Stevie's Law

I love Teresa Stouffer’s compassion for the older folks who sometimes inhabit her poems.  Teresa is a member of my poetry workshop group in State College.

Wheelchairs circle
the worker
dispensing
pills on plastic spoons.
I step over a man’s legs,
drool-soiled napkin on his thigh,
kiss Dot hello on her whiskery face,
a woman’s sticky hand tugs me.
Perfume and bowel odors
mingle, cloud the hallway.
I breathe through my mouth.
Meds swallowed,
Dot spits out,
“Are you in a hurry?”
In her room,
I snip the hairs on her chin.
Dot says,
“All I do is sit
and eat.
And I don’t feel much like eating anymore.
When will you be back? ”

– Teresa Stouffer

P.S.  New prompts are up on the Prompts page.

Hilary Hauck’s poem of the River Ganges is a powerful statement of death and of life.  You can read more about Hilary’s work here.

Street sleepers line both sides of the avenue
like colorful rows of dolls.
They’re old or sick the guide says. Train fare
is cheaper when you’re alive.
He leads us to where time hasn’t changed,
alleys glowing oil-lamp yellow,
so narrow we meld our backs
to the stone walls to let a sacred cow pass.
A loudspeaker chants
impersonal prayers, bells toll.
The buildings end on a terrace
above the cremation ghat,
where lucky bodies bandaged
in cloths wait their turn.
Smoke of flesh emanates,
we cover our faces with scarves
but he says it’s an insult to
imitate Indian dress
so we breathe in the dead.
Only the wealthy can buy
a thick sandalwood pyre,
the poor make do with scant scraps
whose flames…

My poem “rust belt,” just appeared in the new verse news. Here is the link.

http://TheNewVerse.News

and here is the poem.

Rust Belt

Sure, we loved the hats and hoopla

the rhythmic chants of lock her up,

but we are not a stupid people.

We know full well this patchy place

between the slag heaps

and the scrub pine–

these crumbling houses perched behind

the padlocked plant once known

for truck tires,

will never be great—

or even good.

You say rust belt

and mean the measure

of empty factories

and gutted storefronts.

The jobs bled out.

The eyesores left behind to moulder.

But the rust is mostly in us.

Too many years of children

born to little hope.

Too many years of promises

from windbags in dingy union halls

and air-conditioned buses

painted red, white, and blue.

This afternoon, I take my maul

to the wood pile

by the…

“Good Bones” went viral in 2016 when it was published in Waxwing.  It seemed to sum up all of our hopes and fears for our children.  Maggie Smith, who wrote “Good Bones,” has several award winning books and chapbooks.  You can read more about her here.

Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep…