It must be abstract but with colors, green for the magnolia, yellow for the finches in the white cage. Blue is the bear I stitched for you from velour and buttons and leaned on the fence of your bed.
Already I’ve drifted into narrative and particulars, the name of the bear I will tell you, and the story of the stitching, the colors of zinnias tall in your window. There are no screens between you and me
and the zinnias. I could touch them from the chair where I sit by your bed reading, opening the space in which you are dying, all the world should come in, petals like paper arrows—
purple-red, pink, gold, sharp-raw as the rasp of your breathing. Don’t die, I’m thinking. Live so I can carry you back to the beach, your house where I slept on the porch,
the sea pounding, shells rattling in laps of waves, so many in the turned-up hem of your shirt pulled close to your heart, your small breasts
brooding metastasis. Dying is what you wanted, no measures, let alone extreme, anything but this lingering drug-induced limbo.
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2021-10-11 15:47:002022-02-25 17:20:01“Blue Bear,” by Idris Anderson (Poetry ’06)
In the first months of the pandemic, I found myself living in a borrowed house, beautiful and light-filled, with large granite countertops—a stately old structure ideally located near the center of a quaint, gothic city. Perfect for afternoon walks and evening drinks on the upstairs patio. Each night I would listen as the oak trees slowly filled with bird song and marvel at the languid persistence of the Spanish moss, glowing dimly above the lamp posts.
All I missed, really, besides friends and family, was my book collection, 500 miles and three states away. The house, having been renovated for weekend vacationers, had nothing in the way of reading material except for brochures of nearby tourist attractions. So, I ordered a few books from a local store.
It was in this way that I first encountered Ellen Bryant Voigt’s Messenger: New and Selected Poems 1976-2006, a book that has anchored me amid the tumultuous uncertainty of the past eighteen months. Voigt’s poems are shorn of superfluity, each line shaved down to its essential, burning core. She is a poet of control and precision; across decades and amid differing poetical movements, Voigt is steadfast in her adherence to a clear-eyed iambic elegy…
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Rose Auslander (Poetry ’15) was recently featured in Posit. Read an excerpt of Auslander’s poem “It” below:
It
better keep its hands to itself, better not slit your wrists & say you did—no,
it won’t admit trouble sleeping, won’t look in the mirror, will hold no dew, no slow afternoons, or home or tide swirling or otherwise, would rather explode—oh it refuses to feel the wind on its cheek, mouth hanging open crying out, it denies pain, my dear, it will watch you eat your heart as if anyone would know…
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Friends of Writers congratulates Reginald Dwayne Betts (poetry ’10) who has been selected to be a 2021 MacArthur Fellow. Betts received a BA (2009) from the University of Maryland, an MFA (2010) from Warren Wilson College, and a JD (2016) from Yale Law School. He is currently a PhD candidate in law at Yale Law School. Betts was appointed by President Barack Obama to the Coordinating Council of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention in 2012, and since 2018 he has served as a member of Connecticut’s Criminal Justice Commission, which appoints state prosecutors. His additional publications include the poetry collections Bastards of the Reagan Era (2015) and Shahid Reads His Own Palm (2010) and the memoir Question of Freedom: A Memoir of Learning, Survival, and Coming of Age in Prison (2009).
From the MacArthur website:
Reginald Dwayne Betts is a poet and lawyer promoting the rights and humanity of people who are or have been incarcerated. Betts’s work is informed by his experience with incarceration after being tried as an adult for a carjacking at the age of sixteen. As a practicing lawyer, Betts fights for clemency and parole for individuals facing lengthy sentences, and he is a member of local and national taskforces dedicated to ending cash bail, limiting sentence lengths, and prohibiting the practice of sending juveniles to adult prisons.
