Category Archives: Great Poems Online

“Crime Against Nature”: A Lesbian Mother’s Poetic Manifesto

Minnie Bruce Pratt’s Crime Against Nature is everything a poetry collection should be. Politically urgent but never one-dimensional, in language that’s always clear but never pedestrian, this groundbreaking book recounts how the author lost custody of her sons when she came out as a lesbian, then forged a beautifully honest relationship with them later in life.

The speaker grieves, rages, yet bravely refuses to take the blame for the impossible choice forced upon her. “This is not the voice of the guilty mother,” she writes. Connecting her loss to other forms of oppression and violence against women, she dares to dream of a world that “will not divide self from self, self from life.”

Crime Against Nature was originally published in 1989 by Firebrand Press and won the 1989 Lamont Poetry Prize, a second-book award from the Academy of American Poets. A Midsummer Night’s Press, in conjunction with the lesbian literary journal Sinister Wisdom, reissued it this year in an expanded edition with historical notes and an author essay. It is the first book in their “Sapphic Classics” series reprinting iconic lesbian poetry that is now out of print. Subscribers to this excellent journal will receive future Sapphic Classics (one a year) as the equivalent of one magazine issue. Crime Against Nature does double duty as Issue #88.

Sinister Wisdom editor Julie R. Enszer has kindly given me permission to reprint a sample poem below. I chose this one because I could relate to the speaker’s dilemma between speaking and not speaking about trauma. In the end it is better to speak, even when it hurts. It sets free others’ “tongues of ice”, as well as your own. Thank you, Minnie Bruce Pratt.

Justice, Come Down

A huge sound waits, bound in the ice,
in the icicle roots, in the buds of snow
on fir branches, in the falling silence
of snow, glittering in the sun, brilliant
as a swarm of gnats, nothing but hovering
wings at midday. With the sun comes noise.
Tongues of ice break free, fall, shatter,
splinter, speak. If I could write the words.

Simple, like turning a page, to say Write
what happened, but this means a return
to the cold place where I am being punished.
Alone to the stony circle where I am frozen,
the empty space, children, mother, father gone,
lover gone away. There grief still sits
and waits, grim, numb, keeping company with
anger. I can smell my anger like sulfur-
struck matches. I wanted what had happened
to be a wall to burn, a window to smash.
At my fist the pieces would sparkle and fall.
All would be changed. I would not be alone.

Instead I have told my story over and over
at parties, on the edge of meetings, my life
clenched in my fist, my eyes brittle as glass.

Ashamed, people turned their faces away
from the woman ranting, asking: Justice,
stretch out your hand. Come down, glittering,
from where you have hidden yourself away.

 

Poetry by Robert Gross: “Poor Souls”

Poet and dancer Robert Gross, whom I met last year at the Ollom Movement Art summer program, has kindly given me permission to reprint this prose-poem. It was first published in the current issue of the St. Sebastian Review, an LGBTQ Christian literary webzine. As I read it, “Poor Souls” suggests that every sin and regret that seems to separate us from God is trivial compared to the magnitude of God’s love, if we could only see it properly.

Poor Souls

Little by little, they unfold out of purgatory; origami figures undone in silence, each a metaphysical yawn, a backbend out of time. Everything slow-motions to the beat of rosaries and suffusions of incense, the unclocked passage of steady repentance. Atom by atom, the gilt wears off; innocence emerges. Back then, I would’ve given anything . . .

They stagger out of the dead-letter office, each one exhausted by the dusty bins of misaddressed intentions, insufficient postage, the vast shabbiness of venial offenses. They squint, contemplate the deserted plaza, sigh. No such thing as an original sin, they chuckle, just the steady dissipation of extenuating circumstances, endlessly recycled . . . the gun misfired. . . I couldn’t get it up . . . I thought desirously of his lips, then sneezed . . . sins of omission and implication, of reverie and miscalculation, inertia and cliché. Nothing and everything mortal.

I was determined to offend big-time but my mother came to visit . . . Imperceptibly, each infraction becomes unfascinating, silly, dwindles before the massiveness of love. I even considered . . . I know this sounds ridiculous . . .I can’t remember how . . .

