Gravy by Barbara Crooker (HOW TO Series)

Gravy
by Barbara Crooker

To make good gravy, you must be patient,
let the juice settle to the bottom, let the fat
float to the top in all its golden light. Skim
it with a thin spoon, take its measure. Equal
it with flour, sprinkle with salt, speckle
with pepper. Stir constantly in the roasting pan,
making figure eights with a wooden spoon.
Scrape off strips of skin, bits of meat; incorporate
them in the mixture, like a difficult uncle
or the lonely neighbor invited out of duty.
Keep stirring. Hand the wooden baton
to one of your daughters; it’s time for her
to start learning this music, the bubble and
seethe as it plays the score. One minute
at the boil, then almost like magic, it’s gravy,
a rich velvet brown. Thin it with broth,
stir in chopped giblets, then pour into
its little boat, waiting with mouth open.
Take up your forks, slide potatoes, stuffing,
gravy, into your mouth, hum under your breath.
Oh, the holy family of gravy, all those
little odd bits and pieces, the parts that could
be discarded, but aren’t; instead, transformed
into a warm brown blanket that makes
delicious every thing it covers.

SOURCE: Line Dance (Word Poetry, 2008).

PHOTO: Rich steaming gravy with ladle by Christopher and Amanda Elwell, used by permission.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Barbara Crooker is a poetry editor for Italian Americana and author of nine books; the latest is Some Glad Morning, Pitt Poetry Series. Her awards include the Best Book of Poetry 2018 from Poetry by the Sea, the WB Yeats Society of New York Award, the Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, and three Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowships. Her work appears in a variety of anthologies, including The Bedford Introduction to Literature. Visit her at barbaracrooker.com and on Facebook and Twitter. 

How to Become Invisible by Mary McCarthy (HOW TO Series)

How to Become Invisible
by Mary McCarthy

Lose your job, your mind, your husband
step over the lines, off the map,
into unmarked alleys

Talk too fast, too much, too loud,
or not at all

Balk at the strangeness
of ordinary things
spot the dark intent behind
their bland disguises

Walk too close to the edge
of every conversation
answer the words behind the words they say

Forget to smile, to wash, to comb your hair
wear your clothes carelessly

Count the rough stitches
where the patchwork world
threatens separation

Carry your ghosts with you
shuffling and mumbling
in a long procession
that follows you down the street

Where no one sees you now
you’ve lost your place
your face your reflection

And even your shadow
fades to nothing
in the unrelenting sun

IMAGE: Woman with Veil, pastel by Odilon Redon (1895).

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: This poem is a sort of Anti-How-To set of instructions, a guide to the kind of things that too often win you nothing but a place to sleep on the street, where you have become the kind of social refugee citizens successfully ignore. Unfortunately it can be all too easy to end up here, particularly for those with mental illness. This “invisible” affliction continues to carry the burden of a crippling stigma, that makes you as unacceptable as any leper or “untouchable”—worthy only of erasure. This poem comes of my own anger and despair in experiencing that stigma. It has appeared previously on Poetry Circle.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Mary McCarthy is a retired Registered Nurse who has been a life-long writer and student of the arts. Her work has appeared in many journals and anthologies, most recently in The Plague Papers, edited by Robbi Nester, The Ekphrastic World, edited by Lorette Luzajic, and the most recent issue of Earth’s Daughters.

Concrete Image by Laura Glenn (HOW TO Series)

Concrete Image
by Laura Glenn

En route to a poetry reading
I stumble on a square of sidewalk
with a crude sketch of a swastika. Startled
to see this in my liberal town,
and hoping it’s chalk I can wash away,
I stick my foot in a curbside puddle,
and rub the emblem
with the wet sole of my shoe,
then briskly walk on.

After the reading,
I retrace my steps
to see if the symbol remains.
It wasn’t chalk—
tossed on the grass, I note
a jagged triangle
of broken sidewalk
whose coarse edge was used
to etch hatred.

