A Poem from minerva for Day 24 of Poetry Month 2019

Gail "minerva" Hawkins 4/12/19

For Day 24 of Poetry Month, we have a new poem from Gail "minerva" Hawkins.

minerva read "Friendly Fire Forgiving Spirits" at the San Diego Art Institute earlier this poetry-month. The first Patsy mentioned in the poem was the wife of Joe Milosch with whom minerva taught in California Poets in the Schools (CPITS). The second Patsy was minerva's sister.

After long careers as a researcher and then as a poet teacher, minerva has turned to television writing. Her series is called "Those Ebony Girls," and is a comedy about a black family in 1970s Philadelphia, the matriarch being a member of the 30's intelligentsia and her granddaughter being a new post-graduate who has come to the edges of answers that don't match the new questions.

The story also includes the post-grad's sister, not unlike the one mentioned in the poem below. "Friendly Fire Forgiving Spirits" is the voice of a woman writing her way through life's Act III, paying attention and respect.

Gail "minerva" Hawkins will perform at The Victory Theater on May 19 as part of Backstory's "The Kids Are Alright" reading at 7 p.m. The Victory Theater is located at 3326 Victory Boulevard in Burbank, California.

Friendly Fire Forgiving Spirits

--for Patsy's husband Joe and for my late sister Patricia

Burning bright years after their friendly fires

Were said to have gone out forever

Patsy and Patsy passed away from a same-named illness.

Cancer separated them from their loved ones.

Spirits times two. Linked bright eternal.

Both help me fight fire with fire each God-given day

Like the outdoor California nature job of a wife named Patsy

And the cold indoor bookkeeper’s bed-for-a-desk of my sister Patricia.

The Patsys worked for years and retired with accumulated ER visits and sick days.

Laughter-laced warm conversations roamed their sick rooms from time to time

Answered by friends’ slips of tongues and lips outside hospital doors, metal and shivering

Conversations after ablaze, thundering with thoughts of what likely comes next.

I’m alone again and again; gone are a friend, my mother-sister and yet another sibling-sister!

California husband Joe, me and the rest of us went down a few pegs when they all passed.

Poet Joe was back, I know, when he translated the alphabet, letter by letter

Each page a poetic matrix of poems by himself, on his own with his wife for life.

Our Patsys were Frida Kahlo spirits of female forests.

They climbed Mount Everest like broken-bodied super hikers

Crossing a summit of earthly chasms between fullness of life and wholeness of pain

Morphed into a crescent moon of death, a cradle for a comfortable departure.

Thank you Patsy and Patsy for allowing me to be human, right, and wrong.

To be one’s sister and the other’s friend, and forgiving me when I was neither.

My sister Patricia leaves off. The other Patsy remains in her husband’s care.

Friendly fires extinguished. Bright smoke wafting.  

Lori Davis "The Same Story Without the Weapon" from White Dime

For Day 23 of Poetry Month, here's a poem from Lori Davis' book White Dime. 

When it came out, White Dime was one of my hard-edged favorites for a hard-edged year.  The poem "Caring for Your Spider Plant" was a classic about the toxic romanticism of parenting. The epigraph about Andrea Yates, who drowned her five children, sets the context for a culture with policies that burdens future generations with environmental disaster, a huge national debt and multilateral destruction as a cultural values. Well worth the read if you can find a copy.

Davis has a dark sense of humor in some of her best poems like "How To Relax While Making Love" or  "The Same Story Without the Weapon" from White Dime

Pretend for the moment there is no knife in his hand.
This way you won't worry when he compliments
her necklace or suggests they go walking together, 

down a stairway, into an alcove she can't see into.
Even if without the knife, he gets right to the point.
Holds out his fist, as if to appropriate something. 

He tells her to take off her pants. Is he kidding?
She never learned alleys are like rickety bridges.
She giggles and says no. but senses something 

mandatory about this man. He takes his words
and pushes them up against the pale of her neck.
From a distance, they look like two old friends, 

reuniting, but if you stood closer you'd hear him
hiss quiet bitch in her ear. No, she says. Period.
That she has her period. And like so many men, 

he believes her, immediately. She wonders why
he hasn't leaned how to hug without crushing
a girl's toes or how to look a woman in the eye 

without liquefying her insides. Ok, let's pretend
for a moment, the knife has been here all along.
Unforgiving and lethal. This time it's in her hand.