Coal Stove

You were the girl they wanted to send away.
Hot path under your feet, balancing your vessel
awkwardly on your head, zigzagging away from home.

But you stayed. You were the girl carrying water,
dousing the blue flames of your eyes
because fire, you decided, wasn’t the right element.

You were the girl they wanted to leave.
Their hints were subtle. Drafts kept the doors ajar,
cracks formed at the window. When a dagger of glass

broke off and fell one story, it didn’t shatter.
A wedge propped the window open all day
where the curtains sucked for air yet grew paler.

When everything invited you to leave, you crouched
down. You were the arch of the door, guard
to the fire, feeding it with each wooden step

she would pace. Her hums around the dinner table
reminded you of songs she used to sing before
you were born. You can go no further than her songs,

even though she doesn’t want you. You give the fire
your fodder, and listen to its own songs of forgiveness.

Of “Coal Stove,” Jean Voneman Mikhail says,

This poem began as a story my dad told me about a coal stove in his house, and a story about a girl who was not really wanted by her mother. I think I placed the two ideas side by side because of the idea of the hearth, of home, and the conflict experienced by those children far from home either as a place, or as an idea that brings them peace and comfort.

More About the Poet:

Jean Voneman Mikhail is from Avon Lake, OH. She has lived in Athens, OH, however, since 1982. She has a BA and an MA in Creative Writing at Ohio University, and a Masters in Library Science from Kent State. She has published in the Worthington Press, Riverwind and Fifth Wednesday Journal. She lives with her husband and three children and too many cats and dogs in Athens.

Photo (see above): Jean Voneman Mikhail’s writing space

Crawl In

I feel as if I have been waiting to write
this poem a long time—

I practiced rituals of forgiveness, scattering
sage on the threshold or

peeling the wax leavings off the red candle.
None of it quite did

away with the needle that stabbed through
at odd moments of the day.

I found myself saying junior high things
like “I thought we were best friends.”

What is it to do harm? In some sense the
results were dramatic for me—

I left and/or lost a home, a knowing of my place
and what the objects around me

might mean. Morning: a slight shiver as
rain streaks across the windshield and the

person before me in the take-out coffee
drive-through suffers some kind of fit of road

rage, begins pounding her horn for no
reason I can see. I don’t utter your name.

Along the river here, swollen with autumn storm,
a willow grows half in, half out of the

water, a leafing so intense when I duck under
through the long twiggy curtains of branches

I feel quite erased. There is that scene in
the story—we both knew it by heart almost—

where the witch opens the oven and asks
the girl to crawl in. She doesn’t, but we all sense

that moment of hesitation, the green thrust of
a trust that should be able to remain unbroken.

I don’t call you “witch,” though sometimes other
things equally unkind. But mostly I puzzle as over

a photo in a locket, that picture in my mind.
We are at a table over our poems, we pass the

papers back and forth, scrawling messages of
encouragement. Ice thins the windows and the

trees—we do not notice them—slowly turn
blue with it, blue and terribly silent.

Of “Crawl In,” Sheila Black says,

This is a poem I sent out for at least six months with no luck; it was always the odd one of the batch–the one that wasn’t chosen.

I think I know why, but I like this poem a lot.  It is about a difficult subject. A few years ago I had a very close friendship end very badly and really without much warning—at least on my end. There is a history of women writers trying to write about fraught female friendships–I think of novelists like Margaret Atwood or Hilary Mantel, who have both tackled this topic, female envy, female power, what women don’t know how to say to each other or admit feeling towards each other–the difficulty of sisterhood, the notion of betrayal.

The relationship story was long and dense and in some ways mortifyingly so–and I knew I had to write the poem in a way that didn’t get bogged down in the narrative; where I didn’t whine or moan (which I felt like doing) to the point that the reader lost interest.  I wanted it also to be a little bit an elegy or a poem that gave me a space for forgiving, but also one that recognized just how terrible the end of the friendship felt.

I think when painful things happen to you, especially things you feel in some way victimized by–that is often the hardest subject matter to write about in a way that is remotely credible–you feel so invested, you tend to lose any sense of perspective, the proportion necessary to make the poem move outside you.  I was pleased when I stumbled upon the image of the witch and the oven from Hansel and Gretel–that is such a moving moment, because the children– Gretel in this case, hesitates because she is so used to wanting to please the adults–everything she knows about being a good and helpful child. That’s what makes the moment where she hesitates so terrible—we all feel the betrayal that is about to happen.  I knew then I wanted that to be the heart of the poem–the way we conspire in those moments and also the ways in which we resist and why.

More About the Poet

Sheila Black is the author of House of Bone, Love/Iraq (CW Press), and Wen Kroy (Dream Horse Press). She is a co-editor of Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability, named a 2012 Notable Book for Adults by the American Library Association. A 2012 Witter Bynner Fellow, selected by Philiip Levine, she lives in San Antonio, Texas where she directs Gemini Ink, a literary arts center.

Photo (see above): Sheila Black’s writing space 

Samantha Duncan. One Never Eats Four. Washingtonville, NY: ELJ Publications, 2014. 40 pages. $14.99, paper.

In the chapbook, One Never Eats Four, Samantha Duncan speaks with a raw intimacy that demands our attention. Though much of her focus is on relationships, these are not typical love poems. “I loved / every moment, every second- / hand smoke you gave // me,” she says in “Memoir,” and we know there’s nothing conventional about this book. At once coy and honest, mysterious and blunt, these poems ring with a dazzling truth, which becomes more apparent with each reading.

Duncan creates tension between the appearance of spontaneity and the discipline obvious in her tight line breaks and well-crafted stanzas. The title poem begins,

How would I discover – in play all along,

an additional functioning part, an erect,

homogeneous switch under my chaptered eyelid?

