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Enter the Circle

Posted in Imagery, tagged , , , , , , , on July 4, 2025| 4 Comments »

 + 
[poems from BRILLIG: a micro lit mag]
 + 
Ghazal for sunrise
 + 
Wrens are first out of bed at sunrise. Their sharp warbled song suits the sky’s deep red at sunrise.
 + 
Down the hill a deer slips out of mist. Then her fawn, ready to be fed, at sunrise.
 + 
Then a fieldmouse, light as a wisp, climbs a spent coneflower with most careful tread – at sunrise
 + 
The night’s winds are done. Above, only a last fading star, and a few clouds sill ragged at sunrise . . .
 + 
I join this pause to which all things have led (at sunrise), I close my eyes on what he last said, at sunrise.
 + 
Matt Snyder
from BRILLIG: a micro lit mag, Winter/Spring 2025
 + 
❦ ❦ ❦
 + 
Gravity is an illusion, a charade played out behind the scenes by matter as it warps spacetime. The illusion is complete within my deep never-spoken sense that somehow the universe ponderously orbits me. Where is my wider view? Long lens and tight focus blur everything except the center where for one moment light falls.
 + 
Thoreau sits beside the pond for hours so long and so still that the otters have come to consider him simply a natural element within the universe they inhabit. They pursue their plashy play all about him unperturbed. When the otters finally leave for elsewhere, Thoreau walks to town to buy a pair of socks.
 + 
Oh Mr. Lennon, my beloved, my idol, is life really what happens while you’re making other plans? Or is life the plans the universe has made for you whether you subscribed to them or not? Evidently the universe is not a bus you can hop off at the penultimate stop before you reach the bad side of town.
 + 
I’m trying to figure this out. The mockingbird doesn’t shut up when my neighbor fires up his Terrafirminator and attacks the clover. Just sings louder, it seems. And me? An hour walking in the woods, sweat and deep cleansing breaths, but driving home I hear again that last snarling conversation and begin another rehearsal of its next installment in my head. I thought I might have hopped off that bus, but no.
 + 
The titmouse perches above the peanuts I’ve laid out and squeaks and scolds with his head thrown back, ten iterations. Then he swoops down and pecks the hell out of them. What was he saying up there? “These are mine, bug off!” – or – “Hey world, good eats here!” What am I saying to the universe? Scratch that – what am I saying to myself?
 + 
 + 
❦ ❦ ❦
 + 
Vim
 + 
Your clay pots are stacked into towers.
Stakes propped in the garden shed corner.
Out-of-use stuff claims off-season place:
a montage of tools ready to oblige.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Regret
drops by every day, helps leisure select midwinter
pastimes. Our most-recent waltz only a twitch
in the calf on gray afternoons. So much
overlooked when we busy ourselves.
 + 
I rake leaves wedged into fences. Sharpen tools
in case we plant again. Zest fallen out of favor,
the Almanac forecasts weather cycles, but desire
for a new garden is shelved.
++++++++++++++++++++++++ Verve fastened
behind the shed door, our pursuits dwindle.
Intuition must carry us through seasonal tedium,
and each loss it festers. You stare at me and ask,
+++++++ Tell me again where do seasons go?
 + 
Sam Barbee
from BRILLIG: a micro lit mag, Winter/Spring 2025
 + 
❦ ❦ ❦
 + 
 + 
When Deborah Doolittle first placed in my hands a copy of her hand-made lit mag BRILLIG, all I could say was, “O Frabjous Day!” The slim booklet is delicate yet solid with surprising heft; it is simple in its turning pages yet subtle and complex with its interlockings and interweavings, concealing treasures, revealing them. But glue and ink and color are not enough to create treasure. The words, the lines, the flow, the side-steps and juxtapositions – these poems by ten authors link arms and pull me into their circle.
