Writing Back by Janet Bowdan (ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER Series)

Writing Back
by Janet Bowdan

I had a letter from my mother who is

not a Henry Moore sculpture with that luscious
bellied curve stretching into the dais.

Elbows on the floor, she kneels
on the kitchen carpet with the Washington Post,
the way I sit to read her news.

In her letter it is Sunday.
All this summer wasps or poison ivy have tangled
in her gardening, but methodically

she sets up new wilderness next to the woods,
brambles and groundcover—
repaying worlds for the insects in her lab,

that kind of imagining
that is so different from my own or my father’s
she has to translate for us to understand.

Now again she misses her mother
in England, misses me. She makes the house run itself—
how often is she there? She sends a photograph

a poem of the house:
lit, light flickering over the wood floors,
the lamp’s diffusion’s golden
in the living room.

My mother curls in her chair near the lamp reading.
She does not like to be in the picture;
neither can I say, “There is her violin.
Look at the grain, satin. That is her.”
My mother is tension and impulse,
the technical movement

as she poises her hand on the bow,
her neck taut to place against the body,
an intelligent music

she says she is always listening to.

First published in The Missouri Review (1991). 

PAINTING: Young woman playing violin by Henri Matisse (1923).

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: “Writing Back” was first published in The Missouri Review in 1991. It was my first published poem; I wrote it in graduate school in Denver on a day I felt very far away from home, and, for me, home was my mother. When she wasn’t reading, my mother was an insect neurophysiologist, violinist, and gardener.

AUTHOR’S PHOTO CAPTION: Mum, 1963.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Janet Bowdan’s poems have appeared in APR, Tahoma Literary Review, The Rewilding Anthology, Sequestrum, Lit Shark, and elsewhere. The editor of Common Ground Review, she teaches at Western New England University and lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, with her husband, their son, and a very sweet book-nibbling chinchilla.

Hot Enough by Bonnie Proudfoot (SPICES & SEASONINGS Series)

Hot Enough
by Bonnie Proudfoot

not a spark
but a blaze,
not a welding torch
but a glass furnace
molten and glowing,
heat like an express train
across the tongue
down the throat, not
Chet Baker or Stan Getz,
but Arnett Cobb, Pharoah Saunders
not Ringo but Gene Krupa,
Buddy Rich, a box set
of surprises,
better to surrender.
Hot enough for you?
my neighbor asks.
No, of course not.
Give me ghost peppers,
Carolina reapers,
keep that Frank’s off the table,
kiss with your teeth.

Previously published in the New Ohio Review (Autumn 2022 Online edition).

PHOTO: Mighty Taco Hot Sauce, available at citymade.com.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: Now that I look at it, this poem seems almost autobiographical. I grew up in Queens, New York, and often as a teenager, met up with friends and took the express train to Greenwich Village to hear live Jazz. I landed in Buffalo for college, a town that not only had a 24-hour jazz radio station (WBFO-FM), but also a red-hot jazz nightclub (The Tralfamadore Cafe) and an all-night taco joint (Mighty Taco) on the same block. Anyone who could eat an entire burrito with their XXX hot sauce got their burrito free. Say no more! My lifelong passion for hot peppers blossomed, side by side with a deeper awareness of jazz on Main Street in Buffalo during the 1970s. These days in Ohio, I grow some variety of hot peppers every year, (scotch bonnets, Carolina reapers, habaneros, even tiny Thai peppers, and jalapeños), each has its own kind of heat. Sometimes I pop them into pickles, sometimes pasta sauce, always chili, homemade salsa, even potato salad, or omelets. And every year someone mocks me for planting peppers that scorch the palate. “Hot enough for you?” say all the cynics, but that is just fine with me. Jazz-wise, what are the hottest instruments? Certainly the drums, the horns too, but of course, as with spice and heat, that’s all a matter of taste and temperament.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Bonnie Proudfoot lives in Athens, Ohio. She has published fiction, essays, reviews, and poetry in a variety of journals and anthologies. Her writing has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her debut novel, Goshen Road (Swallow Press), was the 2022 WCONA Book of the Year, and was long-listed for the 2021 PEN/ Hemingway. Her first chapbook of poems, Household Gods (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions), was released in September 2022. She currently teaches part-time for the Department of English at West Virginia University.

