Grandma died in Chicago. Dad had her body shipped via train back to Edwardsville, three hundred south of the City of Big Shoulders. We waited for the coffin to arrive at the train station on Franklin Street, on the very edge of town. Of course it was raining, which matched our collective mood completely.
I’m not sure what we expected to find at the depot. The coffin–ordered over the phone by the local funeral director–was a ghastly, lurid specimen of funereal craftsmanship, a bronze monstrosity. Mom remarked on the beauty of the death box. I blinked in disbelief but of course I said nothing.
A worker from the funeral home was slumped against the hearse, nonchalantly taking nips from a suspicious looking amber colored bottle. Soon the door of a boxcar rolled open with a heartrending screech.
As the casket was off-loaded by the porters and the man from the funeral home, it teetered precipitously on the lip of the train car and then suddenly disaster struck. One of the men handling the coffin said “Shit!” and with a loud crash the darn casket tumbled to the ground! I half expected to see Grandma spill out onto the tracks, but it didn’t happen, thank God!
It would have been horrific for my parents, although I, who had met the old lady only twice in my nine years of life, might have been somewhat amused. I was perhaps a rather sadistic little boy.
After at last being laden with its burden, the hearse sagged wearily under the weight of Grandma and her ugly orange casket. The vehicles used back then were really glorified station wagons, similar to the ambulances in use at that time. It was a Studebaker, my Dad remarked.
The driver, pausing only long enough to take a swig from his bottle, made a beeline for the hearse. On his way he tossed the empty bottle through the open door of a boxcar, where it clattered loudly.
Dad looked pained–this was his mother–and he thought we should commemorate the occasion in some way–say a prayer, perhaps. As we gathered near the open door of the hearse, now loaded with Grandma, he began to pray aloud.
But just following “Dear Lord,” the driver slammed the door on Grandma, scampered into the driver’s seat and cranked the engine. At the very moment Dad reached “Amen,” the hearse peeled out with a spray of gravel and with an effluvium of oily exhaust fumes. Dad, discomfitted not at all, smiled and said, “Well, that wasn’t so bad, was it?” I remember Mom rolled her eyes.
The train station is gone now; the railroad no longer stops in Edwardsville, though Amtrak, when it first began service in Illinois, did for several years. But Grandma passed long before that, way back in the1950s.
Unfortunately, that’s not the end of the story. The hearse driver, by this time, was fully in his cups. On the way to the funeral home he ignored a light and gate posted at another railroad crossing.
Thinking–mistakenly–that he could beat the train, he drove the hearse past the signal, around the lowered gate, and over the tracks, where he was struck by the speeding locomotive.
The only good that ever came of this episode is that the railroad company, in order to avoid bad publicity or a lawsuit, was on the hook for the funeral expenses–though, coincidentally, the service was conducted with a new but now empty casket.
back and forth – each infant so tiny and transparent
you could see the milk they just suckled in their bellies,
each so helpless with closed eyes and barely a sound.
This mouse was somebody.
She was grey and looked typical for a mouse.
All of us working there loved her
and let her and her offspring live. Eventually
we moved them to a safe cage and later
to an abandoned warehouse. We fed her
and watch her feed until her babies grew
and weaned.
This mouse risked her own exposure and life
to save her brood, each time running back and forth.
If she wasn’t at an animal sanctuary, no doubt
she would have been killed.
This mouse shocked me with her audacity,
showed me the courage necessary for motherhood,
which some call instinct, but I call and know it
as love.
This Tree
This tree is huge,
has been there since the beginning
when we moved here.
When my son was a young teenager
he had a wooden sword and swung at this tree
damaging its bark with playful ignorance.
We were told it would die,
but over a decade later it lives.
Last winter its evergreen leaves turned brown
and I thought that was it, but then the spring came
and now late summer and it is fully green again,
defying its fate.
This tree’s roots bubble up from the ground.
They tilted our old shed
so we had to get a new one,
changing the area where we put it on.
Many squirrels play in this tree and leap from its branches
to another tree and back again.
When we had our bird feeder, a hawk would perch
in this tree, watching and swooping down for its meal.
That is why we no longer have a bird feeder.
Out of the four trees in our yard,
this tree is my favorite.
It didn’t sprout like the one that is a weed,
soaring and wide and choking out
the sky or like our neighbour’s with its walnuts
toxifying the ground and an overhead danger
in the early fall.
This tree is wounded but peaceful.
It is a guardian of our yard and home,
like a friend I can count on,
mostly beautiful, always there.
