Joyce Schmid

A Ceremony of Lessons

Why are we called

to motherhood

without a seminary

teaching how

to be a sun

and not a storm,

to bathe our children every night

in holy water,

to prepare their sacrament

with reverence,

to bear with strength

the sacred burden

of our love?

Hunger

I used to fill myself with all the sweetest food, until

I grew so big it frightened me.

I’m hungry,

hungry.

Who’d believe

I was a five-pound preemie

incubated like a hatchling,

air so pure it could have blinded me,

the milk of many mothers

keeping me alive?

My hunger’s not a metaphor. At most,

a simile:

as hungry

as a hummingbird almost erased by frenzy of desire—

as hungry

as a glorious white pelican, tail tilted up,

head in the lake to satisfy three stomachs.

Words were found and I did eat them.

As we near the end

I turn again to you.

Will you still lie with me,

surround my hunger

with the truth of bodies,

wordless as the flight of birds?

_________________

Note: Italicized lines are from Jeremiah 15:16, KJV; and Archibald MacLeish

Celebration of Life

My sister has evaporated from the slide show

like an old perfume.

Picture after picture flashes by—

girl hiding braces with a tight-lipped smile—

bride in white with stephanotis—

bride in blue, a crown of roses sparked with baby’s breath—

old woman wilted on an old man’s shoulder, giving in.

Enter my foolish ghost, I acquiesce...

and Nothingness becomes its own caress.

Has she discovered

only Nothingness?

Her name was Dolly Gordon.

Now her name

is scouring the shrubbery for her, the clouds.

Not finding her, it wastes away.

She is a blossom dried and pressed,

flaking into stardust

spreading out into the Nothing

and the Everything,

contained in all the living flowers.

__________________________

Note: Italicized lines are from a poem by Dolly Garter Gordon, published in 1060’s.

My spirit so high it was all over the heavens

--Li Po

My mother used to lose me purposely

when I was two, to see if I could find my way

among the shelves and knees,

the empty dresses swaying over me.

Last night—again—

that murky nightmare—

driving home from Oakland—

dark—roads tangled—

grimy fog—dead signals—

signs obscured—my car

careening into badlands—

That’s when I usually wake up.

But this time,

I was in your slipstream,

following your lead—

your silver Honda

flood-lit

in the halo of my headlights,

trailing star-shine.

“And the gold of that land is good....”

Genesis 2:12

There was still snow in Innsbruck,

early April, you and I new-married,

sitting on a lift-chair, swinging low

above the cold and rocky Eden

of those early days.

So many mountains and so many lakes,

so many meadows overlaid with snow,

so many cities with their freeways,

castles jutting out of history,

and supermarkets selling winter strawberries.

We’ve seen the nakedness

of Eden—bare-boughed trees recuperating

from their fruit, collapsing floors,

exploding pipes, torn circuits, trip-wires arcing fire.

The knowledge baffles us.

But this is Garden—Garden—

all of it—

the Eden of our lives.

There is no wisdom to be found in Eden,

just this strange geography of grace

and you and I.

---

Joyce Schmid's poems have appeared in Bridport Prize Anthology 2023, New Ohio Review, The Hudson Review, Five Points, Literary Imagination, Poetry Daily, and other journals and anthologies. Her chapbook, "Natural Science", is forthcoming from Glass Lyre Press.

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Rebe Huntman

DEAD MOTHER TOUR:

Moscow, 1983

She is 19 & drunk on Dostoevsky when she dreams

of walking the Volga. There will be snow dusting

the Kremlin & she will be dressed in black. The man,

slick with Marx & Mayakovsky, will take her hand as

they stand in line to see Lenin pickled in his tomb. Shoot

vodka with some men he knows. Later, in the eye

of night he will undress her, & as she thrills to the trill

of Pushkin pouring from his throat, she will catch

the reflection of her own eyes sparking in the moon of his

& believe this is all there is to love. Perhaps, if the mother

were alive, she might warn the daughter that the river,

the moon, are easy. It is the waking that is hard—

the man now distant at the edge of the bed & & you, left

with your own skin, stark & naked beneath the knife of day.

