Poetry Monday: Irene Willis

POETRY MONDAY: IRENE WILLIS

Welcome once again to Poetry Monday. This is to wish all of you a healthy, sufficiently prosperous and as happy a new year as you can achieve, given all that is happening on our precious Earth.

One thing I’m very grateful for is that International Psychoanalysis has continued to provide us with this space for poetry each month. For 2009, we are announcing a new policy. Although all of our poems thus far have been solicited, we are now opening submissions to all poets, year-round. We will welcome all kinds of poems, both formal and free verse and will guarantee them, if not acceptance, at least a careful reading and prompt /reply. Complete guidelines can be found by clicking here.

I thought it was about time I shared some of my own work with you and came out from behind the editor’s curtain, so here I am. My poems have been published in many journals and anthologies and in two collections, They Tell Me You Danced (University Press of Florida) and At the Fortune Café, to which Snake Nation Press awarded its 2005 Violet Reed Haas Prize. The poems below are all from my new and forthcoming book, Those Flames.

(Photo by Keith Emerling) 

Irene Willis
Poetry Editor

POEMS BY IRENE WILLIS

That Ring, That Veil

Smoke came out of them
as if they grew it.
My father, my brother,
my first husband
announced themselves
with smoke,
perfumed themselves with it
and I danced in it,
sang in it, breathed in
the rich, good smell of it
because it felt like love,
what I thought love was –
having a man who crowned me
with a wreath of smoke,
who blew smoke rings
I could slide a finger through,
who hung me with smoke
like that veil.

(from Women’s Review of Books)

The Burning of the Books

I didn’t see it happen; I only knew it did.
I pictured flame. I pictured smoke and ash.
I pictured pages curling up from all my books.
Bible Stories for Children, A Sawdust Doll,
A Child’s Garden of Verses, Mother Goose.
They all had scarlet fever, I was told,
and that was bad and would be burned
together with my dollhouse and my quilt.
My Indian bathrobe, slippers had it too
and that was bad. Goodbye, goodbye.
Go to sleep, they said, and when you wake
you’ll have a clean room to go back to.
But it was cooked and empty when I saw it
after the bomb, the yellow candle they called
fumigate. Then the sign came off our door
and I was pushed in a stroller like a baby
in a hooded snowsuit, mittens, cap and scarf,
and the face I see in snapshots that I wouldn’t
smile for, wouldn’t, no matter how they begged.

(from Women’s Review of Books)

You Want It?

Here take it,
my mother would say,
unwinding a scarf
from her neck,
slipping off a bracelet,
a ring too small for my finger
she tried to force anyway.
A giver, a couldn’t-hold-
on-to-it, my mother was.
She would give you,
as they say, the shirt
off her back – and ours.
My father’s three-piece
suit and gray fedora, my
white embroidered sweater,
last year’s coat, and once,
three jackets, lowered
on the dumbwaiter when
the super needed clothes.
A fiver for the insurance
man, out of cigars. Hazel,
my mother’s friend, got me
for lessons on an out-of-tune
piano while her out-of-work
husband sat in my father’s
pants and watched.

(from Ploughshares)

Giving

Don’t give her that! It’s mine!
my generous mother yelled

as I covered her nursing-home
roommate with a quilted comforter.

I’d brought two, in case the first got soiled.
The woman cried that she was cold.

So why not? Except my mother screamed
and pushed a button that, presumably,

rang somewhere, was heard.