April Is National Poetry Month -- and I'm All In on This One!

Today you can read "Hometown" in RockPaperPoem literary magazine -- I wrote it when translator Tony Hao, a resident artist here with Catamount Arts, suggested ways to write about our home towns, and I realized I didn't have one. Where I grew up is so different from where I live now, and my roots are confused. See what you think: https://rockpaperpoem.com/current-issue/

I'll be at the St. Johnsbury PoemTown reading at the St. Johnsbury Athenaeum on Saturday April 11, at 4 pm -- my two poems displayed downtown for this year's Poem Town are "Voices in the Night" (at Momentum Business Solutions at the intersection of Eastern Avenue and Railroad Street), and "Revolution" at Caledonia Plant Shop (nearby at 18 Eastern Ave). I'll post photos of them soon, but you can stroll the town and read these, along with many other wonderful insights.

I'll be at Bear Pond Books in Montpelier on Sunday April 26, 4:30 pm, along with other Northeast Kingdom writers including Judith Janoo and S.J. (Steve) Cahill, as well as my old friend Garret Keizer and long-ago Kingdom Books ally Chard deNiord, and others. 

Last but not least, on April 27 there will be four of us reading online with the Vermont Jewish Poets -- if that's meaningful to you, do look into it.

Watch for a BIG announcement about my poetry collection THRESHOLDS later this week. 

So ... am I working hard enough? 

After all that, you've earned a bit of a poem, right? This is from "Voices in the Night":

   

                            Here, the language of trauma (reddened, sore)

and the language of regret (tender apology for a path not seen) mingle,

soft balm to burned fingers. We always wanted to hear each other,

didn’t we? But accent and origin, animal nature, our canine, feline,

equine coughs of distress fell like rough echoes. What you say at night

your voice uncovering, discovering, slicing, even scarring: I hear you

with an organ centered just below my beating heart. 

BK 

"Getting Published": Cover Reveal, and Lambs

It's lambing season! Photo taken at Too Little Farm, 2022.

Most days, I'm focused squarely on the next poem, with notes on scraps of paper scattered around my desk, and a brisk morning walk to get the mind delving into new (or treasured old) ways to see, and to speak about it. I'm loving this.

But poetry can be meant, much of the time, for sharing. I'm not a person who memorizes her own lines. Robert Frost did that, I know -- so did Vermont's Ruth Stone, so that when her vision completely failed, she could still share her work. 

Faint excuse, I know, but true: It's easier to memorize a poem when it rhymes, with lines that match in length. We all know song lyrics, a great example of that. Limericks, too. 

For me, sharing a poem means "submitting" it to a literary journal that's looking for similar work. Pull that apart and there are three challenges: Reading enough of the publications' already-printed work to see whether "my stuff" might fit, then choosing a set of three to five of my poems to send, and then waiting ... and waiting ... because it takes time for any person or group to go through the dozens or hundreds of arriving poems and choose their favorites.

 That's the stage I'm usually in. Today I have more than 40 sets of poems "out there" for editors to consider. Maybe three will get chosen, and that will be worth celebrating.

 

In fact, in the past few months, I've had a big YES from two wonderful publishers taking on groups of my poems to turn them into the slim softcovers called chapbooks. The first, THRESHOLDS, is filled with writing about transitions, big and small changes in life. For me, some of those include walking through breast cancer discovery and treatment, and walking into widowhood. (Why yes, I do see life as walking, a lot of the time.) The poems also open doors to other transitions that we all experience, like going to school, or taking a job, even raising children or bonding with pets.

The second collection, PORTRAIT STUDIO ON THE RIDGE, gathers work that speaks to this place where I live, which I love dearly, even in March and November.

THRESHOLDS will be published by Kelsay Books around the end of May or early June. PORTRAIT STUDIO aims for next January. For each of these, there are now very very long lists from the publishers on my share of the tasks -- pulling together all the pieces of the books (cover, words from other authors) and preparing for book orders from individual readers and stores. It's a complicated set of labors, and isn't likely to spark the joy that writing a good poem creates.

