Tonight men walk with flashlights beside the road, their cars parked at City Point by the bridge, and I think they must be elvers. Men seeking elusive glass eels. Green ferns pulled down beneath mud and rubber boots, these men enter the river where it ebbs and wallows, lugging fyke nets, metal chains rattling like coins in pockets. Tiny diaphanous offspring struggling in from the ocean, transparent gold, enough to line the coffers of the most balky of fishers. Men who scramble along the earth’s hard face, kicked by sun, maligned by rain, stuck in the throat of dirty snow. Determined. The ice melts, waters warm and their own sorry bellies pull them to the river as surely as the young eels are called upstream. Twenty six hundred dollars a pound. What does that equal in hours spent wielding a saw in a damp woodlot or stocking shelves at Walmart? Asians weep for this food, grow noodle thin American eels to adults and sell them at market. These Anguilla rostrata will never see the Sargasso Sea, never turn yellow and plump in brackish water. Caught in nets, they turn in star-backed water like letters that have lost their form, shift in this unnatural space, no longer moving with the tidal stream. Instead, lifted by calloused hands, they shine in picnic coolers shoved into pickup trucks, slosh against each other down pock-marked roads on the way to docks and dealers. Their thread-like bodies a writhing promise, treasure held in red and white chests. Worcester Review Vol. XXXVII No. 1 & 2 Fall 2016
On the Purchase of a House on Mountain Valley Road, 1985
In the year Samantha Smith died, the year they captured the Night Stalker in LA, I bought a house on Route 220, two floors, six rooms. This house bore me along for quite a few years, from rapture of little boy noise to secret teenagers upstairs playing games with impenetrable rules. Before I completed the sale, Joyce, the woman who owned it, died at home and it fell to her daughters to come and pick apart her life, tear up rooms, even dig up the asparagus beds in the yard. Yet they abandoned jars of smoked salmon in the basement, tintypes of unknown people in the shed, diaries Joyce kept where she talked of her time at the sardine cannery, how on gray days she would leave the house at seven, hope for a run on fish, some time slicing heads, and not a day when she would be sent home unpaid. She visited her mother, helped her clean the rumps of root vegetables torn from the garden. She laid out the hard cargo of her life—her mother’s gout, her own arthritic knees, the pain that twisted out at each step, the unpaid bills at the Apple Squeeze. I read each page, followed the lines of her pen, lines that carved a small cave of meaning, whittled down years to kindling, small sticks that were once her life. Miramar No. 8 2019
Country Girl Thinks of Home
after Girl on Porch by Eudora Welty She perches, solitary, on that dusty city porch thinks of foxes, owls, rabbits, coons, hears their night songs, their rustlings in the deep brush, feels the pine needles soft beneath her feet, thinks on that slice of marble-cake she just ate from the plate with the glued together crack that ran straight between the two blue dragons like some tall cloud, skinny, blown jagged in the wind while she sat on the red seated chair in Aunty Nadine’s kitchen. No wind now, only the ragged dancing of heat, thick electric wires hung like strings from poles, winking silver in the thickness of sun. That cake no match for the stream that she saw daily, swift and burbling, sweeter than any store bought gum, sweet as the way Uncle Jacob would grab her under the arms and swing her high, even after haying, with the sweat like a splash of jug whiskey over his shirt, laughing, calling her his best girl, even when she wore her brother’s cast off overalls, her hair caught in tangles, a burdock bound up behind. He made her light as a bobwhite, waiting to lift wing to the sky. Miramar No. 8 2019
Succulent
The hot Long Island sun pokes fingers into sandy ground, stirs dust in my young throat as I kick high the swing, hit bottom on the downward fly. White jelly bread rolls around my hungry tongue, washed with purple kool-aid. I grow where green grass won’t, nourished on margarine, wonder baked in bread, Saturday morning cartoons, the buzz of test patterns in my head. Father builds a shed beneath the staircase, packs in rakes and brooms, bikes and wasps and whispered things that hang from nail hooks shredded like cardboard Halloween skeletons that glow in the dark. Honey- suckle with fuchsia hearts grows on my best friend’s vines. We pluck them to suck the sweetness free, rub the juice into our skin, run with green feet beneath sprinklers, later, sip ice tea, nibble toast thick with butter, play with candy beads and lipstick, then practice- kiss our arms, grape and tangerine. Miramar No. 8 2019
While Aunt Irene kneels at the coffin
