POETRY and PLACES

Camelback Road, Scottsdale, Arizona by Rafaella Del Bourgo

arizona rosemarie mosteller

Camelback Road, Scottsdale, Arizona
by Rafaella Del Bourgo

Sunday, seven a.m.,
before the unbearable heat.
This six-lane highway almost empty,
the double line down the center
white as bone.
I am running toward the small lake
near my mother’s condo,
pumping my body clean
with air and speed
and coursing blood.

To the west, Camelback Mountain
pushes up out of the ground,
double humped.
At the hospital
Mother lies in her
new, astonished state—
an open-eyed still life
of woman and machine.

Across the lake, a few small boats
float in the morning calm,
barely leaving a wake.
Close to the water’s edge
a duck waddles toward me
with her fantail of young.
I have remembered my offering of oats
and, both palms extended,
drop to my knees.

PHOTO: Arizona desert, Phoenix/Scottsdale area, Arizona. Photo by Rosemarie Mosteller, used by permission.

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NOTE: Camelback Mountain, a prominent landmark of the Phoenix, Arizona, metropolitan area, is a popular recreation destination for hiking and rock climbing. The name is derived from its shape, which resembles the hump and head of a kneeling camel. The mountain is composed of a geologic unconformity between two separate rock formations. The higher part of the peak is Precambrian granite (ca. 1.5 billion years old). The head of the camel is predominantly red sedimentary sandstone from the Chattian stage of the Oligocene epoch (ca. 25 million years old).

PHOTO: Scottsdale, Arizona, desert landscape at sunset, with Camelback Mountain in the background. Photo by Artisan, used by permission.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: I was staying in Scottsdale while my mother was ill and in the hospital. I was very worried about her, of course, and this anxiety seemed to infect my entire body. Only by running hard and sweating hard could I externalize it. Then, at the end of the run I was rewarded by the sight of the cool water and by the duck and her ducklings. Feeding them gave me a brief moment of pleasure, before I turned around and ran back to shower and go to the hospital for visiting hours.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Rafaella Del Bourgo’s writing has appeared in journals such as Nimrod, The Jewish Women’s Literary Annual, The Adroit Journal, The Green Hills Literary Lantern, Caveat Lector, Puerto Del Sol, Rattle, Oberon, Spillway, and The Bitter Oleander. She has won many awards, including the Lullwater Prize for Poetry in 2003, and in 2006 the Helen Pappas Prize in Poetry and the New River Poets Award. In 2007, 2008, and 2013, she won first place in the Maggi Meyer Poetry Competition. The League of Minnesota Poets awarded her first place in 2009. In 2010, she won the Alan Ginsberg Poetry Award and the Grandmother Earth Poetry Prize. She was awarded the Paumanok Prize for Poetry in 2012, and then won first place in the 2013 Northern Colorado Writers’ Poetry Contest. Finally, she won the Mudfish Poetry Prize for 2017. Her collection I Am Not Kissing You was published by Small Poetry Press in 2003, and her chapbook, Inexplicable Business: Poems Domestic and Wild, was published in 2014 by Finishing Line Press. In 2012, she was one of 10 poets included in the anthology Chapter & Verse: Poems of Jewish Identity. She has traveled the world and lived in Tasmania and Hawaii. She recently retired from teaching college-level English classes, and resides in Berkeley, California, with her husband and one spoiled cat.

Paris Stories: Two by Diana Rosen

Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation

Paris Stories: Two
by Diana Rosen

On our way to somewhere else, noon time
Gregorian chants draw us into Notre Dame
another mystical moment possible only when
you leave the guidebook in your hotel room.
We light candles, “just in case,” then visit
Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation
the cryptically named homage to 200,000
martyrs deported from Vichy France
to the Camps of Cruelty to The Other.
It’s silent, somber, as stark and simple
as a shroud. Stepping down the narrow
hallways, we find irony everywhere:

in the chilling floor plaque:
“They descended into the mouth
of the earth and they did not return”

in the land under the monument:
that once supported a morgue

in the exit sign:
“Forgive But Never Forget”

in the names of those camp, but
no mention of who was sent there:
not the Roma, Jehovah’s Witnesses,
political dissidents, the disabled,
homosexuals, Resistance fighters,

nor Jews.

PHOTO: Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation (Paris, France).

