Tag: Poetry

“Each page I turn arouses memories,
ghosts mustering in my tiny office,
bumping each other and crowding me” 

“there was much
steepling of hands
as if the surgeons
were trying to build
a church to house
their inoperable religion”

“I have the same disease my family does.
I try to tell stories to make things right.

I keep trying to tell our stories right
because I want to understand our past.”

“It’s almost September again.
I sit stiffening in the wide
wicker chair, watching
my line break while late summer folds
the garden like a spent libretto, edges
shredded to a slatternly fringe.”

“My father’s ashes
sit on a bookcase,
waiting for a promised trip
to San Francisco,
where he spent the
best years
of his life.”

“I read this collection shortly after the sudden death of one of my best friends. I picked it up, even though I didn’t feel any spark for art. I started reading in the bath. Then I was on the bathroom floor, water cold, a little shocked to return to myself in human form, holding a book.” 

“We leave in a respected line
wearing red:
We’ve been sent good weather,
orange fish that flip over beneath the bridge,
a building of rust-colored brick that you exit as if from your body.
You can’t have everything.
No one has everything.” 

“You are two and each day is a world
in which to peel gold pawpaw leaves

from the path; to plunk pebbles
in water, one by one; to trace tar

ribbons on cement in watermelon
rainboots”

“What if mourning is my engine? Sound almost muted, just a whir, behind the T-shirt and jeans. My hands do what is expected—wash dishes, answer emails—instead of reaching down to thump on the dirt or dig.”

Forgive me if the books I might have written linger like a miscarriage.
That word—as in miscarriage of justice—and what is justice now

that the surprise quickening of my youngest might have felt
less blessing than sentence. I had a choice, and still somedays

I lament the sentence I’ve been given and not given.

“I’m with you tonight at the candlelight
service in my new straw hat, Mary Janes,

white gloves, a dress that you’ve sewn,
the whole congregation holding candles

at midnight.”

“prayer beads and a well and cow dung and smoke and coal and flag plastered on a hill and olive trees and olive trees choiring and an olive seed smacked onto a plate by my grandmother and sheepish eye and a rug in the bedroom from Bulgaria and yogurt fermenting and ashtray with a stomach full of ash and cevşen read thrice and halo of television and plastic covered couches and kahvehane and kahve and Müslüm Baba hunkering hangimiz sevmedik? on taxi radio and Atatürk street and my uncle looping a rope around the awning as a swing for me and kittens and chickpeas and chickpeas dried and collected in a pile and chickpeas on fire”

“Try to remember the actual
moon is never less than full.
The evening cashier has a secret
sorrow and plans for the weekend.”

“Dear eyes
like breaking stars,
some days I hear your voice
in the trees, some nights
I send you half my dreams.”

“I thought it was just opening, he says. I thought
the petals were just unfurling.”

“Tonight, I am going to push
the Susquehanna away with my body,
ignore the waning moon’s fractioning
of light.”

“Still awake believing our silence might leave us,
desperately needing to make ourselves heard,
every girl told a story before parents came for us.”

“Always, I begin
with nothing and too much
to say.”

CALYX Celebrates Fire, Fury, and Resilience  with Oregon Artist Betty LaDuke Please join us in ekphrastic appreciation of the artist Betty LaDuke, whose most recent exhibition, Fire, Fury, and Resilience: Totem Witnesses and Turtle Wisdom, will be at the Corvallis Museum from October 7, 2022 – January 22, 2023. The exhibit opens with an artist’s

“Hideous beauty, I shake you loose
from a cushion of the wicker chair
where, it seems, you’ve gone to die.”

“Something reminded me today that a parent of mine had died
and the barometric pressure fell, and rain began to touch the river.”

“a white moth arrives rising and falling
on the warm breeze, lingers on the headstone

then on my bare arm, clinging as if
searching for moist skin or the scent of me.”

“Milk passes through me like liquid moons,
wet stars on her tongue. She sucks

till I’m emptied of all the white
cells in my celestial body.”

“Bored, my children open me up, like a fridge,
to find out what’s inside. I glow and show them
leftovers, mostly, some of them over a week old.”

“one was peering at a recipe
for risotto, the other
at the microscopic script
in an obsolete telephone book.”

“You salt the egg anticipating
the salt. Count on the hill
for the view, and, when you get to the top,

there’s the view.”

“We approach
middle age as undiscovered country when
really it’s the same old alley, the bowling pin
that wobbles like a drunk but won’t go down.”

“In quietude I feel I am everywhere at once—my own body rehearsing its wintering act, too. I look up from the table to the far side of the lake to see a buck limping, his hind legs sixteenth-notes in the dry leaves. From far off, a shot sounds like an encyclopedia falling to a wooden floor and like the echo of its striking.”

“It’s too good to last, this early sunshine in April,
this smell-of-cut-grass morning
and this body, with its mirage of infinite breaths,
its lie of immortality.”

“It’s official: dementia and medication. Not unexpected. But getting the ICD code is like being pinned. Mom does not protest.
The transitions before me are not unique, I know. Yet the fact that they’re universal and part of life matters as much to me as cocktail party chitchat.
What I treasure are tiny pearls that appear in mundane surroundings, a particular moment between particular people.”

“They tried to scratch off the paint. A portrait. They tried to scratch. A woman. The paint. A woman with a long face.” This audio recording of “La Femme” by Nicole Miyashiro from Vol. 32:1 of CALYX Journal was inspired by Diane Samuels’ art piece, “Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas/Testimony Against Gertrude Stein”, 2011 (ink

“When I imagine a life after this one, I imagine a field. And in this field, there are people running toward each other, delighted to be able to.“ Enjoy this audio recording of “What I Mean by ‘I Love You. Goodbye.’” by Kristine Nowak from Vol. 32:2 of CALYX Journal! Buy the full issue here. Kristine Nowak

“revolve this landscape encased by pulverized petals the stories round the wood in areola waves” This audio recording of “Rings of Pink, Enheduanna” by Nicole Miyashiro from Vol. 32:1 of CALYX Journal was inspired by Diane Samuels’ art piece, “Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas/Testimony Against Gertrude Stein”, 2011 (ink on handmade paper, coated in pulverized

This week we are excited to share Caitlin Scarano’s poem “To My Little Sister, Driving Drunk,” which was published in CALYX’s 27:3 issue. Caitlin Scarano is a poet in the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee PhD creative writing program. She was a finalist for the 2014 Best of the Net Anthology and the winner of the 2015 Indiana

CALYX is happy to showcase Abby Minor’s piece “Whitetail,” which was published in volume 28:2. Abby Minor has studied at Smith College, The Penland School of Crafts, and The Pennsylvania State University.  Her book reviews and poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Georgia Review, AGNI Online, Pleiades, and The Fourth River, among others.  Also a visual artist,

We’re proud to exhibit our first audio piece, written and recorded by Camellia Phillips. Camellia’s piece appears in Volume 27:3 of CALYX Journal. Camellia Phillips is a longtime grant writer with nonprofit organizations focused on social justice and civic engagement. In addition to CALYX Journal, her fiction has appeared in cream city review and her

To Do List for the Damaged: My Hedgebrook recipe for writing a book By Tammy Robacker As Hedgebrook opens their call for women writers to apply this June, I cannot help but express gratitude for my own poetry residency there in 2011. My experience at Hedgebrook is especially humbling today since I celebrate recent news