Leanne Grabel

Stupid Blouse

Someone emailed me a poem by David Lehman.

I liked it and printed it.

I put it in my pocket.

There was a line about a piano:

Rank & file/Black & white.

I thought it was a good way to describe a piano.

Then I went to see my father.

He was asleep in his deathbed.

There was a tube down his throat.

It had a headlamp, a camera, and a sensor.

What was snorting down there?

Everyone was asking.

All the busy doctors were sifting through the membranes

caked with ash from cigar butts and steak fat.

He ate towers of salami, their casings stacked up like undershirts.

There were vats of anger.

Little sharp pellets of anguish.

And there was row of glass jars labeled Disappointments.

I went to see my father in my mother’s floral blouse.

It was probably crepe, so liquid.

Fit like a bath.

I knew my father would like it.

But I felt like a cupcake.

Or a cowgirl.

I sat on his deathbed and stared at the devastation.

Dry-eyed, lock-jawed, I put my hand on his arm.

His was mottled with blotches.

My hip touched his hip.

And I read him the poem by David Lehman.

He said he liked the piano. I knew he would.

And then his eyes closed and he slept.

I could see his life force leaking out with every breath.

Three days later, he died.

My mother was on Pacific Avenue heading to the cleaners.

She was picking up that stupid blouse.

I was on I-5 heading North picking up where I left off

Ugly Love Seat

I had no idea how hard my mother worked

to colorize her life

bleached by the disenchantments of my father

who blamed her for his failings.

What color was that, his disenchantment?

Olive green? Puce?

It was splashed over everything–

the easy chairs, the dinnerware, the comforters, us.

My father was no carpenter, no sculptor, no lover.

His vision for himself was impossible.

He wanted a throne, a crown, a scepter, a fleet.

His failure was inevitable.

He called my mother cunt at the dinner table.

This insured his failure to rise.

His mouth kept him scudding through dirt

chewing on pebbles of calcified ire.

For their final house, my mother got a new couch.

The decorator called the color mushroom bisque.

A fabulous name for such a weak brown, a dark beige.

I should have helped her.

I should have helped her choose a gem tone.

An emerald green or garnet red.

I should have shut my father up

then washed his mouth out with soap.

Thinking about Being Called Trite by a Poet

In the dark with the truth

I began the sentence of my life

and found it so simple there was no way

back into qualifying my thoughts

with irony or anything like that.

I went to the fridge and opened it

                        –William Stafford

She had on a mask when she said it to me.

I don’t know if she saw me hear her

or if my hearing her indeed was the intent.

I thought of the first time I heard her read.

She was wearing a mask with a thick Irish accent.

I understood very little.

We were on the same bill and I used a synthesized beat.

The audience seemed to love the beat.

But I saw her get angry, her eyes and forehead furrowed.

I wanted to tell her I try to entertain.

I try to use words that roll together like cue balls

quietly clacking along.

Is such soft joy stupid?

I’ve worked every day for it–

that and clarity.

Soft joy is the harder of the two

but clarity is no walk in the park.

And thick words are such a complication.

I want to tell the Irish poet that on Sundays

I actually take my brain off.

I wash it, kiss it and blow out the grunt.

On Sundays, I try just to feel.

And that Sunday, I felt we poets were being pathetic . . . again

avidly counting audience

hungry for a prize that won’t come

Wool

I was always small and fast.

I already told you.

I was in a big hurry from day one.

Once in kindergarten

walking back from recess

I decided to slip into the bathroom.

The teacher kept walking and

so did most the class.

Only a couple girls stayed behind.

I waved them in.

It was my first act of defiance.

Or was it resistance?

Our teacher was French.

She wore black wool cardigans

buttoned in the back.

There was something so French about her lips.

They were wavy and wry

lopsided, and gymnastic.

Only Shirley McCoy stayed with me in the bathroom.

We were there for a minute max, spinning with fear and thrill.

Then the teacher appeared and yelled us back into line.

We both had to stand in the corner when we got back.

I had to do twice as much time as Shirley, though

since it was my idea.

I think I only got in trouble three times throughout school.

This was the first time.

It made me feel strong and excited.

I kept giggling with little control.

I was always giggling with little control.

Laughter was all I had.

I don't remember getting in trouble when I got home.

My father admired defiance.

He probably gave me a dollar.

I do remember what I wore.

My favorite dress.

A red plaid A-line with a sewn-in dickey in light wool.

And there were about sixty tiny buttons

all the way down the back.

They were red and shiny like cherries, little cherries.

That was one problem with the dress, all that buttoning.

