The Art of Waiting
by Anne Namatsi Lutomia

The long-awaited letter arrives
Announcing good news
Giving permission to work
Making the next level possible
Signaling permanency
The boxes are packed for moving
Three states in eighteen months
Still waiting to be loaded and move to the third state
Waiting to settle in a midwestern small college town

Spring comes seed are sowed
I watch the ground to see the sprouting
My impatience drives me to watching everyday
There is nothing for some time
Then there is something
The seeds have germinated
I am still waiting for them to grow into plants
For the blooming of the flowers
For the green leaves
For the bees and butterflies
For the harvest

PAINTING:Flowering Plant by Shibata Zeshin (1878).

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: Last year and this year have taught me to be patient and in the moment. This poem is inspired by…

The Point Where the Circle Begins
by Kerfe Roig

I am still waiting for the moon—
face against the window,
staring between the buildings
to where it appeared once before.

I draw
a circle not quite
an enso but still
opening
to let the inside out.

I am still waiting for the night
to grow ravens’ wings—
black on black, glittering, quivering—
almost a color, escaping form.

The inside
is never really empty—
there is always more
to reveal
always more to hide.

I am still waiting for the wind
to take the shadow branches
and dance against the sky, against
the moon, flying on ravens’ wings.

Those gestures
turning on nothing
at all and then
suddenly
returning to all that is. 

PAINTING:Moonlight Crows by Bernadette Resha (2014).

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: When I first moved into my current apartment in August, I could see the moon out my…

Cover image of the character William Stoner.

Real life isn’t fair, and the same goes for fiction. Some stellar novels deserve more reader love, but remain relatively obscure.

Among the many books that should be much better known is one I just read after it was enthusiastically recommended by several of this blog’s frequent visitors (credited in the comments section). The novel is John Williams’ Stoner, and it left me absolutely gobsmacked with admiration. It’s exquisitely written, with a near-perfect authorial voice. Plus one feels such sympathy for the beleaguered, achingly three-dimensional protagonist William Stoner (yes, the 1965 novel’s title is the last name of its lead character, not a reference to being stoned).

So the question is why Stoner didn’t become as famous as other exceptional 1960s novels such as One Hundred Years of Solitude, To Kill a Mockingbird, Slaughterhouse-Five, and Catch-22. I’ll offer…

Jacket2: On Brion Gysin, ‘Minutes to Go’

“Two months before 1960 commenced, Stanley Kunitz in Harper’s Magazine redefined the word ‘experimental’ to mean the inevitable resistance to any prevailing style for the sake of ‘keep[ing] it supple.’ Yet at the time of his writing, the turn of this new decade, ‘the nature of that resistance is in effect a backward look.’ The recent Pulitzer Prize winner added: ‘This happens not to be a time of great innovation in poetic technique: it is rather a period in which the technical gains of past decades, particularly the twenties, are being tested and consolidated.’ By using the phrase ‘the twenties’ Kunitz was referring to modernism’s American heyday. He meant expatriation, avid rule-breaking, aesthetic hijinx coinciding with social high hilarity. The Sixties, starting now, he averred, would be a time of modest ‘consolidation’ rather than of experiment.  Kunitz’s historical generalization would make better sense…

Present Continuous, Meaning Past,
Implying Future
by Paula J. Lambert

I am waiting for the train and
I am thinking how much I like

trains (the present tense here,
the present continuous, means

past, past tense, and implies
how often this happens) and

I am thinking of all that trains
have taught me: the way out,

a way back in, the journey
(journey is overused, of course,

but still useful) that tangle of
meaning when trains approach

tunnels (no way to stop a train,
etc., but I’d rather not go down

that particular track) and I am
standing here squinting toward

perspective (you don’t forget
that point once you’ve learned it,

don’t stop seeing it, searching
for it) and I am straining to hear

the whistle blow and I can’t stop
glancing over my shoulder to

where the tracks lead: mystery,
adventure, forward, yonder,

the destination (that’s another
tired phrase…

i am still waiting in line
by Richard Vargas

only one employee is manning
a checkout-station as the rest
are closed off maybe for good

white haired, five feet tall at the most
stocky and wearing glasses thick
as the bottom of a coke bottle
the blue vest hanging over
her slumped shoulders
she could be someone’s great-grandma
trying to stay afloat paying
property taxes on the farm
medical bills her dead husband
left behind or maybe she
likes the job because
it keeps her on her toes
and out of that dreaded
assisted-living facility
her kids bring up every
time they come to visit

here she gets to meet people
who would normally ignore her
but now are at her mercy
as she picks up one item
handles it with care turning
it over in her liver-spotted
hands looking for the universal
product code so she can scan and…

Sugar Jets
by Patrick T. Reardon

I was six and unclear on the concept.
The commercial, black and white, for Sugar Jets
told me, if I ate a bowl, I would be jet-propelled.

I could see the boy and girl eat Sugar Jets
and fly around the box, jet-propelled.
They were drawings. But a contract was offered,
I thought.

You can see where this is going.

I nagged my mother or maybe my father
— a scary proposition, either way —
to buy Sugar Jets, without saying why.

A box was bought.
I ate a bowl
and went to the back porch, two flights up
from the pavement and lawn below,
looked out over the yard and alley and blacktop,
a gray pavement playground.

At least I didn’t throw myself off.

Instead, I waited for whatever would happen
to jet-propel me
out into the air
and into freedom
and into…

Senegal. “Tante Angélique,” 1961.

“A little more than a year ago, the archival storytelling group came across a photo of a woman carrying on her back a baby holding a tiny Nigerian flag. The year was 1960. It was a powerful illustration of how new independence felt for so many African nations. Seventeen countries declared independence that year, which became known as the Year of Africa. And with the coming of its 60th anniversary, the idea for this project was born. We selected images — some from The New York Times’s archive and others from various collections around the world — to tell the story of the heady days around the Year of Africa. Each of the 17 countries that gained independence that year is represented here in photographs, but there are also images from countries, like Ghana, with especially rich photographic traditions. We then invited a group of creative…

Best-Laid Plans
by Cynthia Anderson

What happens to a dream deferred?
—Langston Hughes

In the 1960s, the preteen girl
who is me scours her local library
in a small New England town
devouring what they have

on Iceland. My paradise—
a place where everyone cares
about poetry, where books
are the national pastime

and there are more authors,
and readers, per capita
than any other country
on Earth—

not to mention
glaciers and volcanoes
hot springs and waterfalls
the wild rocky coast—

Land of the Eddas!
I imagine belonging there
in ways I’ll never
belong here.

The dream freezes
but doesn’t die. Finally,
retired, I have the time,
money, a friend to go with.

We book the trip
for April 2020—
then COVID explodes.
At least, we get a refund.

So I am still waiting
for Iceland—unlikely
to try again, as global
warming worsens

and my need to stay
home…