Fiction


Northeast Region Poetry

I was honored to be asked to judge Persimmon Tree’s Northeastern States Poetry Contest; it was a pleasure to read so many fine poems. It’s comforting to know that even in this time of bombardment from all sides by the plethora of electronic toys and diversions in this “brave new world,” poetry—the real thing— still lives on so vibrantly: not only the urge for it and the need for it, but the burning desire to write the stuff. I received over two hundred and twenty-five poems from more than seventy-five women. To narrow that down at first seemed impossible. How does one pick through and select diamonds from diamonds? Still, here are ten poems that just wouldn’t go away. No matter how many times I shuffled through the stacks (and there were stacks), there they were again, insisting on themselves, demanding to be read once more and once more: poems that by language, thought, or emotional punch proclaimed their worth. Funny, isn’t it, how language in lines, boiled down to its essential nub, is enough to knock one’s socks off.


Annette Basalyga

Annette Basalyga



Missing the Boat

If the phone call with news of the car crash
comes at the same time as e-mail
from your long-lost brother’s second wife
who’s passing through,
even with your hand on the doorknob,
you’ll turn back to do what must be done.
You will leave late, arrive at the pier, maybe in time
to watch the ferry pull away without you.

But the truth is, late is late. No matter how good
the reason, whatever the excuse, the cruise has filled.
That boat has sailed without you.

Now if you improvise, let’s say,
catch the next ice floe heading south and you stand
in the safe middle, you may not notice
a shrinking circumference, edges melting
minute by minute.

Time passes with a sense of something missing,
and you won’t think twice when a galley heaves in
to pick you up. Glad to be in the same boat,
all together on the same bench,
we lean on the oars. Windward.

 


 

Jean-Marie J. Crocker

Jean-Marie J. Crocker



Upon Hearing of Another Divorce

Once again the wince of disappointment,
the startle at news that friends
no longer can withstand
the constrictions of commitment.

We do not ask whose fault;
his tendency to rage or her
predilection for self-pity.
Perhaps it is a subtler flaw,
daily comfort dwindled to routine;
or else, for one of them
the unsought flare of sexual allure.

It is not for us to judge,
we who daily walk
the precipitous edge of betrayal.

One afternoon in May
when the sun shone purely through the chapel window
we witnessed their hope.
Gaze matched to gaze, they inscribed their vows
across the hush of gathered guests.
Later on the fresh green lawn
they received the embraces that encouraged
their sure intent.

Now, remembering the perfume of white lilacs
in the bouquet she held,
we suffer an implosion of joy.

 


Christine O’Connor

Christine O’Connor



To Warren’s Mother

I am sorry to tell you that Warren
was not welcome at the pharmacy,
that the salesgirl in cosmetics
shuddered to see his black Army beret
float over the shelf of Jean Nate.
It was simply a matter of his muttering,
his smirking at the Buff Puffs, at the oatmeal soap,
till the manager appeared
in a flurry of importance.

Your son was a minefield, this man
all feet. So Warren merely
raised the can for the March of Dimes
and shook it till our ears
banged like pipes. Such a noise
so few coins can make.
The Muzak sounded sheepish
when he stopped.

What was it like to greet
the green plane that took this version
of Warren home to you?
You’d guided his growing
like a clipped hedge. He was never meant
for jungle leaves riddled with holes—
almost like your pachysandra looked
that spring the cicadas came.

 


Penny Harter

Penny Harter



After and Because

After my mother died from the accident
when my father drove into the back
of a stopped eighteen-wheeler while
yelling at her on a Texas access road;

after the contents of his Alzheimer’s-addled
brain had him blaming us for her death,
hiding knives around the house to defend
himself because we were clearly stealing
from him those things he valued most:
car keys, loose coins, the wallet we found
in a coffee can, and the deed to the house,
buried in the basket of unwashed laundry
he’d dumped into the storage room;

after dementia had robbed him of the
raging contents of his mind, torqued him
into fetal position on his twin bed,
and extinguished his swallow reflex
so he aspirated food, got pneumonia,
was taken to the hospital, gasping
Who’s going to pay for this? and died,

my sister and I had to clean out
the double-wide they’d called home,
uncover the detritus of their years:
bent playing cards scattered across
the green-topped, peeling card table;
stained blouses in my mother’s closet
hanging like a row of empty lives;

so we hired a dumpster, chanting
When in doubt throw it out, as we
winnowed the piles, remembering
how Mother tried, again and again
to make some sense of it all,
and how he always yelled at her,
went outside to rip open those black
plastic bags, and haul it all back in.

