Press 53 2020/2021 Poetry

Chanel Brenner won the 2021 Press 53 Award for Poetry for Smile, or Else (Judged by Tom Lombardo, Press 53 Poetry Series Editor). She is also the author of Vanilla Milk: A Memoir Told in Poems, (Silver Birch Press, 2014). Her poems have appeared in Rattle, Raleigh Review, New Ohio Review, Duende, Muzzle Magazine, Spry Literary Journal, Barrow Street, Salamander, Spoon River Poetry Review, Literary Mama, and others. Smile, or Else by Chanel Brenner is a moving collection of elegiac poems dealing with the death of Brenner’s six-year-old son, and her and her family's ongoing trek toward healing.

To the Frustrated Mother
in Starbucks with Her
Three-Year-Old Son

Don’t worry. One day he will
stop hitting you when he’s mad,
hands swatting at your face,
like a short-circuited robot.

He will stop throwing himself
on floors, and thrashing
his head like a punk rocker,
when you tell him, No.

Some day he will stop
running outdoors every time
he sees a mangy pigeon,
bobbing along the sidewalk,

leaving you to spill coffee,
and chase him, grabbing
his shirt, just before he steps
into moving traffic.

You probably won’t notice
when he stops. You’ll be
too busy, helping him trace
his uppercase letters, playing

game after game of Roshambo,
listening to his knock-knock jokes.
You’ll be too busy answering
his questions, Mommy,

can I tell you something?
Mommy, can I have gummy bears?
Mommy, who was the first
person on earth?

You probably won’t remember
when he turned three,
till you see another mother
with her three-year-old—

her jaw tense, her hand
clutching his arm,
as he pulls her hair
with his freakishly strong fist.

By then, your son will be standing
in line beside you, ordering
Iced Caramel Macchiato,
his large hands hanging at his sides.

Then, you will remember
him small in your lap,
one hand holding your finger,
the other pointing at a balloon,
Mommy, Boom!

• “To the Frustrated Mother in Starbucks with Her Three-Year-Old Son” first appeared in Rattle

Amy M. Clark is the author of the poetry collection Stray Home (University of North Texas Press, 2010), which was the 2009 winner of the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry and a 2011 “Poetry Must-Read” selection by the Massachusetts Center for the Book. She is co-author with Molly Peacock of the chapbook A Turn Around the Mansion Grounds: Poems in Conversation & a Conversation (Slapering Hol Press, 2014). Her poems have been published in the anthologies Good Poems, American Places (Viking, 2011) and Old Flame: from the First 10 Years of 32 Poems Magazine (WordFarm, 2013), as well as many journals and magazines.

Rounds

He had a gun. He wasn’t a bad man
and in his heart he wished no one harm
although he harbored ill will
toward his first wife, his boss, and a few others.
He had a gun, his father had guns,
and his father’s father had guns.
His was a 9mm Glock. At one time
he also had two rifles, but he gave them away,
one to each of his sons, now young men
who took the rifles to their own homes.

He kept the gun, unloaded, in a case
under a pile of folded t-shirts on a shelf
in the closet of the bedroom he shared
with his second wife. There was
a box of bullets somewhere. They lived
their lives and the gun was a piece of metal
shaped like a gun. They loved each other
not without difficulty. You could say
the gun slept, or hibernated. Or
you might say it lay in wait, fully alert.

He drank and became desperate
to keep hold of his wife, not because
he thought it best for them but because
he couldn’t see another way. Now
he brought the gun from its case.
His wife saw him come down the hall
holding the gun to his head. Even as he did so
he wished the gun back in its case,
even as he knocked her down
and as he took the gun when he fled.

She did not press charges and sat with him
in the detox ward. She looked down
at his shoes, stripped of their laces.
She’d found the box of 50 rounds intact.
You might say this story is not over
because after all the gun has not been fired,
and maybe you’re right. Now the gun
rests in its case in the older son’s home,
in the manner of all weapons,
or in the manner of women and men.

Maureen Oehler DuRant’s cousin in Broken Bow, Oklahoma, died in 2019 at 102, yet her Aunt Mary in Belfast, Northern Ireland, lives on and turned 102 in April, so she believes, perhaps, there is still time, after all, to be a poet. Maureen earned an MFA in Creative Writing with her patient husband’s GI Bill at Queens University of Charlotte and her poetry has appeared in Crosstimbers, Red River Review, Westview, and The Great American Wise Ass Poetry Anthology. She is the co-author of Postcard History Series: West Point, published by Arcadia Press, 2007. She currently serves as the country’s loudest librarian at Lawton High School and teaches at Cameron University.

Sonnets from the Marriage-Impaired:
Don’t Tell Me to Smile

You chide me for a frown, a down-turned lip
that fixes on my face in nothing thoughts.
A few to-dos: plans for our weekend trip,
lamb chops for dinner, soaking out the spots,
a sauce on your blue button-down work shirt.
You want smiles. The deep elevens between
brows cause consternation, what wrong, what hurt
do I suffer? Where must you intervene?
My husband, I wish my face were frozen
like Mona Lisa’s hanging in the Louvre
or Goya’s Isabel. You have chosen
to love flesh. Trust me. Trust me that it’s true.
My scowl is only to say the sky is gray,
not to hang in museums, forever on display.

