November 2014

FEATURED POET: LIZ DOLAN. A Secret of Long Life has been nominated for the Robert McGovern Prize. Liz Dolan’s first poetry collection, They Abide, was published by March Street. A six-time Pushcart nominee and winner of Best of the Web and finalist for Best of the Net, Liz has received an established professional in poetry fellowship from the Delaware Division of the Arts and has been chosen for residencies at The Atlantic Center for the Arts and Martha’s Vineyard. She has also won fiction prizes from The Nassau Review, The Master’s Review and The Cobalt Review’s Baseball Poetry Prize. Liz serves on the poetry board of Philadelphia Stories. She is most grateful for her ten grandchildren, all of whom live one block away; they pepper her life.

A Secret of Long Life has been nominated for the Robert McGovern Prize. Please check it out at Cave Moon Press

The Spelling Test

Teach your brother to spell
Sister Caritas said.
So each night Michael and I
fifteen months apart, sparred
at the enamel table over
i before e and double b’ s.

How I relished folding up
my sleeves like Sister,
tossing my braids
as if they were a veil
and stabbing his decieve,
occassion and bubles
with my red pen.

He’d rip the papers to shreds
and convert them to confetti.
Each session ended in poisoned barbs,
You dumb ox, I’d hiss.
Ass kisser, he’d sneer.

Today through a trach,
my brother spits out muddled syllables
his left side paralyzed, his lips trembling.
When I massage his neck and shoulders
I test him still,
Where are my fingers, I ask.
Here,
           here

                      or there?

 ― Liz Dolan

For My Best Friend 1950

In the cellar was buried the dismembered body
of the cherry-cheeked child butchered by the super of 598.
And even though I thought it a myth to keep girls like me
tethered, I still hugged
the curb as I skipped by. And hugged
it even more closely on that day in June
when your father and mine
bolted up the slate stairs to the roof bellowing,
Get the bastard, get the bastard. Pressing my flesh
against ochre stucco, I, wall-eyed and slack-jawed,
saw your trembling five-year-old body
brindled by the ruby rays of the stairwell’s
stained glass, your flaxen hair buried
in your mother’s corn-flowered house coat,

the X of her arms like crossed swords guarding you.

 ― Liz Dolan

WRITE YOUR POEM:

Too Soon

You understand that this is a draft
and that my tears keep screwing up the line

You were the only one who heard the chord
of my line breaks.  Awkward first steps

where modern poems offer not meter.
They offer few rules.

Han Shan offered no confessions
The Tao understands only still waters

Still, you left yesterday and I cry.
This is all a draft.  There is no tomorrow

There is no scrubbing the audio
filling the effects
sanding the burr
tuning to 440
grand flood lights
thunderous applause
perfected rehearsals.

You are only gone.
Please come back.

 ― Doug Johnson

We write in context.  For all the artifice of language, rules and infinitives, our poems die when they only live in  a grammar book.  Liz wrote "My Best Friend"  My best friend died yesterday in a car wreck.  She was the first one to recognize my efforts.  There is no distance from that event.  The river of the internet will wash by.  We will talk of cats, grandchildren and politics.  Poetry has always been the fleeting record of a drop of water rushing by.  Write your poem.  Someone needs your words.