COOKIE BLAZE'S QUESTION

by Anne Harding Woodworth

Cookie Blaze is a persona created by the poet, but 89-year-old Penny Starr (above) stripped on America's Got Talent two years ago.

I’m 81, and I want to ask you

if that’s too old for me to return

to the excellent career I’ve had,

the career that made me happiest.

See, I was a stripper. I stripped

in Lou’s bar there in upstate New York,

and sometimes I sang, and sometimes

I stripped and sang all at the same time.

When you’re 81, you need affirmation—you know,

an assurance that you didn’t live in vain,

that you still have the moves, Cookie,

that your crowds still love you

and want to see your new acts,

that they deny anything’s happened

to your skin and your voice.

Oh, maybe I’m a little off-key at times,

and forget a word here and there.

If the crowds were to notice

these trivial changes, they wouldn’t care.

Tell me, is 81 too old for me

to get back up on the stage at Lou’s?

I feel good when you watch me.

Yeah, watch me.

I’m fine for just a few more years,

maybe four. What do you say?

Anne Harding Woodworth is the author of an 8th book of poetry Gender: Two Novellas in Verse and of a 5th chapbook The Spare Parts Saga which looks at the USPS from the perspective of her trying to mail her 2008 book Spare Parts to a friend in Ireland.

HELPLESS

by Anne Harding Woodworth

Support the rescue efforts of the White Helmets.

     a prayer of sorts, Tuesday, February 7, 2023, 4:30 a.m.

In the quiet of this early morning, he’s left our bed

and walked into the hall, then to the kitchen

 

probably to get a “swig of klim,” as he calls it.

I move my foot over to his side just to feel the warmth

he’s left behind. At that moment, I know how survivors

in Turkey and Syria are shivering, reaching for warmth

where there is none, no lingering vestige of a spouse,

parent, child, no body next to them that said, “I’ll be right back.”

Buildings have fallen, din deafened, and then silent,

as snow passes into illicit spaces, upside down rooms,

and chairs drop into cold chasms of confusion,

terror, and pain with no one there to explain

what has happened. This is nightmare, a woman thinks,

held down in darkness between two concrete blocks

with one leg bent the wrong way. I tell her I am coming

with a blanket and lamp, but that too is dream

and will never happen. When he comes back to bed,

sweet-smelling of milk, I move closer to him

for his warmth, seeking comfort and more air

for those still breathing, buried deep in the rubble.

Anne Harding Woodworth is the author of eight books of poetry and four chapbooks. Her recent collection is GENDER: Two Novellas in Verse, which was a Literary Titan Silver Award Winner. Her chapbook The Last Gun won the COG Poetry Award and was subsequently animated (at https://vimeo.com/193842252). Anne is a member of the Board of Governors at the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, MA, which is opening soon after two years of restoration.

GOING HOME

by Anne Harding Woodworth

Portrait of Grant Wahl by Dan Leydon. “Grant arrived home Monday, December 12, and this transition was handled with the utmost care and sensitivity… An autopsy was performed by the New York City Medical Examiner’s Office. Grant died from the rupture of a slowly growing, undetected ascending aortic aneurysm with hemopericardium. The chest pressure he experienced shortly before his death may have represented the initial symptoms. No amount of CPR or shocks would have saved him. His death was unrelated to COVID. His death was unrelated to vaccination status. There was nothing nefarious about his death. While the world knew Grant as a great journalist, we knew him as a man who approached the world with openness and love.” —Céline Gounder, Grant’s Wife, at Substack.

      In memory of Grant Wahl

The shoot-out wasn’t over

when you left.

But you know by now

that Argentina sent

The Netherlands packing,

a fitting end to a soccer game,

to any game, really,

which is all it is we’re playing.

You, one of the lucky ones—

you turned yours into a living.

Living. You lived to the max,

free to write of parties,

beautiful vistas, catastrophes,

trivia, friends, fears, premonitions.

Your wrote down your observations

of injustice as fluidly as those

of offside or of a shoot-out.

You left early, Grant, probably

just hours before you’d posted

your “Three Thoughts” on the game.

And the Netherlands went home.

