My Latest Book! Available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble sites

 

 These are three wonderful anthologies that feature my poems, among many others'. I highly recommend them. Forgotten Women is from Grayson Books. Stay Salty is from Read Furiously. Worth More Standing is from Canada, and should be available at the usual book venues.

 Here is my third book, published by Read Furiously in 2020! This one is close to my heart, as the poems in it are about growing up in Paterson NJ during the 50s and 60s.

Tuesday Poem: Announcement

I am pleased to post about my second book here. 

The Girls In Their Iron Shoes was published in 2016 

by Finishing Line Press. 

It's available at their website and on Amazon.com

The Witch Series

Witch’s Prayer

To wear a hat made of rain

to float like a little skiff

into the enveloping mist.

To be naked and fogbound,

to be cloud caressed

and chilled to the marrow.

To be invisible, wild

as a neutrino bouncing

across the emptiness,

blissfully small, to be

a blip, a phoneme,

O no, no O, O no name .

To see nothing, to take

nothing in for a change,

to move through

the blessing of blankness

all your cells drunk

on the smell of earth,

water, and air.

To feel yourself dissolving

into something vast

and sentient. Smoke

from a slow burning fire.

To let go of the world, this life,

for a few free moments,

face the clean white page,

and begin the story anew

So mote it, for me

so mote it be.

The Witch Series

The Night Witches - 1941

Flew over the Soviet Union,

bombing the Nazis

in wooden planes

no one else wanted to fly.

They wore saggy

ill-fitting men’s

uniforms, flew

without parachutes,

got frostbite on their faces

in open cockpits,

and cut their engines

to glide in over their targets.

Russian women who didn’t

care whether they lived

or died, flying so low

you could see their faces

glowing against the sky.

The Germans said they took

magic pills that gave them

night vision. They laughed

and painted their lips with

navigational pencils, drew

flowers all over their planes.

The Witch Series

Witch’s Test

She has been put into the furnace

and reborn again. She has held

the orange coals like bright candy

up to her lips, as Isaiah once did,

to purify them for speaking the truth.

She has nursed the sick and dying, in

rooms filled with the smell of nightsoil

and decay. She has kept several drunken

men at bay with her words, and if words

failed her, she didn’t hesitate to pick up

a knife. She has been a faithful wife,

opening herself to affection and eros,

giving him the gift of her keen sight,

her humor inciting and sharing his

laughter. She has felt both new life

and small death sliding from her

in a rush of waters and pain, she has

taken long walks in the rain to keep

from weeping overmuch in front

of the children, she has taken flight

without so much as a broom or wing,

taking everything in going on below,

tried to use her knowings wisely.

She vowed to do only good with

whatever amplitude of spirit she’d

been given, always aspired toward

Heaven, though she suspects its

less of a place and more like a

pleasant disbursement, the milk-

weed pod of her soul puffing

apart to mingle with all the other

invisibles. For all this, she must

endure a witch’s test. Here she sits

naked and shaven from head to toe,

being poked by little men, as

they look for the Devil’s mark.

She prays when they prick

her, her body will bleed.

The Witch Series

Crone Song

My face is a hex                     

made of clouds                       

rapidly passing.

These hands betray,               

and always pay                      

what the cards tell them.

Where is the beak that can peck away at sorrow?

My knees are a jinx

crusted and frozen

over, leaving me

rooted and tree slow.

These feet search

floor after floor          

for the path

that will lead me

to what must be said.

What chain opens up grief’s damper,

so its terrible vapors can fly?

A vestigial tail

at the base of my spine,

wags at the prospect of relief.

My mouth unlocks

in harmony.

The Witch Series

Bridget Bishop’s Accusers

            hanged in Salem in 1692

Workers repairing her tavern in Salem Town
who found two poppets full of pins
in the old plaster walls.

A scragged* woman who had
accused her of stealing a spoon years ago, 

and of constantly plotting retaliation.

A field hand who blamed her
for eating three eggs, gone missing,
and then turning into a cat to get away.

A man with a child who wouldn’t look

at him, nor say his name.

A disgruntled employee, who said
she paid him, but the money disappeared,
as he rode off, and then his axle broke
as he hit a brand new hole in the road.

The parents of a child who drowned

because of her evil eye beams.

Two guards who said, as they
led her in, she looked at the church,
and they heard something fall inside.

A nextdoor neighbor who swore
he was attacked by a monstrous beast
that tried to kill him, as Bridget was walking
out from her house to the orchard.

The visionary girls who were
the main accusers, predicting fits, pin sticks,
bites, and all things spectral, a few moments
before they befell the entire assemblage.  

*broken of mind

The Witch Series

Sue Cross

took herself out one day,

to the woods she’d been foraging in

for years, went out among the may-apples,

colts foot, burdock, lamb’s quarter,

plants she read , nature’s literature,

expanding her life beyond itself,

nurturing woods, medicinal woods –

learning all its secrets, riding the steady

wheel of the seasons, its comings and goings,

the small predictable bounties.

Woods she’d come to, after quitting nursing,

collecting for teas, elixirs, and tinctures,

taking other peoples’ children

on wild foods walks, collecting

watercress, nettles, ramps,

and in the spring, morels, their tiny

convoluted skulls peeping out among the roots.

I can hear her low voice, its sibilant consonants

and vowel melodies filling the afternoon shade

with the riches all around us, opening our eyes.

Herbalist, house wren,

small, watchful, and full of knowledge,

went out to the woods alone

one day, not long after her divorce,

stood at the edge of the deepest

rock ravine, and threw herself down.

Who knows how long she lay there,

awake and aware, as the raptors

went sliding overhead, how many

nights she watched them turn into stars?

Those of us who saw her

for the hero she was trying so hard to be,

hope new shoots feathered up

around her, unfurling a green caress,

that little birds gathered above her,

to sing her their sweetest songs.