By: Bruce Arlen Wasserman
66
The flakes emerged from rocks
tumbled in winter avalanches
that show in the salt of summer
like yesterday’s scramble over
boulders 7,000 feet above
the sea, miles beyond the view
of canyons tumbled down vertigo
cliffs and the lack of wavesong
covered by a silence of circling
wings and the tiny songbird that
found a crack in a trunk to squeeze
into and the rarified air playing
its own kind of jazz that poets
hear while deer dusted trails exist
as things to make every day like
sunrise for 20 hours or the O2
in air like a bake of apples
crusted and waiting to cool
and bites of ice cream
hidden delight like night
like bitter cold on hot steam
and the pleasing of pie to an eye
and every step raises dust and flies
loop lazy in the breeze and this
abandonment just loses language
Clay
As Ray Charles croons
the moist days of Georgia as the red clay that Alabama
sows to potters’ fingers is thrown and every bit as pink as
sunburn yet brown as the fleshed
earth ought to be and those lovely
hues overtake our tunes instead of
seeing inequality as souls speak every
sense of mind and tongues wager the last
of each day’s wages and the story of a place grows in solitude and slaves’ hands remember
numerous unmarked graves and rope burns
burn like pyres alighting the faze of horizons and each mark that’s made goes down in the dawn
of passing ruins each rising to the earth yields
some kind of fleshing going off and we wonder
don’t they learn from old experience and is every
move so worth repeating and each step something
to be seized over and over rolling till tired clay breaks
down from substance into grit that scratches fingers
that leaves little lacerations and empties
like just so many pissing pieces?
How to Lose a Mother
Wait until her 94th birthday
or any other day or wait
for some kind of long-lost email
you never remember to send
& forget to call because you are just
packed full, then the text from your sister
to say there’s been a fall, a sudden
cardiac arrest or stroke with just a strain
of breathing not revived & almost
stable at the hospital so there’s still
a little time to cram now urgent flight
to wish her happy birthday & forget
you’ve been less than present &
the frequency of calls has declined
to not at all because she always asks
when are you coming? or says
I miss your face which reminds the
distant placing of your life
an investment that’s failed like batter
left too long to rise or the wrong flour
labeled gluten-free & the counter
at LAX lined like arms of tens of junkies
that never made the cut & you stand
slap-spined like a chef too drunk to chop
& the pan’s on fire, burnt to crispy toast
& the life you live has lost its feeling
lost its love & memories, like apnea
with every other breath & a pitch-thick
room echoes the Polish you never learned
to please her Slavic soul & the
words you dreamed but couldn’t speak
& the stumbling blind way you’ve
walked on borrowed feet & her
painful to hear rasping breath tearing
the padded sack from off your heart
like a book with a broken spine
or the poem you drafted then shifted
to the bottom of a pile, the pitch that makes
darkness fly through veins without saying
anything but the sloshing splashing walls.
Bruce Arlen Wasserman assembled his first poetry manuscript at the age of seventeen and later farmed and worked as a blacksmith in his twenties and as an editor before and through his first graduate degree program. In 2016, he was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and his short story was a semi-finalist for the 2017 Francine Ringold Awards for New Writers. In 2020, he was named the second-place winner of the Anna Davidson Rosenberg 2019 Poetry Award.
Bruce received an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts in 2017. His writing has been published in the Proverse Poetry Prize Anthology, The Fredericksburg Literary and Art Review, The River Heron Review, Kindred Literary Magazine and Broad River Review. He is a literary critic for the New York Journal of Books and the Washington Independent Review of Books and a Graduate Assistant at the MFA in Writing program of VCFA. His fiction manuscript, The Aroma of Light, was a finalist with LSU Press and is currently represented by Mark Gottlieb of Trident Media Group.
Bruce creates visual art as a potter (BruceArlenWassermanStudio.com) where he draws from the reservoir of poetry and his experience in working iron and wood, correlating a continued exploration of language, function and esoteric form. At other times he performs as a musician in a band, train horses on occasion and is a dentist in clinical practice.
"66:
The poem was birthed during a hike on the Colorado high country, the perspective offered by the macro and microscopic views brought an urgency to gather my observations into the kind of cohesive mass that makes up any poem. This poem was a short recording of a longer venture into
a rarified environment. The challenge from the experience was to bring back an artifact that would allow a reader to dip into and take away a sense of that experience.
Clay:
As a potter, the engagement I feel when handling wet clay forms a base for other experience. This poem is steeped in that warm mud. And just as a potter works in a kind of struggle with the material to form his vessel, this poem is intended to be a vessel to bring to light the struggle that has perpetually fought inequality and that still finds the challenge of its persistence something that defies sense and works against nature in the same way that overworked clay will break down into component grit, losing the elasticity that creates its ability to be identified as clay.
How to Lose a Mother:
No one is ever ready to lose a parent. That is likely because we spend our time as adults creating our own identities, which, sadly, distances the bonds we have with those responsible for creating our firm footing in life. Our parents were there when we toddled and stumbled, when we “grew up” and found our own way, one step at a time. They held our hands when we needed support and administered family justice, as well, yet they are rewarded by becoming further and further from our view. This poem is the reckoning of that phenomena in my own life as I dealt with the loss of my mother—first from the stroke that hospitalized her and ultimately, from her lack of will to live a fractured life after the stroke, and her reckoning with that and peace.
More difficult has been my own attempt to be satisfied with my lack of presence—prior to the stroke—even if I would be called a “good son,” by some. I also see the poem as an outreach to others, a reminder that this day is the perfect time to reconnect with those who have given the impact of love and support in our lives and to give back some of what we have received, while there is still opportunity."