This Cat
This cat is not a cat
but a hybrid of cat, dog and human,
talking all the time, holding conversations
in chirps, trills and occasional long meows.
His coat is cushiony, shines silver in the light
and hardly sheds. He has a white diamond patch
in the centre of his chest.
He is demanding and affectionate
on his terms. He panic-cries if he
wakes up alone and only calms down
after he is held and spoken to softly.
He screams and throws his whole body
against the door if he is locked in a room,
because a plumber came
and this cat wants to be involved,
say hi and then oversee.
If you tease this cat or laugh at him,
his dignity is spurned and he’ll hunt you down,
nipping at your ankles, patiently waiting,
never forgetting. There is a special war-cry
he has for this.
When my husband has him on his lap,
this cat looks into my husband’s eyes and pets his face.
I think he is part Korat, this cat, though his brother
is a pale orange, sweet and gentle and
very much all cat.
This cat has a name.
He is muscular. He is king
from the moment he came here
from the shelter. Sometimes
his tongue just sticks out a little –
a picture like that is what first drew me to him.
I knew he would be trouble, this cat.
I knew I would love him and he would be
unlike any other cat I have known,
a toddler-cat, relentlessly demanding,
a singular force, a gravity well,
shifting everything in this home
with his extravagance and deep attachment.
This Man
This man is refined –
his incomparable intellect,
the way he moves his hand, his eyes
to look up from resting.
This man is charged
with electrical inspiration,
every day singing, making notes
on paper, in the sky, pushed forward
by an inner force, potent and searing,
tracing existing edges, making new edges
and shapes from sand.
He is always sharp with humour and often
he is joyful, dancing in spurts
or making strange sounds
like an animal let out of his cage,
touching grass for the first time.
This man grew up in home of brutal hostility –
a violent loveless father and an ally for a mother,
but never a protector, and a brother who was once
vibrant and on fire then became soiled with bitterness
and died before he reached sixty.
This man has always been a devoted father.
When his children were young every afternoon
he took them on adventures to local parks he named,
and they explored these sacred fantasies without money
and just a stroller. He read to them every night –
sometimes other people’s books, sometimes
his own stories he told them, inserting
them as heroes and stars of the tales.
When his children grew older, there were rough years –
re-defining love, stretching love into hurt
and anger clogged then bursting. But that is the past,
and now, his family is tenderly connected everyday
with rich affection – each loving him
and each loving each other. He has heaven again
with his family and in his home.
This man is a husband. He is the kindest,
most entertaining and the most uncompromising
of lovers and friends – never letting me get away
with darkness – ridged barriers of purity I am called
to account if I every cross, our mutual understanding
clear and unaltered through the years.
After my mother died, he read to me every night,
tales of detectives, of an isolated Swedish man
finding life on a stark iced-covered island.
When my father died, he did the same
in a different way – being there for me, sitting beside me,
allowing my grief to live for years as the main course,
patient, supporting, until that grief became background.
This man never made much of an income,
but works at his craft as though every day
is his last – at the library, in the basement and on
walks where he fine tunes and rehearses his creations.
This man is a genius, many know this, but
in many ways, he has never been received
or seen by the greater world.
Those who have seen him,
know, and call him what he is – a legend,
a master of his art.
This man has never
diluted or degraded his dignity
just to receive attention,
nor has he twisted his moral and spiritual core
just because he is getting older and what he believed
when he was younger – that his work was guaranteed
to receive world-wide recognition –
has not been the case, has not been valued on
a wide-scale for its rare magnificence.
And though that baffles him,
has left a living wound inside him, he has not
grown hard and distorted by blaming others nor
by relinquishing his sturdy and fecund faith.
This man is the best man I have ever known,
and no one knows him like I do.
It has been a radiant privilege to love this man,
to walk decades together hand in hand.
He is an iconoclast. He follows
Jesus. He is my love and he is golden,
beautiful as the first altered leaf,
the first breeze in the first inklings
of a brilliant oncoming fall.
This Anxiety
This anxiety is a spear
that churns and burrows
turning to soot its surrounding flesh.
Every day it widens to fill my body’s
cavity, telling me I’m never going
to make it, neither are my husband nor
my children, shouting at me at
the corner store, from the rubber band
around the washing machine, from
electrical outlets, from monarch butterflies
that float close to my back window.
This anxiety doesn’t care if I pray or
stay the course of a disciplined morning –
it can smooth over for a bit but then it charges,
first digging at the dirt in relentless fury.
