Poems by
Kierstin Bridger,
Kathleen Cain, Kyle Laws,
Willem M. Roggeman, Jerry Smaldone, and Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
© 2022 Bristlecone
Click here to download a PDF of this issue
Bristlecone seeks to expand the scope of that earlier publication by presenting the best work the editors can find from poets across America’s Mountain States region and beyond. We’ve chosen the name Bristlecone for several reasons. First, because this species of pine is a native of our region. Secondly, bristlecone pines have a number of qualities in common with poetry as an art form.
They are among the planet’s hardiest and most long-lived beings, the oldest known individual in North America having been dated to around 2800 BCE.
They prefer freshly open ground, flourishing in high altitudes and severe environments where few other trees can even grow. Is this not an image of poetry and poets? It is for the editors of Bristlecone
The aim of this journal is to publish poems that embody qualities that make the bristlecone pine so resilient, long-lived, and worthy of reverence. Ezra Pound advised the young W. S. Merwin to “read seeds not twigs.” Bristlecone seeds, of course, are carried in cones, which resemble poems in a number of ways. By showcasing ideas, insights, griefs and joys and even subtler emotions, this journal hopes to tap into the deep time that bristlecones inhabit, the toughness they exemplify, and the model of endurance they offer to poets and readers of poetry alike. Please note that whenever possible we will provide links readers can use to buy copies of books by Bristlecone poets. Please support their good work!
The Editors: Jim Keller, Murray Moulding, Sandra S. McRae, and Joseph Hutchison
Kierstin Bridger
White Cemetery Tour, Placerville, CO
Wooden tombstones
litter this plot of memory-scape.
Note the illegible births and platitudes
etched and carved under names of centuries past.
Bones underfoot leach calcium and character
while tongues of Iris albicans chant
late March prayers
through unruly rhizomes which rise to trip
stumbling looky-loos and well-heeled guests.
The scent of juniper haunts unsettled specters
who seem to beckon children and chase dogs
over these weed-rich remains.
Welcome friends in this, our most dusky hour
among the skeletal scare of Bristlecone limb
and cactus-poked earth, see how white iris flags whip
in the western wind while their thin blooms float
like ghosts—petals ruffled
as dressing gowns tasteless
as communion wafers, they wend toward
our waterway, bow toward the fading sun.
This town was larger once
the railroad crossed the narrow canyon
between red cliff and river bend.
What’s left could go like that—
Say flash flood
Say avalanche
It’s a glossolalia of demise
as unknown as is next of kin
but listen, in the waters that swell nearby
you can hear a plea to rise again:
hung in the whiskey flush of current
a fading cry
a whisper under breath
a moving anthem,
a wink of surrender.
The Dream Where the Highschool Bully
Becomes Rodeo Royalty
She, a woman leaning outside the concrete wall
of a truck stop latrine,
the glare of sunlight white-washing her face.
She, a woman in a muscle shirt,
nibbling at torn cuticles
and the islands of candy apple polish
deserted on her fingertips.
You casually mention to her
that the children, back in the hotel room,
are making tin tiaras,
mostly from gum wrappers, you say
and she, ever squinting, eyeliner black and sharp
under already narrow, glacier blue eyes
says, I’ve always wanted to wear a crown.
So rather than ignore her, you decide
to coronate this stout blonde, this middle-aged siren.
You tell her to go into the restroom and get ready
that you’ll surprise the girls with the news.
You tell them their queen will give them
audience presently and that today
their monarch will be ceremoniously crowned.
Then your long-ago nemesis
rises atop a western steed, and emerges like a bride.
She parades down a long aisle, forward focused,
fists curled around a jewel-encrusted saddle horn.
She’s completely transformed herself.
She’s buttoned bedazzled jeans over her ample hips
and donned a gold-threaded plaid.
Her earrings dangle,
and her belt buckle shines as big and bright as Texas.
and you receive her, you take her in.
Therefore, when the girls, with great care
and solemnity, nestle the thin twists of silver paper
upon her frosted ringlets
she becomes radiant with yes.
Alchemic Reaction
I turn sideways and disappear into the stone.
—Anne Dettmer
We sit down near a window.
As she sinks
her paper sachet into its hot bath
the opened leaves
carry the scent of both grass and ocean.
I ask
what is it
if not tenderness
that allows us to pass through stone?
First is the turning, Anne says— and I’ve seen it—
shouldering into the passage of any dark alley
a shaft of sun finds her, encompasses
the whole of her, renders her luminous
where shadow once reined.
