The Mothers I’ve Known by Rick Lupert (ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER Series)

The Mothers I’ve Known
by Rick Lupert

I
When I was a rambunctious little boy
I would stare just off to my mother’s right
until she would say “what?” and look that way.
When she turned her head back she’d find me
staring just off to her left. I don’t know
what I was trying to accomplish here
but as a poor family, before the internet
and all its riches were available to me,
it’s one of the only things I had.

II
Last night my mother came into my room
and caught me publishing myself.

I was embarrassed but she said
don’t worry honey, it’s normal

Everyone does this, especially at your age.
I screamed Mom, get out of my room!

and she did, leaving me to
display myself to the world.

III
What is it with this mortal impermanence?
You live and do things and the end is inevitable.

Like a story called life which begins with a death.
A reminder all our narratives have the same end game.

On the same day as a Syracuse mother’s yahrzeit.
On the same day that a Van Nuys wife

travels to Pennsylvania to bury her grandmother.
We don’t live into our hundreds like our founding parents.

But ninety-four is pretty good.
Let’s all live to ninety-four.

IV
My mother makes her own cigarettes now.
It’s cheaper she says.

The new cigarette tax forcing the initiative
that was never around when it was time

to find a job
pay the rent

feed her high school boy lunch.
It’s alright.

I’ve been feeding myself for years.
She delicately rolls another—

killing her softly
with her hands.

PAINTING: Smoke Dream by Allan D’arcangelo.

AUTHOR’S PHOTO CAPTION: My mother in 1950. Long before I met her. Long before the cigarettes kicked in and ruined everything.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Rick Lupert has been involved with poetry in Los Angeles since 1990. The recipient of the 2017 Ted Slade Award and the 2014 Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center Distinguished Service Award, he is a a three-time Pushcart Prize Nominee as well as 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. For almost 21 years, Rick hosted the weekly Cobalt Cafe reading, which has lived on as a weekly Zoom series since early 2020. His spoken word album, Rick Lupert Live and Dead, features 25 studio and live tracks. He’s authored 28 collections of poetry, including It’s Spritz O’Clock Somewhere (forthcoming), The Low Country Shvitz, 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.

Our Losses Return to Us by Bill Ratner (ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER Series)

Our Losses Return to Us
by Bill Ratner

Long after other dreams
my mother comes back

like an ancient celebrity in a hotel
with an appointment secretary

Before you see her you need to know
she is in a very fragile state, says the man

I am no longer trusted
walled off by protocol

her papery skin, dry viscera
decades under the sod at Saint James Kingsessing

I need to tell her
how hard it was to do without her

Perhaps I am being unfair
a bit too needful

Promptly the dream slides away
like lamb from a meat slicer

PAINTING: Mother and Child by Pablo Picasso (1922).

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: My mother died of breast cancer when I was seven years old, so as I live my life and write my poems she occasionally appears in dreams, and I include her in the occasional poem. Hopefully I write about her, not in a maudlin, helpless manner, but lyrical and evocative, honoring her memory.

PHOTO: The author with his mother Dolly during a visit to Spider Lake, Wisconsin (Summer, 1952).

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Bill Ratner is one of Los Angeles’ best known voice actors and author of the poetry collection Fear of Fish (Alien Buddha Press), the poetry chapbook To Decorate a Casket (Finishing Line Press,) and a Best of the Net Poetry Nominee (Lascaux Review). His writing has appeared in Best Small Fictions 2021 (Sonder Press,) Missouri Review (audio), Baltimore Review, Chiron Review, Feminine Collective, and other journals. A nine-time winner of the Moth StorySLAM, a certified grief counselor, and an officer in his union SAG-AFTRA, he teaches Voiceovers for SAG-AFTRA Foundation and Media Awareness for Los Angeles Unified School District. Find him at billratner.com and at Soundcloud, YouTube, Instagram and X (Twitter).

I Am Still Waiting for My Heart to Catch Up by Cristina M.R. Norcross (I AM STILL WAITING Series)

I Am Still Waiting for My Heart to Catch Up
by Cristina M.R. Norcross

After celebrating our youngest son’s
15th year on this earth,
I am still waiting for my heart
to catch up with the hurried footsteps
of time.