New Venue by Alarie Tennille (ONE GOOD MEMORY Series)

New Venue
by Alarie Tennille

That night in 2015 when Riccardo Muti and the Chicago Symphony
performed at the new Helzberg Hall in Kansas City, Missouri,
Maestro Muti was so impressed with the acoustics that he promised
they would return.

Even while the orchestra warms
up, one second violinist wears
her stormy Beethoven face
lest we forget whose Fifth
this is. The baton drops,
duh-duh-duh-DUH. We all know it.

But something is very different
tonight. We hear the color
of each instrument. Less thunder,
more lightning. Flutes take wing
over a buzzing meadow of strings.
Our eyes race after our ears to find
each star of the moment.

Instead of pouring over us,
like the soup of sound we’ve heard
a hundred times before,
the music lifts us.

Previously published as “Why Riccardo Muti Wants to Return” in the author’s collection, Waking on the Moon.

PHOTO: The Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts, Helzberg Hall, Kansas City, Missouri.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: My husband and I share a love for the arts, especially literature, Classical music, theatre, and ballet. In our newlywed days, when we were house poor, we relied on libraries and the Classical radio channel. Soon after we moved to Kansas City, we began subscribing to an annual concert series. We thought it was wonderful! Then we got a new concert hall, and it felt like we were hearing music for the first time. Of course, that made it even more heartbreaking when our concerts and ballets were closed down due to Covid.

PHOTO: The author and her husband.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Alarie Tennille was a pioneer coed at the University of Virginia, where she earned her degree in English, Phi Beta Kappa key, and black belt in Feminism. She serves on the Emeritus Board and Programming Committee of The Writers Place in Kansas City, Missouri. In 2020, she was honored to receive the first Editor’s Choice Fantastic Ekphrastic Award from The Ekphrastic Review. In January 2022, her new book, Three A.M. at the Museum, was selected as Director’s Pick at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art gift shop. Please visit her at alariepoet.com. Her books are available at Amazon.

Music by Elaine Nadal (ONE GOOD MEMORY Series)

Music
by Elaine Nadal

I forgot I had known you.
I didn’t remember your ways,
your body, how it moved
like a snake sometimes—
or a dolphin, spontaneous and playful,
leaping for air. And you are air.
I had known you,
the manner in which you move a heart
dispirited by storms. You catch the storms,
and they become dissonant wonders.
How did I manage to live like this—
with the heaviness of things—
without your sky?
I wasn’t looking for you.
Your embrace came unexpectedly
on a cold day of thunder and lightning.
You saw me off-key—with achy, dry bones,
sitting on my sofa with too many pillows.
Your eyes, finding beauty in a desert or pasture,
lit up the room. A song rose from slumber,
and I felt alive, a little less lonely.
I will cherish you.
I will take the debris, the roots, the particles,
the pockets of joy, the butterfly and the cocoon from which it came,
and I will turn it all into breath, into life, into you.

PAINTING: The music by Ernest Hébert (1880).

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: I wrote this poem thinking about a bad day turned sweet when out of nowhere, I started singing a song I used to sing as a teenager. This is my way of remembering. This is my love letter to music.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net-nominee, Elaine Nadal is the author of two poetry chapbooks: When and Sweat, Dance, Sing, Cut, published by Finishing Line Press. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in several journals and anthologies. Nadal has shared her work at many venues. She recently did a TEDx talk on hope, poetry, and music. Visit her at elainenadal.com and on Instagram.

When I Got Down with the Christ by Jewish person Rick Lupert (ONE GOOD MEMORY Series)

When I Got Down with the Christ
by Jewish person Rick Lupert

When I was older than a boy, but younger than
the man I am today, I went to see a high school

production of Jesus Christ Superstar.
I was not in high-school, but a friend of mine was

and she was playing a soul sister, or a dark angel
or, honestly, I don’t remember, it was a hundred years ago.

I wanted to say death eater but then I remembered
that’s from Harry Potter.

As a Jew I was not down with the Jesus.
I didn’t know any of the music, the story, and

had a general sense that he was not my guy.
Somehow I found myself in the center of the front row –

little Jewish man, alone at a high school with
Romans and parents and Christ.

Judas came out first. I didn’t know enough
to have heard his name in pop culture.

But now, whenever it gets mentioned I have
deep memories of that guy and what he sang.

Then What’s the Buzz. This was rock and roll.
This was the concert I never knew I wanted to be at.

