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A Book for You

Posted in Art, Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged Beth Co, Bill Griffin, Danielle Ann Verwers, Don Ball, imagery, Kakalak, Main Street Rag Publishing, Moonshine Review, NC Poets, poetry, Southern writing on November 19, 2021| 5 Comments »

Hepatica

[poems from Kakalak 2021 by Beth Copeland, Danielle Ann Verwers, Don Ball]

How cool would it be if your friends got together and wrote a book for you? Friends you hadn’t seen in a while, like maybe two years. Friends you’ve swapped a few stories with and suddenly here they are sharing new stories. Friends who at this very moment are just now becoming your friends.

How cool? Very cool.

Kakalak 2021 arrived last week and here are my friends! I’ve read the book through and gone back to re-read my favorites over and over again; the Carolinas have suddenly become cozy and personable and at once broad and expansive. Heart-expanding! Among the poets and visual artists in the book I see so many people I’ve met before at a literary gathering, read with at an open mic, served with on a board or committee. And then there are all the people whose books I’ve read or whose names I’ve seen and now the many more names I’ve not heard before but am learning. Names becoming friends. Somehow they’ve all come together to write a book for me. And for you.

. . . . . . .

Fog

Morning fog erases the mountain and trees.
No, not an erasure but unseen.

+++ Not an erasure but unseen.
+++ The mountain, the laurel still green.

Unlike the mountain and laurel still green,
the dearly departed lie beneath white sheets.

+++ The deer depart beneath white sheets
+++ of fog, stepping into a forgotten dream

of fog slipping into a forgotten dream
the ghost mountain dreams.

+++ The ghost mountain dreams.
+++ Crows fly to pines on mascara wings.

Crows fly to pines on mascara wings,
mourning. Fog erases the mountain, the trees.

Beth Copeland

Ptera

. . . . . . .

In between reflecting on the poems and enjoying the art, I flip to the back of the book for the bios. The array of people’s publishing kudos is, of course, impressive, but personal glimpses also shine through (which, true confession, is what I’m really looking for in a bio):
Dean of Arts & Sciences at Isothermal Community College . . . Kathy Ackerman
interior designer . . . Melanie T. Aves
proud member of The Poet Fools . . . Don Ball
retired librarian . . . Richard Band
academic therapist . . . Joan Barasovska
feels a good day mellows blissfully with . . . creating art . . . Christina Baumis
poems featured on a transit bus . . . Michael Beadle
beginning poet . . . Gay Boswell (an awesome beginning here, a devastating poem)
eats dark chocolate daily . . . Cheryl Boyer
loves roots music . . . Joyce Compton Brown
marriage and family therapist . . . Bill Caldwell
sings in several church choirs . . . Joy Colter
masterfully overbooks non-existent free time . . . Julie Ann Cook
creates “convoluted notions” . . . Caren Stuart
passionate about reading aloud to children . . . Jennifer Weiss
collects library cards . . . Danielle Ann Verwers
and more, and more . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

Two Sparrows for a Penny

+++ I.
If an airport is anything, it must be purgatory. And positioned
here in this terminal is benevolent holding space to store heavy
baggage as I watch my status, wait for take-off. A hollow metal
locker contains all my small treasures as I perch near walls of
windows. Iron flocks drift into the cumulous blue.

+++ II.
Milton, the bishop not the poet, believed humans would soar
in time. Brethren mocked his vision, convinced all schematics
to be sketched were drafted, nothing new under the sun to be
invented. Still, Milton knew his offspring inherited aviation
faith in their DNA, their eyes fixed on the heavens, their irises
bright with flight. Before fruition, typhoid took him. He missed
it when his sons fulfilled the prophecy, when his boys flew
with sparrows.

+++ III.
No one sings about two sparrows for a penny. Instead, we praise
our own ascent after a shell of flesh is molted. I’ll fly away, Oh Glory!
When I die let them sing the blues. Play a minor key for the birds
who crashed, feathers intact. Sing about birds who caught
tender gaze of God. Yes, let them sing of paradise lost.

+++ IV.
Close your eyes. Imagine you are a cloud drifting in the sky.
Light and free. No—imagine you possess hollow bones, you
are all sparrow. And now you flap your feathered wings but
your sternum is lead heavy. And you are falling towards the
ground at the speed of—no imagine you are light, warm and
bright. Imagine beams emit from your eyes, your chest, your
feathers, your beak. You radiate. No—I take it back. Imagine
you are a vapor, here today and gone tomorrow. Yes, imagine
you are a cloud.