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NOTE: The Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation (English: “Memorial to the Martyrs of the Deportation”) is a memorial to the 200,000 people who were deported from Vichy France to the Nazi concentration camps during World War II. It is located in Paris, France, on the site of a former morgue, underground behind Notre Dame on Île de la Cité. Designed by French modernist architect Georges-Henri Pingusson, it was inaugurated in 1962 by the President of France, Charles de Gaulle.

PHOTO: Interior, Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation. Photo by Morbilli, used by permission.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Diana Rosen is a poet/essayist/flash fiction writer with credits in Tiferet Journal, RATTLE, Existere Journal of Arts & Literature, among more than 70 publications in Canada, the UK, Australia, and the U.S. She is also the author of 13 nonfiction books on food, beverage, and lifestyle topics in the U.S. Find more of her work at authory.com.

Stone of North Circle, Near the Cove, Avebury by William Doreski

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Stone of North Circle, Near the Cove, Avebury
by William Doreski

Am I more impressed by the stone,
a notched and corrugated haystack,
or by the neighboring oak embraced
by two dozen ivy vines thicker
than my thigh? The oak itself
boasts a four-foot diameter trunk
and looks sturdy enough to brace
an Anglo-Saxon Parthenon.

Here everything’s suspect, houses
cringing inside the great circle,
overlapped by the central and south
circles, ditched and surrounded
by a white chalk bank. Anything
could happen within this space,
in this timid whitewashed village.

Look at the sheep, grazing fearless
in flat and ordinary pastures.
Note the sheep dog. He’s happy
to see me, dashes over for pets
and praise, so proud of himself
for keeping his flock whole and fluffy.

The rotund stone looks dreadful
as some prehistoric monster’s skull.
The crease across its middle
suggests a toothless scowl. It’s watching
the huge oak tree, waiting for it
to die and fall, the vines tearing loose
and dangling like severed nerves.

The village hunkers down and hopes
the stones aren’t as sentient
as they appear. The tree and sheep
don’t care, but don’t realize
the big stones define this circle
to dominate, not to share.

PHOTO: Part of the South Inner Circle of Avebury in Wiltshire, England. Photo by Traveling Light, used by permission.

NOTE: Avebury is a Neolithic henge monument containing three stone circles, around the village of Avebury in Wiltshire, in southwest England. One of the best known prehistoric sites in Britain, it contains the largest megalithic stone circle in the world.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: William Doreski lives in Peterborough, New Hampshire. He has taught at several colleges and universities and retired after three decades at Keene State College. His most recent book of poetry is Stirring the Soup (2020). He has published three critical studies, including Robert Lowell’s Shifting Colors. His essays, poetry, fiction, and reviews have appeared in many journals.

Author photo by Keene State College

Ghosts of The Great Hunger by Thomas A. Thrun

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Ghosts of The Great Hunger
by Thomas A. Thrun

In Ennistymon, County Claire, Ireland
the River Inaugh at The Cascades
falls o’er bedrock in its wild rush
in its hurry to the hungry sea
for all the souls lost upon The Burrens
the poor unfortunates wasted away
buried nameless in mass graves
or in the countless small graveyards
beside the small churches abandoned
for want of any living still left
who hadn’t yet given up all hope
their fortified walls thus in ruins
that their limestone blocks be used
as headstones, each moaning with the gusts
that blow harsh across the emptied fields
of the children orphaned and adults
taken by The Great Hunger
the potato blight famine of 1845
because there was nothing left for them
no food nor coats nor even means to
buy the wee boy Michael a proper stone.
And the River Inaugh yet roars in vain
still now to drown the anguished cries
from the ghosts in all those crudely marked
and unmarked graves, as well as
even now our own salty tears.

PHOTO: Monument to An Gorta Mor (The Great Famine) in Ennistymon, County Clare, Ireland,. This is first memorial in Ireland to honor those who suffered and were lost during Ireland’s Great Famine (1845-1852). It is located across the road from Ennistymon Hospital, built on the grounds of the local workhouse, where an estimated 20,000 Irish died, and a mass graveyard for children who perished and were buried without coffins. The memorial shows a mother’s ghost, wringing her hands as she watches her starving orphan son from Heaven’s Gate.

Photo by Steven Cukrov, used by permission.

