Two Gun Lil

Two-Gun Lil
Karen Douglass

Two-Gun Lil is five years old.
She wears a purple skirt and vest
with white fringe, leatherette holster
for her matching six shooters.

She rides a broomstick to the edge
of the yard, careful not to trot
across the rotten cesspool cover
half hidden by waist-high grass.

A rhubarb patch by the empty barn blocks
the other end of her trail. She’s heard
that rhubarb raw can kill you.
She ties her stick pony in an empty stall

and worries that she’ll never catch
any cattle rustlers with so much in her way.
Inside, Gram has hung the jelly bag
from a knob on the cupboard door.

“Don’t touch! The jelly isn’t ready to eat.”
Nothing Lil can do for now but
accept Wonder Bread with butter
and sugar, folded to keep her hands clean.

“You can’t shoot with butter fingers.
Now go back outside.” No one tells
The Lone Ranger to go play. He doesn’t
worry about riding Silver into a cesspool,

or getting a mouthful of raw rhubarb.
Kemo Sabe won’t ever see his gram
thin as a fence rail and wonder
what he could have done to save her.

***

Karen Douglass writes poems, novels, a blog, and grocery lists. She lives in Colorado with three dogs, one cat, and her family. You can visit her at KD’s Bookblog, or you can come to Colorado. Her books include Red Goddess Poems; Bones in the Chimney (fiction); Green Rider, Thinking Horse (non-fiction); Sostenuto, (prose poems) and The Great Hunger (poems), which is available from Plain View Press (2009).

There Are Untold Failures

There Are Untold Failures
Patrick Winn

As a boy, I saw the processes of failure,
Unto those secret and leaden coves,
While others played in the industrial parks, waving dry sticks around,
I saw beautiful Maria melt into her cotton sheets
While the rest hid and sang to each other through the nettles,
Maria, we could never sing to each other.
And there was rage in me the likes of which you could not imagine.

But then, somehow, I was a man, and mellowed in the vale of years,
Before me a new generation rose in the Hollow,
shuttering and turning back and stopping.
In rising defeat, you ante-heroes, fearsome eyes for the decline.
I stand in the distance, your malignant Aeneas
Warm defector, wrapped in an aegis of calm,

But the distance between us is not that great.
Mark my words: the best things ever written have been thrown out on the backs of inventory tags
Or forgotten in the smoke and ether of broken hearts.
Heaven simply cannot exist,
If it is not a tender conclave of such failure.
You will lose beyond reckoning,
Failure upon failure, you will live forever.

Come, look into the sinking face of Maria,
You see, there, you do not know how to live.
But I love you more for it.
Your wounds are about me, and I am with you.
Sing your decompositions, and I will listen.

***

Patrick Winn is an attorney who studied literature as a grad student at Boston College, and as an undergrad at Brandeis.

Letter to a Dead Grandmother

Letter to a Dead Grandmother
Karen Douglass

Before I forget again, let me say
that I remember the front hall
with the stag’s head watching over us.
And the enamel topped kitchen table.
I remember your lap, the porch,
the rocking chair with paint so thick
I etched my initials in it with my fingernails.
Summer evenings we watched barn swallows
diving and darting, and you and Aunt Grace sang
“Bye, Bye Blackbird” and “I’ll Be Seeing You.”

Bedtime meant the door between my room
and the dining room left open because
I was afraid of the closet and a little bit scared
of the whippoorwill who sang every night
under my window. We never saw that bird.
The summer after first grade, I never
saw you again. Oh, Uncle George said
the thin woman in that high bed was you.
I didn’t believe him. Now I do. I’ve visited
the cemetery and seen your name on the stone.

In those seven years you mothered me, did you ever
resent raising another child? After all,
your youngest, Gracie, was ten the day I was born,
soon dropped into your lap when my mother vowed
she had to work and couldn’t watch me. She was right.
Not made for mothering small children, not like you.
Maybe she never noticed your hands as you made
jelly, lemon pies, mashed potatoes, tea with milk.
She drank coffee and smoked Pall Malls and married
four times. You were widowed early and never again
had the comfort of a man at your side. It wasn’t fair
that you had to suffer, never an easy day or
enough cash to shop anywhere but the IGA.