Moving closer, I find
someone has transformed
the swastika into
a foursquare grid—
and with two deft strokes
scratched an upcurved roof,
protecting this “house” where
an Asian ideogram now appears
in each square “room.”

Someone has turned the concrete page.
I can’t read the characters;
still, they erase my fear.
I can do this too, I think—
though I hope I never have to—
transform symbols of hate
into four squares, say a window,
with an abstract landscape, maybe break
the pattern in one square, in case
I need to escape.

PHOTO:  Chinese character “wu” (dance) on cement canvas. Photo by Laomacz, used by permission.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: Not a traditional “How To” poem, “Concrete Image” depicts an experience that showed me something that can be done when confronted with a hateful symbol. It is based on an incident that took place in 2019, before the pandemic. Dismayed at the sight of a swastika carved into the sidewalk in my hometown, I attempted to remove it. A little later, I was heartened to see that the image had been turned into something else. Then, I discovered that transforming graffiti of swastikas into other things had become a form of street art and a meme. Hate crimes in this country have been on the rise, targeting many different groups of people, but there seem to be more and more creative attempts to ameliorate some of the damage.

PHOTO: In California, a property manager tried to obscure the hate symbol by etching additional lines (2009).  Photo found in the Orange County Register. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Laura Glenn’s book of poems I Can’t Say I’m Lost was published by FootHills, and her chapbook When the Ice Melts by Finishing Line Press. Her poems have appeared in many journals, including The Antioch Review, Boulevard, Cortland Review, Epoch, Green Mountains Review, Hotel Amerika, Massachusetts Review, Pedestal, Poet Lore, Poetry, Smartish Pace, and Rattapallax, as well as in anthologies. She has completed work on another full-length manuscript of poems, and is working on a chapbook of pandemic-related poems. Also a visual artist, she lives in Ithaca, New York, where she works as a freelance editor. Visit her at lauraglennpoetandartist.com.

AUTHOR PHOTO: Laura Glenn with Liu Jianhua’s installation, Collected Letters, in the background.

How to Look at the Sea in Winter by Massimo Soranzio (HOW TO Series)

How to Look at the Sea in Winter
by Massimo Soranzio

How do you look at the sea
when there is nothing to see
but a colourless expanse,
a flat and dull reflection
of a blinding sunless sky?

Will you just sit down and wait
for anything to happen
or anything to appear,
immersing yourself in thoughts
shallow or deep? Will you sleep?

Will you count the infinite
shades of grey, brown, palish green?
Will you close your eyes, content
with feeling a bracing breeze
from the sea, brackish and cold?

Will you imagine the lands
beyond that line you can’t see,
the places you have been to
and more you might have seen
had life not kept you ashore?

Will you choose to sit and look
without actually looking,
combining all your senses,
scanning colours, smells, and sounds,
to find a makeshift summer?

Or will you like what you see,
savour the melancholy
of a dismal empty beach
on a gloomy, cloudy day
and become all romantic?

And if you do get to sleep,
will the sea be in your dreams?
Dreams of mermaids or pirates,
holidays past, summer flings,
your collection of seashells?

Let me tell you what I’ll do:
I will sit on this old chair
someone forgot by the sea,
and I’ll look, I’ll look, I’ll look,
losing myself in the sea.

PHOTO: Adriatic Sea, Northern Italy. Photo by Angelina Soranzio (January 2020).

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: There have been long periods, this winter, when due to anti-Covid-19 restrictions we were not allowed to cross the municipal limits of our town. But we were allowed to go out for a walk, so we often went for a stroll along the coast.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Massimo Soranzio is a teacher and translator living on the northern Adriatic coast of Italy. His poems have appeared online and in print in a few anthologies, including Silver Birch Press’s Nancy Drew Anthology. He blogs at reflectionspoetry.wordpress.com, where he wrote mostly about his lockdown for NaPoWriMo, in the month of April 2020.