Ben Greer was born in Spartanburg, South Carolina, on December 4, 1948. He was raised in the magical hamlet of Glenn Springs. He graduated from the University of South Carolina and Hollins University. He published his first novel, Slammer, at twenty-six to rave reviews and went on to publish four others. His first book of poetry was published at fifty-nine. Ben has also written three plays, including Little Tin Gods, produced by Theatre South in 2008. Having taught at the University of South Carolina for thirty-three years, he is retired and divides his time between South Carolina and Maine.

A First Memory

Ripe with sleep
only a car can make,
I hear my father’s voice
like a cat’s breath,
feel his arms
scoop me from
a vinyl seat
in the old Chevy.
I relax
in his embrace
and the doting night.
Feeling, even then, feeling
this is love: carried
towards the windows of home
by the first man to know
me, loose and languid
beneath
the humpty dumpty moon.

Mohja Kahf won the 2020 Press 53 Award for Poetry for her poetry collection My Lover Feeds Me Grapefruit (selected by Tom Lombardo, Press 53 Poetry Series Editor). She has been professor of comparative literature and Middle Eastern studies at the University of Arkansas since 1995. She is author of the novel The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf, two collections of poems, Hagar Poems and E-mails from Scheherazad, and the nonfiction Western Representations of the Muslim Woman: From Termagant to Odalisque. Her writing is available in Arabic, Turkish, Japanese, Italian, German, and French translations. She has won the Pushcart Prize and an Arkansas Arts Council Individual Artist Award. Kahf competed in the 1999 National Poetry Slam on Team Ozarks alongside the late Brenda Moossy. She is a founding member of the Radius of Arab American Writers and has served on the board of the Ozark Poets and Writers Collective in Fayetteville, Arkansas.

My Lover Feeds Me Grapefruit

First he peels the grapefruit
The undulating rind descending fragrant
makes a hanging garden of Ninevah
Next he scrapes off the white
queensbread
making a little mound
of torn lace the knife
wheedling
the little altar growing
till the grapefruit is bald
Then he pulls back the tender membrane
exposing rose-glistening
grapefruit flesh
wet wedges opening
between his fingers
the plate of my thighs shifting slightly
my tongue-tip snatching
pips from his palm
every little morsel containing
the slippery seed holy

• “My Lover Feeds Me Grapefruit” first appeared in Banipal: Magazine of Modern Arab Literature, Issue 12, Autumn

Andrew Rihn is the author of numerous scholarly articles and chapbooks of poetry, including America Plops and Fizzes (sunnyoutside press, 2010) and Song of the Rescue (EMP Books, 2019). He writes a boxing column, The Pugilist, for Into the Void magazine. Revelation: An Apocalypse in Fifty-Eight Fights uses 100-word prose poems to immerse us into the fifty-eight professional fights of Mike Tyson. The voice of an Old Testament prophet shines through the fight commentary, and relates Tyson to a modern-day Elijah—climbing the mountain to do battle, and climbing back down to a world of depression, anxiety, and alienating silence.

Tyson vs. Scaff

Dec 6, 1985
Felt Forum, New York City, New York, U.S.

The ring is a desert on smelted pillars where the devil is both loosed and contained. There is blood on the glove. Mike Tyson, thunderous and poised in the ring, remembers that soon he will have to climb back down again. The mountains of the poets shake and tremble and melt; apocalyptic mountains are spread with flesh. Salt and sulfur and sins like mist. Reflections of demons, echoed voices ricocheting off the backs of teeth. Every demon was once an angel, after all. Blessed opponent, salvage. This is how we think of the descent. This is also how we climb.

• “Tyson vs. Scaff” first appeared in The Hunger

Faith Shearin is the author of six previous books of poetry: The Owl Question (May Swenson Award); The Empty House; Moving the Piano; Telling the Bees; Orpheus; Turning (Dogfish Poetry Prize); and Darwin’s Daughter. She has received awards from Yaddo, The National Endowment for the Arts, The Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her poems were featured in the syndicated column “American Life in Poetry” by former U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser and several times on The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor. Her newest collection of poems is Lost Language: Poems.

Amelia Earhart, beside
Her Final Fire

If it’s true she died on Gardner Island, her Lockheed Electra
lost to the Pacific after slipping off a reef, her navigator

fatally injured, then there must have been a final night
on the beach when she sat in the sand, roasting a rat

perhaps, beside a fire, as giant crabs dropped coconuts
from the trees; maybe trade winds blew from the east

while, behind her, sharks circumnavigated a blue lagoon.
Amelia must have realized there would be no rescue

and when she laid down in the sand maybe she
gazed into the sky: a place she could

no longer reach, that black cup of longing
pricked with light.