I think I should go on medication
but I won’t. I’ve lived so long with it
and I think it is mostly circumstantial –
having no material security nor hope for anything
but short-term survival.
I am not sure why Jesus doesn’t take it,
heal it with a snap even when I offer it
into the divine light-fold and ask
for mercy.
This anxiety makes me believe
it is me, that it is all I own and all
I am. It is so intense I cry,
left trying to just breathe. It is
exhausting to hold it at bay.
It is nearly impossible some days
to wake up, to face another
afternoon.
This anxiety is only anxiety
and I have my books, my writing,
my family and God. I have love
beyond expectation, on all sides
buffering me in, overpowering
this anxiety and the ways
this anxiety sometimes succeeds
in sabotaging my faith and flow.
These Children
These children, my children
are not children
anymore but have grown
into tall and formidable dreammakers,
dreamkeepers, lovers on their own paths
of unique and obsessive interests.
These children, my children
are spectacular individuals,
both giving their all to their focus,
both with a strong moral code,
and stronger compassion
for the less-than-lucky.
One is a painter, working
with rich unexpected tones
with intense, living eyes
and auras that pulse and breathe.
She is also a policy maker,
a helper to the almost-homeless,
brilliant in her capacity to thrive in the system,
and then shift the system enough
to make a difference.
She is a film maker and a crafter
of original formations – using old cardboard boxes
or strings and stuff she has lying around her house
to astound us all with her one-of-a-kind
gifts and creations.
One is a warrior, with a warrior’s blood
and unwavering determination, creativity
in motion, passion sparking up his alert eyes,
daily drip-wet training, more interested
in comradery than in competition, always helping
others succeed while maintaining his own
forever rising, personal standard.
He is also an old-watch collector, repairer,
taking apart beautiful broken things
at his desk, with his magnifier
and many tiny tools,
with patience, stillness and precision,
making those beautiful things
spin again, in sync again.
These children, my children,
are both close to me and my husband.
One, we share texts with every day –
sometimes for hours texting, sometimes briefly.
We have our haircuts, restaurant lunches,
and weekly home visits, as she lives on her own,
with her partner and their two cats.
The other, we have our sacred morning
conversations over breakfast, while
cleaning the kitchen, and often, if time permits,
throughout the day.
Throughout the day we laugh
and acknowledge our mutual respect and love.
These children, my children
share a medical condition that
has never been seen in medical books.
They have had countless hospital visits,
many needles, tests and time off school,
especially when they were younger, when
no one knew what it would mean, or if
they would be okay when they were older.
These children have walked through hellscapes,
watching, supporting
their dear core-family grandmother
through a year of dying unto her death.
One journeyed to Cambodia, the other spent
a month in Thailand.
They have both, themselves, in different ways,
nearly died. Sometimes they fell
into oxygen-deprived lightless pits,
and one, we feared for years would never get out,
but they are both on grass, on land now, walking,
building their uncommon worlds.
These children, my children are blessed,
have both found their lifelong partner-loves.
They are water drinkers, vegetarians
since they were born.
They are original and devoted
to everyone they care for.
They are exactly who they are supposed to be,
these children, my children,
adults, tidal forces of giving inspiration,
thriving, still, with far to go.
This Friend
This friend was more
than any other friend, a sister,
a fellow traveler on a quest
we understood as just ours.
This friend was a reader
of Carl Jung, e.e. cummings,
and Thomas Merton,
a monk, a nun, a cleaner of toilets and bathtubs,
quiet in her airy sanctum.
She was a walker, a reciter
of spoken poetry and of prayers
gifted to her from the angels.
She was either terrifying in her
do-not-talk-to-me seriousness or laughing
with colourful yellow shoes, making acquaintances
at every turn.
She was intense, and light, almost-white blue
like a blue dwarf star, burning,
radiating, speeding, on the threshold
always, of combusting.
We were roommates at different times.
Once, in her mother’s old Montreal home, and once,
near a Toronto valley-park, in an apartment
that we made into our monastery.
This friend and I loved our conversations
of abstract truths and revelations.
We loved words and images, poetry,
making monuments, for us alone.
We would sit across from each other
for hours, at the coffee shop, or on the phone,
weaving in and out these exciting exchanges,
grounded in our real-life dilemmas.
This friend is someone I would have died for,
someone I deeply loved, admired and needed
like family. She never betrayed me
or left me stranded in a place of danger.
