David Meischen's Blog

What's in a Name?

Everything. Each of us, it seems to me, lives inside a name, resonates to the sound of this name spoken by others.

Consider a short poem by Demetria Martínez:

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Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published  So Much Depends    On an accent mark  Our name was Martín  Until great-grandpa Trinidad  Changed it to Martínez  So that no one  Would call us Martin  I may be the only cousin left  Who strikes the i with a lightning bolt  I stand in that light  And am seen.      Poetry in Dangerous Times    Casa Urraca Press 2025

I hear the echo of William Carlos Williams in this poem’s title—and the implication that much can depend on something ordinarily seen as insignificant. Here it’s an acute accent on the letter i—a crucial stroke. In five lines, Martínez demonstrates what ignoring this accent mark can do, how pronouncing Martín without the accented i changes it to another name entirely—featureless, stripped of identity.

I am reminded of how Anglos, this writer included, mangled Spanish names when I was growing up in South Texas. Our school had students named Villareal. I cringe, remembering we called them Veer-ee-AHL, all the music flattened. In Texas history, we anglicized the Battle of San Jacinto, changing hah-SEEN-toh to juh-SIN-tuh.

“So Much Depends” arrives at a remove of three generations from the great-grandfather who added a syllable and kept the accented í. Succeeding generations, immersed in American English, might have dropped the accent mark. But not Demetria Martínez. “I may be the only cousin left,” she says, “Who strikes the i with a lightning bolt.” Perfect!—this visual image of the accented letter in Martínez, surprising the poet—surprising us—with the energy that transforms both name and poet in the act of a simple strike.

The surprise is complete as we follow Demetria Martínez into a landscape illuminated by the lightning strike of an accented í:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published  I stand in that light  And am seen.About the Author

Born and raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Demetria Martínez is a writer, a poet, an immigrant rights activist. Aside from Poetry in Dangerous Times, which shares its pages with the writer Susan Sherman, Martínez’s poetry titles include The Devil’s Workshop (2002), Breathing Between the Lines (1997), and Turning (1987). Her novel Mother Tongue (1994), recipient of a Western States Book Award, is based in part on her 1988 indictment on charges of conspiring to smuggle Central American refugees into the United States.

Note

Casa Urraca Press, based in Abiquiu, New Mexico, is publishing books that are worth your attention. Take a look ⇒

Poetry in Dangerous Times is available here ⇒

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Believe

I admire a poet who drops a title onto the top of a page and then launches into a poem that tantalizes me, eludes me, skipping beyond any explicit connection to the title, as if to say, Chase after me. You’ll be glad you did. Here is one such poem:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published  Mouth Harp    You smell like you met rain in a dark alley  and it soured your cologne. Kissed you with  its milk breath and left you allergic. Fourteen  hours of weeping later you meet a man  in your mirror and ask him his name.  It’s not uncommon to question yourself,  but you’re wearing the same shirt you wore  the day you met your wife. Hard not to  recognize the hope tornado forming under  your umbrella. I’ve seen this before.  Someone made you think it’s possible to love  popcorn without risking heart attack again.  Someone buttered you up with promises  like flower petals dripping from their sticky  fingers. I gotta hand it to you. Your ability  to believe in regular people makes you  seem almost superhuman. Almost mythical.  In school you took so many fists to the face  you returned your bruises for a nickel  per pound, your flesh felt priceless. Still  you did not find the value others see in you.  But hope, yes. Love, yes. Believe  in spirits with thread counts like Egyptian linen.  Believe it is possible to touch something  that returns it to you touch for touch.  The street performer on the corner  plays Stravinsky on the harmonica. Maybe  anything is possible.      Zacchary Kluckman    When I Say Ghost, I Don’t Mean Dead,     winner of the Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Prize

I love how Kluckman opens with the word you. Our narrator might be writing to someone who smells soggy with rain, breath gone funky in the aftermath of drinking milk. But then, four lines in, “you meet a man / in your mirror and ask him his name.” Aha! The narrator is speaking to himself, and because there is a deeply personal essence at work in this poem, I’m going to assume Kluckman is having a conversation with himself.

