Poems of Transition

Turning a Corner:

Exploring and Creating Poems of Transition

with Angela Voras-Hills / Thursday, January 20, 2022 / 7:00-8:30pm

PROMPTS

1. Think about how you marked the changing of the seasons when you were younger. Were the seasonal changes of your memory linked to a holiday or certain people or activities? What smells do you remember? Were you with others or alone? Do you remember any particular clothes?

2. Think about how you mark the changing seasons now? How have the seasons of the year changed for you?

Read “The Chorus,” by Craig Morgan Teicher (below)

4. Are there ways to combine these ideas not chronologically? Can you maybe incorporate the perpetuity of seasonal changes into your experiences of the changing seasons as you change?

5. Think about a time in your life when you felt like you lost yourself. What were the circumstances? Use as much detail as possible. How did you find yourself again?

Read "Poem Beginning With a Retweet," by Maggie Smith (below)

6. Type into your search bar “If you don’t” and then one more letter (for example, just type "If you don't r"). See how your search engine thinks you might want finish the sentence. Choose one of these lines as the first line of your poem. Or use a line from a book or headline as your first line. Maybe you can incorporate repetition or a list into your poem?

1. Think about a moment in your life when you realized nothing would be the same. Write about that moment in as much detail as possible.

2. Now think back to the time before that moment. What do you wish you would have spent more time on? What do you wish you would have appreciated more or paid closer attention to? Think about all of the ways that time was special. Write about those things in detail.

3. Now, think about who you are now, looking back at all of this. What do you know now about who you are that you wouldn’t have known if it weren’t for that moment?

Read "Salad Days," by Barbara Ras (below)

4. Go back through all of your notes and find a way to connect them. Maybe they connect chronologically or thematically and move back and forth in time? Can you condense that last part of the prompt— you looking back— into a sentence or two and make it a turn?

POEMS

Poem Beginning With A Retweet

by Maggie Smith

If you drive past horses and don’t say horses

you’re a psychopath. If you see an airplane

but don’t point it out. A rainbow,

a cardinal, a butterfly. If you don’t

whisper-shout albino squirrel! Deer!

Red fox! If you hear a woodpecker

and don’t shush everyone around you

into silence. If you find an unbroken

sand dollar in a tide pool. If you see

a dorsal fin breaking the water.

If you see the moon and don’t say

oh my god look at the moon. If you smell

smoke and don’t search for fire.

If you feel yourself receding, receding,

and don’t tell anyone until you’re gone.

https://blueflowerarts.com/illuminations/poem-beginning-with-a-retweet/

Salad Days

by Barbara Ras

How easy then, the fun house at Lincoln Park

before it grew into a field of weeds, you could buy

five tickets for a buck from a blank face in a booth

and enter the dark with your brother to be scared

by tilting floors, phony doors, corpses

bursting out of coffins, and once out into blue sky

dash breathless to your mother and father, dazed,

you could have called them salad days,

but why would you — no one in your family

had read Shakespeare — so you bought

French fries, doused them with malt vinegar,

the four of you, competing for your share

of potatoes improved by salt and grease,

and nothing in those early evenings free

of care could have prepared you

to be the last one left, the one

with grief to spare.

https://granta.com/salad-days/

Petty Theft

by Rosalie Moffett

Forsythia will forever remind me

of my mother stealing

branches of it outside the Doubletree Inn

in Murfreesboro, Tennessee,

for her mother’s funeral. Stupid strip-mall

side of town we’d gone to for Starbucks,

caffeine fortification and an Office Max

to print the programs. That’s one facet

of the end: your family scrounging the city-side

for something pretty as tribute under the eyes

of Ruby Tuesday patrons. Here I am,

still young, young-ish, no kids, perched

in the bland middle swath of my life, wondering what

I’ll pilfer for my own mother’s ceremony. Her own

purple irises, perhaps, or if in winter

the prickly stalks of thistles, brown

and old but holding magnificent

crowns of snow: translucent sculptures

of time I’m taking from some future to let

melt in my present embrace of eventual grief.

I know each moment I poach just repopulates.

Something borrowed is the standard rule

for weddings; something stolen, my new protocol

for funerals. Here I am, young, my whole life

ahead of me! Whole life-ish. I shouldn’t dwell

on any of this. It’s the start of spring. Everyone

is still alive. Everyone, within reason. The yellow

branches of forsythia are fireworks, shedding

bright sparks in piles on this parking lot.