Still, this is what the poems are for: heading out to you all. I'm on it. 

What do lambs have to do with all this? Hey, it's March ... in like a lion, out like a lamb. I'm in mid-month as I write this, looking forward to those playful lamb-ish moments after more work. Wishing you the same. 

The Astonishing Variations of "Poetry World"

My first published poem, "October," came out in YANKEE magazine -- which meant a lot to me (and still does), because more than any other, this magazine captured what my mother loved and valued. In the enormous gap that her premature death left (she was only 53), I could at least feel that she saw my poem this way.

For a long time, the only other place my poems appeared (under the surname Dugger, which I'd kept from a college marriage) was the Green Mountain Trading Post. In its wide and welcoming pages, I wasn't afraid to write about my Northeast Kingdom world as I saw and treasured it. To be read by my neighbors seemed the best reward ever. And it shaped me "forever," because when I went (twice) to the prestigious Bread Loaf Writers Conference and met poets whose work often seemed very complicated, very hard to understand, and made them famous, I made a decision:

I want to write what my friends and neighbors might want to read.

And that's still my goal today, although I write differently than I did back then.

This morning, out to a relaxed diner breakfast with a buddy, I learned she'd connected with one of my poems that Ginosko Literary Magazine published this week. (I'm still stunned that the magazine editor chose ALL TEN of the poems I'd sent to him. And very much honored.) My friend's reaction to the poem reassured me that I'm not just writing to "be creative" or to "vent" -- I'm writing poems about parts of my life that might mean something to someone else. It feels right to me.

"My" Dave, the man I happily married in 2003 after we'd met in a bookstore, chose poets for who they were in his life. That meant Galway Kinnell, deeply connected to the Northeast Kingdom and a neighbor to Dave's beloved Lyndon State College, was the most essential poet in Dave's life. But you know how it is -- married people start to notice each other's interests more, and soon Dave was insisting that we go to poetry readings all around the Kingdom, and even to The Frost Place in Franconia, NH, as well as to a reading in San Francisco when we went there for our honeymoon.

Bobbie Bristol and Donald Hall at The Frost Place (Dave took the photo).

 

Even though he wasn't a poetry reader by preference, he had a great ear for strong work, and his highest compliment was "He (or she) is the real thing!" That's how he felt about Maxine Kumin, too, and Ruth Stone, who was nearly blind by the time we met her -- she responded to his warmth, flung an arm over his wide shoulder, and inscribed a book to him, "To My Darling David." He treasured signed poetry -- here's a poem Galway inscribed to him.

 

 There are a lot more of my poems coming out this year, including a book of them, THRESHOLDS, around the end of May or early June. I did have a small collection in print way back before I met Dave, thanks to a friend who thought they should be "out there" for others to read ... most of those included in the pretty chapbook "Mud Season at the Castle" came to life first in the Green Mountain Trading Post.

 But this will be my first poetry collection with a national/global publisher, Kelsay Books, and as Dave would say, I'm "more than thrilled."

To add to today's joy, a rather distant cousin of my mother's got in touch this morning because of the poems in Ginosko ... and gave me a long email about my mother's New England family roots in various locations. I had no idea getting the poetry out there would mean this kind of reconnection. Dave would have loved every minute. 

* * 

Consumer

 

Grocery shopping was my late husband’s delight:

his quick scan of what’s on sale, his seasonal urges insisting,

cherries, melon, organic farmed turkey—he prowled the grocery aisles.

heaping the cart, sending me back to aisle number two for olives, sardines.

In widow world I miss his pulled-pork mandates, his fragrant coffee grinds,

the newspaper stains on his thumbs from sorting coupons. Yes, I kissed

those fingers anyway. Ate his enthusiasm, spread thick on toasted

sourdough bread. Savored kisses redolent of sautéed onions, of fresh garlic,

smiled at belches, farts, and his well-fed contented groans.

