the air, winter cold but no snow, no ice.
I’ve always been afraid of water. Never learned to swim,
you, on shore, skirt aflutter in a wind I didn’t feel;
felt the ocean, tasted salt in the air.

I’ve always been afraid of water. Never learned to swim;
the river turned to black sheets of rain, I felt your lips,
felt the ocean, tasted salt in the air.
The moon was a sun, there were no stars.

The river turned to black sheets of rain, I felt your lips
your not quite smile when you tease me.
The moon was a sun, there were no stars.
I woke, heard my heart beat, caught a scent of you,

your not quite smile, when you tease me.
Your leg wrapped ‘round mine, fingertips tendering my neck,
I woke, heard my heart beat, caught a scent of you.
Of course you weren’t there. Yes. You were.

Coats of salt, manes like white linen, and the wind, the horses there are the living anchors of the delta, drained by the Rhône, which by the time it reaches this particular shore of the Mediterranean, has already traveled at least 500 miles – more if you count the braiding and unbraiding along and through it branchings. Everything’s in a constant state of revision, including the etangs, salt water lagoons, remnants of old arms and legs of the body of the river, emerging and disappearing, ghostlike. Even when we were there that summer, so long ago, it felt illusory, the many-stranded alluvium piling and unpiling its sediment – the hard remorse of sand carried in its muds and made from everything before. And that slanting, gold light.

Together there, our
long apartness already
gauzy in my heart.

Ten hands can’t bring back the dead, any more than a tapered candle or starched collars and cuffs. A wooden table contains stains that spread like maps, dividing dead from alive & here from back then. When I was ten, my cousin David had a seance in the basement of his Pittsburgh home. His sister Michelle turned off all the lights. The anticipation was intoxicating creaks & coins in darkness. At the same time in a town in Poland, a group of stolid male cousins was doing the same thing in the back room of a tavern. It snowed the first snow that evening: shattering puffs of white, snowdrifts the height of fledgling apple trees. The bark was partly covered, & on the stove, plates of red meat & whisky. In the distance a neighbor’s mangy dog howled. No one ever returned here, no one emerged from beyond. But the air was full of living memory, more than headstones could ever record, or the final dust of cremation. Loved ones’ footsteps could not vanish – not their voices, not their fingers brushing your hair at night. The glare of streetlights stained the windowpanes as frost emerged like smoke.

I am split in twain
singing about the damage
remembering stones

watch the horse eat that light bulb while
      Scientists predict a rise in sea level of two feet
the lady with the dead baby is going to bite down
      Within the next ten years,
on the mouth of that wall-eyed bull
      The entire eastern seaboard under water, and
a man on fire his hands to the sky
      The summers so hot the only water sea water.
and people dying in the war against the earth

I was running on a back-trail and came across
a woman and her dog. She was yelling back, back
and throwing flat, gray stones at the snake’s head,
hoping to kill it – it blocked our path. I wanted
to be involved. I don’t know why. Animal
instinct, saving the dog, telling a good
story. So I took a big rock and hurled it –
I flattened its head. Its bottom jaw jutted out,
its teeth went crooked. Then I went home
to New York and told everyone at work about it.
I said, I delivered the killing blow. I read
rattlesnakes grow by the bushel there in Texas.
There’s so many, they have round-ups
to kill them and eat them, in Sweetwater.

the light out the patio door: bright and gloomy,
as if a thunderhead were hovering
over the roof just beyond our line of sight.

I blamed a lack of boxes to poke apertures into,
and when other solutions appeared on Facebook
– colanders, holey objects–

I thought of how years ago, my husband woke
at two a.m. and put on hat and snow boots
to view the aurora borealis

while I stayed in bed, unable to leave my warm sleep.
Now the sun is direct and dazzling, the air
open-window dry, the celestial do-si-do having

scrubbed the humidity from our collective
lens, as if the sky saved an extra miracle
for us in case we missed the first one.

A figurehead mounts the foaming sea at dusk when waves become dark green
and turn to black. The tines of a fork score the water to row the sinking ship to port.

We stand at the ship’s rail to share a cigarette, the common brand: le Gris – our words
and smoke torn apart by the wind.