But the main problem was the light wool.

There was a very small window for wool in Stockton.

And I realize I’m not as courageous as I once was.

I may be more defiant, perhaps, but in a sour-breathed whisper.

The quietness, I suppose, cancels it all out.

---

Leanne Grabel is In love with mixing genres, Grabel’s newest work, Old With Jokes, a performance and chapbook, was created for ArtLab 2023. She was recipient of Bread & Roses Award in 2020.

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John Popielaski

Withholding Information

            My nephew, entering eleventh grade

            this fall, says every generation,

            once it’s settled in advanced adulthood,

            claims that things have never been so bad.

            I’m on my fourth strong beer. My powers

            of allusion and rebuttal aren’t mustering

            the way they ought to if my standing

            as a balding elder who’s at least possessed

            of ready wisdom is to be maintained

            in this punk’s eyes, so I say what he said

            is interesting but I have to see a man

            about a horse. He squints at me

            as though I’ve drifted too far

            from the shore of sensibility.

            I squint back, ready to explain

            how idiomatic threads bind cultures,

            how when they get loosened, lost,

            you end up bowling by your lonesome,

            but I realize I have to concentrate

            on standing tall and walking.

            The wall art in my sister’s bathroom

            makes me wonder how two close relations

            can diverge so sharply on important matters.

            I flush and watch the water drain

            and rise. I wash my hands, splash water

            on my face, and ask myself what’s so wrong

            with my sister’s choice to hang Be Happy

            on the narrow wall above the light switch.

            I’m surprised my nephew’s still there

            in the kitchen, waiting to resume.

            He may be representative of something

            I’ve forgotten must stay vital in the world.

            His brother’s moving to Kentucky

in the morning, and the younger doesn’t need

            to hear me tell him all the water that we have

            is all the water that has ever been.

            He doesn’t need to hear me tell him

            there have never been so many of us

            needing and exploiting and polluting it

            as though it will keep coming back to us,

            which it has no choice but to do,

            like some resilient lover biding time

            in a dysfunctional relationship

            that can’t continue its intense asymmetry forever.

            He and his are anxious for a reason,

            and a person who is not sure what he is

            the elder of, who sways when stepping

            into kitchen light, should let who needs

            to whistle past the graveyard whistle,

            let who needs to be like Beowulf take refuge

            in the old days, in a savior with a record

            of unparalleled success.

            Let me not open for the dragon.

            Let me not be like Jim Morrison,

            who could have ended album number one

            with “Take It As It Comes,” a song

            he dedicated to the Maharishi,

            yogic, spiritual, enlightened,

            but instead decided on “The End.”

Why I Still Tell Myself I Will Say Yes to Ayahuasca Someday

            I keep showing up and thinking

            this is when the show begins, the frog eyes

            peeking from the temporary pools,

            the phoebe on the hemlock branch,

            her hatchlings huddling in the nest built

            on the porch-roof beam three years ago,

            all waiting for what I will do.

            I clean and fill the feeders

            for the hummingbirds and fill

            the feeder for the rodents not shy

            of the light of day. They dawn on me,

            the hemlock saplings, branches

            severed at an angle or denuded

            almost to their spindly tops.

            The gruff man four tenths of a mile

            up the discontinued road,

            the malcontent who never waves hello,

            must know I disapprove

            of his philosophy and junk. Who else

            would come down here with clippers

            and a ladder, snipping, stepping, snipping

            so that I would know he knows?

            My friend, a Pingree, uses words

            like dooryard and has lived

            in Garland all his life. He studies

            several samples and is sure

            the culprit is a porcupine.

            “You see he stops each time

            right where the tree would start

            to bend and moves on to the next one.”

            I try to dream when I am elsewhere, home,

            of what goes on here, who resides,

who passes through, but all I ever dream of

            is a bald spot shaped like Africa,

            or sex, if I am lucky, social situations

            in which consciousness of self

            appears to be the theme.

            I have no clan, no totem,

            no instruction in the dreamscape,

            in the seamless elongation

            of experience that I have heard

            turns out to be a beautiful circle.

            I don’t mention dreams to Ping.

            We sit in plastic Adirondack chairs,

            one white, one pastel blue, and watch

            the forest as we drink.

            Then twilight comes and grackles

            by the hundreds, by the hundreds,

            flying through the shaken hemlocks,

            landing on the beeches, marching trunkward

            on their branches, pecking systematically,

            then flying on. For fifteen minutes

            this goes on, and when they’re gone

            we hear them still, their susurration,

            barometric, pressuring the south.

