COMMONPLACE Volume I, Issue I
Spring 2025
Hudson Valley Writing Project
“Delicate Arch” cover photography by Emily Frawley
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To all writers who shared a bit of their writing.
To all writing that refracted a bit of our world.
To all readers who take time to imagine.
Join us in a toast to Commonplace . This is ours!
Thanks to the generous foundation supporting this project for their belief in our vision and unwavering commitment to honoring teachers’ voices.
And special thanks to Sarah Wheeler who designed and edited this first edition and to Meg Roberts for her steady role in advising the process.
Tom Meyer, Director Hudson Valley Writing Project
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Contents
It’s About Attention? Meg Davis Roberts........................................................................... 6
(teacher) (human)* michelle g. bulla and Christine Zandstra..............................................7
I’m From Jennifer Howard.............................................................................10
The Lesson Plan Mary Sawyer................................................................................. 12
Dear Parkinson's Samantha Mossman....................................................................... 22
Saying Goodbye Kim Ellis........................................................................................25
Defying Dysfunction: A Dance Toward Divine Destiny Jess Oakley...................................................................................29
My Linguistic Artifact Harriett Meyer............................................................................... 30
The Ones You’ll Never Forget Caitlyn Robillard.............................................................................35
A Layered Story Denise Maltese...............................................................................37
Cows and Modern Art at Storm King Arts Center Carolyn Herman-Loh.......................................................................42
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A Random Poem That Is Only Part of the Story Edward Gold..................................................................................45
Homesick Ann Marie Woolsey-Johnson.............................................................50
A Work of Art Sarah Wheeler...............................................................................52
Fork in the Road 2013 Alicia Hudak..................................................................................56
Lessons from a Willful Five-Year-Old Janet Bisti.....................................................................................59
Barbados to New York Laura Lenox Kufner........................................................................ 64
Bloom Where You Are Planted Olga Choedron...............................................................................70
To the Gardeners of La Finca de Sur Community Garden Amy Estersohn...............................................................................75
Etta Katelin Grande...............................................................................77
Birthday Party Olana O’Connor..............................................................................79
A plea Tom Meyer....................................................................................83
Contributors.................................................................................. 85
Call for Submissions.......................................................................90
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Sandra C isneros
“While not everyone is an author, everyone is a writer and I think that the process of writing is deeply spiritual and liberatory."
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It’s About Attention?
By Meg Davis Roberts
for the class of 2018
I ask them what a poem is And they tell me a story about modern art It looks like nothing, you see , until the Velvet stanchion ropes in a perfect braid And gilded ornament curves its corners I want to say the poem is not nothing They’re being obstinate, postmodern It’s like that block of Swiss cheese with hair in it! Stylize some trash and put it in a case! They’re spirited now, this post-lunch crowd
Seniors, despite themselves, debating the Boundaries of the form, their voices
Weaving to a dense, purply silk And I see the chalice for the face So, you’re saying—
Rubin’s vase, named after Danish psychologist Edgar Rubin in 1915, features the silhouette of a vase in black and the profiles of two faces in white looking inward. The image illustrates the figure-ground principle, which explains how the brain switches its focus in order to perceive two different views.
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(teacher) (human)*
* Inspired by and modeled after “(citizen)(illegal)” by José Olivarez
By michelle g. bulla and Christine Zandstra
I.
Alarm clock blasts between 4:30 and 5:00 am (teacher) making me feel my zombie state (not human) Shower (human) or workout (motivated human) Sometimes slam the snooze (human) Until the lateness of the hour becomes minutes I cannot spare (teacher)
Hot water (inner grandma) or coffee (teacher life) in hand, drive (human) Arrive on time (teacher) not late (human)
Check emails (teacher) (human) Make the daily to-do list (human) (worker) Manage plans (teacher), text mom / friend / colleague (grateful human) Make sure materials are laid out (organized teacher) Try to predict whether I’ll need coffee later (tired human) (teacher) Enter Poetry class (teacher) excited for today’s adventure (human) Hopeful for eager voices (teacher-human) Curious to read and talk and write and share (writer) (poet) (teacher) Did this go as hoped? Did we meet my objectives? I reflect and regroup, reach forward or retrench Do we need more time? (human students) And how can I manage it (teacher trying to be human) Without getting lost in endless extensions - Tendrils of intentions - Swirling distension of relentless compassion (human trying to stay human)
Three hours to go (human)
II.
Fifty-something woman (human) is responsible for teenagers’ literacy (teacher). Is the woman more human or teacher?
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Place the woman in a classroom (teacher) If the woman stays there till 5 pm (teacher), does she become less human? The woman is tired (teacher) (human) She makes supper, engages with family, and tackles infinite household tasks (wife) (mother) (human)
She goes to bed early and late (teacher) (human)
She has interrupted sleep and guilt over Ungraded essays (teacher) Lessons unplanned (teacher) Feedback ungiven (teacher) The children (teacher) (human)
The woman realizes it’s too much (human) and not enough (teacher) The teacher breathes (human). Reaches out (human)
III.