 

BK

 

Business Plan: Meet the Robert Frost and Mary Oliver Goals

"I can buy myself flowers" -- Miley Cyrus

This morning I carried my painfully totaled business figures -- income, expenses, proof of everything, except I forgot the documents for the college savings accounts for the grandsons -- to the careful and smart woman who's minded the math for me since a few years after I married my Dave. Before that, I copied the numbers onto tax forms myself, but Dave had more complicated details, and we needed her help. I still immensely value her careful stewardship, and it's worth every penny of her fee to see the neat and professional results of her work.

Along the road today, I met some "my" deaths in this community, the ones that matter so much to me. One that's still raw is the murder of a young mom, who worked two jobs, had a toddler, was targeted by a truly insane and cruel murder plot. I took time to picture her smile, her attentive gaze, her quick movements, as I passed the place where she was taken prisoner. It's important to me to remember her.

 In that moment, I felt as though my dead are always attached to me. There are the terrible tragedies, like the not-yet-sober woman whose body was found in a snowbank, the crib-death baby, the Covid-stricken aging mother who could not hold the hand of her grown son as she passed, because the virus was still new to us and there was no vaccine at that point. And there are the gentler ones, the heartache of friends whose health signaled the approaching end. At this season, I also walk again toward the death of my husband Dave, because with deep snow still around the house at the end of one February, we asked for a hospital bed, to physically assist us through his steady loss of mobility.

 But this is also a time when spring begins to tease. I won't even start tomato seeds for another month, but I'm thinking about rotating garden beds, moving the strawberry plants (which month?), fertilizing the plum trees that began to bear fruit last summer. The seasons, like the night sky, provide an arc of reliable change. 

So it is that holding death as a long chain behind me -- or perhaps a slowly dissolving hard sweet candy on  my tongue? -- also means holding life, and love. It is a marvelous thing to be able to say, "I have loved and been loved, with all my heart and all of his."

 But I was going to tell you about the poetry goals. I told them to the CPA, as proof that even my poetry writing has an organized nature to it. Here you go:

 I have a casual friend in the next village who often posts snippets of others' poems, especially Mary Oliver's. I know others who post Robert Frost lines. It is my goal that one of these days, they will post words and images from the poems I've written.

 In case you are moved to help me toward that ambitious goal, here's a set of ten of my poems in the newly published issue of Ginosko Literary Magazine. I hope one of them, as my Quaker mom would say, "speaks to your condition."

Here's to a life of love for each of us.

"Day Job" + Poem = A Winner ... in Lit Shark Magazine's "The Best of 2024 Anthology"

Where do poems come from? Each one comes differently for me. My "day job" is copyediting articles and books written by other people, often in the sciences, and one day I noticed some writing about resilience in nature -- how it happens, how to plan for it as you work with your yard or woodlot or forest. 

It sounded good, but I was having a tough time that day on the personal side, really missing my late husband Dave and the way two people do things so much differently from one alone. So I felt a bit skeptical about "resilience." And maybe a little guilty, too, because I don't want to feel sorry for myself. Dave and I had a great "run" of 17 years and there are plenty of great memories. Plus I grew into a different kind of person through that marriage and his constant curiosity and encouragement.

So the poem became both a talking-back to the article, and another bit of the grief process. Lit Shark Magazine's editor chose it to be one of the Poem of the Month group last summer, and she also pulled it into this year-end anthology.

 

Then the editor had the notion of asking for an "old" poem from each of her poets, to add to the anthology -- actually she asked for three so she could pick one -- and that's how Never-Ending List also slid into the pages!

 There are such varied and tasty poems in this anthology. To pick up your own copy, here's a link to the paperback version (you'll see a hardcover is available too, for an extra $5). Let me know if you opt to buy one ... I'll be thrilled.

