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"WE'RE ALL BECOMING AWARE TOGETHER", MWP INTERVIEW WITH CHRISTIEN GHOLSEN
Christien Gholsen is a therapist and author of numerous poetry collections. The most recent being The Next World (Shanti Arts Press). In th
MEDITATIVE WEEK OF POETRY: JACK STEWART
The maples redden, dependable as mesas. At my age, I might still feel the edges Of crisis sometimes, and the car dealership Tube men are going epileptic They are so desperate for a sale.
But under a cuticle of moon, the cedars Are sharp and dark, and copper beeches Billow in every season. I know My body will always be unfamiliar now. Even words ache. Even words, hauling their cargo of grief, Don’t want to say what they need.
MEDITATIVE WEEK OF POETRY: STEPHEN KNAUFT
Willow chair, made right here by her dad, forty years ago. Cobbled up from twigs, he’d say, disclaiming artistry. And yet, the fleurs-de-lis carved along the headrest, the palmate ribs.
A chair made of sticks, now parched, caving slowly to the south like an old barn, nail heads sprouting along the legs. Forest creature, returned this day to the cove of its origin, to the very creek where its young roots once reached.
Arranged without ceremony beneath a withered sister tree. A gracious lopsided seat in the wilderness, it seemed, as we paused along the ridge to look back, then walked on ahead.
MEDITATIVE WEEK OF POETRY: WILLIAM MILLER
The red dirt was flecked with mica— the pattern of a promise—fool’s gold but real for children. The same road our grandparents had crossed and recrossed with a mule-drawn wagon, hauled coffins to the cemetery hill, was worth exploring. We spent hours in the hot sun to find pieces of chipped flint, a single perfect arrowhead.
I found one and have it now, still recall the mystery of a stone triangle that was worth more than any store-bought toy, even the promise we’d spend a weekend, a single day, on a Gulf Coast beach. I have it now in a metal box with a will and a few old love letters to read before the end just to remind myself that mystery
happened once and seemed worth everything: her red hair, violet eyes, the blue dress she wore because it was my favorite. The arrowhead is still a perfect triangle, picked up from the red-dirt road, and points in any direction. I close my eyes— close up my hand—to cross a blue, unknown sky.
MEDITATIVE WEEK OF POETRY: JOHN SCHNEIDER
curl and crackle in the wind, swiftly opening, folding and unfolding like the myths of childhood
we marvel at, then look away from, working hard to find our place in a misremembered history.
How the metaphors we affix to nature are meant to express something human:
wind for breath, roots for where we have come from, home simply a place to settle in or for,
bloom for both growth and how far a bruise spreads into surrounding tissue, colors our skin—sinks
deeper to our soil. Even if we’re just destined to be uprooted, to be planted in the earth’s dirt tombs,
nourishment for new seeds to sprout into healthier trees. Even in a sky filled with question marks,
solemnly poised caesuras, both intense summer sun and the turmoil of past and future
storms, we pray for just one thing solidly defined. Something to remember without ambiguity.
Just some regular old muck-filled boots or a porch that doesn’t yield to even a child’s weight
or a palmful of fronds that aren’t so sharp. Or a rain that’s meant to wash away the past, collected for
another kind of Baptism, and all these temporary tears that come with it.
MEDITATIVE WEEK OF POETRY: JANE O. WAYNE
Not long ago change moved at the speed of hair growing, sneaking up on you one strand at a time, and just now folding laundry, singing to yourself, you noticed
the high notes have gone. What else is missing? Remember when you could touch your toes, could balance on one leg with your eyes closed,
then gradually your hips and knees turned against you? So did the calendar. You have been reduced to living in the middle of the week—blank days that no one celebrates.
On slow afternoons, you take longer naps, and most nights to fall asleep you need the patience of a rock that slowly works itself into the ground.
There must have been a pivotal day when the past began to weigh more than the present, those years, like jars filled to the top. Too much to remember.
And no letup. You’re mending, sewing on buttons, but the gray thread you need is nearing the end of the spool. Which of you will run out first?