Two teachers collaborate (inspiration) until the idea feels rich, layered, complex, compelling Until the fire in their bellies feels both fueled and sated
If the humans work together, maybe they have a chance (teacher + human = being)
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O ctavia Butler “First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you’re inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won’t. Habit is persistence in practice.”
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I’m From By Jennifer Howard
I’m from sunlit small city days and kitchen window mountain views.
I’m from church choir anniversaries and crisp plaid dresses, bright white socks (lace trimmed of course)
atop
Buster brown black patent leather shoes, and from daddy’s quarter change, to spend after church.
I’m from early morning apple picking dewdrops, And long roads, up steep-steep hills, a-round never ending mountains of fresh air.
I’m from Saturday morning chores, with music everywhere, Pine Sol, Murphy’s Oil Soap, and Mops,
Tito Puente
outside
drum summoning
connection
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I’m from snowy - ice cold winter days, And hot, humid death valley summers.
Italian bakeries everywhere, factories dotted all over town, The Jackson 5 playing every day.
I’m from Love and Safety, Bible verses & Family Devotion,
and Donuts on the way home from church, as I look off to the mountains all around us.
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The Lesson Plan By Mary Sawyer
It's Tuesday, September 11, 2001, and I’m off to campus to teach my 8:00 am class for future English teachers. Tuesdays are busy on-campus days for me, but today will be different. I’m leaving work early to pick up my cousin Suzana whom I have not seen in several years. She's coming to the east coast for work and making a detour to the Hudson Valley to see us. Yesterday, I put fresh sheets on her bed in the guest bedroom, which doubles as my home office. I usually work on my computer after putting the boys to bed, but I am taking tonight off. I’ve got the wine chilling in the fridge and hamburgers ready to grill. As I step from my parked car and walk toward campus, I breathe in the cool air and silky blue sky. Now I must shift my thoughts to the 3-hour class I am about to teach. The syllabus shows that today’s focus is “lesson planning,” a skill that is the source of great anxiety for students. They will all be expected to produce daily lesson plans in their student teaching placements next semester, and today’s class will show them exactly how to do it. At least, this is what the syllabus says and what I had gamely announced at the end of last week’s class. I have a Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction but I am still struggling with how to teach lesson planning. As a high school English teacher, I taught from instinct and creative passion. My lessons were commonly crafted in the late night hours while reading student papers. Or sometimes a half-formed lesson plan would spring into shape during my morning shower. One of my colleagues once told me that in her first teaching position, her principal required that every Friday she submit her lesson plans for the following week. I would not have been able to hold a teaching position in that school much past Labor Day. Lesson planning requires concrete sequential thinking and deductive reasoning, both in short supply to my drifty, random-abstract mindscape. A lesson plan generally asks for the day’s objective, using a “Students will be able to do X” format. Administrators will expect the X to be stated in observable, measurable terms. When asked for their objective in teaching a literary text, most soon-to-be English teachers will say that they wish for students to appreciate it, but appreciation is difficult to measure. What does “appreciation” look like? Sound like? What skills are needed to appreciate literature? These questions masquerade as straightforward. I try not to overthink. My own life is a swirl of conflicting priorities, and my mind is unharnessed, untamed. I reach for my journal at all hours to contain the seepage. In the middle of the night, I jot down the worries that prevent me from being able to go back to sleep. When I am coding transcripts for a
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research project, soon I’m not coding but am searching for children’s summer camps or pricing plane tickets to visit family during the winter holidays. Yesterday, I was getting estimates on repairing our in-ground swimming pool which was built in the 1960s and needs replastering. My brain is associative, not linear. My own high school English teachers required that we recite Shakespeare. I doubt they thought much about what they wanted their students to accomplish with these recitations, but I can report that the effect can be long lasting. Here we are, a quarter of a century later, and I can still unspool Hamlet’s innermost struggle as if I were sitting in the recitation chair next to Mrs. Schroeder’s desk:
To be, or not to be, that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them. To die: to sleep; No more; and by a sleep to say we end The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation Devoutly to be wish'd.
Hamlet’s soliloquy has braided its way through my mind’s murky caverns, bumping into my rising ineptitude and my struggles to stay on top of things.
I long to be free from the thousand natural shocks .
I pity these students that I am their teacher for lesson planning. I can barely arrive to class on time, let alone pass as someone who is a sequential thinker who can help them write the perfect lesson plan. One of the primordial rules for lesson planning is that a teacher should abandon a plan when circumstances dictate it. A plan for students to paraphrase Hamlet’s speech must be tossed if a snow delay dramatically shortens the class period. Or maybe a plan should be abandoned if planes fly into buildings on a bright September day . . . The future teachers and I begin our lesson on lesson planning. As typical, at 9:30 am we take a bathroom break. I stay in the classroom. Students begin to come back in. They tell me something happened. The Dean’s secretary is listening to the radio. A plane has hit one of the Twin Towers. I imagine the confused pilot of a single-engine Cessna—what a stark ending to a life. No, two planes have hit the Twin Towers. Perhaps a deliberate attack. Planes attacking? A version of a Charlie Brown comic strip comes to mind—Snoopy as the Red Baron dodging rounds of flak, wearing his aviator cap, goggles, and windblown scarf . . .
