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Archive for September, 2023

NCPS @ NCMA

Posted in Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 29, 2023| 13 Comments »

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[with poems by Jim Zola, Rhett Trull, Celisa Steele, Nancy Martin-Young,
Khalisa Rae, Joanie McLean
and a special feature by Felicia van Bork and ampydoo]
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Learning to Live
 . 
For years I walked out and heard
rustling in the rhododendron
that blooms each spring and paper-mâchés
the patio with white petals.
 . 
Yet I’ve never seen wings or nest
or bolt of bird such as one might reason.
Just the flurried sound, a semaphore
of leaves and branch, that could be finch
 . 
or swallow, but isn’t.
Not coincidence, I’m convinced,
this signal more subtle than lightning
is grammar for my soul,
 . 
an insistence that I must find
a way to live among the small things
with bones like air and hearts
like small sledgehammers.
 . 
Jim Zola, winner of the 2023 Lena Shull Book Award of the NC Poetry Society for his manuscript It’s the Unremarkable that Will Last, which will be published by Redhawk Press. Learning to Live originally appeared in Rat’s Ass Review.
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Night before last Linda opened the final frontier of jigsaws. Galactically difficult, broad swaths of monochromatic nebulae, the merest quantum fluctuation in individual shapes – I fear that to complete this one I may have to boldly go where no one has gone before.
 . 
I almost give up before I even finish the border, its infinite deep unvarying black. Be logical here, Bill! I array the pieces by subtle color variation, columns and rows, and turn on all the lamps in the room. Still only cold inhospitable vacuum. Suddenly from the depth of blank stare I discover my fingers picking up pieces and fitting them together, six, then eight, little cellules of life spontaneously generating until logic again reaches in and shuts me down.
 . 
Is this how creativity works? A little bit Spock – analyzing patterns and calculating probabilities. A bit more Kirk – impulse, hunch, release to the flow of the subliminal. A prompt, a theme, a roadmap, all good – semper paratus – but I know for myself that the most likely moment for a line to leap up and embrace me is when I’m in free fall in love with a poem I’m reading. Creativity perches just at the periphery longing to show me the piece that will fit, the one I’ve been looking all along.
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❦
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Felicia van Bork and Alan Michael Parker offer to tickle that little perching creature until you feel its firebreath in your ear. Draw a portrait without looking at the page or lifting your pen. Write five things you would never do and pick the most interesting. The two multi-creatives led The Best Creativity Workshop Ever at NC Poetry Society’s September 16 meeting at the NC Museum of Art in Raleigh. Felicia describes her life as a love affair with art. AMP describes his next book as a collection of flash fiction and Bingo cards. And when I asked if they would contribute to this feature on NCPS @ NCMA, I should have expected that they would send something unexpected.
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Drawing Exercise No. 30
 . 
We come in peace.
We are the Are
Me.
Do not be a
Fraid.
Draw with us.
Together we take up
charcoal
and
Touch
the wall up high
Hi!
high as we can.
We draw down with force.
Use more force.
We step back we step forward.
We connect the vertical lines by drawing
Strong
horizontal strokes
again
again
Until we have made a fence a wall
To shelter us from the Fraids
Who will not cannot join the Are
Me.
Trace the outline of the person next to you.
Look, that outline is visible through the fence
That is a Fraid.
Now with your eraser erase the Fraid.
It won’t erase yes it smears.
It becomes more present yes the more we erase it.
Now it is inside the fence with us.
All the Fraids are inside with us.
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Felicia van Bork @draw_felicia_draw
 . 
 . Alan Michael Parker @ampydoo
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Each September the North Carolina Poetry Society meets to feature readings by winners of the year’s most competitive contests. This year for the first time NCPS has held this meeting at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, with a morning of readings, the afternoon workshop, and an open air “pop-up” mic-less open mic hosted by Regina Garcia and Caren Stuart.
