As Finishing Line Press’s Chapbook of the Day, I offer you a poem from my forthcoming poetry book, And Yet.

In Praise of Children Who Don’t Listen
Rita Coleman

When asked why, they say Sometimes I don’t want to listen.
Fair enough you think.
You remember what it’s like
Filling every waffle hole with syrup
Pondering the swirling bathtub drain
Feathertouching a cicada shell, brown, brittle, cramped
Gazing out of focus, losing what self you have in dreaminess
While people taller and older interrupt your world.

But you say I need you to listen
Because saying it twice or even three times demands
more words for your tired mouth
That squirrel could bite
No running on the couch
That is not stable
Over and over day after day, alert, you repeat
Because your job is keep little bodies safe.

Yet you long to uphold the right to not listen,
To silence those damnable interruptions for a
A glint off a golden dome
A mockingbird’s tumblesong
A green bite of parsley from the earth
Sensations, colors, shapes, gaining admittance–or not.
Now that you’re older you can. But do you?
Or do the conspirators have all your attention?

AND YET, my new poetry book, is now available through Finishing Line Press. Presales, which determine the press run, begin today, April 27, and run through June 18. Books are shipped August 11, 2017. The cost is 14.99 plus 2.99 shipping. www.finishinglinepress.com Click Bookstore

Now that you have the basics, I’d like to give thanks to the many poets who have inspired and provided suggestions for the poems in this book: Pauletta Hansel, Poet Laureate of Cincinnati, the women of the Practice of Poetry and the Practice of Spiritual Memoir, my fellow students in Creative Writing Vision classes at Thomas More College and Ohio River Retreats at the Thomas More College Biology Station, the poets I’ve met through Conrad’s Corner, a poetry radio program on WYSO 91.3 FM, and my first writing circle, “Mudrock Writers,” who aided me in shaping my writing and “putting it out there.”

The title of this book, And Yet,  is taken from a poem of the same name. Here it is.

And Yet 

Rita Coleman

Out of the inky spill
emerge tiny objects
sculpted into
faces, words, wings.
Drumbeats coax
them into villages
of shadows.

The search for sky virtues
designed only for the earth–
caves, fields, rivers–
leads to dwellings of
long-ago mothers
and terrified children
vigilant for night monsters.

Starborn birds
drop feathers of hope
scarlet
azure
iridescent
reassuring lost ones
they will find the way.

When forgiveness is served
knots of fury untangle,
woven love
cradles earthen plates
and primitive paintings
lit by a circle of firebright,
all of it fragrant as star anise.

“What caused it to die?” I asked, writing out a check larger than our mortgage payment

“It’s an elm tree,” he said. “Dutch Elm Disease, kills the elms.” He paused.  “It’s like today, the Ash Borer’s taking down the ashes.”

Earlier I’d walked out to what was now a stump and asked one of his workers how old he thought the tree was.

“Oh, a hundred and twenty-five years,” he said. “Not too old.  It looks older than it is.”

Not too old?

I looked at the circle of rings, the elm’s history. Once past the sapling stage, a wide ring stood out, a year bursting with growth: the mid-eighteen nineties. 

To what events had this elm tree been privy?

Every year, crops were planted and harvested, primarily corn and wheat, in this land, once a Revolutionary War land grant of 1200 acres.

On a clear day, the Wright Brothers and their flying machine rose into the air over the Huffman Prairie.

When the first automobile came rattling into the driveway, chickens squawked and flew out of the way, feathers drifting everywhere.

The power and light company strung electric lines alongside the road, and days became longer than sunrise to sunset.

Family constellations came and went: big farming families, a mother and son, a husband and wife, a newlywed couple and her teen daughter.

Over time, land was trimmed off the acreage until a mere two acres remained.

On the eastern property line beside a broken-down fence, the elm tree shaded in summer and grew deep roots in winter.

Last summer, a new hammock went up between two majestic maples, near the elm.

The big elm had lost big plaques of bark and leaned further over the neighbor’s paddock.

I didn’t want to think about.

The fact was: I was losing another grand tree.

Over the years, two maples, each well over two hundred years old, came down. An ice storm left the black locusts looking like stunted giants missing significant limbs. A wind shear–a tornado according to our immediate community–downed twenty five mature trees, mostly maples and locusts.

We’ve planted maples–sugar and silver–dogwoods, Colorado blue spruces, birch. We’ve seen some grow heartily while other snap in the extreme wind out here.

Now, one more giant was coming down.

