“It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.” William Carlos Williams

An award-winning teacher, Josh A. Brewer has taught writing at Purdue, U of Miami, South Carolina, Tennessee State, Ivy Tech, and Aquinas College. His work appears in Poetry Quarterly, Harvard Rev., Southeast Rev., Natural Bridge, RHINO, Booth, Yemassee, and Sargasso. His books are Writers Resist (2017) and When is a Will (2022).

Welcome to the Poets Weave, I'm Romayne Rubinas Dorsey. Josh, what poems have you brought for us today?

1.
When I place talismans
in the sock drawer,
Not believing in saints
Or shrines,

I do not display a picture
That I took with a disposable camera
When you told me you would die.

No lock of your hair, no wedding ring.
Nor What I Cut
From your big toe:
A half-moon you could not reach

 
2.
Dying Mantis

This has nothing to do with a mantis
praying, nor dying,

except she was kneeling,
doing a little sidestep, eyes round, reflecting,

raising your abdomen with a bent thorax
and shaking your curled left legs.

Look—she became you.
Transmigrated I suppose.

I moved the blue bucket
to block the sun—watched you writhe,
turn brown as the porch,
leafy green wings still.

Later I watered you
as if you were a plant.

You moved a bit
lifting her bald head one last time.

 
3.
This Week in Northern Ireland
“Martin McGuinness says Queen handshake 'highly symbolic'”
BBC Headline, 28 June 2012

Streets flooded.
A queen shook hands with a republican.
They looked at art.
Some people spread out a flag on a hillside with the sign
“Ériu is our queen.”

One of these people was beaten
and escaped by rolling down the hill.
In town, some kids threw petrol bombs at policemen.

Our toddler son, Polish and American, said
“Q is for queen.
She will come to Belfast,
and she will shake my hand and follow me.”
He looked at the coastal cliffs from a bus and saw
gorse, heather, knobby trees, and linksland.


4.
The Bakeries of Warsaw
had cold stones for three weeks in 1939. Kielbasa disappeared from the butcher’s shop, cabbage from the market. No food left in the house for your mother, little Rachael. Vinegar in the cabinet, salt. Rationing meant nothing in the streets. Food stamps were useless.
Your grandmother stood in a snowy queue, a food line. An icicle formed slowly on your mother’s tiny nostril. When they got to the front of the line, the store had one can of baking powder left on the shelf, more vinegar and salt. Not even pickles.
So, when sourdough leaven finally filled the cold air, your grandmother left with two burlap sacks, no matter what the radio advised. She would not be late, she said. “Stay here. Lock the door. Don’t let anyone else in.”
That same air (wafting baked rye notes now, promises) brought the sirens through the window. As the savory sweet rolls, gingerbread, pączki arrived in your mother’s nose, in her mind, almost on her tongue—out on the street, four blocks away—a single continuous tone entered your grandmother’s two ears. Then your mother’s. Then the bombs fell and neither heard anything.
Your mother watched out the window until it grew dark. She smelled something novel, burning.
It was not a bakery. She still hasn’t left that apartment, and the new aroma has never left her.

You've been listening to the poetry of Josh Brewer on the Poets Weave, I'm Romayne Rubinas Dorsey.