MEMORIAL’S INSCRIPTION READS: Gentlemen, There is a little boy named Michael Rice of Lahinch about 4 years being an orphan, his father having died last year and his mother has expired on last Wednesday night, who is now about being buried without a coffin! Unless ye make some provision for such. The child in question is now is at the workhouse gate expecting to be admitted if not he will starve. (Robs S. Constable)

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NOTE: The Great Famine was a period of mass starvation and disease in Ireland from 1845 to 1852. The most severely affected areas were in the west and south of Ireland, where the Irish language was dominant. During The Great Famine, about one million people died and more than a million fled the country, causing Ireland’s population to fall by 20-25%. The Great Famine had many causes and contributing factors that remain a source of controversy. Read more at theirishstory.com.

IMAGE: Map of Ireland, with County Clare indicated in dark green.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Thomas A. Thrun, retired in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, is a former weekly newspaper editor. An English/ Journalism graduate of University of Wisconsin-Platteville, he edited both the campus newspaper and literary publication, before editing weekly newspapers in Wisconsin and Washington State. Influenced by Robert Frost and his Wisconsin farm heritage, Thrun most recently was published in Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets anthologies. He claims no Irish heritage, but did go for a week’s vacation to Western Ireland. Though the tour bus stopped only for 10 minutes at the memorial described in “Ghosts of The Great Hunger,” he was deeply affected. Thrun comes from a third-generation Wisconsin farm family of German heritage. He, too, has hoed potatoes.

Barcelona, June 26th, 2007 by Julia Klatt Singer

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Barcelona, June 26th, 2007
by Julia Klatt Singer

Somewhere between late-night and early morning
it is the sound of breaking glass that fills the air—
not the call of the cooking-oil man

with six orange barrels strapped loosely
to his dolly with bungee cords. He taps and rolls
them through the cobblestone streets, metal

on metal, the din of drums enters
through her window
my mother’s sleep.

She does not dream of needles,
her body grown wild,
organs she has lost.

Now she is present tense. Her past
she has flown out of, her future she left at home,
next to the stack of books on cancer

written in a language no one speaks here.
The sound of breaking has us standing
on our balcony, mother and daughter

four stories up
as a woman curses, smashes another bottle
on the stone wall of the building across the street,

a wine bottle in one hand
she flips off the neighbor, who, three stories up
stands on his balcony, clutching

the empty bucket.
The water perfectly aimed—
angry drunken crazed woman

does not mind, decides, instead, to pull
her wet shirt off, wave it to the gathering crowd,
then pour wine from the bottle on both of her breasts.

I have not seen my mother naked. Just
X-rays of the tumor, her bruised forearms, a quick
glance at the scar that tracked the progress

the tumor made. Her skin is a blueprint,
her body altered so deeply, I feel the urge
to draw a new map, one that will lead me to her.

We watch now as the woman’s mother
in her heavy black shoes that pin her to this night
White haired and bony, dressed in hose and a shift

Takes her daughter by the elbow, opens her purse,
and takes a dry shirt from it, that her daughter refuses.
We watch as the daughter holds the bottle high,

watch as her mother tries to reach it.
She cannot. Her daughter swings
the bottle.

It slips from her hand, drops
slowly, strikes and splinters on the sidewalk.
We follow the river the wine makes, notice

it flows to the sea. My mother and I
find ourselves drawn to the scene, to the sounds
as if they are here for us. Require us.

We both know the red pool of blood
even the tiniest prick draws, know too
its irreversibility, its clarity, the surprise,

both intimate and ordinary. Know that beauty,
like the memory of this night, is broken
in pieces and shards, jagged and sharp.

PHOTO: Barcelona, Spain, with the Basílica de la Sagrada Família designed by architect Antoni Gaudíin the center background. Photo by Michel Jarmoluk, used by permission.

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NOTE: Barcelona is a city on the coast of northeastern Spain. It is the capital and largest city of the autonomous community of Catalonia, as well as the second most populous municipality of Spain. With a population of 1.6 million within city limits, its urban area extends to numerous neighboring municipalities within the Province of Barcelona and is home to around 4.8 million people, making it the fifth most populous urban area in the European Union. Barcelona is a major international tourist destination, with numerous recreational areas, one of the best beaches in the world, mild and warm climate, and historical monuments, including eight UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

Map courtesy of mapsoftheworld.com.

