Wilda Morris, Workshop Chair, Poets and Patrons of Chicago, and past President of the Illinois State Poetry Society, has published hundreds of poems in anthologies, webzines, and print publications. She has won awards for formal and free verse and haiku. Her most recent collection is Pequod Poems: Gamming with Moby-Dick. Her poetry blog at wildamorris.blogspot.com features a monthly poetry contest.
Where It Began
All the eggs a woman will ever carry form in her ovaries
while she is a four-month-old fetus in the womb of her mother.
This means our cellular life as an egg begins in the womb
of our grandmother. Each of us spent five months in our
grandmother’s womb, and she in turn formed in the womb
of her grandmother.
~ Layne Redmond, When the Drummers were Women
There is something metaphoric about stacked
Russian dolls, how the little egg-shaped girl
sits inside the mother, the mother inside
the babushka, perfect fits, but separable,
each doll herself. It’s like that, I think,
me cellular but unformed in Mother’s body
while she was a fetus in her mother’s womb,
a great start for my life, the beginning
of the many ways I was nurtured by Mother
and Grandmother, the ways their strength
and openness to the world gave me the pluck
to be myself while still held in the wings of their faith,
my pulse beating to the rhythms they taught,
the songs they sang still echoing.
~ Wilda Morris
Previously published in Nostos, IV (2020), p. 119.
Bio of Bonnie Manion
Bonnie Manion is a much-published, often awarded poet who writes in a easily understood, accessible style. Her poetry can be found in three chapbooks offered on Amazon.com and on her website, www.BonnieManion.com.
The Fifth Dimension
Grandkids learn their ABCs
to musical stories on TV
while my thoughts fly away,
far and wide, whooshed
among waffling oak leaves,
poked under pungent pines,
riding high on moist clouds,
sliding down a hot breeze,
finally coming to rest in
early evening light
as the summer
meanders on,
while my
seeking
soul
abides
The American Sin
Man’s inhumanity to man
took a much-needed hit
when a secret home video
showed George Floyd-unarmed-
slammed to the street, head
pounded into the ground, neck
pressed under a uniformed knee
for nine long minutes in the
northern city of Minneapolis.
Meanwhile, two novice cops
stood silently by, watching
but not interfering. Later on,
news came out that the killer-
cop had a part-time security
gig at a bar with the guy he
had just pressed to death.
Colonial patriots wrote
our beautiful Constitution
while engaged in slave-
buying, selling, prostitution.
Claiming Christianity, but
Indulging in hypocracy,
they launched a democracy
to promote the plantation
economy. It took beatings
and lynchings to keep blacks
in their assigned second-place.
Now, one more killed-by-a-cop
story; still racist, cruel, gory.
And all over a $20. debt? We
can’t make sense of it yet.
published by illinoispoets.org
Noah’s Flood
“. . . Noah’s flood is not yet subsided;
two thirds of the fair world it yet covers.”
~ Herman Melville, Moby Dick [Chapter 58]
Two-thirds of the world is watery,
calling the vagabond, the troubled,
the adventurous, the meditative,
to come to the shore and beyond,
to sail out into the deep,
the gull and albatross overhead
and beneath feet which play the deck like a drum,
teeming villages of dolphin, shark, squid,
and thousands of other species, many still unknown.
We’ve learned to love remnants
of the flood, what flows between continents
and up estuaries, waves that foam,
climb the air and fall,
the white sapphire sparkles on the surface
in moonlight or sun.
Scientists say the ice is melting,
the flood returning.
When the waters don’t recede
and whole cities sink below the crest,
you and I will play the role
of Noah’s neighbors.
~ Wilda Morris
Originally published in Pequod Poems: Gamming with Moby-Dick by Wilda Morris (Kelsay Books, 2019).
Bio of Irving Miller
Born in New York City and educated at New York University, Purdue University, and the University of Michigan, Irving Miller taught and served as a university administrator at New York University, University of Illinois at Chicago, and the University of Akron. He has authored over 80 refereed articles and book chapters in science and engineering, over 200 abstracts and presentations, edited and translated several monographs, and received numerous science and engineering grants and awards. A casual poet for most of my life, he began writing poetry seriously in 1995. His poetry has appeared in journals, collections and chapbooks, and on several websites.
The Rules
The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth – Albert Camus
you cannot play backgammon
if you eat yogurt
you cannot shoot BBs
if you own a watch
you cannot ride a bike
if your name starts with a vowel
you cannot play bridge
if you have red hair
you cannot sing carols
if you can spell quetzalcoatl
you cannot eat corn flakes
if you are an only child
you cannot play the harmonica
if you have an older sister
you cannot feed the pigeons
if you are left-handed
you cannot watch the sunset
if you have freckles on your nose
you cannot read Tolstoy
if you had an appendectomy
do not assume the rules
do not apply to you
they do
Morning in the Wetlands
Looking for my lost self
I walk the Wetlands path.
