Hi friends! I haven’t posted here in a long time and have missed all of you. If you’re still here, I’d love to share this year’s Sealey Challenge with you.
If this is your first time hearing about the Sealey Challenge, it was founded by Nicole Sealey in 2016, making this week the tenth anniversary. The whole point is to read more poetry during August, with an ultimate goal of reading 31 books in 31 days. Chapbooks, full-lengths, and poetry found online all count. Enjoy the poetry for the beauty of poetry, and you win!
For Day 1 of The Sealey Challenge, I read Monica Wendel’s chapbook English Kills, which has since been published as a full-length collection, English Kills and Other Poems, which I’m very excited to read.
Here’s Monica Wendel’s chapbook, English Kills.
English Kills by Monica Wendel – Coal Hill Review – 2016 – ISBN: 978-1-938769-15-3
And if you’re interested in the full-length collection, English Kills and Other Poems, you can find it here.
And it wouldn’t be a post by McKenzie Lynn Tozan if I didn’t include some poetry, would it? 😊
BACK HOME
one of my students disappears underground
into the subway, carrying her mother’s purse, wearing cream-
colored high heels. She reminds me of Ellen—the black hair,
a wildness that’s hard to explain by exists as solidly
as a granite stone flecked with mica, flashes of light and black.
In one picture, hanging in the Laundromat, she’s posing
for fifth-grade graduation. In another, she’s grainy,
her body a newspaper comic, one hand closing the door
of her apartment building, caught by security camera.
In this city, rivers open their mouths, swallowing each other,
joining, and the harbor says to the rivers, come here,
and the ocean to the harbor says, come here, and the moon pulls
all of the water on earth without saying anything,
just doing, moving its silent way across the sky
which is turning from purple-brown to light blue in morning.
Meanwhile her brother moves the potted plants
from the fire escape to inside—no matter if they die
without sun—and sets up watch in their place.
Wears a red shirt that everyone’s eyes rise to,
a bright wing against the faded building. He meets my gaze.
Fourteen, and she eleven. When she comes home,
she won’t say where she’s gone, is no snitch. She pulls
a baseball cap over her eyes, doodles her own name: Angel.
LITTLE POND
I hadn’t expected the land to fight so hard against
the farm—at sunset we slept, and by sunrise
the bugs were eating the kale, rain had split the tomatoes,
deer graced their long necks over the electric fence
to part their mouths around corn.
In the stink of it, Ellen humming some long-
forgotten pop song, fire ants crawled up my leg
as I knelt in hot sandy soil, planting roots of ginger
two knuckles deep. The ants blistered my thighs.
A little piece of heaven, she said the farm was, and divorced
her husband for it. I knew her husband before I knew her—
bearded, big laughed—together we climbed into dumpsters
to rescue battered apples bound for landfill.
What does it take to nourish love. Or a child,
like the one he wanted and she didn’t.
Is a fetus a creature that fights the blood that feeds it
until it emerges from one body into its own?
Like the thunderstorm that uprooted
the spotted beans, their dried-out stalks
heavy with seed pods we would break open,
the soil beneath them charged with
the nitrogen the roots had fixed behind.
Even the tomatoes reminded me of women,
their skin split, pink flesh emerging, scarred.
KEEP SNOWY WAVES IN SUMMER
After heavy rains, the tree roots crack the sidewalk open.
It hinges like a door, ravines tracing the outlines of a map
I’m learning how to read. I thought of how a river
deposits sediments, and those sediments change the river’s course.
Am I only thinking these things because it’s so hard
to find your way underground? Like something has to guide us
in between subway tunnels and sewer lines and the water pipes
and if I could only find that blueprint, spread it out over the roof
and make my way along its hard-edged lines there would be an answer.
Angel came back, for a moment, holding a birthday present
in penitent palms. We asked her to stay, to help puzzle out
a sentence from Latin into English: In vere flue lenis, et serva nivales
undas in aestate. But it was no one’s birthday, and then her mother
ordered her back home. College isn’t for girls like her, her mother
told me when I called that evening, begging for Angel’s return.
I felt a door close in my heart. Then I felt it open again.
The rains here water even dead languages. They find soil
where it seems like there was none, and roots grow.
It’s so nice to reach out to all of you again. I hope you enjoyed this post and will come back for some of the other entries for this month’s challenge.