THE WOMAN WITH NEWSPAPER SHOES by Penny Perry

My friend, Penny Perry, has a new book! 

The Woman with Newspaper Shoes is an exceptional book of poems by Penny Perry, an eight-time Pushcart nominee.  Set in Southern California, her second collection of poems is at once memoir, cultural and period snapshot and a volume of compelling and grace-filled poems. The 104 poems, all previously published, form a chronicle of struggle, desire, loss and acceptance.

ISBN-13: 978-1-7350556-5-7                        Publisher: Garden Oak Press

LCCN: 2022937588

$15

156 pages

paperback

Valerie Hastings, winner of the 2020 Steve Kowit Poetry Prize, said this about The Woman with Newspaper Shoes: "These poems are pure gold. They sing of loss and love, of the dead we carry with us and the living we work to keep alive, of survival, memory, family and, most importantly, the joy of being in the here."

Here is one of the poems from Penny Perry's new book;

THE ORDER OF THINGS

Home from college, she climbs

in the car, squints at my hair.

Her father wants me to look

glamorous like his actress friends.

I wound my hair in sponge rollers

and combed it into a stiff helmet.

I wait for her to tell me

I look stupid. She has always

been my critic-in-residence.

Daughters denigrate their mothers

so they will have the courage

to leave. The order of things.

"I love your hair, Mom," she says.

The car reeks of too sweet hair spray.

Airport palms look like movie trees

on this bright December day.

I streak onto the wrong freeway.

Cars in the next lane zip past.

She sits forward. "We're lost."

Her words anxious puffs of air.

"I want to kill myself. Let's do it together."

She smiles in conspiracy.

"You're not that happy."

Like dove-gray kindling, my fear ignites.

I glance at myself in the car mirror,

a timid woman under a foreign helmet.

She leans against me,

the sweet small weight of her

an arrow in my bow.

I will become a warrior.

I don't know it yet.

Sunglasses hide my wet eyes.

I tell my first lie.

"I know the way home."

    by Penny Perry

IT'S THAT TIME OF YEAR

 IT'S THAT TIME OF YEAR

When the temperatures cool down and the leaves have fallen, there's a mania that grips many people. Pumpkin spice this and pumpkin spice that. Some folks just can't get enough pumpkin spice.

Myself, I prefer it, as most likely it originally was meant to be, as a spice in pumpkin pie.

Here's a poem for this season:

Pumpkin Spice

As the summer heat abates, maturing into Autumn's chill,

Leaves of green change into gold and red and orange and brown.

Groves of apple trees create a crisp aroma that instills

A sense of changing and of cold, of closing, winding down.

I love the fragrances of Fall, the colors of this time of year,

The flavors and the way it feels, the quiet fading ebb.

The world decreases, woes grow small, the air itself becomes more clear,

And everything appears more real, from stars to spiderwebs.

A whiff of cinnamon and cloves, a breath of ginger and nutmeg:

The taste of Fall is in this spice, warm and rich and sweet,

Mulling wine upon the stove, in the oven baking bread;

Pile whipped cream upon a slice of pumpkin pie and eat.

    by Ester Spurrill-Jones

Ester Spurill-Jones is the author of several books of poems and a manual on how to write poems (available on Amazon). She describes herself as Poet, lover, thinker, human and says of herself: 

"I am not an open book although I wish I could be. A part of me is all you see--the rest is hidden deep inside. 

Words have always been my art. They dance for me and sing for me. They laugh for me and cry for me. That are my paint and brushes. They are my clay."

To see more of Ester's work go to:

https://sites.google.com/view/thewordartist/home

November and the waning of the year

November Night

   by Adelaide Crapsey (1878 - 1914)

Listen...
With faint dry sound,
Like steps of passing ghosts,
The leaves, frost-crisp'd, break from the trees
And fall.

The poem's central image is formed by two elements: the falling leaves and the steps of the ghosts. As in many of Crapsey's poems, she juxtaposes something small and ordinary (such as the leaves) with something large and timeless (here, death). The leaves become a momento mori and the simile that connects them to ghostly footsteps intensifies this.

November Night is in the chinquapin form invented by Adelaide Crapsey.  A cinquain is a five-line poem in which the first line has two syllables; the second, four syllables; the third, six syllables; the fourth, eight syllables and the fifth, and final, line goes back to two syllables.

Adelaide Crapsey's poems (her entire poetic output, less than one hundred poem) often speak of death and dying. Diagnosed with fatal tuberculosis of the lining of the brain in 1911, she began writing cinquains in the same year. These poems reflect her knowledge of her own impending death. The form itself (the gradual increase of syllables from lines one to four, followed by the short final line) is a metaphor for the life of this young woman -- a brief life, cut short.

Crapsey was born and raised in New York. A graduate of Vassar,  she taught briefly until tuberculosis left her bedridden. In addition to her poems, she produced a study of metrics, praised for its clarity. She was 36 when she died.

Here's one more poem by Crapsey:

Release

     by Adelaide Crapsey

With swift
Great sweep of her
Magnificent arm my pain
Clanged back the doors that shut my soul
From life.

And lastly, another November cinquain by Adelaide Craipsey:

Niagara

     Seen on a Night in November

How frail, 
Above the bulk
Of crashing water hangs,
Autumnal, evanescent, wan,
The moon.