 


Jacqueline Lapidus

Jacqueline Lapidus



Bypass

First, the treadmill: an hour’s brisk
walk to nowhere, increasingly uphill
and no more stressful than five flights no
elevator   Then, the angiogram:
a tiny eye threaded through from groin
to heart, throwing on the screen
a living map of blockage too far gone
for a benign balloon
In the operating room
they pulled an artery from your arm
like a small boy’s legendary tapeworm,
butterflied the chest like a breast of veal
and cracked your sternum open.  Four bullet holes
for the instruments and you were fitted with new
pipes, oh, it was a class act!  Now
the grafts are supposed to do the work, but who
can feed blood to a stone?

 


Christina Woś Donnelly

Christina Woś Donnelly



a response to Jane Hirshfield’s “The Poet,” with respect

The Poet Thanks the Master but Has Small Need of Chairs

Or paper, or silence. For herself,
she can perch anywhere.
The kitchen stool is often handy.
More likely she will be in motion:
walking or bathing, or riding to market.
One hand in dishwater, she dandles
a heavy child on her hip. Her table
is covered with quinces and pears.

She writes best on whatever is closest.
A grocery sack, a scrap of cloth suffice.
The corner of an old envelope is still useful,
even a napkin lightly soiled. She jots, really.
When the time comes, there may be something
humming, something bright, electric, but
a piece of chalk, a twig in mud, the handle of
a spoon will serve. If pressed, memory triumphs.

Her truest words come always, like the love
of one’s life, when she is busy, happy,
otherwise occupied. Sitting would be inadvisable.

The poet accepts with gratitude the Master’s benediction
but has small need of chairs, or paper and silence.
She has written large her mistakes on empty walls.
She has ample room to go on.

 


Kathleen M. Kelly

Kathleen M. Kelley


Mushrooms
after Sylvia Plath

We dug in the calloused heels of our feet,
eased ourselves up from our knees,
unfolded our shoulders and shook them.

We lifted the towers of our necks,
straightened our pleated collars,
came out from the shadows,

and raised our cephalic heads.
We saw what the world had become.
We saw who we were—

chanterelles, entalomas, shiitakes,
all specked and studded,
sleek, split, complicated,

light fleshed and dark—
the riotous spectrum of color—
carmine, puce, brass, bronze, brick.

We saw the way everything changes—
no beginning, no end.
We opened the tired earth

like a book, lifted pine needles,
raised up leaf rot and mulch.
We sprouted from stumps,

scaled trees, toppled stone,
upended systems, centuries,
every single stronghold,

and yes, we were disorderly.
There was nothing we did not touch,
and everything we touched, we changed.

 


Paula Phipps

Paula Phipps



Gloss on Giotto’s Last Supper

What does this moment mean, burned
As it is in my memory of Giotto’s vision,
This central fragment of the Last Supper,
Jesus and Judas looking deeply
Into one another’s eyes like lovers
About to kiss?

Jesus, the more beautiful of the two,
Is already deified with a halo.
Yet face to face it’s still man to man here.
A dark line defining Judas’s brow
Brings him forward into Jesus’s plane,
Separates him from the soldiers he has brought.

In this remarkable moment of history or of myth
A god is being born, and the messenger of the arrival
Will perform his appointed task.
He will get his place in history, this Judas,
A short man with the brow and build of a peasant,
Eyes blazing for that kiss.

 


Sb Sowbel

Sb Sõwbel



Of Two Minds

I wish I could love like a saint.

Before they got saintly.

St. Callixtus: Embezzler & Brawler
St. Olga: Arsonist & Murderer
St. Camillus: Mercenary & Card Shark

I want to be one of those salty,
fishy, down in the dirt types
doing everything—everything, everyone
to the limit, going to the center of the earth
to the stars, to hell in a hand-basket
to the end of the line and then, only then
get struck with a sense of error.

After I’d taken every risk
tasted every possible lover
loved every possible taste
said every possible truth…and untruth
made every gorgeous-dire-worldly mistake I could
or could not, manage—the bloat
of iniquity would be achieved
and only virtue would remain.