Here’s to the real world at rest. To scudding white and the light’s reflections.
To woodgrain solid as a table, the table consuming a glass, to a box of matches,
each angle affixed.

Some untold gladness must lie hidden here, within reach.

  there. Mother
too. The apples
  kept falling

  onto the car
overlooking the Atlantic.
Father and mother

outside
  the car. Salt
  air. Apples

  bobbing in
the Atlantic
air. More

thuds. The car
a soundtrack. More
salt. No talking

the day the crab apples
  fell in Belfast.

Once the porpoise is out of water
I know it is time to go,
the story of swimming miles in the bay
is past tense
feels like showing off
without my goggles nearby.

I cried when she said from the stage
Those of you who have dogs understand
and I did and I wanted licks and love
cried too when the fellow said
he was sick, but for
different reasons. Los Angeles
a pick-up truck, now a bike, those ears.

Riverside drive and leaves and mums
some kids and a clean bathroom
the old lady in a long black coat
we think ran away from her attendant
that story too because I wanted it for me
to be found,
and steered gently home.

I will never not love a drunk is the truth.
My grandfather tends his potatoes in the field
while my sister and I sell cut flowers
in front of a withering barn.
Who can resist two small girls
handling money?
Aren’t we adorable?
Don’t our flowers look pretty
and smell like rich people’s soap?

These are the days before two girls
alone on the road will prompt
a call to Child Services.
Our grandfather is right there
in the field, we say,
picking dinner.
His breath smells of grandfather
because we don’t yet know
the smell of gas-station brandy.

His stories are funny,
the way he hiccups over them
and lets us finish his sentences
when he’s lost in the buttons of his shirt.

He loves the ponies and so do we,
but we mean different things by ponies.

Later I come to love that aftershave
of slur that takes me back
to phosphorous in dirt.

(My compass always points east
to vermiculite).

I love that familiar perfume
on the life of the party.
I love the hard way bubbling men
hold my body (like religion
is how it feels) and the hard secrets
they tell me after everyone has left.

I love them as a wound
that needs five stitches.
I carry a needle and thread.

When fists punch a wall
avoiding my shoulder
I beg them to stop,
maybe just a week
to see where it goes.

I stick around one more day
and then another in case
they learn to be gentle with me.

They won’t quit for good
till I’m altitudes gone
and then turn immaculate
with children and jobs
and telephones they answer.

That smell of hops coming
off the next confession?

It’s the stamp of
my never enough.

and when I turn to tell you I am scared I see you
smiling, fiercely, with all your teeth, and the wind
yowls back at both of us, filling my gums
with the taste of salt, and I am still scared, and alive,
and the wind is alive, and the water is alive,
and the dead kelp is alive,
and the invisible fish churning in the water

with their tiny ancient brains
are so, so alive.

Two days and a naval funeral – gunmetal water fills
the screen of the wall-mounted TV. I can control it
with a button on a box hooked to the bed – 

but every channel is the same. An American flag,
whipping, voiced over. The word tragic
until midnight. Nothing else but sleep 

until 2 AM, when the next bed begins keening,
calls again and again to her dead husband
begs him to cut the clot boots off her legs.

If I’m sleeping, swimmers are yelling underwater,
padding hands through cracked fuselage, rooting bodies
from cold swells. One of them is mine, I’m sure,

in the green shadow of the Vineyard,
a hundred other wrecks. It’s me, it’s my dissolving cast
of plaster, the tendrils melting into sea, nimbus

illuminating my beautiful corpse. If I’m awake,
I’m plumbing the nurse button, my sewn neck locked
on a dead, wet pillow, and I can’t

fit any more members of that family
into this bed.

on my father’s birthday when I was fifteen,
and I walked onto the stone jetty at the beach

with my brother. I can feel the push
and pull of gale forces against my thin

body still, water spraying from ocean 
and sky at once, my flapping clothes damp

and heavy, coated in a mist of wet sand.
I trusted my brother. But we should not

have been standing on that rocky pier,
as waves crashed at our feet and the hurricane

roiled around us, flooded streets and splintered
boats. Now, I question his judgment, imagine

how fast we might be swept into the swell.
My mother would have been distressed

had she known he took me into the heart
of the storm. But we made it home that day,

with blurry photos to mark our victory. 
It was another forty years before a storm 

barreled through my brother’s body,
sent him tumbling to his death. 

