October 2015
I’m retired from a variety of careers as a medical microbiologist, psychotherapist, seminar leader, and have been a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee. I’m also the author of six self-help psychology books, including Dreaming Your Real Self (Penguin/Putnam), although now I seem to know less than I did when I wrote those books. My poetry has appeared in Rattle, The MacGuffin, Mezzo Cammin, Buddhist Poetry Review, and The Nation. I ran away from the hurricanes of South Florida to be surprised by the earthquakes and tornadoes of rural central Virginia, where I write poetry and do fabric and paper art. www.JoanMazza.com
Unpacked Box
I look in my desk and jewelry box for safety pins,
remember them in the middle drawer of the sewing
cabinet left behind in the last house. No sewing room
in this one— a cardboard box, jumbled contents
of those drawers. Spools of silk thread, pastel ribbons
for a project never started, packets of needles folded
in black paper from Mother’s millinery days.
“I wish she could see me here,” I say aloud, habit
of long solitude. Mother is dead twenty years.
A roll of lace, hand-tatted, but by whom?
“I didn’t make that,” Mother says, snatches it
from my hands. “Someone spent hours of her life
on this.” I leap backward, ready to run. Mother says,
“Can’t you make me a little coffee? Oh, put some
lipstick on. You look like you’re dead.”
-first published at Ouroboros Review, spring 2010
Hibernation
Bears crawl into their dens to sleep,
slowing down their pulse and breathing,
gestating bearishly, relying only
on inner reserves through coldest
months, rather than foraging in snow.
The earth warms.
Knowing the right time to emerge
for nature’s largess, bears awaken,
fatten on berries, shoots, grasses.
Coldness comes again.
Bears crawl into their dens to sleep.
-first published in Red Owl Magazine, Fall 2004
I look in my desk and jewelry box for safety pins,
remember them in the middle drawer of the sewing
cabinet left behind in the last house. No sewing room
in this one— a cardboard box, jumbled contents
of those drawers. Spools of silk thread, pastel ribbons
for a project never started, packets of needles folded
in black paper from Mother’s millinery days.
“I wish she could see me here,” I say aloud, habit
of long solitude. Mother is dead twenty years.
A roll of lace, hand-tatted, but by whom?
“I didn’t make that,” Mother says, snatches it
from my hands. “Someone spent hours of her life
on this.” I leap backward, ready to run. Mother says,
“Can’t you make me a little coffee? Oh, put some
lipstick on. You look like you’re dead.”
-first published at Ouroboros Review, spring 2010
Hibernation
Bears crawl into their dens to sleep,
slowing down their pulse and breathing,
gestating bearishly, relying only
on inner reserves through coldest
months, rather than foraging in snow.
The earth warms.
Knowing the right time to emerge
for nature’s largess, bears awaken,
fatten on berries, shoots, grasses.
Coldness comes again.
Bears crawl into their dens to sleep.
-first published in Red Owl Magazine, Fall 2004
©2015 Joan Mazza