If I should cease to bring a Rose (by Emily Dickinson)

Emily Dickinson 

[1859]

If I should cease to bring a Rose
Upon a festal day,
‘Twill be because beyond the Rose
I have been called away —

If I should cease to take the names
My buds commemorate —
‘Twill be because Death’s finger
Claps my murmuring lip!

*

twenty five (by Jeffrey Bowen)

Jeffrey Bowen – photo by Kim Yanoshik

twenty five 

once, when you were a little thing,
and excited to tell me
about some imagined future event,
you started by saying,

“when i’m as big as you, and you are little like me…”

and I was blown away to think
that in your child’s unblemished mind
you assumed
that this was simply
the way things worked.

now that many moons and stories have passed,
and we celebrate your milestone birthday
of five and twenty,

i understand that you are not
quite suddenly
a quarter of a century old,
but millenniums young

and rather than trading places,
we have expanded like stars,
to become,
in our heart of hearts,
exactly
the same age. 



* * * * *

Jeffrey Bowen’s poetry has been published by ArtCrimes, Cicada, Cool Cleveland, Crisis Chronicles, CSU Poetry Center, Dimensions, Doan Brook Watershed, Excursions, Green Panda Press, Hessler Street Fair, Procrastination Press, Poet’s League of Greater Cleveland, The City, The Cleveland Reader, and Whiskey Island Magazine.  He is one of six poets profiled in the 1995 documentary, “Off the Page”.  Four of his poems are featured on Cleveland Tumbadors, an album of Traditional Afro Cuban Music and Latin Jazz on Fame City Records.  Jeffrey is the resident poet & conga player with the band, Cats On Holiday, and his poetry appears on their CD, Holiday in a Box from COHTONE Records.  In addition to his poetic work, Jeffrey’s writing has appeared in Call & Post, City News, Cool Cleveland, EcoWatch, Elephant Journal, Girl Scout News, GreenCityBlueLake, Live Cleveland, Neighborhood News, Nonprofit Notes, Sun News and various Habitat for Humanity publications.

Circular Reincarnation (by Helen A. Shepard)

Helen Shepard at Jim’s Coffeehouse & Diner, 2011 — photo by JC

Circular Reincarnation
 

Time is not linear
Our lives are lived in circles
Going from past to present
Seeking love, hoping for warmth
Yearning for eternity
And never ending life
Fulfilling our innermost desires

I looked into your eyes one day
And saw an intense light
You came from nowhere into eternity
The present became past love
I was reincarnated and changed
A sudden burning desire
Eroded my reality

My heart began to sing songs
Erotic songs that pound inside of me
Dreams that haunt my being
Thoughts that fill my summer days
Winding through sleepless nights
Hoping you return me to my past
Before the flowers fade

* * * * *

Helen Shepard of Oberlin, Ohio, taught at Lorain County Community College and retired as an Associate Professor of Spanish. For many years she continued giving courses for their Center for Lifelong Learning.  Helen has traveled extensively and read several times at Snoetry and elsewhere.  Find out more about her at www.helenshepard.com.

Reasonable Request (by Rose Mary Boehm)

 

Reasonable Request 

Saying ‘she slept and never woke’

sounds like running water

under the stone bridge

somewhere over the Carwinley Burn.


I want my death to approach me softly,

like a child sliding in socks

along a marble floor.

* * * * *

A German-born UK national, Rose Mary Boehm lives and works in Lima, Peru. Author of two novels and a poetry collection (Tangents), her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in US poetry reviews. Toe Good Poetry, Poetry Breakfast, Burning Word, Muddy River Review, Pale Horse Review, Pirene’s Fountain, Other Rooms, Requiem Magazine, Full of Crow, Poetry Quarterly, Punchnel’s, Avatar, Verse Wisconsin, Naugatuck River Review, Boston Literary, Red River Review, Ann Arbor, Main Street Rag, Misfit Magazine and others.

On This Dock (by Allison Grayhurst)

On This Dock

I hear the white steed
and the fish together
in dark obscurity.
I look at the body,
the children weeping to gain control.
I listen for the perishing wind
and declare to it a vigil
of telltale strength.
The journey here faces
the drive of instinct — to buckle
in and walk the safest hallway
or to carry the weight of failure
and still harbour a cry to the fox and a belief
in the many shapes of heaven.

