Plague

by Brett Rutherford

Human Intolerance:
if only it were
a creepy-crawly,
under-the-microscope
bacteria, waving
its little flagella,

if only some pill,
some mineral added
to the drinking water,
some aerosol a plane
could dust from on high
could eradicate, but no!

It is not airborne at all.
The proudly unvaccinated
were already infected.

Human Intolerance,
a worm in the brain
if ever there was one,
is freely spread
by memes and sermons,
by Catholic cardinals,
and demagogue candidates.

It breeds in repression,
guilt and self-loathing,
concealed in casual
   classroom
   locker-room
   barroom chatter.

Millions ashamed of their genitals,
their animal urges,
     their polymorphous nature,
millions insulting the universe
     by worshipping some god
who picks the wings off flies!

Close down their TV ministries!
Bolt up their churches!
Put them in special asylums,
where they can await their rapturing
without annoying the rest of us.

Hurry along, believers,
   to the one who made you
   in his smiting image!

1987, revised July 2011, revised July 2026.

Mill Towns

by Brett Rutherford

Old factories:

how painfully forgotten!

Once, the hopeful immigrants flocked to them.

Workers and foremen built cities around them,

if not exactly blessing the ground they stood on,

grateful at least to have escaped the whip

     or starvation back where they came from.

The railroads webbed out to meet them,

branch lines and sidings eager to take

the crates and bundles outside their gates.

Without them

     the towns have forgotten the reason

          of their founding.

What did they make?

cotton and calico prints,

steam engines and locomotives

parts of machines uncountable

and the tools to make other machines

and their parts uncountable,

rope walks, brass foundries,

lace- and jewelry-making,

light bulb assembly lines,

refrigerators and fountain pens,

and glory! a piano factory —

all now only names in peeling paint

checkered on bricks and falling signs. 

The nearby houses are humbled now

with torn clapboards,

rot beneath the stage paint of shingles,

the cheap bluster of aluminum siding,

walls bloated, foundations shifted,

split into rat-cell studios for commuters.

Many are boarded-up, foreclosed.

No one remembers when mansard slate

and gable and cupola gleamed new,

when a smokestack with a man’s name on it

was a place arrived at as a good sign

of a continued paycheck.

Things that got made here,

kept getting made.

Now these sad brick temples accuse us:

their plywood-covered windows,

their undecipherable placards,

the weed-trees on their loading docks,

the mystery of abandonment.

Like unburied dead they haunt the roadside,

somber in daylight, shunned and abhorred

when their shadows grow long at dusk.

They will not burn, their wearing away

protracted by fences and guardians.

(Heirs living on compounded interest

preserve them like Chinese puzzle boxes

they cannot open or understand.)

At night, another commerce lights up

the sidewalks along the chain-link fence

as women sell the only thing they have

from the pavement, and men in cars

circle, circle, hands offering dollars,

other hands offering, and taking, small

envelopes of powders and crystals.

Some midnights, the ghost machines awaken,

their ungreased axles screaming,

drive shafts spinning of their own accord.

A dynamo turns, and furnace mouths flicker

in the cool blue flame of St. Elmo’s Fire.

The power looms weave an invisible shroud:

it is long enough to enclose a city.

Tombs without occupants,

they wait for the rites that no one will pronounce.

—Pawtucket, Rhode Island, late 1980s.

From Poems from Providence, 1991.

The Ten-Letter Sign

95 Hope Street, Providence RI

by Brett Rutherford

A man who loved books, and who
assumed that others loved them too,
was inclined, in a town so rich
as Providence, to open a shop,
on Hope Street no less! What street
could be more auspicious?

With pride he marched down
to the sign-maker’s emporium
and ordered his name inscribed
in gilded and calligraphic
letters: J. J. COUTANCHE,

and then, in ten bright red
hand-carven woodblocks,
to be nailed above the window:
B O O K S E L L E R.

It was 1902. Streets teemed
with merchants and salesmen,
workers and well-dressed men
hurrying downtown and back.

Newspapers all folded up
they carried, for lack of better
things to occupy their time.
He would see to that.

He had Dickens by the boxcar,
Shakespeare in every mode
from pocket-plays to massive
collections of all the dramas.

From the French, there was
de Maupassant, so droll and moderne.
From the Russian, the latest
novels, from London, fine
bindings in leather rows,
their marbled edges butterflies.

Although he opened early,
stayed late, only a few
impoverished old ladies came.
Seeing his prices,
    they did not come again.