HALLOWEEN

Halloween is my favorite holiday.  

As a little kid, I loved to dress up and pretend I was a different person.

Here I was a princess

and, here, a ballerina. 

(Both costumes were

sown by my grandmother.)

Even as an adult, I love taking on a different persona.

I'm dressed as Snow White

and holding my book,

The Gospel According to 

the Seven Dwarfs.

Here are two Halloween poems:

HALLOWEEN PARTY

We're having a Halloween party at school.

I'm dressed up like Dracula. Man, I look cool!

I dyed my hair black, and cut off my bangs.

I'm wearing a cape and some fake plastic fangs.

I put on some makeup to paint my face white,

like creatures that only come out in the night.

My fingernails, too, are all pointed and red.

I look like I'm recently back from the dead.

Mom drops me off, and I run into school

and suddenly feel like the world's biggest fool.

The other kids stare like I'm some kind of freak-

the Halloween party is not till next week.

       by Kenn Nesbitt

        from his book, 

       When The Teacher Isn't Looking (2005)

 Fie fean I svarte helvete

    by Marsha Segerberg

The clutch on my broom

    is acting up

or maybe it's the carburetor.

    I'm not an expert

but the ride has become

    twitchy and

the backfires are giving me

    a headache.

When I'm crossing the moon

    it's the silhouette

that counts. I can't be looking

    like a drone

from Disneyland. It's dangerous

    out there.

The other night a missile

    went flying by.

I barely snagged it on re-entry but

    my hat blew off.

I had to drop down to pick it up

    and was late

for the gathering and they stirred

    the kettle without me!

Fie faen I svarte helvete!

(I'm told by the author that the title and last line are the worst thing one can say in Norwegian.)

 I want to share an amazing video with you.

It's the late Tony Hoagland speaking about poetic voice.

Here's a wonderful book by my friend and fellow poet, Susan Vespoli:

 

From the hilarious cover art through all the poems, this book is quite a ride. Susan Vespoli, with determined frankness and unrepentant humor, showcases modern love, loss and their aftermaths. She writes, when the relationship ends, that she "tore off our bed sheets and bought a pink set" and "Goodwill clothes [he] liked and kept the ones [he] didn't." By the end of Cactus as Bad Boy, you'll be rooting for her.

 

Susan Vespoli

Here's a poem from the book: 

Sea Otters

Sea otters hold hands while they're sleeping

so they don't drift away from each other,

lying on their backs, they float through night

like kayaks rafted together by tow ropes,

lulled by the cradling rock of waves that roll

from flat to round to pointy peaks of foam.

And that's what I miss the most.

Lying on my back with you dozing beside me,

your hand draped over my heart like a gentle tent,

my fingers laced through yours in a sort of truce,

because when we slept no one had to be right.

MONSOON SEASON

In Arizona, we have a fifth season, the monsoon season, which begins in June and continues through September.

The name "monsoon" comes from the Arabic word "mausim" which means "wind-shift." While during the winter the primary wind flow in Arizona is from the west and northwest, during the summer the winds shift to a southerly or southeasterly direction. This brings moisture up from the Gulf of California and the Gulf of Mexico.

Before the actual thunderstorms, there are gust fronts that pick up large quantities of dust and sand from the desert floor, creating a dust wall called a haboob (from the Arabic word for wind). Many times the heavy pre-storm winds are more damaging than the thunderstorms themselves, although there are places plagued by regular monsoon flooding.

Here are two monsoon season poems:

Towering Cumulus

I.

Another appears outside our kitchen window.

Weather apps worry us with warnings

to watch for floods and thunderstorms--

as the dew point climbs higher and higher.

The wind picks up. Ripe grapefruit plop

to the ground while our wind spinner seems frantic--

as if its wheels might just crash through the window

and slice our throats. The sky darkens with thick dust

that will settle on patio table & potted plants.

Only a few fat raindrops splatter the pool.

Five miles up the road a neighborhood

suffers three inches of rain.

Cars trapped under downed power lines

& rescues in gullies get national attention.

II.

We waken to ozone alerts, humidity--hot and muggy

we say. Look at the sky. Yet another, we say.

Trapped in purgatory, we surmise

August will last at least 90 days.

            by Johnnie May Clemens

Standing Outside, I Remember A Line By Charles Wright

            Summer in the Sonoran Desert

From the concrete bridge,

a view north to Daisy Mountain,

dun-colored, a crooked triangle.

And in the south, dust

                        gathers its discontent.

We are deep in the monsoon season

when, in the parched parlance

of the desert, a storm's prefix

is dust.

A handful of dust is a handful of dust

                       no matter who holds it.

The east valley from Ahwatukee

and Queen Creek to Carefree and

as far away as the Tonto Basin

braces for what's to come.

            The afternoon air fidgets,

unappeased and impatient,

and, suddenly, before one of our

summer thunderstorms, gusts of wind

lift loose dirt from the arid land 

and build walls of dust and debris.

It's hard to imagine the height and length

--almost absurd in its drawn-out

deletion of all forms, everything

covered over to a camel brown.

Then a hard rain

                        with distant snarls

and snaps like a bad-tempered pit bull

barking at something we can't see.

            by Lenny Lianne

            (previously published in

            Inlandia: A Literary Journal)