It’s a shift so remarkably subtle she becomes
unrecognizable and yet so fully herself.
I’m learning, I said, that heat can rise
set spark to our every cell,
I tell her my anger can flare unbeckoned
but where I once relied
on something like hand-to-hand
combat and raising ramparts,
I’ve found the quiet
warrior’s glide of stepping aside,
letting blows pass, feels as strong now
as the granite fists once did.
Outside the mountain looks
like a painting of itself
a Japanese scroll, inside the cafe
the invisible calligraphy
of our hands dissolve into air.
We mull over the simple miracle of
ice becoming water as we talk
and isn’t it mist that penetrates
the pores of rock?
She knows I live in a valley
formed by patient rain
I live in house companioned by a river.
Every year boulders cleave by its might
every year freeze sculpts the canyon.
chips away the defense.
We want it to be us
rising to meet the detestable
with the softest lick of grace
we want the way of an open hearth,
limp uniforms of battle
dripping from the last storm
steam rising from those sodden
fatigues
the way hearts melt
the same way
flame warms her green tea.
Kierstin Bridger is a Colorado writer who divides her
time between Ridgway and Telluride. She is
author of two books: Women Writing the West's 2017 WILLA Award-winning Demimonde (Lithic Press) and All Ember (Urban Farmhouse Press). She
is a winner of the Mark Fischer Poetry Prize, the
2015 ACC Writer’s Studio award, and a silver Charter Oak Best Historical Award.
Bridger was short-listed for the Manchester Poetry Competition in the UK. She
is editor of Ridgway Alley Poems and
Co-Director of Open Bard Poetry Series. She earned her MFA at Pacific
University.
Kathleen Cain
Crane Fields
It was my father’s job to scout the best fields for viewing.
Lesser sandhills—for years I never knew if “lesser” meant the birds or the
hills. Sometimes you have to let ambiguity stand. He knew all the fields—not
just the obvious ones around Old Fort Kearny, or the bridge off Highway 10.
Farm roads were his cartography; his own home place lay a few miles off to the
south. He could work his way through a labyrinth of corners—my mother and I
hard pressed to find the way back to town when he asked if we thought we could.
We learned not to question when he said nothing as we eased past some farmyard
dead end. There they’d be. Red heads startling our pulses. Druid wings raised
to dance on first one, then the other leg. Fields alive with primal purr. 5,000
to an acre (more, actually, but you wouldn’t believe me)—years before busloads
of tourists began to arrive at the Highway 10 bridge, subsuming bird purr with
digital click and hum. We kept our pact of triple silence, windows down, even
though it was March, with a blizzard brewing.
each spring a return
one hundred miles of river
forty million years
Phenology
When will the Sphinx moth appear?
Or the ring-necked doves return from Mexico?
What day in June
does the first Peace Rose bloom?
Where is the young blackbird hiding
as it begs to be fed?
Why does the hawk circle at noon?
All these I can answer
though after all this time
I know nothing
of your heart’s migration
or its seasons.
Easier to explain
the colors of the winds
how long since the sea was here
why we never see the dark side
of the Moon.
Scarstruck
Sometimes when I go to visit
this old cottonwood I call Scarstruck
when it’s time to go, I don’t want to leave.
All her children are gone.
She doesn’t know where, though
they’re probably no more than
two or three miles from home, at most.
In the early summer she speaks, always
jubilant about new life; always some
water-wisdom tricked out of the wind
turning her leaves. “Wait . . .” she
whispers. “Wait . . ..” She creaks
at the exact place where her trunk
left the soil. The old wound from
lightning gave her a voice. Each push
from the wind adds another word
to the story. Thirty years ago, and still
she doesn’t give up trying to surround
that wound. Not healing it, trees don’t
actually do that. But she contains it.
Holds it and keeps on living.
Kathleen Cain’s poetry recently appeared in Mad Blood (anthology), Mad Blood #6 Poetry & Art Calendar, and is forthcoming in the debut issue (online) of Abandoned Mine. Two of her poems were selected for the recent Forces of Nature ekphrasis show at the Windsor Art and Heritage Center, where “At the Window” received second prize in the poetry competition. Her nonfiction book, The Cottonwood Tree: An American Champion was nominated for a Colorado Book Award and was selected as part of the Nebraska 150 Books Project. https://kathleencainwriter.com
Kyle Laws
Steel Dreams
In last week’s dreams, the back of the house became an
industrial
warren of rooms. Trying to trace the cause, I remember telling a
friend that I'd worked on the dig in the basement of the Fariss
Hotel, scraped away layer by layer after the first corner of the fort
was found. On the second floor, where the lobby had been, was a
linoleum covered front desk, keys still in cubbyholes behind, and
narrow rooms with space for a single bed, railroaders' rooms, those
staying longer occupying two suites in front overlooking the river
where it once ran downtown, odd angle of streets made by the
banks as they shifted depending on the flow after winter snows.