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The lines that follow flow as smoothly as honesty. And they are not without the kind of surprising whimsy that makes a reader smile with recognition.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published  Someone made you think it’s possible to love  popcorn without risking heart attack again.  Someone buttered you up with promises  like flower petals dripping from their sticky  fingers.

Notice what a line break can do:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published  Someone made you think it’s possible to love

For the length of one perfect syllable, this is how a poem can surprise. This is what a poem can mean.

By this point—during my first read—I’d forgotten Kluckman’s title. I didn’t care what he was calling this note-to-self poem. I just wanted the ride to continue—even when the poem remembers childhood trauma: “so many fists to the face / you returned your bruises for a nickel / per pound.” Then, a line later—self-surprise—the poet remembers: “But hope, yes. Love, yes.” And the reaffirming power of the verb believe, addressed not just to the self inside the poem but to us reading these words: “Believe it is possible to touch something / that returns it to you touch for touch.”

The poem might have closed here, on the word touch. But Kluckman has a lovely surprise waiting:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published  The street performer on the corner  plays Stravinsky on the harmonica. Maybe  anything is possible.

The title’s been up there all along—Mouth Harp—a bit of an itch, there and then gone, forgotten, as the narrative engages us. Almost forgotten. Until this image of Stravinsky by way of mouth harp. And Kluckman’s epiphany: Maybe anything is possible.

About the Author

Zachary Kluckman is an award-winning poet and nationally ranked spoken word artist from New Mexico, currently living in Albuquerque. Oliver de la Paz selected When I Say Ghost, I Don’t Mean Dead for the Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Prize, 2025. Founder of the Chicharra Poetry Slam Festival and a dedicated mental health advocate, Kluckman is the author of three previous poetry collections.

Note

Avoid the big A. Purchase your books from local bookstores and independent presses. When I Say Ghost, I Don’t Mean Dead is available here ⇒

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Poem as Chalice, as Receptacle

I want to start by sharing a favorite poem of the past five years:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published  Through the Keyhole      After Breakfast, by Elin Danielson-Gambogi    The woman’s cigarette turns to ash,  the frail balloon of her thoughts rising  with the smoke. If I could slip    through the keyhole, I would sit  in the chair abandoned by her  breakfast friend, sip from the glass    of cold coffee, put out the burning  cigarette on the tablecloth’s edge.  Remnants of companionship.    It’s Saturday morning, days  after my husband’s death, and I gaze  with the woman down the long hours ahead.    Grateful for the company and a day  that may be as empty as the shells  of her soft-boiled eggs or an egg cup    I could fill to the brim. Widowhood  has surprised me, arrived unannounced.  I’m drawn to her youth, all that lies ahead—    Italy, the Italian artist-husband,  a painting life. And remind myself  of the richness of my own past. Still, I envy    the rebellion born in her bones,  the different melody painted on  this canvas. She’s a woman at home    in her skin, as the French love to say. Like her,  I could make myself into a perfect song.      Sandi Stromberg    Frogs Don’t Sing Red

As a publisher and editor, I’ve known this poet for twenty years. We became friends in the course of a long conversation one afternoon in 2017, sitting in the lobby of a hotel in Alpine, Texas. In August of 2020, when I decided to make use of pandemic time by teaching a poetry writing class, Sandi was among the first to sign up. A year—and several Zoom seminars later—Sandi wrote “Through the Keyhole.” During our final session, two or three days later, each of the participants read aloud a piece written during the class. Sandi summoned the strength to read this remarkable poem.

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A note before I continue. “Through the Keyhole” was Sandi’s contribution to a challenge at The Ekphrastic Review—poems responding to After Breakfast, an 1890 painting by Finnish artist Elin Danielson-Gambogi. If you have a few minutes, take a look at the painting and the poems written to it ⇒

Sandi begins by sketching details of Gambogi’s painting—a woman smoking, an empty chair, a lit cigarette at the edge of the table. The surprise of an effective ekphrastic poem is that the writer enters the scene, as here, when Sandi imagines “the frail balloon of her thoughts rising / with the smoke,” suggests that dark liquid in a glass on the table is “cold coffee,” and intuits that the lit cigarette at table’s edge and the empty chair “abandoned by her breakfast friend” are “Remnants of companionship.”