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The 2023 Lena M. Shull Book Award for an unpublished manuscript from a North Carolina poet (coordinator Sherry Thrasher) goes to Jim Zola for his collection It’s the Unremarkable that Will Last; finalists are Nancy Martin-Young and Joanie McLean.      INFO
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The Brockman-Campbell Book Contest is for the best volume of poetry published by a native or resident of NC in the previous year (coordinator Preston Martin); the 2023 winner is Joseph Bathanti for Light at the Seam, with finalists Eric Nelson for Horse Not Zebra and Katherine Soniat for Polishing the Glass Storm.      INFO
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The Susan Laughter Meyers Poetry Fellowship (coordinator Steve Cushman) provides an honorarium and a week’s residency at Weymouth Center for the Arts and Humanities. The 2023 winner is Rhett Iseman Trull of Greensboro, with finalists Khalisa Rae, Celisa Steele, Anne Myles, and RK Fauth.      INFO
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The Randall Jarrell Poetry Competition is sponsored by the North Carolina Writer’s Network coordinated by Terry L. Kennedy. Winning entries are published in storySouth and will be available to read there in the coming months. The 2023 winner is Joshua Martin, with finalists Maria Rouphail and Melinda Thomsen.      INFO
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This is the first year for the Jaki Shelton Green Performance Poetry Prize, co-sponsored by NCPS and North Carolina Literary Review at East Carolina University (coordinator Devra Thomas). Winners’ videos will be posted online; the 2023 winner is Allan Wolf, with finalists Michael Loderstedt, Onyx Bradley, and Janet Ford.      INFO
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❦ ❦ ❦
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The Stars Align Themselves in Ancient Sisterhoods of Light
 . 
And Jade and I sat on the hood of her car
and didn’t mind the rain, the sun
that ticked on anyway, the sun would not go out.
And Megan held my hair back.
And Molly taught me cigarettes. And Sarah
kept her promise not to tell. And Riley told.
And Coach chased me down—night
we lost the playoffs and I’d planned
to kill myself, out the bus emergency door, took off
for the roof downtown—and she carried me to
Brittney’s and Brittney leant me dry clothes, underwear and all,
and let me sleep beside her, in the morning
bought us donuts, even though
I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep.
And sometimes it was as if there were
a party thrown to save me, devout
committees formed, tasked
with just that job. And
 . 
sometimes there was no one
 . 
but wind off the ocean, the evening
all laid out before me like bedclothes,
and even the gleam in the eye of the wren
and the sunrise all red-dressed and boasting and once
there was this Great Dane, Charlie,
who knew—somehow he knew—
on my lap the full-grown anchor of his body, head
to my shoulder, world I didn’t want
to want to leave.
 . 
And Caleb sewed the captain star
I’d ripped from my letter jacket and
kissed me when I needed to be kissed, Bridge
of Sighs and all of Venice incandescent, inviting me
to drown. And kissing didn’t save me. And anything
might save me. And Karen understood.
And Joy did not. And Lauren grew delphinium,
she said, just for me. And Jenny—when the light spiked
sharp and I forgot the way to breathe—
held me for an hour
outside the party, outside everybody else’s ease
and laughter. And Corey found me in the field.
Her hair like smoke and ribbons. We didn’t need
 . 
to speak or touch, just watched the sky
until the bats delivered twilight. And Eli
deemed my pain divine and let me see
above his bed where he’d drawn a map of his
in a fever of blue ink after watching Fight Club, and did not
take my clothes off, even though he could.
And Brittney brought me everywhere and Brittney
kept me in her Jeep and Brittney did the talking
when I had no words.
 . 
And Nicky gave her lucky coin and Chris
the flannel off his back right after class, right
when I said I loved it. And Janelle at two a.m.,
no hesitation, let me in and shared the Irish whiskey
she’d been saving, lit us candles, until
we were the last, we were sure, awake alive.
And Leah steered us into safety, let me rest
across the back seat, Indigo Girls and yes,
I’m on fire, I’m on fire through the years.
 . 
And Jade couldn’t take it anymore
and turned away. And Heather sent an actual
disinvitation, her stationary tinged the palest pink,
but Lizzie patched me up
in the back of the cathedral and kept
her hand on me all night, even in her sleep.
And Holden stayed past visiting hours
and Vanessa, the night nurse, let him. And
under the oak tree, Stephanie
told me all her secrets.
