Poem of the Month for May 2024
As It Is
by Mark Wagner
The moment just after you wiggled
Through the womb into the world
Your mother cradled your fragile skull.
Your skin still wet from the waters
Held to her, before fear and surprise
Before anyone had said your name
Or sullied time with their longing.
There was only love and the light
Called for you to open your eyes,
To forget the pain that came before
And begin to love the world as it is.
by Oliver de la Paz
If there is a way to tell them about heaven
tell them without the flourishes. No one
is ever bewitched. No one ever finds food
in dry places. There are deserts and deserts
of fact parching throats. If there is a way
to tell them. Say it as though there are flames
agitating the sides of the barn. Say it
to the bones arranged on the plate. Each
stone has its dream of green field.
Each field is full of your sober friends.
Tell them smoke fills their mouths, that
the house is on stilts made of matches.
Everyday, no one loves this theater of
confused gods, no one loves the fuse
though someone falls in love in libraries
everyday and that we never need apologize.
Oliver de la Paz is the author and editor of seven books. His latest collection of poetry, The Diaspora Sonnets, was published by Liveright Press (2023). In 2023 he was appointed as the Poet Laureate of Worcester, MA. He is a founding member of Kundiman and he teaches at the College of the Holy Cross and in the Low-Residency MFA Program at PLU.
Poem of the Month for March, 2024
Turbines line up offshore
straight as desks in a classroom,
white as headstones in a
military cemetery.
Extraterrestrial beings
far from earth orbit
might spot them as artefacts on
a planet where natural right angles
are usually fool’s gold.
We imagine alien
intelligences as bipeds, while
whatever intelligences inhabit
the ocean must imagine
extrathalassic beings as
something else:
less intelligent, or
aesthetically challenged.
Burdened by rectangular
obsessions and unable to
camouflage ourselves in
the curves of a good
environment.
Maine native Gale Eaton won poetry prizes in the 1960s, continued to write while a children’s librarian in Massachusetts, and lost the thread during an academic career. As assistant director and then director of the University of Rhode Island library school, she helped set up satellite courses for Worcester students. Since her 2012 retirement she has published four volumes of nonfiction and (with a sense of homecoming) returned to writing poetry.
Poem of the Month for February, 2024
On the Common
by Judith O'Connell Hoyer
He was idling there, as if it were a desert island,
no ship on the horizon come to save him,
not a soul to spot his distress,
just traffic whooshing by on Franklin Street.
Hello, Mr. Prendergast, I said.
But his mind had gone soft with the weight of memory.
I knew him from the Belmont Home for Men
where I worked that summer as a nurse’s aide.
When day died down, he’d sink into a seat on the # 24
that still runs along Belmont Street, a street stacked
with three-deckers like volumes of old history books.
He’d step off at Green Hill, walk to that place where
the side door was never locked, where no one asked
what he’d been up to, where he could count on 3 square meals,
a clean cot, his US Army Air Force blanket unraveling
at the foot, and meds dispensed at the nurses’ station
where I once watched his nightmare unfold
somewhere over the Pacific. He was shaking and sweating,
mimicking the rat-a-tat-tat of a machine gun
pressed against his cheek, face down in the tail of a B-29.
Today I walk through those public acres behind
Worcester City Hall, see a younger Mr. Prendergast
killing time on a bench by himself, with looks a girl
would have gone for before some other war came along.
Judith was raised in Worcester and lives in Wayland, Massachusetts. She is a retired school psychologist whose full-length poetry collection, “Imagine That” was published by FutureCycle Press in February 2023. Her poems have appeared in journals that include the Atlanta Review, CALYX Magazine, Cider Press Review, Tar River Review, The Lake (UK), Southwest Review, The Moth Magazine (IRE) and The Worcester Review.
Once upon a time in Paris
By Daniel Letona
Those colors, dessert for my eyes,
I wanted French words with lots of vowels like "oh la la,"
So my voice could wave like the ocean hitting shore,
Like the function collapsing into a particle,
I wanted sounds, YELLOW,
Like Icarus' excitement before the fall.
Like Elton's Bridge Road,
Like fields of sunflowers with ORANGE skies,
Those colors merging like clouds,
Textured like cotton candy, wrapped around my mind.
I felt all the possibilities,
I was both dead and alive,
I was Schrödinger's Adam with an apple,
Emerging into consciousness, no longer a probability.
I exist and I'm the observer,
I'm Rodin's Thinker, bridging my soul with poetry,
I'm living love through hell,
Because life is finding peace in loss.