I know you’ll never read this. Writing to you now
cannot make up for my silence, or break open
the family secret that you were dying.
I was yanked away, sent off to the other grandparents,
who were good, but who cut off my braids,
and closed the bedroom door, who had no birds but
silent, tiny hummingbirds they fed on sugar water
from red glass bulbs. Now I am a grandmother,
not like you, not singing and rocking. One day I will die
and my grandson will—maybe—think about
what he might have said, but didn’t. Generations,
lineage, heritage—what is it but a bird flying over us,
dropping feathers that blow away in the breeze?

***

Karen Douglass writes poems, novels, a blog, and grocery lists. She lives in Colorado with three dogs, one cat, and her family. You can visit her at KD’s Bookblog, or you can come to Colorado. Her books include Red Goddess Poems; Bones in the Chimney (fiction); Green Rider, Thinking Horse (non-fiction); Sostenuto, (prose poems) and The Great Hunger (poems), which is available from Plain View Press (2009).

Outsiders

Outsiders
Doris Lueth Stengel

Grandfather sailed into New York on the Bremerhaven,
clutching the American dream.
He waved to the lady with the torch---
she was an immigrant too, from France.

In the steamer trunk were his tools,
plane, lathe, level, chisels.
A cabinet maker by trade, also
undertaker, because he made coffins.

He traveled to Minnesota,
where other Germans had settled.
The train traversed broad prairies.
Such good land, such opportunity.

Then came the day when a farmer
hanged himself from rafters in his barn.
The widow pleaded with grandpa
to find a place to bury her husband.

Righteous townspeople
would not abide lying near a suicide.
They were buried south of town,
tidily laid down in order of death,
too thrifty to waste farm land on large plots.

A man must be put into the ground.
The immigrant carpenter walked north
where a family had a small private cemetery.
Could he buy one plot? Not inside the fence.

To this day, too sinful to lie among neighbors,
that man lies alone outside the fence.

***

Doris Lueth Stengel grew up in North Dakota. Her paternal grandfather immigrated from Germany and this is his story. Doris is a member of Heartland Poets, League of Minnesota Poets and National Federation of State Poetry Societies (NFSPS) and has served as president of all 3 organizations.

The Sewer Line Fall

The Sewer Line Fall
Geordie de Boer

        in memory of my grandfather

Melvin judges the fall while I dig
the ditch for the sewer line. A harsh sentence,
twenty yards hard labor. “Dig a bit more
out here,” he says pointing with his shovel
keeping me bent to the task and grunting,
a Semite slave and he, my Egyptian
master warning: “The rod is in my hand,
be not idle.” Under the house we hollow
a bowl below the joint where the sewer pipes
converge before making their exit
to the septic tank. Then, with a pail nailed
to the end of a two-by-four he dips
the tank, (an Old Master’s painting in dark
tones: The Sewage Dipper), pours sewage
into the wheelbarrow, which I push. Each
bump sends sludge sluicing forward in waves
that splash my face when they slap against
the back of the barrow. Thus, am I baptized:
The Wasted Baptismal, another painting
in somber tones. On Melvin’s command
the sewage goes onto Laura’s flower garden.
It scorches the plants and the fabric of
their marriage when she finds out. We
crawl back beneath the house to break the joint.
I sit, another clod on the dirt pile,
as Melvin, like a long-time jailbird, raps
an anemic tune on the pipes till they
give way. Sewage pours out wrenching at his
pant legs dragging him into the hole. (I
imagine him as a mummy wrapped in
a toilet paper shroud.) “We didn’t dip
the tank low enough,” says Melvin. “We could
have killed more flowers,” I say grasping his
arms. Escaping to daylight we watch as
sewage flows the length of the ditch, our toil
gone to waste. “You’ll need to dig that sewage
out of there so we can lay pipe,” Melvin
says. “And be sure to not ruin the fall.”

