Poetry Pop Up: Barbara Goldberg

FURLOUGH

I love to see those tall, lean, muscular men

with their clean-shaven heads and digital

watches toss their kids in the air. And I love

to see them drop, not weightless, but light

as grenades. This is how children learn that fear

can be fun.  And fathers, that this too is hand

to hand combat.  To cradle or kill – what story 

do we tell ourselves to justify.  That a dunam

of earth is worth dying for?  That a child opening

his mouth with an o of pleasure overturns

everything?  We grow like onions, our heads

buried in dirt.  And we die like onions, face

down in a pot of boiling water.  Gravity causes

all to fall down, and love, to hold things up.

BARBARA GOLDBERG is the author of five prize-winning books of poetry, including the Felix Pollak Poetry Prize for The Royal Baker’s Daughter. She also translated Scorched by the Sun, poems by Israeli poet Moshe Dor.  Goldberg and Dor translated and published four anthologies of contemporary Israeli poetry.  Goldberg received two fellowships from the NEA as well as awards in translation, fiction and speechwriting.  Goldberg is Series Editor of the Word Works’ International   Editions.  She lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland.   www.barbaragoldberg.net

Poetry Pop Up: Grace Cavalieri

Big Mama Thornton

Credit: Cuffed Frays, 2001, Argonne House Press

Last time I saw her

she wasn’t so big. Actually

she was downright skinny,

singing the final time

in Washington, D.C.

Backstage she drank a

quart of milk

mixed equal parts with

gin—

Seagrams, she told me.

Then she got the idea.

Could I contact the Seagrams

people and then she could

advertise for them and

they’d like her for

drinking a full quart a day—their gin.

I said no, I didn’t

think so, and I didn’t

think the milk people

would like the commercial so much

either. She still felt bad

about Elvis stealing “Hound Dog,”

The way he did, even though

she was much too much of a lady to say so.

Once she talked about it, long ago,

before she started milk with gin.

I guess the drink left a

sweet taste in her mouth.

Grace and friend/photo by Joanna Tillman

Grace Cavalieri is the author of poetry books and chapbooks and several produced plays. Her latest book is Other Voices, Other Lives, a compendium of poetry, plays and interviews (Alan Squire Press). Her most recent play is “ Calico and Lennie” (Theatre for the New City, NYC 2017), one piece of a three-part bill with plays by Langston Hughes and Luigi Pirandello. She celebrates 40 years on public radio in 2017, with “The Poet and The Poem” now recorded at The Library of Congress. She has four children, four grandchildren, and now is a great- grandmother.

Summer Solstice Splendid Wake Poetry Pop-Up

ABANDONED CONSTELLATIONS

by Kim Roberts

Some disappeared as Earth

grew brighter. Some just fell out of favor.

Some were mere flattery:

Louis XIV’s hand and scepter

(proposed by the royal astronomer)

or the crossed swords of Saxony

to honor the German Emperor Leopold.
My favorites among the obsolete
showed off the new technologies,

as if their invention were star-prophesied.

Tubus Herschelii Major,

Sir William Herschel’s largest telescope,

Machina Electrica, stars forming

the cube of an electric generator.

Or the crowded chaos

of Officina Typographica, the printing office.

In the 1801 star atlas Uranographia,
it jobbed up east of Sirius.  Did its noise

keep the neighbors up at night?

Did Canis Minor bark for hours?

And little Pyxis Nautica,

the Mariner’s Compass: did the printer

interrupt its navigation, confusing
its ascension and declination,

pulling barques and schooners

wildly off their course?
Retired rollers and plate cylinders

clang no more.  Monoceros,

the unicorn, lives atop those same stars,

straddles the press with its hind legs.

The stern of Argo Navis covers
the box of movable type.  This section

of the celestial sphere,

previously gerrymandered
by Johann Bode, has returned
to form.  Held in place

by frisket and tympan,

the inky sky fades back to black.

No characters, no ligatures,

no copyright, no authorship.
Gutenberg stands mute.

Silence reigns in space once more.

“Abandoned Constellations” is reprinted from The Scientific Method by Kim Roberts, WordTech Editions, 2017, with permission of the author.

Photo credit: Dan Vera

BIO: Kim Roberts is the author of five books of poems, most recently The Scientific Method (WordTech Editions, 2017). The title poem from that collection was featured on a seven-foot banner at the Poetry Tent at the National March for Science in Washington, DC, sponsored by the Wick Poetry Center’s “Traveling Stanzas” project, and is now touring the US. Roberts co-edits two literary journals, Beltway Poetry Quarterly and the Delaware Poetry Review, and the web exhibit DC Writers’ Homes. She is the recipient of fellowships from 17 artist colonies, and has been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Humanities DC, and the DC Commission on the Arts. Her website: http://www.kimroberts.org.