In the Afterlife / Spring 2022 by Marianne Szlyk

“Two days before her death [from COVID], [Czech folksinger Hana] Horka posted on social media: ‘I survived … It was intense. So now there will be the theatre, sauna, a concert … and an urgent trip to the sea.’” (Agence-France Presse in Prague).

In the Afterlife

are there theaters, concerts, saunas,
longed-for excursions to the sea,
the Czech folksinger is musing.

Dressed for a walk in her garden,
she stands on the brink. Fog closes
in and embraces her small frame.

Bringing nothing, not even a purse,
she walks across what she hopes is
sand. Her laced up sneakers tighten.

Fog horns bloom behind opaque drapes.
Closer by, waves sound like traffic
while constant traffic sounds like waves.

She cannot smell the sea, but she
remembers scents of her garden
in winter: pungent earth and damp.

She listens for great-grandmothers’
angels, for all her dead singing.
She wonders where she will haunt.




Spring 2022

Rockville ants scale ceramic tile
without noticing its calm.
Outside white flowers speck lawns,
mold on forgotten bread.

In Mariupol, large ants
traverse damp, dark carpet
in roofless houses. Black
quiet sooths stunned ghosts,

angry ghosts.

Chernobyl’s ants cross counters
while old women sleep alone.
Seeds huddle in tainted earth.
Still they will grow tall, will wave

in spoiled wind. Night ants track
through white flour and sugar
women forgot to sweep.
Their work never ends.

Each morning they pull weeds
in the shadow of the stopped
Ferris wheel, scarecrow
against unruly birds,

against bombs.

Marianne Szlyk is a professor at Montgomery College. Her poems have also appeared in of/with, Bourgeon, Spectrum, and Beltway Poetry Quarterly. Her books include I Dream of Empathy, On the Other Side of the Window, and Poetry en Plein Air.  Each is available on Amazon or Bookshop.  During the pandemic, she led writers' workshops on writing about those whom we have lost to COVID-19 as well as those who have survived it.

In the Black and White World by Marianne Szlyk

The last owl hoots, the last
coyote howls, someone’s

lost cat cannot help but
squeak.  This blackened tree,
a clean tooth, juts out at
the sky.  Branches are smoke,
are ash, dangling, blacker
than sky at city’s edge.
Bugs trill and click; moonlight
glistens the far foothills
soon to be someone’s home
but now as empty as
a picture drawn in chalk.

Marianne Szlyk is a professor at Montgomery College. Her poems have also appeared in of/with, bird's thumb, Bourgeon, and Nixes' Mate. Her books include I Dream of Empathy and On the Other Side of the Window.  Recently, she and her husband were part of Pony One Dog Press' reading at the New York City Poetry Festival.  Pony One Dog Press will be publishing her next book, Poetry in Plein-Air, soon.

When Death Stopped for Me by Marianne Szlyk

After Emily Dickinson

I might have been happy with my cat

who would have leapt up into my lap

one last time before everything

went silent, went blank.

Instead Death became the man
I’d wasted my early thirties on.
In dreams, he had avoided me,
even turning into someone else
once I found him.

This time
he tugged on my arm,
then lured me into his car
with the tinny radio.
But there was
no more music
we could not agree about,
no more music
we would not dance to,
just talk.

All the news stories ran together
as I forgot how to pay attention.
As we cruised west past the setting sun,
the long night led to this slot in the wall,
a space for my ashes only,

this place where I am
silent, where I am
waiting still.

Marianne Szlyk edits The Song Is... a blog-zine for poetry and prose inspired by music (especially jazz).  Her second chapbook, I Dream of Empathy, is available through Flutter Press.  Her poems have appeared in of/with, bird's thumb, Cactifur, Mad Swirl, Solidago, and Resurrection of a Sunflower, an anthology of work responding to Vincent Van Gogh's art.  Her third book, On the Other Side of the Window, will be coming out soon from Pski's Porch. 

Visiting the Ancestors by Marianne Szlyk

The deer are visiting the ancestors,
nibbling on grass at Mt. Calvary,
waiting in the shade of winter

underneath the low trees that could be
on a riverbank in the deep
South that the ancestors fled from.