There’s a Starbucks nearby, no matter where I go.

There’s a big box store, a row of measly

ornamental shrubs, a tree or two.

There’s the present where everyone lives, now

studded with moments I’ve robbed from a time

I imagine, in which a child watches me scavenge

the landscape for bits of beauty,

learns how to do it herself.

from New England Review 40.4

The Chorus

by Craig Morgan Teicher

It’s, you know, the part that repeats,

the bit you’re supposed

to remember, the bit that bears

repeating, the part that means

something new

each time, something different,

and the same thing, too,

the thing you can’t forget,

that gets stuck in your head.

So, like, childhood

is endless and over

almost as soon as it begins?

Yeah, like that. Ten years

shrinks like the pages

of a water-damaged book.

No, the pages don’t really shrink

or shrivel, they crinkle, get kinda

crisp and brittle, but

time’s like that, a wrinkle,

and suddenly you’ve been

married as long as

you were ever a kid,

ever awash in the interminable

Thursday of your first ten years, when

three months was an aeon, when,

like, childhood was endless

and over as soon as it began.

See what I did there? Shifted

the refrain into the middle.

Yeah, time is like that, and

suddenly your newborn

is ten and your wife

is celebrating the birthday

only grownups do,

and you must be older

than your mom was

at your age, and it’s not

Thursday—was it ever? And the two

pills you have to take every night.

How is it Sunday, I mean

Monday, this morning, your alarm,

your coffee grumbling, thunder,

and the kids (two of them,

suddenly) are out the door, and

their childhood is

endless and already over

as soon as it begins, and

you’re on the bus to work. See what

I did there? I don’t. The four

pills you have to take three

times every day, you might

as well be already

at your desk, your deathbed,

holding your daughter’s

grownup hand, you

hope, the hospital calm and

clean, like the one your mother

died in, and there’s hopefully

money somewhere to take care

of everything, and this

is like childhood, endless

and over as soon as it begins,

or as close as you’ll ever get

again—see what I did

there? Did you

see? Did anyone?

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/06/03/the-chorus

Opera Singer

by Ross Gay

Today my heart is so goddamned fat with grief

that I’ve begun hauling it in a wheelbarrow. No. It’s an anvil

dragging from my neck as I swim

through choppy waters swollen with the putrid corpses of hippos,

which means lurking, somewhere below, is the hungry

snout of a croc waiting to spin me into an oblivion

worse than this run-on simile, which means only to say:

I’m sad. And everyone knows what that means.

And in my sadness I’ll walk to a café,

and not see light in the trees, nor finger the bills in my pocket

as I pass the boarded houses on the block. No,

I will be slogging through the obscure country of my sadness

in all its monotone flourish, and so imagine my surprise

when my self-absorption gets usurped

by the sound of opera streaming from an open window,

and the sun peeks ever-so-slightly from behind his shawl,

and this singing is getting closer, so that I can hear the

delicately rolled r’s like a hummingbird fluttering the tongue

which means a language more beautiful than my own,

and I don’t recognize the song

though I’m jogging toward it and can hear the woman’s

breathing through the record’s imperfections and above me

two bluebirds dive and dart and a rogue mulberry branch

leaning over an abandoned lot drags itself across my face,

staining it purple and looking, now, like a mad warrior of glee

and relief I run down the street, and I forgot to mention

the fifty or so kids running behind me, some in diapers,

some barefoot, all of them winged and waving their pacifiers

and training wheels and nearly trampling me

when in a doorway I see a woman in slippers and a floral housedress

blowing in the warm breeze who is maybe seventy painting the doorway

and friends, it is not too much to say

it was heaven sailing from her mouth and all the fish in the sea

and giraffe saunter and sugar in my tea and the forgotten angles

of love and every name of the unborn and dead

from this abuelita only glancing at me

before turning back to her earnest work of brushstroke and lullaby

and because we all know the tongue’s clumsy thudding

makes of miracles anecdotes let me stop here

and tell you I said thank you.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/92017/opera-singer

Two Men & a Truck

by Laura Kasischke

Once, I was as large

as any living creature could be.

I could lift the world and carry it

from my breast to its bath.

When I looked down from the sky

you could see the love in my eye:

“Oh, tiny world, if anything

ever happened to you, I would die.”

