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.

The Witch Series

Book of Shadows

Her book. This book,

spanning all the time she’s been allotted.

All of them neatly folded and tucked

between two of its pages –

Father, so long Dad,

so long, his legs, his darkness,

hang(s) out bookmarking gloom.

All of it yellowed by beer,

river water running under the bridge

as he hurled himself down and slipped under.

Mother, hello Mother, saying goodbye,

her phantom breast, its tumor shadowing

a line across her chest. Her kitchen simmering

with delicious mystery, kindnesses from

strange men, her wild waitress friends.

Their separation, the chasms it multiplied --

his family’s disapproval, their withdrawal,

the brittle crackling facts of abandonment.

Catholic school, Sister This, Father That,

their stories about martyrs 
bloodying page after page,

the few teachers who took 
an interest in her, the poetry

she wrote, a string of A pluses 
strung up like prayer flags.

Witches she knew and admired.

Witches she loved and feared.

Animal familiars. Animal tutors and chaperones.

Dogs and cats, foxes, hares, elks, bears, elephants,

her fear of mice. Crows, always crows 
disposing of carrion, gathering 
shiny things, squawking at the moon.

Then the rituals, her intentions

floating away from her,

seeding the future, her hands tying knots

for stability, a candle burning against

the wall, the flash of residual ashes

that let her let go, Loved ones on

moonlit nights, as they hung

from high branches,

twisting on the breeze,

tiny outlines of dollies

bearing messages

to the underworld,

litanies of hope, yearning,

praise and blessed be.

Little parcels weighed down

by rocks underground,

what needed or wanted burying.

Spells for babies wanted by friends, for babies

who had to be given back before birth,

love spells, sweet mingling of cells 
as they decompose, healing 
tokens of friendship and admiration, 
talismans for courage or protection,

planted in tree trunks around her house,

spells chanted over water, over food to

enhance its nourishment, over little heads

while they’re fast asleep, spells to ease the body,

lift it away from pain.

All her optimism and acceptance tucked into

this book’s many leaves, her life a wheel

turned by the earth’s steady compass.

She can feel herself growing lighter,

as the shadows take on weight.

The wildness, the weediness in her,

the roots reaching out from between

its pages, all of it flimsy and fleeting.

The sun moves across each day

in a woman’s life, leaving behind

this dance of dark upon light.

It feels to her like enough.

                         

The Witch Series

 

History: The Immolations

Imagine fifty thousand

women on fire at once,

illuminating the shifty

landscapes of time.

Fifty thousand queens

on thrones of cord wood

drenched in oil, then set ablaze,

as they gaze at the men who despise them.

Watch their feet blacken, then their legs,

pudenda, bellies, wombs, their breasts

and hearts, their mouths agape, screaming

into silence, arms with match head hands alight,

hands adept at catching babies, making balms,

tinctures, poultices, offering small comforts, spells

for rekindling hope, draughts of blessed forgetting.

Smell their hair burning. Know them

for what they were, and still are: grandmothers,

mothers, wives, daughters, spinsters, lesbians,

midwives, nuns, saints, wise women, healers,

inventors, women who speak up for others,

who have little care for obedience any more.

Take the ash of their sacrifice into yourself.

Understand it as the benediction,

you need right now, to carry on.

Imagine them strung across the horizon, 

brighter than all the stars.

The Witch Series

               Collage by Romare Bearden

Conjure Woman

She’s got them all teetering on

the tips of her fingers, tiny as mice.

One flip of the wrist and all the men,

who ever tasted her; then turned 

their faces away, and all the men,

who drove them to ruination, 

go flying to who knows 

where, and who cares?

She holds them up in yellow

curtain light, watches them shift

their weight to keep from falling.

Each one of them knows what he’s

done or not done. It’s chilling them

to the bone to see she’s wearing her

haint blue dress. No more feathers,

no Adam and Eve root. That’s how

very much danger they’re in.

Outside, her bottle tree glistens,

as she squeezes them for good measure,

rolls them between her palms, before

laying them out like sardines

in the bottom of her reddest meanest box.

The Witch Series

Effigies

Dolls for stubbornness, their

heads made of smooth river stone.

Dolls for finding water, with

long dowser legs and splintered feet.

Dolls for snagging memories,

in teasel heads and little burr hands.

Nut eyes, leaf wings, bark body, red leaf fire

Dolls bound head to toe with string,

to make a lover cleave and cling.

Dolls sitting in little boats

spiriting nuisance people away.

Dolls full of pins, their

crisscross faces in pain.

A white shell face, wild grass hair, a toadstool bed

Straw dolls with their hair on fire

turning all worry to ash in the wind.

Wrap a doll safe in a mullein leaf, tuck in

milkweed seeds and a child returns from fever.

Nail a doll to a tree and watch grief twist in pain,

go brittle and crumble; each tiny loss a bit of letting go.

The Witch Series

-->

Mirror Spell

You are a shape-shifter

and a storyteller.

You have spent many nights as crow

or snail or leaf waving in the wind,

for you are changeable and unafraid.

You have been hurt many times, oh, yes,

wrecked and ravaged, and then set free.

Your relatives think you crowd a room,

though you feel yourself tiny and bee-like.

Your heart’s ease sprouts from

the pine needled floor of the forest.

You can conjure love for every being,

whether flesh bound, leaf adorned,

petaled, antennaed or furred.

You carry every kiss, every compliment,

every lightening you ever walked away with,

in a little suitcase behind your eyelids.

Right now, you are long overdue

for a voyage on waves of bliss.

Just write your desires across the sky

in the swiftly moving alphabet of birds.

