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Prost Neujahr!

Posted in Imagery, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , , on December 27, 2024| 9 Comments »

 . 
[with 3 poems from Kakalak 2024]
 . 
How to Hold Small Things
 . 
You were this big,
Mom used to say,
cupping her hands
as if to keep a bowl
of holy water
from spilling.
 . 
Is that why I love
to hold small things?
Ladybugs. Twig tips.
Clover petals. Auger shells.
 . 
It’s in the way
we hold small things
that makes them precious,
how we tender moments,
keep them warm
and safe in our clutch –
the newborn kitten,
the wounded bird,
the crab shell that might blow away
if we’re not careful –
as if holding our breath
as we carry them
might keep something
inside of us
from breaking.
 . 
Tonight,
I hold you, baby girl,
cradle you against my chest,
your quick breaths
like scissored whispers,
your tiny fingers
thimble pinches,
and those blue eyes
dreaming with the fury
of newborn stars.
 . 
Michael Beadle – Raleigh, NC
from Kakalak 2024, Moonshine Press Review, Harrisburg NC; © 2024
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
God Bless You! Whether I’m at Food Lion, the post office, Dad’s nursing home, even at church, whenever I sneeze some friend or perfect stranger invokes God on my behalf in that benediction. And I sneeze a lot (I even sneeze when I chew peppermint gum). God Bless You! comes a small voice from around the corner in the condiments aisle. Why?
 . 
A medieval superstition is one explanation. When you sneeze your soul is expelled from your body and a quick invocation prevents the devil from snatching it. Even earlier is a tale from the bubonic plague of 590 CE in Rome – a sneeze or cough might be the first manifestation of that fatal affliction, and since Pope Gregory had implored the populus to pray without ceasing for delivery, benedicat Deus was no doubt a universal refrain. When I sneeze, those three words are raised as a warding or talisman to protect me magically from death.
 . 
What about Gesundheit? It simply means health auf Deutsch. Raise a glass of lager in Frankfurt or Bonn and your companion will likely toast, Sei gesund! (Be healthy!, as in To your health!). When I was a student in Berlin, however, the standard invitation was Prost! I never actually knew what Prost meant and just assumed it had origins in some dark Prussian drinking tradition, but surprise!, it’s Latin – a contraction of prosit, may it be beneficial. Another kind of blessing.
 . 
But here’s my problem – I don’t want you commanding God to bless me. It’s not just because I enjoy sneezing. It’s not because when you say those words it feels superstitious and almost pagan – a little pagan is fine with me. I disagree with God Bless You at a fundamental level. God is not a jurist who bestows or withholds blessings depending on whim or quota or petition. God who is universal and who is the universe has already blessed me in the simple fact of my existence. The greatest additional blessing I might seek would be to recognize the goodness of this earth and of every creature, every person, around me.
 . 
I am already blessed. What if the phrase on everyone’s lips were God has blessed us! Or even better, God is blessing us! Could this become an antidote to consumerism, tribalism, the culture of resentment and entitlement? Could I be healed of my feverish striving for more and more blessings and my coveting of yours? Contrary to my nature, I feel pretty pessimistic about the state and the fate of humanity as 2024 approaches oblivion. Is there any good that will survive our human perversity? Instead of wishing a Happy New Year, I might rather wish for you and me both to discover one good thing and hold on tight. The beneficial, the good, is around here somewhere. It always is. As my Prussian friends would proclaim, Prost Neujahr!
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Upon Hearing U2’s “The Sweetest Thing” at the Harris Teeter in Friendly Center
