Wednesday 29 July 2015

from The Modie Box, i.m. Bernadine Meeker Etter, 30 July 1945-29 July 2011





from The Modie Box


I do not understand how I can be alive while you are dead. The field white with snow and the absence of crops. Closer, the creamy brown clumps of stalks, the world after harvest.

*

They offered you to us as a possible vegetable. A butternut squash, perhaps, its pale warmth.

*

I took a box file and put everything I had of us into it—letters I wrote you, cards you sent me, photos and postcards. I stuck on a label. Its presence on the shelf reassures me.

*

Burnt toffee peanuts, salt water taffy, lightly sweet white wine, Constant Comment tea, raisin bread toast, orange roughy, salmon, Polish sausage, black olive pizza.

*

Death, resurrection, death. What could be more violent?

*

The line crackled, but I could still hear pain in your voice, if not each precise word. I fought myself not to call back, to find a clear channel, to extend or intensify your difficulty. If I’d known it’d be the last, I would have succumbed to my selfishness. Without such knowledge, I nearly had, anyway. I tried to allay my guilt for not calling back but wanting to by going online for flowers at once.

*

This hunger unappeasable.

*

There is no redemption here. Sometimes I pick up the box and shake it, and that absence, its dry sound, drags me to weeping.

*

Hazel eyes: sunlit wheat

*

The florist could say when the flowers had been left at the hospital, but not if—

*

I begin to suppose I will never stop writing this poem so I, agnostic, dubious of heaven, may keep talking to you.

*

Your body soft with loose flesh, your embrace a leaning into ease.

*

I wrote my first poem outside of class at age 11. We were camping in Indiana, and I’d gone to the lake with my journal while you and Dad set up the Steury. As soon as I finished the first draft, I dashed back to the site to show it to you.

*

When you laughed hard or long, you wiped the corners of your eyes.

*

A lock of hair from youth: black-brown. A lock of hair from age: hazel, glimmering honey brown, dye from a box.

*

Marigolds and mums, the only flowers she dared plant, they needed so little care. 




---

This piece originally appeared in Shearsman. 


 

Friday 17 July 2015

My first collection of fiction

Some of you will know that I've published a number of stories in lit mags over the years, so hopefully it won't be a complete surprise that V. Press has offered to publish a chapbook/pamphlet of my flash fictions next year. I haven't decided on a title yet, but I'm already trying to obtain a particular image for the cover. We're aiming for May 2016 publication, so I can do a launch at Bath Spa before the school year ends. 

Yay!

 

Saturday 11 July 2015

The Ware Poets' Competition 2015

Last night I attended the reading and celebration of the Ware Poets' competition for 2015, which I judged. I like a number of aspects of this competition. In addition to the prizewinners, another fifteen or so poems can be highly commended, and all 23 poems, in this case, were published in a slim anthology. At the celebration, the first half is devoted to the reading of all 23 poems: where the poets themselves couldn't be present, different members of Ware Poets read the poems--and read them well, no one having responsibility for more than a single poem and apparently practiced. It meant all 23 were treated like winners--as is only right when they constitute the top 2% of the poems submitted! (In the second half, I read from Imagined Sons.)

There are also no sifters for the Ware Poets' competition: I saw every single poem. I think that allows for a greater range among the chosen poems. Anyway, congratulations to all 23 winners, with my thanks for your work!