Selections from the brand new issue of Passager, featuring honorable mentions by Susan Zimmerman, Judith Bowles, Bonnie Jacobson, John Biggs and Mark Fryburg.
7 minutes
TRANSCRIPT
This week’s podcast features five pieces from Passager’s brand new, hot off the presses poetry contest issue. And next week’s episode of Burning Bright will feature an interview with the 2024 Passager Poet, Joyce Schmid, that was conducted and produced by Passager intern Ruby Taylor.
Susan Zimmerman said she went to a musical performance by a father and son, and their obvious happiness together was infectious. She said to her friend, “not dead yet,” and the poem developed from there. Here’s Susan’s poem “Not Dead Yet.”
post-reunion brunch
my back to the aging
dwindling gang
an old flame
nuzzles my neck
I startle
arctic so long
animal ache
awakes
“Not Dead Yet,” Susan Zimmerman. The poem jumped out at me when I was reading the new issue because my 60th high school reunion is this weekend in Ohio. Turns out Susan made up the part about the reunion.
Here’s another poem about that earlier time in our lives from a writer who also grew up in Ohio. “The Future” by Judith Bowles.
My father said our light blue Studebaker
was the future it moved forward when it idled
we were seniors in high school Bev Smith and I
dying to leave Ohio on a long country road
fences and empty cornstalks we got out
and walked along the idling car let loose
I took off my yellow blouse waved it
in circles over my head Bev gave a yell
and did the same thing. Two cows raised
their heads and stopped chewing.
Judith Bowles’s poem “The Future.”
This next poem ends with the future. “Crossword” by crossword puzzle lover—and, I can’t believe it, ANOTHER writer with ties to Ohio, Bonnie Jacobson.
The illusion
that if you exercise
the muscle of your mind
you will someday
think your way out of the box
comes to you daily
right next to the funnies
on the page with
everybody’s lucky stars
and the unjumbling of
four words whose letters
guarantee they will make sense.
All sweet palliatives
as opposed to the puzzle
your life is when plop
it lands on your doorstep
like somebody’s
love child meant to
run this way and that
chasing its rabbits of joy.
If it should fall
bind up its wound,
sing it to sleep.
More reliable than answers
the future comes true.
When you are old and slow
the sum of your days
will care for you.
Bonnie Jacobson’s poem “Crossword.”
John Biggs said laundromats are places where people perform private acts in public. Here’s his poem about one such act that he observed. “Sudsville.”
Hum and rumble of washers and dryers,
round windows in rows like at the aquarium,
a sleepy underwater feeling.
A man on a yellow molded plastic chair
reads a book called How To Be A Better Husband.
He’s underlining passages with a pen,
pen cap dangling from his lips like a cigarette.
He looks up at the ceiling
as if he’s looking for answers on a test.
Now he’s staring into the slosh of his washer
stunned by the strange, colorful fish,
their baffling patterns of repetitive behavior.
“Sudsville,” John Biggs. John said he was moved to write the poem “for him and for other men lost in a changing world they don’t understand.”
Many of us have had the experience of learning about something later in life that we wish we’d known about earlier. Maybe we could’ve done something about it. Or maybe just knowing would have helped. Here’s Mark Fryburg’s poem “Claudia.”
You are my family’s dark secret,
the firstborn abandoned
at the state’s human warehouse.
I only know you, big sister,
from sterile reports found after your death,
starting with your label, “mongoloid idiot,”
ending with the mere number on your grave.
Handwritten ledgers hint abuse,
but mostly dull grayness.
Two photos covered 36 years,
(I think you had red hair like our mother)
a lifetime locked in a filing cabinet.
I would have held you close, Claudia,
in your helmet and diaper,
if only someone had told me.
“Claudia,” Mark Fryburg.
All five poems from this episode of Burning Bright came from the brand new issue of Passager, the 2024 Poetry Contest Issue. All of the poems in this issue were written by people who received honorable mentions in the contest. Next week’s episode of Burning Bright will feature Passager intern Ruby Taylor’s interview with the 2024 Passager Poet Joyce Schmid.
You can buy a single copy of Passager’s 2024 Poetry Contest issue. But better yet, subscribe! You can do either of those things and learn more about Passager and its commitment to writers over 50 at 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 Kendra, Mary, Christine, Rosanne, 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.