 + 
If you were to step into my office and attempt to calculate the mass of processed printed-upon cellulose that surrounds you, you would intuit that I have a thing for words on paper. Oh yes, most every day I read from my bright paper-white monitor the poems the internet offers up to me, but if you were to step onto my back porch today when it’s 85 degrees and 85 percent humidity and discover me there with a book nonetheless, you would intuit that real creative thought requires an adequate escape velocity from computer gravity. And if a print journal’s appeal is an order of magnitude greater than poems online, then art and quirky originality, BRILLIG, is an order greater yet.
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I unfold the pages, read backwards and forwards, turn and return. These poems surround me as if I am an element of the universe they inhabit. While they pursue their plashy play, I will abide in their circle. I have all the socks I need.
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❦
 + 
Deborah Doolittle contrives and creates BRILLIG: a micro lit mag with the help of artist friends and submissions of poetry. Each issue is published in a limited edition, but she no doubt has one she would like to send you and will make an extra copy if you subscribe.
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Onions
 + 
I think of you prepping risotto,
stirring the pan while you add
onions, red wine and broth.
you wore a red-striped apron.
I have it still. Should have worn it.
My shirt is dotted with oil.
Oversized sweet onions
roast in the oven, ready
to add life to a sandwich.
My eyes leak. Nose drips.
I yank a paper towel off
the rack and remember.
 + 
Patricia Joslin
from BRILLIG: a micro lit mag, Winter/Spring 2025
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❦ ❦ ❦
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 + 
Doughton Park Tree 2021-10-23
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Speaking with the Dead

Posted in family, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , on June 27, 2025| 10 Comments »

 . 
[with 3 poems by Joan Barasovska]
 . 
The Box
 . 
They are quiet in their photographs,
my mother’s dead.
 . 
They speak to me, entreat me to explain.
 . 
A magnifying glass held to their fading faces
proves scant help.
 . 
To listen, I must listen to myself,
to memory.
 . 
Joan Barasovska
from Unblessed, Unsung, Main Street Rag Enterprises, Edinboro PA; © 2025
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❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
To speak with the dead, one must listen to oneself.
 . 
Before my mother died we talked about dying. Her dying. When I helped her fill out the living will forms. Before the first visit from the palliative care nurse. As her health took yet another sudden stepwise decline. I asked her, not at all for the first time, “Do you want to go to the doctor? To the hospital?” “No. No.” And then we didn’t talk about it any more.
 . 
Instead we talked with the dead. Some people approaching the end of their life close themselves off. They draw the veil about their diminishment and turn inward. My mother, though, turned outward, like a great flower that slowly pivots throughout the day to face the sun. Like one of those giant radio telescopes that can hear the earliest whispers of creation, she became a passive receptor who welcomed anything anyone desired to bring her. I brought her the dead.
 . 
Photographs of the dead. Some were in antique frames, some dropping from ancient scrapbooks, most of them loose in envelopes or the bottom of cartons. She and I collected them all into a grand new album and along the way we told each other stories. “Isn’t that Lucy and Ted just married? Linda and I met them at Nana’s reunion 50 years ago. And there’s you with Lucy, both teenagers. Now here’s Carlyle in the little car Grandpop built for him. I guess it was already obvious he’d be crazy for cars the rest of his life.”
 . 
Some stories she told me; some I imagined while she fingered the photos and nodded in silence. At the moment of shutterclick, each photo was created within its world of vast significance. Those worlds dissipate, decrescendo in brilliance like photons that have traveled light-years to reach our eyes, red-shifted with distance in an expanding universe. But during those moments together my mother could enter their world and hear them, the dead, their voices.
 . 
Next month it will have been a year since my mother exhaled her last breath. Her living essence has joined the whispers of the cosmos. Her essence still lives in me and all who knew her and who have not yet joined the dead. Yesterday I found a photo Grandpop took of Mom at age 10 surrounded by her wonderful collection of dolls. There it is, that hint of a smile on her lips, in her eyes, the joyful teasing hint I have seen in person a million times. But looking at that photo is not when I miss her most. The pang of absence strikes me most sharply when a random question pops into my head: “Did you have boy friends before Dad? What was it like to be living 500 miles from Nana and Grandpop when I was born? Who is that standing behind you in this photo?”
 . 
