Single Parents

April 1, 2014

“What to Do with Leftovers” by Edison JenningsPosted by

Edison Jennings

WHAT TO DO WITH LEFTOVERS

When she doesn’t show,
toss out the bread for birds,
freeze the shrimp in Tupperware,
and forget the words—

all that awful sweet-talk
you practiced while you cooked,
the boyish innuendoes
on just how good she looked.

Plug the cork back in the wine
(the fresh whipped cream won’t last);
what was meant to be a feast
has now become a fast.

Take the pills the doctor gave
and try to get some sleep:
what you could not save
was never yours to keep.

—from Rattle #41, Fall 2013
Tribute to Single Parent Poets

[download audio]

__________

Edison Jennings: “I live in Virginia with my two sons, and none of us are sure why I persist in writing poetry. But sometimes I tell my sons that maybe I write poetry because of a desire (a need?) to take part in an age-old conversation. In other words, I want to respond to a call, as in call and response. The bard calls and I squeak out a response. There are many calls and many responses, stretching back millennia. It is a communal and constantly evolving conversation. At least, that’s what I tell my sons.”

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March 31, 2014

“Elephant Drops Dead in the Ring” by Anne Ward JamiesonPosted by

Anne Ward Jamieson

ELEPHANT DROPS DEAD IN THE RING

No stunt of his has ever awed a crowd
like this vast sudden mound he’s made
out of himself.
                    Mommy, is he sleeping?
The pink dot of a woman pirouetting
on his head has toppled off like a sequin
cut loose from its thread.
                    The problem of his body
lies inert where it fell, a sawdust blanket
sifting over him, absorbing his circus smell.
Our collective gasp
                    rises like a stray balloon
clear up to the big top’s peak to settle
in fresh gloom. The children ride quietly
home. Read us a story, Mommy.
                                        Hush.
Goodnight stars. Goodnight air.
Goodnight noises everywhere.
Goodnight, Elephant. There there.

—from Rattle #41, Fall 2013
Tribute to Single Parent Poets

__________

Anne Ward Jamieson: “A while back there was an op-ed columnist whose work I followed in the newspaper both for what she had to say and how well she said it. She was a single mother. Then, inexplicably, the quality of her columns seemed to take a disappointing dip. But I read on and, one day, she mentioned being recently married. I was instantly convinced that explained her poor performance. I know it could have been because she was very very busy or very very happy or both or something else entirely but my immediate take on it was that she had someone she shared her inner thoughts with, someone to talk to, someone whose attention obviated the need to spill her feelings to the general public.”

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March 27, 2014

“Emily on Tuesday” by Ken HollandPosted by

Ken Holland

EMILY ON TUESDAY

Saturday night my daughter told me
how much parmesan
to mix in the Alfredo.
She prefers her fettuccine
al dente.

She is smug and confident
and in-my-face.
If we haven’t rented a movie
she’ll watch commercials

and point out which models
I should date.
Emily, I want to ask her,
how is it you know so much?

I mean, what did I know
at seven?

I want to ask her
but that’s not something
I can do
on a Tuesday.

—from Rattle #41, Fall 2013
Tribute to Single Parent Poets

[download audio]

__________

Ken Holland: “When the poet Hal Sirowitz asked me what I sought to convey in poetry, I answered that I was trying to capture and interpret moments. Whether from my own memory, or incidents outside myself, or from the gauze of official recollection we call history. In one such moment my daughter, then seven years old, had remarked to me (divorced dad that I’d recently become) that while her mother was like a mother, I was like both a father and a mother to her. The poem that’s published here deals with all such moments of intimacy, but also those moments when that same intimacy cannot be shared.”

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March 26, 2014

“The Transfer” by Elise HempelPosted by

Elise Hempel

THE TRANSFER

His car rolls up to the curb, you switch
your mood, which doll to bring and rush

out again on the sliding steps
of your shoes half-on, forgetting to zip

your new pink coat in thirty degrees,
teeth and hair not brushed, already

passing the birch, mid-way between us,
too far to hear my fading voice

calling my rope of reminders as I
lean out in my robe, another Saturday

morning you’re pulled toward his smile, his gifts,
sweeping on two flattened rafts

from mine to his, your fleeting wave
down the rapids of the drive.

—from Rattle #41, Fall 2013
Tribute to Single Parent Poets

__________

Elise Hempel: “I’ve written poetry since I was a child, but I suppose one of the reasons I keep doing it is that I have a soft voice that’s often misheard or not heard at all; writing poetry gives me a stronger voice. It’s also a place to put my feelings, my inner voice. I’ve had many feelings about being a divorced mother of an only child; so much of my poetry over the last eighteen years has been about my daughter and the experience of single motherhood. The poems have helped me get through some of the more difficult times, and they’ve also created something of a diary for my daughter to read and keep for the future.”