I did lose this friend. Many years ago,
I lost her and when I sneak-check in on her,
I don’t know who she is anymore. All I know
is that she was a true friend and I miss her
and will go on missing her as I know for me
this friendship was the height of all friendships.
I also know this friend has strayed,
locked for a long while into a conspiratorial
twisted fantasy place of dark belonging.
Sometimes I am angry with this friend
for going where she went, for leaving me
without her, for giving up her rarified beauty
for a taste of finally being a-part-of and maybe
being able get out of poverty and survive.
I accept what has happened but I don’t
honestly understand.
I remember this friend
as a powerhouse of directed clarity and
full-to-the-brim sharp imagination.
I honour this friend, her once shocking courage
to forge authentic no-place-in this-world alliances,
to challenge accepted norms,
even in the simple things,
in the movement of her arms
and in her joys.
.
I still love this friend
as my dearest (other than my husband) friend,
though I know our intimacy, our sisterhood
is over, is wrapped in a tight, sealed ball,
never to be unwrapped
never to be restored.
This Father
This father was a good father,
a man alive with many unrealized dreams.
He grew up in India and went
to boarding school in Shimla.
When he was fourteen, he and his family
moved to London, and weeks later,
his own father died suddenly.
He started working right away
as he had four siblings and a mother
with brown skin who lived before in India
with servants, a cook and a nanny.
When he landed his first job at a newspaper,
he ran home and yelled with unharnessed exuberance,
“Ma, the sky’s the limit!”
This father went to war in Korea,
he boxed and he cooked and he didn’t know
if he ever killed someone as he shot his gun
but couldn’t see what or who he was shooting at.
This father was paralyzed on half of his face
from a childhood illness, so he knew what it was
to be outcast, to never quite belong.
This father had a father who was an English solider,
conducting trains through the Indian terrain.
He gave coal for free to those who needed it
and prayed every day for God’s grace and protection.
This father had a mother who he loved
and honoured as someone sacred, to be cherished.
She was of Indian descent, an unwavering Catholic
and a mother of six, as she lost a child, a little girl
who she still dreamed of every night,
even when she reached eighty years.
This father moved to Canada and became
a journalist. He won awards and a University scholarship.
He wanted to write novels, so he and his wife and two children
went to Spain for a year, and he wrote. When he got home
he would wake up every morning at 4 a.m., typing,
creating plots, revising plots. After he faced a few rejections,
he gave up his dream, promising to return to it when he retired.
This father never retired but died suddenly at sixty-two.
When he was in his early 50s, his older brother died, it was
one of the few times he cried. He felt sorrow and he felt guilt.
He said – It should have been me.
This father read many books, at least ten a week.
He would go to the library each Friday and
a new pile of books would sit on a table by the front door.
This father recited memorized Shakespeare
at the dinner table and old poems that rhymed.
His booming voice, as dramatic and engaged
as a stage performer.
This father took his children to many classes.
He would sit and wait and read in his car
for hours, waiting while his daughter
took acting, figure skating, and his son,
hockey. When I was young, he carried me
on his shoulders, he held my hand often
and would gaze at me frequently with loving pride.
This father worked
as an editor for a major newspaper.
He was good at his job, respected in his job,
and gave it his all, but he was never satisfied.
For this father had an ever-erupting
anger in him, energy that stirred wildly
and never rested even when he tried to
quash it with drink.
This father loved children,
and they loved him, gathering around
his story-telling magnetic sphere. This father never
got to be a grandfather as he died too young.
This father had great depth
and even greater generosity.
The same year his own mother died
and just days before he died,
(although he didn’t know he was going to die),
this father sat me down
and told me that he was finally at peace,
with his life, with himself. That finally
he forgave himself for being who he was.
And I know life was hard for this father,
that he was always living
with an internal raging war,
but this father was such a good man,
missed and admired on a grand scope.
At his funeral, one after another
came to me to tell me so, that
which meant so much, and I already knew.
This father was perfect to me, for me
he was the sun – untouchable strength,
aggressive existence, but so giving,
so protecting, so warm.
This Mother
This mother lived
until she was ninety-four.
Her married parents journeyed from Poland
when they were seventeen on a boat
to Chicago, later moving to Canada.
Her father worked in a shoe factory.
He had a sister who stayed in Poland and
was taken during the war to a Russian gulag.
I never met her father. From what I was told,
he was a harsh man, a violent man who threw
cutlery on the floor if the table wasn’t set right,
if his wife dared to complain.
