Betty

Framing it this way, today
Will be a different picture tomorrow
Or next week, next month
In months, in a year, in collected years
The illusion of memory will change
The story
No longer an immediate image
To cue a clear thought about (you)
Then all the emotions with that
Cloud the canvas
Giving pain a Monet comfort
Out of focus, distant
You will try to look at it that way
From a vantage point
From a far corner
Watching what life is left disappear
You squint to try and recreate it
But often it is in the nightscape
The agonizing lack of sleep
The eyes closed that can only see
His  image
See his memory
A strange odd moment created by desire
Unconscious wanting
Oh Frank, you’ll say, did you have to do it?
Oh Frank , you’ll say, I sure do miss you.
When something strange happens between your blinking eyes
 the frames will be stacked and piled
In that same place
Again and again

When I was 21 living in Delaware
There was this big black woman
Who worked in the senior center kitchen
Where I worked who told me,
“Lord have Mercy! No matter what
always be generous about buying food.
You should always have plenty of food in the house.
I don’t care how poor I am I’ve got to have lots of food.
It’s the most important thing, God and food!”
This made quite an impression on me.
I immediately took her word as Gospel.
My shelves became well stocked
I over bought in case of famine or disaster
I filled the freezer with meat
And ravioli, peas and vegetable medleys
I bought gallons of milk instead of quarts
I filled my Tupperware containers with flour and wheat germ
Nuts and dried fruit, cereals and bran
I owned every flavor of herbal tea
I had enough coffee grounds for ten years
I made fresh bread on a weekly basis
There was always ice cream on hand
I made my own granola
I bought Bon Appetite magazine and tried out all the recipes
Which caused an increase in unusual items that also increased
The Tupperware population.
Things were getting out of control when I realized at one point
That I was becoming as large as the cook in Delaware
And I said, “Lord have mercy!
I shall not live by bread alone.
This largeness of myself has overcome me
And my stockpile mentality has overrun me.”
I began to empty the shelves and the freezer
I released the sugars and the flours to the garbage bin
And I genuflected as I discarded each item,
A kind of farewell blessing to the black prophetess of Delaware
Who God only knows
Is crying out still, “Lord have mercy!”

St. Mary’s Thursday Night

St. Mary’s open for prayer on Thursday night
Anyone can pray
Anyone can plead with God
Anyone can pretend to be Catholic
Anyone can cough
And echo the rasp unashamed
Anyone can thumb through the text
Read their own passage
Anyone can confess into the air
Into the lily’s aroma on the altar
Anyone can stare at the others praying
And think that these are their own prayers
Anyone can gaze at the stained glass
Count the stations, notice the expressions
Of the tortured Christ
Anyone can be forgiven
Hear God’s voice, wash in the holy water
Anyone can stand or sit
Kneel or walk and it will be considered
But no one
Should let the door slam
Like I did
When five steps from it
It let go its own ‘amen’
So be it

It’s not so much
That the tree falls in the forest
And we can’t hear it
But that the drops of rain
Tell that the trees are there
By the softness of sound
Indicating its surfaces
Its leaves and trunks
Its height, width and depth
The solidness found
By reflected sound
The roof tells us it is there
By wind messengers whistling
And torrents of water
That give away its geometry
Triangular sound, Teepee sound
A-frame sound
Flat roof sound
Plastic tarp sound
If I had to close my eyes
Become blind
If I were blind, am blind
Then every voice becomes my perimeter
a thumbprint of edge and wall
the bumps and clicks
of furniture
heels on the surface
tapping fingers and sticks
they tell me
they would say
here
the shape of things
belie themselves
in the world of vibrations
breathing in the empty spaces of unseen silence
filling space, giving shape
with the comforting barrier of sound

Betsy Retallack

Betsy Retallack lives and works in Beverly, Mass, teaching music in the public schools. She lives on Poets Hill in the Ryal Side neighborhood. Her day job is teaching classroom music and by night she writes.

She recently read her poetry in NYC to celebrate the recent release of Best American Poetry2006 of which her poem, “Roadside Special”, appears. Betsy frequently reads at poetry readings and has been a featured reader on several occasions. She has spent most of her adult life performing as a musician but has only recently taken this new turn into poetry. She has three self published chap books, titled, “From Poets Hill”.

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Fonder

            Absence makes the heart grow . . .

Great cushy fluffs of fonder billow
from the ventricles.  The texture
of cotton candy, but not as sweet
as it crowds the other organs
like insulation—the spleen, the lungs.

That cough you get the second week
she’s gone?  That’s fonder, clotting
your esophagus; in a month,
it has reached the back of your mouth

absorbing your saliva, making
you talk in dry painful gulps.
And it has begun appearing
in your urine, thin silvery streaks
that waver in the yellow stream.

When you think back to her,
it is with curses, for you see now
how her lips planted these manic seeds,
how she watered them with her tongue.