And I said, “No!” to the hand. Snatched

the pebble from the mouth, fished it out

and told the world it would choke!

Warned the world over & over! “Do

you hear me? Do you want to choke?!”

But how was the world to know

what the truth might be? Perhaps

they grant you special powers, these

choking stones. Maybe

they change the child into a god, all-swallowing.

For, clearly, there were other gods.

The world could see

that I, too, was at the mercy of something.

Sure, I could point to the sky

and say its name, but I couldn’t make it change.

Some days it was blue, true, but others

were ruined by its gray:

“I’m sorry, little world —

no picnic, no parade, no swimming pool today ... ”

And the skinned knee in spite of me.

And why else would there be

such terror in the way she screamed, and the horn honking,

and the squealing wheels, and, afterward, her cold

sweat against my cheek?

Ah, she wants us to live forever.

It’s her weakness ... Now I see!

But, once, I was larger

than any other being —

larger, perhaps, than any being

had any right to be.

Because, of course, eventually, the world

grew larger, and larger, until it could lift

me up and put me down anywhere

it pleased. Until, finally, I would need

its help to move the bird bath, the book-

shelf, the filing cabinet. “And

could you put my desk by the window, sweetie?”

A truck, two men, one of them my son, and

everything I ever owned, and they

didn’t even want to stop for lunch.

Even the freezer. Even the piano.

(“You can have it if you can move it.”)

But, once, I swear, I was ... And now

this trunk in the attic to prove it:

These shoes in the palm of my hand?

You used to wear them on your feet.

This blanket the size of a hand towel?

I used to wrap it around you sleeping

in my arms like this. See? This

is how small the world used to be when

everything else in the world was me.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/58008/two-men-a-truck

Aubade with Burning City

by Ocean Vuong

South Vietnam, April 29, 1975: Armed Forces Radio played Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas” as a code to begin Operation Frequent Wind, the ultimate evacuation of American civilians and Vietnamese refugees by helicopter during the fall of Saigon.

Milkflower petals on the street

like pieces of a girl’s dress.

May your days be merry and bright ...

He fills a teacup with champagne, brings it to her lips.

Open, he says.

She opens.

Outside, a soldier spits out

his cigarette as footsteps

fill the square like stones fallen from the sky. May all

your Christmases be white as the traffic guard

unstraps his holster.

His hand running the hem

of her white dress.

His black eyes.

Her black hair.

A single candle.

Their shadows: two wicks.

A military truck speeds through the intersection, the sound of children

shrieking inside. A bicycle hurled

through a store window. When the dust rises, a black dog

lies in the road, panting. Its hind legs

crushed into the shine

of a white Christmas.

On the nightstand, a sprig of magnolia expands like a secret heard

for the first time.

The treetops glisten and children listen, the chief of police

facedown in a pool of Coca-Cola.

A palm-sized photo of his father soaking

beside his left ear.

The song moving through the city like a widow.

A white ... A white ... I’m dreaming of a curtain of snow

falling from her shoulders.

Snow crackling against the window. Snow shredded

with gunfire. Red sky.

Snow on the tanks rolling over the city walls.

A helicopter lifting the living just out of reach.

The city so white it is ready for ink.

The radio saying run run run.

Milkflower petals on a black dog

like pieces of a girl’s dress.

May your days be merry and bright. She is saying

something neither of them can hear. The hotel rocks

beneath them. The bed a field of ice

cracking.

Don’t worry, he says, as the first bomb brightens

their faces, my brothers have won the war

and tomorrow ...

The lights go out.

I’m dreaming. I’m dreaming ...

to hear sleigh bells in the snow ...

In the square below: a nun, on fire,

runs silently toward her god —

Open, he says.

She opens.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/56769/aubade-with-burning-city

Aubade with a Broken Neck

by Traci Brimhall

The first night you don't come home

summer rains shake the clematis.