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March 25, 2014

“To My Husband, Who 33 Years Ago …” by Maryanne HannanPosted by

Maryanne Hannan

TO MY HUSBAND, WHO 33 YEARS AGO DIED AT THE AGE OF 33

De mortuis, nihil nisi bonum
Of you dead, I’ve spoken nothing
but good, nodded at over-fond
family memories, the favored first
son who skipped school to sneak
into the new museum. I’ve let
strangers tell our girls how you fell
forty feet taking a leak, behind
the garage, at your graduation party,
never dropping your grilled chicken
leg. Such was not the nature
of the man-to-be, yet these dull shards
are now my own. What else of you
can I offer our daughters, raised
by another man? You are at our table
always—in the gap, the sainted lost
father, shrouded in respect, silence
the price we pay for life. Was it wrong
to let you slip into cliché, pallid
memory? But how could it have been
otherwise? You have been undoing now
as long as you lived. Even the ink in your
notebooks fades. Remember how you
used to read “Dover Beach” and we would
shudder with faux foreboding? Remember
our pleasure when Emily said she didn’t
know how the sun set? Neither did we
then, nor did we much care. But oh, now
to see it rise again, one ribbon at a time.

—from Rattle #41, Fall 2013
Tribute to Single Parent Poets

[download audio]

__________

Maryanne Hannan: “‘I live on Earth at present/ … I am not a thing—a noun./ I seem to be a verb,’ wrote Buckminster Fuller. When a person no longer inhabits the earth, they do become nouns, able to be defined by anyone with a memory. When I became a single parent, I felt intensely the impossibility of keeping alive, for our daughters, the dynamism that was their father. Over the years, stories have ossified, including my own, but there is still verb, an underlying stream of energy, left in memory. This poem finally enabled me to grapple with some of that pain.” (website)

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March 24, 2014

“The Story, For Now” by Janlori GoldmanPosted by

Janlori Goldman

THE STORY, FOR NOW

No father. That’s what I told you.
        By second grade, friends said
                all kids have one, somewhere,

called you liar. The difference between biology
        and Dad? That’s the story that grew
                as you grew, like dated pencil marks

on the doorframe. Now I tell you—
        I met him on a work trip.
                In the morning, we circled Henry Moore’s

massive, marble women.
        In other cities we’d meet for Greek food,
                fool around. A divorce.

He said he was getting one. I said,
        you should know. I’m going to have this baby.
                I’m not asking you for anything.

I knew nothing of asking.
        All I knew, the gift was in me,
                even if he didn’t mean to give it.

He looked at the mound under my sweater—
        you can always make another. This one
                will ruin my life. The wife and I,

we’re trying to work things out.
        He needed me to keep a secret,
                and I could only see my way

to one very sure place of going it alone.
        I agreed to No Father,
                just xxxxxxxxx on your birth certificate.

When you’re very young I give you this story:
        a friend helped me. A woman
                needs sperm to make a baby—

this is true the way a story with a missing piece
        can be true. By twelve, you ask
                what was your friend’s name?

I forgot, I say. You hear the lie,
        demand I put his picture and name
                in the piano bench, inside the purple book

with mirrors on the cover. Is he good at math?
        Do I have a brother? Over soup, you say
                he should’ve wanted to know me,

should’ve told his wife—aren’t you angry?
        I thought I’d given you enough of a story,
                but under the clapboard a vine’s been growing,

a prying wedge. I tell you now, I am angry.
        For not knowing you’d long to fill in the blank
                with something other than a string of x’s.

—from Rattle #41, Fall 2013
Tribute to Single Parent Poets

[download audio]

__________

Janlori Goldman: “My daughter, Maya Rose, is now in her second year of college. It’s been a long, stupendous trip from there to here. For the past twenty years, I never thought of myself as a ‘single mom.’ But recently I made myself sit at the kitchen table until ‘The Story, For Now’ was written, hours sweating over the page, resisting the garden, the refrigerator. I made discoveries. I let my daughter read the poem. Does poetry save me? Yes.” (www.hugeshoes.org)

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March 20, 2014

“Custody” by Louis GalloPosted by

Louis Gallo

CUSTODY

Once upon a time there was no time.
It held us like water.

The minutes were monsters
sewn out of hatred.

They steal the young princess
from the house of her father.

She grows up a stranger,
he falls into darkness.

A lord without light,
he prays that this story

will end without ending
or end right.

—from Rattle #41, Fall 2013
Tribute to Single Parent Poets

__________

Louis Gallo: “I have written poetry all my life. I have no choice. It is a compulsion. I’d be a lot richer if it were not! But it gives me a joy I find nowhere else, not even in fine vino. And I still don’t quite know what it is … poetry, that is. I was a single parent for quite a few years, starting when my daughter was five years old. After the divorce, of course. Every possible obstruction was levied against me by the courts and lawyers for reasons I have detailed in my novel Life Beside Itself: The Abductions. I wanted the poem ‘Custody’ to assume the flavor of a fairy tale or children’s poem in order to, hopefully, drain out the sentimentality that sinks many of the other poems that I have attempted on the subject. It is the most difficult subject for poets—the loss of their beloved children.” (web)

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