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The poet for January gives us some pointers on “deep ecology," the spiritual aspect of green living. A profound union with the natural world does not come without commitment &ndash even sacrifice &ndash she warns, but the rewards are beyond compare. — Meredith Holmes
Advice to Myself, Lesson One
by Darlene Montonaro
First make a home in the forest
with air as your door frame and birds
your only companions. Bathe
in a cold mountain stream, your hair
the ripple and roll, your mind as loose
as the current. Learn the color
of birdsong, the smell of thunder,
and the way to tell time
with shadows and trees. In gratitude
spill wine from your glass, share
watermelon with raccoons. Let inchworms
make their slow, painful way
up your arm as a lesson
in patience. Eat silence
for breakfast and penance
as your evening meal. Read
the letters delivered by the leaves
and the cursive of stars in the night sky.
Go to bed smelling of pine tar, camp smoke,
and rain under the night sky
beside the fire pit
where all your memories burn.
Darlene Montonaro lives in Lakewood and was, for 13 years, executive director of the Poets' and Writers' League of Greater Cleveland (now The Lit). She is a member of the Take Nine poets.
Valentine’s Day comes in mid-winter, when we need it most: the holiday season is behind us, and spring is a distant hope. The poet for February draws us into a vivid childhood memory that shows us how we can, in a way, always return to the people we have loved. — Meredith Holmes
After the Blizzard
by Linda Tuthill
Sunday morning we trudge to church
through corridors of yesterday's snow.
Sun fingers the facets in crystals,
turning the familiar into a dazzle chamber.
I reach back across the years
and grasp my dad’s gloved hand.
He bundles me onto my Lightning Glider,
long overcoat flapping, as he pulls
me to Friedens Evangelical and Reformed.
Metal-clipped galoshes squish along
the rural highway, the sled’s runners
cutting lines in the snowy crust.
We grow shadows in a world of hush,
white stretching like rumpled linen
across the sleeping fields.
Linda Tuthill lives in Shaker Heights and facilitates a poetry and nonfiction workshop for CWRU’s off-campus studies. She is a member of Night Vision poets.
People in Cleveland Heights are staunch, even fierce, supporters of their public libraries. Poet John Panza imagines what it might have been like if his Cedar-Lee neighbors had run amok when the Main Library closed for renovations a few years ago. — Meredith Holmes
My Neighborhood
by John Panza
The library closes
For at least a year,
And the locals revolt
As I write this. I see
Them. The neighbors
Must walk an extra half
Mile to temporary digs.
Still, the disoriented
Librarians and the books
Wait for the first
Slam of the sycamore log,
Then another. Doors
Splinter. A rush.
An impending crisis
At hand, torches flaming,
Pitchforks, the lot.
Just now, the mobs
Converge at Lee and Cedar.
The kids are tearing
Up some cars behind
The theater, setting
To work on the drugstore,
Five coffeeshops,
All six bars. Deafening.
I stand in the window
Of the sidewalk gallery,
Consider the scene
Worthy of pen and ink,
Of hyperbole, of time,
And know this will end,
And the neighborhood
Will be the neighborhood's
Again.
John Panza produces a weekly Heights Arts podcast at heightsartsradio.blogspot.com and serves as a trustee for Heights Arts. He is Assistant Professor of English at Cuyahoga Community College's Eastern Campus and is drummer for the band Chief Bromide.
It's April. We dare to look forward to spring and the first lettuce harvest. Gail Bellamy, the new Cleveland Heights Poet Laureate, considers the assertive Arugula, a salad green with a lot of personality. — Meredith Holmes
Arugula
by Gail Bellamy
When I encounter arugula dressed
in the company of tender leaves
on a white salad plate in a restaurant,
it reminds me of those street-tough,
spiky greens that grow up along
the railroad tracks
and between pavement cracks
on urban basketball courts,
those prickly resilient greens
that lurk behind condemned buildings,
or jab their way up through gravel,
refusing to be trampled,
held back by chain link fences,
smoked out,
or otherwise suffocated.
By the time arugula arrives
at the restaurant,
it isn’t just a punk in a dinner jacket
escorting the debutante:
Arugula owns the place.
Cleveland Heights poet Gail Bellamy has been selected by Heights Arts to be the Cleveland Heights Poet Laureate for 2009-2010. She is the author of Cleveland Food Memories (Gray & Co.), Design Spirits (St. Martin's Press) and the poetry chapbook, Victual Reality (Pudding House Publications) in which Arugula appears. Her chapbook Traveler's Salad is forthcoming from Pudding House.
In the course of clearing out the basement, the poet witnesses an unexpected disappearance. — Meredith Holmes
Sweet Smoke
by Robert E. Mc Donough
That’s the title my wife suggests
when I ask if she thinks there’s a poem
in burning these old issues
of The American Poetry Review,
the ones stored in the basement
till the paper too was soggy, turgid.
But my wife’s too kind. Like death the fire lends
a temporary dignity. Surely
what is now so fully destroyed
must once have mattered greatly? No.
The fire vaporizes
what I never would have read.
Thousands of reports on how
the poet had been feeling, tens
of thousands of goofy similes
(“This fire burns like a lost child
at midnight,” “like a symbolist trumpet
at high noon”) are received
into the unmeaning air.
After living in Cleveland Heights for 30 years, Robert E. McDonough moved to the country to be with the woman he loves. His books are No Other World (Cleveland State University Poetry Center) and Greatest Hits (forthcoming from Pudding House Publications).