Danielle Ann Verwers

Two

. . . . . . .

Somehow they’ve all come together to write me a book . . .

Well, not somehow come together – they’ve arrived here by intention. This book for me (and for you) was born of diligent labor and evolved quite intentionally. Enabled by the founders, sustained by editors and publishers through the years, the Kakalak vision perseveres and flourishes – a regional anthology created of and for people connected to North & South Carolina. This year’s Editors have sprinkled their selections with an especially effervescent cloud of pixie dust: they have created magical groupings of poems, 2 or 3 or more with complementary theme, style, subject. And the Art Editor has added a swish more magic by partnering the groupings with art that amplifies the verse.

And then . . . and then the real magic. The shiver. The heart to heart. I read these lines and something shifts inside me. I see with another’s eyes. I feel the depth of another’s struggle. God almighty, this is the place and this is the thing I need and this is certainly the time. When have we ever before needed it so much, this connection? Here we find it: connection with each other; connection with our small place on this planet; connection with our self.

Thank you, friends, for writing this book for me.

. . . . . . .

Wish
Park View Hospital, Rocky Mount, NC

I am supposed to kiss my grandfather,
stroke-frozen in his high-racked hospital bed,
but he is angry at us and crying,
half-realizing the difference.
I stand by my brother and close my eyes.

About the same,
my mother says to someone in the hall,
and he’s about the same,
she whispers later on the bedside phone,
nodding to the wall.

But I am changed
by the hospital light, cold-yellow and dry,
by the white carts gliding through plastered corridors,
rattling over steel plates, swallowed by the swinging doors,
and voices that start up and quit—voices
suffocated by the secret-keeping walls.

This is it — I am thinking —
God almighty, this is the place.

Outside we are walking, our breath released.
The summer evening is blade-green and black.
The parking lot is full but quiet.
Crickets call behind looming elms,
and the moon booms out into the open sky.

Look, points my mother, The first star.
Make a wish.

The rows of hospital rooms are burning and hanging;
my brother is bending over the hint of a penny;
Grandfather, I am kissing you goodbye.

Don Ball

Currituck

. . . . . . .

Kakalak 2021
Copyright © Moonshine Review Press, Harrisburg, North Carolina, 2021

Editors & Contest Judges:
+++ Kimberlyn Blum-Hyclak
+++ David E. Poston
+++ Richard Allen Taylor

Executive Editor and Publisher (and Art Editor)
+++ Anne M. Kaylor

[You might imagine how difficult it was to select just a few poems from many, many new favorites in this book!

Today’s art were among the entries I submitted but which were not published in Kakalak 2013, 2018, 2020, 2021. You’ll have to buy a copy of your book to see Incisors, selected for this year’s issue! — Bill Griffin.]

Order your copy of Kakalak 2021.

Explore past issues of Kakalak published by Main Street Rag.

. . . . . . .

Delivery

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Oldest Sibs

Posted in Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged Bill Griffin, imagery, nature photography, NC Poets, poetry, Southern writing, Susan Lefler on November 5, 2021| 4 Comments »

[with 3 poems by Susan M. Lefler]

Forty-four years ago this month, Linda delivered our son Josh after an epic display of Lamaze prowess. We had celebrated Thanksgiving with friends; we suspect the sweet potato pie induced labor. We lived in Durham, NC, and her parents and mine plus all our family lived in Ohio, five hundred miles away. Ooh, how they wanted to get their hands on that baby boy. First grandchild on both sides, Linda and I both the oldest sibs.

I was just weeks away from my last day of med school at Duke. Benevolent powers granted me Christmas off and my Dad, as I recall, bought the tickets with a plane change in Pittsburgh. If you notice that current day lavatories have baby stations it’s probably because so many callers contacted the authorities after being grossed out by us changing poopy diapers on the main concourse.

We finally cinched ourselves in for the last leg. The flight attendant noticed us – curly brown locks, rosy cheeks, has anyone ever been so young? – and remarked, “You must be brother and sister!”

Then she saw the tiny well-blanketed bundle nuzzling Linda’s breast. “Ahhh,” she said, “I guess not.”
. . . . .