Imagine such near-angelic fullness.
You would certainly be present.
I would have dragged you along
all sorts of base, unforgivable, unforgettable
streets. We would be reprehensible.

But instead, my tepid integrity
trudges the paved path with not one
sordid intention. Not     one.

 


Alice Casey

Alice Casey



The Big Question

How will you be, my friend,
When the last bell tolls?
Waiting? Welcoming?
Or fleeing,
As though some hellish hound
Were snapping at your heels.

We have no road map
For navigating the dense black hole
That waits to claim us.
We are skeptical of
Reassuring brochures
Promising happier times.

The departing soul
Leaves no visible footprints.
It vanishes like morning dew
In the first warmth of the day.
We know only when it is gone,
Not where.

Maybe the answer is to be found
In our new religion:
“Light is both wave and particle.”
In this life we are particle.
When we cross the mysterious divide,
We become wave.

 


Alice Friman

Alice Friman



How It Is
Published in The Georgia Review

Late October
and the pitiless drift
begins in earnest. And all
that whispered in the pockets
of summer’s green uniform
is shaken out and dumped.

My mimosa knew, for wasn’t
that death fingering the leaves
all summer? Yet the tree
plumped its pods, spending
all July squeezing them out,
going about its business, as did
the slash pine and loblolly,
spraying pollen—coating
windows, cars, filling every
idle slit with sperm.

What does life mean
but itself? Ask the sea.
You’ll get a wet slap back-
handed across your mouth.
Ask the tiger. I dare you.

And your life, with its
tedium of suffering, what
does it mean but what it is?
And mine—balancing
checkbooks and whomping up
a mess of vittles as my son
used to say. My son, the funny one,
the always-hungry-for-supper-
and-the-happy-ending-
I-was-never-able-to-give-him one.

Who am I to write the user’s manual
for a life, except to say,
Look at trees, dug in and defiant. 
Be like the river. Stick out your tongue.
 
Why not? What’s to lose
when what’s to lose is everything?

 

Bios

Annette Basalyga was a fellow at the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop where she received that university’s Academy of American Poets’ award. She has taught at the University of Puerto Rico, in the New York City Public School System, at Penn State, Worthington campus, and as Lecturer of Distinction, Marywood University, also in Pennsylvania. Among her awards are an Individual Artist’s Grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and a Duncan Lawrie Prize from the Arvon Foundation. She has been visiting artist in SUNY Farmingdale’s Paumanok Poets Series, and last year was a Hedgebrook fellow. Basalyga’s poems have been published in periodicals including Atlanta Review, Audience, Beloit Poetry Journal, Columbia: a Journal of Literature and Art, and Valparaiso. Her first book LIFER was published last year.

Alice Casey was born in 1928. She went to University of Chicago, 1944-47. She worked as an offset lithographer (fancy name for printer) for 5 years, one year as receptionist, switchboard operator for newly licensed TV station in Denver, married her college sweetheart, had four children in five years, was a substitute teacher in elementary schools. She finally settled on a farm in upstate NY, was village librarian for ten years, reading tutor for 16 years, left the farm when she was 80 and became an apartment dweller, the old cliché: little old lady with a cat.

Much of Jean-Marie J. Crocker’s writing life has been concerned with the aftermath of her son’s death in Vietnam. Her memoir of his life, “Son of the Cold War,” is being used by Ken Burns as a source for a forthcoming PBS series on Vietnam. Crocker’s poetry and essays have appeared in numerous literary magazines and newspapers, including Blue Unicorn, North Atlantic Review, Off the Coast, Blueline, and The Hartford Courant. She is a graduate of Simmons College and lives in Wilton, New York.

Christina Wos Donnelly co-founded and co-edited the ejournal, Not Just Air, for Sundress Publications. She is the author of two chapbooks, Venus Afflicted and The Largely Unexpurgated History of Scheherazade, and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Pearl, Nimrod International Journal, Earth’s Daughters, Lilliput Review, Moondance, Stirring and other journals, as well as nine anthologies to date. She has been widely featured at Buffalo, Baltimore and Washington-metro area venues including the Library of Congress. The Niagara River flows past her windows.

