When asked if he got tired of singing “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” Tony Bennett replied, “Do you ever get tired of making love?”
This homage to Tony Bennett, who passed away last week at the age of 96, is brought to you through Linda’s One-Liner Wednesdays. Join us! Find out more here: https://lindaghill.com/2023/07/26/one-liner-wednesday-whats-the-hold-up/
Today is the eighteenth anniversary of my father-in-law’s death. He was the first of B’s and my parents to pass away. I wasn’t blogging or writing poetry then; it took years for me to process enough to write about his death. This poem was first published by Eunoia Review here in 2016. As it happened, he was the only one of our four parents that we were able to be with at the moment of death.
The Last Night
~ ~ ~ by Joanne Corey
Hospice told my husband what to expect
as his father’s death approached,
skin mottled,
eyes open but unseeing.
Crush the morphine,
mix with water,
spoon into his gaping mouth
every two hours.
The death rattle started,
unmistakable,
though we had never
heard it before.
We did what we could,
smoothing his hair,
holding his hand,
another dose of morphine.
I prayed the rosary silently,
lacking beads,
counting the decades
with my fingers.
When he quieted,
breath slow, gentle,
we woke his wife
of fifty-one years.
She lay beside him that last hour.
Breaths shallower,
with pauses between,
longer –
longer still –
until, near dawn,
no next breath comes.
We switch off
the oxygen concentrator.
Silence heralds
his absence.
Just about a month ago, Kelsay Books published my first chapbook, Hearts, available from Kelsay, from Amazon, from me personally (if you are local), or by asking your local bookstore to order it through Ingram.
The experience has been exciting, gratifying, emotional, and exhausting by turns. There have been new things to learn, like keeping a spreadsheet to track sales tax and profit and signing contracts to place books on consignment. I’ve been trying to get the hang of doing publicity, which is a different universe from writing poetry. Sending notices to my poet-friends and non-poet-friends was relatively straightforward, although I admit it feels strange to ask people to spend money to read my work. I’d never been paid for my writing beyond gratitude and the occasional in-print copy of a publication but I am finding it easier to say writing is a profession for me now, even though the total amount of money I earn from it will be small.
Besides the discomfort of self-promotion, which works against my introverted nature, there is the sobering personal aspect of asking people to read poems about my mother’s final years. I’m grateful to know that the poems touch people’s hearts. I’ve had people tell me that our story reminds them of their own experiences with aging loved ones, that the poems made them cry. My heart goes out to them and it is humbling to think that my words might be a help to them as they continue to deal with their loss.
It’s also gratifying to know that I fulfilled one of my goals with this book. I am seldom overt about my own feelings in my work, preferring to “show rather than tell.” I try to leave space in my poems for people to bring their own reactions and emotions to the work and I seem to have succeeded, at least among those who have communicated with me. Three people have even written Amazon reviews, although it seems a bit surreal that I have an Amazon listing at all.
One thing that has happened since the book came out that I wasn’t expecting is the technical publishing questions that I’m asked. Most of these are a version of “how do you get a book published?” which I don’t feel well-equipped to answer. Generally, the person is asking because a family member writes as a hobby and they want to know how to get a book in print, but publishing poetry is different from fiction or memoir or non-fiction, which often involve having an agent, and self-publishing bypasses all the querying and rejection but means you need to know or hire expertise and have financial resources up front. People have also asked me how many copies I’ve sold but I have no idea. I could count up how many I’ve sold, but I have no idea how many have ordered from Kelsay and Amazon. I do occasionally look at the stat for the Poetry by Women category on my Amazon page; at the moment it’s #720, but I have no idea how that translates into number of copies. I probably won’t know until early next year when I get my first annual royalties payment from Kelsay.
I’m feeling as though I’m through most of my initial promotion list but I have more to do. A friend has offered to help me line up a couple of readings or signings locally. I need to find a printer to do business cards and bookmarks to have at events. There is a list of reviewers and awards to look through, although that seems a bit rarefied for me.
And more promotion.
No doubt, more blog posts here at Top of JC’s Mind.
I’m also trying to do more submissions for my new chapbook, full-length collection, and individual poems. Hearts proved that it can take a few dozen attempts to get an acceptance.
Having a book in print does, though, make it seem more possible that another acceptance will come my way.
And, if not, there will always be Hearts…
All I can think of is how hard it was for my father to be left alone when my mother passed away. It was the thing she had been most worried about. What she couldn’t have known was that a pandemic would arrive which severely curtailed our ability to visit.
I’m grateful that she never had to know.
*****
Linda’s prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday this week is “left alone.” Join us! Find out more here: https://lindaghill.com/2023/06/02/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-june-3-2023/
My first poetry chapbook Hearts is now available from Kelsay Books and Amazon!