How To Deal With An Intruder by Suzanne O’Connell (HOW TO Series)

How To Deal With An Intruder
by Suzanne O’Connell

The sound woke me up.
Thump drag, thump drag, thump drag.
It was coming from the attic.
Maybe a feral cat, I thought.
But if so, it was a really big cat.

I got the ladder, climbed barefoot,
opened the crawl space.
In the darkness, I saw an old lady,
shuffling with the help of a walker.
She was bent over, looking at her big slippers.
She wore a stretched cardigan.
Her gray hair was greasy.
“You can’t be here,” I said.
“It’s too soon.
You have to get out!”

The leaves on the magnolia tree are rusty.
Soon they will fall,
the rain will soak them.
In spring, green knobs
of new growth will appear,
then dazzling pink flowers.

I want to be like the tree.
I want a hundred new haircuts,
a thousand midnights,
a few thousand chicken dinners,
a bonus round,
many more days of love.

IMAGE: Magnolia and Irises, stained glass by Louis Comfort Tiffany (1908).

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Suzanne O’Connell is a poet living in Los Angeles. Her work can be found most recently in Delmarva Review, Brushfire, and Cimarron Review.

How to Overcome Inertia by Betsy Mars (HOW TO Series)

How to Overcome Inertia
by Betsy Mars

Set an alarm. Don’t hit snooze.
Set more alarms

at fifteen minute intervals.
Let your phone fall beneath the bed

where it can’t easily be silenced.
You have to reach to quiet it.

Doze off while thinking
of ways to overcome your inertia.

Encourage the cat to sleep on your bladder.
Remember you are nothing

if not productive.
Forget the bird beyond the pane

unaware of your watching.
Feel the urgency of days and news

forever passing without observing.
Scroll your mind’s endless listing

awaiting scratching. Check
your time, just existing.

IMAGE: Still Life with Sleeper by Henri Matisse (1940).

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: I thought about what I have gotten really good at during the pandemic and came up with the obvious answer: inertia! Of course, while practicing inertia so effectively, it was difficult to write. And then how to describe the how-to’s of inertia? Other than a blank page, which wouldn’t be very instructive, I strained to describe my techniques in a way I hoped could be replicated. I hope that you find them helpful!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Betsy Mars practices poetry, photography, pet maintenance, and publishes an occasional anthology through Kingly Street Press. Her second anthology, Floored, is now available on Amazon. “Pyriscence” was a winner in Alexandria Quarterly´s first line poetry contest series in 2020, and she was a finalist in both the Jack Grapes and Poetry Super Highway poetry contests. Her work has recently appeared in Verse-Virtual, Sky Island Journal, Writing in a Woman’s Voice, and Sheila-Na-Gig, among others. She is the author of Alinea (Picture Show Press) and co-author of In the Muddle of the Night with Alan Walowitz, coming soon from Arroyo Seco Press. Visit her at marsmyst.wordpress.com and on Facebook and Twitter.

How to Handle a Migraine by Dakota Donovan (HOW TO Series)

How to Handle a Migraine
by Dakota Donovan

Recognize the early warning signs:
sensitivity to smells,
tunnel vision,
seeing zigzags,
nausea,
runny nose,
yawning,
stomach pains.
Take OTC meds,
Excedrin works best.
If full-blown attack ensues:
Drink caffeinated beverages,
put icepack on affected
side of the head,
place cold, wet washcloth
over eyes
and affected side of the head.
Eat saltine crackers or dry toast.
Eat popsicles.
Pray to St. Gemma, the
patron saint of headaches.
If you’re lucky, you will fall asleep
and wake up without a headache.
After the attack,
you may experience
acute visual phenomena such
as outlines around objects.
You may also experience a giddy
euphoria, something to enjoy
while you can.
You’ve lived
Through another attack.

IMAGE: Portrait of Françoise Gilot by Pablo Picasso (1948).