Gradually he came to see
that much of the day-time traffic
was Irish men and women
headed for mass at Saint Joseph’s
directly across the street.
At noontime, men hurtled by,
on their way to saloons
and boxing matches.
No books in their lunch pails!

After five years of this,
Coutanche developed
the most profound contempt
for the people of Providence.
If only he had gone to Boston.

And then, hearing the bells
that rang when his cash-register
did not, watching smug priests
and the resplendent funerals
one after another, 

it dawn upon him
     to change his profession.
He who had once sewn books
would now sew flesh. He who
had rubbed his hands along
the ribs of a leather binding

would now caress the cheeks
of the freshly-dead. The glue
that repaired and made books
whole when they were damaged,
would now be formaldehyde.

He read up on his new
profession. He would learn
as he went; no need
to take lessons or earn
a certificate. Ready at last

to start his new trade,
he laddered up his storefront,
removing the letters
B O O K S E L L
and had the sign-maker’s
emporium make up and paint
in the same block style
U N D E R T A K

His bargain-basement room
with all its penny discards
and damaged bindings
would now house coffins.

The Irish were not particular.
They needed Granny buried
cheaply and lickedy-split.
The priests, for a commission,
would send the grieving
relatives to his door.

He could not make them read,
but, damn, he would
bind them up handsomely
in shiny black caskets!

 

What the War Did

by Brett Rutherford

He blocked a door
I wished to pass through.

His muscled arm,
sweat-beaded
in August heat,
was not going to budge.

“I see the way you look at me,”
he muttered, unsmiling.
“I’ve heard about you.
I know you want me.” —

“That’s just not so,” I said.
I did not say,
“I’m not like that.”
There was no use pretending.

He flexed his arm; his chest
expanded. “I have
a perfect body. I know
you want to touch it.

“They say, at the gym,
I’m like a Greek statue.
If you saw me naked —
best thing that ever
happened to you.”

Imagining myself
in the aftermath,
black-eyed in an alley,
I said, “No thanks,”
Homeward I went,
circling around and back
to be sure I was not followed.

Drafted and gone
to Vietnam, he returned,
shrapnel in skull, with half
his perfect Greek statue
weak and immobilized.

All I can think of today,
passing among
the plaster casts
of discus throwers and warriors
in the sculpture gallery —

figures even now
I do not dare to touch —

is that long-ago offer,
and my refusal.

Not Years Enough

by Brett Rutherford

How many autumns more? I cannot guess.

How slowly thirteen moons go rolling by,

how achingly the thirty dozen days

count off the torn inked sheets of calendar.

Life wrinkles silently, by phases imperceptible

the skull and bones show through the flesh.

More than the other signs of passing

the shelf of unread books accuses me —

not years enough to read them all!

And all those books unwritten, languages

to learn the lilt of, music to shape

beneath the independent fingers —

millions of words and thousands of melodies.

No matter what, the end must come

before the final page is writ, the coda sung.

Composers dreaded to start their Ninth

of symphonies, but trembled all the more

when the Ninth was done, behind them.

How many symphonies would they eke out

before the unrelenting knock of Fate?

If only Sleep, that dark-eyed panda,

were less the brazen thief — if only dreams

could quicken the long drear nights

with more than a passing vision.

I do not need to dream-quest Mt. Yaanek —

a quiet study would do, a reading lamp,

a chair and a sturdy book. My ka,

my lazy double, my astral body

can lounge on a hammock with a Dickens novel,

or browse through the night-locked Athenaeum.

Never too late to learn the names of trees,

of sleeping birds and withered flowers.

Or maybe I’d walk with book in hand

barefoot in graveyard, a midnight reader

of horror tales, epic reciter.

I’d make the dead listen to the Faerie Queene,

count on their fingers the knights and Moors

of the endless Orlando Furioso,

wear them out with the embracing lists,

the straw that stuffs the Song of Myself.

Maybe my eyes would retrace Shakespeare.

But this is Autumn: lamp-dousing time

for my waking self, long nights sliding

to the gravity of solstice, dead leaves

like pages escaping me unreadable.

Not years enough to read them all,

not years enough to count them!

From Poems from Providence, 1991.

Underfoot

by Brett Rutherford

If, on a New York sidewalk, you
walk amiss, the foot first feels it —
some gelid and formless object
that will take hours to remove
from the shoe-sole’s nicks and crannies.
One rapid inhalation tells
if it be horse or dog in scent —
but no! obnoxious, odorous,
it is a Trump I trod upon.