***

Geordie de Boer, a rambler and wrangler of rhythm lives in rural Washington. He’s been published most recently by Hobo Camp Review, Hobble Creek Review, the beatnik, Offcourse, and Cirque. Visit him at Cockeyed Fits.

One Hundred Strokes

One Hundred Strokes
Bill Roberts

Never once did I count aloud
the hundredth stroke,
sound asleep in Grandma's bed
as she brushed my hair with
her silver hairbrush, counting
aloud with me till I tired,
closed my eyes, went off
to a comfortable dreamland.
Awakening next morning,
usually a Saturday, stretching
to get going, we'd dress,
head out the back door,
through her garden full of smells
that intoxicated if you lingered,
but we had a mission - the bakery.
There she purchased Parker House
rolls in a pan, still warm, so
we hurried home, made tea,
stretched out breakfast on her
sunny summer porch until most
of the rolls and orange marmalade
had disappeared into a full tummy.
I had to go back home, reluctantly,
later in the afternoon, taking
a sleep-inducing streetcar ride,
nodding as I counted blips
in the steel tracks, relaxing, yes,
nowhere near as comforting as
Grandma's soothing brush strokes.

"One Hundred Strokes" was previously published in the January 2011 issue of Long Story Short.

***

Bill Roberts is a retired nuclear scientist and widely published poet; his works having appeared in over 200 online and small-press magazines. His poetry has been nominated both for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Bill gives a seminar on how to write a poem a day in 15 minutes, then prep it for market. He, his wife of 53 years (both her age and years married), plus two totally spoiled dogs live too near the edge of Broomfield, Colorado.

Genealogy

Genealogy
Susan Duncan

I find they’d been neighbors on Fourth Street,
a garden, perhaps only a fence between.
But here
on the microfilm of the 1850 Springfield census,
they’re separated by just two lines:
David Grayston, preacher
Abraham Lincoln, lawyer
Footnote, that’s all, to a pedigree
whose pyramid of neat boxes has room alone
for my family’s birth dates, spouses, gravesites.

No place for the neighbors’.

Just a stair-stepping, very tidy
from father to child.
A careful sidestepping of the disorderly
waged beyond the boxes:
secession, sedition, emancipation,
assassination.

In my next row down
hometowns and cemeteries shift west
one state.
Joplin’s 1920 census shows
George Grayston, lawyer
lived on Elm Street with
John Baker, preacher
Richard Smith, druggist
Henry Jackson, shopkeeper

Again, I have no boxes for the neighbors.

But they wanted to be nameless
as on that night—
in the interest of the neighborhood—
they pulled on white hoods
and bathed the Grayston porch in torchlight.


Genealogy was previously published in THEMA Literary Journal, Summer 2008.

***

Susan Duncan has an MBA in arts management from the University of California, Los Angeles. Having made her living in performing arts administration and arts philanthropy for many years, she is presently an independent consultant with a performing and visual arts clientele. She has served as executive director for San Francisco’s long-running musical comedy phenomenon Beach Blanket Babylon, the al fresco California Shakespeare Theater, and the Grammy-winning, all-male vocal ensemble Chanticleer.

Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Atlanta Review, Compass Rose, the G.W. Review, Iodine Poetry Journal, The MacGuffin, OmniArts, Poem, River Oak Review, THEMA, and The Yalobusha Review.

Sterkte

Sterkte^*
Lynn Otto

Sterkte says my mother when I go,
one of the many Dutch words she knows,
one of the few I’ve learned.
Strength.

Her mother said the same to her
when she left Los Angeles for Tacoma,
two babies in diapers, no dryer.
It rained all but one day of November.

The tenth day of wet gray,
it took strength to smile even briefly.
On the twentieth, she whispered
it a hundred times. Sterkte.

My great-grandmother wished it
when her daughter, new baby in arms,
boarded the boat. Wished it for her daughter
and herself. Just to walk home.

In each letter we’ve sent: Sterkte.
Four generations, in different hands,
the one word we still write
in the mother tongue.