At a certain point, me, at this high school,
with these people in the last throws of their childhood

almost pulled me out of my seat to mosh-pit
in the space between the front row and the orchestra.

To say this musical, this high school production
was better than Cats is to say that there is air in the air.

Since then I’ve seen it thirty silver pieces worth of times –
The film, stage productions of every size.

It’s always good. That’s the way he wrote it.
I had to put on the soundtrack to write this.

I’m dancing between every stanza.
Half of my knowledge of history comes from musicals.

I’m an expert, and I know, if this whole Judaism thing
doesn’t work out, I’m going to ride into Jerusalem

on the back of this sacred rock and roll.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: I was tearing my brain apart trying to find one good memory to write about and then the email came from Broadway in Hollywood letting me know that the 50th anniversary tour of Jesus Christ Superstar was coming to the Pantages while I was staring at the empty word processing document. I was immediately transported back to the 90s when I first saw the show. I bought three tickets for New Years Eve and wrote this poem.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Rick Lupert has been involved with poetry in Los Angeles since 1990. He is the recipient of the 2017 Ted Slade Award, and the 2014 Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center Distinguished Service Award, a three-time Pushcart Prize Nominee, and a Best of the Net nominee. He served as a co-director of the Valley Contemporary Poets for two years, and created Poetry Super Highway. Rick hosted the weekly Cobalt Cafe reading for almost 21 years which has lived on as a weekly Zoom series since early 2020. His spoken word album Rick Lupert Live and Dead featured 25 studio and live tracks. He’s authored 26 collections of poetry, including I Am Not Writing a Book of Poems in Hawaii, The Tokyo-Van Nuys Express, and God Wrestler: A Poem for Every Torah Portion (Ain’t Got No Press) and edited the anthologies A Poet’s Siddur, Ekphrastia Gone Wild, 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 a Jewish poetry column for JewishJournal.com. He has been lucky enough to read his poetry all over the world. Visit him on Facebook.

Author photo by Alexis Rhone Fancher. 

Piano by Anita Howard (ONE GOOD MEMORY Series)

Piano
by Anita Howard

In the early days
before forced marching took over,
they brought me to see
the place where I would go to school.

I stood on a polished, wooden floor
and was shown the piano,
the mechanism of music without choice.

A white-headed woman,
her kind smile not to be our fate,
turned upon a padded stool
and shimmered the heavy keys
to emit a few juddering notes.

“It sounds like a lioness,” I said,
my thoughts back to the zoo,
and the laughter nearly knocked me down.
No harm to find my roar
before the place revealed its demons.

©Anita Howard

PHOTO: Two lionesses (Chobe National Park, Botswana, 2017). Photo by Geran de Klerk on Unsplash. 

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: The poem was inspired by an early memory of childhood.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Anita Howard is a writer, storyteller, and actor living in Passage West, County Cork, Ireland. Her work has appeared in HeadStuff, Poetica Review, Bluepepper, JA Books Magazine, Written Tales, and the Don’t Get Caught! anthology by Write In 4 Charity, Leicester, as well as the Zooanthology by Sweetycat Press and the Querencia Fall 22 Anthology. She is on Twitter as @AnitaHowardSto1.

Last Chance Melody by Maryann Hurtt (ONE GOOD MEMORY Series)

Last Chance Melody
by Maryann Hurtt

two days before he gets up
and leaves
after eighty plus earthbound years
my grandpa tells me
Get out my ol’ mouth harp

it sits in a nest
of worn Kodaks
recording a now too-long life

I crank the sick bed
prop pillows
as his at one-time wife
mother of seven kin leans close
then sings old woman
cracked notes
to his wheezy harp tune breaths

a harmony of sorts
dances the air
hymns and tunes played back
in Depression time before
lead and zinc chewed lungs
and booze held sway

listen now
you might find yourself believing
for this little while anyway
in torn and tattered
stick around love

two doors down
Death waits patiently
hums along to a few hymns
knows not to disturb

Originally published in Anti-Heroin Chic.