DEAD MOTHER TOUR:

Leningrad, 1983

after Ocean Vuong

What I need you to see is not

how Spring is stilled

by the click of the shutter—

the inadequacy of the girl’s

neckline torn like Alex

from Flashdance to reveal

her motherless throat,

or the two men—

strangers—propped

like exclamation marks

beside her on a park

bench piercing

the horizon

with their gaze,

but the hands holding

the camera that are

my father’s hands,

& the face squinting

into the sun that is

his daughter, his flesh.

Like all photographs

this one fails to tell

the story. Like where

the girl is thinking

of yet another man—

their tour guide sworn

to be their shepherd

in this foreign land.

How, not yet fluent

in the tricks of the moon,

she’d mistaken the flash

of conquest in his eyes

for love.

Or how,

when the trip

draws to a close,

the father

will slip

a bill

into his

pocket—

a tip

for showing

them all

a good time,

& the girl

will be too

ashamed

to stop him.

---

Rebe Huntman's poems, essays, and stories appear in such places as The Southern Review, CRAFT Literary, Ninth Letter, South Loop Review, Tampa Review, Quarter After Eight, Sonora Review, Juked, and The Pinch. The recipient of an Ohio Individual Excellence Award, she holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from The Ohio State University. Her debut memoir, My Mother in Havana, is forthcoming from Monkfish Books. Find her at rebehuntman.com and on Instagram @rebehuntman.

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Brett Warren

Spring

From the window I saw a red-tailed hawk, perched

in a tree, eating one of the neighbors’ chickens.

I’d seen that chicken before, standing in the sun

next to her sister, new grass and clover

beneath their feet, while the neighbors worked

on the coop. I knew they might shrug it off,

say, That’s nature, bound to lose a few.

But if she had been mine, I would want to know

what had happened. Someone over there had cared

for her, fed her, maybe petted her feathers.

I decided to leave a note. I started to write,

She seemed like a nice chicken—quiet, demure,

winsome even. Then I stopped myself.

Best to stick to the facts. At the end, I added,

So sorry. I left the note in their mailbox.

Walking back, I saw a burst of feathers

below the branch where the hawk had been.

Some of the feathers had a little curve to them,

like a chrysanthemum tricked into early bloom,

perennial though the flower is gone.

These Days

When I get up, it’s still dark. I feed the cats,

set the coffee to brew. To oats soaked

overnight, I add cinnamon, candied ginger,

blueberries, a sprinkle of split cashews.

I imagine the hands that dug the ginger

and cut it into cubes before my hands

cut it into smaller cubes. I sit by a lamp

and read a poem in silence. I listen.

Beyond the burble of coffee dribbling

into the carafe, I might hear howling wind

or the no-sound of snow falling. Maybe

a late owl or the neighbor leaving

for an early shift at work. I think of you,

so far away, out west where I once was,

coastline eroding into its own majesty,

hazy valleys sprawling under geometries

of light, asphalt ribboning the land

with traffic that barely lessens overnight.

I wish you could be in the same blue

as me, this darkness blue as blueberries.

Wish I could roll it over mountains

and canyons to you. My friend,

what do you do to sustain yourself

these mornings, these days?

Losing My Mind

I started losing my mind again.

But then I wondered why we say

losing my mind, when it’s really

being submerged, engulfed,

consumed by mind. So I revised

to losing myself to mind. And then

I wasn’t anymore. I was thinking

about thinking, choosing distance

without losing anything. That night,

I was lying on my side, a question

that might never be answered,

when the disruptors arrived,

clearing four stairs at a time,

chirping from the darkness

of their throats. One curled

into the cradle of my belly,

where a baby would’ve been

if I’d ever thought to have one.

The other pressed himself

against my back, facing away,

bones of tail along bones of spine.

The three of us dissolved

to listen for the first bird

of morning, which never lasts

but always comes again.

---

Brett Warren (she/her) is the author of The Map of Unseen Things (Pine Row Press, 2023). Her poetry has appeared in Canary, Halfway Down the Stairs, Harbor Review, Hole in the Head Review, ONE ART, Rise Up Review, and other literary publications. A triple nominee for Best of the Net 2024 (Poetry), she lives in a house surrounded by pitch pine and black oak trees—nighttime roosts of wild turkeys, who sometimes use the roof of her writing attic as a runway. www.brettwarrenpoetry.com

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