MY MARY
Does the rain have a mother?
Who made the drops of dew?
Out of whose womb came the ice?
She is hardened against her young ones
As though they were not hers.
The face of the deep is frozen.
Cover photo: Anonymous photographer, Palermo, 1924.
Friends who do not fail us
Mary in our hour of
despair. Take not
away from me the small fires
I burn in the memory of love.
-JOHN WIENERS
The maiden language all over.
-ZORA NEALE HURSTON
My chapbook, DARK WHITE, will be published by
Omertà this month. This little book includes the title piece, "Dark
White," "Small Square" (ars poetica), "Feminine,"
"My Mystic," "My Mary," "Begin in Blue," "Words Looking for a
Street," and "In My Girlish Days" (all of which have been
published in little magazines, some of which can be found elsewhere on this
blog). "My Mary" is an erasure+ of pages from The Book of Job (from a wet Bible I found in the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans, two years after Hurricane Katrina).
I doubt that Omertà ("Omertà, as practiced by the
Mafia: A Code of silence about criminal activity and a refusal to give evidence
to the authorities") has ever published a book more relevant to its
name. Thanks to Les Gottesman for adding my work to a list that includes
chapbooks by Joanne Kyger, Diane di Prima, Donna De La Perriere, Denise Newman,
and many other writers I admire.
DARK WHITE is a
small sampler of work from the full-length memoir with poems, WITE OUT, that Hanging Loose Press will
publish in the spring of 2020. I’m extremely grateful to Robert Hershon, Mark Pawlak, Dick Lourie, and Donna Brook for making a home for a manuscript that was
orphaned after the death of our friend and my first publisher, Bill Corbett.
