April 15, 2022

Janice N. Harrington

CONNECTING FLIGHTS

1

A skinny, pony-legged thing
in canvas shoes and pig-tails,
she skips into the yard, then runs
to jump, jump, and skyward wave.
Her baby brother does the same.
She taught him: a childhood game
on Alabama’s red sand and yella clay.

They wave at silver wings,
at silver bellies, at the people
in the silver bodies whom they can’t see.
They wave to the passenger they
imagine who must even now look down
on them. Goodbye, Daddy,
they shout. Goodbye to their father
who is always leaving, and every plane
or contrail is their father’s flight
and a chance to say Bye-bye! Bye-bye,
a chance that he will see them and come back.

 

2

A few years later, in Nebraska then, at Pioneer Park,
A Negro Family Flying Box Kites, circa 1964–65.
The children hold cotton strings and run, run
downhill trying to launch frail paper into flight.
But they are poor engines, poor lures for fickle
winds, poor practitioners of a difficult art

made from balsa and paper, and pushing
through air with brown bodies as fast, fast
as they could go so that maybe … maybe
a brief lift, a shudder, til something unseen
snatches up their tender offering, a strength
that pulls the cotton taut, briefly, briefly,
before their minds can think: It’s flying,
or Higher, or Take us with you—then lets go.

But there was something in those plummets
and ceaseless falls, in their disappointment,
their father’s trying, trying, so that they never
went back to fly kites again. But maybe
the story errs. Or memory, though its strings
are so tightly held, turns, spins, and always falls.

 

3

Years later, she looks out a small window
into the kingdom of clouds, bulwarks,
fortresses, palaces of vapor.
She imagines walking over the cloudscape:
the still, the cold, the press of wind.

In Alabama, they are laying him down,
her father, digging his grave in red sand 
and yellow clay. She didn’t go back.
But she imagines now his heart’s rupture,
his body falling. Turbulence,
the pilot says. If the cabin pressure drops,
apply your own mask first and then …
the safety bulletin reads. In Detroit,
she reboards. The plane takes
the runway, rises, banks into flight.
She wonders how they returned the body,
thinks of her father in his coffin-box.

On the way to Philly, she sits in the belly
of a silver plane, by a narrow window
looking down, looking back.
From that height the world reshapes itself,
green squares, brown squares,
the threads of rivers, grids of roads.
She knows he never saw them waving,
flinging their bodies up, up, as high
as they could, trying every time to reach him.

from Rattle #75, Spring 2022
Tribute to Librarians

__________

Janice N. Harrington (from the interview): “I loved being in libraries; I loved the silence and the quiet. My library at that time was the Bennett Martin Public Library in Lincoln. It was the one place where you could find this luscious quiet, and I gravitated towards that. Of course, it had books, and it had magazines in the basement. You could smell the old paper. It was a sensual experience. You could pull anything off the shelf; you could look at it, put it back; you could walk out of the library with it, and nobody stopped you.” (web)

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June 26, 2021

Janice N. Harrington

MOLLY

All motion is love.
—Rumi

Unlike the others, with her it was never rough
or quick, or half-done, and never,
because it was endless, done with anger
or jaws grinding: enough, enough.

It was done carefully, spreading thighs,
lifting the scrotum with its rope
of penis, the leaves of labia pushed aside
and then a washcloth, slick with soap,
flesh and flank washed and washed in a tide
of skin
of touch
of water.

And this was intimacy.
Its shame they couldn’t hide but did it matter?
Handmaid, menial, servant, daughter,
she washed them and touched with practiced skill.
Each movement precise, each movement ceremony,
cradling these white-fleshed raku,
each holding its fill of bitter tea.

All the exquisite parts of her work, fingers,
palms, wrists, arms, shoulders,
the motion of cleaning and drying,
the certainty that one day
she too would lie
in a County bed, waiting, compassion
taken from the hands of strangers.

from Rattle #15, Summer 2001

__________

Janice N. Harrington: “A librarian and professional storyteller, I’ve told stories at festivals throughout the United States, specializing in participation stories and African-American folk tales. I’m also my family’s historian. Poetry is a way of saving what remains to us.”

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December 31, 2009

Janice N. Harrington

ODE TO THE BEDPAN

Consider the arching hips, the buttocks
squeezed, thrust upward and then pressed
to that metal lip, almost sexually. Consider
the bedpan—shit bucket, hat—its adaptable
demeanor: triangular, oval, saddled, slippershaped,
sloped, enameled, plastic, antique
porcelain, disposable, yellow to match the pitcher
and the plastic glass, spoon-colored or blue,
the faithful servant who bears away
the human ordure, its stench and its dye-free tissues.
Feel its patience. A bedpan waits more placidly
than a woman curbing her dog. Washed out,
it is used again. How many buttocks and thighs
has a bedpan cradled? How many beds has it
sat upon? The warmth of a bedpan
forgotten beneath a sleeping rump. The floor-
jarring percussion of a bedpan dropped
on the night shift. Consider its calm,
its kindness, really, that a bedpan accepts
these urges, spillings, the bowel’s complaining,
and the voweled protest. It does the job
assigned to it. Thigh, buttock, hip, the hand
that takes it away, embarrassment—
it is all the same. Shame—yes—but
that too is easily sluiced, nothing that anyone
should keep or have to sleep with. Bedpans
do not judge us. They are a measure
of humility, a scoop, a shovel, a gutter,
a necessary plumbing, the celebrant of hierarchy
and the social order, pleased to be lifted
by darker hands paid the minimum wage.

from Rattle #31, Summer 2009
Tribute to African American Poets

__________

Janice N. Harrington: “I worked my way through college as a nurses’ aide in several nursing homes. I am still haunted by the memory.” (website)

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November 5, 2008

Review by Michele Battiste

EVEN THE HOLLOW MY BODY MADE IS GONE
by Janice N. Harrington

BOA Editions, Ltd.
260 East Avenue
Rochester, NY 14604
ISBN 978-1-929918-89-8
2007, 85 pp., $15.50
boaeditions.org/

Janice N. Harrington won the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize for Even the Hollow My Body Made Is Gone, a distinction she shares with the likes of Li-Young Lee, Dorianne Laux and Kim Addonizio. Harrington, like her predecessors, is doing her share of (re)building poetry’s readership. She writes for readers, welcoming them to her poems, drawing them in with narratives and pleasurable rhythms and anchoring refrains and, dare I say it, musical hooks.

I was drawn in when I went to hear Harrington read on a cold, rainy February evening in New York during the 2008 AWP Conference. Her voice warmed up the room like the woodstoves in her poems. But it isn’t her reading skills alone that can shake a readership out of two dozen bodies shifting their weight in metal chairs, it is her ability to breathe life into the subjects of her poems, to lift them off the page and to place them into her readers’ laps like a gift.

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