And then: “It’s Saturday morning, days / after my husband’s death, and I gaze / with the woman down the long hours ahead.” Each time I reach this short stanza, I am stunned—by the fearless directness with which this poet pairs her own loss with “the long hours ahead” evoked in Gambogi’s painting. Line by line, then, the poem returns to details of the painting, drawing parallels between the life Sandi sees in the painting and the older woman looking on—including “a day / that may be as empty as the shells / of her soft-boiled eggs or an egg cup // I could fill to the brim.” And the lovely, heartbreaking, hopeful line with which the poet as widow concludes. “Like her, / I could make myself into a perfect song.”

A final point, if you will. Poetry is not therapy. But like “Through the Keyhole,” a poem can hold the writer’s grief, if only briefly—can serve as a record of moments such as the one Sandi Stromberg brings to life here.

About the Author

Sandi Stromberg is the author of Frogs Don’t Sing Red (Kelsay Books 2023). This collection is highly recommended; it includes “Through the Keyhole.” Moonlight, Shaken (Kelsay Books, forthcoming, 2026) is Sandi’s second poetry collection.

Support Kelsay Books. Frogs Don’t Sing Red is available here ⇒

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Language Trapdoors

What’s on my mind today is how surprise can lurk in the language we use to tell stories, how unexamined words and phrases can shape what we say or write in ways we aren’t aware of.

My father’s father ended his own life in May of 1941, seven years before I was born. His story has haunted me—or rather, what I don’t know of his story, what I do know of how silence in the aftermath of suicide can ripple for decades. About a decade ago, as I launched a personal essay focusing on my grandfather, almost by itself, my keyboard spilled this phrase onto the page: commit suicide. For some reason I paused. Looked. And the words stopped me cold.

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I was raised in the Catholic Church. Saturday mornings at catechism class, we learned a two-part dogma about sin. There are two kinds of sin, the nuns informed us—sins of commission and sins of omission. A sin of commission is the sole responsibility of the person who chooses—and then enacts—the sin. This kind of sin results from a personal choice. The person who commits it must own the sin and accept the consequences—must confess the sin and promise to expunge the sin from future behavior.

Saturday mornings, we learned two complementary categories—venial sin and mortal sin. Venial sins, the nuns informed us, are trivial—mere smudges on the soul. But a mortal sin is consequential. A mortal sin must be followed by confession and atonement; a mortal sin, unconfessed, unatoned at death—damns the committer to eternal hell. Suicide, according to this belief system, cannot be confessed, cannot be atoned, must result in permanent punishment.

Staring at the page I’d been drafting, thinking about the import of the two words I’d keyed into my narrative, I realized that decades after I’d left the Catholic Church and the rigid dogma that would consign my grandfather to eternal flame, the phrase so often on my lips when I spoke of him actually certified orthodox, unforgiving religious dogma.

Every time we speak of someone committing suicide, our words are saying: suicide is a choice, taken rationally; the committer must own the act, must accept the consequences. I do not believe any of this. I do not believe that my grandfather’s death was a rational choice, a cold-blooded choice, a mortal sin. I do not believe that he committed suicide.

Since that day at my keyboard, I have not used the expression that so surprised me, that changed how I tell what I know of my grandfather’s death. “He took his own life,” I say. “He died by suicide.” My words need not say this man was the worst of sinners, need not say he is eternally damned. Any way of referencing suicide sees a person acting in his own death. But without the word commit, there is room for compassion when we speak of individuals who take themselves out.

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Sinking

First, a short poem for your day:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published  Dear Gravity  May I call you Grave? An old tree falls  after long weakening, after years of unseen hollowing,  and it keeps falling, rotted core turning to damp dust,  becoming earth. The body its own trench.  At the doctor’s office, the nurse says  I’ve grown shorter. Only natural. I stare hard  but can’t wipe the pleasant smile off her face.  I am sinking not quite like a ship or a deflating balloon,  but like the house’s foundation. I am the house  and the clay it is built on and eventually  the unrecognizable ruin. My mother’s hips  are out of plumb; she lists like a sailboat  about to slice sideways into waves and then under.  My father’s head is even with my own, so he’s winning  the shrinking race. Imagine us becoming not just shorter  but thinner, not lying down for a last time  but disappearing altogether, like a popsicle  that has melted into a stain on someone’s smile.    Rebecca Aronson    Anchor    Winner of the Eric Hoffer Award for Excellence in Independent Publishing    Winner of the Annual Book Prize from the Philosophical Society of Texas    Orison Books, 2022