I didn’t want to watch. I didn’t have to.

The tree company came as a surprise last Monday morning. I had several appointments.

It can be said that a tree dying is an act of nature. It can be said that a tree’s beauty never dies. It can be said that all things are transient.

Yet, these homilies do not fill the space in the distance where a tree once stood, where birds swoop toward nonexistent branches..

I went in search of a killer’s house today.  I knew the name of the street from a newspaper article.

I drove and scanned the two-block long neighborhood, looking at cozy homes with white siding, gray siding, yellow siding. Almost all remained original with three bedrooms, one bath, living room, and kitchen.

Was it the yellow house with a string of electric candy canes stringing the driveway?

My icicle lights still drape my deck railing.

Was it the gray home, a section of lattice leaning against against a faded front door?

Under our deck a piece of lattice is down: our old hound used to crawl beneath and sleep in its coolness in the summer. The previous front door of our farmhouse leaked air so badly in its last years, we covered it with plastic and a blanket in the winter.

Does a killer who fires multiple shots in one victim and a neat shot through the forehead of another have any identifying characteristics outside his house?

Maybe the home isn’t his. Perhaps, he rents it, shares it with a mom or a dad or both; a grandmother, a girlfriend or friends or friends’ family. Maybe he lived alone. Does he have family to share his life?

Our house is home to my husband and one cat. Numerous friends and extended family have slept on couches and floors.  My daughter lived here into her 20s and came back, briefly, in her 30’s with her young family to look for a house to buy.  Now two grandchildren come for overnights.

What does a killer’s home look like?

Probably like mine or yours with four walls, windows, doors, a roof.

Most killers’ homes may have no extraordinary outward appearance that would separate it from another house in the neighborhood.

But sometime during that person’s life, something went terribly wrong. Whatever the wounds, the pain, the desperation that lay behind invisible walls that allowed him to survive as long as he did, were just that–invisible.  Either no one noticed or no one cared.

I don’t think I’ll ever know what a killer’s house looks like.

All I can do is be vigilant with my own inner home and look beyond outer appearances.

When the ash wing dove

dips my way

on the day

that is my last

I will float

onto its feathered back

lean low

steady, ready

to soar into

the near unseen

a teardrop

in someone’s eye

a sigh

in someone’s breath

an ache

in someone’s chest.

The ash wing dove

flies closer

to the sweet place

landing from memory,

standing on

the unmarked target,

ascending

to the far world again as

my voice drops away

my eyes settle deep

inside me and

my body is a flash of gold.

Dedicated to my mother Suzie O’Neil and my ex-husband, Bob Speer.

If Narcissus the god had gazed at the narcissus flower

Blooming somewhere in the folds of the earth

If he had become enchanted by the warm yellow center

Enticed by slender, waving, come-hither lovelies

Entered the tubal opening, finding mirrored passion,

He would have beheld beauty staring back at him

Rather than the shallow reflection of his face in a pond,

A reflection, that when the wind arose, blurred, then erased it.

.

My Mother, The Atom Bomb Maker

Fresh off the farm, a Mrs., a mother,

twenty-one years of living,

you came to work in the town

that didn’t exist on any map.

Tennessee, 65 cents an hour,

far more than birthing calves,

hoeing beans, baking cornbread,

tending to your baby, helping your mama.

Just up the road 40 miles, brand-new

buildings, a field of red mud so thick

you carried store-bought saddle oxfords

high above your hair, feet squishing in the muck.

In your building, a vague smell of metal,

gauges, chemical tanks you scrubbed while

flyboys bombed Europe, sailors scoured

the Pacific, one of them your Mr.

How were you to know,

how was anyone to know, that

uranium split into the power

of small sun would write history?

The secrecy endowed mystery

to your life, why nothing was ever

produced that you could see,

that anyone could see.

You blossomed into a beauty,

a flower behind your ear in one picture,

in another, the tallest in a crisp white uniform,

farm-tough, the leader of your group.

In your dorm, you learned nail polish–red–

lipstick–red–and face powder not meant for

the farm but a perfect blush for days and nights,

a small beacon, like so many in the shadow of the mountains.

When a second sunrise in as many days

lit up a land half-way around the world,

your voice called for answers:

How safe was this work?

Is it any wonder, the bossman in his suit

whispered “undesirable” creating a chain-reaction

leading to your “termination” (they called it),

releasing you into the freedom you helped win.

After the rent in the earth, your heart began

Mending from its own attack and you began

Living the peace that had come,

Living the peace that had cost.