TURTLE ISLAND QUARTERLY 15
Summer/2018
Chapter two:
poems by Tim Mayo, Jennifer D. Michael,
Sarah Henry, and Donna Pucciano
poem by Tim Mayo
Revocable Beauty
the blue heron tilting its way
away from us into the tawny,
clustered stilts of reeds,
finally, the reeds, themselves,
their purple flowers blonding
in the autumn sun.
All this reflection
in a looking-glass calm.
We die . . . we die . . .
nothing new there.
What we want, however,
is to re-envision the wilting flower
perking back to full bloom,
luminous in its vased stillness,
the rabbit and the pheasant
sucking in their entrails
as they unhook themselves
from the hunter’s door,
each shuddering its way back
to the quick in a hop or a flap.
But what we get, instead,
is the circumspect, blue heron
reappearing in leggy defiance,
the reeds now fully arranged
behind it like a chorus,
as it fearlessly steps toward us
in its slow, ungainly cakewalk,
the erratic dip and ess of its neck posing
the same question again and again.
Tim Mayo is the author of two full length collections of poetry: The Kingdom of Possibilities (Mayapple Press, 2009) and Thesaurus of Separation (Phoenicia Publishing, 2016), which was a finalist for the 2017 Montaigne Medal and a 2017 poetry category finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Award. Among the many places his poems and reviews have appeared are Avatar Review, Barrow Street, Narrative Magazine, Poetry International, Poet Lore, River Styx, Salamander, San Pedro River Review, Tar River Poetry, Web Del Sol Review of Books, Verse Daily, and The Writer’s Almanac. He is a six time Pushcart Prize Nominee, a finalist for Paumanok Award, and the recipient of two Vermont Writers Fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center. He lives in Brattleboro, VT, where he was a founding member of the Brattleboro Literary Festival.
poem by Jennifer D. Michael
In Shakerag Hollow
It’s not a jar in Tennessee,
just a fragment of white porcelain:
maybe a plate, a coffee cup.
It glistens through the palimpsest
of years of leafmold, time’s dark script.
To get here, we’ve veered off the path
that leads us safely through near-wilderness,
past silent deer and bustling squirrel.
Once off that well-signposted track
we stumble over remnants of stone wall,
black locust fence rails, even a rusted sink.
What is this rubble doing in our woods?
We like to think of wilderness untouched:
a place we visit Sunday afternoons,
not someone’s homestead eighty years ago,
abandoned soon, through death or poverty.
Even the name bespeaks a human act:
a carved-out place among the towering trees,
the shaken rag the sign of fresh moonshine,
treasure distilled from stony soil.
We go into the woods to lose ourselves.
Instead, we’re shocked to find ourselves again.
Jennifer Davis Michael is professor and chair of English at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, specializing in British Romanticism. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Southern Poetry Review, Cumberland River Review, Literary Mama, Amethyst Review, and Mezzo Cammin, among others. She has also published a book of criticism, Blake and the City (Bucknell, 2006).
poem by Sarah Henry
Visions of a Musher
in the Iditarod
It’s a long stretch
through the Yukon.
The route is slow
and predictable
but the visions
aren’t.
My sled creaks.
The dogs bark
at something
up ahead.
It’s an Indian man
crossing the road
and dissolving.
Where did he go?
The dogs prance
like horses,
my little horses.
They carry me to Nome
in this sweet chariot,
in no man’s land.
The birds fly
toward me.
There are birds,
so many birds
rising up
and vanishing,
birds with wings,
cutting through
the brutal air,
coming toward me.
Look, at the last
moment, I put
my glove on my face.
They are taking
aim at my eyes,
taking aim.
I want to rise
above the pack.
The dogs have hooves
like horses or pigs.
Listen to the dogs--
huff, huff they say.
Snow lives everywhere.
It grows beneath
my boots like grass.
It flourishes
like despair.
The sky is a borealis.
When I sleep,
I lie down with dogs.
Later, it’s worse.
Sarah Henry studied with two U.S. poet laureates at the University of Virginia. Today, she lives near Pittsburgh, where her poems have appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Pittsburgh Poetry Review. Farther afield, Sarah's work has been included in Soundings East, The Hollins Critic, Plum Tree Tavern, What Rough Beast and many other journals, as well as seven anthologies and three chapbooks.
poem by Donna Pucciani
The Arno by Night
A small flat, five flights up,
offered a cheap view of apartments
tumbling into each other,
just a block away from
the Ponte Vecchio, the tilting bridge
of pastel shops, bicycles and tourists.
Below, the river Arno
hid its reflected secrets
in a slow tide of smiles.
That first night, in love
with the Florentine darkness,
we flung open the shutters
and bedded down in fresh air
and crisp mounded linens.
Hours later, mosquitoes
happily hatched in April’s
stealthy river. They woke us
with their famished hum,
the water’s deceit biting
our pale sleepy faces
with leprous hunger, leaving
red unholy souvenirs,
relics of a betrayal
lapping the shore below.
Donna Pucciani, a Chicago-based writer, has published poetry on four continents. Her work has been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Italian and German. Her awards include those from National Federation of State Poetry Societies and the Illinois Arts Council. Her most recent book of poems is Edges. More at: donnapuccianipoet.wordpress.com.