The Connecticut Poetry Society

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34 John Jeffrey Prometheus

35 William Jolliff Cold Calls

37 Marilyn Kallet Wanted -The Day Ike Won

39 Nancy Kerrigan Empty Boots

40 Lee Keylock Clytemnestra Speaks

41 Patricia Lafayllve Stages

42 Jack Powers How to Write a College Essay

43 Anesa Miller That Kind of Virgin

44 Patricia Mottola One Night Stand

45 Meghan O’Reilly Museum

46 Robert Parham December

John Jeffrey

Prometheus

By morning the whole town was in flames,
and the man with the matches
and the promiscuous sense of kindling
was pressed against the library window,

studying the blazing racks of books.
He looked proud as a father
whose daughter has just won the state science fair
and is beautiful.

Later he would say, I wanted to see
if you could divine the conceit of a book
by the color of the flames .

A woman shrieked passed him.
He recognized her from high school,
had always blamed her bright sun dresses
and the hard fists of her calf muscles

for his failing Geometry.
On the day of the final, after studying
the angle of light falling against the curve
of her crossed legs, he attempted

to prove every theorem false
and failed. He watched her run away,
her hair flouncing like limp brown flames,
her calves formless.
Later he would say, Nature knows everything,
yes, in its time, everything
needs a good burning .

By day the flames looked less like a miracle
and the living gasp of the fires was drowned
in the sound of sirens and the flood of hoses.
He slumped to a bench,

his red, pinpointed eyes closed.
While he slept, his glasses reflected
the last few flames, the blasted buildings,
the ever-rising clouds.

Later he would say, My hands are cold,
always so cold, and see—
I have these matches.

William Jolliff

Cold Calls

When you have kids, these things just happen.

Even when you’re about to settle in for pie,

pecan pie which, though squirted out

in a factory with an oil crust instead

of butter or lard, is tasty nevertheless,

and you’ve been thinking about it

since you finished your last call

of the morning, and even a little before,

even when you were trying to convince

an ex-rocker with a pony tail and nose rings

that your new MegaBoom amp line

will kick more nasty, useful wattage

than the Behringers or Fenders,

and he was about to believe you,

but was finally too short of capital

to stock your line. But you’re happy

that you’ve finally shed your Plymouth

for a new Toyota that rides like a horse

trailer but should start each morning

(cross your fingers, make your payments),

so you drive through Emma’s Lunch Box

and buy the roast beef and the pie,

get two creams for your coffee, what the hell,

and the Toyota whinnies and kicks back

out onto the I-5 ramp. Then you stop.

Everything stops. And right in mid-bitch

and moan, you remember that you can

still make some calls, but the cell phone

won’t work, so you’ll just sit and eat

Auntie Emma’s Wild Western Roast Beef,

and the pie, too, without a fork,

and when traffic starts moving again

and you find the prime rubber-necking spot,

you see by the look of the men

in the squad—two firemen smoking

on the bumper of a medical unit—

and by the horrible shortness of the sheet—

that some poor mother’s child has died,

even, maybe, as you were stirring your decaf

and thinking about how if you exercised

enough, though you wouldn’t be young forever,

you might see your daughter graduate.

Your cheeks flush. You shake your fist

at the crumbs that stick to your jacket.

Marilyn Kallet

Wanted

I wanted to be tan for you,

to speak sea, sun, skin.

I wanted to be twenty,

reading poetry in Acapulco,

admiring my brown body in the mirror.

That was the summer of

William Walkoff.

Anyone would have known better.

But he was tall and built,

a construction worker,

proof of D.H. Lawrence,

sturdier than my nebbock college friends.

He wanted to make love on the roof,

the only cool breeze

we could afford those days.

Of course he walked off.

And here you are 30 years later

young Schwarzennager

oblivious to the woman

old enough to be your mother.

I wanted to be tan for you,

to let my skin be parchment

unfolding the history of love

instead of sun damage.

Let the language of flesh

call out to you:

Only the imagination is real!

I have declared it time and again!

So said the aging William Carlos Williams,

and so sayeth my skin, at sixty.

The Day Ike Won

Grandma Stella wept

behind the guest room door,

where she napped and prayed

and waited to have her heart attack.

We were Democrats, she said.

Democrats helped workers and the poor.

Next door Mrs. Mills cried,

more than when the squirrel

bit her. So did the Cusas

who used to beat their daughter Rebecca.

Across the street palsied Grandma Asher

cried beneath her babushka,

and Ira's mother leaned red-eyed

over the Yiddish paper.

Their beagle Petey howled at the moon.

Grandma said that Stevenson was intelligent

and that our country

needed a president with brains.

Our whole block sat shiva

over Adlai, his name soft and open

like a song.

But Ike had lead Allied forces and could

whip Korea. Soon Ike was eating bombs

for breakfast, Life magazine said.

Often I hear weeping

when I read the news. Grandma died

long before Bush the First;

Mommy saw a ghost and cried for a year.

I like Ike , buttons boasted in '52.

My bumper sticker still hails Gore.

Grandma, if you're up there,

put in a word

for Petey the Beagle,

or any yellow dog who can lift a leg

on Shrub.

Nancy Kerrigan

Empty Boots

A soldier in camouflage, a young man,

kneeling in prayer like the men he has come to kill,

kisses the empty boots of a fallen comrade.

His soldier was a young woman.

Both toes of her dusty government issued shoes

are lined up so evenly, they look as if they’re saluting.

She will not realize the college education

for which she enlisted. She will never again

slip into a pair of slinky high heels,

or kick them off as she peels away lingerie

on the way to the bedroom. Nor will she

chase after her kids in sneakers, or try

to balance motherhood with anything again.

