HOPE: APRIL 2020

by Marjorie Maddox

Print by jolieguillebeau

A “thing,” perhaps,
and fowl,
       but bloody-
plucked,
dipped in disease
and plummeting,
the sky-high                       yours/mine
                   violently de-plumed,
bald as a vulture,
               fickle flight undone
in this freefall frenzy of fear
to doom
become dust
 become

what we don’t know
                        become
before
            and void
become dark, become
                         the dawn crack
of Eden on replay
and maybe—hope against hope—
become
the “warm breasts, bright wings”
of Spirit hovering,
                        warming,
readying its weary-
world nest
once-again
for wings.

Marjorie Maddox has published 11 collections of poetry, a short story collection, an anthology (co-editor), and 4 children's books.

FIRST 100 DAYS TRIOLET

by Marjorie Maddox

Cartoon by STEPeHEN

Ridiculous standards to hold me
to standards. Huuuge mistake
to mistake me for me.
Ridiculous. Standards can’t hold me;
I’ll flip-flop alternate news. Bigly
mistake by media to mistake
standards for ridiculous me. Hold me
to standards? Huuuge mistake!

Marjorie Maddox has published eleven collections of poetry—including True, False, None of the Above (Poiema Poetry Series and Illumination Book Award medalist), Local News from Someplace Else, and Wives' Tales as well as the short story collection What She Was Saying (Fomite Press) and over 500 stories, essays, and poems in journals and anthologies.

JULY 5th

by Marjorie Maddox

All the flag-clad oohs and ahhs fizzle
just past midnight, a slight singe of burn
hovering over today: patriotic hangover
with stars and stripes banging about in brains
that never Ok’d reciting names and dates
in 4th grade History. Such a dazzling,
distracting explosion: all that reality behind
the pomp, so ceremoniously like that other
season’s parade: winter’s green/red (the frigid
red/white/blue) pa-rum-pa-pum-pummed
into “Little Drummer Boy” with only tepid recognition
of the day’s conviction. Holy Mother
of Jefferson, the fireworks’ dizzy outbursts
of Me! Me! Me! reveal our belief in nothing
but the day’s commemoration, the morning after’s
leftover hot dogs or eggnog a hodge-podge of forgotten births:
nation and God piped-in patriotically
as afterthought for the background.


Director of Creative Writing and professor of English at Lock Haven University, Marjorie Maddox has 9 books of poetry, most recently Local News from Someplace Else Wipf & Stock 2013), which focuses on living in an unsafe world, and an ebook of Perpendicular As I, winner of the 1994 Sandstone Book Award.

BAN ON MILITARY GEAR . . .

by Marjorie Maddox

except here? Last call
for chain-gangs-
in-training at this chain
bar and grill where each chain-
clad cult sparks shootouts
in a city of brotherly bonds
($1 million and counting),
as bloody as that 90’s Waco,
or trying, nine dead but riding
too fast toward that other road
block, those blasted
and blasting seventy-six bodies
in the siege that inspired
McVeigh, another chain-
reaction of cult-carnage.

History is heavy
on our backs
as are tire tread on a biker’s foot,
muscle-imposed taxes,
rival-enforced respect;
knives, ammo;
as are Bandidos and Cossacks lighting up
the ticking bombs of their lives,
revving up revenge in this parking lot
of smashed-in faces,
bashed-up corpses;
this past of bloody sorrow
and linked pain, ongoing narrative
of chains, chains, chains.


Director of Creative Writing and professor of English at Lock Haven University, Marjorie Maddox’s book, Local News from Someplace Else (Wipf & Stock 2013), focuses on living in an unsafe world. In addition, she has a new ebook, Perpendicular As I (Kindle version, Nook version).

FIREWORKS AT WHETSTONE PARK

by Marjorie Maddox

                                    Columbus, Ohio


This is a poem I didn't write
but caught, on the fly,
fumbled, words sputtering
like an exhausted firefly overcome
by the pyrotechnics of the Fourth.
The smell of words lingers.

At Whetstone Park fire
works almost as well
as words ignited in near-
dusk by families on folding chairs
waiting for something,
a drive-in theatre of lights
with no screen.

And these relatives I'm just beginning to know
because my father died,
and this man I just married,
all write the poem, spark
the concatenations that rise
into my ahhh!

The sharpest among us forgets
whole sentences, remembers
the lives gone
out—in our group of five:
three fathers, two mothers, one brother.  Her old words swell,
minute explosions, articulate
across our graying sky.

This is the telling of time,
tickings both loud and soft
we forget we are listening
for what we've lost:
the blank peaceful black
before and after
griefs, joys:  the definitions of when
to begin.

"Fireworks," someone says, "determines the time
of dusk."  Someone else argues,
"It's mosquitoes."  Our watching
makes the sky crackle.  In our small circle
of chairs, we slap and smile;
we listen.