*(stĕrk'-tǝ)

***

Lynn Otto teaches writing classes for homeschoolers and is an adjunct writing instructor at George Fox University in Oregon. She'll begin work on an MFA in poetry at Portland State University in September 2011. Her work is in Triggerfish Critical Review, Yamhill County Arts Alliance’s Paper Gardens chapbooks, and forthcoming in Plain Spoke.

Genealogy

Genealogy
Ed Bennett

(For my Cherokee great great grandmother)

Some days I can feel your breath
in the rustle of brown paged documents
where I seek a hidden trace or revelation
from so many generations removed.

I heard your name in childhood
from hushed voices in other rooms
sharing drinks and laughter
over great grandma’s legend.

You were my dream that night,
drawn from purloined snippets
of grown up conversation hidden
like coins beneath my pillow.

You have been erased from us,
turned from flesh to whisper,
invisible as the wind
yet part of me, contained in every vein.

Mother of wind, my blood, my breath
sit with me as I glean these records
where the pieces of your life lie open
for me to take and place on your bones.

My old life falls from me like leaves
in an autumn gust of anxious change,
to take this legacy of fire and drum
from someone gone to someone resurrected

You are part of me, a shaman’s cry,
the breath of change roiling my soul
like the angel’s finger in Siloam’s pool
embraced with the chant of eagle voices.

Bless the whispers of my childhood,
Mother of the Spirit Wind,
that restored my blood
with the songs of my lost people.

***


Ed Bennett is a Telecommunications Engineer living in Las Vegas and is a Staff
Editor of Quill and Parchment. Originally from New York City, his work appeared
in The Patterson Literary Review, The Externalist, Quill and Parchment, and
Touch: The Journal of Healing. In March of this year The Lives You Touch Press
published his chapbook, “A Transit of Venus”.

The Captain

The Captain
Bradley McIlwain

The Captain, again,
has come and gone.

He has been here twice
in the last month,

each time his purpose
unknown –

and we have left empty
handed

burning with the same
unanswered question,

each time, taking only
what you have to give.

I heard from your mouth
he was the lover no one

knew you had, not even
your daughter who was

baffled by your seventy
year silence,

left to wonder about her
legal birth.

We wondered if he died
in the war,

but you wouldn’t tell us;
only that he was coming

to take you away,
from that steel bed

and whitewashed walls;
when you were afraid to

fade out with the rest of
the furniture.

To this day I wonder
If he made it to your

deathbed, standing
there in uniform

with your luggage
and your boarding

pass,
waiting to take you

to the harbor.
No photograph

of him remained,
whose name you buried

with the dead;
and all his secrets

on your skin
were carried by the tide.

***


Bradley McIlwain is a Canadian-based writer and poet, who lives and works in rural Ontario. His works have appeared in Wanderings Magazine, New Verse News, Rope and Wire, Frostwriting, The Copperfield Review, and others. He holds a Bachelor of Arts, Honours in English Literature from Trent University. His first collection of poetry, Fracture, was published in 2010, and is available at Blurb.

Warrior Blessing

Warrior Blessing
Patricia Wellingham-Jones

Two old warriors
long divorced
bow gray-streaked heads
over their wounded firstborn.
Ask the Ancient One
to gird their son with strength,
hold him steady
in his new course.
They gaze at each other’s
life-scarred face,
smile about pain
inflicted, time-eased.
Muttering thanks
for what they’ve learned
they pass it in silence
with hands and eyes
to the young warrior
going into his greatest battle.

Warrior Blessing was previously published in Kota Press Poetry Journal, 2002

***

Patricia Wellingham-Jones is widely published with an interest in healing writing and the benefits of writing and reading work together. Twenty years ago she got fired up about genealogy and wound up researching, writing and publishing five family histories.

Hub

Hub
Hester L Furey

You are the center, my word of power,
my whole life a series of your spokes,
of radii beginning with you
in the short overlap between us.
All my life I have flirted with Death
for your sake, but as I give her up,
Father, I lose you --
each day your flesh retreats a little
further from my mind’s anxious touch.
I gather now only buckeyes you carried,
copper bracelets, a feathered hipster hat, cocked to one side.
I find your smell on a lover's cheeks
from time to time, or asthmatic, I belt out
your wheezing, irresistible laugh,
and a few spoken phrases
catch me unawares in your voice.