Photo by wallpaperuse.com.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: I went to see my grandpa two days before he died. His breathing was awful after years working in the mines and living a rough life. He wanted to play his harmonica again. I propped up his pillows and he was able to wheeze out a few tunes. I ran back to my grandma’s…they had long ago separated but maintained something still kind. She came back with me and I listened to her sing and him play. This will always be one of my favorite memories and gives me a sense of hope even in hard times.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Now retired after working 30 years as a hospice Registered Nurse, Maryann Hurtt listened to and savored a thousand stories. Her family members were all great storytellers, and she recorded in her sixth-grade diary that when she grew up, she wanted to be a “storyteller (a good one).” She lives in Wisconsin’s Kettle Moraine, where she hikes, bikes, reads, and writes almost daily. Since retirement and able to travel, she has had the energy to pursue researching Oklahoma’s Tar Creek environmental disaster. Her grandpa worked in the lead and zinc mines and her great grandmother and grandmother worked at the Quapaw Indian Agency, where the minerals were initially mined. Turning Plow Press published Once Upon a Tar Creek Mining for Voices in 2021. Her most recent poems have appeared or upcoming in Verse-Virtual, Gyroscope Review, Moss Piglet, Hiroshima Day Anthology, Oklahoma Humanities, and Writing In a Woman’s Voice. More can be found at maryannhurtt.com.

Space Is a Long, Long Time by Lillian Nećakov (ONE GOOD MEMORY Series)

Space Is a Long, Long Time
by Lillian Nećakov

I think it was while they were still living on Lansdowne, just up the street from the skating rink. The sidewalk purpled under an awning of mulberry trees, it must have been summer, I could hear Qaani chanting, you walk and you walk and you walk and you stop, from the dappled shade of the Kentucky coffee trees. She was about six, her father John and I on the stoop, a funny little fan club, Frank Zappa in the background singing but space is a long, long time. And I believed her, believed that you could just stop, but you can’t. There are teeth and lips and blades of grass and hate and sausages bubble-popping in the fry pan and Werner Herzog walking in ice for 21 days and Patsy Cline long, long past the midnight of this poem. Sea-swirl and the resistance of garbage bins against meaty hands, Johnny Cash as a bullet made of books and soft brass, over Old Hickory Lake, an ear pressed to the asphalt where happiness lives. A small puddle where you see the reflection of your birth, a hole-full of beating hearts, here where you left me, orphan-gray, bowed under the ash and bone of you as I walk and I walk and I walk.

PAINTING: Frank Zappa (Acrylic Stereoscopic Anaglyph Painting) by MadevilMercantile, available at etsy.com.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Lillian Nećakov is the author many chapbooks, including, The Lake Contains and Emergency Room (Apt. 9 Press; shortlisted for the bpNichol Chapbook Award), as well as the full-length collections il virus (Anvil Press; shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award), Hooligans (Mansfield Press), The Bone Broker (Mansfield Press), Hat Trick (Exile Editions), Polaroids (Coach House Books) and The Sickbed of Dogs (Wolsak and Wynn). Her new book, duck eats yeast, quacks, explodes; man loses eye, a collaborative poem with Gary Barwin is forthcoming in 2023 from Guernica Editions. She has also published in many print and online journals in Canada and the U.S. Lillian lives in Toronto.

Learning By Heart by Laura Foley (ONE GOOD MEMORY Series)

Learning By Heart
by Laura Foley

I was seven, couldn’t sleep,
fearing my French teacher,
afraid I couldn’t learn
a line I had to memorize.

Mom, trilling the night’s
loneliest hour, at the piano,
made up a lilting song,
to help me remember—

I did, and still do,
her voice etched in tenderness,
fingers running over the keys,
somewhere deep inside me.

Published in Why I Never Finished My Dissertation (Headmistress Press).

PAINTING: Woman at the Piano by Henri Matisse (1924).

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: I really do still remember the line I had to memorize. It was: “Une etudiante n’est pas attentive, elle est un peu bavarde.” Throughout her life, my mother, Barbara, was a warm, bubbly, inviting presence. I am so happy to conjure her again, and share her, on the page and in the heart.

PHOTO: The author’s mother, Barbara Ball Cosden, on a friend’s yacht in the Caribbean (1968).

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Laura Foley is the author of eight poetry collections. Everything We Need: Poems from El Camino was released, in winter 2022. Why I Never Finished My Dissertation received a starred Kirkus Review, was among their top poetry books of 2019, and won an Eric Hoffer Award. Her collection It’s This is forthcoming from Fernwood Press. Her poems have won numerous awards, and national recognition—read frequently by Garrison Keillor on The Writers Almanac and appearing in Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry. Laura lives with her wife, Clara Gimenez, among the hills of Vermont. Visit her at laurafoley.net.