Her rifle rammed upward in the sand,

helmet on the bayonet of her gun.

Lee Keylock

Clytemnestra Speaks

So Agamemnon, you are here, somewhere

in our city, and I wonder your years

at Ilium; how you suffered, a man

who has not really come back.

Was it ordained this way—Fate

scattering you in the direction of your wild

hair to live a life unbridled

to the laud of men?

I imagine war spoils; a century of women

defiled in your honor, how could it not be?

But who says who suffers most?

I lost my daughter so your boat could sail,

watched a thousand fatherless sons play war

in the fields frantic for the fame that drove

their fathers east in search of splendor.

I suppose you will want to have me

the way you had Briseis under camplight

with all the grace of a good bull loosed

upon a herd as it hammers life home. No,

my love, let the other women welcome

their husbands. Come Agamemnon,

let me cleanse your wounds, and in darkness

we will bathe. Watch my plot unfold

like your concubine’s robe.

Patricia Lafayllve

Stages

I.

Don’t sing me the psalms, the novenas.

Right now, I don’t want to remember.

Leave me alone. I need to forget.

Five weeks ago doctors found lung cancer.

He can’t be gone, chemotherapy

hasn’t had time to work yet.

II.

Screw the hymns and platitudes, I want no solace.

Give me the rusting razor of rash agony.

Let me shred my own flesh in wails.

I’m not interested in your comfort.

Even less in reasons; shut your bleating mouth.

I don’t care why – cancer murdered Ed Lorenz.

III.

Father McNulty was his dear friend-

Ed called Father Mac his ticket to heaven.

Father Mac had two priests help him send Ed off.

So, God, how are things going?

Are you willing to send him back yet?

I think we need him in our fields more than you do.

IV.

I lie on the sofa staring at the television.

It isn’t on. Silent in the growing darkness

my chest caves under gravitational force.

My body craves the sleep I cannot settle beneath.

Eyes filled with grit, desert sand burning them

blink slowly, examine the enfolding night.

V.

The departed live on in our memories.

I stand, raise a shot glass, tell his stories.

A good Catholic, he was always out in the backhoe.

He competed for last place in barrel races.

Ed played 21 Aces, smoked Marlboros

drank Drambouie and preferred contagious laughter.

Jack Powers

How to Write a College Essay

Start with your greatest loss, biggest obstacle, the woman you loved, the man you killed. Open your heart. Relax. Show the real you. This is the most important paper of your life; be unique. Never mention the word "special." Be specific: the time your mother wished she'd never adopted you; the night your father died in the fire. Make the reader see the veins in her neck, feel the words strike, the door slam. See you in the garage smoking by the turpentine; see the garage ignite.

Anesa Miller

That Kind of Virgin

That yellow day, walking in the open gusts of fall,

nowhere near the bedroom, you did not patronize me

with reproaches or cajoling. Ever curious about all

the earth’s odd niches, you reminded me of

passing seasons, “You’re thirty-eight years old—

when are you going to decide to be ready?”

I thought I had decided—readiness would be denied

me. Prioress in my lichened halls,

I had accepted that I’d never know

the joy you wished for me.

But home, when I struggled

to sweeten our tea, honey clotted

in the bottom of the jar, you took

a long-handled spoon and insisted on helping.

“I’ll get some real sugar out of there for you.”

You went at that jar, and I had to turn

away to hide the war of eagerness

and fear that felt like shame.

But you took me in a comradely way

by the shoulders to lie in slatted sunlight

and pressed with irresistible,

gently questing, fingers. Rarity

means once in a million for most things,

but this was a first in at least many thousand,

with more men than I have told you.

One death-denying leap—and

we flew to the future we would share

these many years, my body

spinning on elated viscera,

this continent resplendent,

gone begging millennia

for settlement—opened

with your imprint

on my soul’s

scoured beach.

Patricia Mottola

One Night Stands  

On my bedroom ceiling
I have pasted all those
stars that glow
in the dark. I lie
awake in my bed, know
that they will not last the night.
I stare at them
and watch their faces fade.

  They make a sound when they go, like clouds eclipsing the sun on a summer day when I lie exposed in my bikini, eyes closed, and suddenly feel the chill.   Next day I fight to find proof of their existence. Lost stars that mock memory. Sometimes in daylight I think I see one coming unglued, separated from the ceiling.   Defective. It hangs there like hope. I wait for night and quit believing. They only shine when the lights go out. Sometimes I think darkness is their only reason for being.

Meghan O’Reilly

 Museum


High school students chew candy bars,
steal kisses in front of grim portraits.
They slump in narrow seats
as the survivor with no name
recounts, as she does each week,
the occupation of her father,
what the light was like after five days
packed in the cattle train.
She could be a flight attendant
reciting seatbelt instructions
or a waitress with her monologue
of welcomes and specials
except for her careful detachment,
that tone like a doctor
harboring bad and complicated news.
In the lobby, they dole out
childrens passports
like morbid business cards -
at the end of the video
we can slip our cards into a computer
to find out if our child lived or died
and we stand there before the machines
holding our breath, like fools in Vegas.
Later, in a moment of unsupervised peace,
I approach a long display of artifacts
and stare at a pair of flannel pants
so intimate and exposed
I want to break them out of their case
bury them like the dead
whom we cherish too much to preserve.

Robert Parham

December

Each year the calendar remembers

it must finish what it started.

This is hard because important dates

take over, get in the way

of the large picture, the contract,

if you will, the fait accompli .

Now, this: like a dog lolling in the mouth

of the yard gate, open, waiting

to go in or out, nothing that smacks

of persistence or chance,

merely what is , perhaps what will be,

but will not be again.

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