You are becoming an idea, a story:
a wild old wicked man, a rake of the thirties,
the third son, the one who had adventures,
who threw parties every week and invited everybody,
right down to the police.
You kept a gun propped behind the bedroom door,
another across the back of the car, a pistol
in your desk, and probably another on your person,
for reasons we never discussed.
You talked to me about social policy from infancy
and invented “take your daughter to work day”
long before feminists thought of it. At three
I learned to read, so you gave me encyclopedias.
You left home in your teens,
with only a sixth grade education.
In 1929 when your mother died,
you came back to the farm in Amboy.

Then the market crashed, and
men dived from buildings in the big cities.
You hated farming. You opened
a laundromat, a bus station, bought an inn,
opened a bonded warehouse,
bought cotton for Hohenberg Brothers.
All through the Depression,
you had money when no one else did.
You let Mr. Philips borrow your car to court Miss Ruby,
and you never let anyone else pick up the tab.
At the height of success
you suddenly left everything behind,
the respect of your neighbors, the goodwill of family,
even a cabin at the river,
for a stubborn girl, crazy in fact,
young enough to be your daughter.

Later, you complained to her mother, almost your age.
The girl was wild and uncontrollable, you said.
She lied every day, drank, started brawls in public places,
and spent money like a house on fire. As if you didn't know.
The mother had herself a good laugh, wiped her eyes
on her apron, and served you more cabbage,
just the way you liked it, still a little crunchy,
steamed with butter and pepper.
Then she served you an old country joke.
"You wanted her so bad," she said.
"You got her. She's yours. We won't take her back."

The crazy girl did love you, in her way.
She knew that I preferred you, so when I asked,
she brushed me off, saying you cared only
for “women and money,” but in a good mood
after a few drinks she loved to recount
your life together, the good and bad
mixed together so that I grew up perverse,
unable to tell which was which:
The time you almost bit her toe off,
or the time she drove up and found you with Mary,
did not ask questions, just reached down and threw
a cinder block through the cabin window,
and you refused to fix it all winter long.

Before she died, she cracked herself up telling
about the babysitter who ate your chocolate rabbit.
Coming home from a party to find
the tub full of cold clean water,
me in bed with black filthy feet,
and the rabbit missing from the freezer,
the two of you parsed these signs
and discussed your conclusions.
She raged, "I told her to bathe Lee, damn it!" but
you said drily, "Naw, she thought you said,
`just go on in the kitchen,
an' eat up every damn thing in sight.'"
When you died you had lived with diabetes
and suffered cancer twice, but I always believed
– the therapist got this one the wrong way around –
my mother had finally killed you.
Over her protests, you had named me
Hester after your mother,
the only woman, you said, who ever really loved you,
the one whose death called you home.
The crazy girl called me “baby” for 3 weeks,
unable to say the name while I nearly died
before Dr. Lee saved me with goat's milk.
Sometimes I still run into people who knew you.
They tell me I have your hands.

***

Hester Furey teaches college English. She has published Dictionary of Biography 345: American Radical and Reform Writers, Second Series (She compiled and edited the volume, wrote the intro and two other essays), various academic essays and reference book pieces, and a chapbook of poems called Little Fish (Finishing Line Press, 2010). She lives in Decatur, Georgia.

Third Cousins in Norway

Third Cousins in Norway
Candace Simar

I would have been the one who stayed
behind. Timid, afraid of oceans
choosing familiar over precarious
caring for parents and sickly aunts
safer than uncertain wilderness
where Red Indians threatened.

I would have written letters
with news of deaths or sickness
births and weddings
tucked pansy seeds inside envelopes
to homesick brothers on North Dakota
prairies and Minnesota pineries.
Read their stories from afar, stroking
blond curls of nephews’ hair
pressing the locks to my lips
knowing I would never see their faces.

I would have been the last of my
generation left in Norway,
the only one to speak with tenderness
connect a face with names, share memories from childhood
answer questions why they left and what they gained
or lost by leaving.

