June 2020
Bio Note: If I ever doubted it before, this extended quarantine has
shown me how much I love being home and alone. I’m retired from all my paying
jobs and have been writing a poem every day since December 28, 2011. For now,
I’m also making snazzy masks to raise money for a local charity, and it’s a
delight to return to the pleasures of fabric and thread. I live in very rural
central Virginia and don’t leave my wooded property.
Telephone to Another World
On this anniversary of Ivy’s death, I remember the long days of picking colonies from agar, drawing blood from HIV patients while gowned and masked, hardly able to find a vein. I imagined Ivy sleeping on my bed or chewing underneath, eager for my return. Often, I wanted to call her to tell her I’d be home soon. Thirty-six years, and I still miss her more than the dogs who lived with me in the years after. When friends stayed in the condo with her when I flew to New York, I called to check in. They put the phone to her ear so she could hear my voice and I could hear hers. Thirty-six years without magic to bring her back, no phone or clone to resurrect that life. On this thirty-first anniversary of my mother’s death, anniversary of sorrows, I’d like to tell her what she’s missed. In Japan, people call their dead from a garden phone booth on a black rotary dial, whisper the numbers aloud as they place a call to a home washed away in the tsunami. On a Wind Telephone where the veil between worlds is thin, the dead can hear your news of graduations, your purchase of a home surrounded by oak trees, daffodils, iris, perfect haven for a pandemic quarantine. I used to call my mother in New York and then tune her out, let her criticism roll over me without comment, allowed her voice to soothe. Today she’d say, Are you eating well? You need a haircut. April 27, 2020
Overheard
I wanted a large dining table, oval of dark wood— wormy maple with a distressed pine finish-- with a glass top. This one has traveled from its North Carolina factory to my New York house, to a Florida apartment, condo, then house where the dining room looked out on the pool and fuchsia bougainvillea blooming against the cedar privacy fence, and is now in Virginia with a view of shrinking sky as the canopy of red and white oaks try to meet at their crowns. This table has heard the last tense conversations of a marriage, has held up fabric and patterns, witness to poem drafts and secret sharing between friends. Perfect for a buffet of baked eggplant parmigiana, meat balls, stuffed pasta shells, artichokes sautéed with mushrooms and two salads, while it listened to the friendly chatter of the Folk Club. And then, guitars and banjos. It remembers the questions of my sister’s boys before they grew too distant and knew everything, remembers the assembly line of folding, stickering, stamping, for The Florida Book Group’s newsletters for bulk mailings. I leave this table open, large, one placemat for my plentiful, solitary meals, the opposite place with a stack of poetry books, Post-It flags, a pen, and a leather book of handmade papers with a metal clasp for gratitude, joy, my lucky lists.
©2020 Joan Mazza
Editor's Note: If this poem(s) moves you please consider writing to the
author (email address above) to tell her or him. You might say what it is about the poem that moves you. Writing to the author is what builds the community at Verse Virtual.
It is very important. -JL