His poetry reflects both his legal training—particularly his deep engagement with scholarship on notions of guilt, punishment, and justice—and his command of craft. Throughout Felon (2019), his third collection, Betts inhabits multiple voices, making visible the entire spectrum of the criminal justice system. The opening poem, titled “Ghazal,” is written in the classical Arabic form of the same name, which is characterized by rhyming couplets that end with a repeated refrain. In this case, the refrain is “after prison,” and the speaker recounts the separation and loss that come with imprisonment and the struggle to rebuild a life as a convicted felon. “For a Bail Denied” depicts the fear and despair of a teenager, his mother, and his public defender in a hearing that results in his imprisonment. In a series of redaction poems, Betts uses source material from Civil Rights Corps lawsuits that challenge the imposition of cash bail and court fees. He blacks out the often obscure and sanitizing language of legal documents to lay bare the criminalization of poverty. Impoverished people, unable to pay traffic tickets or excessive bail, are jailed indefinitely in a modern-day version of debtor’s prison. In collaboration with artist Titus Kaphar, Betts created a series of prints of the redacted poems overlaying Kaphar’s portraits of the plaintiffs in the lawsuits. The resulting exhibition, Redaction (2019), was a powerful indictment of the human impact of cash bail. It addressed a community that rarely sees itself reflected back from the walls of museums.
Betts recently launched the nonprofit Freedom Reads to give incarcerated people access to the power of literature. Freedom Reads donates books and shelving for libraries, organizes author visits, and sets up book circles in prisons and juvenile detention facilities. Through his profoundly moving poems, public defense work, and advocacy efforts, Betts provides a unique perspective on the lifelong impacts of incarceration and the injustice of a criminal justice system that relies so heavily upon it.
The MacArthur Fellows Program awards unrestricted fellowships to talented individuals who have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction.
Even before the stay-at-home order that spring, Jen’s latest pregnancy had threatened to lock her down. She’d thought stress and fatigue were bringing on her headaches, but her twenty-six week check-up revealed her blood pressure was high. If it continued to spike, she’d have to go on bedrest. She couldn’t very well deliver groceries from her mattress, she’d pointed out. Her doctor thought Jen was joking, but this little guy had exhausted her sense of humor. Now that the pandemic was forcing her to sit around most of the day helping the kids with remote schooling, it was harder to distract herself from the baby’s constant kicking. Her headaches were better, but he never settled down for a moment. What felt like perfect somersaults pushed acid up her throat every few minutes. Plus, she’d never stopped spotting after about week seven, when she’d braced for a miscarriage. So, maybe she had it backwards? Maybe her body was a danger to this baby, and here she was, some mother, blaming him for battling to be born.
To make it all worse, Michael, who was really Robert’s dog and barely gave Jen the time of day outside of mealtimes, had turned clingy since the lockdown. He’d leap in her lap while she helped the kids fill out the worksheets their teachers had assigned during the morning’s Zoom sessions. As she colored shapes with Daniel, formed letters with Rebekah, watched Rosemary work her algebra, since Jen couldn’t help out with any math more advanced than long division, Michael would plop his full Labrador weight on her knees and lick her silly. No amount of pushing him off and no, Michaels, and banishments to the back yard, where he promptly set to barking at the snotty neighbor woman with the unpronounceable last name, would make him leave her alone.
Maybe her stomach acid smelled like raw wieners.
Or maybe, she thought as she leaned in to guide Rebekah in a cursive h and Michael slathered a kiss, he was trying to get her to lighten up.
“Why does my name end in h?” Rebekah asked. “I can’t even hear it.”
Before Jen could answer, Rosemary looked up from a string of mysterious alphanumerics. “It’s Biblical.”
“Does the Bible say why we can’t hear it?”
Rosemary deadpanned, “Yes, it does.”
This from the daughter who’d declared herself an atheist last month. “Your sister is just kidding. I thought your name looked pretty with an h. An extra special something you don’t have to hear to know is there.”
“Like God. Which is Biblical.” With a quick glance back down at the problem, Rosemary easily solved for x.
“I can’t hear any h in God.” Daniel looked up from the triangles he was supposed to be coloring with primary shades. Burnt sienna wasn’t primary. Neither was raw umber. Would his teacher mark him down? Why were they giving kindergarteners marks, anyway, especially now?
“There isn’t, honey,” Jen told him. “What your sister means is that you don’t have to hear God to know He’s there. Like Rebekah’s h.”
“But you have to see Him, right?” Rebekah was outlining her name with a blue crayon. “I can see my h.”
Rosemary looked at her mother as if daring her to answer for faith on that one. “You just have to see Him once,” Jen answered. Without thinking, obviously. Rosemary’s brows shot up.
“If I draw Him then I can see Him.” Daniel grabbed the Crayon box.
Rebekah stared at her mother anxiously. “When will I see Him, Mom?”