I would be the one who stands
on the other side of the door
flatbread and lefse baked and waitin
hand-woven cloths with Hardanger lace
reindeer sausage, gjetost brown cheese
everything to perfection.
Welcoming distant cousins from America,
astonished they could travel so far
and yet find their way home

***

Candace Simar is a member of Brainerd Writer’s Alliance, Bards of a Feather and the Western Writers of America. Candace’s historical novels, Abercrombie Trail (2009); Pomme de Terre (2010); and Birdie (2011) tell the stories of Scandinavian immigrants in 19th Century Minnesota.

Photo Album

Photo Album
Juliet Wilson

She didn’t travel much
Clacton, the Isle of Man
for family visits and sea air.

Had her feet done before each trip
and a special blue rinse.
Packed a paperback.

Once there, played bingo, bought gifts
for the grandchildren,
drank tea with distant cousins.

For a memento of every holiday
she visited a photo booth,
pasted the prints into a book.

The snaps are still lined up, numbered
from early black and white –
bright eyes and jaunty hats

to later, older faces
staring straight ahead
bravely in full colour.

***

Juliet Wilson is an Edinburgh based poet, adult education tutor and conservation volunteer. She blogs at Crafty Green Poet and at Over Forty Shades. Her chapbook Unthinkable Skies was published in 2010.

Labor Day

Labor Day
Laura Madeline Wiseman

Council Bluffs, Iowa, late 1860s

Miss Florence E. Felts
Durand, Illinois

Happy birthday littlest sister!

I’m writing to announce our first,
Alice M. Fletcher. She shares your day.
The delivery was long. She seems to thrive.

Did I ever tell you what I remember
about your birth? I was seventeen
when you were born—

father (48), mother (43), Susan (24),
Aaron (22), Sarah (19), George (16),
Oliver (14) Emeline (14), Edward (13),
Armihta (8), Orilla (5), and Charles (3)

—all of us were there
by the summer kitchen. It was Sunday.
Besides the labor, only prayer work was done.
Our boarder, a new minister, whispered

verse as he turned pages in his book.
On the trellis porch above the kindling
a wasp flicked its wings as it climbed.
Runners twisted up the whitewash

with scarlet blossoms open as vulvas.
Honeybees purred in the red petals.
The leaves of broomcorn and squash
swayed in our mother’s garden.

Beyond the privy’s crescent moon,
father paced in the wildflowers
as mother cried out during your birth.
I think he knew something good
was coming into this world.

Matilda

***

Laura Madeline Wiseman is a doctoral candidate at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln where she teaches English. She is the author of Sprung, forthcoming from San Francisco Bay Press, as well as three chapbooks of poetry, My Imaginary (Dancing Girl Press, 2010), Ghost Girl (Pudding House, 2010), and Branding Girls (Finishing Line Press, 2011). Her work has appeared in Margie, Prairie Schooner, Arts & Letters, Blackbird, and 13th Moon. She notes this poem is based on the life of her ancestor, nineteenth century suffragist and lecturer, Matilda Fletcher (1842-1909).

Draft

Draft
Jacob Oet


First the settlers’ dream
to build a home.

Later the immigrants dreamed
of two-bedroom apartments
and fantasized
about the availability of showers.

Some came naked.
Some came with clothing but sold their clothing
for a bag of seeds
from trees back home.

And they planted their children in the new way,
showering them with allowances
and enlisting them in public education.

Some joined the army.
They planted
only their own gravestones.
In spring they bore a name etched into rock.

My name is Jacob.
I am the grandchild of second-hand dreams.

***

Jacob Oet lives in Solon, Ohio. He has loved writing and making images since he was little. Jacob’s poetry and images appear in The New Verse News, The Jet Fuel Review, Superstition Review, H.O.D., and OVS Magazine.

Student by choice, Jacob Oet is never sure which language he speaks. You may spot him in a park, forest or beach, with planted feet, arms stretched up and shaking in a breeze. But don’t let him see you; he likes to sing to strangers. He takes photos of snow, and hates winter.