The beginning of summer is full of possibilities, including the possibility of being someone else.— Meredith Holmes
Aspiring to Gingerhood
by Gail Bellamy
The summer before I turned eight,
I begged my parents to
change my name to Ginger,
envisioning a life of jasmine that would follow:
Blossoms, iced tea, a whiff of perfume on the evening breeze.
I idolized Mack and Butch, the bug-tearing
brothers who spent most of their year
incarcerated at military school,
and I practiced being our neighbor, Mrs. Ridgley,
who moved like an iodine-and-baby-oil-slathered
Joey Heatherton. I aspired to her yellow bikini,
peaky hair, squinty eyes and croaky voice.
Sometimes she crooked a suntanned claw,
summoning me to borrow a pack of my dad’s Lucky Strikes
and run them over to her at the pool.
“It’s Marge, not Mrs. Ridgley,” she’d say
through the straw hat over her face
as she handed me a coin.
Each time, I bounced back
to my own side of the street,
ten cents richer, shinier and that much closer
to Gingerhood.
Gail Bellamy is the Cleveland Heights Poet Laureate for 2009-2010.
Sometimes we are happiest when nothing happens. — Meredith Holmes
Fishing for Stillness
by Kathleen Cerveny
The dry grass scratches the backs
of her eight-year-old legs
below her shorts.
The sun freckles her thighs
in leaf shadow.
Nothing moves
except the confusion of gnats
stumbling through the humid air
at the edge of the lake.
Her father stands
a little farther down the shore,
whipping his line in shining curves
above the water.
Her bamboo pole rests
steady in her hand, balanced
midway to its tip on a stone
between her knees.
She thinks about the worm, drowning
as it hangs beneath the bobber,
and wills it to be dead. Its wriggling
could attract a fish and end the perfect
stillness of the day.
Cicadas spin a web of song
across the afternoon.
Kathleen Cerveny has been a potter, a high school arts teacher, a and public radio producer. She is now director of Evaluation and Institutional Learning and senior arts advisor at the Cleveland Foundation.
There are lots of diseases to worry about these days, but this poem describes an illness that's done more damage than all the pandemics in human history combined.— Meredith Holmes
Devils’ Plague
by Cavana Faithwalker
others feel the fever
at arms length the keep you.
There is a stench
it turns their heads downwind.
They lock their car doors
when you walk by.
Women’s hands and arms grab
with an
involuntary pinch
at purses as they huddle
and hurry their young.
Men pat pockets
and quicken their steps.
“Those minds are predisposed
to violent thoughts, you know
steal and rape and kill”
they think.
Eyes follow you
and thrust daggers deep
into your flesh. If you
are blessed, you are alive
one more day.
From whence comes their contagion
that affects you so deeply
who is to say?
Cavana Faithwalker lives in Cleveland Heights and works at the Cleveland Museum of Art. He is a poet, the father of a 9 year old, and a visual and performance artist.
This is a month of great change. Nothing is certain, the poet says. We can take nothing for granted. — Meredith Holmes
November
By Linda Goodman Robiner
White light triangles on the back lawn,
and there is shadow.
Yellow leaves scatter over grass
like men and women on an elevator,
no two touching.
Traveling up and down
with strangers,
we have faith in the solidity,
the protection
of the cage we’re in.
We trust the world will hold us up.
Today the Cleveland sky
is soft and cloudless blue,
but, like passengers in the elevator,
on the brink of winter.
Linda Robiner is an editor, writing coach, and workshop facilitator, who has taught at six Ohio colleges. Her chapbook Reverse Fairy Tale was published by Pudding House. Her poems, short stories, and articles have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies.
A modern-day take on an 18th-century poem. Christopher Smart (1722-1771) was an English poet, whose poems of intense religious feeling are admired by many contemporary poets. His My Cat Jeoffry, a free-verse meditation on his cat’s connection to God, is part of a long work, Jubilate Agno (Rejoice in the Lamb).— Meredith Holmes
I Will Consider All Of My Daughters’ Shoes
As Christopher Smart Considered His Cat Jeoffrey
By Mary O’Malley
For they have basketball, soccer, and golf shoes
For playing games I have to watch.
For they have the shoes I wish to have.
For they have boots that displease them because they are not Uggs.
For firstly Megan’s Nike shoes lay around the house.
For secondly there are extras, which overflow the bins.
For thirdly they break our bank account.
For fourthly Rachel’s are forgotten under beds and in the many bins.
For fifthly many are old and do not fit.
For sixthly my shoes are gladly stolen.
For seventhly Madeline desires to visit the golden palace of DW.
For eighthly they think Payless does not deserve their presence.
For ninthly Emily desires shoes for one night.
For tenthly they complain greatly about my lack of shoes.
For the first is addicted to the thought of high-end boutiques.
For the second her need rises beyond all sane expectation.
For the twins they scream in pain for multiple pairs of flip flops.
For they all are not wise as the dogs
For Marley and Micah have no shoes at all.
Mary O'Malley lives in Avon Lake, Ohio and has an MFA from Spalding University. She is part of the Cleveland Heights Pudding Salon Poetry Workshop and was active in a long-running workshop at Lorain County Community College. Mary has read at Cleveland City Hall for Women's History Month and had one of her poems performed in South Africa at a spoken word festival.