“No,” my students exclaim. “These are big airplanes, jets. A big explosion.”
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How odd.
My campus is 90 miles north of the Twin Towers.
I look out the window. Our classroom is in Old Main Building, the heart of the historic campus, dedicated in 1907. This morning we are the only inhabitants on the 3rd floor, our classroom a glowing orb perched high above the grassy quad.
I look toward the south. Do I see smoke?
No, the sky is a majestic blue.
From the classroom window in the front of the building I look across the facade toward the ginkgo tree which grows just outside my office window.
She is a magnificent courtesan, her fan-shaped leaves and arching branches provide a steady, graceful presence to my afternoons as I respond to an endless queue of email messages and marshall forth the optimism needed to draft research proposals and revise manuscripts.
Where is my leafy companion? Is she still there?
Yes.
Regal. Glowing.
Her leafy mantle shimmers on this glorious September day. My students are settling back into their seats. They have different reactions.
One student, John, blurts out that he thinks it is “cool.”
“What do you mean?” asks Kathy, a student sitting next to him.
“Planes flying into buildings!”
John is about 20 years old. He likely still lives in a room with band posters on the wall.
I keep my face still, hiding my reaction. Yes, I am taken aback by his admission, but internally I sense a disquieting consilience. This shocking event has temporarily relieved me of my focus on teaching lesson planning and my deep dive into fraudulent feelings.
“I don’t think it is cool at all,” says Kathy. Her voice is sharp. “People are dying.”
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I recognize the maturity of Kathy’s response. After all, she is married and an adult.
According to my students, some classes are going to the Lecture Center, which is broadcasting the event. Do my students wish to join them? We discuss. Our syllabus shows that next week we move on to the topic of unit planning, which assumes an ability to create daily lesson plans. Their unit plan is due in three week’s time. The students want to continue with our lesson on lesson planning. I agree with them—what is the use? What has happened has happened. The rest is just spectacle. I would rather read about this event in tomorrow’s New York Times than allow for us to be pulled, like moths to flame, into the Lecture Hall with its 12-foot screen. No one is visibly upset. I’m not upset either, at least not publicly. But the instant I direct my students toward the lesson, my sister Kate’s face and her funny “duck-foot” walk flash through my mind. It’s still hard for me to imagine that this baby of our family is now a corporate attorney working in a skyscraper just across from the Twin Towers.
Could she be dead?
Horror uncoils like a cobra from deep inside my solar plexus
I will call her from my office as soon as class ends.
My practical mind assumes control, but I can’t block the sound of a menacing hiss.
“Do any of you have family or friends who work in the Twin Towers area?”
No one does.
I do not mention my sister to my students.
I think about the last time I saw Kate. It was only a few weeks ago. I took a rare day off and met her in her office, high up in a tower overlooking New York’s harbor. It was the first time I had been there—and I was eager to experience for myself the swanky cafeteria that she endlessly raved about. After a lunch of smoked salmon, cheesecake, and self-served cappuccinos, we went to her office by stepping in the elevator and gliding up two floors. The gleaming brass railings and library-like quiet were so different from my own office, with its torn linoleum flooring and the continual comings and goings of students and colleagues. If this were my workspace, I would have the luxury of sinking into my research projects undisturbed. Maybe those manuscripts I had started would be finished by now.
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We stood in front of her office window where we could see the Statue of Liberty. We saw a speedboat, called The Beast, blasting a load of tourists through the harbor. We laughed at the boat’s rollicking antics, decorating the harbor with a foamy white wake. Kate declared she would take the boys out on that boat next summer. Maybe I would join them? I wish I could say yes, but I was always so far behind in my work. From our rosewood paneled perch I imagined having a life as an efficient scholar who could easily take a day off to rocket around the Goddess of Liberty on a speedboat with Kate and my boys. My students are shifting in their seats. They want to learn about lesson planning. We can learn more about this plane crash in about an hour, when class is over. But what if this very second Kate is fighting for her life? Or what if she is dead? How about her husband, who works in the Federal Reserve, just a few short blocks from the Twin Towers? How will I live with myself if I discover that I was teaching the rudiments of lesson planning while they were dying? And how could they be dying on this perfectly glorious day? My students and I sink into the world of teaching literature. We enjoy multiple readings of a poem and consider various methods for helping young people create personal meaning from it. We discover that a single poem can spark a multitude of excellent lessons, each reflecting a teacher’s goals and students’ learning needs. To close the class, I review a standard lesson plan format and several variations, encouraging students to experiment.
The tension from my anxious preparation has now melted into a relaxed glow.