            I don’t ask Pingree if he sees the grackles

            in his dreams. I don’t ask if he hears

            the beech nuts singing in them,

            and I don’t ask what he thinks it means

            to lose yourself completely.

Disintegration

            What is this incessant need to comment

            on what’s passed? Where does it live

            and why does it unsettle me, implore me

            not to simply let what happened go?

            I know, if I go home and tell someone,

            I’ll see that person thinking, if the impulse

            to be politic and sensitive inheres,

            that it was just a bird; okay, a baby

            goldfinch with an eye infection,

            but you really need to get a life.

            The thing is I’ve been reading Barry Lopez,

            and two nights ago, my headlamp on, I read that

            a Warlpiri man, an Aborigine,

            whom Barry asked about the possibility

            of wallabies becoming locally extinct,

            said “that the body of an animal

            might not be visible to someone

            traveling through a certain country,

            but the animal was still there.”

            It may be because my cabin has no power

            or because I haven’t seen a person

            in a span of days I had to keep recounting

            on my fingers, but I thought in darkness

            of that worldview, tried to dream about it

            but did not succeed. The thing is

            in the morning I was going to get water

            from the jug inverted in the crock dispenser

            and looked out the window of the door

            and saw the goldfinch upright on a deck board

            and believed that maybe things undreamed of

            sometimes land like this,

            materializing slightly out of context

            on a surface that your feet know very well.

            I have inadequacies. Such as

I can’t tell if a plant or animal

            is asking for a witness or assistance

            with a wound or time and space to be

            at peace, alone. I put my cup down

            and looked out the window, rooting,

            which did not feel like the way of the Warlpiri.

            Minutes passed. I took a photograph,

            which also did not feel like the Warlpiri way.

            The night before, I couldn’t sleep

            and then I dreamed until I woke

            about a poorly insulated chimney

            and my falling, nothing

            that would brace me for this bird.

            A flash of muted yellow and a flutter, something

            in a language I believed I limned the basics of.

            The goldfinch on the deck board flew

            in the direction of the language.

            I went out the door and drank a cup

            of water as I scanned the forest for the birds.

            I went inside and for the first time

            in my life I wrote a paean,

            which I tore out when I saw at lunchtime

            that the goldfinch was still waiting

            on a deck board but now shielded by a bulbous tank.

            I went inside to watch the mother,

            who returned, returned, with food acute

            or flaccid, and I listened to the paean

            somewhere in the room, uncrumpling

            as though the only thing it needed was more time.

---

John Popielaski's poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in such journals as The Broadkill Review, Clade Song, Roanoke Review, and Sheila-Na-Gig.

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Elizabeth Rae Bullmer

The Birds & The Boys

When I was ten years old and ready 

to mother something.         I thought 

I only wanted to birth boys,

that I would be good at water 

fights & tree forts;          I knew how 

to play in the dirt. Always wanted 

a skateboard & a slingshot—

not to aim at the birds.          I would 

have raised gentle boys 

with coarse ropes of hair & window-

ledge eyes, poet boys, dreamers,        

living together like thunder in sunshine.

I have never received anything 

I admitted to wanting aloud. 

As if the devil were listening,          or god 

thought lack could teach me

a lesson:          perhaps humility 

or how to keep my heart to myself;

children should be seen 

& unheard—dreams we believe

will define us, build our identity,

as if the earth were each dandelion 

& patch of red clover sprouting

from her surface, as if we become

what we create.          God cannot answer 

everyone’s prayers, & maybe some of those 

prayers are selfish or shallow—too foolish 

for anyone to support,          especially god.

What You Could Learn from This

Don’t fall in love with a body;

bodies don’t tell the truth.

They are unpredictable, unreliable.

You will think you know

every delicious inch of skin

only to discover a new scar

shimmering like lakeshore foam

at the receding hairline,

thinning tissue behind knees

or in the bend of elbows—

blood vessels branching violet

broken blooms, a dark spot

in the white of an eye

you had already memorized.

The body lies. And suddenly

you wake beside a perfect stranger

vaguely like your lover. Your palms

will pat and probe for familiar hand-

holds, landmarks, your favorite

birthmark just below the beltline,

and you will be abandoned.

Find something deeper to love:

the patient rise and fall of a

sleeping chest, so innocently

trusting in the next breath.

Beyond muscle and bone, gently

disintegrating, blown away by years,

long instead for the marrow—mold it, like putty

pressed to fit the shape of your mouth.

---

Elizabeth Rae Bullmer's most recent chapbook, Skipping Stones on the River Styx, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. She is a licensed massage and sound therapist, in Kalamazoo, MI.

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