 . 
And Brittney came each time I called,
even though her date, even though her finals, even though
I take and take and make myself the center
of each story. And Greta wrote me songs
and Katie said crawl in and
Mary did my portrait as a shadow.
And Adrienne pinned me down,
fiercest hug until I promised
not to jump. I didn’t jump. I didn’t
swallow the whole bottle. I threw out
the razor blade, even though I hid it first awhile
and touched it sometimes like a lover.
I’m lucky. And that’s all. I’m lucky
I am loved.
 . 
Rhett Trull, winner of the 2023 Susan Laughter Meyers Poetry Fellowship. Originally published in Litmosphere 2023 of Charlotte Lit.
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❦ ❦ ❦
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The Minister of Loneliness
 . 
has no children of her own to entrust
to an aproned au pair, no quick kisses
as she leaves each morning for work. And she
has no spouse who might grow melancholy
like temperamental orchids in the vaulted halls
of the silent house, who might open cupboards, search
neat rows of goods for a jar—just one—graced
with his wife’s precise fingerprints. And she has no
friends waiting for her call, no waggling dog
waiting to be fed. No, she was appointed
to this post because she could give everything
to this Ministry, prepared by the paper
she wrote in college—eons ago—on the geology
of loneliness that proves it doesn’t crumble
like sandstone, isn’t fissile as shale. No,
it’s smooth, she showed, and cold as polished
marble. The kind that won’t be carved into the face
of someone beloved. The kind that remains
blank and empty and clean
as counters in a kitchen where no one ever cooks.
 . 
Celisa Steele, finalist for the 2023 Susan Laughter Meyers Poetry Fellowship. Originally appeared in Southern Poetry Review.
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❦ ❦ ❦
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A Suitable Place
Oakwood Cemetery, Raleigh, North Carolina
 . 
I: Pick Up the Wind Phone
First, choose to wander a path with the dead
through the granite gate, past the stone bridge.
There are no signs to point the way.
 . 
Scan the landscape until you notice it, study
how it stands, nearly hidden in a hollow
downhill from the Gothic House of Memory:
a spare wooden booth, its rotary phone
discreetly placed for the disconnected.
 . 
Lift your hand to hold the heavy receiver.
Take a breath and dial the old exchange—
the one made up of words and numbers,
the one you still remember from a time
long before cell phones and contact lists.
 . 
Say hello. Speak their names. Then wait.
Share the news about the house or the baby
or the oak tree that fell in last week’s storm.
Ask forgiveness. Listen for the wind to answer
you, who are left behind, who seek an open line.
 . 
II: Scan the Landscape
Deep shade, open lanes, no traffic,
perfect for power-walking past cool stones
and twisted angels or treading up the hill
of Gettysburg dead, mostly Confederates
come home at last, but six who wore blue
unresting, out of place, as I am.
 . 
Downhill, a doe browses,
tearing faded roses from a funeral wreath.
Twin headstones pop from too-green grass,
names and birthdates freshly carved,
death dates empty, blank and patient.
Most graves are full, but life lingers
on the landscape’s edges.
 . 
While newer graveyards raze markers
to the ground, Oakwood’s monuments tower.
Workers wield weed-whackers daily,
keeping grass at bay. A toy truck,
a mini bottle of Jack—mementos left behind
on plots prove to the living that the dead lived too.
 . 
Today only I
stand in the echoing House of Memory
remembering my father, hacking his last.
His ashes kill time in my sister’s hutch.
Would he rest easy here beneath the oaks?
 . 
I’m a transplanted Yankee
trying to live long,
but in the end
I think I’d like it here
near these protruding stones
that someone has to rake around.
I’d like to have my daughter trace
my name with her finger, leave
a bottle of Malbec and two glasses.
 . 
Nancy Martin-Young, finalist for the 2023 Lena Shull Book Award. This poem first published in Flying South, 2023
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Circus Acts: No More Black Girl Magic
 . 
Black woman,
 . 
This world will make you circus,
freak show, tightrope walker,
contort your name from Saartjie
to “Sara Bartman,”
 . 
Hottentot Venus—stage performer.