Book Launch, January 25, 2025: WE'VE GOT SOME THINGS TO SAY, Anthology

I have three poems in this significant anthology, and a group of the authors -- including me -- will be reading pieces in on online format when the book officially launches on January 25. If you'd like to either attend or receive a recording of the author event, please use this form to register.

Why the registration? Well, it's a tough topic -- sexual violence -- and for many of us, it's going to be a bit scary to read aloud what we've put onto paper. So this helps the experience to be a bit reassuring.

I hope you may want to listen. I appreciate that! And if instead you're feeling as shy about the topic as I often do, maybe you'd rather just order a copy to browse in a peaceful moment. Here's the link for both the softcover and the ebook. Thanks for thinking this over.

Poems Published in 2024: Three in a Significant New Anthology

 These are not comfortable poems, but I hope they are strong ones. And I feel enormously honored that they were chosen for the new anthology WE'VE GOT SOME THINGS TO SAY, edited by Mary Simmerling, PhD. Her work in gathering together creative writing that un-hides sexual danger and violence is a gift to all those who've been silenced by others -- and by themselves.

I'm posting images of my own poems here, so you can take a quick look, but I hope you may decide to purchase your own copy of the full anthology, available as softcover or ebook here.

There will also be a reading in January from many of the authors; I'll post about it when it gets closer.

Poems Published in 2024: "Sand Dollars in a Small Wooden Box"

The summer issue of After Happy Hour (what thoughts that journal name evokes!) included my poem on page 71 -- here's the link. There's also an audio segment.

This poem took root when a local friend gave me a set of sand dollars (yes, box included) and explained something of the living creatures to me. It all felt new, even though I'd held a few of the dry disks in the past. And that, of course, led into the poem.

You'll get the flavor best if you click on the link, but in case it doesn't work for you, here's a screen shot:

 

Poems Published in 2024: "Body in a Box"

What joy it was to enter the pages of Cathexis Northwest Press with this poem, reflecting on how Dave seems often very present, even though his "remains" are buried at the beautiful Mt. Pleasant Cemetery in St. Johnsbury, Vermont. See the poem and the rest of the issue here. (The poem is on page 43.)

Two Poems Recently Published -- Four More "Accepted for Publication"

A poem begins like a wild apple growing -- from a delicate blossom that's around briefly.

 

A good day for me is when I write a poem that I feel is -- yes, good. It's also nice to have them published. That's the whipped cream on the hot fudge brownie sundae. Or, with the upcoming Caledonia County Fair and the Robillard family's historic gifts in mind, the vanilla ice cream on the apple crisp.

If you haven't taken time to follow the links that I place on Facebook, here are the two most recent published poems of mine. I hope they echo in your thoughts to something vital of your own.

In the summer issue of New Feathers Anthology, which I hope you'll visit by tapping here to see the amazing image they've paired with this, is "My Mother, 1937."

My Mother, 1937

 

Bewildered farm girl with a dying mother (cancer, too late):

ignored, she clung to Lucky Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight,

hoarded newspaper articles about Amelia Earhardt,

refused to beg her cocky cousins for attention—

she could claim the future, sky high, better than theirs. When

death landed as predicted, love retreated into

the unreal hardness of one frozen knuckle (they made her

kiss it). Amelia, she told herself. Amelia would do this

without falling. Her cousins watched, whispered.

 

Amelia, a borrowed badge, a resonant insistence. Next month

her father said “Your mother’s cousin Ruth arrives on Tuesday,

to be your new mother.” Thrust a photo into her hand. That night

she lay sleepless in the bed, next to where her real mother

used to sit, stroke her hair, sing good night. The next evening

the radio hissed, coughed, spat out news: Earhardt lost. Airplane

vanished. Fog. Feared drowned. Lost, lost, lost.

“Stepmother” came just like Hansel and Gretel’s story, strict, tall,

declining soft clothes or embraces. Never call her Mommy!

Be a lady, little Joan. No more running or jumping. No lady wears

goggles or a helmet. Gloves are for Sundays. Not air controls.