Spring run-off from mountains marked boundaries, as the first
year without a women's poetry festival reminded us as we sat in
the Shamrock and wrote to $2.00 draws anyway. We are women
who rely on seminal markers of seasons, beginnings, the flow
of water out of mountains to fields where Pueblo chiles grow,
Bessemer Ditch through South Pueblo down Adams Ave. to the
industrial site which gives it its name, out onto the mesa, from
mountains through streets where Guggenheim had his first
smeltery. This is what populates rooms of dreams, steel remains
of an old Pueblo as we write to the end of day at the art museum
carved into what was the scrap yard bottom of Goat Hill.
Which Mind, Which Body
Years ago I wrote, document the change in body
from young to old with tripod and
remote control shutter.
I wanted to capture the form over years,
a form I was familiar with,
without asking a model.
The 35MM camera is deep in the closet,
myopia progressed to cataracts. By mid-thirties,
I had given up film.
I was thin, beautiful in an English way.
Then belly rounded as evening meals
became the center of life.
Five months after the Port-au-Prince earthquake,
I lost 15 pounds in as many days
to a Haitian parasite.
I’m back to when I wrote the directive.
I’ve recorded the changes year by year:
not in loosening of breast
and softening of hips, but in sharpening of mind,
letting go of expectations.
Still, I would like to be able to see
when I look in a mirror,
which is mind,
which is body.
Lucky Bones
Hook-like claw found only on the male
horseshoe crab worn by whalers when
they set off from shore for safe return.
In a booth in Lucky Bones Backwater Grille,
I record the moon rising over the watchtower
that stood alone on Beach Drive in the ‘62 storm
before the Grand Hotel was built around it,
how I walked into the sunset, to the pavilion
where seniors would sit to watch it go down
at the edge of town before the stretch
to the Point was a bird preserve, before
we knew that eggs laid by horseshoe crabs
were what brought thousands of seabirds
to our shore on the bay to rest and feed
exhausted from the fly north. We would
poke their hard brown shells with sticks
and watch them bleed green, not red like us,
so we felt justified in our probing as if they
were alien and we were defending from attack,
what in retrospect, looking back on the 50s
seems reasonable with Sputnik and the cold war.
Now the humble archaic creatures have risen again
to talisman that I raise a glass to: Lucky Bones.
Kyle Laws is based out of Steel City Art Works in Pueblo, Colorado, where she directs Line/Circle: Women Poets in Performance. Her collections include Beginning at the Stone Corner (River Dog, 2022), The Sea Is Woman (Moonstone Press, 2021, winner of its 2020 award), Uncorseted (Kung Fu Treachery Press, 2020), Ride the Pink Horse (Stubborn Mule Press, 2019), Faces of Fishing Creek (Middle Creek Publishing, 2018), This Town: Poems of Correspondence co-authored with Jared Smith (Liquid Light Press, 2017), So Bright to Blind (Five Oaks Press, 2015), and Wildwood (Lummox Press, 2014). With eight nominations for a Pushcart Prize and one for Best of the Net, her poems and essays have appeared in magazines and anthologies in the U.S., Canada, and Europe. She is editor and publisher of Casa de Cinco Hermanas Press.
Willem M. Roggeman
Translated by Philippe Ernewein
Lockdown
Some can’t take it anymore.
Some paint a mirror on the wall
with the face of a woman in it.
Some listen to a tape
with the voice of a woman
whose whispering can hardly be heard.
Some feed their imagination
with recollections of adventures
they never experienced.
Some see in the creases
of the blanket on the bed
the shape of a sleeping woman.
Some fall asleep
with one hand in the hand of the night.
Some whisper I love you
and listen to the stove’s answer.
Some can’t agree with themselves.
Some know the precise personal description
of a woman they never knew.
Some point to the place
where alcohol gave birth to beauty.
Some sit motionless in a room
and travel with dizzying speed
through the country that begins behind the mirror.
Some are afraid of the sunrise.
Some answer the questions
that no one ever asked them
due to lack of interest.
Some see in the wallpaper
how life passes by.
Some can’t even talk to themselves.