Look, how they abracadabra the
royal exploitation of your form.
 . 
Watch them dissect your broad
bottom saw you into science experiment.
 . 
Call your mending—magic
your root balm and salve a work
of the devil–sorcery. Go out the trap
door, come back in the body
of Beyoncé—prized possession,
they will spit-shine the stage for you again.
What a spectacular woman—
 . 
two-headed and omnipresent
one foot here, one foot in Houdini-state.
Your magic trick is: “Look at all the wonder
I can do with two hands and twenty-four hours.”
When people say, “That’s Black Girl Magic.”
say, “I have no magic for you. I make meals
 . 
from crumbs, cast demons with just
my tongue, envision possibility
from potential.” That makes me
 . 
scientist, inventor, chemist—
spiritual being. Tell them this is
 . 
not super, this is survival.
When they call you hero,
when they hand you the cape anyway,
ask, “Haven’t I carried enough?”
 . 
When they call your strength otherworldly,
say, it is Venus rising
within me, nothing more.
 . 
Khalisa Rae, finalist for the 2023 Susan Laughter Meyers Poetry Fellowship. This poem is from her debut collection, Ghost in a Black Girl’s Throat (Red Hen Press 2021).
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Into My Field
 . 
Pete the old bay horse
called to me this morning
 . 
not so that I could hear
but so that I could not look away
 . 
he stood apart from the others
as an old horse will
 . 
his ribs showed a bit
as an old horse’s will
 . 
his russet face
with the white blaze
 . 
held so still– arrested while grazing
held my gaze without effort
 . 
and his black mane so lush
so thoroughly tossed
 . 
gave him a touch of wild
that wild that gathers these days
 . 
these fall days – translucent days
days of transubstantiation
 . 
all those things
in your hands and your lap
 . 
put them away
come into my field
 . 
and stay this time
till you are cold and hungry
 . 
and even then
stay
 . 
Joanie Mclean, finalist for the 2023 Lena Shull Book Award. Her manuscript, Like Wind Into Air, received honorable mention and has been accepted for publication with Redhawk Press.
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Square Foot

Posted in Imagery on September 22, 2023| 4 Comments »

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[with 5 poems by Bradley Strahan]
 . 
Repeatable Pleasures
 . 
A lawn of families;
beach house, beach clothes,
each evening a glissando
of guitar pulling down the sun.
 . 
Down to the sea we run,
the gulls waving to us;
this year, next year,
our interchangeable faces.
 . 
Our interchangeable places:
flashy beach house,
seaworn motel, not one
here just two decades ago.
 . 
Here until the next big blow
takes it all back,
a wavebeat,
between two stormfronts.
 . 
Still we hope for those scents
of another summer, salt tang
and iced coffee; the clang of horseshoes
and one more beer, one more wave to ride.
 . 
Yes, here’s to that roller-coaster ride,
another year with a son
growing, growing
toward his own summer time.
 . 
Maybe that’s why we like rhyme,
like rock and roll, that repeat
and repeat; simple
pleasures you can count on:
 . 
Wet bathing suits that hang on
a line of laughter,
outboard motors in a chorus
that rides the surf of a backbeat.
 . 
Bradley R. Strahan
from This Art of Losing, BrickHouse Books, Baltimore, MD; © 2011
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❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
One hundred sixty-one square foot off-grid UK vacation rental: I’m picturing myself there while I wait here in reception for the endodontist to drill my father’s molar. By my eyeball reckoning, this space I occupy is 10 times that cabin, 1601 square feet. Here there’s free wifi to be slurped up from the Eye Center next suite over; here 80’s soft rock continuum; here high pitched whines through poorly muffled walls, your free hearing test while you wait.
 . 
There near the cabin birds sing from bushes while the woman wheels her gear and provisions down the trail in a child’s red wagon. Through the door, walls mostly windows, narrow mattress in a loft, ingenious shelving. No electric, no phone. What would I pack? Fresh ground, not instant, and my self-contained backpacking filter? Titanium 1 liter pot and little brass stove with a pint of Everclear 190, wonderful dual use distillation? (Fuel and hand sanitizer, or what else might you be thinking?) Vegetables I’ve dried for rehydration; miso and peanut butter and don’t forget chocolate?
