May 2, 2026: "The Split," Son's Award, "Teenager Hacks into Heaven"

So, National Poetry Month is over.  I survived all the readings and workshops, a quick trip downstate to Ann Arbor and Detroit, plus the entire week of the Great Lakes Poetry Festival at the library.  Now, sitting in the laundromat on a Saturday morning, watching my clothes agitate and spin, I am both sad and relieved.  I’m sure, in a couple months, I’ll be looking back on the past four weeks with nostalgia.  Yes, I’m glad it’s over, but I’ll miss being in the thick of poetry and poetic events every day.  Sort of like the day after Christmas as a kid—you’re haunted by all the anticipation and excitement of Santa Claus.

Marie Howe writes about ghosts . . . 

The Split

by: Marie Howe

I.

She'd start the fires under the bed.
I'd put them out.

She'd take the broom stick and rape all the little girls.
I'd pull them aside, stroke their cheeks, and comfort them.
—How they would cry.

Brit would fight the German soldiers.
She'd crouch by the banister waiting for them
when I was too scared.

And sometimes, she would push me farther into the back woods 

than I wanted to go
But I was glad she did.

She was mean and she liked it.

She'd take off her clothes and dance in front of the mirror 

and she'd say things and she'd swear.

She'd laugh at the crucifix, turn him upside down and watch him hang.
And she'd unhinge that piece of metal cloth between his legs
and run when she heard somebody coming
leaving me.

Mean as she was, I miss her.

Only twice have I heard her laugh since then.
Once, lying on my back in a yellow field,
I heard something that sounded like me in the back of my head
but it was Brit,

and just now, making love with you, it's hard to tell you
but I heard her laugh.

II.

It began as a fear.
There was something, not me, in the room.

And translated into a dumbfounding
forgetfulness

that stopped me on the street
puzzling

over what year it was, what month.

I began to watch my feet carefully.
Nevertheless, I suffered
accidents.

The bread knife sliced my thumb
repeatedly

the water glass shattered on the kitchen floor
and in its breaking there was a low laugh.

Looking up, I saw no one

but felt the old cat stretch inside me
feigning indifference.

Marie, I'd hear in a crowd, Marie
the air so thick with ghosts it was hard
breathing.

One afternoon, the trucks were humming like vacuum cleaners
in the rain.

It was impossibly lonely,
No one but me there:

I called out Brit, the city is burning,
Brit, the soldiers are coming

and she laughed so sudden and loud I turned
and saw her for one second

all insolent grace, pretending
she wasn't loving me.

I’ve had many experiences similar to the Howe is describing.  You’re out and about, not really thinking about the past or future, just being present in the moment.  Suddenly, because of the smell of an orange  or a voice heard in the distance, you’re pulled back into the past (maybe even to childhood).  Last Saturday, walking into church to play the pipe organ for Mass, I saw an old man shambling into the sanctuary, and I swear it was my father.  Same gait.  Same stooped shoulders and back.  It made me stop dead for a few moments, until the present took over again.

The final event of the Great Lakes Poetry Festival is always the awards ceremony for the GLPF Teen Poetry Contest.  Teens are invited to submit one poem to be blindly judged by a panel of poets.  The winners receive gift cards to Snowbound Books, one of the local independent booksellers.  

My son, who will be graduating from high school at the end of the month, entered the contest this year, at my urging.  (He’s entered the contest one other time, and he was awarded second place, if memory serves.). He didn’t want to enter, rolled his eyes every time I reminded him of the deadline.  He’s a really good poet; I might even apply the term gifted to him, but only when he’s not within earshot.  

This year’s judges all agreed that the teen poems this year were the strongest batch we’ve ever received in the history of the contest.  I sat in the Zoom meeting, listening them debate the merits of each entry.  Usually, it takes a little bit of time to come to a consensus on first, second, and third.  Not this year.  Every judge picked the same poem as their number one choice.  

Long story short (too late, I know), my son won first place this year with his poem “Falling Leaves.”  He was so geeked about it that he dropped his indifferent, cool teenager persona for a little while and allowed himself to be excited and proud.  It was really good to see.

My son struggled so much in elementary and middle school.  Bullies and ADHD and suicidal depression, among other things.  His younger self still haunts me on a daily basis.  I made so many mistakes in those years.  I should have pulled him from the school he was attending.  Should have insisted on an IEP and additional help.  There were some people at the school who really did their best to assist him, but, by the time he reached eighth grade, he was labeled a “bad kid.”  My last interactions with the school district’s superintendent in the weeks prior to the end of that final middle school year proved to me that my son was doomed if he stayed in that educational system.