I pack my papers into my briefcase and remember I must soon meet Suzana’s train. But there is also this plane thing. And Kate. I walk to my office and try calling her, but she is not answering. I quickly pack up my briefcase and head out to my car so I am not late for Suzana’s train. As I drive to the station, the radio informs me that all train service has been suspended. I consider heading back to the office and recouping some of this “found” time. But I am almost halfway home and feeling unsettled. When I pull into our driveway, I see my husband’s car. I learn that everyone has been sent home, including our children who soon race up our driveway excited to see that both mom and dad are home. They have not been told why they were sent home early. The day quickly becomes a strange twilight zone. Our mayor’s husband—last seen near the World Trade Towers—has disappeared. The train station’s parking lot remains full of cars—their owners may never return. Finally, we are able to reach my sister and her husband, who tell how they sheltered with others in the basement of the Federal Reserve, including a confused Japanese tourist pushing his baby in a stroller when the Federal Reserve security officers pulled him in from the sidewalk just ahead of a billowing cloud of debris. Automatic doors
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then sealed the whole building shut.
Woosh. Thunk.
Silence.
Deep in Manhattan’s bedrock, their group stood protected by the thick metal walls of the vault and its six thousand tons of gold bars. Eventually, Kate and her husband walked home, joining the dazed throngs on the Brooklyn Bridge. Suzana’s Amtrak train had stopped and all passengers were required to disembark in a small town about an hour north of Poughkeepsie. She then found a “Rent-a-Wreck” car and made her way to our house. The next day, Suzana and I drive towards the Shawangunk mountains and hike along the trail circling Lake Minnewaska. Just like the day before, the sky is sparkling blue. The sun filters through the trees and brightens our leafy path. We stop at a ledge and look out over the valley. Before us stretches a leafy mosaic of gold, orange, and red. Out beyond are the Catskill Mountains, a lavender-hued silhouette of peaks and valleys.
Birds are singing.
Everything is the same, and everything is different.
I’ve often thought back to my choices on this day. Did I fail as a teacher? One is supposed to abandon a lesson plan when circumstances dictate.
Other teachers seemed to recognize this and took their classes to the Lecture Center. One is supposed to shape lessons that help students build bridges between the real world and the classroom. Instead, on September 11, 2001, from 8:30 - 11:20 a.m., my students and I erected a thick barrier between what was happening 80 miles south of our sunlit cocoon. We insisted that the outside world could wait until we learned how to plan lessons. To be fair, we had not seen the images or heard any newscasts. My own understanding at the time was that this was an unfortunate accident. I did not understand the hatred our country inspired. I believed we were—on the whole— a global force for good. I knew the criticisms—the hegemonic arrogance and foreign policy deceptions that brought us the Vietnam war, and I knew the history of corruption and support for dictators in Iran and South and Central America— but my gestalt perspective of our country was influenced mostly by its role in World War II and the Marshall Plan—the rebuilding of Europe and Japan and our efforts to protect human rights and democracy. Our public foreign policy goals focused on bringing peace and stability around the globe, including the Middle East where we were facilitating negotiations between Israel and Palestine.
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My students and I preserved a blue-sky day with its shimmering golden ginkgo tree. As we focused on our lesson planning task, who else besides me wondered if someone they loved was fighting for their lives?
Who else was imagining the near-distant place?
Who else was replacing the blue sky with smoke, the sunlight with debris?
Those outside the classroom, those in hijacked airplanes and burning buildings didn't have the chance to ignore the outside world. Suddenly, without warning, they confronted Hamlet’s “not to be.” Some sat on airplanes and made phone calls, alerting authorities and family members to the hijacking. Others in the towers sought fresh air and an escape from the heat and smoke. They pushed toward openings and pried open elevators. They searched for open stairways and lifted debris off fallen colleagues.
Some jumped or fell.
The firefighters who entered the towers were trained for this work. They climbed toward the fire and relayed information. They reassured people who were panicking. They carried those they could evacuate. The passengers of United flight 93 recognized their stark choice and with “let’s roll” courage fought for their lives and for ours. The attacks killed 2,977 people from 93 nations: 2,753 people were killed in New York in and around the World Trade Towers and on American flight 11 and United flight 175; 184 people were killed at the Pentagon and on American Flight 77; and 40 people were killed on United Flight 93 which crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Also killed in the attacks were the 19 Al Qaeda terrorists.
To die, to sleep; To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause
But there was no pause.
The horror quickly turned political. The Bush Administration's nonsensical response: “a war against terror.” In Manhattan, people protested this response. I considered marching alongside them, but crowds and New York City itself felt unsafe to me.
To die—to sleep, No more.
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I knew that Manhattan was covered with posters of the missing, including our mayor’s husband. Our minister volunteered at Ground Zero and referred often to his experiences in his sermons. The New York Times brought “Portraits in Grief” obituaries every morning, which were written to capture the beauty of everyday people before they became “no more.” I also read 9/11 accounts over the years, inspired by the heroic actions of ordinary people. Books such as 102 Minutes by Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn and The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright helped me understand more about the people we lost that morning and the historical context of the terrorism.