 . 
All this I imagine as I scroll through photos and read the article in my Apple News feed. Feed, apt name for the pressurized flow each time I open my phone. Not unlike a late night procedure relegated to us interns on the wards: snort of xylocaine gel in the nostril, slide the large-bore tube up and then waggle down behind the soft palate, on down and down until we hear stomach gurgles from a syringe-full of air; now hang a pre-digested bag of amino acids, simple sugars, fat emulsion & vitamins like turbid gray cyborg milk and watch it drip.
 . 
I’m sated. Stop the drip. Take me off the grid. I can do without calls, texts, alarms, and I’ll vow to make do without keyboards and uploads. Books on paper. These poems by Brad Strahan with their muse reaching out. And don’t forget college-ruled and a ballpoint – the ultimate back to nature.
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❦
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Bradley Strahan has lived and taught and written all over the world and his poems are a world of imagery and metaphor. His collection This Art of Losing is a night train through Germany, a bridge across the Seine, a girl with neon eyes in Amsterdam, rain through an open window in Macedonia. The atmosphere of place is very strong, but even though one of the section titles insists Not Philosophy these poems are all philosophy; place is simply the door through which metaphor enters and sits down across the table.
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Losing what, and why dwell on it? Truth washes up on the reefs of the real. These poems often present as a careful observation or description – they are arresting in their rich musical language, internal rhyme, and stark novel imagery – but each conceals a deeper metaphor. The passage of time; what it conceals and what we grasp to reclaim; the time before us drawing short as we face our inevitable mortality – these are the cold nuclei of our reality. If we ignore them we walk through life as through blue mist. Brad is not morbid in his quest to discover reality but he never turns aside. And the realities that may grant our existence deeper pleasure are like these poems: to be held close, turned over and back, to be fully delved and known.
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❦ ❦ ❦
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In Translation
for Diana Der-Hovanessian
 . 
Eyes blink.
No, I don’t understand.
But truth,
truth is a weary traveler
and what we say
flies out the window
to next in her hair.
 . 
The muse,
silly girl, runs
through our hands like light
through window panes,
like drops
down the window
when it rains.
 . 
Bradley R. Strahan
from This Art of Losing, BrickHouse Books, Baltimore, MD; © 2011
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Merlin’s Song
for Jean Clarence Lambert
 . 
Among the souvenirs
of a life of art
what part has
the art of life?
Where
in this magic act
does the magician
exist?
on what rope
over the Niagara
of history
do we cross
as we toss
our baggage
piece by piece
into the flood?
The blood alone
remembers
autumn’s flames
in late December.
 . 
Bradley R. Strahan
from This Art of Losing, BrickHouse Books, Baltimore, MD; © 2011
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❦ ❦ ❦
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In a Dry Land
 . 
Water is laughter, children
running through an empty house,
a phantom guitar heard
in cottonwood shade.
 . 
A thread of music weaves
green verses on bleached cloth,
a chorus of crows. Willows sigh,
feet resting in bright water.
 . 
You can hear frogs. Insects sing
as a thousand songs hover
just out of reach
like an iridescent dragonfly.
 . 
We lie on grassy banks
singing the same old words,
a green song in a land
of brass and hard blue silence.
 . 
Bradley R. Strahan
from This Art of Losing, BrickHouse Books, Baltimore, MD; © 2011
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Keepsake
Struga, Macedonia
 . 
Let me wrap this day in cloud,
press it between boards of pewter –
matte pages of lake hammered by rain.
 . 
It will be a whole volume of rain.
The pages will open with thunder
and the sound of water beating on metal.
 . 
It must show how church bells rang
with such a hollow clang, hardly heard
against the shouting of sky and water.
 . 
There will be a line of birds, waterfowl
swimming through a sky of clouds
as if it was just another river.
 . 
For a frame there is a wash of mist
and almost hidden there
the darker forms of hulking mountains.
 . 
But in one corner, a balcony, an iron rail,
a gray poet hammering away
while one lone birds sings far better.
 . 
