Yesterday, I actually left my house and went to the bookstore to try to buy a 2009 calendar (my choices, since most were gone, were between Harry Potter and one with a 3D skateboard on the cover).  I also bought TriQuarterly, which I pick up from time to time, but not with any regularity, and NPlusOne, which I think I get a bit more regularly. Then I skimmed them both. Then I settled deeply into Jana Harris’s poems, (she teaches at University of Washington online),  in TriQuarterly. They are gorgeous things. Here is the beginning of “Feeding My New Son With An Eyedropper, I Remember Coming to This Country with My Parents, One Trunk, and Seven Words of English”:

Until he moved, I knew nothing

about him and almost the next week

it seemed he wanted to be born.

Alone, too soon, what could I do

but wrap him in cotton batting–

even in America, one does not name

a child marked for death.

 

Bottle and nipple clumsy contraptions,

too big for his mouth, I had to draw back

his lip, spoon in

nature’s nourishment. His shoulders

non-existent, legs shriveled–how did I manage

to mark him so?

 

Still,  all newborns bring

their own welcome–he looks

as alien as  I did when first

I came to this country:

my funny name (Papa immediately

dropped its harsher vowels),

my funny dress, shoes

clumsy as cod boxes.

My hair braided wet, brushed

until it stood out like a broom.

She has two recent books of poems, Oh, How Can I Keep On Singing, Voices of Pioneer Women and We Never Speak of It, Idaho-Wyoming Poems, both published by Ontario Review Press. Here’s a bit from another one, “Brother Churchianity’s Garden”, that I found quite moving:

As he saddled up, my new guardian instructed:

cut a switch thick as my thumb.

I found a good one, for his horse, I thought,

poor beast. I’d need correction

while he was gone, he said, flogging

my backside, then promised to beat me again

when he got back. For years I wore

the violets and stems

of bruises and welts. Whipped so often

it grew on me like Oregon rain:

cold and inevitable, tp be borne without complaint.

My body a garden  harrowed by coach whip,

quirt, belt, cane, bridle strap.

To this day, I cannot look upon

 a deeply, red, red rose.

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