Picks by Passager Interns
Celebrating our spring semester interns with poems by Gilbert Arzola, Fran Markover, Ruth Goring, and Wilderness Sarchild.
TRANSCRIPT
As this year’s spring academic semester comes to a close and students are winding up their coursework, I asked our four wonderful interns to pick pieces from Passager that they connected with. This episode of Burning Bright features those pieces.
Alberto Rodriguez is working on a master’s degree in publishing from New York University.
ALBERTO: I’ve always been fascinated by how, in American society, extreme physical sports like American football are often used to define masculinity. That’s why I chose Gilbert Arzola’s poem “Second String.” In this poem, a scrawny boy named Daryl fails to make the grade, fails that rite of passage. He disappears not only beneath a pile of helmets and dirt, but also under the crushing weight of his inability to prove that he’s a man, both to his peers and to himself.
Second String
Daryl was second string and only weighed a buck fifteen
and couldn’t do the crossbody block drill
because you had to just stand there and take a hit.
And he couldn’t just
stand there.
So Coach Mattix spit and
Coach Mattix hollered,
the whistle hanging from his neck
bouncing like circumstance against
his fat belly.
He hollered about toughening up
and taking it like a man.
But Daryl was second string and only weighed
a buck fifteen and would never be as strong or as fast or
good enough
to play the games of boys.
I have no way of knowing what happened to him after that.
I have no other memory of him but the one
of him disappearing beneath a pile
of helmets and dirt.
So I can’t say if he ever toughened up or
became a man.
Gilbert Arzola’s “Second String” from his book Prayers of Little Consequence.
Stevie Rosenfeld is finishing her second year at American University, majoring in journalism and environmental studies.
STEVIE: Fran Markover’s poem “How to Properly Fry an Egg” speaks to me about some simple but important aspects of family life. The poem reminds us to slow down and appreciate both the positive and negative aspects of what we have and who we share it with because these things and people may not be with us forever.
How to Properly Fry an Egg
When family yawns in the farmhouse, the rooster squawking cadenzas,
tiptoe downstairs, open the door – apple blossoms and manure wafting
through the air. On the walk past willowy cathedrals, gather peonies
for the kitchen, if only for petals that cobble the paths toward candles.
Quiet your footfalls when you near the barn. From safe darkness, the
birds will hear the sotto voce of whispers as you beckon the leghorn
celebrated for Olympian jumps or the girl named for a chatty niece.
Wandering through hay is the skinny hen who’s scarred and feisty.
She’s the one to follow with song: Sinatra, not Pavarotti. Or something
peppy, the Supremes: Stop in the name of love, of brief flight, of wings.
Of gifts received, eggs that speak without language. Ovals bedded in straw,
ungraded. Candled from a lifted palm until dawn’s headline – guns
and riot – is folded for another day, until what’s held reminds you of physics:
oscillation, shine, free falls of the unexpected. How the ordinary can spark
into Fabergés under quickening light. Place the chosen in the wire basket.
They’ll soon adorn the cast iron, settle into buttery chunks from the farmer
up the road, the cow you’ve milked. Focus. Breathe. Tap each egg. Conjure
heartbeat, radiance, rebirth. Alchemy as it enflames: albumin, yolk becoming
gold-crowned, white-ringed. Trust small bones in your wrist to twist the
spatula. Trust what’s easy and over, what’s flawed, forgive: lumps and tears,
riverings from mistakes. Count to ten. Let the eggs stop quivering. Assure
they’ll have company from the orchestration of hash browns, toast, home-
made cider. Coax the eggs onto Bramble Pink Wedgwood a great-aunt
bequeathed, platters supporting the eggs with their fine old china bones.
Fork in hand, offer grace for leafy garden greens, sun and rain, your farmer-
father, our birds who came to us unafraid, everyone young and alive.
Fran Markover’s poem “How to Properly Fry an Egg” from her book Grandfather’s Mandolin.
Kristen Lim is a media and communication major at Goucher College where she’s completing her senior year.
KRISTEN: Ruth Goring’s poem “Textiles” draws parallels between stitching and writing. It mirrors my own experiences with the creative process. And she talks about how we transform personal and social pain into beauty and art. Painting feels like poetry to me, and all of these creative outlets represent pieces of my life. This poem really moved me the first time I read it.
Textiles
The lake is a sheet of jade
under a sheet of clouds.
The air settles, alert as a watching animal.
You go still to hear blood
buzzing in your skull. Then wind rises,
its fingers rustle leaves.
Colors speak from white, words from silence,
you rock on haunches, folding language
over itself. Sentences are seams that pierce
and hold the garment of your life.
You rise and twirl this skirt, stitched
of that sky-blue dress when you were seven,
the river falling over rocks, the eggs
you found in dark edges of the shed,
the rope you jumped with sisters,
notebooks you filled, songs you learned.
A friend texts from another continent
to ask if God will hear her prayers
for animals. A calf on her farm is sick;
before you can answer, he dies.
How to weave the boy in a square
of darkness – his grandmother’s backyard –
felled by a storm of police bullets.
What of the swallowing of islands,
the bartered girls.
Some of your seams cut back and forth,
make drunken paths, then fold into long arcs,
miracles of mending. You set yellow
beside sadness, you stitch with words
into the silence that holds everything.
From Passager’s 2019 Poetry Contest issue, Ruth Goring’s poem “Textiles.”
Martha Davis is finishing her junior year as a French studies major at New York University.
MARTHA: My first project with Passager was reading Wilderness Sarchild’s book Old Women Talking, and I really connected with it. As a young woman, it is bittersweet to read poetry written by an older woman about aging. “Visitation” provoked a strong emotional response in me, as did Sarchild’s other poems about her mother. I have a strong relationship with my mother and with my grandmothers, both still living, and was lucky enough to have two great-grandmothers in my life growing up, so I have firm convictions about the unique bonds and strength that are passed down through generations of women. “Visitation” perfectly captures this feeling.
In my dream
I feel her spirit hand
combing
through my hair,
comforting as a lullaby.
How does she know
that I still need
to be cradled
through the night
by the one
who carried me
in her womb
over sixty years ago?
Wilderness Sarchild’s poem “Visitation” from her book Old Women Talking.
We’ve been listening to poems that resonated with our current interns. If you know someone who might want to intern with Passager, send them to the “Intern” tab on Passager’s web site. Scroll down to the bottom of the page under “Help and Information.”
To buy Gilbert Arzola’s book Prayers of Little Consequence, Fran Markover’s book Grandfather’s Mandolin, or Wilderness Sarchild’s book Old Women Talking, or to subscribe to, donate to, or learn more about Passager and its commitment to older writers, visit passagerbooks.com.
Passager offers a 25% discount on the books and journal issues featured here on Burning Bright. Visit our website to see what’s on sale this week.
For Christine, Rosanne, Mary, Asher, and the rest of the Passager staff, I’m Jon Shorr.
Due to the limitations of online publishing, poems may not appear in their original formatting.