I mourned, looking at the photos of the silenced smiling at graduations, at birthday parties, on vacations, and with their friends and families.
Every picture cracked a new facet in the unbearable lightness of being. Christine Lee Hanson looked at me from her bedroom, next to a pile of stuffed animals and against a wallpaper background of giraffes and lions. At two years old, she was the youngest victim of 9/11 and could have easily passed as my own daughter, a baby sister to my two boys who are also of Asian and European parentage. She had boarded United Flight 175 from Boston’s Logan airport with her parents and was on her way to visit her grandparents in Los Angeles. Christine Olender was the 39-year old Assistant Manager of Windows of the World, the restaurant at the top of Tower. She had placed several calls to 911-dispatch, maintaining an airtight professionalism over a surging desperation as she sought help for the restaurant’s staff and their 170 guests.
“We need to find a safe haven on [floor] 106, where the smoke condition isn’t bad. Can you direct us to a certain quadrant?”
No information is available. She is told to wait. In her final call, she asks,
“What are we going to do for air? Can we break a window?”
She gets permission to break a window.
At the 75th floor Sky Lobby in Tower 2, Karen Hagerty had stood in the elevator but allowed others to take her place after hearing them cry out that they had children to care for.
“I have only a horse and two cats,” she joked as she stepped out of the elevator.
She was killed when Tower 2 was struck only minutes after saying those words.
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Welles Remy Crowther had been rethinking his equity trading profession and was considering fire fighting. He was 24-years old. He is remembered by those he rescued as “the man in the red bandana.” He held open the stairwell door and marshaled numerous people to an escape route, carrying one injured woman 17 floors and then going back up stairs to rescue more. He died when the South Tower collapsed. In 2006, he received a posthumous title as an honorary New York City firefighter. John O’Neill, was the 49-year-old Chief of Security for the World Trade Center and a central figure in The Looming Tower, Lawrence Wright’s book about the foundation and roots of al-Qaeda. As a former FBI agent in charge of counterterrorism, O’Neill was an expert on Al Qaeda and terrorism. After setting up a command post, he was last seen walking toward the South Tower.
The rest is silence.
These are Hamlet’s dying words. Is silence our eternity? The lives lost on September 11th still speak to our own. In this sense, they are not silent. Hamlet’s anguish is resurrected with each stumbling sophomore’s recitation—he need not be silent either. For the lives cut short on September 11th, we must point to the holes in the earth and sky where they once lived. We must build a better world in their ashes.
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Arthur M iller
“The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing him, always.”
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Dear Parkinson's By Samantha Mossman
Dear Parkinson’s, Some say that sickness can be only a visitation. But you are no weekend visitor, You are a squatter, an unwanted tenant. You arrived without an invitation Or welcoming open arms, And you overstay your welcome. I wish that this was just A phase, a blip, a hiccup, In the long life my dad had before him.
And here you are insidious visitor, Robbing him of the time he has left.
Dear Parkinson’s, You never thought about the burden that your presence would put upon the shoulders of my sisters, my mom, me. You tricked my mom into your scheme, Turned her into Atlas, and made her hold up your world and sky. You never thought about my sisters, Who have made home far away, from the island The place we grew up and they couldn’t get away from fast enough
You never thought how they would deal With the distance from you, from him. Do you torture them every night with thoughts? Or do they live blissfully unaware? Or are they tortured in ways I cannot know?
Dear Parkinson’s, You never thought about me,
The girl who cried at sleepovers from homesickness And called her mom sobbing to be brought home, To her bed, her stuffies, and her mom’s warm embrace, The TV’s light a beacon to the safety that was just next door,
The one who chose a college close by, So that home was always a possibility, The one who comes home every chance she can
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Because even Atlas gets tired.
Dear Parkinson’s, While you pull wool over my sisters’ eyes, I see you for what you are, A menace, a degenerative disease, A slow and steady march towards a painful destination. They cannot see it or claim not to, The way his words are getting more slurred, The way he forgets simple things, The way he struggles to get off the couch,
Sliding off like a man free falling, Flailing to grab hold of something But coming up empty-handed.
Dear Parkinson’s, It was not enough that you stole my father’s body, Like a parasite, you grew inside him until You had infected all his limbs and muscles. That, Parkinson’s, would have been enough, But you are also devouring his mind, His memory now disappearing in puffs of smoke, A man who cried only at his father’s funeral, Who will now cry at the drop of a hat. You have carved out the man my father used to be, Like a Jack-o-lantern during Halloween, And inhabited him instead.
Dear Parkinson’s, I know you are here to stay, I see your toothbrush occupying space by the sink, I see your unpacked clothes filling the drawers of the dresser, I see your food wrappers appear in our trash And your fingerprint smudges on the fridge. I know you are here to stay, And no amount of bargaining, pleading, or sobbing will change it.
