ENABLERS

by Elizabeth Kerlikowske

 

If you let your sons win at card games,          they will never learn strategy.

If you talk down to them using simple baby words,       they won't understand complexity.

Because you don’t want them to fail,                   you don’t make them do anything hard.

You accept every lie because it is easier   and more comfortable than checking up.

If your son is always where the trouble is,       your son is the trouble.

Your son knows you will bail him out,     make the excuse, buy him another car.

Hell, you might even buy him the gun          he uses to murder a man and then

kill himself.                     Your love knows no bounds.

Author’s note: I saw something like this play out in my own life when my stepmother did provide the gun my brother used at the end of the poem because she could not say no to him.

Elizabeth Kerlikowske teaches ekphrastic writing at the Kalamazoo Institute of Art and volunteers at an alternative high school. 

FROM THE HIDEOUSLY SMOKY MIDWEST

by Elizabeth Kerlikowske

I love my Canadian neighbors but…

 

At least during Covid we could step outside.

I resurrect my masks and wear them now

to water the puzzled garden, get the mail,

drag in the dumpster. Ash on squash leaves

ages them as surely as gray hair. My throat hurts.

Eyes sting and I’m breathing filtered air.

Exhausted squirrels lay in bird baths.

Deer stagger through the yard.

We keep water out for them,

not to breed mosquitos, nosy neighbor!

Sun a muffled peach pit in both skies.

Moon, overcome with particulate matter,

hides her face, throws scarves of stars

over her mouth to filter pernicious smoke.

Just guessing, since we no longer see her.

Elizabeth Kerlikowske’s latest chapbook is Falling Women, with painter Mary Hatch.

SYSTEM SNOW

by Elizabeth Kerlikowske

Elizabeth Kerlikowske pays attention, though she doesn't want to.

AIR QUALITY ALERT

by Elizabeth Kerlikowske

The National Weather Service has issued an air quality alert for Aug. 11-12 for multiple northern Michigan counties because of smoke drifting south from Canadian wildfires. —Lansing State Journal, August 10, 2025

We’re in charge of so little. Less than an acre; a cat. Clearing debris from the street drain. The few things we control are so inconsequential, no one cares. Not even us. Take my lungs. Please. Take Canadian wildfire smoke. Their wilderness makes civilization  hard. Even deer here in Michigan wear masks. How do they get them on?  Last week, we found out we were made of plastic. Today particulate matter is coating our lungs with Teflon. Silver Beach is like the bottom of an ashtray half full of gin. Haze, the weather man says, trying to fool the tourists. Maple/bacon smoke rolls in, a plague from the Northwest, but we are so far gone, its smell only makes us hungry.

Elizabeth Kerlikowske’s latest chapbook is Falling Women, with painter Mary Hatch.

THE FIRST HUNDRED DAYS

by Elizabeth Kerlikowske

If you can see the moon from your window
even through the wall of branches
then it is calling you to worship.
Hard to stay in bed,
impossible to stay in the house.  
If you can see the moon from the front porch,
you can see raccoons and the seven doe
in blue shadows. The owl wonders
what you are doing here.  Thick
wandering roots reach from the trees, 
dusted with a skin of snow, like veins 
on the backs of your hands going 
where they must go. 
If you can see the moon from Earth,
the cataclysm is still in the future.
Your breath is a cloud without shape.

Elizabeth Kerlikowske’s latest chapbook is Falling Women, with painter Mary Hatch.

INVITING THE WORDLE BOT TO DINNER

by Elizabeth Kerlikowske

Linen is good but vinyl would be better, the Wordle Bot told me.
Hmm. Vinyl is almost never better.
All fabrics are not created equal, if vinyl could be called that. 
I want the vinyl sheets on the bed tonight, said no one ever. 
When your grandma was through with sex, 
she covered her furniture with vinyl, and then herself.
Like Superman and Clark Kent, linen and vinyl are never
found together, and one isn’t even found in nature.
But Wordle Bot, please come for dinner.
We will try to listen to the linen records

and wipe our hands (if you have them) on vinyl napkins.

Elizabeth Kerlikowske’s latest chapbook is Falling Women, with painter Mary Hatch.

