Melissa Balmain, ‘Notes From a Jaded Traveler’

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I dreamed I went to Heaven–
it wasn’t all that great.
The angel choir was tone deaf;
its harps were second rate.
St. Pete was glumly scrubbing
the bird shit off one gate.

I dreamed I went to Hell next–
it wasn’t all that grim.
I’d felt worse heat in Brooklyn,
worse torture at the gym;
Satan and his minions
were belting out a hymn.

I dreamed that neither visit
surprised me much–oh sure,
the Bible promised plenty
that wasn’t on my tour,
but what location ever
lives up to its brochure?

*****

From Walking in on People © Melissa Balmain, 2014. Used by permission of Able Muse Press.

Melissa Balmain writes: “This poem, first published in Light Quarterly (now Light), sparked one of my rare disagreements with LQ‘s founding editor, John Mella. He balked at the term “bird shit.” It might offend older readers, he said, and he asked for a substitute. This led to the following message, which is undoubtedly the sort of high-toned correspondence that poetry readers imagine happening behind the scenes:

Dear John,
Thanks for your latest note on “Notes from a Jaded Traveler.” I think we may have had a communication glitch—my preference is “bird doo,” not “doo-doo.” I agree with you that the latter does smack of the nursery. Plus, it doesn’t make the bird connection clear.
“Bird doo” is a fairly common expression—a Google search of the term yields more references than “bird poop.” But the main reason I prefer it to “bird poop” is that—at least among parents I know—“poop” is the nursery term for diaper contents.
So… if “bird shit” is out, I vote for “bird doo.”
All best,
Melissa

John went with “bird doo.”  When ‘Notes from a Jaded Traveler’ ran in my first collection, I finally got to change it back.”

Melissa Balmain’s third poetry collection, Satan Talks to His Therapist, is available from Paul Dry Books (and from all the usual retail empires). Balmain is the editor-in-chief of Light, America’s longest-running journal of light verse, and has been a member of the University of Rochester’s English Department since 2010. She will teach a three-day workshop on comic poetry at the Poetry by the Sea conference in Madison, CT, in May 21-24, 2024.

Photo: “Life’s Trail” by quinn.anya is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Ekphrastic sonnet: RHL, ‘Ghosts of Dead Parents’

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Her ashes spread on Skirrid that she loved;
and his bones buried by the Harbour bay…
Why choose views for the dead? Once in earth shoved,
dirt in the dark is all they’d see, not day,
even if they lived. And if cremated, well…
So is it for our own guilt’s absolution?
Or status, that their graves our standing tell?
Or rites for social change’s resolution?
Those who were always here are here no more –
Their alwaysness runs out when they decease,
and life will now sound different from before,
like insect shrills not heard until they cease.
Dead ghosts sleep twittering in our heads’ domed caves,
waking to fill night skies from dreams and graves.

*****

This sonnet was published by The Wee Sparrow Poetry Press as a response to their ekphrastic challenge for the illustration, a painting by Žofia Katriňáková. It was written for my parents who, although they died decades ago, are still a background to my thoughts. My father is buried by the bay of Governor’s Harbour, my mother’s ashes were scattered on Skirrid Fawr, the Welsh mountain she loved and lived within sight of in Abergavenny. And I have another short poem for them, published in the Amsterdam Quarterly:

In the night’s jam jar of my memory
my long-dead parents live as fireflies.
My thoughts of them worn by time’s emery,
their faint light still suggests where my path lies.

Is it reasonable to hope to be a firefly for your children and grandchildren?

Barbara Loots, ‘Villanelle for the Road’

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The true way may be found, but at a cost.
The dashboard deity presides and judges.
Recalculating really means You’re lost.

Is this a bridge that I’ve already crossed?
I wonder as the snake of traffic nudges
between the tollbooths.  What’s it going to cost?

I have my doubts, refusing to be bossed
by bland advice a nagging voice begrudges,
recalculating how you got so lost.