That Charcoal, the calm after the storm,
The tears almost of joy,
The warmth and comfort of the ashes,
The longing for the life that was, that will never be,
The windmills fighting my sanity,
The burning desire for freedom.
The blending of colors and feelings,
The swirling of time,
My NOW moving like thought dunes,
The awareness that dulls the "je ne sais quoi" of life,
Like some sort of self-plucking in mid-air.
The white feathers across the skies, following my fall,
Spinning towards flashing orbs,
Leaving me with the joy of almost touching the sun.
Daniel Letona:
I was born and raised in a small city in Honduras named Comayagua. Moved to Massachusetts to be a Software Developer after college. I enjoy re experiencing life through writing specially metaphors.
by Judith O'Connell Hoyer
My parents met in this building,
its marble corridors noisy
with people in pursuit of answers,
oak-paneled chambers
presided over by a popular mayor,
ceilings that leak and paint that flakes.
Silver sings in his trousers’ pocket
as he takes the stairs two at a time.
Ominous news of the world rolled under his arm.
Her head a good mess of auburn curls,
her blue handknit spritzed with rain.
A mutual friend sees them and says,
I don’t believe you’ve met.
No chance for him to crush a smoke
or run a pocket comb through his hair.
No escape for her to apply fresh red to her lips
or straighten the seams in her stockings.
There is everything in this brief encounter:
thrilling thunder, dripping umbrella,
slippery mosaic tile, smell of damp wool.
Suddenly sun rests its chin on the windowsills,
and it’s time to head out under the tower’s giant clock,
its gilded needles casting-on stitches for a story that begins
in Worcester, Massachusetts, April 1938. Before the war.
Judith was raised in Worcester and lives in Wayland, Massachusetts. She is a retired school psychologist whose full-length poetry collection, “Imagine That” was published by FutureCycle Press in February 2023. Her poems have appeared in journals that include the Atlanta Review, CALYX Magazine, Cider Press Review, Tar River Review, The Lake (UK), Southwest Review, The Moth Magazine (IRE) and The Worcester Review.
Our Poem of the Month for November 2023:
After Your Illness You Bake Bread
by Susan Roney-O’Brien
Dark rye, the kind we used to buy
in Brookline bakeries, the smell
rich with caraway, the loaf
still warm. You crave sauerkraut,
Swiss, corned beef, Russian dressing
a Reuben for your first meal in days.
We live in the middle of nowhere
It’s eleven at night and even though
I‘m willing to drive three towns away
for the makings, you dismiss the thought,
say you’ll save sandwich dreams
for tomorrow’s lunch. You wake early,
a fever of 102, body aches, screaming
joints. I bring up toast and tea. Rye toast
from the bread you baked yesterday
between Covid and this new sickness.
Reuben will have to wait; I’m afraid
to leave you. I carry your cup
to the sink. While you sleep,
I walk the dog, feed and water
the hens, start soup from bones
pick them clean. You call for me.
Your sheets are soaked. So when
are you going out for corned beef?
Susan Roney-O’Brien curates a monthly poetry venue, is part of 4 X 4, a group of visual artists and poets and works in programming for the Worcester County Poetry Association. Her poetry has been published widely, translated into Braille and Mandarin and nominated for many Pushcart Prizes. She won the 2020 Stanley Kunitz Medal in Poetry. Publications include chapbooks: Farmwife, the winner of the William and Kingman Page Poetry Book Award, and Earth (Cat Rock Press). Word Poetry published Legacy of the Lost World in 2016. Kelsay Books published Bone Circle, in 2018 and Thira in April, 2020.
Our Poem of the Month for October 2023:
Prayer Can Be Anything
By Karen Elizabeth Sharpe
Prayer can be a pile
of roadside stones, beseeching.
The quicksand sorrow invokes.
The hemlock across the lake,
supplicant in thin-needled halo light.
It doesn’t have to be
text, wafer, or baptism,
two hands pressed, rosary clicking.
Witness silver morning light
polish the empyrean sky,
the great blue heron
keyholing the elaborate blue,
the near perfect rumor
of waning snow,
the surety of this late winter light,
however stretched and thin.
Karen Elizabeth Sharpe is the author of Prayer Can Be Anything and This Late Afternoon. She is a poetry editor at the Worcester Review, and her poems have appeared in Columbia Journal, West Trade Review, Mom Egg Review, Catalyst, Mason Street Review and other literary journals and anthologies. Karen has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. www.karenelizabethsharpe.com