Thus, my son started attending an alternative high school as a freshman.  He was an unknown quantity.  Clean slate, as the saying goes. And he has thrived.  He went from receiving C’s and D’s on his report card to being one of the people at the top of his class.  The teachers at the high school quickly discovered he had many talents, especially for math and English and writing.

I’m not saying there haven’t been some setbacks, but I am completely convinced that the decision to switch schools saved my son’s life, literally.  The ghost of that struggling little boy was in the room last Saturday when he won the Teen Poetry Contest, and that tiny spirit jumped up and down, hollered and clapped.  It was an amazing moment of triumph that, five years ago, I never would have predicted.

Poetry saves lives.

Saint Marty wrote the following poem as a challenge . . .

Teenager Hacks into Heaven

by: Martin Achatz

Maybe he’s like Matthew Broderick
playing Global Thermonuclear War
with Joshua, something as innocent
as tic-tac-toe triggering Armageddon.

Or maybe he’s prompted to change
his password by a link sent
from his dead grandmother’s
email, and he clicks on it because
he misses her chocolate chip banana
bread still warm form the oven.

Or maybe, just maybe, he craves
everlasting life, like Elizabeth Báthory
simmering in a hot tub of virgin blood,
Keats spying on a nesting nightingale,
Donald Trump carving his face on Rushmore.

He doesn’t want to be a lost soul
knocking at strangers’ houses, hoping
to find the back door to paradise
where Amazon packages are delivered,
garbage bags hunch, and feral cats prowl
for leftover Communion table scraps.

Now that he’s a poem, perhaps
someone in a hundred years
will read him, encounter him
like a forgotten classmate
at a 50th reunion, you know, that kid
who always sat by himself at lunch,
waiting for the cafeteria ladies to give
away the leftover pizza and tater tots.
If you get close enough, you might
be able to read his name tag.

April 24, 2026: “The Meadow,” Poetry and Poetry and Poetry, “Some Thoughts from the Ghost of Mary Oliver”

Some things can change your life forever.  Certainly, falling in love qualifies.  Experiencing a death, as well.  Getting a new job.  Going back to school.  Moving to a new town or state or country.  Watching Star Wars: A New Hope for the first time.  (Hey, it changed my life.)

These experiences are powerfully instructive.  They teach you about yourself.  The first poem by Sharon Olds I ever read (“The Pope’s Penis”) made me want to be a poet.  Because of Olds’ bravery and boldness., I realized no subject was off limits.  I could write about anything.  Language was the key to the world.

Marie Howe writes about the power of language . . . 

The Meadow

by: Marie Howe

As we walk into words that have waited for us to enter them, so
the meadow, muddy with dreams, is gathering itself together

and trying, with difficulty, to remember how to make wildflowers.
Imperceptibly heaving with the old impatience, it knows

for certain that two horses walk upon it, weary of hay.
The horses, sway-backed and self important, cannot divine

how the small white pony mysteriously escapes the fence every day.
This is the miracle just beyond their heavy-headed grasp,

and they turn from his nuzzling with irritation. Everything
is crying out. Two crows, rising from the hill, fight

and caw-cry in mid-flight, then fall and light on the meadow grass
bewildered by their weight. A dozen wasps drone, tiny prop planes,

sputtering into a field the farmer has not yet plowed,
and what I thought was a phone, turned down and ringing,

is the knock of a woodpecker for food or warning, I can’t say.
I want to add my cry to those who would speak for the sound alone.

But in this world, where something is always listening, even
murmuring has meaning, as in the next room you moan

in your sleep, turning into late morning. My love, this might be
all we know of forgiveness, this small time when you can forget

what you are. There will come a day when the meadow will think
suddenly, water, root, blossom, through no fault of its own,

and the horses will lie down in daisies and clover. Bedeviled,
human, your plight, in waking, is to choose from the words

that even now sleep on your tongue, and to know that tangled
among them and terribly new is the sentence that could change your life.

I love that last phrase—“the sentence that could change your life.”  It’s a powerful thought.  We all carry in our mouths words that can cause earthquakes, heal broken hearts, end hunger, stop wars.  Think about it.  If a war can be started by one lunatic who can’t string together a coherent thought, then peace can be achieved by a sane person who’s not afraid to say, “Give peace a chance.”  (Thank you, John Lennon.)