This muse would never suit you, Mr. Frost.
Bear left.  Turn right.  Take ramp.  She never fudges.
The road not taken clearly has a cost.

But I’m footloose again, my baggage tossed
behind me.  Good-bye, all you drudges!
Recalculating, nothing to be lost,

I roll along the road, a stone unmossed,
a stubborn certainty that never budges,
finding my way regardless of the cost,
recalculating, yes, but never lost.

*****

Barbara Loots writes: “A villanelle seemed like the perfect form to capture the frustration of getting around (or going around and around) with the “help” of a technology I reluctantly employ. This poem and another villanelle of mine appear in Extreme Formal Poems (Rhizome Press). I’m also pleased to be among the 60 poets in Love Affairs at the Villa Nelle (Kelsay Books), an anthology as delicious as it sounds.”

Barbara Loots resides with her husband, Bill Dickinson, and their boss Bob the Cat in the historic Hyde Park neighborhood of Kansas City, Missouri. Her poems have appeared in literary magazines, anthologies, and textbooks since the 1970s. She is a frequent contributor to lightpoetrymagazine.com. Her three collections are Road Trip (2014), Windshift (2018), and The Beekeeper and other love poems (2020), at Kelsay Books or Amazon. More bio and blog at barbaraloots.com

Photo: “gps fail” by marichica88 is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Using form: Sonnet: Max Gutmann, ‘How to Inspire a Sonnet – advice from the pros’

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Inspire amore first, but molto forte
If in sonetti dolci you’d be sung.
Then see that you stay bella. You’ll support a
Passione deep and long by dying young.
— Laura

If thou upon his stage the Muse’s part
Wouldst play, each act thou study’st must prolong
Thy Poet’s pain. ‘Tis pain shall prompt great Art.
Then con thy lines with style, and do him wrong.
— The Dark Lady

Stay always by her. Never for a day
Be from her cherished side. ‘Tis paramount
To share the highest love. (And, by the way,
It helps to choose a lover who can count.)
— Robert Browning

‘Tis mystery that fires the crucial spark,
So make him wait–and keep him in the dark.
— Milton’s blindness

*****

Max Gutmann writes: “A reader of Light Quarterly (the marvellous Light back in its days as a print journal) was so offended by a poem of mine ridiculing a lousy president that he cancelled his subscription. Beloved editor John Mella forwarded a copy of the note to me. It was a sonnet! I’d never thought I could inspire a sonnet. I had a ways to go before rivaling Laura or the Dark Lady, but I’d taken the first step. That inspired this poem.

“John declined the poem, so it first appeared in a journal that didn’t specialize in light verse, one highly thought of. (Digging it out now, I see that contributors to the issue the poem appeared in included, among others I admire, Updike, Espaillat, Turner, Gioia, and Hadas.) But the journal goofed. They changed sonnetti dolci to sonnetti dolce (plural noun, singular adjective). This must have been a typo, I imagined, but when I asked, the chief editor not only admitted the change had been intentional, but defended the decision. Dolce being the more familiar form, he argued, it was reasonable to make the change without consulting the writer. I never sent them anything again

“This story calls for a shout-out to Jerome Betts, who reprinted ‘How to Inspire a Sonnet’ in Lighten Up Online (LUPO). (To avoid the impression that Jerome is less than meticulous about acknowledgements–or about anything–I should make clear that I asked him not to acknowledge the earlier journal, and I didn’t name it for him.) Jerome, like most editors I’ve worked with, always asks before making changes–and his proposed changes are usually improvements, often big ones!”