I stand here in the wake, reeling
from the force of it all.

In first grade, my teacher had us
draw a swan on a river, she held
mine up to show the class – pointed
to my swan’s long S-shaped neck,
declared – This is beautiful!
On the last day of classes, three grades
sat in the gymnasium. A crowd of parents
stood at the back. The Principal
on microphone demanded quiet.
My teacher appeared on the podium
she called me with six others to the stage
and bestowed on each of us our awards–
ten bold letters stitched on a sliver of fabric,
I squeezed it in my hand. Parents sprang
forward, I searched their faces for my foster
mother’s, she wasn’t there. My teacher said –
I invited your mother! I looked then for my
biological mother, she too wasn’t there.
My foster sister waved to me. When we
arrived home, she showed my award
to her mother – Look what Alice won!
She studied the embroidered letters
and asked her daughter – ​
Why didn’t you win this?​

after months of fire, then decades of neglect.
No brick bungalows, no tiny garages or neat gardens.
Former yards and foundations merge in lakes of crabgrass

and nettle, with chunks of broken concrete, metal scraps,
and pottery shards lurking on the murky bottom.
Gone the Kercheval Live Poultry Mart.

The Chrysler assembly plant– shuttered. Even St. Rose,
where my parents were married, was torn down.
My old school’s an empty brick shell.

Can this be Beniteau Street? I sit on the curb
and make out the house number, still painted there.
From above, a cascade of leaves of the weeping

birch I helped my grandfather plant, swing
in the wind. Finger-sized leaves trail around me
to the dusty ground, fall– green and silver.

I once worked the graveyard shift at a photo printing factory and saw other people’s memories slip from machines that washed 35mm film in chemicalized paper. My job was to take the photos the developers spat out, check for errors, and stick the color prints into envelopes: tireless dimensions of magic hour toasts, ring-shaped mouths and children’s firsts, chains of chained smiles– prints of lingering chroma.

We say a picture is taken.

I used to love photomats, those freestanding booths that looked like the ones on causeways like where Sonny was shot in The Godfather, a scene that takes place on Long Island, my childhood home.

My prints are in albums my children will inherit. They will go through them and make decisions.

In the fall of my senior year in college I dreamed my mother called me on a black rotary phone. The handset shook as it rang like in an old Warner Bros. cartoon. I awoke to my brother’s call telling me she was dead.

Without a photograph, I’m unable to recall what my mother looked like; there’s no afterimage. Like Josef Albers’ color theories, she is wheel, light, tone absorbed and transferred.

Now and then at the factory, I would find an image spit out from the machine in gray-scale. An error like a declaration –

I am what I see.
I am what I see.

In Gloria Monaghan’s seventh book of poetry, The Diary of Saint Marion (Found in a Laundry Basket in Hamtramck, Detroit 1971) newly released by Lily Poetry Review Books (2025), we encounter profound imagery, deep mysticism, the natural world as witness and ever present familial stories. Memories real and imagined haunt and illuminate throughout this moving collection divided into sections; Relics, The Chalice, For Martha and Sister Juanita, Dog Poems, and I, too, Have a Chartreuse Cat.

Relics spring forth and are made new in poems on found or remembered items, some going back a century. They include an opera bag, a found diary, handwritten notes, garden tools, and black and white photographs, which leave the reader humming with a palpable sense of nostalgia, desire, and loss. With Monaghan’s terrific restraint and deft imagery, we can almost feel these items in our hands. The soft feel of a small bag in “Opera Bag” leaves the narrator to wonder, “… whether I tell / the truth about beauty and what is lost.” This is a musing that echoes through the book, along with the inherent contradiction of writing “truth” about items both real and imagined that were once touched, written upon, or used in everyday life of loved ones now lost. The entire collection grapples with loss and beauty found in memory.

Lovely questions emerge; what do items left behind tell us of those who went before and can there be greater truth revealed in the construction of poems, which by their nature, force both poet and reader to fill in unknowable details? What untold family stories and memories might we carry in our bodies, always at work somewhere below the surface? What unnamed relics might our own bodies hold? Monaghan liberates herself and her grandmother Marion from the fallibility of the earthly realm which is constrained by limitations of time, imperfect memory, and lived experience. She does this by rendering her grandmother a saint. The poems are told from the perspective of a supernatural-like Marion, who is able to move in, out and through time. This transcendent, almost ecstatic quality is felt throughout the book. Monaghan is in the realm of the metaphysical conjuring both disorientation and familiarity. We feel “the circles of forever” and know without question that each ancestor “has a handprint on your soul.”