 . 
I’m rushing through the grocery store on a Friday evening
after a long week, filled with deadlines, with news of another
sick friend. All I want to do is pick up a bottle of chardonnay,
a rotisserie chicken, and disappear into the weekend. I consider
buying some cookies too, and then among the masses pushing
their grocery carts, I hear the first chords of “The Sweetest Thing,”
on of my favorite songs, and stop, lean against the Oreos
and Chips Ahoy, and listen, at first only humming, then Bono’s
voice has me swaying in the aisle, and I start to sing louder
as people step farther away from me. But I don’t care. I need
this song, on this day, in this grocery store, and when I look up,
there’s a woman, about my age, staring at me, lip-syncing
the words. She steps forward and somehow we’re dancing
in the snack food aisle. I can’t tell you what she looks like
because we’re in motion, and The Edge is strumming his guitar,
and the whole damn week washes away as we hear a man
in a striped shirt, whom I assume is the manager, say Okay,
that’s enough now. She grabs my hand, and we run along
the back of the store, where the seafood counter guys smile
at us, and this one guy, who reminds me of my long-gone father
because of his graying beard, starts to clap, and my God,
his clapping, her hands in mine, this trip to Harris Teeter
feels like the sweetest thing in the whole wide world.
 . 
Steve Cushman – Greensboro, NC
from Kakalak 2024, Moonshine Press Review, Harrisburg NC; © 2024
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
One good thing that arrives as the New Year approaches is the annual Kakalak anthology. It grows each year and has become a gathering of almost two hundred artists and writers; this year there are dozens of names new to me. I especially appreciate the skill with which the editors curate micro-collections within the greater work, often placing several poems in sequence that share a theme or image, complimented by the art. Thank you to Julie Ann Cook, Angelo Geter, and David E. Poston for Kakalak 2024, and to benevolent deity Anne M. Kaylor who makes it happen and gives it life.
 . 
Purchase Kakalak 2024 HERE:
 . 
❦
 . 
Michael Beadle teaches kids to love poetry, to write poetry, to speak poetry.
Steve Cushman works in IT, which does not inhibit him from finding poetry in everything.
Jessi Waugh is well on the way to having everyone on Bogue Banks engaged in poetry.
 . 
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Canopy Disengagement
 . 
The year is closing and won’t come again
 === this day, the way the sun slants shadows
through the space between leaves that will fall
 . 
and never grow again, the ones next year
 === will be different on a changed tree, you can’t
step into the same river twice
 . 
We look for patterns with our primitive minds
 === searching the space between leaves for meaning
and when there is none, we relax and drift
 . 
let the chaos of a system with a thousand variables
 === wash over us and defy explanation, why try?
O sweet surprise, oh symphony of endless instruments
 . 
My child grows taller by the day and further away
 === The tree watches each lost leaf with a sigh
We’ve done our jobs, these rules aren’t yours or mine
 . 
Only the space between leaves and the moment
 === the sun shines through us and the blaze of blood
orange fire as the wind plays with your hair
 . 
I lose the pattern and accept the asymmetry
 === heart lightened by knowing there’s nothing more
I could do, nothing more would make you stay
 . 
We step into the everchanging river your palm in mine
 === and a red sweetgum hand lands like a swirling gem
Your fingers disengage to catch it, the wind blows
 . 
And the space between leaves shifts slightly above us
 . 
Jessi Waugh – Pine Knoll Shores, NC
from Kakalak 2024, Moonshine Press Review, Harrisburg NC; © 2024
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
 . 

