(Previously Published in I-70 Review)
* * *
—Poetry and Collages by Maryfrances Wagner,
Kansas City, MO
CLEANING OUT THE CLOSET
The red sweater goes in the dry-clean pile
with the sweater Margery knitted, its black
angora threads woven with raw silk.
The black wool pants go in the charity box,
the blue-and-white striped dress as well.
At the back is my mother’s navy knit I saved.
I remember other dresses she prized—the flouncy
shirtwaist she wore to dance around the house
with my brother, the pink sweater she spent
winter nights beading with quartz and crystals,
our companion blue frocks that never fit right,
even after the aunts altered them. Arms crossed
over the shelves of their ample breasts, they said
my mother’s shoulders were too round, my waist
too short while we stood pinched and stiff among
pins poking us everywhere while they tucked darts.
And my mother always said it wasn’t only clothes
that never quite fit. Instead of social visits, she
beaded. Winters when my brother and I pitched
marbles within the circled pattern in our rug or tried
to fit jigsaw pieces into a Niagara Falls puzzle,
my mother sewed seed pearls on her black tam,
studded rhinestones into sweaters that curved
around her then perfect size eight, or she beaded
evening bags and embellished gowns she wore
to weddings, long pearl flower patterns she invented
as she went. As we aged past mini dresses,
she shifted to jumpers and roomy smocks
before I inherited her clothes. I pull
the kilt I wore in high school from its hanger,
a gift made in Scotland to fit exactly. As years
passed, I moved the button over more than once,
but now it’s time to let it go with so many others.
The red sweater goes in the dry-clean pile
with the sweater Margery knitted, its black
angora threads woven with raw silk.
The black wool pants go in the charity box,
the blue-and-white striped dress as well.
At the back is my mother’s navy knit I saved.
I remember other dresses she prized—the flouncy
shirtwaist she wore to dance around the house
with my brother, the pink sweater she spent
winter nights beading with quartz and crystals,
our companion blue frocks that never fit right,
even after the aunts altered them. Arms crossed
over the shelves of their ample breasts, they said
my mother’s shoulders were too round, my waist
too short while we stood pinched and stiff among
pins poking us everywhere while they tucked darts.
And my mother always said it wasn’t only clothes
that never quite fit. Instead of social visits, she
beaded. Winters when my brother and I pitched
marbles within the circled pattern in our rug or tried
to fit jigsaw pieces into a Niagara Falls puzzle,
my mother sewed seed pearls on her black tam,
studded rhinestones into sweaters that curved
around her then perfect size eight, or she beaded
evening bags and embellished gowns she wore
to weddings, long pearl flower patterns she invented
as she went. As we aged past mini dresses,
she shifted to jumpers and roomy smocks
before I inherited her clothes. I pull
the kilt I wore in high school from its hanger,
a gift made in Scotland to fit exactly. As years
passed, I moved the button over more than once,
but now it’s time to let it go with so many others.
August
(Previously Published in I-70 Review)
SUNDAY AFTERNOON
Braced for banter on Sundays, the day we always get together, my father and brother send salvos, bullets, wasp stings, smacked softballs, snake bites until conversation breaks down and my mother winds them in with cherry pie or applesauce cake. On this Sunday, my father and brother seek common ground—union news, buy American, gun talk—before my sister-in-law announces their four-year-old son has leukemia. My mother gasps and bolts from her recliner where she’s been crocheting herself into transcendence. Staring at a wren’s nest, knowing I should be unloading the dryer, I snap into focus. My nephew has climbed inside a box, and his younger brother shakes his rattle at the air that is suddenly heavy as wet wool and silent.
American Mercy
WOUNDED VET
You don’t have
to be homeless
to feel
lost,
exhaled
like vapor,
to grab at bits
that sting
like fire ants
or ice pellets.
You sit
with the moon.
It’s traveled
with you
but doesn’t reach
out.
Your hand
tightens
around a glass of scotch.
Words
stumble out
clumsy as mittens.
I see you in a room
of thought
far off,
though I’m only
feet away.
A breeze sifts
across the sill,
shivers a curtain.
Long ago
you waited
on standby
with a four-day pass.
Is it wrong
to ponder
unfinished business?
What Did We Miss?