The five deer browse on the
pale green fringe of the cemetery,
limp parsley left on winter’s plate

beside the river that neither flows
nor freezes.  The deer have bodies
the color of earth in shadow,

but they could be spirit animals
of family living elsewhere come to
visit great-grandparents in the ground,

the great-grandfather who was gentle with
farm animals, remembered horses and mules,
the great-grandmother who kept a pot

on the stove for family, neighbors,
and friends, served Red Rose tea
with milk and sugar like coffee,

The deer linger on the fringes
like the awkward children they
once were when the ancestors

were alive.

* Previously published in Literature Today, April 2016

Marianne Szlyk is the editor of The Song Is... Her second chapbook, I Dream of Empathy, was published by Flutter Press.   Recently her poem was selected by Red Bird Chapbooks for its Weekly Read.  She encourages you to send work to her magazine. For more information about it, see this link: http://thesongis.blogspot.com/ 

At the End of the Long Summer by Marianne Szlyk

Callie, like a ghost,

walks on my chest in the dark.

In the light, she is

a husk curled up on

my lap, as small as a bug,

a dried poppy

that could shatter

at any moment.

Marianne Szlyk is the editor of The Song Is... Her second chapbook, I Dream of Empathy, was published by Flutter Press.  Recently her poem was selected by Red Bird Chapbooks for its Weekly Read.  She encourages you to send work to her magazine. For more information about it, see this link: http://thesongis.blogspot.com/ 

Marianne Szlyk - Walking Past Mt. Calvary in Summer / At Bonaventure Cemetery

Walking Past Mt. Calvary in Summer

The old women with finger curls and clip-on earrings,

with cherries pinned to their straw hats,

the old men with work-gnarled hands

have become

ink-black trees

looming over headstones.

These few trees totter in no wind.

Tonight with open windows,

in the humming darkness,

we will hear them fall.

Resting in the Light by Mary Judkins

At Bonaventure Cemetery

-- after an image by Mary Judkins

At home in the world,

Spanish moss flows like sunlight

from the trees whose roots

are in fertile ground.

Sunlight hovers on the left

like the white light of myth, 

movies, and musicals.

Today the ancestors walk among us, 

recognizing the children in the adults,

laughing at the fashion 

and gadgets we cherish.

Not at home in the world,

the mourning madonna hugs the cross,

but she is streaked with green.

Even the shadow striping her gown

is the color of soil, the red bricks 

of the city beyond.  Her tears

are moss, not the bitter crystal

that etches stained glass

and indoor stone.

The ancestors tiptoe around her,

but they mingle with us

in and out of sunlight,

in and out of shadow.

Marianne Szlyk is a professor at Montgomery College and the editor of The Song Is...  Recently, she published her first chapbook, Listening to Electric Cambodia, Looking at Trees of Heaven, with Kind of a Hurricane Press: http://barometricpressures.blogspot.com/2014/10/listening-to-electric-cambodia-looking.html  Her poems have appeared in a variety of online and print venues, including ken*again, Of/with, and bird's thumb.

Marianne Szlyk - She Lives With Ghosts

-- after Raise the Red Lantern (1991), dir. Yimou Zhang

Staying out of the sunlight,
with unbound feet, Songlian
paces the cobblestone courtyards.

She lives with ghosts:
the sound of a flute’s practiced quaver,
the chirp of an indoor cricket,
Chinese opera sung before dawn,
the voice of the concubine
the Master murdered.

At night she enters Meishan’s quarters
and makes the red lanterns blaze.
They bleed like a young girl’s foot
onto the blue-black courtyard,
onto the white snow.

The servants say that this house is haunted.
But the red and black masks on the wall scowl at her.
She cannot fool the ghosts.

In plain sight of both masks and servants,
she winds up the gramophone,
the clashing cymbals, the rickety strings,
the voice of her fellow concubine,
the voice of the Master’s chief victim.

But she cannot fool the ghosts.
She cannot fool herself.

Marianne Szlyk  recently published her first chapbook, Listening to Electric Cambodia, Looking Up at Trees of Heaven, at Kind of a Hurricane Press:  http://barometricpressures.blogspot.com/2014/10/listening-to-electric-cambodia-looking.html. Her poem "Walking Past Mt. Calvary Cemetery in Winter" has been nominated for the 2014 Best of the Net.   Individual poems have appeared in print and online, most recently in Poppy Road Review.  She edits a poetry blog-zine at http://thesongis.blogspot.com/  and hopes that you will consider submitting a poem there or voting in one of its contests.