MEDITATIVE WEEK OF POETRY: CUMBERLAND RIVER REVIEW
I learned this week that Cumberland River Review was closing. I don't have any direct connection to the journal. I've never been published by them. However, there was an aesthetic connected to the journal that I recognized in another journal now no more: The Bitter Orleander.
It's not the same thing. The Bitter Orleander is still a press that publishes lots of incredible authors. However, I remember going to Barnes and Noble's on Sunday, sitting down in the cafe with every literary magazine I could find, not intending to buy any of them and being paused by The Bitter Orleander. The writing within it always had a soft, divine melancholy similar to Sherwood Anderson's stories.
You felt like a well had grown in you when you finished the journal.
It's similiar with Cumberland River Review.
It was different. An online journal. Yet, online journals have the capacity to paralyze you. Make you feel like looming rain clouds are above you even on the sunniest day. Rain clouds aren't always bad. The smell of petricor makes you feel like you're sprouting flowers from your nostrils.
Goodbye Cumberland River Review. Rest well.
MEDITATIVE WEEK OF POETRY: MATTHEW TUCKNER
It’s a fish because I tell you it's a fish. It’s a fish because I say the word & it swims there. Men fling their poles at it from the shore, casting their lines in perfect parabolas, tempting the word toward the fragment of worm tied to the end of the hook. It’s not a knife because I say the words it’s not a knife, & the knife disappears. If it were a knife, there’d be little spatters of blood on the porcelain, the scent of sulfur leaking from my pores, words like sorry & regret scratched out on parchment paper. But there’s nothing sharp here, just this fish, a fish that’s more like a car than a word for how quickly it drives the mind to the places it already knows it knows, places where the tops of evergreen trees rupture the skyline, where the men, having no knife, tear into the thumping word through the gills, finding flakes of cherry blossom where blood should be, making easy work of the white meat that, eaten raw, melts as soon as it hits the tongue. But the mind can only stay gone for so long. Soon, it makes its triumphant return, crashing into a stanchion of shrubs, clobbering up the front steps with its wet-shoes, its footwork, its motor-mouth, its chin music, leaving the door slightly ajar, lurching forward at a great height, a head with no face that rips the tilapia from my hands & fills the empty space with a knife, freshly sharp, a node of quartz glued to the handle. The mind stuffs a sack with the cherry blossoms that speckle the floor, the blossoms clinging to the lampshade, the blossoms swimming in the toilet water, the blossoms sporadic & soggy in the sink. As it turns to leave, waving goodbye for the night, endless petals billow from the brim of its bag & dirty the room. So much wood to mop & buff until it shines. So many cherry blossoms in my veins, I must be a cherry.
MEDITATIVE WEEK OF POETRY: MATTHEW HARRISON
God is a pea stuck in my throat. Count the toddlers who swallow peas. Kiddos know better. My allergies flare up from walks. Trees. A kiddo screams. Panic comes from air. God is in strollers everywhere. Panic is an uncut shrub blocking a picture window. God is me not getting it. A kid who tests the cross walk, to hell with the Don’t Walk sign. God makes me notice the wet design of the squashed possum on the way to your place. You are sick of the fits of no sleep. I am weary of your spoon, your cereal so soggy. We need to go now. Go if we’re going to go. We need milk to be skin. Be skinned now. Tomorrow I will rake. I am pretty sure. Your place, mine. Loan me a rake. God is the milk film and leaf slime, moldy birdseed, the wishes and dung we bag and count and bag and bag and bag.
MEDITATIVE WEEK OF POETRY: LIANE TYRREL
I was asked to move the bodies — there were just two. Left alone in small beds. Alone already, anyway. Where are we? It’s the same weather only more still. Same air but thinner. The roads, grass, trees, facsimile. I do clean the rooms. I’m busy as a mechanical toy. Effective in spite of myself. But I’m scared of the bodies, who wouldn’t be? What’s another word for expectation? I do as I’m told, or don’t because I forget to move the second body as if forgetting — a weak dissent. I could go crazy from this work, moving lonely men, already dead. Sitting up in bed waiting for nothing. Visible if anyone had bothered, in passing, to glance inside their window.
