Strange Relationship, poem by Sarah Lilius (ME, AT 17 Poetry and Prose Series)

Strange Relationship
by Sarah Lilius

It starts with one white stick,
fragile paper wraps tobacco.
I’m 17 in the Burger King office.

I try to inhale slow, then faster.
Dizzy, I look around at the silver
counters, fryers, through

the tiny window where my boss
feels charitable. I cough and
realize I want more oblivion.

I give rides to a short man
with curls who resembles
Prince. This is all true.

We always stop
at the liquor store to buy
the hard stuff.

He gets me a pack for payment.
I take him to a trailer park
where I imagine his small

Prince-looking children
greet him but he doesn’t
play. He cracks open his booze,

turns on the television
to watch a VH1 special
about Prince and his rise to fame.

We constantly smell like grease,
sticky odor, we are gentle makers
of burgers and fries.

The fast food industry
isn’t really that fast.
We’re always driving slowly away.

AUTHOR’S PHOTO CAPTION: Myself as a teenager at my parents’ house.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: I wrote this poem after Prince died and I remembered the man who I worked with as a teenager. Burger King was a bad influence on me. I was introduced to smoking from a manager. Other parts of my life weren’t so great. I just remember it being a troubling time in my teenaged life.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Sarah Lilius is the author of the chapbooks What Becomes Within (ELJ Editions, 2014) and The Heart Factory (Black Cat Moon Press, 2016). She also has a chapbook forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press early next year. Some of her journal publication credits include the Denver Quarterly, Silver Birch Press, Court Green, BlazeVOX, Bluestem, Tinderbox, Hermeneutic Chaos, Stirring, Luna Luna Magazine, Entropy, and Flapperhouse. She lives in Arlington, Virginia, with her husband and two sons. Her website is sarahlilius.com.

Watching the Planes, poem by Yvonne Higgins Leach (ME, AT 17 Poetry and Prose Series)

Watching the Planes
by Yvonne Higgins Leach

After flipping through your latest Rolling Stone
and listening to all your new
albums, twice, and the air
growing stale in your room,
we declared there was nothing
left to do. Then you remembered
what a friend of a friend told you.

We parked in front of the No Trespassing
sign lodged to the fence. The night
as black as the tar landing strip
that seemed an extension
of our feet. We climbed onto the hood,
warming our backs against it
like a hot dock in summer.

From what felt like nowhere,
the first plane barreled down on us,
screaming, and shaking our bones.
Its silhouette of wings, black
belly, and twinkling lights
so close we reached up as if
to catch it by its tail.

SOURCE:  “Watching the Planes” was first published in Goodreads Poetry Contest as an Honorable Mention in Sept. 2015.

AUTHOR’S PHOTO CAPTION: This is the friend, Chris Davis, who I used to go watch planes with. Here, we’re out to dinner with other high school friends in Spokane, Washington, in February 1978.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: I find it so interesting how long memories can stay with me, taking their place in the mantel of my mind, and then suddenly coming forward and asking for attention. I have such fond memories of my good friend and me, both 17, going to watch the airplanes land at our local airport after we had exhausted doing all the other things that entertained us. This memory came to the forefront about 30 years later, demanding to become a poem.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Yvonne Higgins Leach is the author of Another Autumn (WordTech Editions, 2014). Her poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies. A native of Washington state, she earned a Master of Fine Arts from Eastern Washington University. She spent decades balancing a career in communications and public relations, raising a family, and pursuing her love of writing poetry. Now a full-time poet, she splits her time living on Vashon Island and Spokane, Washington. For more information, visit yvonnehigginsleach.com.

haiku by Patricia McGoldrick (ME, AT 17 Poetry and Prose Series)