Sorry that it has taken me so long to give an update after my last post about my wife’s health issues.  I’ve been eyeballs deep in poetry for over a week.  Last weekend, I visited a high school in Ann Arbor to talk poetry with the students.  Then I participated in a reading at a bookstore in Dexter, Michigan.  The next day, we drove to Detroit, had pizza with some family members I don’t get to see very often, including my grandniece Abby (one of my son’s favorite people).  Then I read poems at Next Chapter Books in Detroit.  (My first appearance in the Motor City—and my family came to support me.)

I didn’t have much of a chance to recover from this trip.  Monday, I dove right into the Great Lakes Poetry Festival at the library where I work.  Readings and writing workshops and movies and presentations.  Poetry and poetry and poetry.  I was surrounded by people who seize every day by the throat and refuse to let go.  Poets.

I’m pretty exhausted tonight, but it’s a good exhaustion.  Birthday exhaustion.  Christmas exhaustion.  You get the idea.  It’s as if I’ve been laughing for a week straight, and now my sides are hurting and eyes are watering.  I could happily sleep for a week, drunk on poetry.

As John Keating says in Dead Poets Society, “No matter what people tell you, words and ideas can change the world.”

Saint Marty wrote a new ghost poem this week . . . 

Some Thoughts from the Ghost of Mary Oliver

by: Martin Achatz

You think you know me because you’ve read

my poems about Blackwater Pond and geese,

bears digging honey from rotten tree trunks.

But I never wrote about stepping onto my front 

porch just as sun unzipped the horizon at dawn

and song sparrows shivered the pines with their

hungry music.  I never scribbled how good it was

to stand in that cold air before the woods 

stretched and yawned, how much I enjoyed 

my first wild and precious cigarette of the day.

April 19, 2026: “ What the Angels Left,” Hospital, “Ode to Cheese and Crackers”

The last four or five days have been a rollercoaster.

On Tuesday, my wife texted me, telling me that it felt like an elephant was sitting on her chest and her jaw was aching.  Having worked in a cardiology office for about eight years, I knew she needed to go to the ER.  (You wouldn’t believe the number of times I spoke to patients on the phone experiencing symptoms of a heart attack and asking me what they should do.  The answer was always the same:  CALL AN AMBULANCE! or GET TO THE EMERGENCY ROOM!)

Two days later, my wife was still in the hospital, and we still didn’t have any answers.  First and foremost—we do know she did NOT have a heart attack.  All the testing (bloodwork, EKGs, stress test, echocardiogram) proved that.  What the doctors couldn’t figure out is why her heart rate kept falling into the 40s.  The first morning, she couldn’t complete her stress test because her heart rate fell to 39 bpm (that’s “beats per minute” for my non-medical disciples).  

Of course there have been moments of grace over through this whole ordeal—simple kindnesses like text messages and an occasional piece of chocolate—and I know that there were tons of people praying for my wife.

Marie Howe writes about unexpected grace . . . 

What the Angels Left

by: Marie Howe

At first, the kitchen scissors seemed perfectly harmless.

They lay on the kitchen table in the blue light.

Then I began to notice them all over the house,

at night in the pantry, or filling up bowls in the cellar

where there should have been apples.  They appeared under rugs,

lumpy places where one would usually settle before the fire,

or suddenly shining in the sink at the bottom of soupy water.

Once, I found a pair in the garden, stuck in turned dirt

among the new bulbs, and one night, under my pillow,

I felt something like a cool long tooth and pulled them out

to lie next to me in the dark.  Soon after that I began 

to collect them, filling boxes, old shopping bags,

every suitcase I owned.  I grew slightly uncomfortable

when company came.  What if someone noticed them

when looking for forks or replacing dried dishes?  I longed

to throw them out, but how could I get rid of something

that felt oddly like grace?  It occurred to me finally

that I was to use them, and I resisted a growing cumpulsion

to cut my hair, although, in moments of great distraction,

I thought it was my eyes they wanted, or my soft-belly

—exhausted, in winter, I laid them out on the lawn.

The snow fell quiet as usual, without any apparent hesitation

or discomfort.  In spring, as I expected, they were gone.

In their place, a slight metallic smell, and the clear muddy earth.