 

Each night, after dark, her heart and mind refused to behave.

Flying, falling, weeping.

 

BK

 

This will also be available in print! Watch for news of that.

 

There's a very different poem in After Happy Hours Review, inspired by the gift of a 3-inch wooden box with hinged lid that contains three sand dollars. (Thank you, neighbors!) It keys in with a very dangerous experience I've described in my memoir pieces on Medium, where someone I now call The Villain hoped to terrify me on a small boat out in Casco Bay, Maine. It was quite effective but not as quickly as he wanted. Well, we all make some bad choices, and learn from them to make better ones.

 

 

Sand Dollars in a Small Wooden Box 

 

This is wealth: three delicate sand dollars, gray, pale,

tucked in a tiny wooden box. Souvenirs of a friend’s

beach rambles. Surfaces shedding fine gold-gray sand

with every touch. See, she whispered, here is the mouth

centered within the five-petaled surface. And here,

the anus. Algae in, remainders out. I, who never held

a live sand dollar, never witnessed one propel itself

through wet sand,  spurting, spined, moist, stroked again

the rough emery finish, the grained surface, and settled these

(three, for luck or love) into their container.

 

The mind, they say, is a curious thing; the brain, surely so.

Wet, questioning, curled in its own tidal pool, saltwater

and moon collaborating. My fingers are sliced open by a net

of knowledge; dampen my morning with dreamy details.

In its dry casket, a sand dollar is a skeleton of a sea urchin

bereft of nourishment and moisture. Of impulse. It had spines.

It digested. It explored, left larvae, expelled exhilaration

plucking a single note of life, life, life. Hunger accompanies

harmony. Lift this to the tongue. The sand dollar tastes of

salt and secrets. See, here is my mouth. Lost on a raw

Atlantic beach, say in Maine, where cold winds rip

and the surge of water overwhelms, I screamed. Once,

someone tried to drown me. Now my fingers, five parts

scratching and scrabbling, spread like the sand dollar—

scrape at the sand, scramble toward skeletal certainty.

When I’m finished, I’ll wait in that little wooden box.

 

BK

 

If you like to listen to a poet's voice with the words, tap here for the read-aloud version. 

 

And oh yes, I have four more "accepted for publication" in the future. That's like, umm, homemade chocolate chip cookies waiting in the freezer for a special moment.

At the Caledonia County Fair ...

  

April Was Poetry Month ... and It Hasn't Seemed Over Yet

 I started April with a poem presented in St. Johnsbury's PoemTown event, framed around the solar eclipse -- and then on April 4, had this lovely news (scroll:

Winifred Hughes from Princeton, New Jersey is the 2024 Henry Morgenthau lll First Book Winner for her book of poems The Village of New Ghosts, due out in Fall 2024. The prize recognizes a poet 70 or older who has not yet published a full-length collection. from the Judge: The task of “the poet” is brilliantly fulfilled with sonics, structure, detail, richness and care. But where this book truly exceeds and excels is in creating a hologram of emotions, a reality we can enter, where aesthetics are crisp and clear enough to create a new paradigm. Poetics that bring emotional worlds into existence have to be held in place with mastery. Someone is obviously in charge of this work. Someone is in control of its precise syntax and beautiful heart. I never wanted to stop reading. Grace Cavalieri, former Maryland Poet Laureate