Bradley R. Strahan
from This Art of Losing, BrickHouse Books, Baltimore, MD; © 2011
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2020-09-08b Doughton Park Tree

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Neck and Neck

Posted in family, Photography, poetry, tagged , , , , , , on September 15, 2023| 4 Comments »

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[with 3 poems by Jan LaPerle]
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Cupboard
 . 
One day I decide I’ll do something
good for people,
but I forget, then I nap.
My daughter wants to make
lemon cake so we do that.
I stand on the stool
and begin this great hunt
for poppy seeds.
Hours pass, and I’m on my tiptoes.
I stop searching for a minute to listen
to the wind. The branches snapping.
My daughter ran off agin to her swing,
her swing tied to the branch
of the tree she climbs,
the tree run through with electric wires
in the yard she flies her kite in.
She flies it high as the cell tower.
Her dragon kite breathing fire.
Her dragon kite headed in a nosedive
straight into those electric lines.
I can’t do anything about anything.
I’m trapped in the cupboard
forgetting what I’m searching for.
I dust the spice tops; they go on forever.
My hair too tight in its bobby pins.
Here as good as any place to pray.
 . 
Jan LaPerle
from Maybe the Land Sings Back, Galileo Press, Aiken, SC. © 2022
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❦ ❦ ❦
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The dark and the light are neck and neck again. When dark creeps in the light just doesn’t seem to have much of a chance. This is a close as we come to living dangerously – taking a walk in the woods on an afternoon that promises thunderstorms. Today Linda and I are at Friendship Trail, part of the Mountains-to-Sea Trail east of town. Such a lovely name – almost no one walks here but when we do cross paths the others always smile. Perhaps they’re filled with the same thoughts as the two of us: cool shade, gentle slopes, chuckling creek. Green welcome.
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Only a lumpy heap of black sky to the north, that’s all we could see from the parking lot. For the moment sun slants through the pines and tuliptrees. Cicadas sing. Into our third mile, though, shadows begin to deepen and the leaves get nervous. We can still see blinks of blue straight up through the branches but dark is moving in, shouldering it all aside. A stick drops from height to land at my feet. Will a widow-maker be next?
 . 
What gives dark its edge? Why its power to blot out a cheery afternoon and replace it with foreboding? Dark needn’t even knock yet I open the door to it.
 . 
Dark 4 AM’s are worst although understandable: the hour when the soul’s earthly tether / gently uncoils its smoky grasp / as tenuous as breath.* If I awaken at such an hour I immediately implore myself, “Don’t think, don’t think of . . . ,” but so swiftly the dark lines up its charges, some sharp as yesterday, some rank with decades, some uncertain ever to arrive at all but all too easily imagined. Dark loves the quiet unprotected moment.
 . 
But why, then, into light and airy freedom of mind is dark also able to intrude? I discover myself on a rural highway, green tunnel and morning dew, but instead of anticipating certain joy around the next bend I am reliving random moments of my own stupidity or, worse, recreating injuries and insults in some delusion that this heaps coals upon the heads of my enemies. Not Buddha but someone apparently equally enlightened said that to hold a grudge is to drink poison while imagining it will kill your foes. Here I am fueling the dark with anti-matter I’ve brought to the bonfire myself. This negativity, what could be more precisely the opposite of experiencing life in the moment? I open dark’s door myself.
 . 
Take a deep breath. Give my heart a good airing. No blame, no shame, just look straight up through the branches and accept what you see. Gray now, but not black. Threatening gusts have settled back to cooling breeze; just a few cold drops on my neck and no more. Here is the edge of the woods, the field, our car up ahead. Linda and I say, as we tend to, “Well, we carried our umbrellas and that’s what kept it from raining on us.” For a stretch it seemed neck and neck, but even so this hour has been full of green welcome. If at this moment we were instead dripping, shoes aslosh, about to shiver, we could still likely bring ourselves to say, even as we are about to now, “That was a wonderful walk.”
