April 2016
Kate Delany
delany@rowan.edu
delany@rowan.edu
I live in New Jersey, just outside Philly, with my husband, Seth, my seven year old daughter, Samara, three year old son, Felix and our black cat, Potato Chip. In addition to writing and teaching college English, much of my time is spent gardening, sewing, and making and selling herbal remedies via my little online store, Tigers Eye Botanicals. My publications include a chapbook, Reading Darwin, published by Poets Corner Press, and a full length collection, Ditching, is forthcoming via Aldrich Press.
Starting Seeds
velvety as cake mix, seed starting medium,
peat moss and pulverized pine bark so satisfying
to run my hands through, turning over the golden glints
of vermiculite, soft as snow but better, warmer,
far more hospitable than soil. what wouldn’t want
to hunker down here and thrive, dream? I think
of my children in the ball pit, submersing themselves,
all smiles. that’s what I dream, tucking in the larger seeds,
lozenges of squash and cukes, whorled beads of nasturtium,
“poor man capers.” others—basil, romaine—are specks
more filigree than eyelashes, tough to commandeer
without tweezers. then foxglove, carrot—just a wish really,
something you have to trust you just made, like a poem.
A Snapshot of the Fureys
|
Mary and Rodger Furey, ca.1940
They make a severe photograph, those first ones over,
old family ghosts burnt into paper in a slurry
of consternation and gelatin silver. Lockstep, they scowl
down the photographer and eternity, a string of sepia
rowhomes hanging behind their heads like a dirty
paper snowflake chain. He hooks his arm around her waist
as if fastening oarlocks. She’s tightening her jaw. Lean
and drawn, they look dressed for church but who knows?
No date or location marked on the back by a careful hand.
Mothballed in their frame, they stand off-kilter, though
ramrod straight, leaning in towards the picture taker,
and perhaps towards us, the generation that will have to
invent them from just this one image and the intimacy
of a census report. Among the stingy breadcrumbs left
by those they raised: “they only said they didn’t come steerage.
And they were never going back.”
old family ghosts burnt into paper in a slurry
of consternation and gelatin silver. Lockstep, they scowl
down the photographer and eternity, a string of sepia
rowhomes hanging behind their heads like a dirty
paper snowflake chain. He hooks his arm around her waist
as if fastening oarlocks. She’s tightening her jaw. Lean
and drawn, they look dressed for church but who knows?
No date or location marked on the back by a careful hand.
Mothballed in their frame, they stand off-kilter, though
ramrod straight, leaning in towards the picture taker,
and perhaps towards us, the generation that will have to
invent them from just this one image and the intimacy
of a census report. Among the stingy breadcrumbs left
by those they raised: “they only said they didn’t come steerage.
And they were never going back.”
©2016 Katie Delany