Editor’s note: This poem suggests what might be appropriate ways to inspire sonnets, according to the subjects of sonnets: Petrarch’s Laura, Shakespeare’s Dark Lady, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Robert and Milton’s blindness. Self-referentially, the poem is itself a Shakespearean sonnet, written in response to being the subject of a sonnet. Gutmann is therefore both sonneteer and sonnetee, and has the credentials to write a “How to –“

Max Gutmann has worked as, among other things, a stage manager, a journalist, a teacher, an editor, a clerk, a factory worker, a community service officer, the business manager of an improv troupe, and a performer in a Daffy Duck costume. Occasionally, he has even earned money writing plays and poems.

Photo: “IMG_0323C Frans Wouters. 1612-1659. Antwerp. The rural concert. 1654. Dole” by jean louis mazieres is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Using form: simple, classical: Sara Teasdale, ‘May Day’

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A delicate fabric of bird song
Floats in the air,
The smell of wet wild earth
Is everywhere.

Red small leaves of the maple
Are clenched like a hand,
Like girls at their first communion
The pear trees stand.

Oh I must pass nothing by
Without loving it much,
The raindrop try with my lips,
The grass with my touch;

For how can I be sure
I shall see again
The world on the first of May
Shining after the rain?

*****

Sometimes clean and simple is best for capturing the uncomplicated emotion of appreciating nature. Sara Teasdale in her element. As Louis Untermeyer commented on her verse: its “beauty is in the restraint” of its “ever-present though never elaborated theme.”

Photo: “Leonardslee Lakes and Gardens May 2022 18” by Timelapsed is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.

Semi-formal: Annie Fisher, ‘Today I’ll be a Slug’

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I’ll flow
slug-slow,
go naked
(naked’s fine).
My only mission
is to glisten.
Watch me shine.

*****

Annie Fisher writes: “I wrote the slug poem a year ago when I was on a writing retreat on the island of Iona in the Inner Hebrides. I was writing all sorts of other stuff on the retreat and that little poem popped into my head during a free-writing morning splurge. I guess the idea of slowing down, going with the flow, being true to oneself and letting one’s inner radiance shine is very much in keeping with the vibe of Iona, but it wasn’t a conscious thing.
I do love short poems. I’ve had others published on Snakeskin, including:

SONG THRUSH, MAY MORNING

Bird at my window, early, early,
Something to say, to say, to say,
This morning will not come again,
Make the most of today today.

That poem plays with the fact that the song thrush repeats its song. I sometimes sing it with some friends as a round using a tune we wrote. Here’s one other from the Snakeskin archive which I’m rather fond of:

GRANNY ON THE NAUGHTY STEP

Granny sits on the Naughty Step
Thinks about what she has done
Wishes she’d been a bit naughtier
It might have been fun…”

Annie Fisher’s background is in primary education, initially as a teacher and later as an English adviser. Now semi-retired she writes poetry for both adults and children and sometimes works as a storyteller in schools. She has had two pamphlets published with HappenStance Press: (2016) and (2020), and is due to have another pamphlet published in the next couple of months with Mariscat Press. It will be called ‘Missing the Man Next Door’. She is a member of Fire River Poets in Taunton, Somerset and a regular contributor to The Friday Poem https://thefridaypoem.com/annie-fisher/

Photo: “Banana Slug – A Series” by goingslo is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Donald Wheelock, ‘Worthless’

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What a worthless thing is poetry,
a product of hard labor I adore;
a counter full of year-old toiletries
will always fetch considerably more.

A merchant selling gift-wrapped bars of soap
will come away with profit and some change;
to sell a poem is no more than a hope
washed clean of what a market can arrange.

Here! Have a few of mine, two for a quarter—
a dime apiece—the bargain of the day…
just name it! I’m here to take your order.
Hard labor’s even hard to give away.

*****

Donald Wheelock writes: “I have spent most of my life as a composer of vocal, orchestral and chamber music. While remuneration for song cycles and string quartets is not unknown, the profits from commissions and other sources rarely exceed the expenses. I don’t have to tell the readers of formalverse that the same could be said for formal poetry. The conceit of this poem has been an assumption in my life for many years, and equivalent jokes among composers of “classical concert music” are not uncommon.

