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

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.

Tuesday Poem: Part of the Post-deluvian Water Series

Drones

Many’s the time, Luna’s spied those

hovering metal hummingbirds overhead,

or buzzing by the windows over and over,

till Sol made an ugly face and gave them

the finger. Many’s the time the two of them

were moved to head into the thickest woods,

so as not to be watched any more, pretending to

heed the hunter’s call to enter the letup of leaf cover.

When they heard, at Kin Gather, about
the young ones squatting in Hill Wagon,
all three of them nullified, where they stood,
for smuggling, and it being the same
kind of drone, Sam shook, and Luna sobbed
until she fainted. From that day on, when the
buzz come, Luna had to lie down, and Sol
made an effort to smile and flash the peace sign.

Tuesday Poem: previously published by Icarus Rising in 2001

painting by Sally Noble

Crow Woman

sits up black as humid earth,

rises out of a wallow of water

and humus, black and stake-burnt

for harboring knowledge,

for power enough say no,

witch woman, cinder saint,

shakes a tail feather loose

and delivers a baby,

footprints filling with ooze

in her wake, as she struts her

reek of passion, muck of sexuality,

stubborn blood that will not come out,

crow woman, shaven headed

intimate of trees and tinctures,

tarred and feathered adultress,

sticky baby you can’t let go of,

nodding earthward, flying, flying,

landing you in the brambles,

earth angel, flying the highways

commuting, commuting

the sentence, the sentence of night,

and you, and you with your sharp

crow eating night kill eyes,

dare you to follow,

dare you to try

to get rid of her.

Tuesday Poem: previously published by Feminist Studies in 1999, and in The Paterson Literary Review in 2005

 

The Circus Comes To Paterson

Once they set up Clyde Beatty’s Big Top

at the foot of Sandy Hill, in the empty lot

where projects used to rise in long barracks rows,

housing the soldiers and their wives after the war,

and then struggling families like mine,

until they finally knocked them down,

flattened them like furrows

ploughed up for just a few seasons

to give us all a chance to sow a future.

And there it was: our future,

in a house, with an alleyway and a garden,

on Summer Street, ripeness setting in, I guess,

because when the circus came

our parents were giddy too,

as we joined the crowd in the bleachers,

sitting in the backs of flat beds,

and pulled in a circle

like a wagon train at chow time.

And we were just like pioneers sitting there,

doing something we’d never done,

a circus right in our living room,

that’s what it felt like

until the elephants came out

and no more than five minutes into the act

one of them broke ranks,

dragging the trainer with her,

the poor guy dangling like an earring

from the hook he held to the side of her head.

That elephant’s berserk!, someone screamed,

and we screamed too when she charged at the trucks,

as people fled up the seats and dropped off the back.

We were paralyzed, which turned out to be all right

because she wasn’t interested in us at all,

she was more intent on the freedom she saw

through an opening in the canvas

and was gone before we had that figured out.

The rest is hearsay.

Stories about her lurking behind the drugstore,

so that Doc nearly had a heart attack,

when he went to see why his dog 
was barking so loud, of how 
she wedged herself between 
the shoemaker’s house and garage,

bending the aluminum siding, 
as she eased back out, how she reared up 
and stamped a footprint in the sidewalk,

before turning tail and running past our house,

so Ralph next door thought he was 
going crazy, when he looked up 
from the paper, and she flew by 
like a bat out of hell.

They caught her way up high on the hill,

locked her in the back of a tractor trailer,

but the circus that day was done for,

there was no going back.

They worked her too hard, 

my mother said to my Dad.

This is what happens .

Meanwhile I stroked the garage’s new curved edges

where her anger had made its mark,

watching the girls take turns

stamping the sidewalk as hard as they could

inside the ring of her footprint.   

Tuesday Poem: an earlier version published by Poetpourri in 1994

One Summer I Read 

A Biography of Emily Bronte

And suddenly I noticed

the ornamental cabbages

penned up too close

to the houses, their ferocious

color, their variegated heads

crenellating gorgeously

despite their captivity.

The fences around them are

just a little too high,

so that they have to

stretch on precarious stems

to be seen, or to see out.

Their leaves show such largesse,

reaching out to one another,
trying to hold hands across the mulchy
darkness, as if it threatened to

swallow them whole.

And they take the frost,

like troopers, holding firm to

that ethereal companionship

as long as they can, 

despite the worms

living inside them,

the slow hollowing
that leaves them feeling
like shells caught in their longing

for the ocean, a whisper

that echoes a roar.