Would I weave a sweater for my mouth?

Gigabytes of inaugural speech pulses with

red foreheads and quarters govern from

hallway closets, overstuffed pies heat

the groundswell for level tangerine alarm,

under staircases ignorant of their use.

Duncan’s language is often startling, and each line delivers an unexpected jolt of discovery. We feel the push and pull of chaos and control, but the poet’s attention to her craft is always apparent.

Though Duncan is masterful at the unpredictable metaphorical leap, many of her poems display remarkable restraint. One such poem is “Camera,” which I include here in its entirety:

I think of being a wet stone

you’ll step on

for the last time,

it fills me with a

cloud wet I find

on internet forums

for lonely pets.

I typed

“womb”

into a search engine once.

I typed “accident.”

I mounted a seesaw and typed

“step on a wet stone.”

I clicked “images.”

As with most of us, not all of Duncan’s relationships are with people. In her final poem, “Era,” she speaks of the ocean, which she describes as both a sister and a siren. “She sang / when I didn’t know what / side of the window I was on. // At night when I visited, we sat closer than lovers, as / the wind cooked us.” Duncan continues, “Her salt whispered / through my ducts / not to leave yet.” The ocean shares a tender confidence with the speaker, and we too feel the lure of this bond.

In her essay, “Madness, Rack, and Honey” (published in the book by the same title), Mary Ruefle says, “Metaphor doesn’t actually exist, insofar as it doesn’t reside in nature, but it exists insofar as it spontaneously arises in the human mind as a perpetual event.” This describes well Samantha Duncan’s use of metaphor. Each poem is a small, spontaneous event, and when we reach the final word in this lovely chapbook, we do not wish to leave yet.

More About this Author:

Samantha Duncan is the author of the chapbook, Moon Law (Wild Age Press, 2012), and she serves as Associate Editor for ELJ Publications. She lives in Houston, blogs occasionally at planesflyinglowoverhead.blogspot.com, and can be found @SamSpitsHotFire.

Donora Hillard. The Aphasia Poems. San Francisco: Solar Luxuriance, 2014. 16 pages. $5, pamphlet.

Confession: upon first seeing the chapbook, The Aphasia Poems, I was skeptical. The volume is tiny even by chapbook standards. Its size is deceptive, however, because the project itself is quite ambitious. In this series of poems, each untitled, Donora Hillard resists grounding us in a specific place and time. She defies our expectations of poetry by privileging words as words and eschewing the use of imagery and its metaphorical strategies. These appear to be Found poems, “adapted with permission from my work as a mentor to those with linguistic disabilities” as Hillard tells us in the “Afterword.” She continues,

I find the connections between fragmentation induced by poetics and the fragmentation in modern life to be striking; I know I am not unique. The parameters of language ignore anyone unable to communicate through traditional means, and those considered “normal” also write/speak/scream along a vast continuum. In employing the rhetorical theorist Thomas Rickert’s concept of a postpedagogy, something is always out of place, sticking out, slipping, in error. Therefore, let us listen more carefully. We are all in this house, and we are all in pain.

Hillard’s choices for this book—deciding which snippets of speech to include, how to break the lines, whether or not to use punctuation—are where the artist in her comes through in this collection. Through this small work, Hillard reveals her empathy and her intellect, and gives voice to those who struggle to communicate.

At times, Hillard’s work resembles L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poetry with its jumbled word order and lines that defy interpretation in the traditional sense. She wants us to experience this confusion to evoke how it feels to talk with these speakers, but she also hopes to enact on the page their own confusion. For example,

I there is a do you know there is a up

around in the there is a it’s a long I know

he didn’t know what I could do

The speaker here acknowledges that “he” underestimated her abilities. We don’t need to know more about this situation; the strong, clear statement at the end surprises us, and we know the speaker has succeeded in her attempt to convey something important.

Throughout the book, Hillard avoids the use of end punctuation and capitalizes only the pronoun I. This strategy is effective as it calls more attention to the fragmentary nature of aphasia. As Heather McHugh states in “Broken English,” an essay on fragments, “All poetry is fragment: it is shaped by its breakages, at every turn.” Though this is a statement about all poetry, it applies quite well to Hillard’s work in this chapbook. Hillard is aware of what is unsaid—or, rather, what cannot be said—and the poems’ breakages allow the reader to feel this as a loss. The frustration of the speaker is particularly clear in the following poem:

this you should see what

tell me what you see

I’ll say it is this way but not quickly, that’ll kill

not ever heaven could be and not

it begins not for me

there won’t be one that is

I’ve got to use you because

I’m trying to tell you something

Most of us take for granted our ability to string words together into a comprehensible sentence and to make our desires, needs, and thoughts known to others. Those of us who write poetry are free to fragment our language in the service of our art, but we don’t often consider what it would mean to lose this language, to be left with only the fragments and never the fully expressed ideas.

Donora Hillard helps us to empathize with those people who are affected by profound linguistic challenges. Though the instinct of other poets would be to speak about or for these individuals, Hillard allows them to speak for themselves. The voices in The Aphasia Poems do not demand our sympathy, however; they merely ask that we listen.

More about this author:

In addition to The Aphasia Poems, Donora Hillard is the author of Covenant (Gold Wake Press, 2012) and other collections of poetry and hybrid text. Her work appears in Hint Fiction (W.W. Norton & Company), Monkeybicycle, Pedagogy, Women in Clothes (Penguin), and elsewhere. The projects she has been involved in have been featured by CNN, Lybba, MSNBC, and the Poetry Foundation. She teaches medical humanities in Ohio, where she lives with her fiancé.