An Afterword for Matthew Paris

by Brett Rutherford​

Dante! -- one sight -- and then
no more of Beatrice, a life
of yearning for an already-
departed Muse. Matthew!
You lucky dog! -- With Jane,
you had a Muse who stayed.

I Dreamt I Was Dante (Revised)

Henry Holiday - Dante and Beatrice (Google Art Project)

by Brett Rutherford 

I dream in mezzanotte silver-gray,
donning the robes of aging Alighieri,
sandalled and aching with brittle legs,
heeding the call of Thanatos —
waking or sleeping? —
I do not know! I feel the dew
upon my ankles, but these feet are numb,
my ankles bony knobs, my toes
the neglected bird-claws of an exile.

The years have browned and scourged
my limbs. An umber moon,
senile amid the drooling clouds,
tilts earthward and winks at me,
changeless and blistering.
the knowing eye of eternity, 

Amid a cypress grove, whose rippled leaves
cat-fur the rigid columns of the sky,
the tree-trunks are deeply furrowed
with weeping moss, and blue drear tears,
unbearable in daylight, collect. How cool
they are, how wise, reflecting in leaf-cups
each one the tiny faces of moon and Venus
(so must we mortals, in mirror'd shields
look on the Gorgon face of Love!) 

Among the trees, close-packed, a maze
made from slab-walls of quarry stone —
square blocks of some god’s
abandoned temple? — an idle Pharaoh’s
never-completed pyramid? —
now an unpeopled catacomb roofed by a vault
of stars! The maze invites my errant feet
to tread its ever-regressive avenues.

You need not tell me what is there.
No carving, no placard
    with a pointing arrow
has been prepared for me,
yet I already know the place
my demon-guided steps will take me. 

At the far heart of this stone-cypress maze,
in a niche cut out of purest marble,
on a pediment of onyx, Beatrice waits.
She is already dead, and I may die
before I ever find her resting place.
There may be stairs beneath it,
     too many to count.

That is the journey, and there is no Virgil,
and although I have read him, his silver lines
fade now to dust motes in my memory.

Beatrice! No matter how long, how fast
I walk, I am no nearer you
than that first sight, when you,
thirteen, scorned to return my gaze.

 --November 16, 2018
Revised and expanded June 22, 2026

Where the Ashes Went

by Brett Rutherford

Drunken half-brother blurts out
his memories of the dead.
Having no funds
for plot or stone,
they dug with bare hands
a hole for grandma,
right next to grandpa’s grave.
No one was looking
as the spade went in,
disturbing the thick turf grass,
soft clover, tough dandelions,
How deep? Who knows?
They dug until it seemed enough,
then in went the ashes,
and the little bone fragments
from the paper bag’s bottom.
No marker, no paperwork,
no money spent
on the damn undertaker —
serves them right.
At least they would always know
where grandma rested.

As for our mother,
she always said, laughing,
“Just throw my ashes
mid-bridge, right into
the mighty Youghiogheny.”
Vaguely she knew how the Monongehela,
then the Ohio, then the Mississippi
currents might carry her
(unless she silted down).
“At last I’ll get to see the world,”
she said. That’s what they did:
the ashes, in the humid air,
fell in a straight line
to the dark and rapid waters.
The inedible fish
flapped with their fins
to spread the ashes.

So now when someone asks.
“So, where is your mother buried?”
I am able to say, with some assurance,
“A coral reef somewhere
inside the Bermuda Triangle.”

The Morning Anatomy Check

by Brett Rutherford

Pavel, on waking up,
holds back eye-opening
until he checks
with anxious fingers
whether his nose
is in its proper place —
god forbid
you should lose your nose!

Next, and even more concerned,
he gently unfolds
the tangled blanket
to check down below —
god forbid
you should lose your penis!

All is well. All is well.
He shudders to think
of poor cousin Dimitri
who awoke one morn,

his nose between his legs,
and his manhood dangling
beneath his forehead.
Now just imagine that,
having to go about,
shorts over head,
eyes looking out
from cotton-stretch leg-holes,

the stifled nose below
enduring the smells
the trousers accumulate.
A sneeze down there
is not a pretty picture!

For Pavel, at least,
it is a normal day.
He can open one eye,
the left one always first,
and then the other —
eyes in their sockets,
mind you, and not
on the fingertips
like cousin Masha,
one for the annals of medicine!

The things that can happen
during a sound sleep
are better not thought of.