This joyous announcement is brought to you through Linda’s One-Liner Wednesdays. Join us! Find out more here: https://lindaghill.com/2023/05/31/one-liner-wednesday-sorry-3/
I’m excited to announce that my first chapbook, Hearts, is now available from my publisher, Kelsay Books, here or from Amazon here.
For local folks, I will also be selling copies myself after my shipment arrives in 2-3 weeks.
For those who might be wondering, a chapbook is a short book, usually centered on a single topic. Hearts is a chapbook of poems that revolve around my mother, including her last years living with heart disease. Long-time readers of Top of JC’s Mind may remember reading posts about my mother, known here as Nana.
I completed the first draft of Hearts in December, 2017, in response to a chapbook contest prompt from QuillsEdge Press. The prompt was “In Transition” and my mother interpretation of that prompt to write about my mother, who was under hospice care. (We didn’t know at the time that her decline would be more prolonged than expected, as she was with us until May, 2019.) Although I didn’t win the contest, I was among the finalists and my poem, “Sixteen Hours,” was included in an anthology of the finalists’ work along with the winning chapbook, Skin Gin, by Rose Maria Woodson.
Given how busy and emotional those next two years were, I didn’t have the wherewithal to send out a new version of the chapbook until spring of 2020. I had continued to write poems during Nana’s continuing struggles and expanded the manuscript with those poems in the months after her death. I benefited from a manuscript review with some of the Grapevine Poets, local poets who meet every other week to workshop individual poems and as needed for manuscript reviews. They were able to offer guidance on ordering the poems and they identified a couple of places where new poems would be helpful to flesh out my mother’s story.
I continued to send Hearts to publishers and contests over the next two years. During that time, I did more revisions, incorporating comments from poet-friends as I went along. In August of 2022, encouraged by Grapevine Poets Jessica Dubey and Burt Myers who had had books accepted by Kelsay Books, I submitted there and received a publication offer from them on September 2nd.
Karen Kelsay and the whole team at Kelsay Books have been amazing! They made the publication process, which was a mystery to me, straightforward. They also were able to move up the publication date, which I had originally thought would be in late summer/early fall.
When I went to the first Tupelo Press/MASS MoCA workshop-in-residence in November of 2015, I had thought that I might be able to put together a chapbook of poem about the North Adams area and my family’s connections there. I set a goal of age 60 to have that book published.
Of course, life events intervened.
That original chapbook idea is now a full-length collection that is being submitted to publishers, unsuccessfully so far.
Now, at age 62, I’m grateful that Hearts is my first published book because it is about my mother, who made my life possible and loving. She was always a strong support for me, whatever the endeavor. It feels right that my first book has her as its heart.
Today is the fourth anniversary of my mother’s death.
As often happens with these dates, sometimes it seems that it couldn’t have been that long and other times it seems longer ago. This warping of time is even more prominent because of the pandemic. I remain grateful that my mother died before we were all faced with the impossible prospect of not being able to visit her in the nursing home where she spent her final months. That would have been a particularly heavy burden for my father, with whom she had celebrated their 65th wedding anniversary a few weeks before she died.
This year feels especially poignant for me as I await the publication of my first chapbook of poetry, Hearts, from Kelsay Books, most likely in June or July. The poems center on my mother with a particular emphasis on her last years dealing with heart failure. She appreciated my writing and I think she would be pleased to know she is the focus of my first book.
She didn’t enjoy having her picture taken, so I will share a photo, taken four years ago in her final days, of one of her favorite flowers, lily-of-the-valley, which was also her birth flower.
Love you, Mom. Miss you. Still cry every once in a while…
With the recent death of Peg Johnston, Broome County (NY) has lost one of its anchors of the arts. She was well known for her involvement with the Cooperative Gallery in Binghamton and the Department of Public Art, which created many of the murals in our area.
In Peg’s memory, I’m posting the poem I wrote as a representative of the Binghamton Poetry Project for the Broome County Arts Council‘s Heart of the Arts Award dinner in 2016, when Peg was honored with that award along with Emily Jablon. (A video of my reading the poem is here.)