Monaghan delivers moments of exquisite, if disturbing, beauty. Trees appear throughout the book almost as if family or witnesses. In “I am Not Afraid of Storms,” the narrator parts ways with a lover on a train and muses over how she may actually like storms. She worries the tulip tree (which has made another appearance in the book) could split and smash in a storm.

I hugged the tulip tree
as if it could divide me, and I would be a fig again
with meticulous seeds and divine divides,
stickiness inherent in my veins
like the callow lies of my grandfather.

These lines have a satisfying sound quality and an almost ineffable dual meaning, perhaps pertaining to epigenetics and trauma contained within families, but also in possibility of new division and divination. The divine presence of trees in Mognhan’s book approaches the mystical. Oak, willows, and tulip trees figure prominently and stand compelling as both literal figures and metaphoric. Branches, leaves, acorns remind us throughout that, “If you can grow on a tree, you can grow anywhere.” In “Twinning Acorns,” the would-be reader is implored to, “Mark yourself, a hero. Emerge. / Let the fine dust settle on your green leaves”… and to “find your neighborhood is a garden.” We gather that trees may know more about the subjects of the poems than the writer or reader can alone. While they contain a certain melancholic knowing, the trees also offer hope, comfort, acceptance, and new possibility.

The Diary of Saint Marion touches on family stories both known and reconstructed from a trail of objects left behind, such as a garage filled with a grandmother’s old garden tools and a great grandmother’s gardening gloves, all still smelling of dirt. In “Garage”, the grandmothers’ hands come to the speaker’s mind, “brown spotted” and convey a deeper meaning of how one can be in conversation, in touch with long gone family members and ancestors. “Help me to plant, I say to the silence”…. begs the question of who might be listening. Of course, there is a God that the narrator hints at, and the ancestors themselves, but we as the readers also hear this prayer and can’t help but think of our own.

There is something of the sublime at work in this collection. For example, in “Car Thief” there is a feeling of a self conscious narrator making observations in moments forever suspended in time within the container of a poem. One can sense the poet’s musings over creative choices and the different truths they could render, as in “Martha’s brother drove the car himself, / I put her in the back” and in the last line, “as he faced oncoming traffic, these are the things I think about.” These lines could be from multiple viewpoints. Monaghan evokes in the reader a sense of replaying/rewatching a memory with an underlying self-conscious awareness. While stepping into the real or imagined memory contained in the poem, one may choose to hone in on different angles and possible choices of both the poet and the poem’s subject.

More wonderful moments of a surreal quality can be found throughout, perhaps most enjoyable in Monaghan’s dog poems. In “When the Dog is more Magnificent than the Man” dogs lead men from “spies, or in a cave with bats shimmering the walls.” We discover that a leash is a soul connection, “shining, beating into a mere single strand / of gold barely visible.” There is whimsical possibility in “Suddenly I Become the Dog” in which the narrator somehow transforms into a dog. This is on the heels of, “Sonya the Dog” through which we learn the family dog was named after a psychologist and that the narrator “decided it would be good to play the part, / and went to the Thrift store to buy a dress from the 1950s” along with “ a nurse’s outfit which I wore for years.” These hint at confining choices for women and girls, but also of the rich possibilities for retreat and relief found within a robust and vivid imagination. “In my youth I was a star shatterer,” the narrator reveals and we feel the powerful truth of these words just waiting to be remembered and realized.

In perhaps what might be the most provocative section of The Diary of Saint Marion, Monaghan retells a harrowing story of Sister Janina who had disappeared in 1907 and whose bones were found buried in a church basement cellar along with those of a fetus in 1918. Martha, friend to Marion, is the pregnant housekeeper of Father Edward and is believed by the narrator to be pregnant by him. In this section, again we discover that memory along with found objects, real or imagined, work to piece together a story both factual and surreal. Martha remembers Sister Janina and is also an insomniac who scoffs at a man who attempts to build a time machine in the desert. There is Martha’s failing report card in “Walk to School with Martha” and her own children bored with her recounting of Sister Janina in “Martha Remembering Sister Janina’s Bones”. Then there is Martha’s diary, through which we consider real and surreal possibilities and impossibilities.