Alice Friman’s fifth full-length collection is Vinculum, LSU, for which she won the 2012 Georgia Author of the Year Award in Poetry. She is a recipient of a 2012 Pushcart Prize and is included in Best American Poetry 2009. Other books include The Book of the Rotten Daughter and Zoo, which won the Sheila Margaret Motton Prize from The New England Poetry Club and the Ezra Pound Poetry Award from Truman State University. A new collection, The View from Saturn, is forthcoming from LSU in 2014. New work appears in The Georgia Review, Shenandoah, Image, The Southern Review, and others. Friman lives in Milledgeville, Georgia, where she is Poet-in-Residence at Georgia College. Her podcast series Ask Alice is sponsored by the Georgia College MFA program and can be seen on You Tube.

Penny Harter’s recent books include the prizewinning One Bowl (e-chapbook, 2012); Recycling Starlight (2010); and The Night Marsh (2008). She was a featured reader at the 2010 Dodge Poetry Festival, and has won three fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts; the Mary Carolyn Davies Award from the PSA; and a January 2011 fellowship from VCCA. Widowed in 2008, in 2009 she moved to the South Jersey shore area to be near her daughter and family. She continues to work in the Poets-in-the-Schools program for the NJSCA.

In 2010 Kathleen M. Kelley’s chapbook The Waiting Room received the Philbrick Poetry Award, judged by Marge Piercy. In 2008 she received the Anderbo Poetry prize. Her work has appeared in Green Hills Literary Lantern (upcoming), The Sun, Earth’s Daughters, Peregrine, Perigee, The Green Fuse, Evergreen Chronicles, The 2012 Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine Anthology, and Mediphores. Poems have also been anthologized in Women’s Encounters with the Mental Health Establishment and The Patient Who Changed My Life. kathleenmkelley.wordpress.com.

Jacqueline Lapidus grew up in New York City and lived abroad for more than 20 years, first in Greece, then in France, where she was active in international feminist groups. A lifelong editor, teacher and translator currently based in Boston, she holds degrees from Swarthmore College and Harvard Divinity School. Her poems have appeared in numerous periodicals and anthologies and in three collections: Ready to Survive, Starting Over, and Ultimate Conspiracy. She has completed a fourth, Significant Other, and co-edited an anthology, The Widows’ Handbook (Kent State University Press, forthcoming 2014).

Christine O’Connor has lived in the same small New Jersey town for 95 years; she recently moved to live with her daughter. During a life spent as a wife, mother and business owner, she always found time to write. She has been published in Passager, The Journal of New Jersey Poets, St. Anthony Messenger, the Newark Library Anthologies and the Paterson Literary Review and participated in readings and workshops. Much of her writing comes from memories or nature and special people. The kitchen table has always been her favorite place to write.

Paula Phipps was born in Boston; she has lived in Cambridge for many years. Overall she is an educator: a teacher; preschool director; advocate for children and families; and a multiculturalist. She has been quietly active in movements for social justice and for peace; a mother, grandmother, and citizen of this beleaguered planet.

Sb Sowbel, recipient of two NYFA and three VTAC grants, was born in Baltimore, the home for many years of the largest ball of string. Sowbel teaches in low-residency adult-degree programs and paints, prints and writes in the Ozarks of northwest Arkansas and the snowpockets of central Vermont. A fan of all things accordion, Sowbel has work in numerous journals and anthologies including Red Palm Review, 13th Moon, Helicon Nine, Black Buzzard Review, Bytchin', Wormwood, Neologisms, Incarnate Muse, Dakota House, Bacopa, Poetry Motel, New Testaments and Temenos.

5 Comments

  1. I loved reading your poetry and stories. I, though not born or educated in the USA, have been writing stories about my life and wonder whether you would like to read some of them in your paper. Please let me know. Kay kadden.

  2. yes, Alice, these poems are life boiled down to its essential nub. thank you for making hard choices and sharing that essence.

  3. “Ask the tiger. I dare you.” Thank you, Alice Friman, I shall. Taught to “ask the next question,” I take your line to heart, as I do your selection of diamonds. From a seeming rust of lives in sculpted piles… lived…these do glow in the light and in the dark. Fine works, all.

  4. What great choices, what beautiful words. This collection of poems is the usual fine reading from Persimmon Tree, but each poem is certainly not the usual. And the ending lines always surprise and connect.
    That kiss from Giotto’s Last Supper, the Mushrooms that changed everything they touched, the blood that can’t be fed to a stone and the implosion of joy that all these poems bring.
    Thank you, Alice, thank you Persimmon Tree!

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