A Secret Birth

     by Brett Rutherford

     After a Callimachus fragment, Aetia, 48

Three hundred Titan years old Kronos slept
while young Zeus and his enamor’d Hera
coupled without let-up, nights — and days, too!
Nectars narcotic they sent
     to the watchful and jealous father,
by the hands of garlanded Dryads,
and, from the lips of Iris, distracting
rumors of some trifles and petty strifes
whose answered he could delegate, then turn
his pillows over for another nap.

Then from Zeus’s labors
     and Hera’s womb’s machinery,
with clank and clatter,
     there came such a birth,
red-light the sky from pole to pole, a cry
as loud as a factory whistle, a smack
as of the first bright anvil, ever, struck
by the world’s first hammer, forged from ore.

Hera, whom Zeus hung upside down, cut cord
with her own sickle knife and cried the name
of their dear new Olympian:
“Hephaestos, the gods’ armory, be born!”

The Ox of Dryops

     by Brett Rutherford

     After a Fragment from Callimachus, Aetia, 24

Now Heracles, in company
of his young son, was slowed
when a thorn, which pierced
the boy’s tender foot
made him unable to walk.
The way was long, across
the plowed fields of Dryops,
and the solar disk seemed
uncommonly hot upon them.
Hungry and out of sorts,
young Hyllus tore at Heracles’ hair.

Just then came Thiodamus,
spindly on nimble feet,
yet still a mighty man
from the looks of him,
into the might hero’s sight.
Across the deep, dry fallow
the old man goaded on,
a ten-foot snapping pole
in one arm, a lazy brown ox.

Hailing the stranger, Heracles,
the generous donor of so many
deeds and labors, and once
he had praised the land and the fields,
and the beneficent orb
whose heat beat down upon them,
inquired, “I great pray a boon.
This wounded child calls out
for nourishment. If anything
your shoulder-bag can spare,
a mouse-size morsel, bread,
or a mouthful of fruit or nut,
would make our moving on
more swift, and quiet him.
I shall always remember you,
how amid your labors,
you were kind to another.”

The arrogant ox-herd
whipped out the floating pole
from ox-back to the very nose
of Heracles. “You, beggar,
and a fool to boot, know
ye not I am King of these parts?
Only a knave can claim
to hunger here. Pass on,
and may the burning noon
     finish you.” The King spat
and turned his back to them.

So what was a demi-god to do?
He seized the howling ox
and hurled it so far up
it looked no bigger than
a starling in silhouette,
and when it came down, its back
was broken. It bellowed. It died.

As Thiodamus fled
to summon his forces,
or hide beneath his blankets,
father and son devoured
the beast from tongue to tail.

Thus, ever and anon,
the uncharitable must pay.

Love Locks

Allegheny Cemetery Mausoleum Door. Photo by the author.

by Brett Rutherford

A blight
on urban bridges,
unwelcome as dead rats
or pigeon-droppings,
padlocks entwined
with chain-link fencing,
lipstick initialed
with names, initials,
swearing eternal love
as rust corrodes
and shifting fancies
make mockery
of mawkish vows.

Some vows are serious,
kept grudgingly
against the decades.
Though she is gone,
he plods along
until a second Mrs
love-locks him in.

And just in case,
the first wife's mausoleum
upon its barred door
has a double chain,
the sternest padlock
impervious to weather.

Old love is locked
securely in.
Better safe than sorry.

The Poor Man's Leviticus 3 - Burnt Offerings

by Brett Rutherford 

3

When the earth was young,
the even-younger gods
came down upon
the human altars smiting.
To watch was to die,
as flame and lightning
cindered up to ash
the living victims.
The gods consumed us,
bones and all.

Later, their appetites,
assuaged with human flattery,
demanded hecatombs
of cattle, sheep, and goats,
oxen piled up and laced
with a delicate frill of doves.
(In lean times, they were offered less.)

To watch was to die,
or so the priests maintained,
but there no longer came
the forked-down lightning,
nor did the thunder rend
the heavens at each god-feast.

Why did the priests now demand
a tithe of timber, and casks
of ever-more-flammable oil?

Why were the temple doors barred
after the slaughtered ox
no longer bled or trembled?
Why did the limp pile
of lambs and turtledoves
just lie there, unbitten
if those above were hungry?

Don’t peek, the priests would say.
Our kinder Lord
     wants only the entrails
anyway. Some days
the mere scent of a burning ox
suffices. Are we not blessed?

Don’t peek, the poor are told
(for they are easily agitated),
as the priests and their families
enjoy their roast-beef dinners.
It is hard work, they insist
to keep the smiting heavens up
and about their heavenly business,
and to leave us poor sinners alone.