Congratulations to our honorable mentions! Runner-Up: Rick Rohdenburg from Duluth, GA: Crows Fly from My Mouth Finalists: Melissa Cannon from Antioch, TN: Doll/Face Kathy O’Fallon from Carlsbad, CA: Listening for Tchaikovsky Semi-Finalists: Karen Bashkirew from Bozeman, MT: Stillpoint Sheila Bonnell from South Orleans, MA: Albedo Helen Bournas-Ney from New York, NY: Just Like the Sky, but Nearer Helen Chinitz from Walton, NY: If Summer Sear the Landscape Sandra Cutuli from Los Angeles, CA: Tracks and Signs Marc Douglass-Smith from Lebanon, NH: A River in Still Life Deborah French Frisher from Mill Valley, CA: Howl Now & 52 Other Poems Gordon Grilz from Tucson, Arizona: Just North of My Dreams: A Collection of Poems from Prison Judy Kaber from Belfast, ME: Landscape with Rocks, Sky, Nails Elizabeth Kanell from Waterford, VT: Break-Out Room Ellen Lager from Robbinsdale, MN: Buried Beneath All That Love Nancy Meyer from Portola Valley, CA: The Stoop and The Steeple Michael Mulvihill from Staunton, VA: The Distant Pines Phillip Periman from Amarillo, TX: Dying: The First Six Years Jim Scutti from Vero Beach, FL: Family Planet Richelle Slota from San Francisco, CA: Letters to My Dead Name Jil St. Ledger-Roty from Franklinville, NY: Lost and Found and Lost Again Steven Winn from San Francisco, CA: Late Light Avra Wing from Brooklyn, NY: Mammoth Life & Accident Cynthia Woods from Philadelphia, PA: Lines Over 70

For those who are curious -- Break-Out Room is a collection of poems, at the length called a chapbook. It's back out in another competition, and I'll let you know when it garners its next award. I'm following in the footsteps of some of the best writers I know in this decision: Each time it doesn't quite reach a book contract, polish it a bit more and add more skill and joy to it, and send it out again.

"Crossing Over the Moose": A Finalist in the Northwind Treasury (Mooselook Diner!)

 Crossing Over the Moose 

 by Beth Kanell, 2023

It’s a funny name for a diner. Newcomers

stare around: the sign says Mooselook,

and maybe the back table will show them one.

Antlers! Long legs! Maybe they even cook

 

wild harvests here. If deer meat is venison

and pigs become pork, what do you call—

they scan the menu, but there’s no sign

of butchered moose at all.

 

Tentative, uncertain, they work their way

through blue-plate names, special dishes.

The waitress, bright smile, sparkling stud

at the side of her nose, collects wishes

 

for eggs over easy, a turkey plate with just

a little gravy. Home fries on the side, much

ordered, always piping hot. Pickled beets.

Vermont homestyle with a chef’s touch.

 

Me, I take my usual table, watch the door,

see who’s coming in—I have a hunch

that my two friends may be running late

but they’re on time for noon lunch.

 

With a nod to the window, satisfied,

they note the water view, smile:

It’s the Moose River out there, wide

as the day’s options. Framed in style.

 

Going home after, I cross the bridge

while at the water’s edge a man stands

patient with a fishing rod. I pass; he reels

his line back in, casts, capable hands.

 

People who haven’t lost don’t guess

the way old passions stir and swirl below.

There was a man who kept my heart. He died.

I find him in each new crossing. I think he’d know.

 

View of the Moose, from the Mooselook Diner.

 

Mooselook Diner's Kevin Fontecha, with the published poem.

 

 

AND: If you'd like to get a copy of the book, it's on Amazon here!

Combining Vermont, Love, Loss, and Literary -- It's Been a Big Poetry Month

My short haircut from Dec. 2017, when I didn't know whether breast cancer surgery and treatment might make it too hard to wash and brush my longer (and increasingly silvered) curls.

 

As a person with decades in recovery from alcohol abuse (it's a long time ago now, but I have no intention of picking up a "first drink" even though time has passed), I'm especially impressed with the online literary magazine Anti-Heroin Chic. It's an "anti-drug addiction safe space" where writers can express pain ... and of course, relief. So I'm touched and honored that the winter issue features two of my poems: "From Nails to Screws" reflects part of the journey I've made to set aside my Dad's well-meant but very dangerous instructions for life as a woman. And "In the Very Air" brings you first to Harvey's Lake in Barnet, Vermont, where I finished raising my sons, and then to my front porch "now" -- the place where I can see both the land's beauty and the tragedy of climate change. 

