Listen to Poems from Our June Issue

Some of the poems I enjoy the most are about relationships. It amazes me how, in ten or twenty lines, authors can capture anything from a single memorable encounter to a lifelong connection. Three such poems are featured in our June issue. Michael Mark’s deceptively simple “My Mother’s Disease Introduces Me to My Mother” distills the complexity of caring for his mother, who has dementia, into a few spare stanzas. Angela Voras-Hills assembles snapshot-like memories into a portrait of her father in “My Father Not the Sky.” And in Hayden Saunier’s delightful “The Wisdom Package,” she falls a little in love with her buoyant eye doctor during an appointment. Keep scrolling for the poems and links to recordings of the authors reading their work.

Take care and listen well,
Nancy Holochwost, Associate Editor

My Mother’s Disease Introduces Me to My Mother
By Michael Mark

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Click the play button below to watch Michael Mark read
“My Mother’s Disease Introduces Me to My Mother.”

My mother’s disease wants
to know my name.

My mother’s disease takes
me in

with my mother’s eyes.
I ask, How can we love

what we don’t understand?
My mother’s disease explains

my mother
is not always my mother

but my mother
is always my mother.

I ask, Who am I bathing,
dressing, feeding?

I am told, You must love us both.

My Father Not the Sky
By Angela Voras-Hills

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Click the play button below to listen to Angela Voras-Hills read
“My Father Not the Sky.”

		My dad used to wake us up at 5 AM on Sundays
		with the vacuum cleaner, saying, Get out of bed,
		the day is wasting, and then he’d be asleep on the couch

		by nine, just as the sun began to lift its head
		over the houses. I have since seen the sky
		from so many places, and it never looks

		like the one I watched for tornadoes
		when the sirens rang. Near the ocean, clouds
		expand as they move, choking the blue

		with their bounding, but over the shorn
		field of corn—nearby marsh, chorus of red-
		winged blackbirds—clouds stretch, linger, roll.

		This summer my dad will ride to Sturgis,
		the sky out West broader than most. Each
		year he waits until my birthday to pull

		his Harley from storage, when the threat
		of snow has passed and rain has finally washed
		the salt from the roads, but in recent years it has snowed

		well past my birthday, flakes blundering in,
		white creeping into May, covering the face
		of every living thing trying to emerge

		from the earth. My dad was never as big
		as the sky to me, and I wonder if I ever
		wanted to marry him, the way my daughter

		tells my husband they will marry. When I was
		five, I looked off the balcony of my aunt’s house,
		and he was below in the Bonneville’s driver’s seat

		lifting a springer-spaniel puppy, raising
		its little paw in a wave to me. Maybe then?
		Sure, he was a presence, a mood shifting

		above us, but he was mostly elemental:
		a gravel path, a worn road, something stable
		burning the soles of my feet.

The Wisdom Package
By Hayden Saunier

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Click the play button below to listen to Hayden Saunier read
“The Wisdom Package.”

I ask the youngish eye doctor why my eyes itch
and burn and why new floaty bits
of paramecium-shaped debris swim

through my view each day, and he tells me
enthusiastically that this comes absolutely free
with the wisdom package—an honor

I have been awarded. I blink. And, he adds,
the wisdom package comes with lots of other
free stuff too, but just like life, some people

will get more than others. I guess he’s in his thirties,
forties tops, and I am falling in love with him
for his gentle way of reminding me I’m getting old

and that it’s a privilege. I’ve passed
the air-puff test, seen my retinal scans, which look
like the red-orange surface of the sun, each

with its pinprick dot of optic nerve—thin thread
connecting the eye to the dark, ornate theater
of the brain, where the picture shows of our lives play.

I laugh and ask him about knees and knuckles,
liver spots and forgetfulness, and to each complaint
he answers: Wisdom! Wisdom! Wisdom!

We do not know one another’s stories, how many
each of us has lost, the who or how of it,
from war, disease, or fate’s unfairness doling out

more death to some than others. He and I give
each other’s hand a quick squeeze, let go,
and get back to the business of my sight.

He swings a heavy black heart suspended
from a giant arm in front of me,
clicks through pairs of lenses

with the careful ticks of a slowing clock.
I blink and answer him each time: clearer,
better, thank you, yes, much clearer now.

Listen to Poems from Our June Issue

My Mother’s Disease Introduces Me to My Mother By Michael Mark

My Father Not the Sky By Angela Voras-Hills

The Wisdom Package By Hayden Saunier

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Related Selections

My Mother’s Disease Introduces Me to My Mother
By Michael Mark

My Father Not the Sky
By Angela Voras-Hills

The Wisdom Package
By Hayden Saunier