Issue 34: 2001 Poetry Contest

2001 Passager Poet
Jean L. Connor

Honorable Mentions
Colleen Anderson | E.G. Burrows | Julian Crowell B.R. Culbertson | Tillie Friedenberg | G. Davies Jandrey | Robert King
Allan Peterson | Roger Pfingston | Carol Reinsberg | Elisavietta Ritchie Rachelle Rogers | Susan Jo Russell | Russell Salamon | Ann Silsbee
Elizabeth S. Volpe | Julie Herrick White

Editors for Issue 34
Mary Azrael | Rebecca Childers | Kendra Kopelke | Ebby Malmgren | Kathleen Fantom Shemer | with Guest Editor Helen Vo-Dinh

Graphic Designer
Ingrid Ankerson
about the cover

On Getting A Late Start

How light drains from the air: amber to blue
to umber, even the creek's glimmer gone
to a bronze throb, a muscle pulsing through
a skin of snow, on skeleton of stone.
We cross it three times or more as we go
up the mountain, leaving behind our own
running stitch of tracks, as if to sew
the banks together. Now a bright moon
eases through retreating shreds of cloud,
keeps our steady pace. We reach the crest
in silence. Not that we have nothing to say—
rather, I think, no need to say aloud
how good this is, what we would have missed
if we had started earlier in the day.

Colleen Anderson
www.motherwitdesign.com

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What Papa Always Said
after Marc Chagall

Papa always said
Chagall painted lies:
shtetl skies were not teal blue,
pink cows with popping eyes
did not sport orange udders
and fiddlers, everybody knew,
never trusted those piss-poor roofs.

Such a crock: the lovers with smiles like virgins,
naked angels (ashamed they should be)
foolishly flying sideways, upside down,
while playing cellos and violins,
string sections in the sky—
crazy.

Papa liked to tell it like it was—
his pillow feathers flying,
panicky snowflakes—
the night of the pogrom.
What he tended to recall
were things like that.
Pogroms, he always said,
do not produce bright colored memories.

But there was one thing
that Chagall got right,
Papa always said,
and he would never forget:
it was the plums,
'O' he would say, almost through tears,
'the smell of those shtetl plums . . .'

Tillie Friedenberg

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Hokusai in the Chesapeake

We cast off to catch crabs
under running lights, our skiff
so frail, when we lean with our nets
we almost fall overboard.

But, standing as close as we dare
to each other, we are as if tied
to the gunwales, reaching, reaching—
crabs forever about to swim in our nets.

The full moon is pinned to clouds.
What neither of us can see, intent
as we are on our prey, is the wave,
unpredicted, tidal, reared over the stern

but frozen, fixed in this instant—
while beneath the keel, crabs moult and mate,
and on deck, we whisper to one another, "Yes,
in another time, not caught in this, oh yes!"

Elisavietta Ritchie
www.elisavietta.com

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Silver My Knuckles

If you are old enough you would have been young enough
to remember trains
and especially the spaces between cars where the steel
platforms slid
between each other like scissors or sharpening knives
and because
they took the curves they had to flex and bend
so there were openings
under the doors the ties and the stones shone through
and clacking
which had been comfort in the cars was shears
and dangerous
Some people passed through mine and never came back

The light was such the world and its objects
looked like milagros
The cloth on the tables in the dining car blindingly white
as the glint off silver
The bowl of flowers silver carnations my hand on the window
the trees passed through
Silver my knuckles my shoes having weathered the transit
Silver the little train itself
the gleaming Rock Island with the names of the towns
along the way
the consoling Owatonna the bright and polished Albert Lea

Allan Peterson

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Cucina Rustica

He has told her of Abruzzi, a village
in the mountains, a cielo, near heaven,
his nonna catching a pigeon
on the roof, wringing its neck,
the wine so smooth,
the roasted pigeon for dinner.

She undresses
the garlic. Its papery sheath
slips over smooth shoulders,
her fingers drenched
in its juices, the air charged.

Drawn by the smell, its hint
of flickering light bulbs and creviced
walls, he enters the kitchen, wanting
to dance. Puttanesca, he whispers,
anchovy.

His fingers on her neck, the oysters sweating
lightly in the pan, she leans into the steam,
lifts a strand of pasta to her tongue,
the moon tense against the wild plum

Elizabeth S. Volpe

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continue to Issue 33: The Forgetting Issue