Some of the questions I may once have asked but don’t recall her answers. Most are questions it never occurred to me to ask while we were together on the earth. Now when I pull that grand album off the shelf, her picture will also be among those gone mute. But not completely so. Memory tangles and untangles itself to create new stories. I will listen to my heart. I am now the one who must speak with the dead.
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 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
In Shul on Rosh Hashonah
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Elizabeth is home with the baby; Ben sits beside his sons
on the hard bench. All three wear yarmulkes, Ben is draped
in his tallis – Reuben and Joseph are too young. The black
straps of tefillin tightly encircle his left hand and arm;
the boxes press into his forehead and bicep.
 . 
The drone of men praying, the vibrato of the old rebbe raised
above their voices, the distant murmur and rustle of women
and girls in the balcony above, and Ben’s own chanted Hebrew,
eyes closed, davening deeply – all are as necessary and familiar
as his heart’s beats and his quiet breaths.
 . 
His boys can barely wait for the blowing of the shofar,
the twisted, ridged ram’s horn the see near the ark.
Ben hears Joe whisper to Rube, “When?” and Rube’s loud
“Shush!” Ben is clean-shaven, unlike the older men. He goes
daily to Boris Adelman, the barber on 21st Street, who keeps
a chin mug painted with his name, Benjamin Nax, on a shelf.
His disc of soap, his ivory brush. Boris strops the razor on a
lng leather strap It’s sinful to let his mind wander like this
on a Day of Awe. He gives thanks for his children: Rube,
a little man; Joseph, their angel. now Elsie.
 . 
He was once a boy sitting with is father and grandfathers
in shul. His chest hollows around their absence. They could easily
be dead, and his uncles and mother, lined up to be shot on the
edge of a ditch. No wisdom from grandfathers for his boys.
 . 
The cantor raised the shofar to his lips and fills his lungs.
Joe has fallen asleep leaning against him, and starts awake at the
first blast. Intervals of blast and chant: Tekia! Sevarim! T’ruah!
Renew our days! Mercy is aroused! Judgement is removed!
Reverberating in the small chilly building, this uncanny sound
of the desert, the First Temple, the shtetl, and the ninety-nine
synagogues of Minsk.
 . 
Ben takes his boys’ hands, and the three are surrounded
on the sidewalk by greetings: L’shonah tovah! Gut yontif!
A gut gebentsht yor! It isn’t his name, Benjamin Nax.
It was changed at Ellis Island, from Binyomin Nakhimovsky.
What is there to believe, in America?
 . 
Joan Barasovska
from Unblessed, Unsung, Main Street Rag Enterprises, Edinboro PA; © 2025
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❦ ❦ ❦
 .  .  .  .  . 
Love flares in the sleeper’s dream,
blue as a Sabbath candle flame, warm as
the kitchen of her grandmother’s house.
from Elizabeth’s Travels
 . 
Her story begins in cruelty concealed and unspoken. It wends its way through hardship and regret, between guilt and resentment. It ends as it started, in death. But that is not all. That is only one harsh thread of the story. The story feeds itself with family love and devotion. It clings to hope in darkness. The story opens its pages because of the expansive heart of the one who desires to be its guardian, its intrepid explorer, its teller. Thus the journey of Unblessed, Unsung by Joan Barasovska.
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There is a bit of mountain trail that winds across a mile or two of bald slopes at Bluff Ridge along the Blue Ridge Parkway. If the summer grass has grown waist high and the cows have not been pastured there this season, the trail is obscured, untraceable except for this: in the 1930’s, the Civilian Conservation Corps placed concrete markers, posts two feet tall, to guide the hiker along the path. Joan has found her own waypoints to reveal her own path into her past: a few fading sepia photographs; recollections written down by cousins; conversations with a last survivor. To these she has applied the poet’s toolkit, observation and imagination, to render this book and bring it to life.
