2024 CAN BE A YEAR OF DELIGHT, PROMISES A TIMES COLUMNIST

by Devon Balwit

Quilter Delight Painting by Karla Gerard

The basic premise of a delight practice (which I learned about in the essay collection “The Book of Delights” by Ross Gay) is simple: You make a point to notice things in your everyday life that delight you… Then whenever you notice something that delights you, you lift your arm, raise your index finger in the air and say, out loud and with enthusiasm, “Delight!” (Yes, even if you’re alone.) —Catherine Price, The New York Times, December 31, 2023

I hold up a finger and say Delight!—two shelf mushrooms

in a hollow tree, a squirrel hanging by its feet. I zoom

in on the electric green of moss, a red leaf peeking

from wood chips. Always the teacher’s pet, if seeking

wonder is the task, I’ll find it, if only for the gold

star next to my name on the chart. Behold

the shining face of a baby at the bar, the daffy

hound, a Beethoven riff that makes me laugh! 

 

Expressing simple gratitude does get old—

the litany of health, family, shelter—but marvels

are singular. Even the same street shifts

with the light. I read the essay to the end sold,

ready to dash out and see what’s revealed

as the world sheathes its terrors and bares its gifts.

Devon Balwit walks in all weather and has rediscovered her love of cartooning. Her most recent collection, Spirit Spout [Nixes Mate Books, 2023], storms through Melville’s Moby Dick.

[THIS POEM WILL PROBABLY GET US KILLED]

by Sharmila Voorakkara & Ron Riekki

Planned Parenthood officials on Monday announced plans for a mobile abortion clinic—a 37ft recreational vehicle that will stay in Illinois but travel close to the borders of adjoining states that have banned the procedure since the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade earlier this year. —The Guardian, October 4, 2022

                                                               for Alexis McGill Johnson

There has always been a running, either away from

or to.  And sometimes, just the promise of anything other than

where you are is all you need to leave. To live.  This fills me

with worried peace… My friend told me that I need

to practice gratitude, to be thankful for mobile clinics

and mobile apps and even my mobile home—

these places of temporary comfort, where people 

might treat you like a person, can understand you are

a being, human, like them, to help with the need to avoid

suffering, needlessly, and perhaps be understood, 

be under caring hands, especially after the hands

that strangled you, tried to own you, drown you,

breakdown you, in your nightgown, you in front

of your children and the law-and-order and the Bible 

that want to shame you, and then, at the border,

this safety, waiting, at the border, thank God, at the border.

Sharmila Voorakkara received her MFA from the University of Virginia. Her first collection of poems, Fire Wheel, was published by the University of Akron Press.

Ron Riekki co-edited Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice (Michigan State University Press).

TARGETS

by Tricia Knoll

Weathered growth rings in a horizontal cross section cut through a tree felled around AD 1111 used for the western building complex at Aztec Ruins National Monument, San Juan County, New Mexico, USA. Source: commons.wikimedia.org . Photographer:  Michael Gäbler.

Soft or hard: like ice cream?
The you-can’t-imagine bull’s-eyes
on the chest of the emergency
room doctor, but someone did.
The deepest Mars crater yawns
wide open for a rocky landing.
Today’s news has turkeys
playing soccer, fenced orphanages
for orangutans. What if instead
of seeing targets and borders
in every mapped topography
we visualize growth rings,
slow but steady widening
of enduring trees as they bow
under winter’s weight
or resprout from the fire?
For seeds of wildflowers.
Gratitude for mandala graces.


Author's note: Written in response to Monday's shooting at Mercy Hospital in Chicago.

Tricia Knoll was born in a Chicago hospital. She has a daily gratitude practice, trying to find that day's hint of beauty in the midst of news of wanton shootings, vicious pronouncements from the administration—a hint of something soothing somewhere. 

READING ABOUT BROCK TURNER DECADES AFTER MY RAPE

by Larina Warnock

Image source: The Other 98%

I feel that I should be silent because this isn’t about me.
Don’t misunderstand: It is not that I believe our society
should leave each person to themselves, but that I respect
a woman’s right to her tragedy without others hanging
the weight of their own rape upon it. I am afraid
of appropriating someone else’s pain. And I want to forget.

Yet, I have woken in a cold, terrified sweat night after night
for days. There is only one sure way to not be afraid: Justice.
But a judge says justice only matters for wealthy, white men,
even when  jury says otherwise. And the most frightening
part is knowing that this means my daughters live in the same
world I did when it happened to me. Sidenote:

This is the essence of PTSD. Reading someone else’s case
and reliving one of the worst days of your life over and over
and over. You know that it is not rational, that these things are
years and years behind you, that it is unlikely that a Brock Turner
act-alike is waiting outside the door (though not impossible).
You understand clearly that the more you think about it, read
about it, get angry about it, the more afraid you will be, but you
are completely, utterly incapable of turning away, of
re-appropriating the rational person you were yesterday.

But back to my daughters. I take a deep breath and another look.
The voices of men, many men, are rising, and they are not
frightening. They are saying, “This is not okay.” They are saying,
“This is not her fault.” They are saying, “Rape is rape and this man
bears the blame. Alcohol does not a rapist make.” This is not the same
world I grew up in. This is a better place. I want to thank these men
I can trust to be just to my daughters.

I am torn between silence and gratitude and an inability to forget.

Larina Warnock teaches in Roseburg, Oregon. Her poetry, fiction, and nonfiction has appeared in Space & Time Magazine, The Oregonian, Touch: The Journal of Healing, Wheelhouse Magazine, Poets Market 2011, and others. She is currently working on her EdD in Education Leadership from Creighton University.