This poem is the first of ten in Anchor titled “Dear Gravity.” As a poet with aspirations, I confess I experienced increasing envy as I read each missive Aronson penned to gravity. I understand that wordplay can be groan-inducing, but I’ll gamble. This series of ten anchors the collection, each succeeding letter offering the poet—and her readers—further opportunity to ponder the inextricable link between gravity and the ravages of aging, the burden of grief as those we love succumb to the inevitable.

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In the opening lines of this first letter to gravity, a tree falls to the weakening that goes with age. Trees fall—nothing out of the ordinary about that. But Aronson pays extraordinary attention: “rotted core turning to damp dust, / becoming earth.” Glance back to the capital on Grave. It’s an adjective in the opening line, but by the poem’s fourth line—“The body its own trench.”—we have arrived at a cemetery grave.

The word body having entered the poem, Aronson apposes three humans and their experience of gravity. She herself has “grown shorter”—an effect of gravity common to humans as we navigate middle age. Here we witness Aronson’s characteristic humor. After a nurse comments that her shortening stature is only natural: “I stare hard / but can’t wipe the pleasant smile off her face.” And then the poet’s blunt—also characteristic—honesty. “I am sinking,” she says, “like the house’s foundation. I am the house / and the clay it is built on and eventually / the unrecognizable ruin.”

And here, a masterful juxtaposition. The word ruin, a period, and then, continuing the same line: “My mother’s hips,” followed by the image of a sailboat going under, succumbing to gravity.

In the following line, Aronson returns to gravity’s effect on a body’s vertical dimension: “My father’s head is even with my own, so he’s winning / the shrinking race.” Aging, approaching death, we become “not just shorter / but thinner” and finally “lying down for a last time.” But there’s more to this poet’s imagination here. What if, instead of the final lie-down, humans could simply disappear, “like a popsicle / that has melted into a stain on someone’s smile”?

From the opening line of this first poem, I knew I was in good hands. When I got to the surprise of myself becoming “a stain on someone’s smile,” I couldn’t wait for more. I kept turning pages, and when I got to the end, I waited until the next morning and then re-read all the poems I’d starred on the table of contents. I want to keep Anchor on a near shelf in my study—so I can visit these poems again.

About the Author

Rebecca Aronson is also the author of Ghost Child of the Atalanta Bloom, winner of the 2016 Orison Books poetry prize and finalist for the 2017 Arizona/New Mexico book awards and winner of the 2019 Margaret Randall Book Award from the Albuquerque Museum Foundation, and Creature, Creature, winner of the Main-Traveled Roads Poetry Prize, 2007. She has been a recipient of a Prairie Schooner Strousse Award, the Loft’s Speakeasy Poetry Prize, and a 2018 Tennessee Williams Scholarship to Sewanee. Aronson is co-founder and host of Bad Mouth, a series of words and music.

Visit Aronson’s website here ⇒

Anchor is available here ⇒

An Occasional PSA from David Meischen

Please purchase books from your local independent bookstore and/or from independent presses. Avoid the Big A, which is in the business of gouging authors, independent bookstores, and small presses.

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Rectangle of Muscle

First, a short poem for your day:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published  Snake in a Glass Box  If there is something sadder  than a snake, wild and honest  in a clean glass box  defeated, who does not move any fraction of an inch  when the boy taps the glass, I’m not sure  what that is. Her length hugs all four colorless walls  mouth to tail, she is become simply a rectangle of muscle  trying to remember, once animal, now  the measure of a sturdy glass box — and there!  the waiting mouse in a small cage on the shelf, unaware.    Kenneth White    Abandoned Mine, Issue 12, June 2025

One afternoon several years ago, a close friend and I were conversing over poems and food at a patio table here in Albuquerque. A passerby, newly arrived in our desert city, overheard us and stopped. I think it was Robert Grant, but it might have been Jasen Christensen, informing us that the two friends were preparing to start a poetry journal, Abandoned Mine.