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Cusp

Posted in Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on December 1, 2023| 11 Comments »

 . 
[with 5 poems from Kakalak 2023]
 . 
Autumnal Asymptote
 . 
The sun’s last red is seeping through the maple now,
and umber too, like the webbing of a frog, like the shadow of winter.
How tenderly the ground holds each leaf. How lightly they rest
before they snuggle down under the rain.
Such a wealth of dying. The coin of the land is on its edge,
a membrane, the balance of water, seeping –
even the roots break light together.
Even the fungus breathes its gifts
to the soil.
 . 
Even the breath of me shatters this silent grace.
My steps churn leaves, worm-cast, root, stone.
The arc of reaching out is endless, airless –
I cannot kiss the earth’s brow so lightly.
She cannot sigh and settle beneath my hand.
 . 
Hannah Ringler
from Kalalak 2023, Harrisburg, NC. © Moonshine Review Press 2023
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
I am about to read an online poem titled Bicuspid and I immediately tell myself it will be about that congenital heart syndrome in which the aortic valve has only two leaflets instead of the normal three (“tricuspid”). The man in the poem won’t even know he harbors the cardiac defect. His life will be flowing along its secure expected trajectory until suddenly in his 30’s he won’t be able to walk up a flight of steps or have sex without gasping for breath. Everything crashes – painful tests & procedures, dangerous surgery, bankrupting bills, a foot-long scar down his sternum. The life he was a moment before so confidently devouring has abruptly turned to eat him up and spit him out. Will he discover a new center?
 . 
The title also launches me into another favorite pastime – etymology. Just what is a cusp, anyway? Whenever you open yourself to a new field of exploration, your first big hurdle is its vocabulary. In scientific parlance, its nomenclature, but, hey, still just words. Don’t your non-poet friends’ eyes glaze over when you wax rhapsodic about enjambment? I know when my grandfather G. C. Cooke attended medical school in the nineteen-teens his required courses included Greek and Latin. Maybe he couldn’t do anything about Bicuspid Aortic Valve Syndrome, or even diagnose it pre-mortem, but he definitely was armed with all the nomenclature he needed to know cusp derives from Latin cuspis, a spear or a point, and the first recorded use of tricuspidem for “three-pointed” is from the 1660’s.
 . 
Dig deep beneath the words growing in these lines, whether cultivated garden or rank unruly weeds, and you discover that all is metaphor. The cusp of the moment is a fulcrum impossible to balance upon; leap left or leap right? The spear prods your back; it will not permit you to remain standing on this spot of ground you imagined so stable. The motion of your very heart is arrested, worn out of synch, its fluttering leaflets no longer able to manage the flow of your minutes.
 . 
Wow. I read the poem. Turns out it’s describing teeth. Bicuspid, duh. But it is still all about getting chewed up by life. And it’s awesome.
 . 
❦
 . 
[ read Bicuspid by Clemonce Heard on poets.org HERE ]
[ and HERE is my favorite online Etymology Dictionary (or download the app Etymology Explorer) ]
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Under
++ from the early Chinese philosopher Mencius:
++“The ten thousand things are part of me.
++ Treat those things as you would treat yourself.”
 . 
Under the cloud, a man in the airplane
looks down from the window and yawns
at the mountain’s green canopy,
the towering tree where, under
a branch, the owl sleeps.
Under the owl, a young mother
leans against the rugged trunk;
under her eyes, a small screen,
her frog thumbs hopping;
under the screen, her hands.
Under her darting glances,
her child squats. Under the child
the tumbling river dances;
under the river, the rock.
 . 
The child lifts the rock and squeals
as, under the rock, the crayfish wakes.
Between two fingers, under her gaze,
its curious feelers, its wiggling tail,
its many legs running midair,
its hooked fingers; its eyes
examine her. It whispers in her hear.
The water stirs. She lifts the rock again
and tenderly tucks the crayfish
under, for now she knows
the ten thousand things are part of her.
 . 
Martha O. Adams
from Kalalak 2023, Harrisburg, NC. © Moonshine Review Press 2023
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Fox Moves in Nearby
 . 
As incense from a censer,
+++ wildness wafts about him –
he saunters
+++ outside our sliding door.
 . 
Red as cinnamon,
+++ gray-flecked belly,
he swings his head side to side,
takes everything in
+++ his black pearl eyes.
Squirrels scatter,
+++ grackles fly.
 . 
He lifts his leg and marks
+++ the stoop
and, with deliberation,
+++ three stones by the fountain.
 . 
He hesitates, concludes,
+++ and prances
through the hostas,
+++ slows beneath the forsythia,
squeezes through the fence.