I stare, clutch a hymnal, revert finally to a prayer that the casket will not tip, spill my mother to the stone floor. Light from stained glass marks the backs of pews and I decide to continue to pray, so right away I ask that the Brussel sprouts in my garden curl their small heads in that tender spot against the stalk, safe from cutworms, cabbage worms, the diamond-backed moth. I pray for a pen that doesn’t leak, for a closed tent in the forest of rain. Someone coughs. Asking for health would be fruitless, I think. Cells die everyday in the millions, sloughing off in waves, an invisible trembling spray. Instead I pray now that the radiator leak in the car won’t get worse, that I can make the drive north without a quilt of worry over my shoulders. I pray for a closed tent in the forest of rain. For my cats to always lie on sunny paws, for the red globes of tomato to survive the fall. Tinderbox Poetry Journal Volume 4 Issue 4
In Which a Mother Smokes Marijuana
After the blood appeared, small spots of uncertainty After the first slice through the fleshy abdomen After pacing, smoking, waiting After the wound widened, the womb exposed After a year of hope, of almost normal After a visit to Florida, to her husband’s brother and his wife, palm-treed roads, sun a helmet, laughter slapped among waves After the doctor again, the body mapped, the body exposed, poisoned with hope After the pills, the vomiting, tiger-clawed, ripped The uncle gets it, a small bag, rolled with clumsy fingers, the smoke inhaled After she coughs, her eyes tear, she bends double, cannot bear weed, air, anything Tinderbox Poetry Journal Vol. 4 Issue 4
Decision
Birch trees, dragonflies and fishers live beneath the same night sky as David when the glass windshield in his pickup truck bursts forth into the grass, shining like black ice, like black lace, tumbling with a speed almost equal to the bullet that speeds through his brain, his upraised arm dropping, not as fast, clumsy, his mouth emitting an exclamation, not a word, not an apology, not even a sob, and it could be that lizards, moles, chipmunks moving in thickets freeze for a moment, it could be that the owl cocks its wing, glides back to the safety of a limb, the hulking blanket of night rumpled and shaken, small noises pierced by a sharp blast, the constellation of broken skull, not unknown beside the black water of the lake during that block of days in hunting season when orange-clad men roam the woods and the sun shudders across the sky, when almost all the leaves have fallen or hang askew on twigs— hunters in pairs, in groups—not like David sitting alone in his truck who swallows the quiet like a snake swallowing its prey, jaw unhinged, muscles contracting, mouth fully open. The Sow's Ear Review May 2018
Emptying the ashes
Each morning they accumulate in the belly of my stove, grey, giving off little smoke or heat, hiding the small, hot coals that I use to start anew. Each morning I kneel, peer in, shovel out their soft bodies, spill them into the waiting pail. They are all that remains of the past, of the hard logs that I carried in, of the trees once standing in the stand before the growl of the chain saw and the black truck that pulled them clear. I think about my children as I carry the pail to the ditch to spill out the ashes—their toys, the way they made castles from clay, the role playing card games, the nights up late, while I lay in bed trying to sleep. I hardly ever see them now, though I still have boxes labeled with their names on the shelves. The ashes cascade down, black clumps among them. Pieces that never finished burning, that leave dark marks when you lift them in your hands. Cafe Review Spring 2017
Prayer on the edge of the morning
For the slow stretch of highway under slight stars the frames that hold lost fathers, black and white sisters. For the chives, weeping in the garden, yellow and wet with the burrowing season. For the red squirrel who chatters after nuts and follows my back with his eye. For the sprinters, the joggers the dog walkers, for all the movers of America going always home, going with no more meaning than the sounds given from one foot to another, with no more intent than to move. Let the jet stream carry my prayers. Let the prayer be for the grey that eases between the limbs of the trees, that brushes my house in the unspent morning, for the riotous waves dissolving on the shore. Let the prayer be for all the shadows that slip between us, for the words we do not say for the thoughts that we hold like lit cigarettes, dangling from our mouths, drop and crush. Cafe Review Spring 2017
Ripley
before a wall of Japanese knotweed—tall, entangled— see from above, a reel of green, before the bones of the house fall, before the shed where I crouch beside the white goat, hands firm on her teats, falls before the walls of the pantry fall before the kitchen, the second floor bedroom where I curl with a man, the hay shed the pig pen, all fall my life is made of light has it too fallen? are those my days sunk deep in what was once the garden lost among roots of redtop, witchgrass the wild remnants of hay? yes—once hayfield, once thick tomatoes on vines diapers and overalls hung from a line peapods snapped, beans canned, sheep with black noses pushing to get grain from my hand have I fallen into this earth? the road still runs with its blue rip-tune spring still comes to take back the fallen I slide my kayak into a stream finally free of ice frogs startle, whirligigs spin in crazed circles, on the shore arrow arum leaves cover earth, my paddle dips, rises Cafe Review Spring 2017