Here's the link to those two poems.

Another online magazine that's become a favorite of mine is Persimmon Tree, which offers space especially to older women writers. You can find my poem "Breast Cancer, 5 Years After," which is pretty fierce -- click here and scroll down quite a ways, browsing other intriguing work along the way.

The winter issue of Persimmon Tree also includes a "likes/dislikes" list of mine, in the fashion launched by Susan Sontag. Because there are a lot of those, they are being rotated day by day, so if you don't see my list when you first click here, take a look at some other time. Or, if you don't have time to visit twice ... here you go, without the attractive graphics of the magazine:

Things I like: hard rain on the roof, new snow, bonfires, fresh cinnamon, pillowcases, signed books, watercolors, chipmunks, Star Wars music, double rainbows, nickels, dark chocolate, globes, rowboats, comb honey, toast.
 
Things I dislike: an empty mailbox, stale mushrooms, herbicides, crumbs in bed, pigs, cheap cheesecake, splinters, garlic before breakfast, collapsed barns, diesel fumes, hammers, nylon petticoats, socks that slide down, malice.

 

**

 

This month also includes publication of "Crossing Over the Moose," as an honorable mention by Raw Earth Ink and therefore included in The 2023 Northwind Treasury, an anthology coming from Alaska. I'll post a photo when my copy arrives!

 

I've also settled into writing about one segment per week for my "story of my life" (aka memoir), on the platform Medium. You should be able to see a few of these chapters when you first visit; after a bit, Medium will ask you to subscribe to the platform. That will give you access to thousands of authors, and you'll recognize many of their names right away -- as well as getting acquainted with rising stars of the literary world.

 

Now I've got to get back to some holiday baking. May your browsing give you a break from your own stresses, and maybe some hope and pleasure as you go. 

 

Dad's Side, Mom's Side, and Poems Linked to Each

Although my parents thought kids should find their own way to religion when they grew up, they each explained briefly their own backgrounds: Dad came from a German Jewish family with little religious attachment (and Dad himself refused any form of belief, he said, due to the Holocaust). Mom grew up with a Quaker mother, valued what she knew of that form of worship, but added that she felt closest to God in her garden. And New England was her core.

For the past couple of decades, as I've investigated Dad's life, with leading questions from my Jewish and much-loved husband Dave, my poems have explored more of Jewish tradition and culture. But when I'm in my garden, I'm my mother's daughter, inhaling the scent of soil and plants.

It seems I've arrived at a life point where I want to probe my mother's side of things more deliberately, so you'll be seeing more of that. In fact, it's sort of obvious in the two poems of mine published this week.

 

Here's one that seeks to find light in the darkness, as Israel and Gaza continue their war -- you'll see it's especially about Dad.

And this one, told from the point of view of Henry David Thoreau's sister Sophia, digs into my mother's New England heart, into the wonders of the natural world, and into the determined sense of women's "agency" that Mom taught me.

More Poetry Publications on the Way

I've probably spent too much time today, trying to figure out how to convert a recorded poem from one format into another -- and failing the tech aspect! But I have hope that the digital natives at The Post Grad Journal will figure that out for my poem "Teen Summer," lined up for their next issue.

Plus this morning I had the amazing experience of learning, before being fully awake, that two other poems of mine, "Crossing Over the Moose" and "This Tree of Ripened Fruit," earned honorable mentions from the Northwind Writing Award, sponsored by Raw Earth Ink. 

In this amazing interior + exterior season, I also am excited that "Diatribe from Sophia Thoreau (His Sister)" is scheduled for the November issue of Does It Have Pockets. 

None of the links above will show my poems yet -- but as soon as there are links for you to see them, I'll let you know! Now I need to get my feet back to earth, for today's exploration out on a back road in Danville, for my next North Star Monthly feature. Which will NOT be poetry!