Some don’t realize that yesterday has never begun.
Some sink like stones into time.
Some feel their blood stop running.
No one is alone in his loneliness.
What Only Painters See
These are the first signs:
A startled moon between the trees.
Animals starting to stutter.
Flowers stirring from a nightmare.
Humans terrified of the future
scurry back into the trees.
The night admires the darkness.
All that ever happened drops out of time.
Silence steals its way upwards.
Old men degenerate into light.
He who keeps vigil pointlessly preserves
The melancholy trellis of his dreams.
Sleep leaves our eyes unseen.
Our fear cries out.
Spring tries on her new clothes.
The sun slithers behind the sea.
Evening enters every home
unrecognized by daylight.
Another day, another flash
Look — lightning, we say, and someone repeats it.
God’s Dream
If it’s true that we’re
all only characters
inhabiting God’s great
endless dream, then he’s also
dreaming all our dreams and has no
power to interfere in our existence
since he’s not conscious of it.
That he’s invented in his dream
Shakespeare as well as Eichmann
testifies to his fantastic imagination.
When the time comes for him
to wake from this nightmare, perhaps he’ll
create some divine Freud
who will analyze this dream
and explain it. Then will appear
what complexes God suffers from.
In the future then we shall
likely experience a calmer existence,
but if the therapy miscarries
we’re in for stranger
stories yet.
Willem M. Roggeman is a Belgian poet, novelist, and art critic. His poetry has been
widely translated, and he is a regular guest at international poetry festivals. He has also
published two novels and several collections of articles on artists and highly regarded
interviews with writers. In 1988, he was awarded the Order of Leopold II for his cultural
work. His most recent book of poems is In Een Getekende Morgen (2019).
Philippe Ernewein is a native of Turnhout, Belgium. He
is the Director of Education at the Denver Academy in Denver, Colorado, USA. Philippe’s published work can be found
at
www.rememberit.org.
Jerry Smaldone
Enter
another world
where ancestors usher you in, point out your seat,
whisper feelings to your soul that carry
you back into a womb of timelessness.
An overwhelming sense of family
everywhere,
angels serving, guarding, humming a kind
of prayer
so deep the sound burrows into your
bones and
leaves you limp and barely breathing.
The golden light dims in the shadows
where saints are old friends, willing to
listen to
all your complaints and requests, and
this guy Jesus
is the forever mystery of why are we worthy
of you
dying for us, what is the value of
sacrifice,
who are we if we cannot love?
And the Mother of heaven, the healer of
earth
Mater
grazia, Mater misericordia, asks and gives
as she always has in the little shrine
by the water
where we coil our troubled hearts
into the end that lets us begin.
Wedding Tarantell’
Ayyy, he growls,
those days are over, shaking his hand
up and down, it couldn't have been that good, right, dage?
nothing left but pictures of happy, hungry people
coming down the church steps, rice flying through the air
lace bundles of coombitz, obligatory
shots of anisette,
sangweeches and home-made cookies
as the fast music starts up and kids pull the old ladies
squealing from their chairs and the old men brush us
away grunting lasciami, whyole and
the great circle straggles together, hand in hand,
arm in arm, as the lucky couple are forced into the middle
and around and round we go, faster
and faster, suddenly stopping and flying the opposite way
until we're dizzy and laughing fire, until the groom pulls
his woman to him with his crimson scarf
and our outstretched arms cover the couple
in good wishes and the promise
of a lifetime of love.
Mother's Day
Sunday morning early Dad sets your picture on the
desk next to him in bed as he turns on the Mass on tv.
I drive to the cemetery, nobody on the road
but churchgoers and classic cars headed to shows,
a bucket T with chrome manifold and V-8,
an unrestored '47 Ford, dull primer black and beautiful
the change from '47 to '57 like shooting into outer space
drifting as I drive, spinzarodd, to yesterday at the bocce
tournament, where Georgie Mash remembered the aroma
of baking bread, fresh from the forn', the outdoor ovens,
and the smell of cooking tomatoes, the canning, drying,
a fragrant cloud over the neighborhood
and mama, I'm not going to cry for you today, not much,
I'm going to smile and be happy and wonder why you
loved us so much, why the sight of us made you light up
even in your anger, only a mother knows. To feel that kind of
love I was once embarrassed by, from a person who I'd ignored
most of my life, whose body and mind were painfully failing
was humbling. It made me realize my own stupidity
and how long it took to grow out of selfish immaturity.