The journey knows its evening
has come and all the beautiful clouds will drop
one by one from the sky.



* * * * *

Allison Grayhurst is a full member of the League of Canadian Poets. She has over 300 poems published in more than 180 international journals, magazines, and anthologies.

Her book Somewhere Falling was published by Beach Holme Publishers, a Porcepic Book, in Vancouver in 1995. Since then she has published ten other books of poetry and four collections with Edge Unlimited Publishing. Prior to the publication of Somewhere Falling she had a poetry book published, Common Dream, and four chapbooks published by The Plowman.

Her poetry chapbook The River is Blind was recently published by Ottawa publisher above/ground press December 2012.

She lives in Toronto with family. She also sculpts, working with clay.

Sad Little Monsters (by William Taylor Jr.)

Sad Little Monsters

Writing poems you’ll never read
is the only way I can speak to you anymore

yet there was a time
when those who mete out slivers of grace
upon the world like occasional rain

spoke our names with a certain fondness

but at some point mercy had other things to do

and they rounded up all the soft things
and spirited them to someplace cold

and burned every map that could ever take us back
to all the pretty things we said

and these days the sad little monsters we sometimes
call our hearts
keep us from sleep with their lonely stirrings
and strange desires

though we drown them like kittens
again and again

the stars will fall and the moon
will break its promises

but honey let’s not squander our sorrow
all in one place

it’s early yet and the night
has more to say.



* * * * *

William Taylor Jr. lives and writes in the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco. Broken When We Got Here, his latest book of poetry, and An Age of Monsters, his first collection of fiction, are both available from Epic Rites Press. The Blood of a Tourist, a book of new poems, will be published in early 2014 by Sunnyoutside Press. He was a recipient of the 2013 Acker Award.

bulbs of man (by Bree)

bulbs of man

when you turn the lightswitch to on,
the light will come on.
and if it does not, you would check
the bulb to see if it’s spent.

you would replace the bulb, and the
light would come on, and if the bulb
had not been spent, you would
check the fuse box,
and if not the box, then the wiring
would be looked after, and so forth until
the light was made to go on at last.

you would be much less likely to give
up on a lightswitch than you would
to give up on a man.



* * * * *

“bulbs of man” comes from Bree’s A Leg to Stand On: memoirs and poesy, published in 2013 by Green Panda Press.

Bree is a poet who lives with her husband and cats in a cozy cottage in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. Her memoirs include was chicken trax amid sparrows tread and The Rainbow Sweater & My Mother, while her poems appear in various little mags you don’t likely know. 

Crisis Chronicles Press has published two volumes of her song lyrics.

You Look Just Like Your Father (by Josh Romig)

Josh Romig

You Look Just Like Your Father

The doctors told me I should abort.
But my mom convinced me that this was for the best

I wanted a closed adoption.
They said that I’d never see you again.
I was okay with that.
It made things easier.

You have to know,
I never wanted any of this,
I never thought I’d be one to abandon my only child
That’s monstrous.
Please believe me,
I am not a monster.

But he was.

Your eyes are the same.
Dark and hard…
but sort of empty too.

Your smile
is soft and gentle – like his.
A practiced liar’s smile.

Your hands,
they look just like the ones he wrapped around my mouth and neck,
long and thin, but surprisingly strong.

Your voice —
Identical to the one that whispered
“no one will believe you”
into my ear that night.

You even kind of smell like him.

I don’t know what you expected to get out of this:
Money?
An apology?
Closure?
Love?
I can’t give you any of those things.

I will tell you this:
I could have spared you this moment,
and not doing so, is my biggest regret.



* * * * *

JM (or Josh, whichever you prefer) Romig likes to write and perform poetry, and is also very bad at writing introductions for himself.

Find him somewhere in northeast Ohio or at https://www.facebook.com/thecatalystpoet. 