One by one, the penitents come unmoored and are carried out to sea. A delicate flotilla awash in perpetual indulgence and plainchant; crystalline buoys impelled toward a luminous horizon. 

 

Poetry by Donal Mahoney: “Woman in the Day Room Crying”

Reiter’s Block contributor Donal Mahoney describes the inspiration for this poem as follows: “Fresh out graduate school in English in 1962, I had a pregnant wife and couldn’t find a job. At that time, a degree in anything qualified a person to be a caseworker in Chicago. Seeing hundreds of clients, one sometimes suspected child abuse in the adult the child had become. PTSD isn’t the product of war alone.”

Woman in the Day Room Crying

Lightning bolts in childhood
can scar the soul forever.
They’re a satanic baptism
when the minister’s your father,
mother, brother, sister,
anyone taller, screaming,
shooting flames from the sky
all day, all night.

The years go by
but the scars remain.
The pale moonlight of age
makes them easier to see
and scratch until they burst
and bleed again,
another reason I wake up
at night screaming.

When the daylight comes,
I talk about the scars
when no one is around
to say shut up!
I draw the details in a mural
on the walls and ceilings so
everyone can see the storms
that never left a rainbow.

Poetry by Rosalía de Castro: “Dos Palomas” (The Two Doves)

Rosalía de Castro (1837-1885) was a Spanish Romantic poet who is recognized as the most outstanding modern writer in the Galician language. Australian writer John H. Reid, who is affiliated with our Winning Writers contest resource website, also happens to be an expert on de Castro and introduced me to her work. He kindly shares his translation of her poem “Dos Palomas” below. Apologies if the accent marks in the Spanish version don’t appear properly in your browser.

Dos palomas
Rosalía de Castro

Dos palomas yo vi que se encontraron
cruzando los espacios
y al resbalar sus alas se tocaron…

Cual por magia tal vez, al roce leve
las dos se estremecieron,
y un dulce encanto, indefinible y breve,
en sus almas sintieron.

Y torciendo su marcha en un momento
al contemplarse solas,
se mecieron alegres en el viento
como un cisne en las olas.

Juntáronse y volaron
unidas tiernamente,
y un mundo nuevo a su placer buscaron
y otro más puro ambiente.

Y le hallaron al fin, y el nido hicieron
en blanda cama de azucena y rosas,
y en ella se adurmieron
con las libres y blancas mariposas.

Y al despertar sus picos se juntaron,
y en la aurora luciente
sus caricias de amor se retrataron
como sombra riente.

Y en nubes de oro y de zafir bogaban
cual ondulante nave
en la tranquila mar, y se arrullaban
cual céfiro süave.

Juntas las dos al declinar del día
cansadas se posaban,
y aun los besos el aura recogía
que en sus picos jugaban.

Y así viviendo inmarchitables flores
sus días coronaron,
y nunca los amargos sinsabores
sus delicias turbaron.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

¡Felices esas aves que volando
libres en paz por el espacio corren
de purísima atmósfera gozando!

****

The Two Doves
rendered from the Spanish of Rosalía de Castro
by John H. Reid

I saw two doves flying in the sky
when suddenly their wings touched
and they were momentarily joined together…

A light touch it’s true, perhaps by magic,
but the two trembled. They were shaken,
and a sweet charm, brief but indefinable,
infused their souls.

Suddenly their two single flights
became twisted into one,
and they were happily rocked in the wind
like a swan on the waves.

Joined together, they flew tenderly attached.
To their pleasure, a visionary world opened,
and a more totally captivating environment.

At last, at the end of their flight,
they jointly find their nest
in a soft bed of lilies and roses,
where they sleep together,
free and white, like butterflies.

At dawn, they raise their beaks together,
and in the shining light of the new day,
their loving caresses make a bright,
cheerful parasol over their nest.

In clouds of gold and sapphire,
they row a rolling ship
in a tranquil sea,
and coo gently
in the day’s
cool breeze.

Together the two exchange
the honey in their beaks.