A redwing’s quiet conk-la
and its shrill reeee! announce
I’m trespassing. When I step
too close to his mate’s nest,
she chitters her tink, tink, tink.
He flies in, a kamikaze aiming
for my head. Okay, Okay,
I say, quickening my step
away from his marsh mate,
I’m willing to watch
from a distance. A mallard
mother, camouflaged
among cattails, broods
her eggs, guarded
by her green-headed
hero. At my approach
he shifts, stands,
takes a few uneasy steps.
I have not come here
to bring fear, only to
get in touch with some
part of me hidden within,
something released only
in the presence of the wild,
the unpredictable,
the unspoiled. I turn
to leave, still not at rest.
A great blue heron
lands on the water
like a blessing.
~ Wilda Morris
Published in the anthology, Natural Voices: Celebrating Nature with Opened Eyes (Natural Land Institute, 2018).
After I Argued with Francisco during Dinner in San Miguel de Allende and He Dropped Something into My Diet Coke
My eyelashes fluttered, became butterflies,
cerulean and gold. They smelled like blueberries
so I plucked and ate them. The tortilla
I dropped tattooed a Mayan sun disk on my right ankle.
Drops of my blood splattered on the stripped floor,
became notes on a treble clef and sang La Bomba.
I leapt up, clicked my knuckles like castanets.
My blue jeans became a scarlet skirt.
I spun out into the night to the rhythm
of a painting by Frieda Kahlo,
whirled into El Jardin.
When I paid a pigeon cinco pesos
for three boxes of Clorets, it offered me wings
instead. I flew into the tower of La Parroquia,
pulled the ropes of all four bells. They were heavy
as Diego Rivera. When the bells rang, I jumped
onto the horse behind General Allende,
circling the park in his blue uniform.
Startled, the horse galloped fast
as the bite of a jalapeño. Francisco’s laugh,
an octave higher than bougainvillea,
turned his cigarette into a stick, his teeth,
to corn-on-the-cob. I smeared butter
and chili powder on them and sold his mouth
in the north-east corner of El Jardin.
I clapped. Skin dropped off my arms and legs.
My face became a candy skull. I hobbled home alone,
now a Katrina on skeletal feet.
Mowing
You have to walk the property
to get a feel for the shape of it,
a trapezoid filled with dozens
of trees. Along one sloping side
rises a low ridge. A two-lane
macadam fronts the longest side.
A farm field edges the shortest.
I dress in old clothes to mow
because the Yazoo is dirty
and greasy, its red paint faded
and peeling, the deck piled
with musty dried grass cuttings.
Filling gas tanks that look like
two saddlebags, I check the oil.
Then swing a leg over the center
post as I start up the engine,
which turns over with a snort
of smoke and an uncertain shudder
before settling into a mechanical roar.
Engaging the blades, I mindfully
settle into the task ahead of me,
starting a circuit of the property that
follows the bordering perimeter.
At each tree encountered, I swing
around its circumference, outside
leg hung out for balance as the
zero-turning-radius mower
makes its tight circle.
Daring the length of the slope,
I lean into its height as I travel
the angling hillside. I follow
the edge of each mowed swath
pass-by-pass as I continue to circle
the perimeter, slowly arcing inward.
Pass after pass. Round and round I
mow, letting my mind wander as I go.
Moon Dust
For years he [the Nantucketer] knows not the land; so that when he comes to it at last,
it smells like another world, more strangely than the moon would be to an Earthsman.
Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chapter 14
Moon dust has no salty scent,
no fishy smell, no reminder
of brine or earthly shoreline.
It does not smell like Kansas soil
awakening in spring,
or windblown Sahara sand.
Moon dust, the dust of broken molecules
smashed by eons of meteorite collisions
left with unsatisfied electron bonds
seeking partners, has no smell at all
when left in place as it was
for billions of years, dry and destitute,
but comes alive when touched by moisture
in a lunar lander or the mucus membrane
of an astronaut’s nose.
It smells something like fireplace ashes
sprinkled with water or the Indianapolis 500,
something like spent gunpowder
but unlike the smell of land or sea
on earth, our home. We only know
from the word of astronauts
who kicked up dust, who picked up dust
on space suits, helmets and boots,
who bottled dust and brought it back
to answer questions of the curious,
their fellow sailors on this little speck
in the vast sea of space.
~ Wilda Morris
[Originally published in Journal of Modern Poetry]
Fog
Beginning with a line by Ellen Watson*
I am the age of my daughter who still loves fog,
but it is sun on the wooden porch I love,
the way heat pushes through my skirt into skin.
It is the rough bark of the apple tree scratching
my calf as I climb to a higher branch I love,
evening-damp grass as I roll down a hill,
cocoa hot enough to singe my tongue.
Fog is a curtain I cannot feel.
Wilda Morris
The first line is from the poem, “Glen Cove, 1957,” by Ellen Watson. “Fog” was first published by
The Avocet.