haiku
by Patricia McGoldrick

seventeenth year
marks a pivotal moment
teen springs to summer

 2017 Patricia McGoldrick

AUTHOR’S PHOTO CAPTION: My yearbook photo, Grade 12.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: My Seventeeth Summer! When I turned 17, all was well with the world — for half of the year, that is! I was in Grade 11, with school going well, lots of fun with friends and, overall, a good time, until a fateful day in June. Just after classes ended, summer vacation was starting, an unfamiliar car drove into the laneway on my parents’ farm. Two “suits” got out and proceeded to turn my world upside down. Apparently, according to this principal and vice principal duo from a local school, boundaries had changed, My younger sister and I would be required to switch to a different high school in the new school year, starting Grades 10 and 12, respectively. This momentous change was mandated in the 70s, prior to the Internet, cell phones, texting, Facebook, Twitter, etc. For us, in rural Ontario, Canada, even landline phones were regulated to a short calling distance. All of our friends would be considered in the long-distance range! My seventeenth summer dragged on until the day after Labour Day when my sister and I entered the enormous new school. With fear and trepidation, somehow we found our homeroom lists in the gym, and turned to walk in different directions towards the future. By the end of the first week, I am happy to share that my sister and I had learned the lay of the land in the gigantic new school setting and made a lot of new friends. Not sure, but this life event might have been the reason for my adopting”The Road Not Taken” as my favourite poem. Ironically, long after my seventeenth summer, I met a man from Montreal (future husband) whose yearbook bio listed a life-inspiring quote from a certain American poet’s Road poem. Guess who!

© 2017 Patricia McGoldrick

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:  Patricia McGoldrick is a Kitchener, Ontario, Canada poet/writer who is inspired by the everyday. She is a member of The Ontario Poetry Society and the League of Canadian Poets. Recent publications include poems at this link, the Silver Birch Press “My Prized Possession” Series, an essay titled “Secrets and Clues and Mysteries, Oh My!” in The Nancy Drew Anthology (Silver Birch Press, 2016), and a poem entitled “Simple Is Best” at Red Wolf Journal.

Black Velvet Hat, poem by Lesley Quayle (ME, AT 17 Poetry and Prose Series)

Black Velvet Hat
by Lesley Quayle

You were the poet who lived
in Muswell Hill, back in the day
when I was the girl in a black velvet
hat with a red rose pinned to the brim.

You wrote a song for me,
about my long hair swinging
and my long legs, tanned by summer sun,
and my velvet hat with a rose pinned to the brim.

You sang it, a whisper of tobacco
on your voice. Everyone stopped
and held their breath. “For her,” you said.
“The girl in the hat with a red rose pinned to the brim.”

I loved the guitarist, whose eyes unsettled
my seventeen year old heart, whose beautiful
hands were like wings, who didn’t write poems
or songs. I gave him the red rose pinned to my hat.

I broke your heart and afterwards
you sent me a postcard scribbled all over
in felt-tip pen — “I loved you.
You gave him the rose so I stole your hat.”

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: I wrote this poem after seeing a hat in a charity shop exactly like the one mentioned in the poem that I’d owned all those years ago. It sparked the memory. (I married the guitarist and I never saw the boy who wrote the song again — or my hat.)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Lesley Quayle is a prizewinning poet and a folk blues singer. A former editor of Leeds based poetry journal Aireings, she was a winner of the BBC Wildlife Magazine Poet of the Year and also the Trewithen Prize and her poem, “Termination,” was nominated for a Forward single poem award. Her work has appeared in The Rialto, The North, Tears in the Fence, Ink, Sweat and Tears, The Interpreter’s House, among others and she has read on BBC Radio 4, local radio and appeared at The West Yorkshire Playhouse. She has a pamphlet, Songs For Lesser Gods  (erbacce), and a collection, Sessions  (Indigo Dreams), and is currently working on a new collection, as yet untitled, and a novel.

Senior Trip, poem by Laura Lovic-Lindsay (ME, AT 17 Poetry and Prose Series)

Senior Trip
by Laura Lovic-Lindsay

We’re driven deep into Pennsylvania forests, ten teens
promise-stuffed, future-certain. Our last time as a unit,
caps-and-gowns awaiting our return, gym decorated
and paused. We’re tented separately, military canvas

cubes and poles: smiling Ms Williams with the girls,
mathematical Mr. Smith with the boys. We spend
the days snaking spiderwebbed paths, only seventeen
but feeling taller than the pines surrounding us. We

collect the flesh-falls of trees, scrape piles of bark to feed
our night fires. Black walnuts, like grenades of ink-and-stain,
pinball their way to our feet in branch-bounces. We gather
satin-bodied acorns with lizard-skin caps. I hoard them

like a currency. After hot dogs strung on sticks, fire-roasted,
we hike the hill to a flat-topped water tower where we lie back:
spot planets, satellites, a comet. We climb back down steel
spirals and stars begin to fall, their points catching in our skin.