Some Deaths on the Field (by Michael Ceraolo)

Michael Ceraolo in [photo by John Burroughs]

Some Deaths on the Field

         1

Monday August 16, 1920

A hot humid day,

                          with light rain

at the Polo Grounds in New York City

(Babe Ruth was in his first year with the team,

                                                                   and

it would take a few years as a drawing card

for him to enable The House That Ruth Built)

Neither team had won a pennant

at that time in the American League’s history

                                                                   (and

there had been some fluky circumstances

in each team’s history along the way,

                                                       such as

the single-season winningest pitcher in the twentieth century

tossing a wild pitch to lose a deciding game,

                                                                 or

losing a pennant by a half-game because

the team ahead didn’t have to make up a game,

                                                                      or

losing out because a world war ended the season

a month earlier than usual,

                                       a month

when you would have had most of your games at home),

                                                                                   but

both teams were contenders this year

The rain had stopped,

                                and

the skies were gray,

                              and

Cleveland led 3-0

as Ray Chapman came to bat

leading off the top of the fifth inning

By a recent directive from the league

dirty baseballs would be replaced less often,

and it may have been a 

scuffed

              stained

                          or dirty baseball

that sped toward home plate on submariner

Carl Mays’ first pitch

“I heard that sound

when the ball crushed his skull,

                                               and

I saw him fall”

                      “I didn’t want

any closer view than that”
(legend says the ball was fielded

as though it had been a batted ball)

The future cliche

“Is there a doctor in the house?”

went through the crowd,

                                    and

two doctors,

                   including

the Yankees team physician,

responded to the summons

Chapman was revived after some minutes

and helped to his feet,

                                 attempting

to walk off the field under his own power

                                                              but

he was unable to walk very far

and had to be carried off the field

An ambulance took Chapman to the hospital

At the hospital,

                        Chapman told a friend

not to call his wife,

                            but if he had to,

                                                    to

“tell her I’m all right”

before he lost consciousness

                                               And

after his pulse rate continued to drop,

the doctors decided to operate,

                                              the operation

beginning at 12:29 AM on the seventeenth

and lasting an hour and a quarter,

                                                   removing

a small square section of Chapman’s skull,

along with some blood clots

The next forty-eight hours would be critical

in determining recovery

                                      but

he would only live about three hours

after the operation ended,

                                      dying

at 4:40 AM August 17, 1920

The morning paper on the 17th,

                                              amid

the headlines of the presidential campaign

and the ongoing ‘Red Scare’ ,

had a Nostradumbass

express his doubt as to whether

Chapman had suffered a skull fracture,

                                                         though

in the same article he hedged his bets

by saying x-rays would tell for sure

The headline in that same paper on the eighteenth

(at the top of the page):

CHAPMAN’S BODY ARRIVES HOME TODAY

Chapman was the first,

                                  and

to this day remains the only

major leaguer killed on the field,

                                               and

his death was the beginning

of a string of family tragedies:

his wife committed suicide eight years later,

and his daughter,

                          born six months after his death,

would die of measles a year after her mother’s death

          2

October 7, 1923

A sunny Sunday afternoon

for a semi-pro football game

at Austin Field in Willoughby

along the banks of the Chagrin River

                                                      (today,

ninety years later,

                             on a day

as much cooler-than-usual

as the day back then was,

                                        but overcast,

                                                            with

no frost in today’s overnight forecast

as there was frost overnight back then,

I visit the site,

                     now called Todd Field

and carved up into several ball diamonds

and a soccer field,

                            and

picture that game)

The Willoughby Merchants team would be playing

the Klesch Sports team from the big city of Cleveland

It was the opening game of the season for the Merchants

(no word on which game it was for Klesch Sports)

Chester Mares,

                       a twenty-three year-old,

would be playing fullback for Klesch

Mares had played football for,

                                            and

had even graduated from,

Central High in 1920,

                                which

put him beyond the average level

of education of the day,

                                        though,

having graduated at twenty,

he apparently was not college material

even with his football ability

                                          Nor

was he quite good enough for pro football,

                                                              even

with the NFL in its infancy

                                        and

the gap between pro and semi-pro

far less than it is today

Wearing primitive helmets and primitive pads,

                                                                  or

perhaps having no protection at all,

the year before Mares had suffered

a skull fracture serious enough

to put him in a coma for four days,

                                                   and

doctors had advised against playing again

Mares disregarded the advice,

                                             but

this would not be a case of foreshadowing:

what would happen to him was both

less expected and less explicable

With around two minutes left in the game

Mares dropped back to throw a pass

from his fullback position

                                     (down,

distance,

              and game score

                                        not recorded,

                                                            but

given the prevailing strategy of the day

his team must have been behind

if he was attempting a pass),

                                            and,

after letting the ball go,

                                  he was bumped,

lightly according to the reporter,

and fell backwards

                             And

during or after his fall

he choked on his chewing tobacco,

                                                    and

after a doctor on the scene

was unable to revive him,

he died in the back of the ambulance

on the way to the hospital

          3

Tuesday June 24, 1947

A smoke-filled steamy Cleveland Arena,

the marquee outside advertising

a welterweight title fight between

the challenger Jimmy Doyle

(born James Delaney),

                                  just a little

over a month shy of his twenty-third birthday,

coming into the fight with a record

of forty-three wins,

                           seven losses,

                                                and one draw

(or possibly a record of forty-six and five),

                                                            with

fourteen wins by knockout,

                                        and

the champion Sugar Ray Robinson

(born Walker Smith, Jr.),

                                      who

had just turned twenty-six

and had a record of

seventy-eight wins,

                            one loss,

                                          and one draw

(no dispute here:

champions’ careers are always better documented),

with fifty-two knockouts

“It’s the fear of many of Jimmy’s supporters

that he hasn’t fully recovered from that baleful beating yet”
referring to Doyle being knocked out

by Artie Lange in March 1946
in a fight that took place in Cleveland,

                                                       but

after that fight Doyle would proclaim

“If I don’t go back to Cleveland

and fight in the same ring again

I’m not a man”

                       (Lange

had also knocked down Robinson

in the fourth round of their fight

on November 6, 1946,

                                though

Robinson came back to knock out Lange

in yet another fight that took place in Cleveland)

As the fight progressed

spectators were wowed by Robinson’s ability

and impressed by Doyle’s toughness

in taking Robinson’s punches,

                                            though

Doyle also earned respect

with some of the punches he threw,

                                                    stunning

Robinson in the third round

and opening a cut over his eye

in the sixth round,

                           possibly

winning both of those rounds,

                                           and

at the end of the seventh round,

in response to the unknown instructions

coming from his corner,

Doyle was heard to say

“I will I will”

“Saved by the bell!”

said the headline in the next morning’s paper,

referring to the round’s ending

before a fighter could be counted out,

                                                       but

while it had been true as far as boxing 

it was already dubious in a much larger way

by the time the article appeared:

                                                  Doyle

had been taken to St. Vincent Charity Hospital

by ambulance immediately after the fight,

having been carried out on a stretcher,

unconscious

At the hospital

the doctors on duty realized

they needed more expertise,

                                          and

they called in brain specialist Spencer Braden

from his home in suburban Chagrin Falls

to perform the necessary surgery

The surgery started at three a.m.,

                                                 showing

extensive brain damage,

                                    and

ended after an unrecorded amount of time,

and all settled in to wait for Time

to determine Doyle’s outcome

                                               but

there would be less than a day to wait:

around noon a priest was called

to administer last rites,

                                  and

in the early afternoon on the twenty-fifth

Doyle died,

seventeen hours after being knocked out,

never regaining consciousness,

                                               leaving

the repeated I will at the end of the seventh round

to stand as his last words

In the undignified next-to-last act,

Cuyahoga County Coroner Sam Gerber,

warming up for the Sheppard case seven years later

(no fear of being defeated in the two elections

to be held during that time),

                                         showed

he could generate headlines even then,

                                                         first

with his insinuations that ‘the powers that be’

were leaning on him to rule this

an accidental death,

                              so as

not to jeopardize future title fights

                                                  (while of course

never naming a single name of the alleged pressurers),

                                                                               and

again at the inquest:

“CORONER CALLS CHAMPION ‘EVASIVE’ “

but in the end bringing no charges against anyone

And in the dignified last act

Robinson subsequently fought a few fights

for the benefit of Doyle’s family,

                                              risking

his title in the process,

                                  but

coming through still the champion

and enabling Doyle’s mother

to finally buy the house

she had long dreamed of owning

Postscript:  Two Close Calls

August 24, 1919

A Sunday afternoon,

as all games were day games back then

Game 109 of the scheduled 140,

                                                as

the owners in their infinite unwisdom    

decided to cut the schedule back

from the usual one hundred fifty-four games,

                                                                thinking

the fans would stay away in droves after

the previous year’s war-shortened season,

                                                              costing

themselves a fair amount of money

when the fans did return

                                      Ray Caldwell,

called Rube or Slim,

                               as well as

other unflattering unofficial nicknames,

would make his Indians debut

in today’s game at League Park,

                                                having

been acquired just a few days earlier

in a trade with the Boston Red Sox

The Red Sox were the second team

to throw up their hands trying to deal with Slim,

the New York Yankees having been the first to do so;