Yesterday Linda and I got our COVID boosters at Walgreens. There was a moderate queue (Yay, Surry County, y’all go get them shots, OK?!). Waiting, masked, yawn, plenty long enough for Linda to forge friendship with the white-haired woman ahead of us and share a few chuckles. We were last in line when the pharmacist stuck her head out the door of the procedure room and called, “Griffins!”

I asked if we should come in together. She looked us over – hiking boots, matching gray pony tails, has anyone ever been together so long? – and said, “Yeah, if you really are together and it’s not just a coincidence that you both have the same last name.” The pharmacist never cracked a smile but I think she looked pleased when, after our needle jabs, Linda said she wished she could hug her.

Define long. In 1985 Linda and I figured we’d been “going together” longer than we hadn’t. In 1995 we calculated we’d lived in North Carolina half our lives. Are there any family stories we haven’t already told each other twice? Is it still likely a stranger would think we’re brother and sister?

When I look at Linda I see her father. When she speaks I hear her mother. What does a stranger see when they look at you? Your history is a cipher. Your thoughts inscrutable. Your desires a swirling mist. The most that stranger can know about you is how you respond to the next person in line. How you react to the person that hurts you.

. . . . . . .

Midwinter Garden

While I stir the soup, my husband digs.
He’s building me a garden in the center
of the barren yard. He marks out paths
with careful edges, makes them long
and straight. Already he plans walls, a gate.

Mind you, nothing grows yet.

While he digs and scatters time
like seeds, he dreams the blooms
full as we were at the start
when gardens grew from us, opening
like Fuji mums released from the confines
of their nets. He leaves the center blank
for a fountain, for the pond, a waterfall . . .
he dreams big and works to prove
that we can look at frozen ground and see
the cold tight seed begin to break,
greening toward spring.

In case spring should come late
leaving the garden t its frozen fate,
I stir the soup.

Susan M. Lefler
all selections from Rendering the Bones, Wind Publications, © 2011 by Susan M. Lefler

. . . . . . .

Susan Lefler is a native North Carolinian who lives in Brevard and has authored a photographic history of that area published by Arcadia Press. The three sections of her poetry collection Rendering the Bones delicately weave family heritage into a journey of moods, observations, trials – the longing we all have to find our way home. In the final section she cares for her parents as they decline through their last days. If we are to live in this world, we must all join her struggle through grief to discover meaning. To see, even in frozen ground, the cold tight seed begin to break.

. . . . . . .

Moon Stick

I want a counting stick to count the moon,
one notch at a time to mark, one thousand
and eight moons since my father’s birth,
five wards, depending how you count,
each month rolled into years, each year
into the next until we couldn’t tell
that time had passed, but we could see
his energy sigh out of him, and I leaned in
to ask old Cowboy Death, astride his big-assed
horse with the sag in the middle like a nag
too worn for use: how wide is dying?
Or is it dry and thin? Is it round
like the blood moon that lifts
above the mountain, or narrow as a bone
and hard to penetrate?

I want to ask if he keeps company with those
he’s taken out, or do new prospects
occupy his time? I want to ask
how many moons he plans to let go by
until he takes my father up, slings
him over the back of that old horse,
and heads away, letting the last moon
slide behind the mountain as he goes.

Susan Lefler

. . . . . . .

About Ashes

Ash Wednesday in the church, I listen
to the ancient words of dust and grief
punctuated with the hiss
of oxygen. Words crunch in my mouth
like little bones.

Slow bodies move forward
to the rail, kneel, submit
to ashes marked on skin, remembering
the palm green fronds, the bloom, the fire
that brought them here.

At home, I shovel ashes from the hearth
until I fill a scuttle full, the very one
my grandfather used to load coal
from the towering pile
next to the chickenyard, piece
by piece to keep the grate alive.

I load the remnants of dead trees
into a heap and haul them to the yard.
I’ll feed the lilacs with them.
They like ashes.

When the shovel lifts
for the last time, one spark
smolders still, telling the tale
once more of who we were,
of who we long to be, of what it means
to come awake, and waking
see.

Susan M. Lefler

. . . . . . .

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Fairy Ring

Posted in Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged Bill Griffin, Blossom and Loss, Halloween, imagery, Jeanne Julian, Longleaf Press, Mountains to Sea Trail, nature, nature photography, NC Poets, poetry on October 15, 2021| 14 Comments »

[poems by Jeanne Julian]

The cosmos blossoms by the rotting stump.