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Pleased with this kind of serendipity, I submitted poems and had work published in the second issue, May 2022. In the interim, I’ve browsed—and admired—the poetry at Abandoned Mine. The twelfth issue, June 2025, includes the short poem that opens this mini-essay.

Like other poets whose work appears in Abandoned Mine, Kenneth White writes with admirable clarity. The syntax here is simple and straightforward—but never clunky, never dull. I cite the opening sentence here, which moves rhythmically over the space of three couplets. The first comma wins me over, with the first of two unhurried pauses depicting a particular snake and earning the word sadder from the opening line. And then this: “she is become simply a rectangle of muscle / trying to remember.” I think of Rilke’s panther, reduced to the dimensions of a zoo enclosure—wildness caged.

This poem need not go farther. White might close with his snake, “once animal, now / the measure of a sturdy glass box”—as if permanently unmoving. But there is more to this glimpse of a pet snake’s life. There is—predatory surprise—“the waiting mouse in a small cage on the shelf, unaware.”

Five couplets, ten lines. Glass box, pet snake, tap on the glass, mouse to be swallowed—this microcosm is complete.

About the Author

Kenneth White earned his MA, Poetry, in the seventies but only started seeking publication in 2023. His poems have appeared in the Paterson Literary Review, Comstock Review, Pinyon, California Quarterly, The RavensPerch, Stone Canoe, Front Range Review, and Abandoned Mine. Now retired from a career in animal rescue, White lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Treat yourself to more poems at Abandoned Mine ⇒

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What Memory Can Save

I’ll open with a short poem:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published  Resuscitation  For a second: jackrabbit prints on snow and you’re in the  frame again, lifting your arms to lower the sky for me.  On this side of Bridge Street we collect all the dead  sunflowers, cut rot from an amaryllis bulb  to end its dormancy.  Our box turtle wakes thin in spring. Asleep  all winter she witnessed  nothing. For a second small as a strawberry  all my dead are alive.    Sara Daniele Rivera    The Blue Mimes    Winner of the Academy of American Poets First Book Award    Graywolf Press, 2024

Loss permeates the pages of this remarkable collection. The poet bears more than a single grief, but her father’s death is the primary loss here. “You,” she writes. “My father.” Her poems remember him so vividly that, line after line, he lives for us—and surely for his daughter the poet. Grief is about what we have lost but also about what memory can save.

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“Resuscitation” saves three details from an ordinary winter day. The poet notices “jackrabbit prints on snow.” She helps “collect all the dead // sunflowers, cut rot from an amaryllis bulb.” But notice her first stanza break: “we collect all the dead”

In the moment, yes, we are hearing about bloomed-out sunflowers being gathered to make way for new growth as spring approaches. But a father has been lost—likely the you addressed in the opening lines; others have been lost. On page 47, as we read Rivera’s third line, already we have witnessed the magic in poems that “collect all the dead.”

Three short stanzas in, Rivera breaks from the immediate moment to comment on her box turtle waking from hibernation. “Asleep / all winter she witnessed // nothing.” So far this poem has lived in one ordinary succession of moments—and beautifully so. But then, set against the word nothing: “For a second small as a strawberry / all my dead are alive.”

I revel in this phrase: “a second small as a strawberry.” I revel in a surprise entirely unexpected—this odd fusion, a measure of time experienced as the taste of a single delicious berry. I revel in the transformative power of surprise, that, if only for a moment, “all my dead are alive.”

Note

On August 29, 2019, twenty-five poets gathered at the National Hispanic Cultural center here in Albuquerque. Twenty-two of these poets had been invited by then Albuquerque Poet Laureate Michelle Otero—to read poems in memory of those who lost their lives in El Paso on August 3, 2019. The reading culminated with the presentation of a collaborative poem by Hakim Bellamy, Jessica Helen Lopez, and Michelle Otero, all of whom have served as Poet Laureate for Albuquerque. Sara Daniele Rivera was one of the twenty-two poets recruited for this event. Her poem for the event, “Fields Anointed with Poppies,” is also the last poem in The Blue Mimes. Like the other poems Rivera offers here, this one is well worth your attention.

The poems from August 29, 2019, were collected in 22 Poems & a Prayer for El Paso. Dos Gatos Press published this little volume, but Michelle Otero and the contributing poets deserve the credit for the poems and the event. Disclosure: I’m a co-founder and publisher at Dos Gatos Press.