The Witch Series

 

Tex

I was the witch of Religion class,

because my hair curtained

my face, when I read aloud,

and when this nun interrupted me

to ask whattt? I didn’t get it,

and I repeated my version of

what, with its softer ending,

back to her three times,

until she turned red and said,

I was saying that word all wrong.

My T’s, back then, were Paterson T’s.

They fell short of the sound on purpose.

They were about a slow fade

which is better than the sudden

death this city was trying to avoid,

and so was I. What with no money

for college, the future was pretty uncertain.

But she insisted I hit those T’s

so hard, every time I got to a what

or a that in the Old Testament,

that I giggled throughout

my passage, which was

sacrilegious on top of ignorant.

That’s when she called me a witch.

So yeah, this felt like Gunsmoke,

and her bullets bounced right off of me, 

because I was a witch, a strega, in fact,

from a big Sicilian neighborhood.

I pictured her shredding her veil

every time she passed a nail, and

wished it so. Then I made myself

disappear for the rest of the year.

I scried into the future and knew

some day at a high school reunion

I would walk right past her,

and her little cowboy swagger,

as if none of us had ever been

afraid of her, as if she were

just a rerun on TV.

The Witch series

                                             Drawing by Rima Staines
Nana
 
Her voice curdled milk, her words hatcheting

the air around us, as we sat, big contemplative
lumps around the TV. She, the antithesis of ennui,
couldn't see the cloud hanging over us.
Forget sympathy. Too many things needed doing, 
shadows and creepings everywhere.

She put hexes on our father, for making too little,

and spending too much at the gin mill,

gave our mother venomous handouts,

drove her ashen with vexation,

cleaned our filthy house,

breathing incantations, rag in hand,

poking around with the vacuum wand,

spraying us all with Windex, and condemnation.

Only the baby was innocent.

To babies she was a smoocher, a laugher,

all goodness and light. At two it was all over;

they turned rogue, like the rest of us.

No candy houses to tempt us into cooperation.

Only vinegar, spitfire, a daily poison mushroom

to toughen body and spirit, a list of standards

that flew like a flag from the rooftop,

and orders barked out by the hour,

with a minute hand’s patience.

If we didn’t jump, she was a stubby cyclone,

doing whatever it was herself, then calling us

names until we wanted to hurt her too,

to startle her into silence, until she threatened

to put her head in the oven unless we let up.

She pushed, and we pushed back, until she went

blind at the sight of us. Then we haunted her

like the ghosts we’d become, howling with
laughter as she went about her rituals, sewing
God knows what into our clothes, as she 
did the mending, stirring the steaming
cauldron, or wielding her broom.

The Witch Series

Ritual Against Separation

Take one of her leopard

print high heels, and one of his

long seldom worn dress shoes.

Hang them out the bedroom window

on the extra clothesline from the shed,

so they dance in the breeze.

Once a week, pull them up, hand over hand,

so you can stuff more hair into each toe box,

hair you’ve been collecting from his hairbrush,

her hairbrush, stuffing his into her shoe,

hers into his, then lint from each of their

sweaters, and any loose threads you can pull

when you hang their wash on the line.

Each time, lower them down

a little closer to the bushes limning

the house, until you see a swirl of

grass beginning, soon mosses

and feathers too, mingling

with parental flotsam, each shoe

transformed into an aerie house

for tiny eggs that will give birth

to baby birds, all beak and need,

their cries a tenderness, a sun burst,

a glitter cascade, almost unbearable

in the fullness of its gladness.

Watch the parents guard them,

feed them, and teach them

how to fly, their larger bodies

dipping below, and bumping up

the smaller, until the currents catch

them and they glide. Call your

father Carolina Wren, House 

Sparrow, Nuthatch, call your mother his

mate. Tie the ropes in a triple

knot, and hope for the best.

from Firefly, Brightly Burning

Was It A Crow You Saw?

Or a priest as you flew down the highway,
his black cassock waving in the cold air?
And you picked him up, didn’t you,
with his pack and his traveler’s hunch
although you never really slowed down?
You picked him up imagining the possibilities
he carried with him: where he was going
with his young face, his anointed hands.
What hand moves him along?
Is it the same hand that moves you,
that moves the deer to leap
across the highway and be killed?
That gives you the blessing of horses
lying at ease in the chill, haloed by the steam
before winter chases them into the barn?
Ah, but then you catch yourself.
Who said it had to be a hand?
It could just as well be tentacles, or a claw.
It could be an oozing polymer, you haven’t a clue.
And maybe what you saw was a crow after all.
This game you’ve been playing
makes you hungry, doesn’t it?
Too bad his pack is empty;
all that he carried now circling
darkly in your head.

The poems in Firefly, Brightly Burning were written and compiled over many years. When I first put the manuscript together, it seemed like a patchwork of unlike things, perhaps because it contains a number of serial pieces. I tended to see those as discrete from the other work I was doing. Many of the poems come from a fictional, narrative impulse, though certainly not all. The Anna God poems, in particular, were instigated by a photo in the newspaper of a college girl asleep on a couch in a triangle of sunlight. Her name was, yes, you guessed it, Anna God. Some of her poems come from my direct experiences as a teacher at a university, one comes from an incredible newspaper story, and one from reading Lorca. Nevertheless, one's own concerns have a way of sneaking in despite our intentions,  don't they? 

Recently, I read a quote from Melissa Pritchard's book, A Solemn Pleasure: To Imagine, Witness, And Write, that, "art [is] a form of active prayer." That seems true of this book, which moves from frustration with organized religion, and the way it fails women, in particular, to direct glimpses or experiences of the divine that have been there all along.

Tuesday Poem: An Announcement

I am so pleased to announce that my first book, Firefly, Brightly Burning is now available at http://www.graysonbooks.com and from Amazon.com