And thus their days were capped
in these living, unfading flowers,
and bitter disappointments never
disturbed their delights.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Happy those peaceful birds flying free
enjoying the expanse and purity
of a virginal atmosphere!

Poetry by Donal Mahoney: “Waiting for the Umpire”

More than 500 years after the Protestant Reformation, Christians still debate the relative importance of good works versus faith in Jesus for salvation. Each team has its favorite proof-texts. Catholics may cite the Epistle of James for the proposition that “faith without deeds is dead” (James 2:26) while Protestants lean on St. Paul’s words in Romans 3:28 (“a person is justified by faith apart from works of the law”).

Never mind that the two authors were probably addressing different issues: St. Paul the question of whether Jewish Christians had an advantage over Gentile ones, and St. James the problem of hypocrisy among professed Christ-followers who didn’t show care toward their neighbors. Humans being humans, any religious rule can be turned to self-serving ends, as illustrated by this satiric Lenten contribution by Donal Mahoney, who describes himself as “a believing but misbehaving Roman Catholic”.

Waiting for the Umpire
by Donal Mahoney

Ralph never planned on dying
but when he did, he was swept away
like a child’s kite blown astray.

When he arrived at his destination,
he heard angels singing, harps playing
and Louis Armstrong on the trumpet

so he figured this must be heaven.
A nice old man at the gate, however,
waved him away without directions.

This confused Ralph until he found
an open window in the basement,
climbed in and found an elevator

that took him to the top floor.
There a smiling angel with big wings
walked him up a thousand concrete stairs

and showed him to an empty seat.
Ralph was in the bleachers now
with millions of others, simply waiting.

None of them had a cushion to sit on.
But down in the padded box seats
Ralph saw rabbis, priests and ministers

sitting in the front row, simply waiting.
His barber, Al, was sitting with them.
For 30 years Al had been asking Ralph

while trimming his few remaining tufts of hair
if he had finally been saved or was he still lost.
Ralph would always tell Al he believed in God

but that every year he cheated on his taxes.
Sin is sin, Ralph would quietly point out.
Faith is all you need, Al would shout.

Seeing his barber now in the front row,
Ralph figured that maybe Al had stopped
cheating on his dying wife.

Otherwise, Ralph figured, Al would be sitting
in the cheap seats, waiting with everyone else
in the amphitheater for the Umpire to appear.

Poetry by Thelma T. Reyna: “Early Morning”

In this season of Lent, we are told to “remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” This reminder of mortality is not meant to make us dwell in gloom, but to practice discerning how to spend our time on what matters most.

Thelma T. Reyna’s poem below illustrates this truth. It is reprinted by permission from her forthcoming chapbook, Hearts in Common, available for pre-order from Finishing Line Press through April 5. From the publisher’s press release: “Hearts in Common focuses on the commonalities that bind us all together. Poems about the dreams, labors, and heartbreaks of immigrants from Mexico, Vietnam, and other parts of the world; about nurses in Haiti treating the dying; about Egyptians in rebellion against their oppressors, join with insightful, poignant poems about the people in our everyday lives: husbands, wives, lovers, parents, children, friends–all of us having ‘hearts in common’.”

Early Morning
by Thelma T. Reyna

She wasn’t supposed to die across the
sunbeams, flowered night-
gown twisted around crumpled knees, eyes
widely unaware and questioning.

She wasn’t supposed to die while
her coffeepot called, and toast rose
with a gentle click as she
cajoled and roused sleeping children.

She wasn’t supposed to die while
she sang to the terrier licking her ankles,
and her husband ambled to her for their
morning kiss, white coffee mug ready
   
for his brew.

She wasn’t supposed to die like this,
arms around his neck, lips pressed to his ear,
warm breath gearing up for morning talk,
her head tilting back to tell him something
   
monumental.

But she died a lightning death, her
big heart failing, her body falling in an
instant to
the sunlit floor, her mouth circled in pain,
   
her hands
clutching her breast as her children
   walked in.

No guarantees. There are no guarantees in life,
   we’ve
been told and retold. Grab love, fight loss, find
joy, hang on, believe, and tell yourself again
  and again
and again that this day, each day, is irretrievable.