Jim Morrison and I Head to Standing Rock by Lindsey Martin-Bowen (HOW TO HEAL THE EARTH Series)

Jim Morrison and I Head to Standing Rock
by Lindsey Martin-Bowen

Dakota Pipeline, North Dakota

When clouds form an eagle above a red sun,
and the Flint Hills and dried-up wheat fields
beckon us onward, we head east and north—

beyond the Great Plains and the narrow lanes
to which we’d become accustomed—after spinning
across sand in our chase for California dreams

of peace and love, still uncaptured. Here, police
shoot pepper spray and water cannons at 30 of us.
Security guards unleash dogs that maim six,

one a small child. Still, we clutch signs—black
crosses against a blue sky, where cirrus clouds
hover then become black knots of rain.

We clasp hands with the Standing Rock Sioux,
pray with them in a circle, and I ask Jim
if he wants to risk getting arrested.

He shakes his head. “We’ll help. But this is their
Wounded Knee. It isn’t to be fought by you—by me.”
He pulls out three fifties to leave for munitions.

I nod to agree, it’s the natives’ call. Even if it’s for all
of us, they must win it in these unaligned times
when the eagle cloud rises high on the horizon.

Previously published in (Tittynope Zine 2017). Forthcoming in the author’s collection Cashing Checks with Jim Morrison (redbat books 2023).

PHOTO: Native Americans demonstrate against the Dakota Access Pipeline in May 2021 at the Standing Rock Reservation, which straddles the border of North Dakota and South Dakota. Learn more at standwithstandingrock.net.  Photo by Jolanda Kirpensteijn on Unsplash. 

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: Years ago, when I (my persona) screamed down asphalt through mauve Kansas fields and the Flint Hills, rock shaman Jim Morrison crawled out of my car stereo while a yellow hornet on the windshield danced like a Kachina in a sand painting. It was magic. Perhaps. I still don’t know. Yet poems resulting from this encounter resulted in my third poetry book, CROSSING KANSAS with Jim Morrison. In it, Jim comes with me to find La Loba*, in hopes she’ll resurrect his bones. But the wolf woman refuses, and we go to Paris and the Père Lachaise Cemetery. There, Jim’s dark monument, wrought with graffiti, commemorates him. I’d thought this story had ended when I left him there. But I was wrong. He won’t leave me alone. He pushes into poems and ignoring his burial, often joins figures from everywhere—ancient Greece and Eleusinian mysteries, wild and wooly creatures in my “frenzies” poems, and post-modern philosophers. Even today, he whispers to me when I stare at a waffled, red-lace sky filled with popcorn clouds looming above our foothills.

*Wolf woman. Bone woman. According to Southwest legends (from various tribes and Mexican cultures), La Loba works with angels to gather bones of humans and wolves, then resurrect them. 

Photo of Jim Morrison, found in The Collected Works of Jim Morrison (June 2021). 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Pushcart and Pulitzer nominee Lindsey Martin-Bowen’s fourth poetry collection, Where Water Meets the Rock (39 West Press 2017), contains a poem named an Honorable Mention in Writer’s Digest’s 85th Contest. Her third, CROSSING KANSAS with Jim Morrison, won Kansas Authors Club’s 2017 “Looks Like a Million” Contest, and was a finalist in the QuillsEdge Press 2015-2016 Contest. Her Inside Virgil’s Garage (Chatter House) was a runner-up in the 2015 Nelson Poetry Book Award. McClatchy Newspapers named her Standing on the Edge of the World  (Woodley Press) one of Ten Top Poetry Books of 2008. Her poems have appeared in New Letters, I-70 Review, Thorny Locust, Flint Hills Review, Silver Birch Press, Amethyst Arsenic, Coal City Review, Phantom Drift, Ekphrastic Review (Egyptian Challenge), The Same, Tittynope Zine, Bare Root Review, Rockhurst Review, Black Bear Review, 15 anthologies, and other lit zines. Three of her seven novels have been published. Poetry is her way of singing. She taught writing and literature at UMKC for 18 years, MCC-Longview, and teaches Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, and other criminal justice classes for Blue Mountain Community College, Pendleton, Oregon. Visit her on Facebook and on Amazon.