Poe and Mrs. Whitman Come to Life in Providence - A Flashback to 1987

Illustrations by Richard Sardinha

 

This note was mailed to various friends in January, 1987:

January 1987 began in dreary Providence with the at-long-last publication of my novel, Piper. Zebra Books issued it at the very end of December, with a splendid cover that has induced booksellers to give it very prominent display. I have seen it everywhere — Walden Books, B. Dalton, Barnes and Noble, drugstores, supermarkets, discount stores, you name it. The few disinterested readers I've heard from seemed to like it.

Even better news is that the publisher loves the book and wants to make a deal to do two more-the second of which would be a hardcover with major national publicity and advertising. So, things are hopping on the fiction front, even if the royalties won't start coming until July.

The most exciting event in January was the publication of the new Poet's Press edition, Last Flowers: The Romance Poems of Edgar Allan Poe and Sarah Helen Whitman. The publishing party was no less than a dramatic recreation of the thwarted romance of Poe and the Rhode Island poetess, in a play by Norman George called Poe and Mrs. Whitman: A Memoir. The one-hour, one act play was performed twice on January 24 to a total of 260 attendees in the very room in the Providence Athenaeum library where Poe and Helen met and courted. The library reading room was transformed into a little theatre with a very atmospheric set. Excellent lighting, costumes and makeup made the time-travel to Poe's era most convincing. Helen recounted her romance with Poe in an 1860 visit to the library, and Poe appeared as a ghost, reading "The Raven," "Annabel Lee," and selections from his lectures and criticisms.

The performance by actor Norman George, who tours nationally with his one man show, Poe...Alone, was electrifying. The actress who performed Helen, who shall remain nameless, did not, alas, do justice to Norman's fine script. Large sections of the script were omitted in shocking memory lapses by the starlet. In the second performance, the audience sat stunned as she introduced herself twice, froze, and then said, "Excuse me, I'll be back in a moment." The actress was gone, Poe was hidden behind a curtain, and the audience stared at an empty stage. Moments passed. We waited for the sound of a gunshot, the thud of a body hitting the floor, the slam of a distant door as the distracted actress fled to the street. But no, she came back and acquitted herself, performing most of the script. A close call, and a harrowing moment for your intrepid publisher. (One can only imagine how the actor/playwright felt behind the curtain!) If we do the show again, it may be with Muppets, with Kermit the Frog as Poe, Miss Piggy as Helen, and Gonzo as The Raven.

Most viewers of the play did not perceive these production problems to the extent that we did, of course. There was generous applause, and strong interest in Poe and Helen was generated. Sales of the book were brisk.

And now to the book-the biggest and finest Poet's Press edition ever.

More than 100 pages in 8-1/2 x 11 inches, the volume is printed on acid­-free paper and premieres my new type design, "Lenore,' in a generous eighteen-point size. The book opens with a 9,000-word essay by, as Miss Piggy would say, mo. The text is a garland of poems by Poe and Helen Whitman, recreating their romance and the decades after his death when she was his most ardent defender. (If Helen had not written a little book, Edgar Poe and His Critics, in 1860, you might not be reading Poe today, except perhaps in French.)

The book contains suitably Gothick illustrations in the form of a dozen drawings by Rhode Island fantasy illustrator Richard Sardinha. If you haven't ordered a copy of this very special book, I urge you to do so. It is the ne plus ultra of the 119 books done by The Poet's Press. I wish all of my friends could have been present for the atmospheric and festive premiere!

The Providence Athenaeum has mounted a month-long exhibition of their Poe and Helen materials, including Poe first editions and autographs-some really fine and precious materials. Included in the exhibit are the drawings for Last Flowers and a montage of working materials from the design of the Lenore type face. The show will run until February 21st and marks the first time a Poet's Press book has been used in a library or museum exhibition. Quite an honor and quite a thrill to see one's work under glass.

The local newspapers ran a number of excellent stories about the play and the book, and there was a radio interview with Mr. Poe and another one to come with the humble publisher. I'll also promote the book at readings in New York (Feb 1 at Chez Emilie Glen) and in May at North Adams State College (MA). 

Envy and Apollo (After Callimachus)

by Brett Rutherford

    After Callimachus, Hymn to Apollo

And Envy whispered
into Apollo’s ear,
“Who cares about the writer
     of mere epigrams?
What matters it that some comedian
     sends jokes into a thousand ears
         and laughter propagates
               like mushrooms gone mad
               in a spring sweat?
What matters is that someone swoons
    while playing a harpsichord
          or that high C’s bounce off
             the opera house balcony?