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NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: This poem takes place in the old town section of Barcelona, where buildings are close and everything is made of tile and stone. Sounds travel, feel as close as they are. I have been traveling with my husband and two young sons. My mother has joined us for a week. She is between chemotherapy sessions and in a rare move, decided to join us. Rare, because my mother has always been supportive, but never wanted to be a burden, or get in the way. It was a delight to have this time with her. And like the drama of our own lives (her cancer, year four) we were willing to be swept up in someone else’s drama, for a few moments. And yes, every drama, feels connected when you are traveling; you pick them up, carry them, like souvenirs.

Photo taken in Barcelona, Spain, by the author.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Julia Klatt Singer is the poet in residence at Grace Nursery School. She is co-author of Twelve Branches: Stories from St. Paul, (Coffee House Press), author of In the Dreamed of Places, (Naissance Press), A Tangled Path to Heaven, Untranslatable, (North Star Press), and her most recent chapbook, Elemental (Prolific Press). Audio poems from Elemental are at OpenKim, as the element Sp. She’s co-written numerous songs with composers Craig Carnahan, Jocelyn Hagen, and Tim Takach.

Photo of the author taken in Barcelona, Spain.

Somewhere Near the Medicine Wheel by Ken Hartke

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Somewhere Near the Medicine Wheel
by Ken Hartke

It was somewhere near the Medicine Wheel
that we knew our lives had changed.
A commitment had formed, a bond unspoken,
that remained that way for months to come.
Unsaid but forged strong for a lifetime. Silent.
We were afraid to spoil it in those days of wonder.
Now, those are hazy days in my memory,
as are many things as I look back. It seems that
for a while we were younger than our years.
But we were on the edge of uncharted territory.
The Bighorn Mountains were almost empty, then.
Things were different those forty-five years ago.
The mountains belonged to us that summer.
Miles and days passed with no intruders.
She was my morning sun and golden sunset.
I was her hero and pathfinder. We laughed
at ourselves. Who did we think we were?
I led her onward and upward with M&Ms.
I turned to help her cross a stream. She stomped
right through — splashing water — making rainbows.
We had a very close encounter with a Mule Deer.
I remember trout rising to a fly. They were so small
that we roasted them on sticks, like hotdogs.
Cloud Peak rose above us, but we were high enough.
I remember the mosquitos — she would too if
she was still here. We camped on the crest of a
hill over Mirror Lake. The breeze kept them at bay.
I recall our night visitors — polite, not destructive.
Another deer, an Elk, or Big Horns? Large animals.
One or twenty? We did not want to know.
Lost Twin Lakes and the high cirques were
not far above us on the trail. There were
horsemen heading up one day. I wanted to go
rambling the trail and the lakes — but she
was happy reading a book. She was content
just to hear my tale. That was her quiet way.
The Medicine Wheel, arrayed on the hillside
for centuries, stands as a landmark in my memory.
We went back decades later to see the place again.
It was not the same — all fences and parking lot.
It was confining — not expansive. We told our
daughter the story but she could not see it.
We have those markers in our lives: milestones.
Those are signs, and we are pilgrims. There are
places where paths diverge or come together,
depending on your perspective. It was there
that our paths joined, at a different place
and time. But my memory holds it close.
How do we get through life? Are there traces
showing us the way? Sometimes we get lost.
Sometimes someone finds us. We leave cairns
for those who follow after us: like Medicine Wheels.
They show we have come this way and
and how we got this far.

PHOTO: Cloud Peak Wilderness, Bighorn National Forest, Wyoming (courtesy of usda.gov).

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NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: “Somewhere Near the Medicine Wheel” is about the Bighorn Mountains in Wyoming and the ancient Medicine Wheel, a sacred Indian site laid out in stones and cairns on a hillside and aligned with the stars. The Bighorn Mountains are an uplifted and glaciated range that straddles the Wyoming-Montana border near Sheridan, Wyoming. The Medicine Wheel is something of a mystery but has been spiritually important and revered by local tribes for hundreds or possibly thousands of years. As things commonly happen, it has been “discovered” since 1975, and visits to the site have increased, requiring modern conveniences and safeguards. Our experience then was solitary and quieting. The poem centers on an often-remembered backpacking trip through the Bighorn Mountains in the summer of 1975 when my future wife and I were in our twenties. This same trip was a spiritual journey, of sorts, that cemented our years and life together next 30-plus years. The Bighorns, and the Cloud Peak Wilderness, were not a formidable mountain challenge but quite welcoming that summer. The Medicine Wheel was a spiritual landmark of that trip.

