POETRY MONDAY: November 2, 2015
Willa Schneberg
Well, everyone, here we are again, well into fall and even back to Standard Time, here in our time zone – and with a strong poet.
I continue to be impressed with the knowledge and compassion of social workers, and Willa Schneberg, an LCSW with a private practice in Portland, Oregon, is no exception. An award-winning poet whose submission was outstanding in its professionalism, she has already authored five poetry collections, one of which, In the Margins of the World, received the Oregon Book Award in Poetry. Her poems have been heard on Garrison Keillor’s “The Writer’s Almanac,” and have appeared in numerous selective literary magazines and anthologies. She has has also been a fellow at both Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony.
It gives me great pleasure to introduce her work to you with the three poems that follow. “Couples Counseling” is published here for the first time. “Tiny Monuments” and “To Inhabit the Body” were previously published in VoiceCatcher.
–Irene Wills
Poetry Editor
Willa Schneberg’s website is: www.threewayconversation.org
COUPLE COUNSELING
In the first session I always ask, what is your hope for couple counseling? He says
he is ready to put his marbles on the table. A few opaque grey ones slyly slip out. Hers
flash primary colors and could fill buckets. She is willing to do whatever. The baby is
due in a month. He says there is the age difference. Now his marbles feel slightly
rubbery and you can almost taste his fear. She says her father died young. She has
always liked older men. Her marbles are becoming the size of robin’s eggs shaped
like tears. And there is the small matter of living in different countries and dreaming
in disparate languages. He wants someone he can wake up with everyday. She says
all their separations make sex phenomenal. He doesn’t disagree. Her marbles are falling
onto the floor in clumps, as his re-harden into formation, the shape of a triangle for
billiard balls. He is not willing to stop seeing the woman he met online. She holds her belly,
marbles crack open, blood seeps out.
TINY MONUMENTS
For David Maisel, who photographed canisters holding the ashes of mental patients at a state hospital in Oregon.
When human beings were still locked away
for sadness clinging to them like a marine layer,
hearing voices telling them how awful they are,
going fetal when cars backfire or corks pop,
they were housed at the Oregon State Insane Asylum,
and when they ceased to be, they were cremated.
If no one claimed a brother, a daughter, or a father,
the ashes were kept in numbered copper canisters,
on pine shelves in an underground vault.
Not infrequently the water table rose
giving the forgotten contained in corroded
canisters homes uniquely their own
coated with efflorescence and mineral dazzle,
where an alchemy
of copper and water bloomed
on their surfaces and burst into color.
These tiny monuments to the scorned and unknown,
wear patinas of pink, burnt sienna, ocher, aqua,
and if you look closely you can find
moon craters, archipelagos, frozen waterfalls,
dunes with lone tracks, and Big Dippers
embedded in their pores.
“Tiny Monuments” was published in VoiceCatcher Journal, 2011
TO INHABIT THE BODY
She tells me that as soon as those protrusions
sprouted, she knew they didn’t belong.
They feel as alien, she says,
a the frilly pastel undies
her mother made her wear.
Grown, her body becomes her canvas.
She is sleeved-up with blue snakes coiling
her arms, their tongues darting out
underneath her chin.
She understands it is different for me,
that I don’t want a permanent
testament to anyone inked in my skin,
and that when my chest was renamed breasts,
I welcomed those modest orbs.
She tells me that no one will ever talk at her tits again.
We both agree that is a perk, and that jerks
ogling me is my burden for liking mine;
and she will awaken from surgery
relieved that underneath her bandages
her chest is flat like a door
that opens into a garden
where she finds herself inhabiting
the body she was meant to wear.
“To Inhabit the Body” was published in VoiceCatcher Journal, 2014