PHOTO: Pennsylvania forest.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: My childhood was pure magic. My senior class had eleven students  (yes, you read that right) and we were like family. We’ve never re-assembled since those days. Everyone went in a separate direction at graduation. Maybe this poem is an attempt to make my family whole again.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Laura Lovic-Lindsay left Penn State University with a literature degree in hand and no plan for the future. Ten years later, she began secretly herding words into poems and short stories. Laura lives in a crumbling farmhouse in Western Pennsylvania, along a river that tells lies.

All the Time in the World, poem by Erin Parker (ME, AT 17 Poetry and Prose Series)

All the Time in the World
by Erin Parker

As I waited for my life to start,
I kept myself alive with an infusion of percussion, bass and rhythm guitar.
Thumbed through the stacks when I could get a ride to a record store.
Bought British 45s with glossy picture sleeves when I had extra money
that I earned from babysitting for people at church.
I filled the spaces in me with music.
I had holes made by questions that had no good answers.
Already knew how to make dollars stretch like hours.
Scoured thrift stores for the right clothes.
Sleeveless mock turtlenecks with a zipper up the back and
black velvet pumps with a pointed toe.
Liquid black eyeliner, powdered skin, pale lips.
Bangs and berets and pencil skirts.
I waited all week, counting the days until I could blossom
and I would dance until my feet were bruised.
Saw Dance Craze again and again at the midnight movie,
found the under 21 clubs in L.A.
The smell of cloves and the weekend rows of Vespas.
At seventeen I was a sparking ember
waiting for the wind to pick up.

AUTHOR’S PHOTO CAPTION: Erin listening to music at 17.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: There have been times when music is the only thing that makes sense to me. The first time this happened in my life, I was 17. It was 1983, and I was a Mod.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Erin Parker won her first Creative Writing contest when she was 11, and has been writing ever since. Her work has been published by Uno Kudo, Red Fez, Drunk Monkeys, Cadence Collective, Lost in Thought, Timid Pirate Publishing, The Altar Collective, Santa Fe Lit Review, Lucid Moose Lit, and the Alice in Wonderland Anthology from Silver Birch Press. Erin was nominated for Best of the Net 2014, and is the Sr. Flash Fiction Editor at JMWW. Her collection of short stories, The Secret and the Sacred, was published by Unknown Press and is available here.

At 17, poem by Debarshi Mitra (ME, AT 17 Poetry and Prose Series)

At 17
by Debarshi Mitra

Walking down the road
that evening with my friend,
we traced out arcs
of neon luminescence
against the black sky,
thick physics books
under our arms, unsure
of our destinies.

IMAGE: “Night Sky” by Roger Wiek (2016)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Debarshi Mitra is a 21-year-old poet from New Delhi , India. His debut book of poems Eternal Migrant was published in May 2016 by Writers Workshop. His works have previously appeared or are forthcoming in anthologies, including Kaafiyana and in literary magazines, including Typewrite, Thumbprint, The PoetCommunity, and Leaves of Ink. He is currently enrolled in an Integrated PhD program in Physics at IISER PUNE.

Confluence, poem by Clemonce Heard (ME, AT 17 Poetry and Prose Series)

Confluence
by Clemonce Heard

Cheating Ma’s keys to slink back, back, forth & forth
to the Lower Ninth Ward, to a cooped backseat
of a coupe, to a deluge where I was canoe & canal,
to a heat that lingered like a sucking, several hours
after the sun sunk in the lento of an initial bead
of sweat is how I spent the first three months. Isn’t
never again will waters become a flood God’s word
abridged. A disciple forced to plunk in my own sin,
to wade within the car I swindled regularly. Year 87
regular surged. Spent the months of surplus riding
back, back, forth & forth from perish to parish, once
inundation departed. Apartment gust-ransacked
here, brick flat plundered by brackishness there.
Age of confluence where neither current prevailed.

AUTHOR’S PHOTO CAPTION: Me, graduating from Natchitoches Central High School (May 2006).