PHOTO: The Bighorn Medicine Wheel, Bighorn Mountains, Wyoming (Wikimedia Commons via wyoshpo.wyo.gov).

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Ken Hartke is a writer and photographer from the Rio Grande Valley in New Mexico, but was originally planted and nourished in the Midwest’s big river valleys. Always a writer, his writing was mainly work-focused until he landed in New Mexico in 2013 seeking a new second act. The state has been very welcoming. His New Mexico photography now inspires much of his writing — and sometimes the other way around. The great backcountry continually offers itself as a subject. He has contributed work for the Late Orphan Project’s anthology, These Winter Months (The Backpack Press), Silver Birch Press, and Foliate Oak Literary Magazine. He keeps an active web presence on El Malpais.

From “Love Poem for Robin” by Michael Mirarchi

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From “Love Poem for Robin”
by Michael Mirarchi

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It’s sunset on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon,
which, with patient effort, was carved 6,000 feet deep
by the Colorado River some five million years ago.
We stare into the abyss,
me through binoculars,
you through your camera.
Gently, I touch your shoulder to draw you
from the canyon’s spell.
Now I am on my knees.
Robin, I love you.
I want to spend the rest of my life with you.
Will you marry me?
Your soft blue eyes, through which your spirit shines,
well up with tears
as you clasp your hands over your heart
and say yes.
The middle-aged woman standing behind us
vigorously shakes her husband, who is
oblivious to us as he
watches the sun set over the canyon.
Larry! Larry!
She points to us.
This is much more interesting
than what you’re looking at!
I stand up and hug you,
tears in my eyes now as well
as I imagine our love,
carved with patient effort,
deepening over the mysteries of time.

PHOTO: The author proposing to now-wife Robin at the Grand Canyon (Arizona, USA).

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NOTE: The Grand Canyon is a steep-sided canyon in Arizona carved by the Colorado River. The Grand Canyon is 277 miles long, up to 18 miles wide, and attains a depth of 6,093 feet. President Theodore Roosevelt was a major proponent of preservation of the Grand Canyon area and visited many times. Nearly two billion years of Earth’s geological history have been exposed as the Colorado River and its tributaries cut channels through layer after layer of rock. For thousands of years, the area has been inhabited by Native Americans, who built settlements within the canyon and its many caves. The Pueblo people considered the Grand Canyon a holy site.

PHOTO: The Grand Canyon (Arizona) by Sonaal Bangera on Unsplash.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Michael Mirarchi is a poet, editor, and attorney living in Philadelphia, where he practices child welfare law. His work recently appeared in Last Call, Chinaski! and The Oneness of All, and he copy-edited Barbara Crooker’s books Some Glad Morning and Book of Kells. In law school, he served as an editor of the Harvard Law Review. In his free time, he enjoys kayaking with his wife in the New Jersey Pine Barrens and fly fishing for native brook trout in small mountain streams in the Poconos.

We Have Traveled Here by Andrena Zawinski

We Have Traveled Here Le Tréport de la Mer, Normandie by Andrena Zawinski All along the line these villages blossom with poppies, sheep and ponies graze backyards, the cows are down for rain. And a couple poses tied up in lacy bows among the jonquil and nasturtium for photographers on their wedding day as we near the northerly reaches of Normandie, stark cabanas locked down from a fickle fleet of wind moving in. It is almost sundown, almost August. A woman pushes a broom through our train car, second class, in half-light. She smiles at our French affectations as you kiss me on a train, making our way away from Paris. All along the noisy rails, leggy geraniums stretch red and weedy at lazy sills outside the city limits, sleepy windows shuttered from light. At Le Tréport de la Mer, waves collide, wind whips the northern night, the two of us bundled together by arms, intoxicated in the unseasonable chill, the exhaustion of a day spent well walking a rocky length of coast, climbing hills to a sun-bleached cliff where Hugo once stopped at Le Calvaire and Baudelaire wrote pour les morts, les pauvres morts, where what we have seen survives enemy boats and artillery fire across the wild lavender, Germans perched, hungry crows cawing at the Atlantic wall. Such a gray light midsummer. So dark the waters here where we have traveled half the day to be, to sniff out fish hungry for a meal, gulls raspy on the somber sweep of sky, icy waves racing the harbor we watch from our coastal landing, from our turret room where we sink down into a bed fat with feathers and frills, turn off the light. As if we have waited our lives for this, we pull in close to each other, bloom in the extravagance of France, learn the simple lessons of love, our hearts memorizing them even as we dream. For what else then can we long? For now, curled into each other, we can call this home. Previously published in Switched on Gutenberg; Milton Acorn Prize winner. PHOTO: Le Tréport, Normandy, France. Photo by Alain Wacquier, used by permission. Le_Treport_Wikimedia_Commons

