Poems

Sample poems from Seven Floors Up:

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Seven Floors Up to the Kitchen of the Soul

The house has one door.
The house has one open door.
The house has one bourbon-hinged jangling dancing open door.

The women say, C’mon inside.
The women say, C’mon an’ have a drink inside.
The women say, C’mon an’ have a drink with all us mad mamas inside.

Hush-hush Hush-hush
Hush-hush Hush-hush

Slip up the stairs – don’t wake the babies.
Slip up the stairs – don’t wake the babies.
Slip up the stairs – don’t wake the babies.
They’re sleepin’ on the stove.

We’re all drunk. We’re all drunk. We’re all drunk with their love.

Up the flame      Stir the pot      Lick the spoon
Add salt            Add stock       Add wine           Ain’t those babies cute?

Our concoction is a potion. Salve, to save your soul.
Eat, drink, rub it in — baby in the bowl.

– mamazine, 2007

*** 

Stay

All the houses you have never owned
those you set foot in, realtor at the heel
selling you this or that amenity
have not fit, have fit too well
have been yours only in a dream—

carved balustrades, polished wood,
beveled window glass—slide
in under the camera’s lens
shifting and posing in a neutral light
that defies time’s pressing thumbprint.

All the houses you have ever owned
those that graze you like a hand
on a crowded street
line the edges of your dreams
like row houses, like brownstones.

From each of them you wave to yourself
below on the quiet street:
from a rooftop patio that glints in the heat;
from a small, high window;
from the uppermost step of cool stairs;
from beside a gently swaying bassinet.

Your close breath on the window fogs
and you draw your finger through,
draw your heat into that fog
dissipating it. And though
you never meant to
stay, always meant to
leave, you have stayed, everywhere
you have ever been,
as though you have never been anywhere else.

– Banyan Review, Winter 2005 

***

Room for Two in the Blue Canoe

Secure in an unlocked house,
my father’s house, redolent of summers
spent during the time-share of childhood,
my baby now naps in my childhood
room. The same blue paper flowers
the walls. The same white window
frames the same view: sheltering
loblolly pines, red & silver maples,
towering oak, and a lake beyond.

My eldest asks to play outside.
I am reluctant to let him go
(the bulkhead will not hold him back
if he totters on its rim; ankle-high ivy
that snakes trunks, corkscrews
branches—leafy boas—conceals
delicate sprigs of poison oak).

I tell him to follow me
to lake’s edge, turning my dad’s canoe
with a thud, banging
out the bugs: black-bodied carpenter ants scatter
like jacks; brown-bodied recluses still
as my paddle falls, rupturing bellies.
I push the canoe into the green water,
hold his hand as he steps down—and the boat rocks,
my son standing, now crouching, now down.

I step in, shove off, teach him
the two-handed push-pull of paddling
in search of that elusive Mute Swan—the one
that returns, summer upon summer, as I did—
but find only Hooded Mergansers,
Gadwall, Shovelers, Muscovies.

This lake, penned
by the Atlantic’s long-reaching fingers
feathered into bays, roads, estuaries, tributaries,
this tributary, dammed into this lake,
is brackish soup, chartreuse algae skin
punctured by heads of turtles, snapping
turtles nipping below
webbed feet

as bass leap for water-strider supper
and minnows gather at lake’s edge
where herons—still as sculpture—alight
amid geese-honks and fanning flap-splashes.
The cicadas’ crescendo diminuendo crescendo
resounds across this lake.
I lay down my paddle, close my eyes.

The bulkhead nudges me back.
I am pushing off with the paddle, aiming
for the dock, when I see the copperhead slung
from a branch above my son, slick rope
swaying in dusk’s rich light
as we pull away.I tie up the boat, lift him out.
My baby, in the house, is crying.

– Literary Mama, June 2006

***  

Her Husband’s Dream 

Cars careen around the corner, stop
in front of their house. They empty, everyone
walking toward the door. Someone rings
the bell. She is putting the babies to sleep.
He answers, asks, Who are you? Poets,
one says. Poets? Poets. You have anything
to drink? Handling the screen door’s handle,
they mill, they prattle. It’s late. Please, leave.
We’re here to see your wife. Impossible.
They scatter, surround the house, each
window framing a face. An arm reaches
in. He says to the arm, Police are on the way,
though they aren’t. Finally he looks for her –
for his wife – but she is gone. In the end,
he could keep them out, but he couldn’t keep her in.

