Category: National Poetry Month
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Origin Stories – Claudia Reder
My Mother’s Superstitions (Bleigiessen) by Claudia Reder We were educated and superstitious, adoring black cats, uneasy about walking under ladders, yet climbing the rickety flight of steps to hear our tea leaves read. On New Year’s Eve platters adorned with marzipan pigs and Linzer torte, we’d spoon small amounts of melted lead into a bowl…
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Origin Stories – Shaheen Dil
The Boat-maker’s Art by Shaheen Dil I. I watched the boat as it was built— the shine of wood, the decadent lines of it, hand-polished surfaces gleaming, sleek, tempting, half-done and up on trestles, looking for all the world as if it wanted to leap into the water, sails unfurled, bow springing above the waves,…
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Origin Stories – Annette Sisson
Under a White Moon by Annette Sisson A daughter, now eighty-two, spends a decade grubbing in dirt, unburying the transplanted roots of her life. She returns to this place, searches for roses— Granada War Relocation Center, rocky, once covered with chain-link, barbed wire, seven thousand Japanese-Americans fenced away like nightshade. After Pearl Harbor, her mother…
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Origin Stories – Anastasia Walker
Before You Fall by Anastasia Walker imagine: 2k skyward, 30 molten stories sirens smoke & uniform frenzy below, but in your crow’s nest buffeted by the cleansing blue the skyline so clear so choose to fly beautiful, you before you fall Origin Stories – Before You Fall Like most lyric poems, this piece had its…
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Origin Stories – Martha Bordwell
Our Path by Martha Bordwell Let’s uncoil our summer of love, when you taught me to detassle corn. I followed behind, distracted by your shoulders and swagger. When you turned around, your voice rumbled, your eyes were an invitation. Remember the raspberries you tended in that garden as big as our house? Each bush fat…
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Origin Stories – Anita Pulier
Only Dinner by Anita S. Pulier Grandma Rose’s cooking pot is too large to have been carried in steerage from Minsk and a few years after she arrived it was dented when it fell off a fire escape on the Lower East Side, still I have kept it for years as the only heirloom from…