You eat his body and possibly linger inside us too, One day will you come to visit me or my sisters? One day will we become your new host? One day will we become a shell just like dad? One day will you call my body home too?
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Saying Goodbye By Kim Ellis
On the second-to-last day of school, I give my English Language Learners (ELLs) in first grade a farewell party. We have mini-muffins and fresh strawberries. For Anton, I bring a peach pie.
“I never taste pie,” he said a few weeks ago when the word came up in our lesson. “What pie?”
We told him it was made with fruit and a crust. He didn’t forget about the pie. When I told the first graders we’d be having a last day party Anton perked up.
“You bling pie for we eat?” he asked me. Along with ESL classes, Anton is getting help from the speech teacher for his articulation.
“OK, but I probably won’t bake it myself,” I said. At the end of the school year, I am weary, as well as inundated with paperwork. I know for sure that homemade pie is not going to fit into my schedule. On Thursday, Pie Party Day, I give the students some free time to play games or draw. Our daily classes are usually crammed with lessons; there’s so much to learn about speaking, listening, reading and writing in English. On this day, I kick back and have relaxed conversations with my kids. I call them “my kids.” You would probably call them my students. Most of them I’ve known for two years, and one has been with me for three years. In any child, the change from a frightened five-year-old entering kindergarten to a cocky seven-year-old heading into second grade is astounding. But my kids—my kids—make enormous changes. To me, this metamorphosis is as miraculous as whatever goes on inside a chrysalis. Only I get to see it happen in a way that regular classroom teachers don’t, because my job is truly special. I’m a teacher of English as a Second Language (ESL) and my skinny classroom that was once a storage closet is a safe haven for many bewildered, anxious children, children like my Leticia. Three years ago, when she trustingly took my hand and walked with me to our ESL
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classroom, Leticia was tiny, even for a kindergartener. She spoke no English at all and had not attended preschool. She spent her first five years in the constant company of her mother and loving relatives, none of whom spoke English. I remember being struck by the great courage of this small person. How very brave to spend hours in a place where no one speaks your language, where there is not one familiar face. Today, Leticia is a leggy, confident first grader who reads well and converses fluently in English. Many songs and language games later, here she is, able to move back and forth between two languages. How many adult Americans can do that?
As we eat our muffins and pie, I ask what everyone is doing for the summer.
Anton speaks first. “I go to Uklaine. He bounces with happiness and his straight, blond bowl cut hair bounces with him. “I go see my glandma and glandpa.” Alberto of the bright, mischievous chipmunk eyes tell us he is going to Mexico. “I’m going to my uncle house in Puebla. He take care of my dog.” Kenny, whose glasses are always slightly askew, is going to visit his Filipino cousins in California as soon as school lets out. “We’re going to eat crab at the beach! I love crab!” I can’t believe I won’t see my kids again in September. They will be new second graders, learning the layout of a new school. I’m worried about them. How will they manage the tougher curriculum? Will their new teachers help them with unfamiliar vocabulary and explain science concepts? In our ESL classroom, we have a photo album full of pictures of our school year. There’s Noodle Day when we ate with chopsticks while practicing restaurant vocabulary and ordering from a menu. There’s Rice Day when we researched and wrote a book about rice. There are pictures of the kindergarteners dressing for the weather in my family’s oversized raincoats and snow boots. There’s Rani, with her birthday crown, showing her gap-tooth smile. She’ll have her grown-up teeth by September.
On the last day of school, it is tradition for all the teachers to gather on the grassy bank by the bus parking lot. We wave goodbye to the students
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as they leave for the summer. In my seventeen years of teaching second grade, I always felt a sense of relief as the buses honked and pulled out onto the road. During the ten months of school I usually enjoyed my students, but I wasn’t sad to say goodbye until I started teaching ESL. This year I am already missing my kids. This year I see those beautiful children’s faces pressed against the school bus windows and my eyes fill with tears.
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Gabriel Garcia M arquez
"It's much more important to write than to be written about."
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Defying Dysfunction: A Dance Toward Divine Destiny By Jess Oakley I am a seed of Dysfunction and Divorce; a Direct Descendant of chaos of the mind elected to break generational curses and stand alone. I am from a Dismantled family, Decimated by the Destruction of morale competencies. I am Determined and Dedicated to the Diligence of self-reflection Dark days may ensue as I Delve into the realm of healthy possibilities I must be Diligent in recognizing possible blind spots I Divulge in authentic conversations with myself as I set Distinct boundaries I seek Discourse to Dream of happy endings and capable generations I am the Departed; I am Devoted to the creation of Divine experiences with my offspring I saw goodbye to the past in complete Dilution We defy all odds, Dancing under stars, in the rain, together, Delightfully at peace!
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My Linguistic Artifact By Harriett Meyer
Mensch (Yiddish): a person who does the right thing, even when it is hard.