THE BLUEBERRIES IN THE BEER

They sit, like children huddling
against some catastrophe
in the bottom of the glass
as the beer above them
empties into the drinker’s mouth.
They roll like pebbles
in the surf.  On the table,
through the glass,  a half-full
basket of sweet potato fries,
a plate of Nacho crumbs.

When they sat on the bushes
and shuddered in the slight wind
above the abandoned quarry,
they could not have known
this would be their life—
beer-soaked, a mouth opening
and closing above them.

They do not know where
they are going—the crush
of teeth, ground by metal fillings,
then the slippery ride
down the esophagus
into the gut of a man.

In the Months of the Roaches

I tried to love you
as you appeared:
diligent, efficient,
gathering at the least crumb.
A drop of orange juice meant
Party!  The fear of you
crawling into my month-old
son’s ear never did fade,
though, and when I witnessed
your hatching upon
the shower curtain—
a hundred white dots
scrambling--I didn’t
celebrate your sheer joy
at life: The fresh dampness
of waking in a bathroom
four feet from the floor,
a nude man grimacing at you.
How wonderful, you thought,
heading for the drain,
How much we have
to live for.

MODERN POETRY

Reznikoff writes of the the pleasures
The Nazis took in violence, forcing
The victims to strip before shooting,
Then sorting the dead by religion.

Sandburg on World War one: a nailed
Body, mouth stuffed with his own genitals.
The ambulance driver’s account
Of his time in northern France.

The poets knew it then: murder
Is elemental, not historical.
Read, read, and the news in the air
Is the news from the past:

There are those who like to kill.
They are in the ditch with the rest.

J.D. Scrimgeour runs the Creative Writing Program at Salem State College in Salem, Massachusetts.  He is the author of a book of poems, The Last Miles, and a book of creative nonfiction, Themes For English B: A Professor's Education In and Out of Class, which won the AWP Award for Creative Nonfiction in 2005.  

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My Mother – J. D. Salinger

Frame-filling portrait at 8th and F Streets:
Where have I seen that face before?

Fluid-muffled rhythm, echoed, so long ago,
first heard, first heard, so long ago.
Everyone knows the lull, the weight of those words.
So heavy were those words, so heavy.
Now, what were they again?
And what did they weigh?

Synapses like forsythia grew
and branched and grew again,
foreshadowing the self-imposed:
the exile, the muttering, the walls and the wells.

I see myself in your dark eyes, Jerome David,
familiar slanted features, that fat lower lip
you lent to Lotte Jacobi’s lens in nineteen fify-one.

And behind you now the artist’s mother peers
(some laboring is never done, kina hora)
and all along the gallery the signs are warning,
“Please do not touch. Photography not permitted in this exhibition.”

Strawberries and Peaches

The fresh strawberries
that we shared
from my juicy lips
to your juicy lips
from your juicy lips
to my juicy lips
marked our faces
with the red of our
commitment,
the flavor of our lust.

The ripe peaches that we
devoured on our steamy picnics by the sea
aroused even the razor clams
and woke the sleepy sand dollars
as we lay naked on the dune
feeding ourselves each to each.

I think of the way you walked away
after our last words,
lifting an orange from the bowl
on the kitchen table,
slamming the screen door,
in search of more forbidden fruit.

The year that was sucked
dangerously down the drain
slurped and spiraling like a super sub sandwich along the esophagus
lodging deep and doomed
on a sludge-covered ledge
under the arctic cap
contained a summer of living
damply and dosed with prednisone,
chilled and pretending hope.

Here
on the tundra,
in the igloo we call igloo,
we hug our mushless Toto
and huddle where the corner
might-could have been.

The fat ring of fat round the belly
strates clairbuoyance.
Some
where
a doctor
is snorting
Some
where
a bison
has no
hump.

Our Kate Spade
could pass
for a Taiwanese
knock-off
at the flea market
down to Canal and toidy-toid.

The year that could not end
without survivors. No wonder
we call them waves.

To the volunteer aquanauts
our pundits and politicians sing:
“You’re just a bunch
of stinkin’ Norwegians”
as they toss Hart Crane
a lifesaver of wintergreen
that if he bites hard enough
will spark like firefish
spelling out the chant:
“Fuck you, Norway;
Fuck you, Norway.”

The houses in the hood all hang
“God Bless America” banners
but the hoods in the houses forget
the aliens who steeraged
from the City of Burns
to the City of Waters.

And down along the boardwalk
Joey and Dee Dee
share a Lucky Strike
in front of the statue
of the Gloucester fisherman,
spinning platters and humming,
“Don’t tell me
the lights are shining
any anywhere”
while waiting for the Wegies
to crack the hull as if it were
one of their sardine cans
and watch for shells called homes
to bubble up
and break the tension at the surface.

The whole crew is lost.

David Byer

David J. Byer is a software developer and writer who lives in Ipswich, Massachusetts. He has taught English and computer classes at north shore colleges and was the developer of the Comdex award-winning software program, HardFacts. He has been a member of the Emerging Writers Workshop since it was founded by the poet Marsha Janson.