This mother’s mother was a Catholic,
she had 19 children. Some died before
they turned one, one died when he was three.
This mother almost died too when she was young
of diphtheria. The doctor told her father to let
her die as they had too many children, but he refused.
This mother lost her older brother when he was 21.
It was his last mission before he came home.
It was World War II and he was a pilot who went
missing in action. This mother said his name was Paul,
and she never stopped thinking of him, even though
she had many other brothers and sisters – a whole
brood of tightly knit siblings who got together throughout
the year, every year, singing and laughing and having
a genuine good time with very little resentments
between any of them. When they were younger,
this mother and all her siblings legally changed
their last name from its Polish origins
to a more palatable easy-to-pronounce one,
so they could get jobs and be taken seriously.
This mother grew up in a house, sharing
one bedroom with her many sisters. That house
was haunted. I know because I lived there for a time –
there were dark grey entities under the floorboards,
in the old bathroom and in every bedroom, hovering like fog.
This mother knew extreme poverty
as child. It was the Great Depression and there
were so many mouths to feed with very little money.
One time, this mother lost a can of beans, coming
home from the corner store, rolling it down a street hill,
it fell into a sewer. She was so afraid to go home,
she ran away, for a short time.
This mother was a journalist, she went to Europe
as a young women, and when she came home,
after studying fashion design, she worked for
a newspaper. She wrote about celebrities,
and met many celebrities, but most treasured
and important to her was befriending Marilyn Monroe
for a summer when she worked at Jasper.
She had many pictures of them together but they were stolen,
save for one, which she carried with her in her wallet
until she died, eager to show whoever she met.
This mother also wrote about strange people, psychics
who would visit us and spoke to cats, and astral planed
to other planets. One claimed to be a descendant of the
true Count Dracula, sharing his blood condition.
This mother wasn’t a great mother at first. At the time
she had me she was 36. She was always kind, but inattentive.
Her friends would say – “I can’t imagine you as mother.”
As she loved to drink, to go parties, socialize day and night,
dancing on tables – her feet hanging and swinging
out the car window on the way home.
This mother later became a great mother.
Even when I lived away from her home,
she would pick me up at station with my
30-pound sculptures and drive to me to my classes
to the cabin tucked away in the woods.
Before I left home, when I was 14 and 15,
I wrote short stories and I would call her at her work
and read them to her. She listened and applauded and hardly
ever criticized. Later when I started writing poetry,
she told me to write romance novels for money
and save the poetry as a hobby.
This mother lost her husband when she was sixty-six.
She spiraled for years, surrounding herself with alcoholics,
people who used her and distracted her from her grief.
This mother grew out of that, finding something
again to live for when she became grandmother.
She was full of adventure and play,
enlivening the atmosphere with her very breath,
loving and vivacious, and so happy
to have grandchildren. Her grandchildren,
my children, eagerly anticipated and celebrated her
weekly arrivals, they danced around and watched
out the window, waiting for her car to pull in.
And when they got older, they remained close,
playing games, playing cards,
debating, painting nails and watching videos.
This mother told my brother and I
that she would share martinis with our long-dead father
on her balcony, and they would talk for hours
about their mutual past. She also wrote him letters.
This mother was such a wonderful mother
and friend. We talked every day on the phone, often twice.
We sometimes cried and argued, but always told
each other how much we loved each other.
She was compassionate and forever helping.
She was very spiritual. She loved God and Jesus,
as she strove to learn and love the true Jesus,
not the one of her upbringing.
Everyone loved her and would vie for her attention.
Before she got sick, she lived on her own
in a large apartment with a glorious view.
She went out every day, and when she wasn’t out,
she was on the phone. She never got depressed
or bitter or slowed down, but had energy
unheard of for one her age. She thoroughly enjoyed
her rich and varied blessings.
By the time the cancer hit she was 93.
She was not the youngest, but the last to go
of her siblings. One time, when she was sick
and on morphine, she said something horrible to me.
And though she was sick and though it was hard,
I confronted her and told her how it hurt.
She couldn’t even believe she said it, and there,
she turned, holding both of my hands in both of hers,
the whites turning red around their turquoise centers,
she said to me – “Don’t you know how much I love you?
You are my whole world.”
This mother was my mother.
It’s been more than two years since she
left. I was alone with her when she died,
and I saw her welcomed home.
This mother was like a large cut diamond,
child-like, sparkling, bold. She was determined
and always ready for action.
She is gone but that is just an illusion.