Recently Published Poems, Stories, More

Rise Up Review, winter 2022 issue, "Psalm for Gaza."

Medium Day tutorial video on writing novels (and more): Make a Promise In Your First Chapter. 

Persimmon Tree, poem, "Forget-Me-Nots."

Written Tales Magazine, poem, "Storm Surge."

RitualWell, poem, "Ten Plagues Sestina." 

Gyroscope Review, winter 2023, poem, "Letter from This Morning's Burdock Plant."

Lilith Magazine, Feb. 2022, "Knit. Purl. Repeat."

Journal of Radical Wonder, "Rescuing the Abandoned Property in Vermont."

Lilith Magazine, "Mythic Under the Radiation's Red Eye."

Mystery and thriller reviews being added steadily at New York Journal of Books.

Where Poems Come From

A few weeks ago, I wrote a bluebird poem for an old friend. He makes bluebird houses. Also he makes poems. Later he asked me: "Did you just sit down and write that poem, just like that?"

"Nope," I answered. "It had been brewing for a few weeks."

For me, that's how it goes. One morning the last straw lands on the camel's back, or a spark catches on a shred of paper under a heap of sticks, and it's time to shut the visiting dog into her crate for a bit, so I can focus on the keyboard instead of delivering scratches, pats, and "good girl" crooning.

Today three poems erupted, after a long-ish dry spell (long for me, anyway). There's fourth one stuck in my chest, like a burp that refuses to escape. Well, maybe later.

At any rate, to reassure those of you who panic about when and where poems "come": I've had a self-assignment of topic for these, for about a month, with no lines crafted at all. Reading an essay this morning on how passages in the Torah are crafted, I found a Greek-rooted word that was new-ish to me: chiasm. By the time I'd looked up several aspects of it, I'd also found a poetry structure I wanted to try out, and realized that it's the word for the way our eyes and brain cross over information, inverting it into what we "see" in front of us.

Which led, at last,  to an opening I could step through, into a poem.

When I didn't care so much, it was easier to "toss off" a poem. Now, though ... it's a day's work, and more. Which, I admit, is how I like it.

 

Optic cabling -- a graphic by Ratznium. [Ratznium at en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0 <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/>, via Wikimedia Commons]

You CAN Go Home Again if You Dare ... in a Poem

Yesterday's road trip into the Upper Kingdom -- the part of the Northeast Kingdom north of Sheffield Heights -- was my third within five weeks. 

Which is a lot, for a region I've carefully stayed away from for years now. Call it dipping a toe back into the ice water. I might not want to go all the way in, at this time of year! (I'm not one of those Polar Bear Plunge folks. Give me a good book and a thick sweater instead.)

At the intended goal location of yesterday's trip, I met someone who'd been living less than 2 miles from my home in Irasburg at the time when I gave birth to my second son, in an uninsulated house on the ridge, facing a spectacular view of distant Jay Peak. It took 23 cords of split wood to heat that house for a winter. And it was actually 41 years ago, but that doesn't fit well into the line.

So here's the poem:

Road Trip

 

December settles into biting cold, and the snow-cased fields

spool past, low metal structures, unpainted houses.

This is where I lived back then, close to the northern border.

Only blink, and a battered green car from forty years back

could pass in the other direction, my young-mother self cooing

to the baby in the snowsuit. With icy chunks of split wood

jammed into the Subaru’s flattened cargo hold, not enough

warmth even as the heater cranks, full on. “Home soon,

sweetheart.” Inside my patched jacket, past my blue sweater,

under the long-sleeved T, breastmilk leaking in anticipation

quick-chilling along my chest. One-third cord of firewood,

five days of heat for the house, maybe six. After lunch,

do it again—lucky to buy six cords with cash. The pale sun

sets early in December. That year’s best Christmas gift was

the slow cooker: It didn’t need to be watched or touched

until, baby nursed, diaper changed, husband hungry,

beef stew was ready. With food stamps, I always got

the cheapest cut of meat.