– kaleidowhirl, winter 2006 

 ****

 “Caution Please Do Not Try To Turn the Head Forcefully by Hand!”
(label found on the knee of my son’s jeans after his first day of preschool)
 

I don’t know where it came from but it’s there, stuck
to his grubby little knee as though someone found

him label-less, saw his small head, how tragically
fragile, how it could turn, like a lid, quite

around, and, with a pop, twist off. I am grateful
to whomever had the foresight to apply

that label, grateful that they did not choose
“Open Me First” or “Discard After ______,”

thankful they turned my attention to the fact
that someday someone may turn his head.

The world will not always be gentle with my son. 
 

– kaleidowhirl, winter 2006  

**** 

 

Inflatable Church

 

 

found for sale on eBay as business opportunity

 

Let us swoon before it as it rises!

 

 

Shucking its folds, flexing its muscled
walls as it fills with electrified
breath, manmade materials thick
as any skin, smelling of raw vinyl freshly
unboxed, unbreathable. We hold our breath
as the thing unfolds, rises before our eyes

like a forty-seven-foot-long by forty-seven-foot-high
Inflatable Baby Pool. It creaks and crackles
as layers peel away from layers. Run a finger
along the vinyl walls, vinyl steeple,
and it will squeak clean as any sinner
fresh from the confessional.

Here in Inflatable Heaven entrepreneur marries
the divine, resplendent with an Inflatable
Gold Cross, Inflatable Altar, Inflatable Pulpit,
Inflatable Nave, Inflatable Pews, Inflatable Candles lit
in perpetuity, Inflatable Double Door Entry
flanked by a Host of Inflatable Angels, brilliant
stained glass plastic windows airbrushed on —

“Take the church to your congregation,” the ad
reads, “perfect for revivals, baptisms, weddings.”
The Inflatable Church also makes an idyllic space
to hold a funeral, replete with an extremely light
Inflatable Casket. Inflated with helium
your loved one ascends as they Ascend!

“Get yours today,” they proclaim, “for only
thirty-five-thousand-nine-hundred-and-fifty-dollars.
At three-thousand-three-hundred-dollars
a day rental it would
pay for itself in no time”.

Fully inflated the church looms,
diminishing the sky,
its pinnacled spires pointing up up up up.
Imagine stepping inside the church,
caressing its Heavenly Inflated Walls,
and with one slash /

bringing the damned thing down.

Poetry Southeast, fall 2005

**** 

Selected Publications

Anthologies: 

White Ink: Poems on Mothers and Motherhood (Demeter Press): *”Administering My Dog’s Cancer Therapy, I Think About My Sons”.

Bedside Guide to No Tel Motel — Second Floor: “Pomegranate, Juiced”

Letters to the World: Poems from the Women’s Poetry Listserv (forthcoming, early 2008): “Poemegranate, Juiced” (reprint)

Journals: 

Umbrella: “Civil Fruit”, “Dreaming the Fruited Damson Tree”, “False Fruit”, “Fructify”, and “Fructus Industriales” (all of these are from my chapbook, small fruit songs)

qarrtsilluni: “Hive” (also from small fruit songs)

kaleidowhirl: **”Where She Is”, “Listen”, and “Mending Her Wedding Gown She Questions Domestic Notions”, September 2007; “Caution: Please Do Not Turn the Head Forcefully By Hand”, “Her Husband’s Dream”, February 2006, special issue guest edited by Rachel Dacus.

Mannequin Envy: “Night Before Thanksgiving All I Can Think About is Him”, Fall 2007.

mamazine: “Seven Floors Up to the Kitchen of the Soul”, “Mother May I”, “A Feline Fine, Kitty Kitty Mine”, and “What She Finds”, August/September 2007.

Literary Mama: “Room For Two in the Blue Canoe”, Father’s Day issue, 2006

MotherVerse: “The Lost Day of a Single Task”, Fall 2005

Poetry Southeast: “Inflatable Church”, Summer 2005

Sunspinner: “The Painting I Have Never Painted”, Summer 2005

Banyan Review: “Stay”, Winter 2005; “The Mum Bell”, Winter 2004

Pomona Valley Review: “Drawing the Name”, “Clara’s Mail”, and “The Chicken Trees”, Winter 2004

SN Review: “The Suicide’s Last Secret”, “Necessary Alms” and “The Casualty of Genes”, Winter 2004

Vermilion Literary Project: “Nest”, Spring 2004

Poetry Midwest: “Drawing the Name”, Fall 2003 

*** 

*”Administering My Dog’s Cancer Therapy, I Think About My Sons”, first place 2006 Gravity & Light poetry competition.

**”Where She Is” shortlisted for the Binnacle’s 2006 Ultra-Short Competition, University of Maine, Machias.