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❦
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The dark and the light are neck and neck again. So they seem to be in every poem by Jan LaPerle. Maybe the Land Sings Back is not a book of platitudes and happy endings. In fact, this is the anti-platitude book. But neither do these lines ever surrender to unremitting darkness. Despair dances with hope even if they are both stepping on each other’s feet. Gray sadness cracks and a thin bright line of joy refracts into color down the wall. These poems accept the small daily trials we might think inconsequential as well as the towering existential anxieties we have to admit if we are alive in this century. These poems offer us the chance to share all of these and in doing so they invite us to become more human.
 . 
Many of these poems are constructed as a series of observations. No, not observations, not apart from the experience but within the experience: these poems are a series of lived moments. Our image of the writer – her age and circumstance, her partner and parent relationships, what she fears and what she loves – is not constructed from what we are told or shown but from sharing the experiences as she does. She struggles to find meaning. So do we. She is surprised that a small act can dispel loneliness or that a small memory can carry a huge weight of joy. We experience surprise at the very moment she does. I have been blown through this collection by a wind of anticipation and revelation and promise. At the end I am simply convinced that, even though neck and neck, the dark doesn’t have much of a chance.

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❦
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Maybe the Land Sings Back, Jan LaPerle, Galileo Press, Aiken, SC. © 2022. Jan LaPerle lives in Kentucky with her husband and daughter, and is a master sergeant in the U.S. Army at Fort Knox. Galileo Press was founded in 1979 by Julia Wendell and Jack Stephens, now lives in Aiken, South Carolina, and also publishes the journal Free State Review.
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[* from Circadian (Welcome Morning) by Bill Griffin, published 2005 in Bay Leaves by the Poetry Council of North Carolina and collected in Crossing the River, Main Street Rag Publishing, Charlotte, NC. © 2017)]
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Dear Tuth Fary
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This is the beginning of my
daughter’s letter, and in it folds
a tiny tooth, small as the foot of the mouse
we caught this morning in a trap
that looks like a hallway to heaven.
The light at the end illuminating a dollop
of peanut butter, heaven enough
for the mouse who was still alive,
still zipping its stringy tail back and forth
across the hardwood. My daughter
and I went outside to set it free, left the tea
warm on the counter, the teabag
with one of those little paper sayings,
The earth laughs in flowers, but there’s no laughing here,
just ice creeping across everything, making us feel
even more zippered-in, my daughter
on the threshold right before the cry.
She could go either way, and this is always
up to me to maneuver. So I make up some life
for this mouse to get back to, some little car,
tiny house, little teacup tinier than a mouse tooth.
Isn’t it all so cute? Isn’t it great, how I can
hold the world in the light like this?
I cannot talk to her about why the mouse
went in there, the temptation, peanut butter
and loneliness, the pinhole of light in all the darkness,
like when she woke in the middle of the night
and came to my door to say, so sweetly, Hi mama,
which I snuffed out quickly with all my middle-aged
darkness. Midnight breath its own nightmare.
In the morning, I go to my coffee, my office
in the attic where I belong, and the squirrels
scrabble across the shingles and we laugh a little,
we being me and the comic part of me that
pops her head through the skylight to talk
to the critters above and below, and I can hear
it all from there. The inconsequential-ness
of my life is a cinch on my heart. The sweetness, too,
of my little girl growing in the most beautiful person
I have ever seen. That’s enough.
The dark and the light are neck and neck again.
I am freezing from my heart up.
I am right here, rooting from the window.
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Jan LaPerle
from Maybe the Land Sings Back, Galileo Press, Aiken, SC. © 2022
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Big Quiet Things
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Forever we remember her
on our way to the coast,
in the back seat, quiet
for a million miles,
watching movies with
headphones on and
then, as if a word were
a thing, as if quiet
were an ocean,
and out of it: CRAB!
And years now later,
my husband can say it
or I can say it,
and we are warmed together
even when all around us,
sinking us, pulling us under,
a riptide. And it feels
impossible. And there’s
nothing to hold onto.
Silence for a million miles.
Then out of it
a word, and then more where
that one came from,
all washing up, and the sun
warm, the sand
here with us,
waiting with us.
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Jan LaPerle
from Maybe the Land Sings Back, Galileo Press, Aiken, SC. © 2022
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❦ ❦ ❦
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2016-10-17a Doughton Park Tree

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