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Articles by Katharyn Howd Machan
Readers Writes - Make Me Smile
By Monica Gullotta I want to smile. I promise. It's just hard these days because of the political divide, wars, environmental decline, and the residual effects of COVID-19 lingering on. Then a switch goes off in my brain, I have agency. I can think about something else rather than cascading into a never-ending vortex playing havoc on my mind. But where do I begin? And how do I start? I look at the ceiling. I look at the floor. Waiting patiently, twiddling my thumbs when a spider comes along.
Blackberrying by Margot Wizansky
After Sylvia Plath The bushes are laden, draw my blood with their thorns. To find sweetness or at least some nourishment, Find sweetness before wasps get the drupes, Don leather gloves. Get ready for a struggle. Struggle to be delicate. Soften your clumsy touch On that honey-feast, fat with blue-red juices. The honey of it, dripping with blue-red juices. Plump and dumb on the banks of the brook. I cling to my footing on the slippery banks. Are the tenderest ones the hardest to hold?
Answering Machine by Neil Carpathios
My daughter quivers across from me at the table. A teabag leaks its copper blood. A clock’s ticking in the wordless air. She is unaware I’m placing the call. Burnt matches in the ashtray like sleeping bodies. The recording comes on. She can’t hear. Her weak sipping breaks the kitchen’s heart. I ask God: Why? She stares at the window. The window stares back. Unlit cigar a small brain-dead animal. I tell God: She chose Winnie-the-Pooh wallpaper. A stain on the napkin? Or the spoon’s tear?
A Poem on Masks
A Poem on Masks Dear fellow Ithacans: My way of writing a protest is often in the form of a poem. I believe strongly that the use of masks must be enforced on The Commons. In the Heart of My Own City a magician tells me Don’t wear a mask: only sick people do it and they breathe back the virus that’s killing all fools. Jagged Success! An email has been sent to with a link to confirm list signup. Error! There was an error processing your request.
POEM: When Your Daughter-in-Law Hates Magic
Hide your spoons. Mask your gingerbread as cumin cookies, lemon loaf, any scent that will put her off what you offer to the world. She must never know how you saved that baby from the sting of the tiny Mexican scorpion or how you died on that cold beach of the lake that shivered your name. She’s married now, to that warm son you kept alive on your round breast. Stay somber, quiet, staunch with grace.
POEM: Where to Stay
In a cherry blossom. You’ll have to get small, of course, and watch out for renegade fairies with their teeth, their curved green blades. They pretend not to like human flesh but they’ll swallow truth just the same. On a goat skull. Pick one that used to have black hair tough as teeth and soft as midnight someone gathered to stuff a scarlet pillow embroidered with a three-horned dragon safely fleeing a saint’s tainted curse. By a fish.
At the Hattie May Inn
We didn’t make love in the wide bed where whores used to entertain members of the Sundance Kid’s gang, as wide as the horns of the steers that used to be driven right past that house on the way to be sold and slaughtered. We didn’t kiss on the round balcony the rich saloon owner had built for his daughter because she read Shakespeare and wanted to dream she was twelve-year-old Juliet calling the man she hoped was her rose in spite of his name.
Poems | News | ithaca.com
Editor's note: This is a selection from Readers Writes 2017, a collection of reader submitted material. BurningFor safety. For the tick of the clockto keep it runningsmoothly.For handsnot to have to touchold words, dangerous words.For eyesto rest, and praise instead.For stillness.
When We Called It
The entire evolvement would never have been possible, of course, without the lake. And the gorges, with water pulsing almost everywhere underground like blood in a healthy human body. And the university, the college. And the fact that so many brilliant women and men opted to retire here.The ‘Big Guess’ factor? Who would stay. Homeowners probably; renters maybe; the homeless pulled both ways. Who would go?
Botany For Beginners
You have to leave the city first:don’t let those new ghosts detain youwith their mystery grins up through cracked pavement, lurid patches of painton stained walls. New York. Boston.Chicago chewing lake air like fat.Even Louisville with its horsy hay,New Orleans’ stench of high water. Carry seeds — or better yet takejust a sack and find them as youjourney greenward. Ignore pigeons.
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