I am still waiting for my arms to realize
that my sons don’t need me to lift them
into a car seat anymore.
Our oldest can now drive
the car himself.
My prayerful thoughts
can still guide them,
willing them to arrive safely in our driveway.
My steadfast words
of faith in their gifts can uphold them,
like scaffolding offering support
at vital pressure points,
or the red training wheels from bikes
now gathering dust in the garage.

I am still waiting for my invisible shield
to go unnoticed,
but this will never be.
They see the candle of concern in my eyes.
They notice the way my attention hovers,
the laser-like focus of my mother brain,
as I listen to their needs
and remember those they never even thought of.

The time of stepping on Legos and wiping
tomato sauce from chins has ended,
but the tiny hands
that once held my finger in sleep
will know that reaching out
always results in finding me.

Like music from another room that lingers
and dances me into the next chapter,
I am still waiting for my heart
to catch up with time.
So I keep looking down at my watch,
then up at the sky,
where the robin’s egg blue of tomorrow
promises to cradle my sons’ hopes,
even when I can’t be there
to open the door.

PAINTING: Motherhood by Pablo Picasso (1901).

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: The blink of an eye that was 2020 caused time to race like a swift runner. Try not to close your eyes, I thought. You just might think we skipped a year and leapt into the next one. Time passes quickly enough for parents, while watching their children grow up. Our lives become busy, spinning wheels of school, activities, and chores. The pandemic caused time to both stand still and flow rapidly, like a river. Our teenaged sons grew by leaps and bounds this year, while we were looking out the window at the world, with longing. I hope that we can all slow down and take a breath. I am still waiting for my heart to catch up with time’s arrow.

PHOTO: The author’s sons in younger years.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Cristina M. R. Norcross is the author of eight poetry collections, and is the founding editor of Blue Heron Review (2013-2021). Her most recent book is Beauty in the Broken Places (Kelsay Books, 2019). Her forthcoming poetry collection, The Sound of a Collective Pulse, is due to be published by Kelsay Books in Fall 2021. Cristina’s poems have  been published in Visual Verse, Your Daily Poem, Poetry Hall, Right Hand Pointing, Verse-Virtual, The Ekphrastic Review, and Pirene’s Fountain, among others. Her work also appears in numerous print anthologies. She has helped organize community art and poetry projects, has led workshops, and has also hosted many open mic readings. She is the co-founder of Random Acts of Poetry and Art Day.  Visit her at cristinanorcross.com.

Endless Summers, poem by Joan Jobe Smith

ENDLESS SUMMERS
by Joan Jobe Smith

Those endless summers when my son
and his buddies were too young
to drive a car, I packed as many
boy-men sardines that would fit
into my VW Bug and drove them
to the Surf Theater in Huntington Beach
to see surf movies, The Endless Summer,
Saltwater Wine and when the surf was Up,
they strapped as many surfboards as the VW
surf racks would hold and I drove them
to the Huntington Beach Pier where they
learned the poetry of the sea, sailed
aquamarine and spindrift soup
while I lay on the sand
studying for grad school exams
trying to make something of myself
and tried not to wish I were one of them
and then all the way home I listened to
their teen-aged a-b-c’s of “awesome,”
“boss” and “cool,” the salt and
sun turning their hair golden till
autumn and time to go back to school
 
and now my son and his buddies,
the age I was back then, their sun-streaked
hair grown-up dark while they try to make
something of themselves, come surfing now
to get back into shape and my son
brings his children now to show them
the way of the waves, those endless summers
and those sonnets of sun, sea and salt
going on and on as endless as
always.

ABOUT THE POEM: “Endless Summers” by Joan Jobe Smith dedicated to her son, former surfer Danny Bryan Horgan, was first published after award of first prize in Surfer Magazine‘s 1997 poetry competition, and next appeared in Pearl (2000). In 2009, the poem received a Long Beach (California) Arts Council City Transit Award and is on permanent display at the Long Beach First Street Transit Gallery. In 2013, 48th Street Press will publish the poem as a broadsheet. The poem will appear in the upcoming Silver Birch Press SUMMER ANTHOLOGY (June 2013).