Poetry | November 2023

Dear Helen

(Letter in the Pocket of a Soldier)
Wish I could give these words to you
With my own hand or not have to give
Them at all but some part of me has got
To come home to you some leftover to
Keep I’m sorry this has to be true but
We are all just dust that learned to dance
And a measure of stars in motion and I
Remember you despite it I remembered you
The moment your eyes met mine that first
Time I walked you home in the snow and
You were the moon so steady so serene
Is there meaning does it matter I knew
I remembered you from no man’s land
Your ivory face bent low over me if you
Read this believe me it happened just as I
Remembered you in the winter sky and my
Brief plain purpose to place you there.

—Emily Murnane

Massacre

To the innocent Israelis
And to this distracted world,
The massacre seemed
To come out of nowhere.

But it didn’t.
We just weren’t paying attention.

It came out of years of misery,
Years of a hopeless existence
In an open-air penitentiary,
Where the choices are between

Hate or resignation;
Where grief and despair
Are not choices,
But requirements.

My own grief-filled heart
Weeps for the Gazans,
Pawns in Hamas’s hell;
Weeps for the Israelis,
Pawns in Netanyahu’s greed;
Weeps for our world
And its sinful inattention.

Now, attention must be paid.
I just pray
That the payment—
In more years of squalor,
In the lost lives of innocents,
In the strangling ropes of grief—
Is not another massacre.

—Tom Cherwin

Understudy

The lamp post rolls my shadow flat
along the walk: The ghost
who wants to be me,
              the ghost who’s where I’m not.
She almost got the part,
dancing, now, on the nether-stage,
imitating all that I do:
She studies my jaw, my bones,
my lines, but I’ve yet
to break a leg, her anguish
spreading like glue at my feet.
She just won’t quit: It’s a wonder.
               She’ll stick
with me through thick & thin—
her proud pantomime
egging me on, haunting
all the places that I’ve been
& not been—howling right on
through my old-age. But
she’ll finally have her chance
to shine when she dances
on my grave, the Understudy
who became the Star—
               the Steady One gone under.

—Marlene Tartaglione

Wings of the Beast

Because it is this way
With us
Each a separate wing
Dipped in honey and vinegar
On either side of the beast aloft
Panicking when the other wing
Stops its flapping
Too dazzled by sun of self
To restrain ourselves
To learn whisper glide
Sustained notes easy
In mercury sky
Sweet with abstinence
Matchless compassion
Our lives braided together
By flight
Heightened fear aloft
Looking down
Beat down
Tread upon
Souls
I try to get
To your side
But the beast plunges
When we’re in total agreement

—Ethan Sirotko

Planning Board Secretary Sees All

The twins will be fine on the floor for an hour with a lunar module
so that I can find the map of Vail Farm,
the one drawn by the County not
the Conservancy.
The former is all borders, and numbers,
the latter, just fields
as if drawn by someone crawling on his belly,
feeling the ground all the way.

If the twins don’t get into a fight,
I’ll find the map in one of the seven stacks of old farms
or maybe a cabinet drawer too heavy for me to open alone,
misfiled long ago, an error that still won’t save it.

I stand at the edge of the room as if
on the surface of the moon, my children playing in moondirt,
and all I have to do is find proof
of an old man’s memory and his work
so he can sell it all off and go south leaving
his children who love every rock
alone to find their own ways.
It’s not his fault it’s the economy.

From the moon, I can see them all
standing together down in their north field.
The map I find will scatter them,
and if they’re like the others
they’ll start to drink and wreck twenty years
building roads through the old alfalfa
for the rich man who is buying it, who will never know
what it feels like to crawl on his belly,

flip over and lie down on his own ground
to look for the man in the moon.

—Darrah Cloud

Calving

The captain was surprised.
He had never seen the great crumbling icecap
shear itself into the inlet with such force and urgency.

We, itinerant travelers on a tourist boat,
had no working knowledge of glacier-dynamics,
no day-to-day experience,
no point of reference beyond
what we had seen on documentaries and
in the icy froth that remained at the bottoms of our
cocktail glasses.

For us in our geologic infancy, the calving,
the ice plunging from the shelf into the bay,
transforming into bergs,
could have been as common an occurrence
as an autumn spectacle
—ochre leaves flowing off October aspen—
a perennial blessing, not an irregular
and ominous indicator of catastrophic changes.

We were dancing partygoers on a sinking ship.
We cheered on each successive explosion,
each ancient ice block careening off the precipice,
each gladiator, and each new victim.
We were agog, intoxicated by the immensity
of what we were witnessing, while at the same time
being struck by the duality of words and matter.

Traveling back to a June dairy barn,
a one thousand-pound blue-ribbon Holstein in labor,
a veterinarian up to his shoulders in uterus,
birthing-chains secured around a breached-fetus,
the powerful muscle-walls of the mother exhausted and failing,
a mass of ice finally breaks free, still born,
and begins to dissolve in the warming tide.

The bloodied cow rises,
the thermally expanding sea rises,
to her own forgiveness, her own baptism,
as we follow.

—Paul Clemente

From the Shadow

Dark. Snow.
Outside, looking in a window,
There is light
Warmth
Food
People.
The snow is deep.
The way is dangerous.
But I ask,
Would you know
That light within,
The warmth
The food
Were it not for me?

—Augusta Ogden

Hungry Sparrow

A woman lets down
her black hair, and darkness
falls over my shoulders.

I kiss her as if I love her
with my eyes closed
and invite the sparrows

in the gutters to sleep here,
to fill the small gaps
between her body and mine,

to rush the dawn
with their mournful brown beaks,
to translate this sorrow into song.

—Russell Karrick

the scarecrow groaned dismally
a thin mist was threading around the cornstalks, slowly deciding its resting place
oh how tiresome this is, said the scarecrow
to stand here, year after year, staring at this vegetable
i am certain that there must be more beyond the hills i see
i have dreamt of twisted gray corridors winding up tall towers
with echoes of books shutting and chains clanking against the walls
but I’ve not been there
sometimes the spiced wind will bring the smells of murky water lazing in lonesome
pools
and scents of blood stained driftwood and perfumed lace, perhaps a fevered kiss
blown to a white brow
within the wind’s howl i have heard fires sputtering out spells and the hooves of
thousands of horses
running across the golden lined clouds
but I’ve not seen them
the crows scoff at my stationary position
and gossip about recent traffic within their gray sky
i swear i have heard some lone artist in an attic long forgot,
play old ballads on a violin that has seen mountain tops with bells on them
bells that rang and rang across the globe, but have since retired
sometimes children run through my fields but are gone with the rain clouds
i wish someone would read to me, even an advertisement would suffice
the straws entwined underneath my cloth figure are restless like the chattering leaves
i wish they would resign to this fate
and daydream as i do
i imagine when my final day is nigh
i will slowly disintegrate onto this wooden pole
my straws will migrate down into the earth, blending with the soil
i will grow with the corn and look to the sun’s face
but i will never venture beyond

—Katrina Steier

Winter XII

I am dreadful. My skies, blank and bird-less.
Blueness creeps and peels your lips like old paint.
Watch as my dour temperament elongates
Black moods of night, stiffens sky to starless,
Sneers down from the moon. I’ll choke and harden
Dirt, water, and trees. My fingers, bayonets;
Each snowflake dripped from them, my creations.
I give them to you. I am not heartless.

Yet how you hate. How you injure my artistry.
Only I can individualize snowflakes.
Are you jealous? Is my misery apparent?
I see what you see, a monstrosity.
My bitterness whips, cracks, retaliates;
You are the child, and I am the parent.

—Jennifer Wise