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[with 3 poems from Tar River Poetry]
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Submersible
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+++ “Red Sky at Morning”
++++++ – for Peter Makuck
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All day and into the evening sullen rain has bucketed dow upon us,
and I think of Peter and the blue-black coastal squalls purpling seaward.
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Ignoring heavy weather is what natives do on Emerald Isle. Years ago
I failed to talk him and Phyllis into fleeing Hurricane Florence, a monster
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storm grinding on Wilmington. Likewise, I used to remind my rother
at Kitty Hawk, half-joking, that he lived in the middle of the god-damned
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Atlantic Ocean. He never listened either – even after his son refused
evacuation from Hurricane Isobel and almost drowned inside their cottage
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with his loyal dog and bobbing bamboo furniture. Tenaciously, Peter and
Phyllis have been anchored to their apartment for years, weathering cancer
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treatments and the Pandemic. Finally – like my father decades ago –
Peter had had enough of chemo, remission, drug cocktails and radiation,
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so six weeks back he stopped. Meanwhile the world obsesses over five men
trapped in the submersible Titan, its only hatch bolted from the outside and
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the seven ways it’s supposed to shed weight and resurface from its great drop
down to Titanic’s ghost spines. The one porthole is small. They’re out of air.
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Peter too has begun a long descent through the murky waters of memory,
morphine, and goodby to land finally (I hope) upon the soft silt of forever.
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Everyone’s half-waiting for the last storm to fade and for Peter – teacher, poet,
and sailor – to resurface and note with delight, again, a red sky at night.
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Don Ball
from Tar River Poetry, Volume 63 Number 1, Fall 2023, Greenville NC.
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❦ ❦ ❦
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As soon as he hops from the car he’s Tyrannosaurus, miniature dangling forelegs, ferocious jaw gaping as he swivels his head side to side, Linda and me his prey. While we wait for food Chameleon appears, thin compressed lips, deliberate robot-like ratcheting gait, front digits at right angles all asplay. Later we interrupt our walk for him to climb the big rock, Gila Monster, but then he elongates his body along a fissure and becomes Chuckwalla.
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Boys are animals. This boy, though, is the master of animals. Not only in transforming himself one into another but also in the thousand and one details he can tell us about their lives and characteristics. We imagine his kindergarten teacher’s eyebrows rising higher and higher at the revelations he pours forth. And what is the best place to really mix it up with animals? Besides, that is, the back yard – bird feeders, bunnies, snakes, hens – and walks along the greenway – deer, skinks, herons, eagles? Well, of course the North Carolina Zoological Park!
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This is the second straight year we’ve spent my birthday at the Zoo with Bert. And with about a thousand other boys and girls of every possible age, shape, size, and color. Come to the Zoo and see the wild children! What other place can keep kids walking for hours and miles with minimal meltdowns? (And what other place features Polar Bear pee and Gorilla poop, fascinating stuff.) Just pack plenty of snacks and you won’t hear the first whine. And while we adults are rewarded minute by minute with Bert’s company, it’s only fair to end the day with one final reward for him at the gift shop. Another addition to the home menagerie. Next time we’re together, I’ll be sure to keep my fingers to myself when Boy Snapping Turtle meets me at the door.
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❦ ❦ ❦
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The Dead
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We want to button them to us,
wear them like clothes. We want
to savor our morning café au lait
with them, hold yoga poses,
walk dogs, skateboard, eat sushi,
rake leaves, stream movies, tango
dribble basketballs with them.
We want them to ride beside us,
windows down, singing
along with our favorite playlists.
We want to tuck them in books
to mark our place, jingle them
in our pockets, lucky coins,
hook them over our arms
like umbrellas to keep us dry.
Coming home at night, we want
the porchlight’s yellow halo
to mean they’re waiting up.
As our key turns the lock,
we pray they’ll call out to us
from the empty rooms
of our dark house.
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Janis Harrington
from Tar River Poetry, Volume 63 Number 1, Fall 2023, Greenville NC.
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❦ ❦ ❦
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I first immersed myself in Peter Makuck’s poetry when I was poet-in-residence at the NC Zoo in 2012. I was working on the Poetry of Conservation project, selecting poems by North Carolina writers that might be displayed in the park, and I also published daily posts of my observations (spending all day every day in the Zoo – it doesn’t get better than that!). In my very first post I featured Peter’s poem, My Son Draws an Apple Tree, a beautifully simple poem that cuts to the truth of the bittersweet relationship between father and son. Peter’s collection in which the poem appears, Long Lens, is filled with generous, haunting, contemplative recollections and themes.
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Peter Makuck founded Tar River Poetry and served as its editor for decades during his tenure at East Carolina University. The current issue arrived this week [vol 63, nr 1, fall 2023] and is dedicated to him – he died last year at the age of 83. Peter inspired me through his writing but equally through his generosity and friendship. Somehow we struck up an email correspondence through the years, first about poetry, then about the NC coast, nature sightings, just stuff we discovered we had in common. Even when wearing his editor’s hat – and I have accumulated more rejections than acceptances from him and Luke Whisnant, the current editor – he was never anything but encouraging and giving of himself. He would have liked me to believe that I, even I, could write poetry as worthy as his own.
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Tar River Poetry is a journal of national stature and reputation, but the three poems I’ve featured today are all by North Carolina writers who appear in this current issue (the wonderful poem One Year Old by Rebecca Baggett is also in this issue but space constraints etc.). Check out TRP and join me in subscribing HERE
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Picking Up Trash with My Sister
on Crab Orchard Road
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She plunges a foot into the dry ditch,
tosses cans, plastic bottles, empty
cigarette packs onto the gravel road
so we can sort them into garbage
and recycling. As she works she asks,
Is this poison ivy? Is this?, trusting me
to protect her as I’ve trusted her since my beginning,
older sister in pictures at ages five and three,
reading to me as we sit on the sofa,
feet sticking straight out, book open in her lap,
pink cat’s eye classes she pushed with one finger
back up her nose.
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And later, at nine and eleven, trying
to sooth with the only stories that made sense:
we’re fleeing the potato famine in Ireland
or Nazis coming to take us away
that morning we heaped dolls into blankets,
shoved clothes into flowered suitcases, fearing
each floorboard creak might be our father
come home to carry out night’s drunken threat
to shoot our mother.
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My sister stomps a beer can flat,
drops it in her bag, slips a Styrofoam cup
into mine. Who would do this? she says,
shaking her head, pushing dark purple glasses
with one finger back up her nose. She twists the lid
from a water bottle, pours the last sip
over the roots of a wilted aster
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Pam Baggett
from Tar River Poetry, Volume 63 Number 1, Fall 2023, Greenville NC.
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V E R S E and I M A G E 
Thank you, Bill. Joyce Compton Brown