Anne Harding Woodworth’s eighth book of poetry, Gender: Two Novellas in Verse, is a Literary Titan Silver Award Winner. Her book Trouble received the 2022 William Meredith Award for Poetry.

ST. FRANCIS IN TULSA

by Anne Harding Woodworth

Shot and killed on the campus of Saint Francis Health System in Tulsa on June 1 were (clockwise from top left) patient William Love, physician Preston Phillips, receptionist Amanda Glenn, physician Stephanie Husen. —KOAM, June 2, 2022.

Four makes it mass murder.

But 4 doesn’t compare to 10 or 21

or 26, except that it does.

Brother Sun, shine on them.

Four names in Tulsa

tragically forgotten as coffins

continue to be interred elsewhere.

Mother Earth, hold them all.

Four gunned down

by a brand-new semi-automatic,

all shiny and eager.

Brother wind, evaporate the tears.

Three were in the gunner’s way,

only the fourth was sought—

for revenge against a healer

of pain. Pain infiltrates.

Pain torments the mind

as it does the body.

Sister Moon, light the darkness.

The gun is always there.

It waits. In a drawer.

In a case. On a coffee table.

On a store shelf. Waits

to be bought by a child

until it waits no more,

rides to the hospital

and seeks to inflict pain

on the one who seeks to end it

and the ones who seek to live,

gunned down by a brand-new

semi-automatic, shiny and eager.

Sister Water, write the names.

 

Anne Harding Woodworth is the author of a seventh book of poetry, Trouble, which received the 2022 William Meredith Award for Poetry. Her eighth book, Gender: Two Novellas in Verse, will appear in October.

PLANTING TIME IN UKRAINE

by Anne Harding Woodworth

A crucial portion of the world’s wheat, corn and barley is trapped in Russia and Ukraine because of the war. Credit: Vitaly Timkiv/Associated Press via The New York Times, March 20, 2022

The fibers of the breadbasket are unraveling.

Metaphor is of no use in wartime.

 

Call the breadbasket what it is: fertile country

that supplies grains near and far,

 

threatened now, as arable fields lie unplowed,

despoiled by the Bear at planting time.

 

Metaphor is useless. The tractor with plow

(or seeder) attached should be chugging out

 

into the fields now and on into the end of April—

but won’t be.

 

Man or woman on a tractor—easy target for the Bear.

But that’s metaphor, too.

 

Call the Bear what he is: greedy and cruel creature.

And not all bears. This one is a singular carrier of evil,

 

who leads his cubs to do his bidding.

There’s little grain left for the families,

for the animals, and none to ship out to Egypt,

Indonesia, Morocco, Israel, Spain, Tunisia.

Tunisia, once called a breadbasket itself,

until it was swallowed up by desert.

Now do you see how metaphors

don’t always work?

The world is hungry and hungrier, as the Bear

destroys fecund fields. No seeds will open.

No grains will be harvested. The breadbasket

empty, crushed. War destroys metaphor.

 

Food! is the only word left.

Anne Harding Woodworth’s seventh book of poetry Trouble received the 2022 William Meredith Award for Poetry.

MOZART REQUIEM STREAMED IN A TIME OF COVID-19

by Anne Harding Woodworth

NOTE: This concert [of the Mozart Requiem] will be closed to the public; please do not attempt to visit the concert hall.
—Harvard-Radcliffe Collegium Musicum, March 7, 2020


On this night of wrath and lacrymosa
the hall is hollow except for soloists,
chorus, orchestra and conductor, who,
at his back, feels eyes that aren’t there.

And at the end, when he turns to take a bow
before the crowd that has stayed away,
it’s as if he’s infected with the emptiness he sees.

The phantom audience, in its contagious silence,
offers no sound of shout or cough or applause,
no standing ovation for those who have just sung out
through an ether of airwaves to the undead.

Confutatis is understatement.

Against all advice, the conductor shakes hands
with the first violinist, who stands ready to leave
with her instrument that played flawlessly, while
the chorus begged eternal rest for whoever was not there.

