubble. But zoom in a couple orders of magnitude and there is no tomato, no he, just space and atoms. You have to dive deep into the nucleus to find any charm at all. It’s all related, generally speaking, space and tomatoes and twenty-five years; only the weak force of gravity keeping them together. If time travel were possible, would she take it all back to the evening he proposed? There was no tomato then, no Data. On days she thinks time runs thixotropic like ketchup in the bottle she needs to shake up, she knows it’s more: the way shifting a single electron from an atom of friable metal to an atom of poisonous gas creates the sodium chloride without which they would die. Like salt, they can’t exist alone. To split them up would take more energy than the universe can spare.
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zEllen Hartley, Dilemma Does my life have direction? What is direction? Do I have a purpose? Is purpose direction? Is direction linear? Is linear 2-dimentional therefore without depth? Can direction be linear yet deep? Am I superficial? Why does this question bother me? (Why am I always asking questions?) I feel stuck mired, rooted BUT wait Doesn’t rooted imply stability & permanence? If a rolling stone gathers no moss Is it therefore stable and permanent? Is that a good thing? Who wants to be mired in moss?
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If the stone keeps rolling it won’t be mired in moss on the other hand it won’t be stable and permanent. I’m baffled. If I give the wrong interpretation mightn’t I be adjudged psychotic and get mired in a straitjacket? Maybe I’d better stop asking so many questions.
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zAnn Kolakowski, Guru
Honorable Mention 2013, Issue 55
You greet me at the door each night with jumps and pirouettes; such happiness ignores the leash. Your tail, in playful Morse Code thumps the gospel of agape love. (I’m sure that’s what you mean.) Had I a tail to shake as well, I would in kind return your praise. Instead, each dawn I bow to you and take the yoga pose that bears your name – first, raise my rump, extend my knees and elbows straight; then clear my mind of every earthly woe. (This rush of blood – a path to Heaven’s gate?) Inhale; perspective shifts. It’s true, you know, that dog reversed invokes a higher form. So bless me, humble master. Keep me warm.
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zJoseph Hann, Toll Free
Honorable Mention 2013, Issue 55
And suddenly the urge came over me to speak into the disconnected telephone to people long gone, dead friends whom I still owed words and to myself who I still owed voice. I dialed 1-800-NOW-HERE, then toggled to 1-800-NOW-GONE. It was easy and everyone was in. No minutes were taken, ghost talk is far too personal. I offered red roses and dark chocolate, but they said: “No, no, save your money.” “Better yet, get yourself something nice instead.” That’s just the way they are. 1-800-JOE-HANN/ 1-800-THE-POET
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zDeborah Arnold, Continental Divide
Honorable Mention 2013, Issue 55
I had traveled 2,000 miles to put a little distance between myself and grief, to find the Continental Divide – a contour of arrows winding like a snake skin across the map anchored to the passenger’s seat with a tire iron and a plastic change purse. I expected to see a billboard announce the rift that washed rivers East or West, streaming questions in neon orange and bright blue flashes proclaiming Christ is the Answer. Baptized a Methodist, I’d never heard Jesus say anything
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a tornado couldn’t grind into splinters, a wildfire burn to ash, an ocean wave drown. Perhaps snakes had the answers in primal secrets rendered holy, left inside the hollow skin they shed. I stopped between the slant of gravel and grass, waiting to feel the earth give, waiting to stretch my body into the skin of that snake and listen for the cold lean truth.
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zKathy Mangan, Fugue for a Student Last evening at dinner the Korean composer taught me the word in his language that means yes, but implies to the listener, no, and this morning my mind thumbs its syllables like the jade touchstone my parents once send me from San Francisco: Kusseiyo:...until its lilt of uncertainty creates a consoling music... that's so/no...perhaps/no, letting you slip between its notes and into my thoughts the way you skittered into my office so flustered that April day, flushed and thumping against one thigh the black case of your piccolo, and unleashed an arpeggio of fears:
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failed exams, missing credits-a high-pitched string of fanciful woe I couldn't silence or soothe. You hovered, weeks shy of commencement. How could any of us know you paused in the stalled measure of every tongue's stark question: no or yes, good-bye or hello-that two nights later you would drive directionless for hours until you turned down an exit ramp clearly marked NO ENTRANCE and steered among the bleat of horns until you picked out the darkness you'd been seeking in a pair of oncoming low beams. You pressed hard the accelerator pad like a key to the deeper octaves-having resolved to go.
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zChristine Higgins, The Fortune One day you will rise up from your kitchen chair and declare yourself. Your hands will fly around your head like wild birds. Your mother’s first thought will be to protect herself. Nothing you say will undo the folding of her arms against you. You will leave this house with your fortune: Don’t bother coming back. It won’t be a moment of triumph like first sex where you admire your body performing in a new way, the sound of one heart beating then two is distinct.
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The small muscles in your arms will ache from the fists you made and used against yourself. Think of it as afterbirth. Consider yourself the fool in the tarot deck, standing on the precipice, having a choice. I don’t mean to frighten you. It won’t be a bad life. It will be a life made possible.
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zClarinda Harriss, Seven Veil Song If I could shimmy like my sister Sal o me o my wouldn't that be swell I'd peel whatever you had an eye for and you'd gimme gimme what I cry for Then I'd roast your head on the white hot moon and I'd eat your brains with a silver spoon.
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zJoyce La Mers, Gumming Up the Future
2013 Passager Poet, Issue 55
When you get very old you become aware of impending doom. Which moment will be your last? Each time you get a cold, or a new ache, or have some minor accident, you wonder: is this it? and you start worrying about all the things undone. It’s a time for concern about poorly chosen underwear, whether your feet are clean enough for the toe tag, and what the coroner will think of that last meal you ate. You worry about letters you never wrote and others you never burned. You think of all the experiences that will die with you, especially those nobody knows about.
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What a novel you could write! Why haven’t you been making notes? If you survive this crisis, you will stop wasting time and get started. Tomorrow, for sure.