midnight sweat
midnight vomit
crying and clutching the trash can
no school for me
mother’s blanket-wrapped sadness
predawn on the front porch
watching the school burn
four fire departments couldn’t stop the blaze
what could a woman in a blanket hope to do
that they couldn’t?
“good news,” she whispers
smoothing back my tangled hair
wiping the fever away with a cool cloth
“no school for anyone”
I am from plant-scented candles
From yarn made for crocheting and jars of stored food
I am from a mix of red bricks and tan parts etched into thick walls
With creaky halls moving on their own
I am from a quiet yet loud house echoing with sounds all too familiar
the old trees that don't go on for long
Whose long-gone limbs I remember
As if they were my own
I’m from modified passed-down recipes and dark-ish hair
From Meghan, Evan, Rachel, Melissa, and Gorman
I’m from overly cold rooms cold as a rainy autumn mornings
and messy closets brimming with random junk
And from skipping breakfasts
I’m from stories told years later and the “scribble monster”
and “beans beans The more you eat the more you toot” and patty cake
I’m from nothing specific
I’m from Charleston, West Virginia and Cincinnati
And skyline chili and sweet pepper-filled spaghetti
From my dad's first fight
ending with him crashing into a dumpster
with a bloody nose and a loud bang still going through his head
Magnets collected over the years some having family photos
and others with small pretty rocks attached
Stuck to the side of the fridge
By Iva Reynolds Sep 15, 2023
Occasionally I get Fig Newtons.
Not too often because they take
me back to what is only a memory
of when the dead in my life were
alive, when I was a boy,
when Mrs. Heinz – who didn’t
have two dimes to rub together –
would have a box when Dad
and Mom would make a call,
park the car on this side of the wooden
bridge that crossed the stream
to get to her house and life.
I should relish such memories,
the near resurrection of memory,
the dead nearly alive. I have
to say the longing for the dead
to rise again fills me with deep
sorrow, that melancholy joy
for what has been not to be again
and say sometimes when I take
a bite in a voice barely audible to me,
“This is the day the Lord has made.
Rejoice.” And can barely swallow.
-Byron Hoot
The rain is eighteen inches or so on the porch
edge. By my calculus of rainfall, a light one
last night. Is there never a calculus in our
attempt to understand what we see and feel
and think? Dreams, off-hand prophecies,
the Freudian slips of life. We collect and sift
the collected and discarded elements of our lives
in hope to see a pattern, a proof of life lived.
We are all artist trying to make the pieces fit
or better yet see where they have fitted in
but not without a sense of wonder
of how now came to be now
by what we’ve done, what was done and
how the two now seem as one.
-Byron Hoot
I throw a slightly baited hook
into memory wanting something
to appear but not too big almost
certain I’d prefer such a memory
to get away and refuse me the chance
to bring it in. There are things in the past
too big for a morning like this to hold
so I have used a small piece of bait
of remembering to lure a moment
or two to me: a remembered song,
a whiff of perfume, a woman passing
casting a memory. Some moment that doesn’t
hold gain and loss, a blues riff of the heart,
love held and lost. . . . I’m beginning to
think I don’t have any other moments
that gave what these did. Reel my line in,
know I don’t need to bait the past at all:
what will come will come.
Once again remember it’s better to receive
than to ask for what I don’t need.
I think I’ll just float on this stream.
-Byron Hoot
In the repertoire of life, repeat performances
are never given. Improvisation is the aesthetic,
variations on a theme. Beginnings
in the realm of moments forever ending.
“Once upon a time,” echoing throughout
eternity. Calls for, “Play it again” are heard
but never repeated. Even our memories
change over time, one thing changing another.
I could carry a sign – The Life and Times of Byron
Hoot – and know how true and false the story,
how impossible the task of words to catch
experience, how life improvises what I would
otherwise leave out.
-Byron Hoot
I am riding the wind, surveying the damage
of the storm as if I’m a bird caught on the wind
currents handed off like a baton in a relay race
whose finish line gets no closer. I see I am surveying
my life by wind and breeze, by close to the earth,
by above the trees in an instant of time and the perspective
changes. The damage and what’s left untouched immense.
The reasons for both unknown, the causality for each
equation unfinished on a blackboard.
This flight is hardly god-like though it suggests an
omnipresent point-of-view. I remind myself I am human
regardless of what I see, what I surmise has happened,
what dreams may still come to me. What I need are nights
of deep sleep; this riding the wind is not as easy
as it would seem to be. So often the spirit is broken
when things are clearly seen. So often it is made whole.
-Byron Hoot
visit hootnhowlpoetry.com.
I buy Fig Newtons
occasionally. They
are a communion
with that time when Mrs. Heinz
would give them to me when
Dad and Mom, Reverend
and Mrs. Hoot, would call
on her to see how she
was, to listen, to pray,
to leave. And sometimes
half the Fig Newtons would
be eaten by her kids and me.
I’m not certain when I take
a bite I don’t hear, “The body
and blood of life.” We’d walk
across a wooden bridge over
a small stream to get to the car.
The silence inside
as we drove away.
-Byron Hoot
Spare me encounters
With the self-possessed
That if uninterrupted
Use more ‘I’s’ in conversation
Than can be found
In a two-acre potato patch.
-Wayne H. Swanger
I saw it
As it saw me
From its pantry
Hideaway:
A momentary shock,
An uninvited guest,
An inconvenient mutuality,
Co-inhabitants of faded grandeur
Amidst the forest
Finally, face-to-face,
Simultaneous recognition,
Suspense suspended,
Both of us finally knowing
The source of those
Strange, nocturnal sounds
-Wayne H. Swanger
I
Light snow, the temperature at freezing,
a breeze moving the outermost tips
of branches. I sit inside. I look out
to see in like a sorceress casting bones
to read the time not yet here arising
from the past. There are days for remembering
and days for not remembering. Like the scales
of Justice, who knows how they are balanced.
The light is up, the sun hidden. “Like memories,”
I say, reach for my coffee, look outside
again wondering where I’ve put my talisman.
II
Who has not felt that treble hook
of the past sink into a moment, drag you back
into the vortex of what was and then that sense
of drowning? And who has not escaped?
Sputtering, fighting for air, saying,
"Never again!" finding a pearl in the center
of your fist.
-Byron Hoot