NOTE: Le Tréport is a commune in the Seine-Maritime department in Normandy, France. The mouth of the Bresle river meets the English Channel here, in between the 360-foot-high chalk cliffs and the pebbly beach. Le Tréport is also a seaside resort and home to a casino. During World War II, the town was liberated by the 3rd Canadian Division on September 1, 1944. Le Tréport was used as the location for the 2014 French police thriller Witnesses (“Les témoins”). PHOTO: Chalk cliffs and beach, Le Tréport, Normandy, France. Photo by Benh Lieu Song, used by permission. zawinski3

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Andrena Zawinski’s poetry has received numerous awards for lyricism, form, spirituality, and social concern, several of them Pushcart Prize nominations. Her latest book is Landings from Kelsay Books; others are Something About from Blue Light Press (a PEN Oakland Award) and Traveling in Reflected Light from Pig Iron Press (a Kenneth Patchen Prize), along with several chapbooks. Her poetry has previously appeared on Poetry and Places.

Isis at Caroni by Robert Bensen

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Isis at Caroni
Caroni Bird Sanctuary, Trinidad
for Derek Walcott
by Robert Bensen

The outboard, tuned a tight tenor,
ponged like a thin metallic bird

trailing us through centuries of mangroves
propped on stilts over the still canal.

Our guide, an Indian named Nanan, lost me
with every turn of his wrist down every channel,

in the reflection of the canopy’s gothic arch,
a chapel the heron purpled with its resilient beat

and sandpipers streaked with their white, hunched skitter.
Drifting through the wake of an egret’s passage

we entered the pyramid of light at channel’s end,
and the lake unscrolled, one green islet

mounded in the center, that the hills magnified.
We tied up at the fence of canes. No one spoke.

A yellow leaf sank through our reflection
into the lake’s brief memory. Here, far

from the lights coming on in Port of Spain,
whose traffic crawled over the map folded in my pocket,

we awaited the ibises’ return. Lifted from papyrus nightly
or from the tiles of a pharaoh’s tomb,

they wheeled, igniting the sun’s last flare, singly
or in pairs, or in whole flocks dipping under

the yellowed hem of a cloud. They settled, a scarlet flutter
that passed like a wave over the islet,

each bending a bough like a lit candle in the dusk.
We turned, our backs fading from the fading torch of birds,

half‑blind, half‑shadow ourselves among the trailing vines
and tightening hold of darkness on the trees.

A sloth, clamped on a high branch, uncurled
from a stunned afternoon of slumber.

But the channel widened, the canopy split,
and what day was left ruddied two ridges of clouds,

one piled overhead, one as deep below, so deep
we seemed to drift in some great, undiscovered

breach in the world, and we were left riding,
by some deific grace, in mid‑air. I had to grasp

the flaking rail to lean into that abyss,
to trace one last bird’s gliding silhouette across

a cloud’s startled face, till I lost it under the hull,
when the space between millennia was thin as water,

when Isis inquired weeping after slain Osiris
and met his ibises folded in their red, indifferent reply.

Previously published in The Caribbean Writer 5 (1991).

PHOTO: Scarlet Ibis, Caroni Bird Sanctuary, Trinidad. Photo by Ondřej Prosický, used by permission.

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NOTE: Trinidad is the larger and more populous of the islands of Trinidad and Tobago. Located 6.8 miles off the northeastern coast of Venezuela, Trinidad is often referred to as the southernmost island in the West Indies. With an area of 1,981 square miles, it is the fifth largest island in the West Indies. Trinidad has over 400 species of birds, including the scarlet ibis, one of the two national birds of Trinidad and Tobago. This medium-sized wader is a hardy, numerous, and prolific bird, with protected status around the world.

PHOTO: Scarlet ibis, Trinidad. Photo by Abraham Badenhorst, used by permission.