“That’s not scary.” We’re hiking through the Haunted Forest with Amelia, age 5. Tree limbs drip with giant cobwebs and red-eyed spiders, bats dangle, skeleton hands reach up from pine needle cemeteries beside the path. The crew has outdone themselves decorating this stretch of the Mountains-to-Sea Trail that, except for the month of October, is nicknamed the Enchanted Forest. Now Amelia stops and calls, “What’s that?!” at the skull-faced ghost bound up in chains, but it’s more curiosity than apprehension.

Past the Halloweeny stretch, though, I see something well off the trail that causes me to stop and exclaim, “Look!!” An immense fairy ring coaxed forth by last week’s rain: chain of mushroom caps that loops and twists and branches through the pines before doubling back on itself. On and on, a new arc & angle appears every place we look. At the word fairy Amelia is instantly engaged. What sprite danced here before us? What might be hiding beneath the ghost-white caps?

I’m thinking, Dang, that is one big organism, mycelia threaded through at least a half acre.

Amelia is thinking, Wonder . . . wonder . . . wonder.

. . . . . . .

The Reservoir

I’m looking for Wildcat Road.
There’s a “Free Manure” sign,
two blossoming magnolias, and a boy
who, up here, gives this passing car
an over-the-shoulder glance
as he walks. I’m going the wrong way.
But, here’s a turn for a road
sharing the reservoir’s name.
Clouds cover the sun and move on.
Light sweeps the hills, harried by gloom.
Birches whiten and fade again.

There’s the expanse of lusterless
water through leafless trees:
I’ve found it, rounding a bend.
Angle and clouds shift, and
the landscape remembers its colors
as if a lady’s fan had opened
revealing a scene in lapis, henna, and rhinestone.

We sat her, on this rock,
years ago – April then, too – learning
to touch, and in late summer embraced
there, on the dam where youngsters
scrawl their names indelibly.
In the silence, eddies of air sound “hush”
at my ear. Those antique fans were meant
to conceal, weren’t they, and
we in shadow to forget.

Jeanne Julian

. . . . . . .

These three poems are from Blossom and Loss by Jeanne Julian (Longleaf Press, Methodist University, Fayetteville NC, © 2015). The delicate volume follows the seasons with all the imagery and metaphor that organic cycle can reveal. Sometimes the captured moments, the vignettes, the narratives are so personal they become cryptic, but as I read on I discover my own stories flowing forth to fill unspoken phrases. Thus does poetry enlighten and inspire. Thus does it become, in the words of Andrea Hollander, entertaining and useful.

The cosmos blossoms / by the rotting stump. from Jeanne’s poem Loss and Blossom

. . . . . . .

Haunted

Each Halloween we hang
ghostlets in the tree,
by morning off they’ve blown.

My friends’ lost boy: how
had he been retrieved? By whom?
Alone? What varnish glossed his veins?

In the hospital they hung
on every beat and breath,
clung to any chance

until their changeling offspring
splintered, vanished, leaving a hollow
husk for them to burn

like autumn leaves or questions or endless
mourning muddled with routine,
travail of the telling and retelling,

dread burden of cereal in bowls
recalling a pajamaed imp held
in the lap, reading The Giving Tree aloud.

How unstoppably he must’ve lapped it up,
a lacquer lulling the limbic brain
until the one dose shoved him over

that last callow October. Still each Halloween
children clamber up the steps for sweets.
“See, I am a butterfly,” the smallest says.

Jeanne Julian

. . . . . . .

Melting

The snow that attacked so frantically while we slept
has blistered into water on the branches.
We also melt ut not as completely as Baum’s witch,
who cannot suffer water. Remember the crooner
in the small-town lounge, that ersatz L.A. club,
who kissed you on the left eyelid
when you were twelve? Remember that first
swig of Colt 45 Malt Liquor? Remember the cocoon
of oblivion that sucked you under before
the scalpel splayed your belly flesh? Remember
how the pressure of one finger spirals
your inner hold into ripples of languid indifference
to all but feeling?
One day too soon you’ll let go for good.
Dripping from the eaves, the fresh liquidity
will patter on unheard while you dissolve –
easily, let us hope, easily, and neither up nor down, while
on the roof the newly fallen expanse, unsullied,,
luxuriates under the sun.