REMEMBERING ERIC SANDERS
We didn’t take him seriously the day
he cruised through the parade
in a convertible, his shaved head
sunburned around his crossbones tats.
The safety pin in his ear glinted.
We thought he was getting in character
for a play. Behind a bullhorn, the boy
always open for a chat, who loved chess
and drama, said we needed to build
a shelter, stock up on water and jerky.
Said Neo Nazis had formed camps to blow
us up, send us in pieces across a crowded
sky. He said killing is a mysterious passion
and every citizen has a prepared place
under a burial blanket. We shrugged,
but raised our blue snow cones.
The next Monday during lunch, he
streaked across the school parking lot
after he tossed a cherry bomb in a toilet.
At his new rage, we tried a fist bump,
but he turned away, broke his pencil,
spit on the floor, and tossed his backpack.
Once the angel in the fifth-grade play,
the one to suffer wasp stings to bring
cornflowers to Ellie, alone in the hospital
with mono. When he drove off a cliff into that
good night, we talked about it for weeks,
counselors offered time to process, and we
kept wondering. Bill printed Eric’s motto
from when he ran for class president. We
pitched in to get the words engraved on a plaque
we hoped the principal might hang in the library.
Lessons Learned
THIRD HOUR REMEDIAL ENGLISH III
My first year, my principal assigned me
one class of Remedial English III, when schools
still tracked students. The course had no books
other than the same novels the regular students
read and a workbook that wouldn’t last a month.
I ordered a weekly magazine with stories and
exercises.
I invented sentences about them to teach
punctuation.
We studied their favorite song lyrics for figures of
speech.
The classroom, converted from the vice principal’s
former office, at a time of exploding district en-
rollment,
was long and narrow with thirty desks crammed
together.
So small, not even a filing cabinet or bookcase
could fit.
The closet was a converted bathroom with two
shelves,
a mirror over a nonfunctioning sink, and a missing
doorknob. That first Halloween, I brought a pump-
kin
full of treats and put it in my closet. Each hour I
went
for the pumpkin to hand out candy. During third
hour,
Donnie Watts shut the door behind me, a door
I could not open from inside. Everyone laughed
but didn’t let me out. The room was on the ground
floor.
The students opened the windows and climbed out.
I could hear them laughing. I could hear my prin-
cipal
on the intercom asking why my class way playing
Frisbee on the front lawn. He couldn’t hear me
calling from the closet. After the bell rang,
Terri, climbed back in and opened the door
but begged me not to tell the others she had.
I filled her purse with Snickers and Milky Ways,
took
a deep breath, and smiled as the next class
shuffled in.
_____________________
Today’s LittleNip:
Your imagination knows what to write, so get out of the way.
—Ray Bradbury
_____________________
Welcome to newcomer Maryfrances Wagner! Maryfrances’ newest books are The Immigrants’ New Camera, and Solving for X. She co-edits I-70 Review, serves on The Writers Place board, was 2020 Missouri Individual Artist of the Year, and was Missouri’s sixth Poet Laureate, 2021-2023. Her Red Silk won the Thorpe Menn Book Award and was first runner-up in the Eric Hoffer Award 2024 (reissued in 2023), and short-listed for the Grand Prize. Her poems have appeared in New Letters, Midwest Quarterly, Laurel Review, American Journal of Poetry, Poetry East, Voices in Italian Americana, Main Street Rag, Rattle, Unsettling America: An Anthology of Contemporary Multicultural Poetry (Penguin), Literature Across Cultures (Pearson/Longman), et al. She is the granddaughter of four Italian Immigrants. Welcome to the Kitchen, Maryfrances, and don’t be a stranger!
____________________
—Medusa
My first year, my principal assigned me
one class of Remedial English III, when schools
still tracked students. The course had no books
other than the same novels the regular students
read and a workbook that wouldn’t last a month.
I ordered a weekly magazine with stories and
exercises.
I invented sentences about them to teach
punctuation.
We studied their favorite song lyrics for figures of
speech.
The classroom, converted from the vice principal’s
former office, at a time of exploding district en-
rollment,
was long and narrow with thirty desks crammed
together.
So small, not even a filing cabinet or bookcase
could fit.