In the closing section of the book, there is a wonderful nod to the metaphysical poet, John Donne’s “Forbidding Mourning”, which suggests love and family may transcend time and distance. In “Standing in the Willow” we return to the grandmother’s too small gardening gloves and tools. The narrator tells us she herself can use these “for the tougher branches too high to reach.” The narrator considers her own hands and fingernails as grounds for buried memories and stories contained within the book. Back in the garage, the narrator is struck by a vivid scent memory, almost of ghostlike quality. “… her smell comes to me a light must, / cigarettes and something I cannot name.” This feeling of longing and nostalgia is discovered, rediscovered, and reshaped throughout the book. In The Diary of Saint Marion, Monaghan sheds light on how family memories and secrets are revealed through both physical and mental relics handed down intergenerationally and by the meaning we each construct, whether in poems or in our own imaginations. This is a book that invites multiple readings, for it is rich in meaning, metaphor, image, and story. It hums with emotion and invitation, as in the closing poem, “Flying West” which asks the question, “Did I shed the world?” Here perhaps, a reader may ponder who is the asker of this question, the poet or a narrator or a subject? “My pain was a house,” the narrator tells us, “to shut myself up in and disappear.” Seeming to speak directly to the reader, the narrator requests, “If you get this, call me. / If you care to explain, put it in a song. / Shed the light of day.” One can imagine Marion directing this to a lost love, a past or future relative, to the one whom the narrator says, “held my hand and sighed into my hair.”

Lily Poetry Review Press, 2025, ISBN: 978-1-957755-57-1

A native of Prince Edward Island, longtime teacher at University of Massachusetts, Boston, where he was Director of Irish Studies from 1984-2019, and current Scholar-in-Residence at Saint Mary’s College in northern Indiana, Thomas O’Grady poems are grounded in landscapes of both the Atlantic shore and on midwestern plains.

And everywhere, there are birds! Crows, herons, vultures, finches, gulls—some in congress on freshly mown wheat fields, some posturing on the roof ridge of a neighbor’s house. Here, six herons rise out of their rookery and there, “newly fledged wild turkeys/ startle[ ] the sky….”. It’s enough to seek out one’s Peterson’s Field Guide… to trace the landscapes involved. Gulls soar and cormorants glide neck deep marking sky and shoreline. Foxes sometimes feint in setting-sun light and across this selection, from time to time, it’s January again and the gray-on-gray of the river and its banks mixes with the slate and bullet tones of shore and sky while the meadows lie in wait of their colors (yellow of daffodils & goldfinch, September’s burnishing, fall’s scarlets) before winter lays down its gray mantle once again.

When Thomas O’Grady is not coloring the world and palpating its air with wings, he is reckoning the deep breath of music as in his sextet, “6 X 6” in which he picks up strings by Charlie Christian & Django Rhinehart and carries us along to Les Paul’s ‘improvised tangle of tubes and wire’ past Barney Kessel’s ‘My Embraceable You’ and Grant Green’s ‘Smokin’ to land on Wes Montgomery’s ‘Naptown Blues’. List poems made of old standards, become dancefloors planked with the wood of nostalgia for a time we know wasn’t really as wonderful as a thousand song titles made it out to be, but which we are still keen to imagine as bright and lovely in spite of the world that careened around that music. And when we leave all those played notes behind, they follow, the way a dove’s flute is followed by a dove’s silence.

O’Grady’s poems are of this world, even when they call down the Greek or Roman dieties. In his triptych, “Variations on a Theme” we are reminded right from the start of “Mythos” that “We are mortal. We all must fall….” Still, the speaker can’t help imagining the way two mortals deep in post-coital sleep would have looked to those dieties. In section 2, “What Saw the Gods…” we are invited to observe, along with said Gods

your fingers a tender cuff on my wrist
your ankle in the clasping grasp of my hand –
our limbs the weathered ribs, the splintered keel
and mast of a half-buried shipwreck play
across an uncharted desolate strand….