I hear this word in my father’s voice. I see it in the deep lines of his face, the question mark of his nose, the spark and flash of his eyes. To be a mensch is to be a good citizen, self-sacrificing. To me, it speaks a code of ethics that I received in place of religion—to me, being Jewish is less about a vengeful god (“why,” I ask my short-haired aunt, “why no shellfish?” “A vengeful god!” she answers, halfway through a spluttering laugh, her small, ringed hands dancing upward in a shrug between bites of crab) and more about the certainty that this world is all there is, and that how you live in it matters. It is about a diasporic history, Said’s expatriate, strangers in a strange land. To be Jewish for me means never being sure that your currency in the dominant culture isn’t counterfeit. It means: that you can see the edge. I grew up in a small town in Western New York state, where everyone I knew was Catholic. I was doubly odd for my Jewish heritage and for my family’s lack of religious sentiment—it was hard for my peers to wrap their heads around the fact that no, I didn’t go to a church, and no, I didn’t go to a synagogue either. Having inherited white-blonde hair from my dad’s eastern European ancestors and blue eyes from the pilgrims who became my mother’s great-greats, I passed. I still do. My dad grew up in Miami, where his family was white enough that he went to a segregated white high school, but not white enough to belong to the country club (they did not allow Jews until, as my dad loves to tell it, a group of Jewish businessmen bought the country club, a capitalist middle finger to the old order of capitalism). He was active in anti-war protests through college, and, when he became a professor himself, he was vocal on campus, advocating for people who were more vulnerable than him. Every night of my childhood, he sat in a pool of light at his desk, grading his students’ work with care. This is the lesson that I learned from him: that life should be lived for others. This is what it meant to be a mensch . I think of Toni Morrison’s commandment, “if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you
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have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else.” To me, that is what it means to be Jewish. It means to be a fellow traveler.
My dad has never been to Israel. When I ask him about it, he is evasive. He was born in 1947. He is older than the Jewish state. His sister, though, is deeply connected to Israel. She worked as the director of the Jewish Community Center in Washington DC, and while my dad lived in a small upstate New York town where you couldn’t get a decent bagel, she lived at the center of American Jewish life. Her daughter, my cousin, was born Johanna, but moved to Israel when she was in high school, and renamed herself in Hebrew, Yonina. She claimed Israeli citizenship, served in the IDF, married an Israeli. I wonder often about how my dad’s experience diverged from his sister’s—they had the same parents, attended the same reform temple, grew up in a similar time. I traveled to Israel in 2010, after my sophomore year of college. My roommate, her boyfriend, and our friend signed up together for Taglit, or Birthright—an organization that sponsors free trips to Israel for Americans with Jewish heritage. We spent two weeks on a guided bus tour, and two more on our own. I remember breakfast at the Kibbutz, feta, boiled eggs, yogurt, olives. I remember limestone hikes (slippery like soap) and
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limestone buildings with doors of electric sky blue. I remember walking through the Golan Heights, cautioned to stay on the trail, that there were still landmines from the 1967 war. I remember our tour guide, Sarah, pointing across the valley from Misgav Am, “those hills over there, that’s Syria. And you can see from here, a Hezbollah flag in the window.” She showed us—there is the edge. The edge of this place, the edge of this identity, and over there, across the valley, is hatred, harm, violence. I remember Tsfat, the oldest synagogue I’d ever imagined. I remember Shabbat at the Western Wall, Sarah telling us, “Israel is your home, if you want.” I could feel the power of this. Belonging. But the cost was also palpable. I’d debated about whether or not to even participate in Taglit—I understood its political project as fundamentally propagandistic. But—I told myself—I didn’t have the resources for international travel on my own dime, and, how could being in a place leave me with a less nuanced understanding of that place? So, I went. And while we floated the Dead Sea and hiked Masada, while we socialized with IDF soldiers and ate falafel and shawarma, I listened to the story being told, and analyzed it with the critical consciousness that I’d learned from my dad. Overlooking Jerusalem, we engaged in icebreakers with our IDF companions. One of our tour group asked a soldier, “What’s your favorite Israeli food?” And he answered, “Bamba.” We laughed—Bamba, a sort of peanut butter cheese doodle, was a novelty we’d delighted in. But then, he continued, “Bamba is the only Israeli food. Hummus? That’s from Lebanon. Shawarma? That’s Egyptian.” And so on. Israel, he pointed out, was invented, was new. Even though he carried an M-16 for the IDF, he saw its edge. In Ta-Nehisi Coates’ collection of essays The Message , he describes a protest at Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial and museum, when dignitaries from Apartheid South Africa were welcomed there. Protesters decried the alliance with a morally bankrupt Apartheid government, but a survivor of Auschwitz, still bearing the numbers on his arm, spit in their faces, insisting that the nascent Jewish state would ally with whomever they needed to, in order to prevent a tragedy like the holocaust from happening again. I remember Yad Vashem. I remember its linear architecture, in which visitors are forced through a subterranean maze of this hardest of histories, and then, at the end, released outward onto a broad overlook, Jerusalem at their feet. The narrative is clear—a long night of suffering and oppression, and then, liberatory statehood, the promised land. And yet.