MEDITATIVE WEEK OF POETRY: NICOLE SHEPHERD
The girl I used to be didn’t plan on the divorce, the cracked leather on a dusty Bible, condoms under the bed that pray for responsible lust, the mushrooms— the ones that let you meet God— and knees calloused for different reasons.
I swallowed needs. Was a whore for self-erasure. So quiet, I almost disappeared.
But now— communion is my body. No sip and gentle bite, but a whole feast.
Younger me is still horrified by who I call a prophet. Tell her the firm flesh and dribbled juice make the pit worth it.
MEDITATIVE WEEK OF POETRY: C: SESSUMS
Light tears itself apart over the lake— the Perseids dragging their bright incisions.
I believed you. I believed the lake could swallow a man like a fish swallows the hook, could hold him under fifty-two days
while the divers circled and the sheriff dragged his nets through the silt.
The body rises, they told me. The gases expand. The dead want to be found.
But you were already in Paris. You were in Paris with Katya and her two children, your new passport clean,
the old one reported stolen months before you ever said I’ll be home by morning.
Thirty thousand dollars to drag a lake for nothing, for a man eating breakfast in Montmartre.
Money for snow plows. For potholes. Money the sheriff won’t forget.
We shared three children, a cinderblock house I thought was enough.
Your parents divorced when you were three— you said you’d never put the kids through that.
Instead you gave them a father the lake couldn’t return.
I get the minivan. The tackle box. The boat trailer.
I stand where the herons lift off at dusk, each one hauling its patience into the pines.
Some nights I sit on the trailer hitch until the bats come, the water wood-dark.
I open the tackle box. I touch the hooks.
MEDITATIVE WEEK OF POETRY: RON STOTTLEMEYER
Too heavy to pick up, impossible to carry. It weighs down the chest of drawers upstairs.
My hands hold each other still while you’re a whirling sky, a night of rustling
leaves, starless as the chosen mountain that waits, another November leaving.
I can’t begin the climb to break the seal and pour out your cloud of gray dust
over the impatient stream, that endless curve of bedrock bones.
MEDITATIVE WEEK OF POETRY: RAE ARMANTROUT
A branch of purple orchids poised mid-air.
“Poised” meaning to stand in relation to a future that isn’t there.
Time meaning rhythm in music as elsewhere.
A flicker knocks on a bare trunk. A flicker being a lone drummer.
MEDITATIVE WEEK OF POETRY: MONIKA CASSEL
The fir trunks rise around him like cathedral piers. Hands in greatcoat pockets, hat brim tipped to shade his eyes. Vest, collar, tie. The rifle’s leather band, slung round his shoulder, gleams. Long Tielsch nose and narrow, handsome face. Eldest son, set to inherit this land, these trees. How long still will that future bend to his imagining? For now, no war mars the horizon. Stretched out across the frame, the stag lies at his feet. It’s huge. Five points — or more? Tangled in brush and forest litter, the rack’s obscured by shade. Underbelly white in sunlight; down the midsection (far from the heart) a narrow trickle. That can’t be my father, my aunt says, peers at the photo print. He’d never make a kill that messy, or pose with it.
MEDITATIVE WEEK OF POETRY: SALLY KEITH
I found a little poem called “Obedience” including a ferocious current and the pointlessness of working against it. I understood the words but for whatever reason could not bring myself to translate it. Whether the river is a trope or whether sadness relates to rain through tears, I don’t know. Even knowing, the future tense construction as not the future tense but, rather, an expression of doubt
does not help. And, anyway,
I would not solve the question of obedience nor when in a life it matters most, or might. I wouldn’t say A river is ferocious, I don’t think. Whatever
crying did, I can tell you, it does not do anymore —
unconquerable resolve, steadfast march, even dust looks wet given how dry my eyes are.
It’s not that the poem won’t be turned into something else.
I started all this supposing I’d learn to write with letters. To tell you all of it.