Anne Harding Woodworth is the author of a six books of poetry, with a seventh appearing late this year.  Of her four chapbooks, The Last Gun won the 2016 COG Poetry Award, and an excerpt from it was subsequently animated at www.cogzine.com/watch. Harding Woodworth is a member of the Poetry Board at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC, and of the Board of Governors at the Emily Dickinson Museum, Amherst MA.

TRAGEDY IN ELMO, MO

by Anne Harding Woodworth

ELMO, Mo. AP, January 20, 2015 • A 9-month-old northwestern Missouri boy is dead after his 5-year-old brother playing with a handgun accidentally shot him in the head. Nodaway County Sheriff Darren White says the baby was pronounced dead at Children's Mercy Hospital in Kansas City just before noon on Monday. The Kansas City Star reports that emergency responders were called to a home in Elmo around 9 a.m. Monday after a 5-year-old found a loaded .22 caliber handgun and apparently was handling it when it fired. White says the bullet struck the 9-month-old, who was in a playpen. The sheriff says there is no reason to believe the shooting was anything other than an accident. 

There was every reason.

Stupidity.

The father was not there.
Absence.

The mother was in the kitchen.
Multi-task.

The baby was in the playpen.
Safety.

The five-year-old found the 22-caliber Magnum revolver.
Curiosity.

It was near a bed.
Paranoia.

It was loaded.
Paranoia.

He pulled the trigger.
Imitation.

The baby died inside his microcosm.
Innocence.

A gun killed a baby brother.
Insanity.


Anne Harding Woodworth is the author of five books of poetry and three chapbooks. She lives part-time in Washington, D.C., where she is a member of the Poetry Board at the Folger Shakespeare Library. The rest of the time, she is in the mountains of Western North Carolina.

ANUBIS SPEAKS

by Anne Harding Woodworth




I will embalm the gun,
dip it in antimony salts and mercury
to preserve the image
of a life that is no more.
I will detach the grip and the trigger.
Both have fingerprints,
which cannot be erased
thoroughly, but I will try
before I reattach the parts to the body.
History must be able
to interpret the design
and the intention
centuries from now.
I will hook the bullet, pull it
through the barrel nose,
steep it in formaldehyde
and return it to its chamber.
History must be able
to decipher the bullet’s use
as the empowering heart
of a cherished anatomy.
I will wrap the gun in linen strips,
brush them with sweet resin
to conceal the stench of death.
And I will place tokens
within the wrappings,
a sword, a toy, a raven,
a rose, a razorblade.
This is my duty:
to prepare a thing for the journey
across the river,
where it will be judged
for its deeds on earth.


Anne Harding Woodworth is the author of four books of poetry and two chapbooks. Her work is widely published in literary journals and on line in the U.S. and abroad. She divides her time between the mountains of Western North Carolina and Washington, D.C., where she is a member of the poetry board at the Folger Shakespeare Library.

RELICS

by Anne Harding Woodworth

“We have found a holy thing in a chest,”

said lead archaeologist Professor Gülgün Köroğlu.

“It is a piece of a cross.” UPI.com, August 2, 2013

Photos, undated and curled,
4x6s, 5x7s, lie out in the garage
in a metal chest, some framed, some loose,
some stained with wine and oil,
places miles away with names forgotten,
forgotten eyes and smiles,
pieces of you and me that have lain buried
decades, centuries, millennia,
to be remembered in swabs of saliva
from the inside of a cheek someday.
They will ask: who were our mothers?
when did we live? how did we die?
From the photos nothing will be known
of cracked ribs, nothing of teeth
(though they’ll say we ate grains, of course).
And what about the nutshells
at the bottom of the chest?
Carbon 14 will determine that squirrels
entered it a half-life ago. And surely
it’s the squirrels that gnawed
that rough slat of wood among the photos
with its ancient glyphs of black ink along the edge,
a stick that measured, or so they will say,
the height and width of a holy thing.


Anne Harding Woodworth is the author of four books of poetry and two chapbooks. Her work is widely published in literary journals and on line in the U.S. and abroad. She divides her time between the mountains of Western North Carolina and Washington, D.C., where she is a member of the poetry board at the Folger Shakespeare Library.