I have written formal poetry for almost as long as I have music, often to set to music. But it is relatively recently that I have submitted it to journals welcoming formal poetry. Snakeskin (where this poem was first published), Able Muse, Think, Blue Unicorn, Rue Scribe, Quadrant and many other journals have published my poems. My first full-length book, It’s Hard Enough to Fly, was published by Kelsay Books in 2022. My second book, With Nothing but a Nod, will appear in May of this year from David Robert Books.”

Photo: “A THOUGHT FOR TODAY from A.Word.A.Day” by Wordsmith.org is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Short poem: RHL, ‘Pithy’

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His words are witty,
with a twist.
He says they’re “pithy”;
note the lisp.

*****

This is one of my three short poems published in the current Rat’s Ass Review – thanks, Roderick Bates – where the good and the rude, the mocking and shocking, all coexist harmoniously.

Photo: “Protest signs are an ineffectual means of communicating my nuanced views on a variety of issues that cannot be reduced to a simple pithy slogan!” by duncan is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.

Tom Vaughan, ‘On the Twilight Mountains’ (Jeremiah 13:16)

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On the twilight mountains
leopards change their spots
distributing their cast-off coats
to helpworthy have-nots –

lions and lambs and lynx lie down
and tell each other tales
of how at sea the seals now go
for walks with killer whales –

lovers linger hand in hand
promising to be
truthful, faithful, thoughtful, kind,
supportive company –

and peace seems deep and peace seems long
until the morning sun
wakes us from our ancient dream
like a starter gun.

*****

Tom Vaughan writes: “The poem (published in Snakeskin 316, April 2024) is among several inspired by my current reading of Robert Alter’s magnificent – and magnificently thought-provoking – translation of the Hebrew Bible. However gloomy the concluding stanza, and however accurately that gloom may reflect the violence and slaughter always at the heart of the world, I hope the poem also catches some of the equally permanent and however illusory yearning for things to be otherwise.”

Tom Vaughan is not the real name of a poet whose previous publications include a novel and two poetry pamphlets (A Sampler, 2010, and Envoy, 2013, both published by HappenStance). His poems have been published in a range of poetry magazines, including several of the Potcake Chapbooks:
Careers and Other Catastrophes
Familes and Other Fiascoes
Strip Down
Houses and Homes Forever
Travels and Travails.
He currently lives in Brittany.
https://tomvaughan.website

Illustration: ‘The Peaceable Kingdom’ by Edward Hicks, via Snakeskin

J.D.Smith, ‘Proposal’

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Resign yourself, my heart’s delight,
To me before a better offer
Comes along with hair and height,
A sea-deep chest, a bulging coffer.

Don’t wait for him: if love’s a song,
I am the toad’s primeval croak.
If love’s a wheel, then I belong
Among its rusty, broken spokes.

If I mean nothing in the world
To you, that nothing could be all,
A version of transcendence, curled
And primed to blossom from your soul.

Who else is equal to this test,
This cup of gall? You’ve had a sip–
In our shared life you’ll taste the rest.
Come join me on this sinking ship.

*****

J.D. Smith writes: “This poem explains, if nothing else, why I didn’t go into sales. It was not written for a specific person, but it does capture a time earlier in my adulthood when I was frustrated on all fronts. The poem also partakes of self-parody. If Philip Larkin had proposed in writing, it might have gone something like what I did.”

J.D. Smith has published six books of poetry, most recently the light verse collection Catalogs for Food Lovers, and he has received a Fellowship in Poetry from the United States National Endowment for the Arts. This poem is from The Killing Tree (Finishing Line Press, 2016). Smith’s first fiction collection, Transit, was published in December 2022. His other books include the essay collection Dowsing and Science. Smith works in Washington, DC, where he lives with his wife Paula Van Lare and their rescue animals.
X: @Smitroverse

Illustration: by Edward Lear for his poem ‘The Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo’.