Off the Coast, a literary magazine out of Bristol, Maine, has published two of my poems in its fall issue. You can find Off the Coast at this url:
http://www.off-the-coast.com/otc15.4.html
But they include only a sampling of the magazine, so here are my poems.
Two Twisting Ropes
When spruce trees stood straight-spined and tame,
my father backed the gray truck from the garage,
spread sawdust over the cement floor’s grease,
and hung from the rafters two thick twisting ropes.
Leading two lambs from the pen, he said,
“Go play somewhere else.”
I hurried from the slaughter, found refuse
in the barn loft where I straddled a thick beam,
thinking how I had told Job secrets, nuzzled his wool,
and baked for him fat molasses cookies.
Our freezer was a deep hole. I’d jump my belly
onto the frosty sill, swing my head down, and rummage
for hamburger, venison stakes, lamb chops—white packages
labeled in my mother’s black writing and heavy with cold.
We were born implicated, Dad and I, the two ropes of our wills
twisted in a family history we don’t want to remember.
We have lost ourselves under the finger and the fist.
How buried is our cold grief?
Dad never butchered personally a lamb we had named.
Job, wethered in his first month, would be sold–
an alternate way to die.
I found him waiting for his cookie. While he munched
I gently berated him for the folly of his birth.
Sheep, to live, have to be girls.
Corn and the Psychologist
He tells her he’s been pouting. Says
she feeds the roses while he sits alone.
You seem content, she says, puzzled.
He says that in his line of work they have names
for what’s wrong with her. Mentions a few.
She goes out, picks up medicine for his heart,
stops for sweet corn. She likes car time, smiles
to see purple cosmos nodding in town, savors
how their grandson asked, “Is it Friday as your house?”
Back, she checks his sulk, puts on the pot,
shucks and silks the corn, getting fingers sticky.
At table he brightens, tries an ear, says
“umm good,” smacks over another. He smiles
and, into her answering smile, as if invited,
launches his critique, a list of her faults, footnoted.
(His belief in improving her is reckless.
Among the roses she works softly,
not to stir up bees.)
When he stops for breath, she holds up a hand.
“You might stay,” she says, “on your side of us.
Tell me what you need.”
He is above need. A man complete.
Self-actualized, he begins another pout.
Like a forbearing referee,
the plate of corn cools silently.
Next day, in her new place and eating along, she feels
the air stir with old women’s cheers. Each wife
had had no place to go, no cash, no way to leave,
had confessed a man’s error as her own.
Each had bowed her head in silent outrage.
She wonders if he misses corn the most.
(Note: After reading this poem, a friend of told me that many years ago he had worked in a pychiatric ward. There he met women whose husbands had not allowed them to get out and work. Shock treatment had made these women more docile and was, therefore, considered a good thing.)
Red Hen's Daughters 