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[with 5 poems from Kakalak 2023]
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Autumnal Asymptote
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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.
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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.
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Hannah Ringler
from Kalalak 2023, Harrisburg, NC. © Moonshine Review Press 2023
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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[ read Bicuspid by Clemonce Heard on poets.org HERE ]
[ and HERE is my favorite online Etymology Dictionary (or download the app Etymology Explorer) ]
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Under
++ from the early Chinese philosopher Mencius:
++“The ten thousand things are part of me.
++ Treat those things as you would treat yourself.”
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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.
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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.
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Martha O. Adams
from Kalalak 2023, Harrisburg, NC. © Moonshine Review Press 2023
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Fox Moves in Nearby
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As incense from a censer,
+++ wildness wafts about him –
he saunters
+++ outside our sliding door.
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Red as cinnamon,
+++ gray-flecked belly,
he swings his head side to side,
takes everything in
+++ his black pearl eyes.
Squirrels scatter,
+++ grackles fly.
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He lifts his leg and marks
+++ the stoop
and, with deliberation,
+++ three stones by the fountain.
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He hesitates, concludes,
+++ and prances
through the hostas,
+++ slows beneath the forsythia,
squeezes through the fence.
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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.
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Preston Martin
from Kalalak 2023, Harrisburg, NC. © Moonshine Review Press 2023
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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!
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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.
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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!
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[ Kakalak 2023 is edited by Angelo Geter, David E. Poston, and Kimberlyn Blum-Hyclack; learn more about Kakalak, and purchase HERE ]
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Moon-Child
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+++ +++ +++ 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
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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.
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+++ +++ That’s enough, isn’t it?
+++ To feel day draining into atmosphere?
+++ +++ To hear the surf recite the history of a planet –
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+++ +++ +++ extinction events,
+++ +++ +++ +++ rise and fall of Rome,
+++ +++ +++ discovery, war, conquest,
+++ +++ pandemics, and underneath it all,
+++ echoes of lost Atlantis rumbling in the waves?
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Sophie’s nose twitches.
+++ Something in the dark has put her on alert.
The cone of my flashlight reveals where a ghost crab
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+++ +++ has been sidling. A moon-child
+++ +++ +++ gleaning alms offered by the tide
+++ +++ has scribed in the sand abstract patterns,
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ragged as the Milky Way,
+++ like a record of all the small events
that drive the Earth, too delicate to see.
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Gregory Lobas
from Kalalak 2023, Harrisburg, NC. © Moonshine Review Press 2023
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The Hive in the Wall
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Sometimes, when a soul has more to say,
it holds on to some place, some person,
or just moves in between joists and frames,
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taking the shapes of bees, even their names,
their endless buzz near the too-warm kitchen.
Unlike other ghosts, they work by day.
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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.
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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.
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This may not be true, but here’s what I believe:
that one day, all bees, in one swarm, will leave.
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Paul Jones
from Kalalak 2023, Harrisburg, NC. © Moonshine Review Press 2023
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Hannah Ringler (Durham, NC) is a poet, gardener, and educator.
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Martha O. Adams (Hendersonville, NC) includes drawings for coloring with her recent meditative poem In Your Meadow.
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Preston Martin (Chapel Hill, NC) facilitates classes in poetry and literature at Duke Continuing Education.
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Gregory Lobas (Columbus, NC) won the Dogfish Head Poetry Prize in 2022 for Left of Center.
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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.
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V E R S E and I M A G E 
Thank you, Mary Alice. The side benefit of cleaning off one's desk occasionally. ---B