She is here in the hummingbird
visiting on our deck, in her voice
still strong in my ears,
and in the love she gave,
knitting my family a touchstone
sustaining core.
This House
This house is an old house,
built in 1929 as one of many
of the same types of houses,
attached on one side, a thin alley
on the other.
This house has a red door, three bedrooms
and a wildlife-filled green backyard.
One time I heard my neighbour (who has a house
just like ours) call her house a shoebox.
I understand but I don’t understand because
though this house is small for a house,
it has everything needed for a family of four.
It has rooms bright with light, two staircases,
two bathrooms and places to sit and talk and have coffee.
Sometimes I walk through this house
after 28 years, and I am still overwhelmed
by its grace – warm and inviting,
ample. I never get tired of this house.
Sometimes secretly I tell it thank you
and kiss its exposed brick wall.
This house is not a house but a family member.
She is maternal, and was a gift from
my mother. We moved here
just before our daughter turned one.
Three years later, our son was born.
This house is a protector and also has a temper.
If we tread too far into darkness, it explodes.
One time a sewer pipe burst in the basement.
It was the right time, and a wake-up call.
Once we also had a wasp infestation,
wasps living in the walls. We needed to clean.
Then we needed to reclaim.
When I first saw this house I fell in love with her.
I have lived in many houses –
nine before I became a teenager,
and many more than ten after that.
But this was the only house I loved, the only home
I have ever truly had. The ones I lived in as a child
in Montreal were fine, but I felt nothing for them.
The one that looked out over the lake, I hated.
Even though my parents loved it, I knew
it had a soiled energy, something within it
that was deliberately vindictive, unkind. After that,
there were slews of apartments, some cold,
some hostile, none ever, a place to rest.
The couple and their golden retriever
who lived here before us, loved this house too.
They never wanted to move, but had to because
there was a medical condition, and there were stairs.
The woman who lived here painted hidden hearts
throughout the house, and she carved a heart on
the wooden backyard shed. The hearts
have been painted over and the shed is new,
but the vines she painted on the front porch walls
remain and I never want to paint over them.
My husband loves this house, and our children do too.
My daughter no longer lives in this house
but she still calls it home, and she still has her own room.
This house is so perfect, that my adult son
said to me “Sometimes I think, living here,
I am living in a beautiful dream.”
This house has also been home to many creatures,
to eight cats, a dog, a bird, two rats and two guinea pigs.
They have all been happy here, and sometimes I swear
it was like living in a Disney movie –
their furred or feathered bodies in sync,
affectionate, playful, merged.
This house is in need of many repairs.
It has had some repairs but needs more.
She is an old lady, a gentle but strong spirit.
She is a comfort, a sanctuary, a refuge.
This house is our house
and I will take care of her
as she has taken care of us –
holding us between her walls,
still holding us, for decades now
giving us space to foster love and breathe.
This Faith
This faith can see
what it couldn’t see before,
that there are no tricks or
complex rituals to perform
or ancient tongues to speak
to bring me one inch closer to God.
This faith at one time was thin and leaned
on astrology and psychic guess-work
to appease my loss of control, ease my dread
and desperation that bled
into existential crisis.
This faith has streamlined, knowing
now God is one and the only
way to the light is one-on-one,
no one has the cure, only myself
face to face with Jesus, fears all around
then bypassed. I know that God is a Trinity
of the Father and of the Holy Spirit-Mother,
and of the Child – speaker of truth, radical reformer
of Earthy laws, embodiment of tender mercy
that sees and loves us all.
This faith has asked me to be clean,
and everyday sees more crevices and nooks
that need to be cleaned
and then re-cleaned.
This faith has studied many philosophers,
found its key from a certain philosopher,
has also been open
to the complexities of the cosmos,
science, the shifting realities
of knowledge and unknowing.
This faith is not blind.
It has no priest, no institution,
but has my husband to talk to
when doubts surface and at times overload,
or when blessings come and sync us, celebrating
the wisdom of an ever-abundant grace.
This faith is demanding,
demands to be the priority
and to be singular. This faith
is complete surrender,
it creates a longing to embrace this faith
to be encased within it, so it is air,
ground, imagination.
This faith demands a wanting
for this faith so great
there can be no wanting
for anything more.
Allison Grayhurst has been nominated for “Best of the Net” six times. She has over 1,400 poems published in over 530 international journals, including translations of her work. She has 25 published books of poetry and six chapbooks. She is an ethical vegan and lives in Toronto with her family. She also sculpts, working with clay; www.allisongrayhurst.com
The map has finished loading. Our building is a red pin driven through the pharmacy next door.