NORTH AMERICAN MIGRATION

by Elizabeth Kerlikowske

Canadian wildfire smoke created a hazy red-orange sky over Lake Michigan on June 23 at the Michigan-Huron watershed. Wildfire smoke is causing poor air quality in the Great Lakes this week. —Fox Weather

Just a whiff of Armageddon seems worse
than a year of Covid precautions. Canadian fires.
Some jet stream sending a radar plume of it 
like a purple hot dog cuddled up to the blue bun 
of Lake Michigan. Thinner but more toxic
than mountain fog, smoke blurs horizons
and pulls a gray film over every noun,
smothered in adjectives. Diluted sun thins
the smoke like cream into soup, a color
variation, same raw taste. Ash residue
floats on bird baths. Only the crows sing. 
It’s a song they learned on their migration
from Hell. Not long ago. North of Thunder Bay.

Elizabeth Kerlikowske is a Michigan native. She is a poet, visual artist, and mother of three. Her publications include dozens of print and online journals, five books of poetry, and inclusion in several anthologies. She would never live anywhere else.

SWING STATE

by Elizabeth Kerlikowske

Missy Mandel photo on Instagram via Pinterest.

Yard signs shimmy in November’s wind.

They only have to last two more days.

Our deer huddle as snow sifts over their backs.

There is something to see here: the way

they groom each other. No one is in charge.

They browse downed yellow leaves

then chew for hours against the fence, safe

from cars, dogs, the buck that moves through

like he owns the place. Like them, we want

to live out our destinies. To kiss each other’s

velvety ears and bank our spines together

for warmth.  The signs are red, white, blue;

the deer are almost invisible against the fallen

leaves, the pine needles.  If only human congress

could learn deportment from the deer. Winds

through the branches promise nothing. 

No party affiliation. Deer days will be the same. 

Simple. Without rancor.

Elizabeth Kerlikowske spends her time looking out windows, managing two nonprofits (Poetry Society of Michigan and Friends of Poetry in Kalamazoo, Michigan, or Kamala-zoo, as some call it), and hoping to meet Olive Autumn, the newest member of her family.

IN THE NEW CLIMATE

by Elizabeth Kerlikowske

This is what it looks like when national parks are sacrificed for a #borderwall. Footage at Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument via Kevin Dahl, NPCA Arizona Senior Program Manager pic.twitter.com/VE9UKziPzl

— National Parks Conservation Association (@NPCA) October 4, 2019

no need to migrate, so geese fly laps around the county
lake to lake at dawn, louder than garbage trucks.

A friend makes a demon cozy, so she doesn’t always have to face it.
She can know where it is even if she doesn’t know what it is

unlike mosquitos with valises full of Eastern equine encephalitis
come to visit. Swatting lunchmates, even on the face, becomes socially acceptable.

A friend draws stories with her own language of shapes not everyone can read.
That’s okay. Lilacs do not bloom this year; there is a mid-April blizzard.

Fawns come to the door wanting the cat to play.  Children holding hands
walk across a lake of grass. Yard lights never let the trees sleep, not deeply.

A friend grieves deeply and with laughter, at once. She raises monarchs
and tonight the government will poison them as well as mosquitos.

On her balcony flickers and doves fight squirrels and raccoons for seeds
and a little honey.  Tomorrow the butterfly rain.

Elizabeth Kerlikowske most recent book is Art Speaks with painter Mary Hatch. She tries to live outside as much as possible while owning a house.

IN OUR ETATS-UNIS

by Elizabeth Kerlikowske

the republic is kaput.
We have turned our dhabarkoodas
to the banderas which the Tribunal Supremo
says we can burn,
hoping four anos will pass by like manana.
We live in rebellion secreta.
Our menschen eat shakshuka
and after dinner, play mahjongg.
Only four years. There will still be
algebra, kayaks, canoes, haus katzen,
carne adobada and brassieres.
We are the homogenized parfaits
of years of einwanderung.
We have found chaque autre.

A retired professor of English at Kellogg Community College in Battle Creek, Elizabeth Kerlikowske served 25 years as president of Friends of Poetry in Kalamazoo.

IT'S KALAMAZOO'S TURN,THE FACEBOOK POST SAYS

by Elizabeth Kerlikowske

A man is shooting people from his truck, just

any people. Four old friends. A father and son.

A mother walking with her kids. A teenager

now on life support. Our town is such a nice

town, this hurts us all. We are not perfect, but

we are a town that tries. I stayed home the day

after the shootings. I didn’t want to see anyone.