Dorothy Q - Oliver Wendell Holmes

Dorothy Q.
A Family Portrait
Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894)

GRANDMOTHER’S mother: her age, I guess,
Thirteen summers, or something less;
Girlish bust, but womanly air;
Smooth, square forehead with uprolled hair;
Lips that lover has never kissed;
Taper fingers and slender wrist;
Hanging sleeves of stiff brocade;
So they painted the little maid.

On her hand a parrot green
Sits unmoving and broods serene.
Hold up the canvas full in view,—
Look! there ’s a rent the light shines through,
Dark with a century’s fringe of dust,—
That was a Red-Coat’s rapier-thrust!
Such is the tale the lady old,
Dorothy’s daughter’s daughter, told.

Who the painter was none may tell,—
One whose best was not over well;
Hard and dry, it must be confessed,
Flat as a rose that has long been pressed;
Yet in her cheek the hues are bright,
Dainty colors of red and white,
And in her slender shape are seen
Hint and promise of stately mien.

Look not on her with eyes of scorn,—
Dorothy Q. was a lady born!
Ay! since the galloping Normans came,
England’s annals have known her name;
And still to the three-hilled rebel town
Dear is that ancient name’s renown,
For many a civic wreath they won,
The youthful sire and the gray-haired son.

O Damsel Dorothy! Dorothy Q.!
Strange is the gift that I owe to you;
Such a gift as never a king
Save to daughter or son might bring,—
All my tenure of heart and hand,
All my title to house and land;
Mother and sister and child and wife
And joy and sorrow and death and life!

What if a hundred years ago
Those close-shut lips had answered No,
When forth the tremulous question came
That cost the maiden her Norman name,
And under the folds that look so still
The bodice swelled with the bosom’s thrill?
Should I be I, or would it be
One tenth another, to nine tenths me?

Soft is the breath of a maiden’s Yes:
Not the light gossamer stirs with less;
But never a cable that holds so fast
Through all the battles of wave and blast,
And never an echo of speech or song
That lives in the babbling air so long!
There were tones in the voice that whispered then
You may hear to-day in a hundred men.

O lady and lover, how faint and far
Your images hover,—and here we are,
Solid and stirring in flesh and bone,—
Edward’s and Dorothy’s—all their own,—
A goodly record for Time to show
Of a syllable spoken so long ago!—
Shall I bless you, Dorothy, or forgive
For the tender whisper that bade me live?

It shall be a blessing, my little maid!
I will heal the stab of the Red-Coat’s blade,
And freshen the gold of the tarnished frame,
And gild with a rhyme your household name;
So you shall smile on us brave and bright
As first you greeted the morning’s light,
And live untroubled by woes and fears
Through a second youth of a hundred years.

***

This poem is about Dorothy Quincy, the mother of Holmes' maternal grandmother.

Looking Into Origin

Looking Into Origin
Jessica Erica Hahn

I am from the green-blue world
born upon the high seas
to salty dog expatriates
who met on Belizian soil
who birthed me on a ship
where gulls flipped through the air
and sunshine glittered on the sea

a long line of fighters is where I spring from
on the matrilineal side,
Prussians pushing through
the Baltic sea, into forests sweeping
escaping Nazis, running to New York
where she grew up, leaving the money behind,
fighting with the freedom riders
raising my sister alone

my father hails from the tinker-builder-welder side
making machines for smashing atoms
weaving through quantum physics
surviving accidents that left others dead
building rockets to send mice to outer space
& riding motorcycles and mail trucks across the land
destroyer escorts & minesweepers from a mothball fleet
full of schemes & dreams
before drowning decades later in a southern sea

two wild creatures of the 60s & 70s
shirking lines of normalcy
crying for freedom in a whirling world
clinging to architectural visions of life together
propelled to leave remnants for posterity

birds flew over where my father
was to be buried in the sea, upon a silver sunrise
& the first night of many my mother woke alone
then there was the migration westwards for
us three, to land in SF, the city by the bay

build our timbered home upon a granite hill
and when the thieves crept in our windows,
padding softly, scattering pictures across the floor
we did not run or hide.
when cops devastated and raided us
it was simply fate’s brutality
my mom incarcerated for growing marijuana trees
somewhere someone whispers,
beware of crossing boundaries
or you’ll get what you deserve

