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Home – Terri Kirby Erickson

Posted in Imagery, tagged , , , , , , , , on April 9, 2020| 1 Comment »

This evening at suppertime she peers into the beef and carrots simmering on the right burner; I snip pea pods and spinach into the black bean broth on the left burner. Pretty soon both pots are smelling darn good. It’s usually something like this, the scene in our kitchen all the years since I decided to stop eating meat and she didn’t. Separate skillets, or sequential nuking, then sit down together.

But then every once in a while it’s all her show. She steams the broccoli while I sit near the lamp and read. I start on a little dry white wine (she’ll accept two ounces for herself later – Pastor Jan, pretend you didn’t read this) while she simmers the pasta. She serves two blue patterned Japanese bowls we’ve owned since year one. Then we sit down together.

When I die, sorry to say, I have no faith that there will be an angel in heaven who can make broccoli Alfredo this good.

 

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Getting home from the office early these days, I’m revisiting the overflowing stacks beside my desk. Poetry, philosophy, poetry, nature, poetry — I’ve rediscovered that all of Terri Kirby Erickson’s poems are home.

Lots of poetry is about home – you get a peak through the curtains and maybe you can imagine life on the other side of the pane. Terri’s poems are home. Welcome in. Don’t mind the mess. Maybe you didn’t understand this is your home but for twenty or thirty lines you will be part of the family. So many families. So many homes longed for, left behind, returned to. Soft light, hard edges. Sweet and harsh and all shades between. Come on in. Let’s sit down together.

 

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from In the Palms of Angels, Terri Kirby Erickson, Press 53 © 2011

 

Wayfarer

He seems like a man
you’d see walking down a long
stretch of road, the kind
with dust

rising

in a red haze beneath the wheels
of pickup trucks, cutting
through fields of golden

wheat. Scudding clouds cast
shadows
across the ground like whales

swimming through clear
water, and the air carries the scent
of grain and loam.

Every few miles, the glint of a silo
(startling against the lonesome

sky)

signals a farm house
where peach pies sit cooling
on window sills, and patterned
carpets are worn-out from parents

pacing to and fro with fretful babies
in their arms.

He’s traveling toward the horizon
with the steady gait of someone
with a place to go, whose tender

gaze

will soon find home, that place
more sacred than communion wafers
nestled in the palms
of angels.

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Rosary

Down by the creek,
we sit on dry
stones,

our shoes and socks
jumbled in a pile.
The sun

warms our toes
and casts its
net of light

from bank to bank,
where willows
trail their

fingers in the water,
and snakes look
like branches

floating by
them. Mosquitoes
lay their eggs

in stagnant pools,
far from leaves
and grasses snagged

by rocks, twisting
in the current.
Tadpoles swim

in tight formation,
wiggling their tails
in tandem,

as salamanders
scuttle by, searching
for places to nap.

Dragonflies hover,
then hurry
away,

their wings
thrumming a one-note
song – while we,

silent as nuns in prayer,
count the beads
of summer.

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[Rosary first appeared in Basilica Review; other collections by Terri Kirby Erickson from Press 53 include: Telling Tales of Dusk; A Lake of Light and Clouds; Becoming the Blue Heron.]

Author Page, Terri Kirby Erickson, Press 53, Winston-Salem, NC.

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Buxton Woods – Susan Laughter Meyers

Posted in Imagery, tagged , , , , , , , , on July 21, 2019| Leave a Comment »

A ten minute walk from Buxton Woods there are a hundred people milling around at the base of the lighthouse waiting to climb or just spraining their necks. A ten minute walk into Buxton Woods it’s just the three of us. The trail rises, ancient dune now eternal with live oak and yaupon. Surf crash can’t reach us here but the hum is constant, cicadas, mosquitoes, something swift in peripheral vision. We descend to a slough, marsh slowly becoming meadow then woodland. Looks ancient. Smells ancient.

Even in deep shade the trail is not cool but our grandson thinks it’s cool to be here. We’ve never seen this many different colors of dragonflies. Along one stretch a platoon of thumb-sized toads is invisible until one hops across the trail. It’s not a dinosaur, this trail, not yet extinct but endangered. Not only because every other scrap of maritime forest along the outer banks is scrutinized greedily by developers with bulldozers, but because this is the Outer Banks. The dune ridges are a timeline of shoreline creeping ever west, the bank rolling over itself for millennia, now faster and faster. Thousand year old clam and oyster middens are still uncovered, evidence of the human beings that have visited and resided here. How much longer?

This little trail is an insect in amber. Engrave it in memory. From the gallery rail on Hatteras Lighthouse they can’t see us here.

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This poem is from Susan Meyer’s My Dear, Dear Stagger Grass. I return to this book when the world smells like asphalt and I need a whiff of spartina. I mean, when my own ideas are pedestrian and my inspiration is muckbound and I need something with clear veined wings to chase me back into sunlight. Or a chiseled head and slender neck. How can writing be at once so rooted and so lofty? Oh Susan, how few words we need.

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Two Friends Hiking at Old Santee Canal

Ahead of me, he balances his feet, left then right,
on the first of two planks – an unsteady bridge of sorts –
laid down for hikers to cross
what, on most days,
would be bog,
but on this one, after weeks of rain, is flooded.

We are learning the look and feel of swamp.