I think what Howe is getting at in this poem are graces that don’t seem like graces at first:  missing a bus and finding out later that the missed bus got hit by a train; getting sick on Christmas thereby avoiding a family get-together that ended in tears and screaming; or not eating dinner and hearing that everyone who DID eat ended up with food poisoning.  You get the idea.  The scissors seem like a plague, but, in actuality, they are gifts from angels.

My wife did her second stress test on Thursday morning without any problems.  By noon, she was discharged from the hospital sporting a 30-day Holter monitor.  By 3:30 p.m., our car was packed, and we were on the road for a whirlwind weekend of poetry readings in Ann Arbor, Dexter, and Detroit.  (More on that in an upcoming post.)

So, you may be asking, where is the grace in all of that?

Answer:  all of our family and friends.

Being in the hospital can be a pretty isolating experience, but we never felt that.  My sister-in-law and brother-in-law waited in the ER with us.  One of my best friends (who happens to be the head of the cardiology clinic) made sure my wife’s tests were completed as quickly as possible.  Another friend who’s a cardiology nurse stopped by to see how we were holding up.  It was simply grace upon grace upon grace from everyone (and that includes my friends and family from downstate).

Here’s a poem about grace that Saint Marty wrote . . .

Ode to Cheese and Crackers

by: Martin Achatz

Nothing special.  Saltines.  Kraft American

cheese slices.  I sit on the couch at 11 p.m.,

home from the hospital where I left

my wife in a bed, her heart singing

lullabies on a screen at the nurses’ station.

I place the cheese and crackers on my tongue

like communion wafers, blessed by the salt

crunch, creamy orange blandness, the way

I used to feel blessed when my mother gave

me Campbell’s Chicken Noodle when I was home

sick as a kid and I believed she could cure

leprosy, raise the dead with a can opener

and microwave oven while Bob Barker

dispensed miracles to the sick and lame

on the TV as long as they promised

to spay and neuter their pets.

April 13, 2026: “Death, the Last Visit,” Emily Dickinson, “Writing a Poem”

It’s Monday night.  Just got home from the library after showing a movie about the life of Emily Dickinson.  A Quiet Passion.  I’d seen it before.  Thought it was a perfect choice for National Poetry Month.

I’m not going to write a whole lot tonight.  I’m tired.  I think it has something to do with the dreary weather.  Driving to and from work today, the fog was so thick I worried I was going to run into a deer that got lost in the woods and wandered onto the mist-choked highway.

Marie Howe gets a little Emily Dickinson-esque . . . 

Death, the Last Visit

by: Marie Howe

Hearing the low growl in your throat, you’ll know that it’s started.

It has nothing to ask you.  It only has something to say, and

it will speak in your own tongue.

Locking its arm around you, it will hold you as long as you ever wanted.

Only this time it will be long enough.  It will not let go.

Burying your face in its dark shoulder you’ll smell mud and hair and water.

You’ll taste your mother’s sour nipple, your favorite salty cock

and swallow a word you thought you’d spit out once and be done with.

Through half-closed eyes you’ll see that its shadow looks like yours,

a perfect fit.  You could weep with gratefulness.  It will take you

as you like it best, hard and fast as a slap across the face,

or so sweet and slow you’ll scream give it to me until it does.

Nothing will ever reach this deep.  Nothing will ever clench this hard.

At last (the little girls are clapping, shouting) someone has pulled

the drawstring of your gym bag closed enough and tight.  At last

someone has knotted the lace of your shoe so it won’t ever come undone.

Even as you turn into it, even as you begin to feel yourself stop,

you’ll whistle with amazement between your residual teeth oh jesus

oh sweetheart, oh holy mother, nothing nothing nothing ever felt this good.

It’s funny.  I wrote a poem this evening about death, as well.  Most poets are pretty obsessed with mortality.  It’s one of the pitfalls of being a poet.  Death kindly stops for you all the time.

Here is Saint Marty’s new poem . . . 

Writing a Poem

by: Martin Achatz

Doesn’t it always start with a question,

like why is that snowman standing alone

in a field or how did Mom make perfect

pancakes every time or did my sister

feel my hand holding hers in those last

breath moments before her lungs went

to sleep and heart became a drumbeat

on a distant battlefield, when hearing

was all she had left, my voice entering

her ear canal, slowly drifting toward

the shores of her mind—a kid’s

inner tube blown across the lake by

a summer squall until it washes

ashore, finds a home in cattails where

it waits to be remembered, claimed

like a lost soul?