The closet was a converted bathroom with two
shelves,
a mirror over a nonfunctioning sink, and a missing
doorknob. That first Halloween, I brought a pump-
kin
full of treats and put it in my closet. Each hour I
went
for the pumpkin to hand out candy. During third
hour,
Donnie Watts shut the door behind me, a door
I could not open from inside. Everyone laughed
but didn’t let me out. The room was on the ground
floor.
The students opened the windows and climbed out.
I could hear them laughing. I could hear my prin-
cipal
on the intercom asking why my class way playing
Frisbee on the front lawn. He couldn’t hear me
calling from the closet. After the bell rang,
Terri, climbed back in and opened the door
but begged me not to tell the others she had.
I filled her purse with Snickers and Milky Ways,
took
a deep breath, and smiled as the next class
shuffled in.
_____________________
Today’s LittleNip:
Your imagination knows what to write, so get out of the way.
—Ray Bradbury
_____________________
Welcome to newcomer Maryfrances Wagner! Maryfrances’ newest books are The Immigrants’ New Camera, and Solving for X. She co-edits I-70 Review, serves on The Writers Place board, was 2020 Missouri Individual Artist of the Year, and was Missouri’s sixth Poet Laureate, 2021-2023. Her Red Silk won the Thorpe Menn Book Award and was first runner-up in the Eric Hoffer Award 2024 (reissued in 2023), and short-listed for the Grand Prize. Her poems have appeared in New Letters, Midwest Quarterly, Laurel Review, American Journal of Poetry, Poetry East, Voices in Italian Americana, Main Street Rag, Rattle, Unsettling America: An Anthology of Contemporary Multicultural Poetry (Penguin), Literature Across Cultures (Pearson/Longman), et al. She is the granddaughter of four Italian Immigrants. Welcome to the Kitchen, Maryfrances, and don’t be a stranger!
____________________
—Medusa
Maryfrances Wagner
A reminder that the
2024 Stanislaus County
Young Poet Laureate
Reading and Reception
takes place in Turlock today, 2pm.
For info about this and other
future poetry happenings in
Northern California and otherwheres,
click on
UPCOMING NORCAL EVENTS
(http://medusaskitchen.blogspot.com/p/wtf.html)
in the links at the top of this page—
and keep an eye on this link and on
the daily Kitchen for happenings
that might pop up
—or get changed!—
during the week.
Photos in this column can be enlarged by
clicking on them once, then clicking on the x
in the top right corner to come back to Medusa.
Find previous four-or-so posts by scrolling down
under today; or there's an "Older Posts" button
at the bottom of this column; or find previous poets
by typing the name of the poet or poem
into the little beige box at the top
left-hand side of today’s post; or go to
Medusa’s Rapsheet at the bottom of
the blue column at the right
to find the date you want.
Would you like to be a SnakePal?
Guidelines are at the top of this page
at the Placating the Gorgon link;
send poetry and/or photos and artwork
to kathykieth@hotmail.com. We post
work from all over the world—including
that which was previously published—
and collaborations are welcome.
Just remember:
the snakes of Medusa are always hungry—
for poetry, of course!
2024 Stanislaus County
Young Poet Laureate
Reading and Reception
takes place in Turlock today, 2pm.
For info about this and other
future poetry happenings in
Northern California and otherwheres,
click on
UPCOMING NORCAL EVENTS
(http://medusaskitchen.blogspot.com/p/wtf.html)
in the links at the top of this page—
and keep an eye on this link and on
the daily Kitchen for happenings
that might pop up
—or get changed!—
during the week.
Photos in this column can be enlarged by
clicking on them once, then clicking on the x
in the top right corner to come back to Medusa.
Find previous four-or-so posts by scrolling down
under today; or there's an "Older Posts" button
at the bottom of this column; or find previous poets
by typing the name of the poet or poem
into the little beige box at the top
left-hand side of today’s post; or go to
Medusa’s Rapsheet at the bottom of
the blue column at the right
to find the date you want.
Would you like to be a SnakePal?
Guidelines are at the top of this page
at the Placating the Gorgon link;
send poetry and/or photos and artwork
to kathykieth@hotmail.com. We post
work from all over the world—including
that which was previously published—
and collaborations are welcome.
Just remember:
the snakes of Medusa are always hungry—
for poetry, of course!