I bury the dead moth I found in our bed,

scratch up a rutabaga and eat it rough

with dirt. The dog finds me and presents

between his gentle teeth a twitching

nightjar. In her panic, she sings

in his mouth. He gives me her pain

like a gift, and I take it. I hear

the cries of her young, greedy with need,

expecting her return, but I don't let her go

until I get into the house. I read

the auspices the way she flutters against

the wallpaper's moldy roses means

all can be lost. How she skims the ceiling

means a storm approaches. You should see

her in the beginnings of her fear, rushing

at the starless window, her body a dart,

her body the arrow of longing, aimed,

as all desperate things are, to crash

not into the object of desire,

but into the darkness behind it.

http://www.versedaily.org/2010/brokenneck.shtml

Obit

by Victoria Chang

Victoria Chang—died unknowingly on June

24, 2009 on the I-405 freeway. Born in

the Motor City, it is fitting she died on a

freeway. When her mother called about

her father’s heart attack, she was living an

indented life, a swallow that didn’t dip.

This was not her first death. All her deaths

had fallen like snow except this one. It

didn’t matter that her mother was wrong

(it was a stroke) but that Victoria Chang

had to ask whether she should drive to

San Diego to see the frontal lobe. When

her mother said yes, Victoria Chang had t

he feeling of not wanting to. Someone

heard that feeling. Because he did not die

but all of his words did. At the hospital,

Victoria Chang cried when her father no

longer made sense. This was before she

understood the cruelty of his disease. It

would be the last time she cried in front of

it. She switched places with her shadow

because suffering changes shape and

happens secretly.

https://blackbird.vcu.edu/v17n1/poetry/chang-v/obit-victoria-page.shtml

Pitching Horseshoes

by Claudia Emerson

Some of your buddies might come around

for a couple of beers and a game,

but most evenings, you pitched horseshoes

alone. I washed up the dishes

or watered the garden to the thudding

sound of the horseshoe in the pit,

or the practiced ring of metal

against metal, after the silent

arc—end over end. That last

summer you played a seamless, unscored

game against yourself, or night

falling, or coming in the house.

You were good at it. From the porch

I watched you become shadowless,

then featureless, until I knew

you couldn't see either, and still

the dusk rang out, your aim that easy;

between the iron stakes you had driven

into the hard earth yourself, you paced

back and forth as if there were a decision

to make, and you were the one to make it.

https://blackbird.vcu.edu/v2n1/poetry/emerson_c/horseshoes.htm

Toad

by Kathryn Nuernberger

My child is sitting cross-legged on the floor reading to herself.

Sometimes she is so full of need I push her to the floor.

Only once I did that and I don’t even remember the moment

right, but I was trying to wipe urine off my leg and she was

naughty like a squirrel and jumping and singing and her head

slammed into my chin, which hurt and even more than that,

it pissed me off, because she’s my beautiful child, but in that

button snap of a moment she was suddenly just one more person

and I pushed her away in a way that felt to me like setting her

down, but awkwardly, because of how she was also balancing

her feet on my feet as I tried to pour out a bowl of pee

from her little potty as a toothbrush dangled foaming

from my mouth. Somewhere in the mess of that morning

she’d become person enough to, in the space between us,

create force of momentum, and then I did not set her down,

but pushed her and she fell away from it against the wall

and was crying because I, her mommy, pushed her. And I know

this should be the poem about how I’m horrified at myself,

the poem about what in ourselves we have to live with,

but in that moment which followed two years of breastfeeding

and baby-wearing and sixty-nine hours of natural childbirth

and the hemorrhaging and the uncertain operation, after which

I pumped every two hours, careful not to let the cord tangle

in the IV. Even then when she cried and no matter what

and no matter and no matter and no matter and no matter what,

I held her all night if she cried so she would not ever know

someday you’ll cry alone, but I held her and ached and leaked

and bled too as long as it took. Of course there’ve been nights

since but sometimes it feels as if I’ve never been asleep again,

so when I say I pushed my two-year-old against a wall and I don’t

remember it happening that way but it happened and I did

and I’ve been wondering a long time now what the limit is

and when I would find the end of myself, and that day, which

was yesterday, was the end. And this day, when we played

hide-and-seek with Daddy, and touched bugs, and read

Frog and Toad Are Friends twice together before she read it

to herself as I wrote this, this is the day that comes after.

“What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why”

by Edna St. Vincent Millay

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,

I have forgotten, and what arms have lain

Under my head till morning; but the rain

Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh

Upon the glass and listen for reply,

And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain

For unremembered lads that not again

Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.

Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree,

Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,

Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:

I cannot say what loves have come and gone,

I only know that summer sang in me

A little while, that in me sings no more.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46557/what-lips-my-lips-have-kissed-and-where-and-why