Right now, our little family, always full of drama
has never felt more screwed up. I stand before your
cold crypt, close my eyes and think of you.
Even with the dead, you have to be careful
who you ask for advice, and what advice you ask for.
“Enjoy!” she beams with that sardonic grin, “enjoy the turmoil.
Someday you'll wish you had.”
The Good Times Are All Gone
You lay like a corpse
straight from head to toe
on your adjustable metal bed
naked, but for a sheet
grasped with crossed hands
just beneath your chin
Death stretches on the dirty
windowsill, amused by the battle
of birds versus squirrel, content to wait
until every friend you ever had
every cousin you ever drank with,
all your sisters and hardheaded brother
sainted mother and father you barely knew,
wrap you in their arms
and carry you away
My wife has baked the sweetest cake,
light as air and smooth going down,
full of butter, fresh with cream
but you cannot swallow, you will
not eat, look up into space
what is it that you see?
The future passes over you
this inevitability we are not allowed
to face until the very, very end
the final moments of this melodrama,
of troubled times, unleashed laughs,
hard responsibility and love you can't lose
until you rise like a lion on invisible wings,
peek over the great abyss and go to meet
the dark night, full of glancing stars
light as air, fresh as a babe's breath
your wife softly calling you forward
your angel leading you home
and you smile at your golden birth
and run toward it
like a fawn on newfound legs.
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
New Mantra
To this day with its deepening whirlpools of grief,
I say okay. Okay to the way I am swirled
and pulled down. Okay to the thick muscled sorrow.
Okay to the throat with its clenching, its tightness.
Okay to the ambush of tears.
On this day when saying yes to the world
is too shiny, too perky, too yes, too bright,
on this day with its churning currents of pain,
on this day when there is no clear path forward
at least I do not say no.
Okay, I say, as I pull on my clothes. Okay,
I say, as I don’t make the call. Okay
is my life vest, my life raft, my passage.
I’m grateful it isn’t a verb. Okay.
Okay. Okay, I say, blessed by its unstriving truth.
Okay, I say as the whirlpool spits me out.
Okay as another pulls me down again.
The Naked Heart Goes into Town
The heart walks down the street
with its big brim hat, its sunglasses,
its four chambers stepping up
onto the curb. It hopes it doesn’t
run into anyone it knows.
It’s hard enough to keep pumping,
pumping, one hundred thousand times
a day. That’s all the heart can manage right now.
No conversation. No small talk.
No big talk. The heart has nothing to say—
a heart is made to feel,
and feel it does as it makes its way
to the post office, stops at the crosswalk,
feels it all.
Feels the cool breeze that buffets it.
Feels love for the scent of autumn,
love for the low-glancing light.
And it grieves for the loss
of what once it pumped for.
Grieves for the boy who still
lives in its walls. Grieves for
all who grieve, who weep.
Oh the heart, it feels so exposed
as it stands at the door of the coffee shop,
wonders if it can go in.
The other hearts in the coffee shop
wear so much skin.
The heart sniffs at the dark and bitter scent,
remembers what it was like
to go inside, sip a latte, talk about weather.
It pounds against itself,
walks on down the road.
What the Sky Knows
Before the feast,
I slip outside
into the rose glow
of evening and
talk to my loves
who no longer
walk this earth,
and I thank them
for being in my life
and I cry and cry.
How is it possible
at the same time
to hold so much grief
and so much gratitude?
And the sky holds me
and the rooftops, the
streets and the fields,
the factories and forests,
it holds it all, holds
what is most beautiful,
holds what is most foul.
It doesn’t try to change
anything. Like that,
it seems to say
as it turns a deeper
rose. Like that.
There Is Only the Field
On the day my father begins hospice,
I watch the pronghorn in the field,
marvel as their brown- and white-striped bodies
nearly disappear in the dead grass where
they graze. If only I could camouflage
my father so death can’t find him, so that pain
would never have discovered him.
Tomorrow, my mother and brother and I
will gather around him the way a herd
might gather, circling him as some antelope
circle their young. But death will come.
And we, unable to run fast enough,
unable to hide, will meet it together.
And if I could fight death, would I? Whatever horns
I have are more for ritual than danger.
When death arrives, I want to bring
my softest self. I won’t bargain,
but I’ll tell death it’s taking the best of us—
the one who worked hardest to survive.
When death arrives, I want to ask it, Please,
be gentle. He suffered so much already.
I want to tell death, You don’t get all of him.
I carry in me his goodness, his courage.
While I live, he will always be alive in this field.
Beautiful new publication!
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