Give favor instead
     to only the grandest things:
arches imperial and gold pavilions,
fights to the death on an even bet,
treasures piled up beyond account,
and the kind of art that goes along
with a thousand-year reign.
Give favor instead to heroic sagas,
to lines that outlast
the tuning of the lyre,
to epics long-lined
and even longer-winded.
Embrace Hyperbole.
Bless nothing that’s not as big
as the world-girding Ocean.”

Apollo turned, and with one foot,
he stamped on Envy’s pretty neck,
just as he had once crushed
the mighty Python.
“Wide is the torrent wild
of the great Euphrates,”
the god explained
    to Vanity’s idiot daughter,
“Yet half its flow is silt and muck.
And not from any common flow
do priestesses fill Demeter’s bowl.
From one small stream
whose origin is a holy fountain
from there the best of waters come.

“Look here, at the world’s navel,
at the blessed spot of Delphi.
None come in chariots,
     but one by one, on foot,
         each must ascend and wait.
Do horns call out
     if something that calls itself
          a king arrives here? No!
Does some triumphal arch offend
     the sight of sea and cliff and sky?
Again, Envy, no.
That which is least, is best:
Greeks hurl their epigrams
as well as I my arrows.

“Temples may come and go.
No glint of gold spells out
my name upon the pediment.
One Doric column suffices."

Persilere's Daughter, Dead

by Brett Rutherford

     After Theocritus

Seven, just seven, when Fate
saw fit to hurl her down
to Hades! What do they say below
when a mere child comes among them?
Will she drink the black wine,
and will her young lips curl back
at the sour bite of cornelian cherries?
Will she have leave to search
for the infant brother preceding her,
himself not even three years old?

Nurse them, Persephone, and place
some honeyed water near them,
that they, poor bees, may slumber.
Send some consoling dream at least
to Persilere, their mother.

The Stranger's Tombstone

by Brett Rutherford

     After Theocritus

I did not live out my days.
Too young I died, among Greeks
who scorned my Syracusan accent.
Subsisted, I, and borrowed not:
small point of pride for a man,
but I did not return in triumph
to an arbor’d rest, and a grave
with native soil around me.
Here, even the gnawing worms
avoid my humble shroud and say
to one another, “A foreigner!”

An Ox-Herder's Holiday

by Brett Rutherford

     After Theocritus

Camped in the hills
to get away from it all,
on a leaf-bed hastily made,
the beauteous Daphnis slumbers.
Such arms, such legs, such line
of neck and shoulder
ought not be bared
beneath the snitching stars.

You might, at least, flap closed,
conceal yourself within that tent
so artfully constructed, but no,
the warm night air seduces.

No rest for you, fair Daphnis,
for wicked Pan has got your scent,
and not far off, Priapus springs
to full attention in his own lair,
and hearing the pan-pipe summons
primps all his attributes and dons
his yellow ivy garland. The game
is on as fleet-hoofed feet
bound this way and that
among the somnolent sheep.

Wake up! Wake up
and get away,
poor Daphnis. Sleep
holds you down,
while lust makes mighty leaps
in your direction. Oh, flee!
You’ve not a moment to lose.

The underbrush stirs.
The pipe of one
draws the tread of the other.
A long priapic shadow
precedes the intruders.
Flee, Daphnis! No lad
should have to endure
what they might do to you.
No witnesses, for even
the oxen will avert their eyes,
embarrassed.  Unless,
of course, you’d rather stay.
Unless all along
this is exactly what
you meant by camping out.

Muses the Roses Love

by Brett Rutherford

     After Theocritus, The Greek Anthology

Muses the roses love
and thyme grows thick
where nervous poets lean
into sweet-clotted air
around Mount Helicon,

but where I climb
for healing and inspiration,
pulling behind me
some reluctant goat
dumb to the sacrifice
ahead of him — there,
no simpering flowers bloom.

Bay trees, leaves dark and sharp
cover the cliff entire.
Delphi means business.
Apollo expects no less than blood
as the horned billy-goat
quelled by the branch he gnaws
would understand
if he had half a brain.

Hoax Epigrams

by Brett Rutherford

1
Memed, with a blue-sky
background, the unsigned
platitude soars.
Unclicked, unshared,
let the gilded pig
wallow.

2
Glad-handed and hugged
by a stranger, beware.
Winged wallets fly
when least expected.

3
Your grand-son calls.
Robbed and left stranded,
he needs some money wired.
You have no children.

4
I have made so many happy.
I gave the buxom Russian girls
who look for husbands
the millions I got
from a Nigerian plane crash.