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: After decades of suffering from migraine headaches, I’ve learned a few things about the condition. Migraines can result from a variety of factors or triggers—anything that causes the veins to dilate and press on a nerve (this is what causes the intense pain). Triggers include foods (garlic), beverages (red wine), and weather conditions (low cloud cover). People often confuse a “bad” headache with a migraine. You’ll know it’s a migraine if the pain is on one side of your head. Visual phenomena, such as auras or seeing zigzags, can precede or accompany a migraine. Treatments all aim to contract the blood vessel, so it no longer presses on the nerve in your head. Caffeine and ice packs help in this regard. Over-the-counter medications that include caffeine (e.g., Excedrin) are also helpful. An insightful book on this condition is Migraine by Oliver Sacks.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Dakota Donovan is a ghostwriter for the rich and famous who lives in Los Angeles. She’s had many wild and crazy experiences while working with celebrities to tell their life stories, and some of these strange-but-true tales appear in her comic mystery novel L.A. Sleepers, where she is both author and protagonist—and suffers many migraines. In other incarnations, she’s written novels, plays, screenplays, and television scripts. She’s currently working on the second novel in her Hollywood Ghostwriter Mystery series.

The Fallback Plan by Jay Passer (HOW TO Series)

The Fallback Plan
by Jay Passer

my niece moved to Santa Cruz
to attend the University there.

for her birthday I gave her a nice
chef’s knife, cutting board, and
a clean bar towel.

she was delighted, but perplexed
by the bar towel.

what’s this for?

2 functions, I said. wet it a little
as an anchor for the cutting board,
so it doesn’t slip around while
you’re using the knife.

she pursed her lips and nodded.
and the other?

to practice flipping pizza pie,
of course.
just pretend the towel is the dough.

I showed her how.
she was tickled, but flummoxed.

why would I ever need to know
how to do that?

her major is astrophysics.

you never know, I said,
keeping that Cheshire smile to myself.

Photo by Benjamas Suwanmanee, used by permission.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: I was a pizza cook for several years, and in the beginning cheated a bit by using a damp bar towel to simulate a pizza dough in order to practice twirling. If the dough is proofed properly, it’s not absolutely necessary to twirl (although the centrifugal force does quicken the expansion process), but if you’re working in an exhibition kitchen it’s definitely worth it because the kids love it.

PHOTO: Still from youtube video Pizza Toss 101 with Carl Penrow. Watch the video here.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Jay Passer’s poetry and prose have appeared online and in print, in anthologies, chapbooks, and a few full length volumes, since 1988. He lives and works in San Francisco, the city of his birth.

How to Write a Villanelle by Marjorie Maddox (HOW TO Series)

How to Write a Villanelle
by Marjorie Maddox

To write a villanelle, think like a bird
that soars and swoops in seven different ways
then sings a song that you’ve already heard,

returning to its favorite branch to perch.
Become a sparrow—light, and quick, and gray—
to write a villanelle.  Think how the bird

salutes you every morning undeterred
from trilling what it always wants to say.
within its favorite song; the one you’ve heard

so many times you suddenly are stirred
to listen closer still, to find the way
to write a villanelle, just like a bird

that flits across your vision in a blur
and leaves the sound of beauty in its trail,
still singing songs that you’ve already heard.

Next time you want to fly away on words,
remember what we talked about this day.
To write a villanelle, think like a bird
that sings a song that you’ve already heard.

SOURCE: “How to Write a Villanelle” appears in Inside Out: Poems on Writing and Reading Poems with Insider Exercises (Finalist Children’s Educational Category 2020 International Book Awards).

IMAGE: Sparrow on a Flowering Branch, circa 1930s, by Ohara Koson (1877-1945).

