Front Doors by Kim Whysall-Hammond (MY FRONT DOOR Series)

Front Doors
by Kim Whysall-Hammond

I met so many people
painting our first front door
but it wasn’t just painting
it never is.
First chipping away rotten wood
and then an artful working of filler
to recreate the simple mouldings
a grey undercoat that smooths
before, finally
a loving coat of shiny navy blue.

It took all of a long day
on a very busy street
first the postman gave advice
then the guy delivering newspapers
to the shop three doors away
commented on how few women
paint front doors
our roofer stopped to say hello
and discuss the precarious roof
a new neighbour introduced themselves
complimented my work
offered friendship
finally my parents arrived
unexpectedly
and made tea.

I remember this, as I hide behind
another front door in another house.
We wipe its UPVC surface with alcohol
to remove virus, and
don’t touch the mail until it’s a day old
no live virus on it then.
This front door isn’t elderly wood
but hidden steel within shiny white
when we lock it, nine bolts
shoot from its interior
into the strengthened frame.
In its centre a double glazed
stained glass window
made from a drawing of mine
a Red Kite wheeling in sky
looking for the windpath
my bird of prey guarding me.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: I am in isolation, as my eldest son came home with the unwelcome present of coronavirus. Our front door is now both our guard and, at times, a symbol of imprisonment. In writing this poem, I thought about the other doors I have lived behind. I have told of the two that I have made my own.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Kim Whysall-Hammond is a Londoner who has been published by Total Eclipse,  Fourth and Sycamore, Ink, Sweat and Tears, Three Drops from a Cauldron, Amaryllis, London Grip New Poetry and Crannóg. An expert in obsolete telecommunications arcana, Kim believes, against all evidence, that she is a good dancer.  She shares poetry on her blog, thecheesesellerswife.wordpress.com.

The New Room by Tamara Madison (MY FRONT DOOR Series)

The New Room
by Tamara Madison

When Dad came home the front door slammed
and the house shook. After a scotch and water
he’d settle down. When we built the “new room,”
Mom took that slammed door, covered it
with mosaic tiles, gave it some legs, put it
in the center of the room – a coffee table.

I used to dance on it, in spite of the unfriendly tiles.
The “new room” had a bigger door and a cold entry
with a terrazzo floor that echoed the slams
throughout the house. With the music up loud,
the old door was my dance floor. I could be

a go-go girl until Dad came home from another
angry day at work. I’d jump off the table,
turn that music off as soon as I’d spot the pickup
trailing a cone of dust up the driveway,
and brace myself for another wall-shaking slam.

AUTHOR’S CAPTION: This is what remains of the house that was first entered by the door that later became a coffee table. It was on my family’s citrus farm near Mecca, California. The corporation that bought the property ripped out all the citrus trees and later they razed the house where I grew from small.

AUTHOR’S CAPTION: This coffee table is a little bit like the one my mother made from our front door. It was bigger and had some kind of thick blocks for legs and a more chaotic, colorful mosaic pattern. This is the closest I could find online.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Tamara Madison is the author of the chapbook The Belly Remembers, and two full-length volumes of poetry, Wild Domestic and Moraine, all published by Pearl Editions. Her work has appeared in Chiron Review, Your Daily Poem, A Year of Being Here, Nerve Cowboy, the Writer’s Almanac, Sheila-Na-Gig and many other publications. She has recently retired from teaching English and French in Los Angeles and is happy to finally get some sleep. More about Tamara can be found at tamaramadisonpoetry.com.

Author photo by Sharon De La O.

Of all the doors I’ve loved before by Rick Lupert (MY FRONT DOOR Series)

Of all the doors I’ve loved before
by Rick Lupert

You are the one – Gray when I found you
Pride of ownership painted you blue.
All my previous doors merely rentals.

A forever relationship started when I
walked through you. I’ve got the
paperwork to prove it.

The bank writes every month to remind
me of the long haul. I send them a tribute.
It’s my way of feeding you.

Oh, the things you do –
You keep the bugs out.
You keep the temperature out.
You keep the virus out.

You open wide when they bring me dinner.
You and your nine glass panes.
Half light is the official term at the door stores.
Forged in the fifties when the craftsmen
still stung from the war.

Sometimes we open you to receive candy
from the youngest of our neighbors
trying to raise money to go wherever
they need to go.

You made friends with the UPS guy.
I hear you two talking sometimes.
Out of respect I won’t reveal the details here.
We all deserve our own relationships.

I put up a door stopper so you and
the wall wouldn’t hurt each other.
But I hope you never stop.
You’re the last thing in this shut-down world
I’m allowed to touch.

Of all the doors I’ve loved before
you are the one.

PHOTO CAPTION: It has been made clear to the author, he won’t be leaving the house today.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: I lived in apartments for most of my life until I was lucky enough, with my wife, to purchase a home in Van Nuys, California. This door we walk in and out of every day is a physical gateway in and out of this American Dream. It deserves a whole book of poems.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Rick Lupert has been involved with L.A. poetry since 1990. He is the recipient of the 2014 Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center Distinguished Service Award and was a co-director of the Valley Contemporary Poets for two years. He created the Poetry Super Highway  and hosted the weekly Cobalt Cafe reading for almost 21 years. His first spoken word album Rick Lupert Live and Dead, featuring 25 studio and live tracks, was released in March 2016. He’s authored 23 collections of poetry, including Hunka Hunka Howdy, Beautiful Mistakes, and God Wrestler: A Poem for Every Torah Portion, and edited the anthologies Ekphrastia Gone Wild,  A Poet’s Siddur, A Poet’s Haggadah, and the noir anthology The Night Goes on All Night. He also writes and draws (with Brendan Constantine) the daily web comic Cat and Banana and writes the Jewish Poetry column “From the Lupertverse” for Jewish Journal. He is regularly featured at venues all over the world. Follow him on Facebook.

