Estabrook, continued

room in the Children’s Discovery Museum (Brooke and Nana), called Mommy at the hospital 5 times, raked the leaves beneath the old apple tree, ate noodles, Santa cookies, strawberries, Cheerios, pineapple, mashed potatoes, and donuts, played monkey-in-the-middle, made copies of our hands out of Play Dough, read Elmo & Friends, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, and the Further Adventures of Peter Rabbit, took apart and put back together again the two Russian dolls, thought about putting the trains back up around the Christmas tree but ran out of energy, danced to Christmas with the Chipmunks and Beethoven’s Third Symphony, drew some colorful abstract art with magic markers, took a bunch of ornaments off the tree and put most of them back on again, and laughed and laughed and laughed.
     Heck of a productive day all in all, wouldn’t you say?

  LEMONS

   By Barbara Crooker

 A yellow sun splashed lavish light
on the garden, a bright bloom
of a morning, full of possibility.
I was away from home, teaching,
when one of the poems peeled
away the thin rind of memory,
and there I was, back
in the maternity ward
when my firstborn died.

I remember how white and cold
the room was, even though
my friends brought flowers:
irises, roses.  I was hollow,
a fruit that had been pulped
for juice, leaving nothing
but a shell, no flesh, no seeds.

Thirty years later, my daughter’s
globed stomach, and then, there
was Daniel, shining and puckered
in the moony glow of the delivery
room, rinsed with light from another
world, and a new day dawning.

Emanuel
By Naomi Ruth Lowinsky

on the day you descended into our world circles within
circles opened one hundred and fifty thousand
people marched up Market street to protest a wrong war
not in our name not in your name Emanuel they chanted
and the drag queens of the city came out beautiful in their highest
heels their sleekest black velvet and they thanked us so much
for coming out to say “no blood for oil” “war is not healthy
for children and other living beings” and an old man on rollerblades
gave yellow roses to the little girls and a woman bared her very pregnant
belly with a peace sign painted upon it and i spoke every hour
on my cell phone to your mother to find out how close
were her pains it was a few hours before your dark head
would crown your broad shoulders twist out and that glistening coil
of your cord from the other world which your father cut
while your mother cried out to behold you old wisdom
still clinging about you Emanuel it was the day after the full moon
in Capricorn and the people had awakened to the gathering armies the gulf
upon which we all teetered and returned to the streets as we had
when your mother was my baby girl and we walked up Market street
to protest a wrong war

Emanuel you have descended and the world is so new your first poop
is big news and your good latch upon your mother’s breast you are
so sweet so calm a being released from forever to sing among us

little house of God
may we deserve you





JACOB, THREE AND A HALF MONTHS OLD,
TELLS ME A STORY
   By Mary Makofske

You have been sleeping all afternoon
thinking up this story, which begins
with a trill in the throat, breaks into
gutturals rocking through a grin.

Then your lips purse to a beak, cooing,
each vowel a word, the words strung
into sentences you know to punctuate
with a shift in pitch and a pause.

I know this is a narrative,
the pace breaking from calm
afternoon to rambling dialogue
to danger and a narrow escape.

I begin to recognize vocabulary,
syntax, know when you repeat
for emphasis, or use parallel
structure with synonymous words.

The sound of sense, I think, Frost's
theory about the music of a poem,
the rise and fall, whisper and thrust
of conversation muffled by a wall.

My task is to be the good listener,
slipping Um hmmm or Really? or Oh!
into a gap, or keeping the silence
you insert to build the suspense.

When your brow furrows and the story
stalls, I know to repeat what you've said
so you know I've heard. And you're
watching to see that I follow, want to learn

what sounds make my eyes wide.
Neither you nor I will remember
this story. Only that you told it.
Only that I listened.

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Acknowledgments

BABYSKIN: NOTES FOR A GRANDCHILD, appeared in Hapax Legomena by Barbara Adams (Lewiston Poetry Series, The Edwin Mellen Press, 1990).

Werner Hengst’s essay, LITTLE MISS ENTROPY, appears online at www.WernerHengst.com.

 JACOB, THREE AND A HALF MONTHS OLD, TELLS ME A STORY by Mary Makofske was published in Calyx: A Journal of Art and Literature by Women (Summer, 2008).

LEMONS by Barbara Crooker appeared in the Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Emanuel by Naomi Ruth Lowinsky appears in her collection, Adagio and Lamentation (Fisher King Press 2010) 
.
SHRAPNEL by Janet M. Lewis is included in Getting Kind of Late and Selected Poems by Jan Lewis.