Bonnie Minick
Train Conversations
How else would you know that I’m allergic
to bees, their fluttering stings?
Or how, that summer, I moved across the grass
barefoot to hang the laundry
when I stepped on one
as it hovered above the brightness of a dandelion.
See, we are all distracted by beauty.
But how much do you need to know
before you really know someone?
You could tell them they’re beautiful
in a dark kitchen after too many glasses of wine.
Or you could say nothing at all.
There’s a living room in Chicago
where he reached for my hand and we started slow dancing
while his family finished their breakfast.
Someone might ask: Where are you going?
There’s a shopping list on the sidewalk
that fell from someone’s pocket
with items crossed out—screwdriver, mustard, pantyhose.
It made me think about other people’s lives,
those things we have in common: how grief stuns us
like the bay window a bird strikes.
There was a day my mother walked me to the bus stop.
She knelt down in the road and urged me on.
Wouldn’t you say we’ve all lost things
we thought we couldn’t live without?
Say we’ll share a cigarette in the snow
when we get off the train.
Already I can see your dog’s paws slip on the ice
as she runs to your calling,
as she runs to what she recognizes as human.
The Lost
Darkness chases the children down the street.
I will not forget the way your face looked, safe, in the rain.
We were shivering from the warmth we saw inside other kitchens.
The last time I saw your mother alive she bought me a pint of beer.
We laughed when the band played “California Dreaming” in the pub in Galway.
A taxicab left one of us alone on the sidewalk in the dark.
My father stood in the kitchen with his briefcase, tie loose like the corners of his mouth.
What have I done with my life?
My mother at the stove, her cigarette quietly burning.
Downstairs, football scholarships are tucked away in his old army chest.
The most dangerous thing I’ve ever done was not tell someone
I loved them.
It is as hard as it seems.
Bonnie Minick’s first chapbook Like the One Streetlight in a Small Town encloses poems that ask the reader to pursue the answer to the question, “What can be saved?” Minick leads the reader into poems of small towns, “the bare backs of dirt roads/ the moon hanging like a loose button in the sky”, towns that are poems of memory, love, and grief. This is what poetry is to Minick. Just as she poses questions in her poems, she does not hesitate to try to answer them. In the poem, “For the Lost” she tells us, “The most dangerous thing I’ve ever done was not tell someone I loved them. / It is as hard as it seems.” It is with this definitive voice that she takes on the subjects of her poems.
Minick’s poems have been published in a variety of literary journals, including Poetry International, Chachalaca Poetry Review, miller’s pond, and Daedalus. Minick completed her MFA in Poetry at Western Michigan University. She currently teaches English at Voorhees High School. In addition to teaching and writing, she enjoys spending time with her husband and son. She also devotes her free time to defending endangered wildlife.
Christine Salvatore
Destination
These days she can’t discern
if she is moving toward something
or away. Airline itineraries
don’t help: To go north, sometimes,
she must first travel west.
And all the time she feels lost
on arrival. When one home replaces
another, does the body ever find rest?
Accustomed to being just gone,
she has forgotten the solid pain
of being present and at every gate
her greeters wait for her absence.
She likes it best in the air–
going anywhere–the checkerboard
pattern of the earth shifting
slowly beneath her. North, East,
South and West, she would smash
the compass glass if she could.
How wonderful to be just leaving,
always about to arrive.
Finding Home for J.M.
In Santa Monica she held
a string of beads to her throat
and I told her the blue
matched her eyes and the green
her tattoo, that dragon etched
into her foot. Years later,
she wrote me long letters
on cream paper in seasoned ink
telling of temptations,
her pain, and of its escape.
When I asked her to come home,
when I tried to persuade
the gold-craggy coast out
of her, she only said
New Jersey had gone gray.
She left behind our bare
beaches for the sunlight
that bleached her blond hair,
and slept on someone’s
rooftop for a month,
her face brightened
by windburn not sunshine.
But she was steadfast
about never coming back
to the winters she left
behind, and now that things
have gone bad again, I can’t reach
across the broken-bottle blackness
between us to bring
her home. California
is no place for her to settle
down, the bluest water
still deep enough to drown in.
Harvest
In the hour before dark, a woman sits
on her front porch watching the geese
head south. She can’t endure
the ritual departure much longer
and feels, on her porch swing, unsafe
as if she is dangling and ready to fall.
If she dreams tonight, it will be of apples,
late in season, trees heavy with red fruit
too cumbersome for bent branches
to cling to any more. In the morning
the hard ground will be littered with them
and, if the air is right, she’ll pack a bag
and leave this town. She’s not running,
but winter is coming and this year has been
without tangible harvest. Maybe she’ll drive
far enough to find an orchard just in blossom–
fruit not nearly ready to be picked, consumed.
There, with the sound of wings overhead,
she will find a place to start from.
She wants to be more tree than fruit.
She wants to bear the weight of each
season and then be able to just let go.
Christine E. Salvatore’s poetry has recently appeared in The Cortland Review, The Literary Review, and The Edison Literary Review, and she is the recipient of a 2005 Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council of the Arts. She received her MFA from The University of New Orleans and is currently an Adjunct Professor of Writing at The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey and teaches English and Creative Writing at Egg Harbor Township High School.