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: This poem highlights how my life at 17 was divided by coming into adulthood and Hurricane Katrina. It is meant to illustrate transgressions brought on by curiosity, along with what can be stolen. This poem also uses the hook from Aaliyah’s song “Back & Forth.” My youth is comprised of my sister playing Aaliyah’s albums on repeat. My writing process usually includes coming up with a first line that has a tone I can carry throughout the poem and writing until I start slowing down. I then move to my desktop and begin typing what I have and filling in what’s missing. The poem usually fails if I’m too conscious of what’s coming next.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Clemonce Heard is a New Orleans native who now resides in Stillwater, Oklahoma. He is currently enrolled in Oklahoma State University’s MFA program for Poetry. In addition to teaching, Clemonce tutors and edits for A Door is Ajar Magazine (ADIA). He spends the remainder of his time cooking and eating food that comforts his homesickness, dancing wherever there’s good music and learning how to fish fresh water.

More Nobody Than Emily, poem by Mary Langer Thompson (ME, AT 17 Poetry and Prose Series)

More Nobody Than Emily
by Mary Langer Thompson

i’m as invisible as a stealth bomber.
It’s me flying over you, i say,
but you don’t hear me.
my shape slides through the air unseen
drifting through clouds.
Crows caw, caw, caw.
i spew few fumes
yet taste fuel on raw lips.
Flight feels like cinders hitting me,
dross tossed by Emily Dickinson
because she was nobody, too.

But i’m more nobody than she is.
i’m as nobody as a dust devil dancing in the desert,
as hidden as a forgotten faultline
as unseen as a soffit under the eaves of your home,
as termite damage in your uninspected walls.
i speak words, and they shrivel
like blackened wicks,
my shine hidden in a bushel.
i’m as “whatever” as you can get.
Old Em there to scoff at it all.

But someday i’ll make the automatic lights
come on with my presence,
or even just one clap.
Em’ll have to salute me to unrecognize me —
it could happen —
even as the temblor finally registers itself and says,
“I’m shakin!”
Even as the bombs fall,
making an impact,
at last.

AUTHOR’S PHOTO CAPTION: .My yearbook photo, Class of ’66, Herbert Hoover High School, Glendale, California.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: At 17, I hadn’t yet heard or learned to take Eleanor Roosevelt’s advice: “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Mary Langer Thompson’s poems, short stories, and essays appear in various journals and anthologies. She is a contributor to two poetry writing texts, The Working Poet (Autumn Press, 2009) and Women and Poetry: Writing, Revising, Publishing and Teaching (McFarland, 2012). A retired school principal and former secondary English teacher, Langer Thompson received her Ed.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles. She continues to enjoy conducting writing workshops for schools, prisons, and in communities in and around the high desert of California.

Girl Villanelle, poem by Pauletta Hansel (ME, AT 17 Poetry and Prose Series)

Girl Villanelle
by Pauletta Hansel

She’s still there, that girl,
the one I was and hoped to leave behind.
I am forever loosening the ties.

The only life she could imagine for herself
was one she’d heard already in a song.
She’s still there. That girl

took more than her share and left scattered
on the table all that could have fed her.
Hell-bent, she was, on loosening the ties.

I am not ready yet to claim her as my own.
She thought her body was the price of being seen.
She’s still there, that girl,

bound and shivering inside her own smooth skin.
I’ll say for her what she could not; that’s how
I’m loosening the ties

and slipping through the doorway
from the past—I won’t return alive.
Though she’s still there, that girl.
Me, I’m loosening the ties.

SOURCE: “Girl Villanelle” appears  in the author’s collection Tangle (Dos Madres Press, 2015).

AUTHOR’S PHOTO CAPTION: This photograph was taken by my boyfriend of the time in Beckley, West Virginia, in the spring of 1977. I was taking a photography class at college and developed the photo myself—thus the yellowing of the background.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: “Girl Villanelle” was created by working with a number of lines from writing I had done about myself as a young woman. I found the form to be helpful in mirroring the subject of the poem—simultaneously acknowledging the trapped feeling of the girl I was and releasing the tight confines of the villanelle form through enjambment and variation of the repetition.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Pauletta Hansel’s poems and prose have been featured in journals including Kudzu, Appalachian Journal, Appalachian Heritage and Still: The Journal, and on The Writer’s Almanac and American Life in Poetry. She is author of five poetry collections, most recently Tangle (Dos Madres Press, 2015.) Pauletta is co-editor of Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, the literary publication of Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative. Recently named Cincinnati’s first Poet Laureate, Pauletta leads writing workshops and retreats in the Greater Cincinnati area and beyond. Read more at paulettahansel.wordpress.com.