The driver calls. We tell him about the door with its brass number missing, the window full of plastic ferns, the laundromat that shut in March.
He says he is where the phone says. We say we are where we live.
Downstairs, a woman holds the door with a sack of onions. Rain climbs the paper toward her wrist. The street is full of people making small corrections.
Someone points across the avenue. Someone lifts a child above a puddle. Someone takes the bag while she searches for the key she has left in the lock.
At last the driver finds us. His screen continues to announce that he has not arrived.
Heat Map
On the city website, heat is orange. The block behind the depot deepens to a red you can select.
Select it: a number. Select the next block: another. The legend fits beneath my thumb.
At street level, Mrs. Cruz has moved her folding chair into the only shade, a stripe the billboard leaves at noon. She keeps a bowl of water for the dog that comes without its owner.
The bus exhales beside her. A boy carries a fan home in its box, both hands under the cardboard bottom. The cashier has put a wet cloth over the back of his neck.
I drag the map until the whole city enters the window. Streets disappear. The hot parts join.
Below the billboard Mrs. Cruz slides her chair six inches to the left. The dog follows. She makes room for it again.
Verification
The website wants the squares with bicycles. One wheel crosses into the next square. I choose the wheel. I choose the frame. The website asks again.
Outside, the repairman turns a bicycle upside down on the pavement. He has a little tin for loose parts. One of the screws has rolled away.
His daughter gets on her knees and looks beneath the parked car. She comes back holding something closed inside her fist.
He opens his palm. She opens hers. It is a small stone, nearly round. He puts it in the tin.
On my screen the bicycles disappear. The new instruction says to find the bridges. Through the open window I can hear the chain catch, turn, catch again. The girl asks him to keep the stone. He tells her where he has put it.
Today is my birthday. No party. No gatherings. No cake. No candles. And my phone has been quiet. Two phone calls. Five messages. That’s it. Fifteen years ago, there would’ve been hundreds. People I barely spoke to would write on my wall, send stupid messages, call me, remember me for one day. Now I look at my phone and nothing lights up. Maybe that’s what getting older is. Not wrinkles. Not grey hair. Just watching the list of people who remember you get shorter every year. Or maybe I’m not being forgotten. Maybe everyone is just getting busy being forgotten too.
* * *
Studying My Darkness
I spent so much time studying my darkness that I forgot I had a shadow because there was still light somewhere. I became an expert at finding my flaws. I knew every mistake by heart. Every regret. Every ugly thought that visited me when the world went quiet. I collected my failures like trophies and displayed them proudly, as if suffering was the only proof that I had lived. But somewhere in between all the things I hated about myself, I forgot to look at the things that kept me alive. The times I helped someone without expecting anything back. The moments I stayed when leaving would have been easier. The people I loved, even when I didn’t know how to show it. The little boy who survived things he never understood. The man who still wakes up every morning and tries again, even after convincing himself he doesn’t care. Maybe I am not the monster I spent years trying to prove I was. Maybe I am just a human being. A collection of mistakes, memories, kindness, anger, love, and scars. Maybe the darkness was never the whole story. Maybe it was just the part I knew how to write about.
* *
Lidl The queue at Lidl is fucking enormous. In my basket: one cheap bottle of bourbon. I came in for food. Changed my mind somewhere between the bakery and the alcohol aisle. “Next.” Beep. “Cash or card?” The cashier keeps chewing her gum. The old woman in front of me can’t hear her. “Cash or card, ma’am?” Nothing. She opens her purse and starts counting coins. Slowly. One by one. People behind me sigh. I look at her basket. Bread. Milk. Two tins of soup. Then I look at mine. Bourbon. For some reason, I’m no longer the saddest person in the queue.
Richard Dulgheriu is a Romanian-born, Greek-raised writer living in London, where he works in construction. His poetry explores working-class life, migration, family, alcohol and the things people struggle to say aloud.
Religious people think you have to sleep in the church just to find God. They think you have to perform all the rituals, confessing your sins in every few hours. Religious people think that finding God is about performance, shouting on top of their voices, condemning everyone who does not look for God the way they do. And I laugh.