Two Poems from Donna Johnson’s “Selvage”

Award-winning poet Donna Johnson was an assistant editor at our Winning Writers online publishing business from 2009-2011. I’m glad that the demands of updating our contest database didn’t keep her from completing her remarkable first poetry collection, Selvage, now out from Carnegie Mellon University Press. I had the privilege of reading it in manuscript and providing the following blurb:

Selvage, a precise yet uncommon word, refers to the self-finished edge that keeps fabric from fraying. Like that cloth, the girl-turned-woman we follow through these electrifying poems must weave strong edges for herself to keep from being pulled apart by others’ desires. She flirts dangerously with alternative selves–the prostituted woman, the fierce nun–to understand her body’s potential as it chafes against the proprieties of Southern white girlhood. Selvage sounds like salvage, too, the hardscrabble work of children seeking nourishment and mementos from the wreck of their past. Every poem digs up treasures of insight, words pungent as the air outside the tannery, ineradicable artifacts like the bullet in a slave woman’s unearthed spine–not always comfortable to contemplate, but satisfying as only the truth can be.

Donna has kindly given permission to reprint two sample poems, below.

Notions
(for Della)

Your mother had notions. Wouldn’t buy Ivory soap–
not because she saw the irony, that whiteness
equals purity, not because it reminded her
of all the carved tusks looted from Abidjan ruins
curled around the wrists of Belle Meade denizens–
she thought it smelled common. Cornrows
and Kente cloth were out of the question.

She clung to her book of proper, as if
it could keep one from harm: the hands of boys
inching down your pants, police slowing,
tinted windows rolling down, all because you crossed
the highway that divided the two halves of town.

She taught you to look ahead (like you don’t see nothin)
balancing flute case across handlebars,
approaching the house of the first clarinet,
with its lawn boy positioned at the gate,
coat and exaggerated grin, freshly painted red.

****


Eve Gets a Makeover

I don’t like to say anybody’s hopeless. But, that yellow Dotted Swiss you just bought–you know, the one with the full dirndl skirt and gathered waist–makes you look wider than you are tall. Enough material in it to patch the Hindenburg. Don’t fret, though hon. You got your charms. Jes gotta make use of em before they’re gone: a little contour cheek powder, a shade darker than your natural, some highlights. What you waitin for? Plenty women gettin all their stuff done. Who’s gonna throw stones? Your kids are clean, their hair is combed. Your make cakes from scratch; once a week you bring that broccoli casserole to the nursin home. I know what they told you. Jesus first, others second, yourself last spells J-O-Y. But joy ain’t beauty. And I don’t see you displayin much of the former, anyhow, worryin about your husband workin late, maybe findin someone younger. Anyway, the King James did get one thing right: all flesh is grass. That’s why you best be ruthless with it. I can help you there. I know flesh. And I know ruthless.

Poem by F.G. Mulkey: “Shore Leave”

Winning Writers subscriber F.G. Mulkey recently shared the good news of his poetry publication with us, and has also given me permission to reprint this poem on the blog. “Shore Leave” was published in the inaugural issue (Summer 2012) of Clockhouse Review, the literary journal of Goddard College.

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Shore Leave
by F.G. Mulkey

The nightingales are sobbing in
  
the orchards of our mothers,
And hearts that we broke long ago
  
have long been breaking others.
–W.H. Auden

someone stands at the end of a pier.
knowing that somebody is out there somewhere;
on the edge of a late night yellow fog,
sheltering waves with only the sound below
where vows were once scratched in wet sand,
captured then cleansed by tidal pools on the mend:

it is law like love which governs
each sailor’s tale, splashed in mermaid luck,
as the lighthouse protects on lucent waves
in persistent sweeps, keeper of a coastline warning,
flashing the way home protecting a rocky doom,
safe passages from temptation, forward-back again.
it is love like law
that demands drowning time with memories,
when breezes fueled flight of driftwood sparks,
and the smell from smoke and salt dazzled senses
and imperfection was abandoned by sand and foam,
forgotten in perfect paradise, keeping a lover
alone with a calendar, page after page.
distant oil rigs dagger skyline of gray on gray,
a bed turned down and without body warm,
morning washes bayou rain uphill, porch lights expect
the tumble home and routines will be routinely done.