Author photo by Alexis Rhone Fancher

My Front Door by Clive Collins (MY FRONT DOOR Series)

My Front Door
by Clive Collins

          The opening and closing of the front door at my childhood home ushered us through our lives. Our house was small, the last one in a nineteenth-century jerry-built terrace – two rooms and a kitchen downstairs, two rooms and a box room up. There was no hallway; the front door in the front room opened directly on the street.
          We seldom used that room or its door. The post came through its letterbox three times a day when I was young, the envelopes falling onto the doormat like heavy leaves in a repetitive autumn. Late in the afternoon, later than the day’s last post, the local newspaper arrived, half its rolled-up bulk pushing sinisterly against the door curtain like the barrel of an assassin’s pistol. When people passed in and out of the door there was always a sense of occasion. My father opened it for his eldest daughter to go from the house to her wedding. He was the one to close it each August when we set off for our fortnight by the sea. It was the door for high days, holidays – and funerals. When my father died he was taken out through that door, returned through it in his coffin, a parcel in a wooden box instead of brown paper, and taken out through it again for burying.
          My mother then was the door’s custodian. She opened it to let me go a-wandering. And opened it to let me back in when I came home, but not at my last returning. On the day of her funeral she was not brought home. Times change. The door stood open, but she lay in the purring hearse outside, seemingly impatient for her final ride. I shut the front door then, and never opened it again.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: Doors, especially front doors, have always fascinated me.  They open to the future; they close upon the past.  The Romans were right to leave the care of them in the hands of a god.  They deserve no less.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Born in Leicester, England, Clive Collins has spent the greater part of his life working as a teacher in Ireland, Sierra Leone, and Japan. He is the author of two novels, The Foreign Husband (Marion Boyars) and Sachiko’s Wedding (Marion Boyars/ Penguin Books). Misunderstandings, a collection of short stories, was joint-winner of the Macmillan Silver PEN Award in 1994. More recently his work has appeared in online journals such as Penny, Cecile’s Writers, The Story Shack and terrain.org. He was a short-listed finalist in the 2009 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction.  Carried Away and Other Stories is available from Red Bird Chap Books.

Scuffed but Shining by A.S. Coomer (MY FRONT DOOR Poetry & Prose Series)

Scuffed but Shining
by A.S. Coomer

     The front door’s red with an old-fashioned twist doorbell that chimes like a music box. Twist it and watch every head inside turn towards the sound. It’s the first thing people visiting comment on when they arrive.
     We’ve talked about painting it, red’s never been one of our favorite colors, but haven’t found the time or the right replacement color. Plus, the red matches the brick and the rocks in the flowerbed. Red can mean any number of things: love, anger, jealousy, lust. This coat, fading and getting fainter, a pale puckered cherry sitting in the sopping remains of a sundae, is easy on the eyes and has come to stand for something akin to relief. Seeing the door, weary from the world outside, brings a comfort. It’s means the end of a journey, or the beginning of another.
     It’s a barrier, sure, but it also calls to be used.
     “Come in,” it says in its silent way.
     Or, “Go on out.”
     The golden doorknob glints in the spring sunshine, worn with use, scuffed but shining. The stained glass, which takes up the top-half of the door, tints the light passing through into blue and green and more red, casting the colors down onto the white tiled floor. I let my bare feet pass through the refracted light and strain to feel the difference in shade. Sometimes, I believe I can.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: A.S. Coomer is a writer and musician. Books include Memorabilia, The Fetishists, Shining the Light, The Devil’s Gospel, The Flock Unseen, and others. Find him at www.ascoomer.com and @ascoomer. 

(Author portrait by Adrian Lime.)

 

What My House Would Be Like If It Were a Person, poem by Denise Levertov

WHAT MY HOUSE WOULD BE LIKE IF IT WERE A PERSON
by Denise Levertov

This person would be an animal.
This animal would be large, at least as large
as a workhorse. It would chew cud, like cows,
having several stomachs.
No one could follow it
into the dense brush to witness
its mating habits. Hidden by fur,
its sex would be hard to determine.
Definitely it would discourage
investigation. But it would be, if not teased,
a kind, amiable animal,
confiding as a chickadee. Its intelligence
would be of a high order,
neither human nor animal, elvish.
And it would purr, though of course,
it being a house, you would sit in its lap,
not it in yours.
***
“What My House Would Be Like If It Were A Person” appears in Denise Levertov’s collection Poems 1972-1982 (New Directions, 2002)

PAINTING: “Hills, South Truro (Massachusetts)” by Edward Hopper (1930)

Doors, poem by Carl Sandburg

DOORS 
by Carl Sandburg

An open door says, “Come in.”
A shut door says, “Who are you?”
Shadows and ghosts go through shut doors.
If a door is shut and you want it shut,
     why open it?
If a door is open and you want it open,
     why shut it?
Doors forget but only doors know what it is
     doors forget.

…“Doors” is found in The Sandburg Range, the first representative selection from Sandburg’s entire body of work (poetry and prose) available at Amazon.com.

Photo: Megspics, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Anais Nin’s Writing Desk, Silverlake

Anais Nin lived in Silverlake (Los Angeles) from the early 1960s until her death in 1977 at age 73. The beautiful home, located at 2335 Hidalgo, was designed by Eric Lloyd Wright (Frank’s grandson), who was the half-brother of Rupert Pole, Nin’s then-husband. Nin led a complicated personal life that included bicoastal husbands (Hugh Guiler in New York and Rupert Pole in California). She eventually had her marriage to Pole annulled, but continued to live with him in the gorgeous house he had built just for her.