Map courtesy of orangesmile.com.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: A few miles from Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, the Caroni Swamp is the nightly roost of a huge flock of scarlet ibis. At dawn, they take off across the strait to spend the day in Venezuela, and at sunset they return to the trees of the island at the swamp’s center. Visitors can take a boat with Nanan through the mangrove channels to a vantage point for the twice-daily flight of the birds. Whenever they appear—their scarlet emerging from the green trees, or vanishing into them at the day’s end—the sight is otherworldy and outside of time.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Robert Bensen is a poet, essayist, teacher, editor, and publisher in Upstate New York. Most recent among six collections of poetry are Before and Orenoque, Wetumka & Other Poems (Bright Hill Press). Poetry and literary essays have appeared in AGNI, Akwe:kon, Antioch Review, Berfrois, Callaloo, The Caribbean Writer, Jamaica Journal, La presa, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry Wales, and elsewhere. He has edited anthologies of Native American and Caribbean literature, and authored a bibliographic study, American Indian and Aboriginal Canadian Childhood Studies, at Oxford University Press online. His writing has won fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Harvard University, the State of New York, Illinois Arts Council, the Robert Penn Warren Award, and others. From 1978 to 2017, he was Professor of English and Director of Writing at Hartwick College (Oneonta, New York). He conducts the community-based poetry workshop Seeing Things at Bright Hill Press and Literary Center (Treadwell, New York). He is the founding editor of two literary presses, the Red Herring Press and Woodland Arts Editions. Find more of his work at robertbenson.com.

Confession by Kyle Laws

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Confession
by Kyle Laws

I confess my struggles to Jan in a Miami hotel,
after 12 hours in a Port-au-Prince airport
trying to leave, after getting up at 5 a.m.
in Montrouis to drive partially paved roads
along coast of a bay where there are no
rules of the road, just a determination
to get there as soon as possible to not
delay a bone rattling drive, after leaving
a bunk bed with mosquito net angled in corner
and stretched to feet, where roosters raise
a 3 o’clock alarm for a 5 o’clock rising,
and waves are faint, not far from a shore
littered with plastic bottles and plastic
footwear, the shower, concrete, without
water, so I’m sticky and hot after a swim,
and nothing to eat, cheese and crackers gone
to a reunion of old friends, party I’m not
invited to, so sit alone in a wicker lounge
from a time when this retreat was lush right
here on shore, but the dock is gone to ruins
I step down from, away from the unending
rebar protruding from buildings, falling
down or going up, either despair or hope,
the between space, a purgatory which is
all and everywhere, and the drip-drip-drip
of black nylon of failed clergy as I try to
find a way back, out of the descent into
darkness that no generator, no slow drip
in a draining sink, no bath from a bucket
can wash from my soul.

PHOTO: Church in Haiti by Roy Harryman, used by permission.

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NOTE: Haiti is a country located on the island of Hispaniola in the Caribbean Sea, to the east of Cuba and Jamaica and south of The Bahamas. It occupies the western three-eighths of the island which it shares with the Dominican Republic. Haiti has an estimated population of 11.1 million, making it the second-most populous country in the Caribbean after Cuba. Europeans first arrived December 5, 1492 during the initial voyage of Christopher Columbus, who subsequently founded the first European settlement in the Americas, La Navidad, on what is now the northeastern coast of Haiti. The island was claimed by Spain, forming part of the Spanish Empire until the early 17th century. Competing claims and settlements by the French led to Spain ceding the western portion of the island to France in 1697. In the midst of the French Revolution (1789–99), slaves and free people of color launched the Haitian Revolution in 1791. After 12 years of conflict, French forces were defeated and Haiti was declared a sovereignty in 1804.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: I made four trips to Haiti, both before and after the 2010 earthquake.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Kyle Laws is based out of Steel City Art Works in Pueblo, Colorado, where she directs Line/Circle: Women Poets in Performance. Her collections include Ride the Pink Horse (Stubborn Mule Press, 2019), Faces of Fishing Creek (Middle Creek Publishing, 2018), This Town: Poems of Correspondence coauthored with Jared Smith (Liquid Light Press, 2017), So Bright to Blind (Five Oaks Press, 2015), and Wildwood (Lummox Press, 2014). With eight nominations for a Pushcart Prize and one for Best of the Net, her poems and essays have appeared in magazines and anthologies in the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Germany. She is editor and publisher of Casa de Cinco Hermanas Press. Visit her on Facebook.