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Being a mensch means, to me, seeing the edge. It means questioning received wisdom, looking at the underside of Truths. It means if you are free, you must free somebody else. It means that this world is all there is, and how you live in it matters.
This “linguistic artifact,” was inspired by Angelina Joshua’s project, My Grandmother’s Lingo | SBS .
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O cean Vuong
“Writing, if nothing else, is a bridge between two people, a bridge made of language. And language belongs to all of us.”
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The Ones You’ll Never Forget By Caitlyn Robillard
Write the names of the ones you'll never forget, they say, so I did.
Sylus and James, Dakota and Peyton From a new place But there was Fern, Nelli, G and Diego What about Rye bread and Connor? Or Emee from many moons ago. Too many to name, too many to list That's how the story goes Some nameless but not faceless Almost remembered but time passing So quickly Where does the time go? In my heart I'll keep you, always With each passing day, Harder to remember but never forgotten Do you remember me? Like I remember you Fragments, pieces, feelings of happiness and frustration So many faces, so many memories Me, a different person then You, unchanged in a memory A moment in time In both our lives Smile after smile, memory after memory
Literary magazine, volleyball, essays, books, Endless conversations, some serious, others theoretical Bus rides and stopping by
Laughing, crying,
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Trying to get of the hook Telling jokes or stories, Sharing and caring
Where are you now? Hidden in my memory, as you were But you're all grown up now. But you'll always be a memory, a photo, a part of me You are the ones I’ll never forget, All of you, some of you I hope you remember me, like I remember you Memories are the mementos I keep I write the names of the ones I’ll never forget In my mind and in my heart, Thank you for always being a part of me.
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A Layered Story
By Denise Maltese
“Live in the layers, not on the litter.”- Stanley Kunitz, The Layers
My daughter and her boyfriend are avid readers. They always keep me in the loop about what they’re reading, and during the last Christmas holiday they shared that they’d read A Streetcar Named Desire because Paul Mescal, a favorite actor of theirs, was in the London version of the play and it received dynamite reviews. It was coming to Brooklyn, they told me. As a newly appointed teacher to the Collegian Bridge Program through SUNY Ulster teaching twelfth grade, I was required to teach one play during the spring semester, so I wondered if I could teach Streetcar. I messaged my department and asked if anyone had taught Streetcar, and my colleague had, so I had the resources I needed to begin teaching it in January. Next, I contacted group sales at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The play was set to begin at the end of February, so I hoped that I had time to book tickets for my students to take a field trip to the play. Group sales said that tickets had sold out almost immediately when they went on sale in November. There were only a few tickets left at $250. Not to be deterred, I asked them to please let me know should anything open up. Meanwhile, several weeks into the new year, my students dove into Streetcar . I selected sections of the play that I wanted them to read aloud. Students paired up, one playing the role of Blanche, the other Stanley or Stella. They felt the lines and they cringed at the sound of the words, and the meaning, the aesthetics of the art. They journaled about the characters’ actions and gave presentations about New Orleans, blues and jazz music, and even polka, as there is one polka song that plagues Blanche throughout the play. During this, I remembered that one of my current twelfth grade students, whom I had taught previously as an eighth grader, was the grandson of Clive Barnes, NYT theater critic during the late 60s and early 1970s. I found two of Barnes’ archived reviews of Streetcar . They were terrific. For example, in 1973, he wrote, “For although Blanche is, of course, Stanley's victim, he is very nearly hers. He is terribly frightened of Blanche's airs and graces and much of aggression is defensive. This is very well shown.”
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And in another review, a few months later, “Most Blanches are natural losers; they are alcoholics and nymphomaniacs. They can promise themselves redemption, but that is really only a romantic dream, another half ‐ lie to eke out a drowned life. Miss Nettleton plays Blanche as a woman of nearly unshatterable courage. If, if, if, Mitch, her shy, clumsy suitor, had taken her at her apparent face value, the play could have had a happy ending.” As a class, we read and discussed Barnes’ two reviews, and they appeared in my students’ writing; those interpretations played a role in how they wrote about the play. For example, Rhylee wrote: “Stanley's immense feelings of emasculation hit an all-time high when he finally reaches his breaking point. He feels extremely insecure when we reach this moment of the play and he takes it out on Blanche in the most dehumanizing way by sexually assaulting her.” I mentioned to Yogi that we would be reading reviews by his grandfather. He informed his mom, who was wondering which reviews they were. I sent them to her via email and asked her what it was like growing up as a theater critic’s kid. She emailed back, and in addition, went through a few binders of correspondence that her father had with playwrights and found these two letters:
“Dear Clive—This comes a bit late for a holiday greeting (was in Vienna) but I hope it’s acceptable as a note of thanks for the invaluable support you’ve given me through this period of revivals. All best wishes to you and Mrs. Barnes for ‘76! Your Tenn.”
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