 . 
We spend sever quiet breaths,
+++ fingertips on glass,
before we step out to sense
+++ his leaving.
The birds flit back
+++ to feed and chatter
Shadows underlying trees
+++ are darker,
redbirds, redder.
 . 
Preston Martin
from Kalalak 2023, Harrisburg, NC. © Moonshine Review Press 2023
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
A few weeks back a friend in my writer’s group (holy poesy, Bill is in a writer’s group now!) mentioned that she has edited an anthology by poets near her home in northwest Ohio. Imagine opening a collection and recognizing the writers by name! See their faces as you read their lines, hear their inflections and cadence. You might realize immediately that the poem is about teeth and not heart valves. Such a concept!
 . 
Welcome to Kakalak 2023. Although the editors no longer require a North or South Carolina connection in order to submit, I still discover many friends and acquaintances in the pages of this annual anthology. This year’s book very much retains the flavor of the South – has there ever been an issue without at least one mention of red clay or grits? But these almost 200 pages span most everything that could be said to make us human, whether grief or exaltation, recollection or discovery, love or despair, current events or origin stories, even a raised middle finger to the Home Owner’s Association.
 . 
I’ve read the book through from page one to the end. I intentionally avoided skipping straight to the names I know in order to discover names I want to get to know. I used my standard criteria to select three poems to feature here, which is no criteria at all except what grabs me in the moment of reading (and the three quickly becam five, eleven, fifty). Do you need some new friends? As Robert Frost invites when he heads down to clear the pasture spring – You come too!
 . 
❦
 . 
[ Kakalak 2023 is edited by Angelo Geter, David E. Poston, and Kimberlyn Blum-Hyclack; learn more about Kakalak, and purchase  HERE ]
 . 
 .
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Moon-Child
 . 
+++ +++ +++ Sophie has pummeled the beach all day
+++ with the unbridled vigor of a one-year-old
dog, her tail held aloft like a kite gaining the wind
 . 
She is tired and wonders why we’ve come back at this hour,
+++ though sand feels coos as the night sky peels off
+++ +++ the top layers of heat. She pants and leans into me.
 . 
+++ +++ That’s enough, isn’t it?
+++ To feel day draining into atmosphere?
+++ +++ To hear the surf recite the history of a planet –
 . 
+++ +++ +++ extinction events,
+++ +++ +++ +++ rise and fall of Rome,
+++ +++ +++ discovery, war, conquest,
+++ +++ pandemics, and underneath it all,
+++ echoes of lost Atlantis rumbling in the waves?
 . 
Sophie’s nose twitches.
+++ Something in the dark has put her on alert.
The cone of my flashlight reveals where a ghost crab
 . 
+++ +++ has been sidling. A moon-child
+++ +++ +++ gleaning alms offered by the tide
+++ +++ has scribed in the sand abstract patterns,
 . 
ragged as the Milky Way,
+++ like a record of all the small events
that drive the Earth, too delicate to see.
 . 
Gregory Lobas
from Kalalak 2023, Harrisburg, NC. © Moonshine Review Press 2023
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
The Hive in the Wall
 . 
Sometimes, when a soul has more to say,
it holds on to some place, some person,
or just moves in between joists and frames,
 . 
taking the shapes of bees, even their names,
their endless buzz near the too-warm kitchen.
Unlike other ghosts, they work by day.
 . 
They still need light and the scent of wet grass,
flowers that love summer and last until fall.
They, I say they, but I mean they act as one.
 . 
Many creatures made of one spirit, a mass
that’s a fused, united, yet scattered, all.
That’s what it takes to get the job done.
 . 
This may not be true, but here’s what I believe:
that one day, all bees, in one swarm, will leave.
 . 
Paul Jones
from Kalalak 2023, Harrisburg, NC. © Moonshine Review Press 2023
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Hannah Ringler (Durham, NC) is a poet, gardener, and educator.
 . 
Martha O. Adams (Hendersonville, NC) includes drawings for coloring with her recent meditative poem In Your Meadow.
 . 
Preston Martin (Chapel Hill, NC) facilitates classes in poetry and literature at Duke Continuing Education.
 . 
Gregory Lobas (Columbus, NC) won the Dogfish Head Poetry Prize in 2022 for Left of Center.
 . 
Paul Jones (Chapel Hill, NC) is a member of the NC State Computer Science Hall of Fame and some of his poems crashed on the moon.
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
2020-03-07 Doughton Park Tree
 . 

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A Book for You

Posted in Art, Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , , , 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

.     .     .     .      .     .     .

2020-03-07 Doughton Park Tree

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