EDITOR’S NOTE: A villanelle is a 19-line poetic form consisting of five tercets followed by a quatrain. There are two refrains and two repeating rhymes, with the first and third line of the first tercet repeated alternately at the end of each subsequent stanza until the last stanza, which includes both repeated lines.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Professor of English and Creative Writing at Lock Haven University, Marjorie Maddox has published 11 collections of poetry—including Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation (Yellowglen Prize); True, False, None of the Above (Illumination Book Award Medalist); Local News from Someplace Else; Perpendicular As I (Sandstone Book Award)—the short story collection What She Was Saying (Fomite); four children’s and YA books—including Inside Out: Poems on Writing and Reading Poems with Insider Exercises (Finalist Children’s Educational Category 2020 International Book Awards),  A Crossing of Zebras: Animal Packs in Poetry and I’m Feeling Blue, Too! — Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania (co-editor); Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry (assistant editor); and 600+ stories, essays, and poems in journals and anthologies. Forthcoming in 2021 is her book Begin with a Question (Paraclete Press), as well as her ekphrastic collaboration with photographer Karen Elias, Heart Speaks, Is Spoken For (Shanti Arts). For more information, please visit marjoriemaddox.com.

PHOTO: The author with her book Inside Out: Poems on Writing and Reading Poems with Insider Exercises (Finalist Children’s Educational Category 2020 International Book Awards).

How to Write a Poem by Robert Okaji (HOW TO Series)

How to Write a Poem
by Robert Okaji

Learn to curse in three languages. When midday
yawns stack high and your eyelids flutter, fire up

the chain saw; there’s always something to dismember.
Make it new. Fear no bridges. Accelerate through

curves, and look twice before leaping over fires,
much less into them. Read bones, read leaves, read

the dust on shelves and commit to memory a thousand
discarded lines. Next, torch them. Take more than you

need, buy books, scratch notes in the dirt and watch
them scatter down nameless alleys at the evening’s first

gusts. Gather words and courtesies. Guard them carefully.
Play with others, observe birds, insects and neighbors,

but covet your minutes alone and handle with bare hands
only those snakes you know. Mourn the kindling you create

and toast each new moon as if it might be the last one
to tug your personal tides. When driving, sing with the radio.

Always. Turn around instead of right. Deny ambition.
Remember the freckles on your first love’s left breast.

There are no one-way streets. Appreciate the fragrance
of fresh dog crap while scraping it from the boot’s sole.

Steal, don’t borrow. Murder your darlings and don’t get
caught. Know nothing, but know it well. Speak softly

and thank the grocery store clerk for wishing you
a nice day even if she didn’t mean it. Then mow the grass,

grill vegetables, eat, laugh, wash dishes, talk, bathe,
kiss loved ones, sleep, dream, wake. Do it all again.

Originally published in Indra’s Net, an anthology in aid of The Book Bus charity (Bennison Books, 2017).

PHOTO: Nautilus Shell by Edward Weston (1927).

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: My process sounds odd to most people, as I seldom know what I’m going to write about when I sit at the table. I simply start writing. Sometimes a word or a phrase sets me off. Or an image, or even a vague feeling, a discomfort or a pleasure of some sort. Life’s circumstances also come into play, and my landscapes, both emotional and literal, affect the output. The words carry me along, and at some point in the writing, perhaps only one or two lines in, but often much deeper in the piece, the poem, the flesh of it, starts coalescing. And then I backtrack and revise. In essence, my subconscious guides me, and such a guide is not always trustworthy or easy to work with, as many false trails are laid out and pursued. But even the false trails lead somewhere, often to greater rewards. ¶ Not knowing is central to my process. This probably sounds cryptic, or pseudo-zen, but it’s honest. I learn by questioning. By doing and failing and trying again. I revise during the course of writing, even during the first blush of creation, as well as after. The poems always sit and marinate for a while, sometimes for just a few days, sometimes for weeks or months, and there are a few that have stewed in their juices for years. When I return to them, I see problem points that weren’t apparent before, and I revise accordingly. At some mysterious point, the poems are done, or at least as done as they’re going to get, and I consider sending them out in the world.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Robert Okaji is a displaced Texan hunkering down in Indiana. He holds a BA in history, and once won a goat-catching contest. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Vox Populi, North Dakota Quarterly, Slippery Elm, Panoply, Book of Matches, Buddhist Poetry Review, The Night Heron Barks, and elsewhere. He blogs at robertokaji.com.