About the Author

Sara Daniele Rivera is a Cuban Peruvian American artist, writer, translator, and educator. Sara's poetry and fiction use both speculative and realist lenses to explore themes of grief, migration, memory, and the liminal spaces between language and silence. She lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with her husband, cats, and turtles.

For more about Sara, see her website ⇒

The Blue Mimes is available here ⇒

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Forgotten by Someone—or By Us

First, a short poem for your day:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published  Premonition  Solemn are lonely mornings in February.  Snow drops off poplars with shivering shyness.  On weathered wallpaper the outline of  a windowpane slants with trembling ochre.  Oboes launch into a procession of chaconnes,  and leaves still rustle, falling from slowly  revolving chandeliers.  Forgotten by someone or by us,  there’s an open Riesling  and years sealed with wax.  The home we left belongs to the dusty  boots of an alien, nomadic spirit —  discomfort, the flying clang of trams  that won’t take off, the curtains, once  pulled shut with their segment of the sun,  cut in vermillion.    Elina Petrova    Donetsk, 1990     Translation for Equinox, Volume 8, Inner Chambers, Secret Rooms, March 2025

These days, with endless Russian depredations in Ukraine, complicitly enabled by our own government, poets such as Ukraine native Elina Petrova can open windows into a world most of us see only in glimpses on the nightly news. “Premonition” is one such poem, published earlier this year in translation. A native of Ukraine, Petrova immigrated to the United States in 2007. An American citizen as of 2014, she is the author of two English-language poetry collections, Miracle (2015) and Desert Candles (2019). Disclosure: I wrote a blurb praising Desert Candles.

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Like the Ukraine-based poems of Desert Candles, “Premonition” is not didactic. Rather than telling us what to think, this poem offers moments in a winter setting, images that flash in the space of a line before the eye moves to another image of desolation.

From “Snow drops off poplars with shivering shyness,” the poem shifts indoors, to light on “weathered wallpaper.” And then, the first surprise—that wreckage of some kind has brought the outdoors in—as “leaves still rustle, falling from slowly / revolving chandeliers.” What I admire here is how deftly Petrova drops us into a room in which leaves are falling and then selects a single tabletop detail I picture beneath the chandeliers: “an open Riesling / and years sealed with wax.” Let that last phrase resonate—“years sealed with wax.” Notice how the word years opens the poem, how the image expands to include a history of such rooms.

A damaged space such as this one is essentially incomplete—no door that closes safely behind us as we leave. An honest photograph—or poem—will render it in fragments. Hence, this poem’s final couplet, leaving the place, the poet, the reader with an incomplete line, a shard—curtains “cut in vermillion.” Oh, and the stanza break: “curtains, once” — so much in the word once suspended there. Once, as in “once upon a time,” with the fairy tale turned apocalyptic. Once, as in once and no more—like other moments, other lines from poems that limn the end of something vital.

Notes

This poem appears in Equinox, a remarkable journal published twice yearly at the spring and fall equinox. The version here is the poet’s translation of her own poem. According to Petrova, “my recent translation for Equinox completely changed the original form and rhythm of a poem I wrote thirty-five years ago in Donetsk. The Russian version consisted of five rhymed quatrains with extensive alliteration.”

Equinox is highly recommended reading. Enjoy it here ⇒

For more about Elina Petrova, see her website ⇒

Aching Miracle is available here ⇒

Desert Candles is available here ⇒

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A Trick the Sky is Playing

First, a short poem for your day:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published  In an Aftertime  Memory gnaws on me in the blue silence  of the withered hillsides where  cracked, earth-stained quartz stones—  mammoth molars?—trip me.  I think I may be just a trick the sky is playing,  a vacancy for the cicada’s incessant trills  and pinecone bits snowing down  from the squirrels. Whatever falls through  the trees falls through my eyes.  It’s September. Wild sunflower faces  tilt back as if just freed from  the dark earth into sharp daylight  like the subway riders who emerged that day  to see people fleeing and falling  in the fast-forward collapse of civilized steel.  For years the workers found teeth  in the rubble, no bigger than the pebbles  I scatter now by walking. Whatever debris  falls through the lines I’m writing  in my head, it is an inadequacy.    Radha Marcum    pine soot tendon bone    Winner of the Washington Prize (The Word Works, 2024)

The poems of pine soot tendon bone invite us to calm ourselves, to let go of daily distractions and ease into the landscapes this remarkable poet shares with us, to let surprise enter when we’re ready to receive it.

