Trillium

A Spring ephemeral

March mud slides into April,
April slaps the house silly,
slams the door back in my face.

May, I take a morning walk
in an anorak, only to find
trout lily’s sprouted gills

instead of flowers. Aeolus
roars and shoves me home,
my retreat now one more

sad retreat. I’ll stay in
and set the locks against
this botch, this washed-out

washed-up spring—

So who is it who calls
my name, and who is it then
who runs, arms akimbo,

down the brambly
path, afraid to be
too late, afraid

this mean and frigid
mountain has no more
place for fragile beauty?

Who but I
who cups the wide
leaves in shaky

palms, lifts
the bowed and
blood-red head

for a kiss,
thrilled once more
by what I’d almost lost?

Editor’s Note:
The narrator, concerned that the mountain landscape has altered due to climate change, looks for the familiar spring sights and flowers on her walk. Assonance, consonance, alliteration, and specific details of the landscape, weather, and flowers keep the reader engaged.

Hilde Weisert’s poetry collection The Scheme of Things was published by David Robert Books, 2015. Poems in magazines including Ms., Cincinnati Review, Plume, Cortland Review, Prairie Schooner, The Sun, Lips, anthologies including Choice Words and What They Bring: The Poetry of Migration and Immigration. Awards include 2017 Gretchen Warren Award (New England Poetry Club), 2016 Tiferet Journal Poetry Award. She is the president of the Sandisfield Arts Center in western Massachusetts. She lives in Sandisfield and Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Pulp to Pulp

The daily newspaper, it was announced
by way of a story buried on B3–
appropriately, the page just before the obituary pages–
would no longer be delivered beginning in the new year,

meaning no longer would the days begin with those heralds
driving through the dark before the dawn,
some with a sure aim,
their pitch landing a step or two from the porch,

and others with the haphazard hope that that baton,
spinning end-over-end,
thrown from the shoulder like a rock skipped across a lake
by someone who had never skipped a rock across a lake,

might, at least, come to rest
somewhere between one fencepost and the next.
And, for the sleeping, no longer would the news
be crouched beneath a car in the driveway,

or hidden in the lawn that should have been mown last week,
or buried beneath the gathering snow that had silently built up overnight,
the paper waiting as patient as a cat
and lapping up the wetness of morning,

which would be the first consternation for those barely out of bed and,
already, presented with such a simple disappointment.
In those final months, the letters to the editor page,
alongside the usual lectures penned from atop imagined soapboxes,

was filled with those concerned at the loss of a ritual:
how would coffee taste when not paired
with that smell of fresh pulp and cheap ink?
And here, I thought of my grandmother,

who had developed the habit
of opening the obituary section as if this, too,
was news that ought to concern us all,
these worlds that had ended some time in the last week and now

huddled together between local news and the weather.
Last year, she had appeared in those pages,
in an obituary we had found already written,
fit to print years ago,

composed when she had been in fine health,
and I imagined her at her kitchen table,
those faces of dead strangers stacked in their
four-down, four-wide paper mausoleum in front of her

as she looked for familiar faces
and then as she searched for inspiration,
finding the words,
one ordinary afternoon in the past,

to best capture her life that,
one ordinary afternoon in the future,
would be taken out with the evening trash
by a complete stranger who, on a rainy morning,

would bend down in that shaky way,
and handle the sopping pages like lily petals,
turning in that shaky way to B4
to read the news of the day.

Editor’s Note: The standard morning newspaper delivery and reading rituals described in vivid images stand for life’s expectations and disappointments and the inevitable end. I loved the way the poet portrays the poignancy of the experience and nonchalant continuity of the life-cycle

Goddfrey Hammit was born and raised in Utah, and lives in Utah still, in a small town just outside of Salt Lake City. Hammit is the author of the novel Nimrod, UT.

Bookmaking

for Al Brilliant, even though he probably doesn’t remember me

Those mild south Texas Spring mornings
you spent guiding and goading four college
seniors in the arduous art
of handmaking books might have
seemed squandered,
but I remember.

I remember the aroma of Earl Grey
in that makeshift classroom—
the Christian Science Reading Room
lent us through kindness—
even though our only shared religion was
a faith in the words on the pages
we saddle-stitched together.

We huddled around the table.
I know now, we were leaning into
your soft-spoken words,
wisdom you near-whispered
in your Brooklynite accent.

You talked of literature,
*******and travel,
*******and books you’d asked us to read,
*******and the sixties,
*******and social justice,
*******and California,
where you founded your
slow and steady press.

My klutzy hands would oft
poke the tip of my awl
clean through a signature of folded pages,
piercing my hand.
I’d bleed on your pages—
these spotted books, you let me keep,
proof of the sacrifice required
for the sacrament of the
enfolded black-inked words.

You taught me that humility is
not mentioning that you’d published
*******Robert Bly,
and Margaret Atwood,
and Leonard Cohen,
and Marge Piercy.

Once, Langston Hughes surfaced from your memories—
his serene, muted intonation
when he would finally speak after
a long pause, in thought,
prior to his purposeful reply
was all you really told us about him.

The art of making books is
lost to me now,
but the value of a life in books
has been collected, sewn, and
bound into me.

I think that is all you wanted
********all along.

Editor’s Note:
I love this heartfelt tribute to Al Brilliant by an eager student of bookmaking. The poet uses vivid descriptions of the bookmaking process, tying each one into a page of memory that finally results in an exquisite book in the student himself.

Shelby Wilson writes, teaches, and lives in Amarillo, Texas. He holds a B.A. in English from Texas A&M University and an M.A. in English from West Texas A&M University. His writing has appeared in many publications, including Ink & Nebula, Sparks of Calliope, Backchannels, BeZine, and anthologies from Madness Muse Press, Clarendon House Publications, and Elizabeth River Press.