Waiting my turn, I can see his every step.
He pauses halfway across, standing sweaty
in the midst of the ordinary.
An inch or so beneath his heels,
under the seam of the two boards,
I see the loops and curves
of a thick brown snake.
The chiseled head, the slender neck. Above them,
his bare ankles.
How few, the words we need.
Snake, I say, unable to utter where
or put sense to it.
Which way should I go? He is a statue,
his arms frozen in air.
I tell him to come back, and he does.
We watch the snake uncurl
and disappear, but in the thrill of fear just past,
our bodies, all breath and jitters, now belong
to someone we don’t recognize.
Forward is the direction we want to choose
but neither of us can step onto the board.
We know what we must do:
stumble through ferns and mud,
clotted roots, the thick
of mosquitoes, a limestone bluff –
backtrack in the safety of a path already taken.

Susan Laughter Meyers
from My Dear, Dear Stagger Grass, Cider Press Review, 2013

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Editor’s Mercy – Part 2

Posted in Imagery, tagged , , , , , , , , on August 31, 2015| 23 Comments »

Here’s a sobering thought: even when you receive that wondrous acceptance letter (or email) telling you that The Editor has decided to publish one of the poems you sent him or her, she or he is still rejecting the other two or three or four that were in the envelope (or .PDF). I hear the trombones going, “WAH Wah wah.” And equally sobering: if anyone is reading the poem once it does get published, they’re not calling you to tell you how much they like it. How not sexy is that?

But no, wait a minute, I take that back. I have a special friend who always tells me she likes my poems. (I won’t reveal her name, but her initials are “Caren Stuart.”) If she finds something I’ve written appearing in a regional journal or anthology she shoots me the kind of email that is 100% guaranteed to improve posture, dissolve scowl lines, and overcome even the most stubborn case of writer’s block. For several years she and I and Nancy King had a monthly email poetry critique session going. We’d share one poem apiece and comment. CS could find something wonderful in my lamest efforts, which inspired me to keep hacking away at them until they really were wonderful. Thanks, Kiddo – I write a lot better when you’re in the world.

Give it a try yourself. Lot’s of times I’ve discovered a poem by someone I know, picked out my favorite line, and sent them a little message about why I like it. Such an act never fails to reverse entropy and slow down global warming.

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Yellow Fringed Orchid, Patanthera ciliaris — Gorges State Park NC, 8/2015

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I confess that for a few years I’ve almost quit submitting poems for publication. Who needs the fame, right? But in 2015 the tide is turning. Maybe I’m beginning to see that my personal journey as poet is developing a more unifying theme or gestalt. Maybe I’m feeling more comfortable in the community of poets. And it certainly helps that so many journals accept online submissions – I’ve got a roll of 100 “second ounce” postage stamps I’ve hardly touched. I’m sending my little darlings out to the Mercy of Editors again.

AND . . . I’ve got a new system. Which I am going to share with you.

Ever get all fired up with a sheaf of poems, stuffing them into a .PDF only to discover the journal you’ve envisioned for them closed its annual submission period last week? Grieve no longer. Check out the creation below (which has been made possible by dozens of hours on the computer and a constant infusion of what CS calls my “Type A-ness”):

Submission Calendar Page 1_crop

This table shows the months when various journals accept submissions, plus how to research their submssions guidelines. Just look down the column of the current month to pick a journal that’s currently open to submissions!

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Click the link below for the entire .PDF. As of March, 2016 I have about 75+ journals and contests listed. I’d like to keep expanding– my email address is listed in the document so you can send me your suggestions and additions, plus any corrections. I’ll keep the updated document linked to this page.

Click  below for .PDF file with the FULL LIST:
[Last updated 3/6/2016]

. . . . . . . . . . . !!Submissions Calendar 2016-03 . . . . . . . . . .

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Luna Moth, Actias luna — Gorges State Park NC, 8/2015

After Shelby Stephenson published Orange Cap in Pembroke Magazine in 2005 I didn’t submit again for a few years, and now he has turned over the reins to the new Editor, Jessica Pitchford. Last year I had written a poem about my paternal grandmother that I thought my aunt and cousins might enjoy. Whenever we’re together we usually share a story or two about Grandmother (no lesser title could ever suffice), the stoic matriarch and proud link to the Weatherspoon side of the family, now to be captured for posterity in a sonnet. But before I sent the poem to the family I sent it to Pembroke. Thanks, Jessica! The family is indeed enjoying this. (And it explains why I bought four extra copies of Pembroke #47.)

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Sonnet for the Woman Who Fried 10,000 Chickens

And don’t forget about a bazillion quail,
each three bites for breakfast with biscuits and grits
and gravy über Alles thanks to red setters’ skill,
Granddaddy’s gun, and us willing to pick little nits
of birdshot out of our teeth, but save that fat pullet
for this Sunday’s dinner, piled crisp high and brown
as pecans shelled last night for green jello salad.
The triumphal platter Grandmother sets down,
we pray Come Lord Jesus, me and Brother grab
for the juiciest piece ‘til we backpeddle before
her Presbyterian eye – Boys, what will you have?
and Finish your greens before you ask for more.
.     No one says thigh or breast here: Grandmother will offer
.     only second joint, white meat, and everything proper.

[First appeared in Pembroke Magazine number forty-seven, 2015]

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Extremely hungry millipede, Narceus americanus, trying to untie my bear bag & steal the goodies. Gorges State Park NC, 8/2015

Post Script – One other reason to send out a poem: last year I wrote a poem about a friend and patient who had died at the age of 98. It placed in a contest and appeared in an anthology. This summer I took a copy of the book to his widow, herself 98, read her the poem and just reminisced for a while about the many great stories her husband had shared with me over the years. About a month later she mailed me a thank you note, said all her kids had enjoyed the poem about their daddy, and she had read my other poem that appeared in the same book and commented on it.

It doesn’t take a thousand readers to make the writing worth the effort. One will do.

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