The Garden of Verse: Magic Moments in Verse-Virtual's December 2020 Issue

Is the fraught year 2020 actually coming to end? 

A troubling year ends on a high note for the poets who contributed some of the year's best work to December issue of the online journal "Verse-Virtual," which every months publishes new work by some 50 contributors. Here are a few of the poems that offered word magic in the waning days of 2020.

Among the poems in the December issue that got deeply inside me and stayed there are two poems by Steve Klepetar. “Thin Air” speaks to the  Election Day anxiety many of us felt (I did: trying to decide whether to flee to Costa Rica), but takes us to a fantastically dark place made beautiful by its depiction. It’s hard to call out the great lines here –

“Your sister hides in the attic.

She has broken the necks 

on all her dolls.

There will be much to discuss.”—

for example; there are so many of them, and they build on one another. The

fractured dolls follow:  

“Your father has limped home late.

His briefcase has torn, his shirt 

hangs in rags. Could it be dogs 

again, or the human gang?”

It’s the ‘human gang’ that’s really scary, isn’t it?

The second poem “Reading Quantum Physics and the End of the World," 

takes us to a similar place. Though the atmosphere is rarified, the landing 

is familiar: 

“But now I have a headache and my Facebook friends/ are 

weeping. Those boots again, and now a rustling in the trees.”

I’m down with Tamara Madison’s strong poem on aging, "The Last Rain," for some of the same reasons. It addresses, beautifully, effectively, things I don’t even want to think about. So the poem sings them to our hearts: 

“Tonight when I hear the rain

slap the sidewalk as they say that it will,

I will stand in the street with my arms

outstretched and let my face go wet

and my clothes stick to my sides

because the way things are now,

this may be the last rain ever.”

 

Marilyn Taylor's poem “The Four Who Would Be Will” may well be the last, best words we will ever hear on the bizarro, upper-class-twit conspiracy theories over who ‘really’ wrote Shakespeare’s plays. The comic zingers keep coming, with the wit and agility that would have pleased the master.

 

“My Lord Francis Bacon, let’s open with you:

a scholar you were, and a scientist too;

you wrote of enlightenment, back in the day—

but nary a poem, and never a play.

It’s likely that we would be sadly mistaken

to look for a Hamlet along with our Bacon.”

 

A poem that serves Hamlet and Bacon on the same dish, the latter as a strong, stanza-clinching rhyme, deserves a bust in Westminster Abbey.

 

Michael Minassian’s poem "Dressing the Buddha” finds shadings of divinity in the street scenes of our secular existence. Even if finding Shakyamuni barefoot on the side of a road was only an “illusion,” the poem’s speaker takes him home for tea and a bowl of soup.

 

Both funny and profound, the poem winks at its metaphysical storyline, suggesting (without preaching) that we should care for someone in need because we never know when we might be driving an angel from our door.

 

The speaker gives the Buddha his favorite clothing “along with my wife’s warmest boots.” And she, arriving home, gets to the heart of the matter: “have you been meditating again?” but then embraces the same wisdom-with-humor philosophy:

 

“she ran after him and gave him her saffron

colored scarf, wrapping it gently twice

around his bare neck.”

 

That’s the bare neck we should all be seeking to save. 

 

Some poems are simply great stories, such as Sharon Waller Knutson’s poem about reliving old loves and losses, “I get an email from a former co-worker on a Montana newspaper in the mid 1960s.” The magic is in the detail: 

 

“It is two am and 44 below zero

and my 1956 Ford Thunderbird

won’t start and he has locked his keys

in his 1961 Chevy Impala. He kicks

in the window and his car chokes

and coughs but finally starts

and we slide over icy streets.”

If you haven’t done so already, you need to read the rest. 

The same is true of “Vietnam Vet,” a poem about a soldier who has

been reported dead. The story is told with spare gallows humor: 

“As the barber cuts his hair, he says:

Aren’t you that soldier on the news?”

The poignancy of these period particulars are the poetry.

These, and the many other fine poems in the December 2020 (my god, are we really at the end of this year?), are still up there for us to make a first, or subsequent, visit.

Here's the link Verse-Virtual December