I live in mythology & am
from the deepest part of earth
I have a darkened mantle
in which lives a craggy dragon
a guardian for my heart
to make the untrustworthy turn
to go back home,
or sweep in ones who are
like the old

***

Jessica Erica Hahn lives and writes in San Francisco, where she might be seen wandering over a hilltop with a baby on her back and a camera on her hip. In the predawn hours she's working on a memoir about her freight-riding days (Ontologica is publishing a selection this summer), and a novel about seafaring hippies in the 1970s. She's a student in the MFA program at San Francisco State, and has several self-published titles to her name, something she's both proud of and slightly ashamed of. Some of her writing can be found at jessicaericahahn.com and Hill Babies.

Judge Hilton and the Women's Hotel: Matilda Lectures

Judge Hilton and the Women's Hotel: Matilda Lectures
New York, 1878
Laura Madeline Wiseman

Urged and sent by a committee of sixty women, Matilda
Dared to come to New York alone with certificates of her
Good character. She arrived at the Women’s Hotel
Early one rainy morning, sick. No one received her or took

Her luggage. She was told she could not be admitted. Out
In the rain she purchased her breakfast. She threatened a
Lawsuit. The clerk said she might come in. Days afterward
The judge called and apologized. He did not want
Out-of-town women, only working women. He said,
Now, see here. The press will be down on us if we make

A single mistake. Matilda knew that Judge Hilton was
No worse than other men. Back in the Women’s Hotel, the
Doors were thrown open on Matilda with the remark

They were never to be closed. Lady physicians couldn’t
Have libraries in their rooms. Lady artists couldn’t have
Easels. The management turned pale when instruments

Were mentioned. Then, a Superintendent ordered Matilda
Out of the library because she brought in a dress to
Mend its ruffle. But I have seen ladies sewing in here,
Even crocheting, she answered. The Superintendent said,
No. That’s different. Those were small things. Though
She hated to kneel to one man for charity, the Women’s

Hotel professed to offer protection and yet had not really been
Open to women. Matilda thought the judge ought to know how
The hotel’s inmates were presided over like school girls.
Even if he thinks otherwise, he doesn’t rule this country. It isn’t
Like a kingdom. But if it was, he’d never be selected as King.

***

Laura Madeline Wiseman is a doctoral candidate at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln where she teaches English. She is the author of Sprung, forthcoming from San Francisco Bay Press, as well as three chapbooks of poetry, My Imaginary (Dancing Girl Press, 2010), Ghost Girl (Pudding House, 2010), and Branding Girls (Finishing Line Press, 2011). Her work has appeared in Margie, Prairie Schooner, Arts & Letters, Blackbird, and 13th Moon. She notes this poem is based on the life of her ancestor, nineteenth century suffragist and lecturer, Matilda Fletcher (1842-1909).

This is How the Holocaust Began

This is How the Holocaust Began
Emily Rosen

Grandma took me to the museum
We saw dinosaurs
or mummies
or 17th century costumes
or pictures by Turnbull
I was nine
or twelve
or six

Outside,
a trillion steps down
Grandma gave the Good Humor man
a nickel
He gave me a chocolate pop.

Right near,
right near the Good Humor man
the newspaper wailed,
“Hitler invades Poland!”

“What’s Poland?” I asked

Grandma sat on the steps
of the museum
and pulled a picture
from her wallet,
a little girl rolling in the grass

“That’s Poland,” she said.

***

Since 2000 Emily Rosen has been teaching a memoir-writing workshop in Boca Raton Florida, "Memories, Milestones and Memoirs." A background in journalism, education and mental health counseling, for over 20 years she has had a column in local papers, "Everything's Coming Up Rosen." For over 17 years she has been a volunteer leader of mental health support groups. She has published two anthologies of stories from her classes - "Memories, Milestones and Memoirs: Selections From A Writing Workshop.