Thanks to the Department of Public Art
~~ by Joanne Corey
for Emily Jablon, Peg Johnston, and all whose hearts are in the arts
Stencils and murals
on descending levels
of the Water Street parking ramp
time-travel through that historic corner –
Link Blue Box flight simulators
evolve from pipe organs –
punching in on Bundy
time recording machines
in the days before IBM
and the move to Endicott –
on street level
“Welcome to the birthplace
of virtual reality”
We walk back
walk through
move forward
cover
recover
remember
build
rebuild
renovate
together
Walking along the Chenango
more murals –
diverse faces
in shades of gray
with colorful songbird
overlay –
hot air balloons
float over green hills –
BINGHAMTON
in bold letters
filled with landmarks
proclaiming their location
We draw
paint
photograph
digitize
share
write
read
view
review
create
recreate
together
Across Court Street
a riot of mosaics
flowing around curves
moving through the spectrum
patterns
shapes
florals
the clear message
“BE INSPIRED,
BE BINGHAMTON”
Broken shards of glass and lives
re-order
re-assemble
tessellate
shine in the sun
glisten in the rain
reflect
renew
touch
together
We sing
play
listen
dance
act
react
interact
applaud
together
We live
breathe
eat
drink
laugh
sigh
smile
artfully
thoughtfully
cooperatively
with heart
I was honored that, after the dinner, Peg had asked for a copy of my poem, which I gladly gave. I hope that, over these last few years, she looked at it occasionally and that it made her smile.
May she rest in peace and may her contributions to the arts be remembered for decades to come.
Yesterday, the proof book for my chapbook, Hearts, arrived.
It’s amazing to hold my book for the first time!
My immediate job is to review it and send final edits to Kelsay. The corrections I had sent in the first round had all been addressed, so there was not much to comment on.
I sent the email today, on what would have been my mom’s 91st birthday.
She is the center of Hearts. ❤ ❤ ❤
Because things have been so busy and because my continuing healing from cataract surgery is still making computer time a bit more difficult, I’ve put off posting on some topics that have been top of mind.
One of those is the continuing – and seemingly accelerating – plague of gun violence in the United States.
Over these past couple of months, there have been some personal reminders of gun violence. The April 3rd anniversary of the American Civic Association shooting in Binghamton and driving by the memorial to it, only a few hundred feet from the site, knowing that, fourteen years on, if the victims are remembered at all, they are just numbers in a long tally of mass shooting victims. A Lenten program on gun violence that was part of a series on social sin, which led to my contacting my Congressional representative to request federal action on gun violence, only to get a discouraging reply that he won’t support such practical actions as keeping military-style weapons and ammunition out of civilian hands.
All of this while hearing every day of more mass shootings and their aftermath. The fact that we are averaging more than one mass shooting per day in 2023, 192 recorded by day 125, according to the Gun Violence Archive. The fact that firearms are now the leading cause of death among children and adolescents (ages 1-19) in the United States, far surpassing the rate in other industrialized nations. Laws being passed in some states to make it easier to carry weapons, despite the dangers to the public. The bizarre ousting of two state legislators in Tennessee for “lack of decorum” in speaking out against gun violence in the chamber, only to have those members re-appointed by their districts.
The feature of news coverage that makes these recent weeks even more disturbing is the increased attention to shootings that happened after harmless incidents. Being shot through a closed door for ringing a doorbell at the wrong address. After chasing an errant ball into a neighbor’s yard. While pulling out of a driveway in a rural area while trying to navigate to a friend’s home. Mistakenly going to the wrong car in a dark parking lot. All instances where you would expect a neighborly person to ask how they can help, not shoot and wound or kill.
I don’t understand.
Is it uncontrolled fear? Paranoia? Rage? Hate? Sense of entitlement? Illness? Racism? Misogyny? Addiction to power? Some combination of these, varying from incident to incident?
One thing that doesn’t vary? There’s always a gun.
We need legislation to address gun violence on the federal level. I live in a state with quite a few statutes regulating firearms but it is too easy for people to cross state lines or use the internet to circumvent them. I believe that military-style weapons don’t belong in civilian hands and that large ammunition clips should be banned, along with modifications that make a semi-automatic weapon behave like it is fully automatic. I think that there should be background checks, training, and licensing required for firearm ownership and robust laws against illegal possession and gun trafficking. People who have a history of violence or those who have restraining orders against them should not have guns. There should be universal red flag laws to make sure that those who are a danger to themselves or others do not have access to guns. Sadly, over half the gun deaths in the United States are self-inflicted; while people can and do die by suicide from other methods, guns kill a much higher proportion than other means. [If you are experiencing thoughts of suicide or are in a mental health crisis, dial 988 in the US or visit https://988lifeline.org/ to live chat or find resources. In other countries, use a search engine to find similar programs. Or ask a trusted friend, family member, doctor, etc. for help.]
Public polling in the US shows a large majority want more regulation of guns but Republican lawmakers are almost universally opposed. That needs to change. Either they need to change their minds or the people need to replace them with representatives who care about their safety.
Meanwhile, the losses, pain, and trauma accelerate…
Joanne Corey 