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Some of the questions Joan must ask about her grandparents have discernable answers. Where did they grow up? What year did they arrive in America? But many answers are as intangible as smoke from an extinguished candle and as difficult to clasp. Joan uses what clues she can amass – a facial expression in an old photo; a fragment of tale from a distant cousin – to build an enlarging picture. If we don’t always know exactly how this man and that woman felt, at least we know that they did feel and we can hope to project their circumstances into our own dilemmas and responses. Considering another person’s memories is a fruitful impetus to reliving our own memories. At the beginning of Unblessed, Unsung Joan quotes Zora Neale Hurston: There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you. Here is a story borne and bared. May these poems now weave and tangle more stories, a never-completed tapestry.
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❦
 . 
Joan Barasovska lives in Orange County, North Carolina, USA, and has authored three previous poetry collections. Unblessed, Unsung is available from MAIN STREET RAG.
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❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Listen
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If I told you I hear their voices
in the apartment on Christian Street,
would you visit there with me?
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At the table where they take their meals,
or by the stove, where Elizabeth stands,
adding potatoes to stretch a soup?
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Between husband and wife,
what heat, what chill, what
balance of force and yield?
 . 
The rooms are scrubbed raw-clean,
it’s crowded, voices are raised,
the three children witness everything.
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It’s a time before parents learned
to safeguard childhood. If I told you I hear
cruelty, in word if not in deed, trust me.
 . 
Joan Barasovska
from Unblessed, Unsung, Main Street Rag Enterprises, Edinboro PA; © 2025
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Pocket Knife

Posted in Imagery, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , on June 13, 2025| 10 Comments »

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[with 3 poems by Pat Riviere-Seel]
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Wander Until You Find the Trail Back
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How insistent the world wakes you,
Daylight pushes through dense blinds.
A one-note bird insists on an answer.
Always the same pulsing – waking – wanting
to know what next? How to parse a life
caught in mid-flight, the light a web woven
in the night. All the things we never talk about.
We let the stories we tell ourselves define us.
What would we be without the myths?
Desire contains ire. De- as in deconstruct,
dismantle the dire. Desire nothing. Construct
your own lifeline. Getting lost may be the last
best thing that ever happens.
 . 
Pat Riviere-Seel
from Because I Did Not Drown, Main Street Rag Enterprises, Edinboro, PA; © 2025
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❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
I think I know where I’ve been and I imagine I know where I’m going. But do I really know anything? I certainly don’t know where this narrative is going. Josh and I are sitting beside a rutted gravel track eating lunch. It’s the last meal of our last day on the trail. Sometime this afternoon a banged up old van will arrive to carry us all back to base camp. While the boys joke around and my co-leaders snooze, I gather some of the trash left by previous loungers and eaters. I lift a sandwich wrapper and discover a pocket knife.
 . 
The summer of 1969 Linda and I started going together. About a week after we held hands for the first ime – had we even kissed yet? – I got on a bus in Akron at 5 AM with three fellow Boy Scouts to spend two weeks at Philmont Scout Ranch in Cimarron, New Mexico. Now it’s the summer of 1983 and our own two kids are teenagers. Josh, our eldest, and I have just finished ten days of hiking Philmont together with his troop – desert plateau and Ponderosa pine forests, rushing gorges and a 12,000 foot peak. Our big adventure is ending. I stuff refuse into my sandwich bag and discover that pocket knife.
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In the summer of 2025 I rummage my desk to return that knife to my pocket. I can’t find it. Turn out the pockets of all my pants, upend my day pack, creep beneath the desk and out to the car under all the seats – not there. I have often pictured the Boy Scout who lost that fine, top-of-the-line Swiss Army Scout’s knife. He had sat there on the ground eating lunch the day before I did. The knife stealthily squeezed its way out of his pocket. He littered his garbage on the knife and never missed it until that night. Too late. Karma. He violated the ethic of Leave No Trace and relinquished his knife to me, diligent trash picker. And such a knife – lock-blade, screw driver & awl, little tweezers and trademark Victorinox toothpick. I will carry it for over forty years, sharpen it and oil it, admire it every time I pull it out and wonder at my worthiness.
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Now I’m imagining someone else finding my knife, excuse me, our knife. Beside a hiking trail where I had squatted to identify a flower? In a parking lot stuck to tar? Appreciate it. Or don’t. I held it for a good long time. This is letting go.