Michael snuggled against her belly. The pressure was calming the baby’s tumbles. For a brief moment, she didn’t feel sick, or panicked. She had no idea why she was being literal about God to her literal-minded young kids. Still, she said, “You will, honey. Everybody does, eventually.”
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2021-09-17 18:32:002022-02-25 17:19:58“Stay Home, Stay Safe,” by Laura Hulthen Thomas (Fiction ’14)
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Light
Light. The rapture of it, heft
and weight. Two birches wear the white sheen
of it, a zinnia’s face blazes gold in it,
sidewalk shadows change size because of it.
Quick as that, a gloss of light lands
on the cricket’s back, then leaves. Leaves in Fall
are charged with it, fierce light pulsing out
from colors against black bark after rain.
When dark falls, there is an absence,
a quiet sorrow in the realm of eyesight.
Edges blur and soften, and we no longer
recognize what we knew so keenly yesterday.
Then daybreak, when the rapt world flames forth
again, scattering bits of light, delirious light.
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2021-09-08 19:26:002022-02-25 17:19:57A Poem from LIGHT ROLLING SLOWLY BACKWARD, New & Selected Poems from Ethna McKiernan (poetry ’04)
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2021-09-07 21:24:002022-02-25 17:19:56“Antepartum: Girl,” by Faith Gómez Clark (Poetry ’19)
I have learned to love turning a bar of soap and the calendar’s empty pages in my hands, soft lather that soothes, feels like ritual, lifts away things I don’t need. I have learned to love the chickens’ ways, the hesitating way they walk like brides down an aisle, their contented churks and startled squawks, the way one gentle hen in the nesting box raises up to let me collect the eggs she’s been warming beneath her breast, then curves her neck to look underneath, head upside down under there, then registering the emptiness begins to make small sad sounds, only lament a bird can make…
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Caitlin Rae Taylor: Your short story “A Sane Person Doesn’t Do Something Like That” examines the strain in the marriage of Yvelis and Hector during the Cuban Revolution. How did you decide when and where Hector and Yvelis’s story would take place, and why did you construct it to coincide with this critical point in Cuba’s history?
Leslie Blanco: My father was born in Cuba in the 40s, and he was sent away by his parents in 1962, under the auspices of the Peter Pan Project, a joint venture of the CIA and the Catholic Church. These unlikely bedfellows worked together to airlift the children of political dissidents and those in disfavor with the Communist government to safety in the United States. My father was not reunited with his family for seven years, and the reunion happened “in exile.” All of this transpired well before I was born, but for the Cuban family that raised me, the Cuban revolution was, and in many ways continues to be, the central tragedy. It was the definitive point of our before and after. It was the measure against which our lives gained or lost purpose, meaning and happiness, all in a strangely predetermined dance of fate and destiny maddeningly beyond our control and inextricable from the joys and tragedies of life beyond politics.
“A Sane Person Doesn’t Do Something Like That,” came out of a discarded section of my first attempt at a novel. The novel was set before and during Fidel Castro’s revolution of 1959. Though magically realist, full of historical coincidence and highly fictionalized, the novel was set in my father’s hometown of Guanajay, Cuba. In my head, all the invented characters of the novel had a real-life corollary. Yvelis was a version of my grandmother, who loved to gamble, secretly, with funds my straitlaced grandfather never knew about. When she died, we found several thousand dollars in cash hidden under her bed. Surely gambling winnings, lottery winnings, dog race winnings. I suspect that in my grandmother’s day, she and her sisters may have placed great faith in Clavelito, even while making fun of those who believed in Clavelito’s miracles. In a way, all my stories set within the framework of Cuban history are an attempt to understand a family, a history and a culture dramatically different than the one that surrounds me as a hyphenated American. And even though I did not experience it, the Cuban revolution of 1959 is and always will be the moment of my before and after, and accordingly, it haunts my writing, cropping up again and again.
Light
Light. The rapture of it, heft
and weight. Two birches wear the white sheen
of it, a zinnia’s face blazes gold in it,
sidewalk shadows change size because of it.
Quick as that, a gloss of light lands
on the cricket’s back, then leaves. Leaves in Fall
are charged with it, fierce light pulsing out
from colors against black bark after rain.
When dark falls, there is an absence,
a quiet sorrow in the realm of eyesight.
Edges blur and soften, and we no longer
recognize what we knew so keenly yesterday.
Then daybreak, when the rapt world flames forth
again, scattering bits of light, delirious light.