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The title of the poem I’ve shared above has just a tinge of the dystopian, a survivor’s account of days in the aftermath of endtime. And the opening lines follow through. Memory is feral, violent; it gnaws. The hillsides here are withered. Scattered stones look like gigantic teeth scattered in a vast boneyard. Amid reminders of ruin, the individual shrinks, the I rendered insubstantial: “I think I may be just a trick the sky is playing, / a vacancy.” Still, the poet brings us into a peaceful scene, a quotidian scene, with “pinecone bits snowing down / from the squirrels,” where “wild sunflower faces / tilt back as if just freed from / the dark earth into sharp daylight.”

Then, smooth as the movement of a simile, sudden as a jetliner turned weapon, we are in the before of this aftertime, with “subway riders who emerged that day / to see people fleeing and falling / in the fast-forward collapse of civilized steel.” Notice how the before has been foreshadowed: Planes flying into skyscrapers looked like “a trick the sky is playing.” Sirens converging on September 11 were cicada-shrill. Shredded paper falling from office windows looked like “bits snowing down from the squirrels.”

Marcum doesn’t dwell on details of the day the towers fell. Rather, she touches on a single image that returns us to the here and now of her mountain walk: “the workers found teeth / in the rubble, no bigger than the pebbles / I scatter now by walking.” From boulders that look like mammoth molars to human teeth scattered like mountain pebbles.

“debris falls” as the poem closes with another echo, a slant rhyme reminiscent of Dickinson. Earlier, Marcum saw herself as a vacancy. Now, a humble admission, that her words—our words, any words—are an inadequacy.

About the Author

Radha Marcum is a poet, writer, editor, and teacher with a focus on the intersection of the environment, culture, and personal history. She is the recipient of the 2023 Washington Prize for pine soot tendon bone (The Word Works, 2024). Marcum’s first poetry collection, Bloodline (3: A Taos Press, 2017), which delves into her grandfather's involvement in building the first atomic bombs in New Mexico during World War II, won the New Mexico Book Award in Poetry in 2018.

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What Makes Fiction Worth the Bother?

Larry McMurtry’s Moving On has one of my all-time favorite openings to a fictional world. Outside a Texas rodeo arena, Patsy Carpenter sits in a warm Ford eating a melted Hershey bar and reading Catch-22, when a beered-up cowboy unzips beside her car and pees on the front tire. I’ve been chuckling ever since. I love how McMurtry includes concession stand chocolate and serious literature in the same breath, how the beer-drinking behavior of the rodeo world intrudes into Patsy’s private experience. I’ve carried the surprise of this opening scene with me for five decades.

Fifteen years after Moving On arrived on bookshelves, Lonesome Dove moved McMurtry onto a much larger map. First came the Pulitzer, then the masterful miniseries. But years before all this, the movies had come knocking. McMurtry’s first novel, Horseman, Pass By (1961), might have faded into the obscurity that awaits so many regional writers. Except that two years later Hollywood turned it into Hud, starring Paul Newman at the peak of his career. And several years after that: The Last Picture Show, Peter Bogdanovich’s mood-drenched black-and-white adaptation of McMurtry’s third novel.

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In my post of two weeks ago, I mentioned hearing decades back that McMurtry had a T-shirt saying simply, “Minor Regional Writer.” That word—regional—has been much on my mind lately. Here’s what I’m thinking. Yes, Lonesome Dove earned Larry McMurtry national, even international standing. But he was—first, last, always—a regional writer. What makes his fiction worth the bother is that the words, the sentences, the pages meticulously recreate the specifics of a region, a place, a rodeo parking lot.

The best writers locate us—in a provincial English ballroom with Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy, in Toni Morrison’s Not Doctor Street or Hemingway’s Italian field hospital or Chicago streets in winter as only Richard Wright could have known them.

We should all of us aspire to be regional writers. And not worry about words such as “minor.”

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