The first time you publish work in Poetry, you eventually convince yourself it was just a fluke. Or at least that’s what I did. But the second…
“Soundbox” appears in the September 2023 issue of Poetry. You can read the poem online here, and hear me read it, too.
.
.
.
Apples, key to so many myths and old stories, were common in southern Illinois. Fruit from orchards there was shipped by rail into nearby cities. Before my time, things changed away from local produce, and then again with supermarkets. But the apple is still one of the first things you see when you step into a grocery store.
“To possess the apple, you must take it from a tree you’ve planted” appears in the Spring/Summer 2023 issue of Ecotone, and you can read it here on Verse Daily.
.
.
.
Some poems seem to belong together. Not because they deal with the same concept or story. Not because they use similar images or forms. Not because they have the same voice or point of view or were created at the same time. No deliberate plan or attempt. Instead, they seem to fall in alongside each other, like people who meet and enjoy each other’s company and enrich each other in that space. As we used to say, they click.
“Preservative” and “Nectar” fit in the Spring/Summer 2023 issue of Salamander.
.
.
.
To write a sonnet used to be an assignment, and not one I did well. These past years, it seems to happen whether I want it to or not.
Does that mean I’ve internalized the form? Am I in a rut or in a groove? I try to give myself space to explore whatever comes these days. I find myself there.
“Hide” appears in the Spring 2023 issue of Cottonwood.
.
.
.
Names fascinate me. When I was little, I loved to listen to any stories about names that people would share with me. I would read maps and imagine stories about the names of the places. Now the Internet offers all sorts of opportunities to learn more about names and their origins and histories and realities, not just names given to people and places but the plants there, and their parts and habits. I like to get lost doing so and realize connections when least expected.
“Terminal Spikes,” a double sonnet, appears in the 2022 issue of Louisville Review.
.
.
.
Cursive was a lesson at school, but I wanted to learn it at home ahead of time because it seemed adult and artful. My father had been hit across the knuckles for bad handwriting in school, so he didn’t feel comfortable teaching cursive to me. But I was eager, so he compromised by showing me how to make simple lowercase letters, like l and i and m, and I played at drawing them and making words from them, like lemon and lime, in the margins of his notebook.
“Graphite” appears as the last piece in the 2022 issue of Jelly Bucket.
.
.
.
Some poems find space for publication right away. Some take time. Others disappear and resurface again.
“Magnetic Compass” and “Star Compass” are poems I had given up on. I wrote them early the summer of 2014. I submitted them for years, then moved on to submit other work instead. When I rediscovered “Sunset Cue,” the poem that inspired my collection of the same name, I also found them. I decided to give them another chance and started sending them out again. They open the 2022 issue of Poetry South.
“Magnetic Compass” explores the ruby-throated hummingbird, “Star Compass” the indigo bunting. Both birds migrate in ways we are just beginning to understand, and both have been a vivid part of my summers since I can remember.
.
.
.
“Snake, Not Serpent; Hopelessness, Not Despair” is one of my very favorite poems. It breaks all sort of rules that well-meaning folks gave me about language and construction and art. It faces prejudices I had about half of myself, ones I had internalized so well that I didn’t realize I could think otherwise. And now, when I find I’m holding my tongue, not because I’m listening (a good and right space) but out of subservience and fear and shame and doubt, it reminds me why, and shakes me loose of that grip.
This sonnet first appears in Issue 22 of The Common (yes, I am behind in posting), then in my latest book Sunset Cue, and you can read it online via the link above here.
.
.
.
The sonnet is a form I fall into. Some are ragged. Some are sonnet-&-a-halfs or doubles. Some are what might be considered standard. I find myself in those when the subject is hard to handle. As is the case in this one. “Movement” appears in the October 2021 issue of Cumberland River Review.
Looking back on this poem, I thought it may have come out of the loneliness of the pandemic. But my notes say it’s from the summer of 2019. The sadness in the heart of our country is nothing new. Facing hard things is part of moving to a better way. Sometimes, though, that’s hard to do.
.
.
.
All kinds of gardens have been part of my life. We live near Garvan Gardens. I went to Missouri Botanical Gardens often. My parents created gardens no matter where we were. That must root in the garden my grandmother grew, the gardens I find in old photos of her family. One of my father’s earliest and few memories was of the fig his grandmother Lucrezia had planted behind the brownstone his grandfather built in Brooklyn.
My father thought his father’s parents were shepherds in Calabria. Through research, I now realize it was his mother’s mother. She raised him so his parents could work, and she must have been the one who told those stories, as records show she moved through the countryside, tending animals and living off the land with her family. The place they left is a now a gateway to Sila National Park.
Today when I looked back on my poems in the Winter 2021-2022 issue of Kestrel, what seemed different at first, I realized wasn’t. “Lips” considers how a girl’s body is landscaped versus what it really might be. “Cultivar from the West” moves from the origin of the Arkansas black apple to consider what we impose on a garden versus what we might realize in one. This sonnet was featured on Verse Daily, and I hope you might draw close to its earth there.
.
.
.
Angie Macri 