5
Called time and again
with offers of above-ground
burial in some
purported mausoleum,
I finally blurt out, "Look,
we are already dead here.
Nestled in native earth,
we are vampires."

The Bachelor

by Brett Rutherford

    After a note by Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1836

I, unmarried and alone,
am the undertaker’s bane.

You, with your dozen offspring,
     have paid in advance
     for a dozen funerals.

With luck, what’s left of me
will feed only a solitary worm.

Free Will Is Best

by Brett Rutherford

     After a note by Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1838

Explaining her ever-
attentive spouse
to a friend-confidante:

It was quite some years ago,
you see — the two of us,
one at each end
     of the house, and one
at the other — my kitchen,
     his book-piled den.
Iron-willed we were
     in mutual detestation.
He might have taken an axe;
     I might have learned poisons.

Then quietly, discreet
as only a Boston lawyer knows how,
we were silently divorced.

So here we are.
He lives at his club.
He brings me gifts,
I give him favors.
Each day is a first —
     at will, the last.

It’s a great deal of fun
and keeps both priests
and hangman away.

Look, here he comes,
grinning with expectation.
Is that ruby? And only one?
I might just feign a migraine.
Look none the wiser, my dear.

 

Who Was Shirley Powell?

Who was Shirley Powell? Some might remember her Greenwich Village apartment, all painted black, where she hosted readings, or her readings at Cafe Feenjon on Bleecker Street. Here is an expanded note about her from the back of "Villages and Towns," revealing some things about her that many would not know.

Shirley Powell, born May 5, 1931, grew up in an Ohio hamlet during the Great Depression, where everyone knew or thought they knew everyone else. Though there aren’t Gotham’s eight million stories to be told of this tiny community, there are many, and the child born there recreates and honors in this collection the small and less eventful lives of the overlooked and overflown part of the United States.

While Villages and Towns might make some readers think of Steinbeck or Faulkner's portrayals of the poor and downtrodden, Powell became, during her peak years, an urban poet. She arrived in Manhattan in 1971, after her studies at Miami University, Oxford, OH, and worked as a substitute teacher in the New York City Schools. A survivor of childhood polio wearing a leg brace, she nonetheless navigated New York's bus and subway systems, occasionally being thrown down stairwells in the schools where she taught.

Along with Barbara A. Holland and Brett Rutherford, she was a participant in Manhattan’s unofficial Gothic poetry circle, often hosting readings in her Greenwich Village apartment, whose walls were painted black. Her first book of poems, Parachutes, appeared in 1975 from Mouth of the Dragon Press. Later, she compiled and published an anthology, Womansong, the offshoot of a Women's Liberation reading at New York University where she was attending graduate school. She hosted The Village Poetry Workshop and co-hosted (with Boruk Glasgow) The Sign of the Black Cats poetry readings at The Cafe Feenjon. Her Poet’s Press editions include Rooms, Other Rooms, and Alternate Lives, and as a featured poet in the 1975 anthology May Eve, A Festival of Supernatural Poetry.

After her move to upstate New York, she founded, in 1981, The Stone Ridge Poetry Society, in Ulster County. She edited the Society's literary magazine, Oxalis, from 1988 to 1994, through all 23 of its issues.

With “The Catskill Caravan,” she traveled through the Metro New York area and New England, staging poetry readings.

In her 1993 notes for the first edition of Villages and Towns, Powell wrote: “The people in these poems lived — perhaps some still do. Their names have been changed to protect the reader’s innocence. Anyway, you do know someone like them; at least you do if you know yourself.”

Sometime after the death of her partner Mildred Barker, Powell relocated to Indiana, where, in a retirement community, she found herself cut off from people interested in poetry. She was grateful that her work was being kept in circulation, but she wrote no more. She died there, December 4, 2019.

In Memoriam Jacqueline de Weever

 

“I joined migrants and refugees long ago. Now I belong nowhere, birthplace an accident/ ancestors from rain forests in Asia, Africa, to meet saturated Amazonia.” — Seed Mistress

The Poet’s Press mourns the death of one its star poets, Jacqueline de Weever, who died in March 2026 after a long illness. The Brooklyn poet, born in Georgetown, British Guiana (now Guyana) was educated there and in New York, earning a Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania. She was Professor Emerita at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, where she taught English Medieval Literature for 29 years.  She has published four books in her field: The Chaucer Name Dictionary (Garland, 1988); Mythmaking and Metaphor in Black Women’s Fiction (St. Martin’s Press, 1991); Sheba’s Daughters: Whitening and Demonizing the Saracen Woman in French Medieval Epic (Garland, 1998); and Aesop and the Imprint of Medieval Thought (McFarland, 2011).  Her poetry appeared in Blue Unicorn, The Cape Rock Review, Sensations Magazine, Tiger’s Eye, Tribeca Poetry Review, and Vanitas, among others. She was also a watercolor painter.