Director of Creative Writing and Professor of English at Lock Haven University, Marjorie Maddox has published nine collections of poetry, most recently Local News from Someplace Else (Wipf & Stock 2013) and a 2013 ebook of Perpendicular As I ( Kindle; Kobo; 1994 Sandstone Book Award).

WATCH VS. WARNING

by Marjorie Maddox

                                                                                        “Female-named hurricanes kill more

                                                                                          than male hurricanes because people

                                                                                          don’t respect them, study finds.”

                                                                                                            —Jason Samenow, 
                                                                                                   Washington Post,  June 2, 2014

Surely the whirling of this world

into some wind-gone-wild transport to Oz-

    opposite names the same tree-thrashing terror

or should, a double-edged Saffir-Simpson scale

of nurture/nature of respect in respect to

whose wrath shakes our quaking spirit

more, which also is just breath gone haywire,

this life built in the lungs and expired

into air as turbulent as any cascading

into climate-crashing crescendo

off the coast of somewhere.

Dorothy/Don, this isn’t

Kansas anymore.

      Each day

               the breeze

                 and we

                       pick up

                       more

                         vio-

                        lent-

                  ly

                brok-

          en.

Director of Creative Writing and professor of English at Lock Haven University, Marjorie Maddox’s book,  Local News from Someplace Else (Wipf & Stock 2013), focuses on living in an unsafe world. In addition, she has a new ebook, Perpendicular As I ( Kindle version, Nook version, Kobo version).

MEMORIAL DAY WEEKEND: ISLA VISTA, 2014

by Marjorie Maddox

Aftermath. Photo by Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times. “Seen through a bullet hole, IV Deli Mart owner Michael Hassan cleans up his store near UC Santa Barbara. A gunman fatally shot someone there.”

     “Authorities on Saturday afternoon removed three bodies from the apartment of the suspect in Friday night's shooting rampage that left seven people dead in Isla Vista, near UC Santa Barbara.” --LA Times, May 24, 2014

On this weekend for honoring the dead,
more dead, the radio blasting updates
between ballads, Beach Boys, the “Battle
Hymn of the Republic.”

Friday night post-graduation
in a college town not unlike ours,
sorrow drenched in war songs and the same
bloody questions we’ve mourned before,
each grief mounting beyond what we feared
possible, and possible again,
the way the radio keeps blaring
Sousa, worse-case-scenarios drumming still
worse long after we’ve tried
to turn the knob, silence the sound waves,
to finally and forever
disconnect the throbbing beat
between each patriotic wave
of the half-mast flag.


Director of Creative Writing and professor of English at Lock Haven University, Marjorie Maddox’s book,  Local News from Someplace Else (Wipf & Stock 2013), focuses on living in an unsafe world. In addition, she has a new ebook, Perpendicular As I ( Kindle version, Nook version, Kobo version).

REOCCURING STORMS

by Marjorie Maddox

Marcus Yam for The New York Times

Searchers Find Body of Killed Child in Oklahoma Tornado --AP, May 26, 2011
Woman Finds Boy After Mother Drives Van Into Hudson --The New York Times, April 13, 2011


Wind/Water, Oklahoma/New York,
the domestically symbolic bathtub/minivan,
two mothers.

And so fear gathers speed, swirls in
or out, grabbing—in its selfish velocity—each state
of who we are or were, what’s left
of our man-made lives holding tightly to the already-
born, the life still coming.

Temporarily wedged between faith and scream,
a mother sings reassurances as each
tree, board, sink, tub, life
twists and spins into the horizon
no one foresaw, grief beyond the boundaries
of such predictions, life splintered limb by limb,
like and not like (half a country away)

that other dream-turned-disaster:
depression’s dark tunnel twirling
beyond the imaginable, tires whirring
too quickly toward the Hudson,
fueling the speed of no-return,
a family’s last vision of sky flooded
with the damp wet of despair.

Except ten-year-old La'shaun,
who—between death and breath—
rolled down his window to let out fear,
then swam toward light.

And in Oklahoma, five-year-old Cathleen,
who, amidst the hurricane’s howl,
recognized hope in the heartbeat
of her unborn sibling:
that faint hum in the ear,
or that sudden surge toward possibility

into what one day even you and I—
after a particularly hard day of the ordinary—
might discuss as casually
as weather, as someone else’s life.


Marjorie Maddox is Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Lock Haven University in Pennsylvania.

GOING OVER

by Marjorie Maddox





not the white cliffs of Dover, but our own steep igneous face,
weathered to the core, all fossilized
values chipped away—with pick, with chisel—
while the granite-grey sledgehammer in the room
of House and Senate smashes three hundred million
blue-collar manufactured piggy banks
into bipartisan shards, and the coins, their faces
likewise eroded, cascade like water-
                                                                   falls.


Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Lock Haven University, Marjorie Maddox has published 8 poetry collections, 2 children's books, and over 400 poems, stories, and essays in journals and anthologies. Co-editor of Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania, she is the recipient of numerous awards.