At home I could pretend things were the same,

that my KIA dealership was not the one that . . .

that the close by restaurant was not where . . .

but today, I left my sanctuary under overcast

skies.  I remember when JFK was killed how

the clouds were gray and girls said even the sky

was crying. We were young and made meaning

from it and now, we are old and know there is

no meaning, only the terrible coincidence of living

your life as if it was yours to keep instead of

target practice for some killer. Kalamazoo is so

small, I know someone who knows him.  I want to

drive by my dealership. I don’t know why. Instead

I head downtown to retrieve a lost umbrella.  No

easy smiles on the street. The sky, if it’s not already

crying, will be soon.


A retired professor of English at Kellogg Community College in Battle Creek, Elizabeth Kerlikowske served 25 years as president of Friends of Poetry in Kalamazoo.

SCOURING

by Elizabeth Kerlikowske

COLORADO SPRINGS — A gun battle erupted inside a Planned Parenthood center here on Friday when a man armed with an assault-style rifle opened fire and began shooting at officers as they rushed to the scene. The authorities reported that three people were killed, a police officer and two civilians, and nine were wounded before the suspect finally surrendered more than five hours after the first shots were fired. —NY Times, Nov. 27, 2015. Photo by ISAIAH J. DOWNING/REUTERS via NY Times

I cannot leave while the wind sings in its cold November voice, exercising spruce limbs above the roof, full of spirits and souls perfecting their escapes: my husband’s colleague, the Paris dead,
unmourned strangers caught up, baffled.

Wind is not what they imagined. Always alive, it blows songbirds from the sills. Smashes streetlights and scatters the shards like leaves.

Below in the ugly solid house, cats sleep on quilts, still, while limbs thrash, cross themselves. Wind is the terrorist with no intention: unequal heating of the earth’s surface, dared by anemometers to blow harder.

Spider webs inside the window and the window tremble. Ghosts of people I once loved make room for the freshly dead. The sound of a train with the force of a bomb lifts our jackets then our bodies and snatches flesh from our faces.

Unsaid fury and unspoken endearments, wind is the thunder of my body breaking up like river ice and letting go. Lost souls from anywhere on the globe pluck at the sleeves of  the living. I am what you will be.  This whirlwind tears boats from their slips, clothes from the line, hope from the future.

Today’s gale prefaces snow with no regard for our journeys; it smoothes our problems into a dull continuous roar and cleanses them of impurities. They return to us, still problems but smoother, speaking a language we don’t understand.


Elizabeth Kerlikowske reports here from time to time on the news here and there.

THE TWO WORLDS

by Elizabeth Kerlikowske

The digital steel electronic world
wears an overlay of nature, a waxy
mist. If we are lucky, we choose
which world we live in.  A cat in
sunlight looks out the door while
the stock market crashes on tv.
Certainly more relaxing to look
at the cat.  A FedEx truck goes by,
three deer in the drive, the skunk
has a route and a name: Jackie O
because it’s fun to say: “Jackie O
is at the woodpile.”  I have never
felt manipulated, used or bamboozled
by raccoons.  Deer paw and nuzzle
at the lick in my trees while sirens
head toward another man-made
disaster. The Dow Jones may fall,
but I’m waiting for bright leaves
underfoot, crunching in that real
way, not like numbers.

Elizabeth Kerlikowske reports here on what is happening in the Midwest.

AFTERMATH

by Elizabeth Kerlikowske

 

Image source: PostcardCollector

Birch postcards scattered on the lawn this morning.
They’re for me though I can’t read them.
Zinnias all spindled in the storm’s path.
My neighbor rakes the street because he hires his yard done.
A downed limb arches over a small tree, very St Louis.
An empty nest means the storm came late enough.
Air so fresh there’s still cellophane on it.
Spider webs scoured from the shrubs.
Thanks for thinning the sunflowers.
We can all start over.


Elizabeth Kerlikowske reports here on what is happening in the Midwest.

TEMPORARY BLINDNESS

by Elizabeth Kerlikowske

I went to the ophthalmologist. She shone the light in my right eye and said, "Do you have a pet? I see an animal hair. And some lint." She lowered the light and looked at me sternly. “I’m going to wash your eyes.”  She found cigarette butts, bristles from street sweepers, an old bike chain, and child’s flip flop. The left eye closest to the yards had dandelion fluff, a flea, and the tip of a Jart. She washed my eyes,  and when I opened them, a pile of scraps was between us. I blinked and said, “There’s still an irritant.”  She followed the light back in and pulled out Mitt Romney. Ah! I could see again. I mean, I could stand to look.

Her opthamalogist has cleared Elizabeth Kerlikowske to drive her car to teach.