Juditha Dowd
Happy New Year, everyone!
Our first poet of 2014, Juditha Dowd, grew up in Caldwell, New Jersey, and on the Jersey shore and wrote her first poem when she was eight years old, in third grade. She never stopped, but didn’t pursue publishing until many years later, after her children were grown. In her working life, she had many different careers- everything from advertising (in the Mad Men era) to designing children’s clothing, catering, hospital administration and teaching. It was in the last of these, as adjunct professor in a counseling master’s program, that she seemed to find her true vocation, teaching what she describes as “real, on the ground career counseling to students who would mostly be working with clients in social service agencies. I still believe,” she says, “that career counseling is a woefully misunderstood backwater, with untapped potential in very tangible ways.” Given today’s employment woes, she is probably right.
Although her poems have appeared in journals and anthologies for many years, and also in three chapbooks, her first – and outstanding—full-length collection, Mango in Winter (Grayson Books), came out just last year. She is now also a member of an ensemble called Cool Women, performing poetry in the New York-Philadelphia metro area and occasionally on the west coast.
Here, then, are three poems by Juditha Dowd. The first and third are from her new book; the second appears here for the first time. I hope you enjoy her work.
Irene Willis
Poetry Editor
The Learning-Disabled Daughter Turns Thirty
The grace that eluded you quickens tonight
as you round second base and pound toward third,
your stride lengthened by some late-blooming angel.
You don’t hear me and I’m glad. Run! I’m shrieking,
Bring it home!
and because this is Florida, where night leagues
and church teams are big-time, I’m not alone—
Everyone is yelling what the runner ought to do.
You can’t hear me and I’m glad because you’re right
to slide, grinning, into third and hang there.
The sidelong glance from a work-weathered dad
next to me in the bleachers says Laaady,
don’t you know anything about baseball?
I do. I know about baseball. And basketball.
I know your nose broken by someone else’s cartwheel,
the endless races where you tore in,
spent and red-faced, last.
And theory, and experts, and time.
Tonight it’s as if the thief repents,
returns your heirloom silver with a note:
It’s all here … except the spoons I melted down.
Sorry, hope you didn’t need them.
Here in the dusty diamond, the fading light,
you’ve outrun the taunts of classmates,
the grades, the accolades you never got,
those driver’s tests you studied for and failed.
What is it? you cried as I drove you home
after the fourth, but not your final try.
What the hell is wrong with me?
Tonight I can answer Nothing,
nothing in the least.
Take up your fork
again, my girl,
and join the feast.
At the Swimming Hole We Consider Female Body Image
?
Why did women do that to themselves, asks my middle granddaughter,
a ten-year-old. Her class is studying China. Why do you think,
I want to know. On bound feet we go, imagining the painful steps.
Then on through wasp-waist and Botox, with a pause at anorexia.
Yes, they know a girl.
!
I eat, says the youngest—seven—shedding her jeans.
Yeah, but only sugar! scoffs the eldest. The four of us stare down
into the creek, regard our wavy reflections.
$
. . . but not “new” Barbie insists the youngest. She looks real.
I describe how an artist once extended “original” Barbie to person size.
She was nine feet tall and weighed one hundred and twenty pounds,
doubled over by her boobs.
< >
The twelve-year-old titters in her new bra.
~
The middle girl, a gymnast, brings up exercise—what’s excessive?
We dive deep into a whirlpool that claims too many of their friends.
Sometimes they can’t stop, I say.
&
Oh, says the eldest, slowly meeting my eyes. You mean. . .
like Aunt Kay.
Revival
Lately it seems that you and I
are trying to remember how to live without each other.
In the basement you warn yourself not to bump your head.
I wonder if I’m strong enough to till the garden.
Old habits slink out of their dens,
remaking themselves at home.
You scramble eggs and burn my favorite pan,
I go off to bed without a thought, the lights still blazing.
We keep seeing these unwelcome guests
as we glance over our shoulders at the dimming afternoons.
They chill the house with their feral weather,
chapping our lips.
We don sweaters, make room.
Our tongues taste metal and salt.