cavanaughpoet@gmail.com
Bio Note:
I grew up in a red brick row house in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, with neighbors always close at hand. Irish coal mining relatives lived about an hour north, and the family frequently left the city to visit these immigrants in the mountains. There, I encountered enormous trees turning red and gold in fall, cavorting beagles, bee hives, introversion, tin cans strung up in trees, long abandoned Fords, a boy turned to stone, shotguns, and strip mining. My mother is a poet, so I grew up with poetry, and felt that someday I, too, would be a poet, even though I went on to earn an M.S. in Urban Planning. I am a high school teacher and poetry club advisor. I began writing poetry seriously, about ten years ago, when my children were grown. I have published three chapbooks and my poems have appeared in various periodicals and anthologies, such as Gyroscope Review, Switched-On Gutenberg, and Stoneboat Literary Journal. I am English Language editor for Poetry Hall: Achinese and English Bilingual Journal. My work has received awards from The Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets, Wisconsin People and Ideas, The Wisconsin Writer’s Association, The Poetry Society of Michigan, Milwaukee Irish Fest, and others. Firestone Feinberg and I were both Breakdancing Club advisors. We enjoyed sharing our stories, and he always happily accepted my breakdancing poems. I felt so proud when he invited me to become a Contributing Editor. I miss Firestone, and am so happy that Jim Lewis is now the editor and that he works so tirelessly to keep our community healthy and vibrant. |
Reception for the Graduating Class of 1969
Nana and I trailed after mom
with our cups of pink punch
mom’s almost-black hair flowed in waves
from her widow’s peak
she might as well have been one
her brown eyes seemed to look inward
rather than outward
the kind of eyes to read an Emily Dickenson poem.
Nana drove us home
while mom cried in the back seat
she graduated on Sunday
and I graduated
thirteen years later
my mother my mother (and me)
my mother
who announced she’d rather I be creative
than get good grades
who couldn’t go on to graduate school
at the University of Massachusetts
because of me
but who baked gingerbread on winter days
especially the year
I was bullied
mom who read stories to me every night
entire novels as I pressed against her
along with our cats
Ishmael and Queequeg
who the next morning told me to go out and play
not to bother with shoes
to get mud-splattered
to collect fool’s gold, horse chestnuts
and scarlet leaves in fall
because she said red leaves
were better than yellow
that’s what they had in New England she said
miles and miles of red leaves
every fall
Finding Frozen Peas
I left home and ate stale donuts
from a trashcan
I followed a trail of fool’s gold
to an off-kilter manhole cover
pried it open the rest of the way
I sensed black stallions
nosing silently towards me
down dark tunnels
this seemed like a world
for men so I moved on
I ate wild garlic grass
with dirt on my fingers
my blunt fingernails pinched violets
I sucked on their petals
tasted a single drop of nectar
over and over
gift of the honeysuckle
in late mid-morning
I found a red-haired boy
we played cards for a while
and summoned the dead
later I begged for broken bits
from the side door of a pretzel factory
I found torn out pages
of a used magazine
and laughed at the naked
I peeled off my clothes
deep in the dump
climbed in the claw foot
to bathe in the sun
I launched
from a rope into the white roil
spilling from a half-broken dam
I hiked trails through woods
that slow dried my t-shirt and shorts
there were long steel tracks
where I placed a penny
I had my breath flattened out
by the bearing down metal
of the great locomotive
I fondled a snake I found
on the rocks
ate purple mulberries
at the edge of the alley
I climbed the branches
of the thick old tree
when I found my way home
I smelled boiling water
my mother in the kitchen
with her frozen peas
rattling on the stove
Sky God
I was a boy for about an hour
and a half
in the green shorts
and white blouse
of Furnace Hills Girl Scout camp
after the first night
of headache hot dogs
and marshmallow goo
we girls became small
about our business
of treading wooded pathways
telling ourselves stories
we believed the treetops
when they claimed to dance
of their own volition
the breeze barely involved
I became a boy
when I was forced
to ask a Brownie to the ball
and present her with a flower
made of tissue
that was how I turned Sky God
strode wide into my mastery
I acquired reason
began to see that the earth
would be undone from above
the Brownie sensed this
and was afraid
I looked down and pitied her
wanted to protect her
even as my mind soared
to the spiraling stars
and deep into the milky spine
of our galaxy
rising up on my toes
I perched atop our far-flung
fingertip home
next morning birds crowded
their insistent voices
into the open flap of the tent
to tell of the blue bowl
congealing into its comforting
mask of day
enveloping an enclosed
and finite world
atmosphere unraveling
even then
sometimes I almost remember
the way my mind
soared above my feet
with Brownie by my side
she’s become the word
I forget
as I near the end of a sentence