And, because this is O’Grady’s poem and he is a poet of place and time, he drags us back to our own era with section 3. “Boxcars,” which relocates us to “these midwestern plains/ that spread in all directions like a good/ long life lived out but not done yet –”. We observe the fate of boxcars shuffled onto deserted side-tracks, “in my mind always in twos…”, “their doors slid wide to frame the world/ just as far as the mortal eye can see.”

In the final stanza of “Boxcars” we are relocated one more time to a small café in Paris, where an aging couple sips coffee in comfortable silence. Mortality, we learn, is the realm where love may outlast myth’s busybody gods….

Cows and cats and fire-fighters managing a controlled burn on an overgrown urban lot, land among O’Grady’s verses as a series of guarantors that these poems are inhabited by the quotidian. His metaphors are as durable as the hermit crab, “…carrying home/ upon its back,” which the speaker likens to the ‘home’ that “I carry [ ] in my head.” And though the passage of seasons and their accompanying migrations and losses weave through these poems of place, no wound bleeds or weeps past healing. August keeps landing on the page; rich and rife with reminders, as in “Auguries”

No more playing blind
casting about
as if miscast in myth,

seeking
in the feathered beat
of birds some sign:

today, ears cupped
to the August sky, we
eyed with awe

the northern harrier’s
scouring scowl across
a fresh-mown meadow.

How the domestic
turns exotic
in a time of change –

…..

What we learn from O’Grady’s graceful, time-bending, light-blending, bird-, god-, and earthbound poems, is that it’s always a time of change; so we might as well open ourselves wide to that exotic fact.

Arrowsmith Press, Medford, MA 2025, ISBN: 979-8-9915254-9

Bone Machine publishes traditional poetry chapbooks with few frills. I like that. I also like other things that are not good for me, like reading and reviewing chapbooks. Publisher Scott Laudati’s chapbook design for Bone Machine is squarely in the small press tradition: roughly trimmed at 5.5 x 8, cover stock only a bit heavier than the text, whimsically attractive covers with the same font repeated on the chaps I’m going to discuss here.

 Starting with William Taylor Jr.’s A Music Even of This, I find – does it matter I’ve known and enjoyed his poetry for some time? – again a number of poems that remind me of past masters, all credit to him for knowing his forebears. Taylor sits cheek by jowl with the best of his contemporaries. In the poem Down at Turk and Taylor, the writer takes a second-person persona sitting – boom-hah! – in the Tenderloin, seeing life and death quite literally. It’s a bit abstract in the suggestion, sure, but readers can fill in what’s necessary pretty easily. Taylor is best when his images are concrete.

You can stop for a drink
in some little place

with hip hop on the jukebox
and pretty girls playing pool

where you try and get a few lines down
before they’re gone.

 No plastic language, no reaching for something beyond this poem at this moment. It’s you, me, and everyone else in the poetic ‘hood seeing anew what Taylor has chosen to show us, to “trick another moment from the world/that has already forgotten your name.” Which is not to say that it doesn t reach beyond but rather that it s not ostentatious in the process.

· · ·

 Victor Clevenger is another stalwart of the underground scene, with at least eleven books to his name, though as prolific as he is I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s actually more. His poetry, haibun, in this case, come from the Midwest. There’s a hard-bitten flair as well as moments of tenderness and insight and grace. I’ve not read a lot of haibun, but these seem to fit as my quick Google reveals, a typical prose poem – 150 words or fewer – followed by a haiku that reflects or amplifies or otherwise complicates the poem’s subject(s).

In Living Color

shortly after kissing underneath a fireball sunset that
brightly burned in the distant sky she stood there
singing etta james while showering a thick layer
of soap suds on the washrag she drug across her
chest before moving down to her stomach
her hips  her ass

the beauty of
closing your eyes & still
seeing everything

 What I like is the plain-spoken first two lines, preparatory to the haiku-end. They don’ot oversell the image nor make it reach too far: So image followed by elevated prose. Images of the woman showering, yes, felt-life detail, yes, then, the haiku, linking to the speaker’s memory and thus the reader’s. Good stuff. I’ll be watching for more from Bone Machine.

A Music Even of This – William Taylor Jr.
The Aching Season – Victor Clevenger