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 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
How to Rebuild Community
 . 
Coming out of the pandemic
+++ I’m having trouble
knowing how to act.
+++ This new landscape
more hardscrabble than highway,
+++ a tightrope walk
not a garden promenade.
 . 
When I offer my outstretched hand
+++ to a woman
I’ve just met, she fixes me
+++ with a chilly stare, says,
I don’t shake hands anymore.
+++ And suddenly I’m ashamed
of my bacteria-filled palm, its brazen
+++ need for connection.
Is it also infected with The Virus? I’m tempted
+++ to rush away, down the hall
and lather that offending hand
+++ with hot sudsy water, the way
we scrubbed our vegetables not so long ago.
 . 
How do I move from cautious
+++ to community?
The knitters know. When they notice
+++ the chaos in the coffee shop,
the customers shouting out orders,
+++ the din around them rising like bread,
impossible to ignore,
+++ Jane stitches herself
to the cash register,
+++ Linda begins bagging cookies
Cathy slices strawberry cake. Their hands
+++ smooth the angry air
grown thick with impatience
+++ and want.
The knitters’ hands fly like needles –
+++ knit one, purl two,
opening, closing, shaping. Each palm
+++ holds a single need to serve.
 . 
Pat Riviere-Seel
from Because I Did Not Drown, Main Street Rag Enterprises, Edinboro, PA; © 2025
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❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Pat Riviere-Seel writes and writes and writes. Has written, is writing, will write. A solid lifetime of essays, poetry, technical pieces, editing, teaching – her life has been creating with words. Because I Did Not Drown is a portmanteau of Pat’s life, her writing life, her life in writing. A memoir fits pieces into a whole – dates and sequences, family and relationships, loves and desires. A good memoir colors them all with the deeper hues of the soul – fear and disappointment, aspirations and joy. This memoir achieves all that plus one more thing: the crystalline beauty awakened by poetry. Each memory in prose is accompanied by one or two poems. Poems touch and reveal the soul of these moments in Pat’s life.
 . 
I discover myself in these poems, not as outward subject but inward seeker. I often find that I more fully inhabit and participate in the lines of a poem that in a paragraph of prose. The distilled essence of poetry is like volatile spirit that shoots straight from tongue to consciousness. Wonderfully intoxicating. A draught that frees and connects. Next time we meet, Pat and I, we shall surely dance.
 . 
❦
 . 
I can still see that knife. I thought to replace it but the model is no longer manufactured and someone wants eighty bucks on Ebay for one like it. Plus it wouldn’t be the object found, the discovery, the reward. Nevertheless, I can still see that knife because this week I found it shoved in the back of a drawer. Where is this narrative going? Is nothing ever truly lost that once occupied a space in one’s heart? Bosh! Or perhaps the finding is the thing rather than the thing that’s found. Tomorrow I will sit to eat a sandwich with my son and I won’t be able to keep myself from peaking beneath the napkin.
 . 
❦
 . 
Because I Did Not Drown by Pat Riviere-Seel, a memoir in prose and verse, is available from Main Street Rag Enterprises.
 . 
Selected poems from previous books by Pat Riviere-Seel:
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❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Astonished
+++ for SLM
 . 
how since your death
the natural world keeps itself,
kaleidoscopic, the brilliant shimmer,
sunlight silvering bay leaves, the veins
of water oak, the dogwood’s sad commentary –
now a winsome glow,
as if every molecule of you
infuses this Earth you loved.
 . 
I expected otherwise – had your death been
anything I considered – that the birds and trees,
the swamps and all that still lives would mourn
as we do. The landscape would lose itself,
fade into shades of gray. The rain that all summer
refused to fall would flood the highest ground.
But now you’ve turned to glimmer. Each glance
into the world I thought I knew brings
a new configuration. You remain everywhere.
 . 
Pat Riviere-Seel
from Because I Did Not Drown, Main Street Rag Enterprises, Edinboro, PA; © 2025
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
 . 
Doughton Park Tree 2015-06-15

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