he had had a good year or two for the Yankees

back in the early and mid-teens, 

                                               but

had been erratic for several years since,

                                                           though

he had been pitching decent baseball

at the time of the trade

                                    but

Caldwell suffered from the disease of alcoholism,

                                                                        then

considered a moral failing rather than a medical matter,

and thus was getting probably his last chance,

                                                                    starting

with today’s game against the Philadelphia A’s

The A’s were in the midst of what would be

another last-place season,

                                       their fifth straight

in a stretch of seven consecutive such finishes,

                                                                     and

were pitching Rollie Naylor,

                                         who came into the game

with a record of two wins and sixteen losses

                                                                    But

given the game’s fine line between good and bad,

anyone can have a good game at any time,

                                                               and

Naylor had one of those today,

                                              giving up

only three hits and two runs (one earned)

over his eight innings

                                  But

Caldwell matched him pitch for pitch,

                                                       having

given up four hits and one run

when a sudden summer thunderstorm

rolled in off the lake

with two outs in the top of the ninth

A C–R–A–A–A–S–H

was heard in the stands,

                                     though

the first lightning had gone unnoticed

                                                          But

the second flash

                          was seen,

                                          and noted,

                                                          and felt,

most players feeling a slight tingle

from their metal spikes being in contact

with the charged ground

                                      But somehow

Ray Caldwell was more affected

                                                 (though

no one was sure how or why it was so),

being knocked completely off his feet

without suffering any serious or lasting damage

He got up,

                 declined

any medical assistance,

                                     declined

to come out of the game,

                                     and

retired the last batter to finish the game,

                                                          and

then everybody got the hell off the field

safely—-

September 13, 1948

A Monday afternoon make-up game

against the woeful St. Louis Browns,

                                                      and

with the time of day and short notice

only seven thousand and eight fans were on hand,

in a year the team would set the

single-season attendance record,

to witness a near-tragedy

Early in a scoreless game

Don Black came to bat,

                                   and

after fouling off the second pitch,

staggered out of the batter’s box

as though in a stupor,

                                 and

then collapsed,

                       unconscious,

                                            and

was taken to the hospital by ambulance

Had Black,

who suffered from alcoholism

but seemed to be in recovery,

suffered a relapse?

No

        The papers reported

that he had suffered a burst aneurysm

(though it was more likely a leaking one

that had bled into his brain),

                                          reported

that Black’s life hung in the balance,

                                                      reported,

in those days before medical privacy,

that doctors were giving him

a fifty-fifty chance of survival

Black did indeed survive the brain bleed,

                                                          but

his baseball career ended with that swing,

                                                             and

he died just over a decade later

at the age of forty-two

* * * * *
This poem comes from Michael Ceraolo’s work in progress Euclid Creek Book Three.  We also recommend:
 
Euclid Creek – available from Deep Cleveland Books
Cleveland Scores Early – from Kendra Steiner Editions
Cleveland Haiku – from Green Panda Press

In the Pink (by Siegfried Sassoon)

 

In the Pink
by Siegfried Sassoon
[from The Old Huntsman and Other Poems, 1918]

So Davies wrote: ‘This leaves me in the pink’.
Then scrawled his name: ‘Your loving sweetheart, Willie’.
With crosses for a hug. He’d had a drink
Of rum and tea; and, though the barn was chilly,
For once his blood ran warm; he had pay to spend.
Winter was passing; soon the year would mend.

But he couldn’t sleep that night; stiff in the dark
He groaned and thought of Sundays at the farm,
And how he’d go as cheerful as a lark
In his best suit, to wander arm in arm
With brown-eyed Gwen, and whisper in her ear
The simple, silly things she liked to hear.

And then he thought: to-morrow night we trudge
Up to the trenches, and my boots are rotten.
Five miles of stodgy clay and freezing sludge,
And everything but wretchedness forgotten.
To-night he’s in the pink; but soon he’ll die.
And still the war goes on — he don’t know why. 
  

*