I laugh because I did not find God in any church. I laugh because I found God in me. Away with your rituals and the ticking of all religious boxes. Away with your need to please your pastors and priests. God lives in me. The Divine. He domiciles right in this body. I only need to listen to him, strip myself of all worldly noises. I need to look inward. Little wonder that no religious priest could handle me, because I am a priest too, and I needed to find my God. Little wonder that the religious structures of this world are so noisy and antagonistic toward one another, one assuming that they are better than the other, one even killing the other at every slight opportunity. The men of this world have turned religion into a tool to get what they want, for what they will gain. But I have God in me.
What It Means To Write
Does anyone have to teach anybody how to write?
How to let the words flow?
And connect to the healing forces of nature?
Maybe yes
Or maybe no.
I’m one who wasn’t taught by anyone.
I only let my stories ferment by reading other people’s stories.
Never knew that I had something to offer the world.
Until stories began to emerge,
All by themselves.
Unforced.
I thought it would be a too elaborate thing,
A thing that only special people could do.
Until I saw myself doing it,
Crafting stories,
Giving myself to the world,
Just like the Messiah telling his disciples:
This is my flesh which is given for you.
The Lost Tribes of Israel
We share ourselves with the world when we tell our stories.
We help them to see themselves,
Discover themselves.
With our stories
We gather the lost tribes of Israel.
We unite ourselves.
We find meaning in a world where meaning slips from the grasp of the hand.
Isaac Dominion Aju is a Nigerian writer and editor. He’s been nominated for the Best Of The Net and The Pushcart Prize. He’s currently the founding editor at Words Not Yet Spoken and the managing editor at The Tiny Dot Review.
A Critical Reading of the book “After Forty Years of Snow”
By Raida Jarjes
Faleeha Hassan’s poetry represents a quiet yet profound voice in contemporary Iraqi literature. Rather than relying on rhetorical intensity or immediate emotional expression, her poems contemplate experience from a distance, allowing memory and time to transform lived moments into poetic knowledge. In After Forty Years of Snow, this approach becomes particularly evident: the poem is concerned less with the event itself than with the traces it leaves behind.
The Title as a Threshold
The title After Forty Years of Snow immediately introduces the reader to an extended landscape of memory. In Gérard Genette’s concept of the paratext, the title functions as an interpretive threshold through which the reader enters the text.
Here, “forty years” suggests the maturation of experience and the long passage through memory, while “snow” evokes silence, stillness, coldness, and emotional suspension. The collection therefore begins not within the experience itself, but in its aftermath—when memory has already begun transforming pain into understanding.
The Poetic Self
Hassan’s poetic self is neither conventionally lyrical nor directly confessional. It is reflective, sensory, and constantly moving between memory and the present.
This is evident in poems such as “A Date at the Restaurant,” “We Women,” “This Evening,” and “My Old Friends,” where everyday details become entry points into deeper questions of absence, belonging, and remembrance.
Her feminine perspective is equally significant. It does not appear merely as a subject of the poems, but as a distinctive way of perceiving and interpreting the world.
The Rhetoric of Silence
One of Hassan’s most striking qualities is her linguistic restraint. Her language is concise and precise, often allowing silence and textual space to carry as much meaning as words.
Short sentences, pauses, and unfinished gestures invite the reader to participate in completing the emotional landscape of the poem. This “rhetoric of silence” transforms absence itself into a poetic device.
Even ordinary moments, drinking tea in New Jersey, observing New York, or noticing someone smoking beneath a window, become charged with memory and emotional resonance.
Time, Memory, and Exile
Time in the collection does not move in a straight line. Past and present repeatedly intersect, while memory disrupts chronological order. The past is not recalled simply through nostalgia; it becomes material for questioning, reflection, and self-understanding.
Similarly, exile extends beyond geography. It becomes an existential condition—a quiet sense of displacement carried within the self.
The body itself becomes an archive, preserving the traces of cold, loss, war, distance, and remembered experience.
Conclusion
After Forty Years of Snow reveals Faleeha Hassan as a poet deeply concerned with what remains after experience has passed. Her poetry moves beyond the event toward its echo, beyond loss toward its understanding, and beyond memory toward knowledge.
Through restrained language, fragmented time, and a remarkable use of silence, Hassan creates a poetic world in which what is left unsaid may resonate as strongly as what is spoken. Her collection thus offers a distinctive contribution to contemporary Iraqi poetry—a poetry in which memory does not merely preserve the past, but continually recreates its meaning.
Notes :
Gérard Genette (1930–2018) was a French literary theorist and critic.
Faleeha Hassan, After Forty Years of Snow. First Edition. Dar Amargi for Printing and Publishing, Iraq, 2024. 158 pp. ISBN: 978-9922-9567-2-5.