A brief account follows of her works published by The Poet’s Press, giving some sense of the flavor and content. Far from vanishing into her medieval studies, de Weever’s poetry ran deep into the history of the colossal clash of two worlds that underlaid her childhood in Guyana.

Trailing the Sun’s Sweat (2015) spans continents and time. Interspersed with quotations from Columbus's journal, de Weever recounts and visits her native British Guiana as seen by its conquerors and ravishers, and by its survivors. Rich with the flora and fauna of island and Amazon, the book poses native against the European’s encounter with the native. The eyes of the caiman look out from the waters, while a visiting European artist paints delicate watercolors of butterflies and lush tropical plants. Some of the poems inhabit the oppressed within our northern borders, such as Tituba, accused witch of Salem, or the lynched Native American Jacqueline Peters. In retracing her own heritage and origins, de Weever invites us to confront the beauty, and violence, of the hemisphere we share.

Jacqueline de Weever’s second poetry collection, Rice-Wine Ghosts (2017), is again haunted by the flora and fauna of the Western hemisphere, “the world’s garden, /where poisons hide in glitter,/ soar and dip of bright wings.” These are poems personal rather than political or polemical, tracing brilliant moments of encounter with a voluptuous world — the British Guyana of her childhood, the Caribbean, the Andes, the Amazon, and far, far off, the Pleiades and the moon. A lemon tree in a Moroccan courtyard, sunflowers outside Florence, a dash of Japanese rice wine, the indigo blue of Canton china, a chest full of Ivory Coast batiks. Yet there is also loss: the survivor of earthquake and tsunami, “desolation stamped in her slow/ stride, humped shoulders, drooped head,” a search for a remembered star constellation that refuses to show itself, a state of coma as “death’s high priest … behind the closed door of your eyelids.” This book is a treasure-trove of voluptuous imagery and moonlit recollections of beauty, memory, and yearning. The author’s catalog of tropical flora and fruit makes up her armory: “I hoard/ jungle flowers/ to warp the hunger/ of the crocodile/ slowly approaching my shore.”

In Seed Mistress (2020), de Weever’s writing prompted an elegantly-designed book replete with Amazonian animals and foliage. The first Europeans to visit the Caribbean and the Amazonian realms of South America were overwhelmed by the profusion of animals and plants, many of them brightly-colored, unfamiliar in shape, and unknown to the gardener’s or the chef’s palette. Could you eat it? Would it eat you? Medicine, or poison? Overlaid with the magic of Inca, Maya, and Aztec, the natural world of our hemisphere is as rich as all of Europe’s myths, if only one looks and listens. In this collection, where “dreams excavate my past,” the poet plunges us into a world of crocodile caimans, howler monkeys, spice trees, boa constrictors, and armadillos, but just as readily engages with close observations from her own Brooklyn gardens. This is a voluptuous collection of poems with a voice gently but affirmatively outside-looking in.

De Weever’s final poetry collection, Waste Basket Elegies and Plywood Glories, came out in 2023. Writers have responded in many ways to seeing the cities in which they dwell become places of crisis and mass mourning. In this somber and elegant collection, Jacqueline de Weever roams Brooklyn and Manhattan to glean darkness and light as a city confronts the COVID pandemic. De Weever, as an elder poet and thus among the most vulnerable New Yorkers, studied the city as architecture and infrastructure in crisis, as public art blossoming out of stress and darkness, and as a mask over the never-ending struggle for justice against violence. Amid a masked and boarded-up New York, the poet found unexpected bursts of hope in the streets, and has revealed them here in terse and understated poems, like watercolors of a near-Apocalypse, or a butterfly at the edge of a volcanic crater.

In a prefatory page, the poet writes: “Anguish floated on the breezes blowing through New York City as we tried desperately to keep ourselves alive. Some of us awoke to the sight of refrigerated trucks waiting outside hospitals to receive the dead. In upper Manhattan, some awoke to ‘Flower Flash,’ installations donated by Lewis Miller Designs. Black trash baskets, old telephone booths, subway entrances appeared stuffed or garlanded with flowers. The florist’s night work became altars of mourning and remembrance.”