Poem by Donal Mahoney: “Christmastime in America”

Herod…gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had learned from the Magi. Then what was said through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled:

“A voice is heard in Ramah,
weeping and great mourning,
Rachel weeping for her children
and refusing to be comforted,
because they are no more.”
(Matthew 2:16-18)

Surrounded by sentimental images of babies in mangers, we forget that the Bible sets the Christmas story as a small but brilliant point of light against the darkness of the world. A world where the murder of children still threatens the peace of our homes, schools, and hearts.

Do we dare take time to grieve? I’ve been frustrated and saddened by the rush to politicize the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School, the instantaneous explosion of Internet debate about guns and mental illness, the finger-pointing and Facebook-unfriending of those who disagree with our preferred solution. Anger gives us an illusion of control. But God in Jesus didn’t come as a gun-toting (or spear-carrying) security guard. This poem by Donal Mahoney reminded me of the lines from “It Came Upon the Midnight Clear”: “And man, at war with man, hears not the love song which they bring; O hush the noise, ye men of strife, and hear the angels sing.”

Christmastime in America
by Donal Mahoney

You see the oddest things
at Christmastime in America.
The bigger the city,
the stranger the sights.
I was driving downtown
to buy gifts for the family
and enjoying bouquets
of beautiful people
bundled in big coats
and colorful scarves
clustered on corners,
shopping in good cheer
amid petals of snow
dancing in the sun.

One of them, however,
a beautiful young lady,
had stopped to take issue
with an old woman in a shawl
picketing Planned Parenthood.
The old woman was riding
on a motor scooter
designed for the elderly.
She held a sign bigger
than she was and kept
motoring back and forth
as resolute as my aunt
who had been renowned
for protesting any injustice.
Saving seals in the Antarctic
had been very important to her.

On this day, however,
the beautiful young lady
who had taken issue
with the old woman
was livid and screaming.
She marched behind
the motor scooter and
yelled at the old woman
who appeared oblivious
to all the commotion.
Maybe she was deaf,
I thought, like my aunt.
That can be an advantage
at a time like this.

The letters on the sign were huge
but I couldn’t read them
so I drove around the block
and found a spot at the curb.

It turned out the sign said,
“What might have happened
if Mary of Nazareth
had been pro-choice?”
Now I understood
why the young lady
was ranting and raving
and why the old woman
kept motoring to and fro.
At Christmastime in America
people get excited,
more so than usual.

When I got home
I hid my packages
and told my wife at supper
what I had seen.
I also told her that if Mary
had chosen otherwise,
I wouldn’t have had
to go shopping today.
That’s obvious, she said.

George Korolog: “Our Adoption”

Winning Writers subscriber George Korolog kindly shares with us a poem from his new collection, Collapsing Outside the Box, which was recently released by Aldrich Press. It was inspired by George’s oldest son, now a college student, who joined their family through open adoption. This poem rings true for me as a depiction of the joy and mystery of meeting your child for the first time, and the complex emotions that arise in a family formed by loss as well as gain.

Our Adoption

It never occurred to me that a strange new
smell would electrify your supple nose hairs,
singe your newborn heart, brand your reptilian
brain with images of smoldering panic that would
mark the watershed of life in your first few seconds.
It never occurred to me that sliding into new being,
slipping from the swathing sac, slapping air in severance
from everything in which your senses had settled were
the questions, Who am I? Why are you here? It never
occurred to me that after nine months of reckoning
her hovering heartbeat to fractions of a second, that
you were already seeding tomorrow with querulous
roots, tendrils that would twist inward upon themselves,
mistakenly embedding the future with layers of suspicion
and doubt even as we yelled, over and over, “I love you.
I love you.” It never occurred to me that you were
beginning to spin the web of one great tear, muddle and
mesh, the blame and longing that awaited us, love dangling,
the snare quivering with the promise of welcoming.