The Bathtub
Caroline Harper New
                                On hurricane days, Mama dressed us

                  in life jackets and bike helmets and tucked us

     in the bathtub. We swirled prophecies


                  of hair around the drain, soothsaying the rain

                                  by the pink of the water line, as Mama split

                                                      her palms between all six ears


                                               and softened the linoleum with psalms,

                                  even the ones we want to forget. Blessed is he

                     that dasheth thy little ones on the rocks. The echoes


                                  folded into a Book more believable than brimstone.

                                              After all—swamps don't catch fire and we are a people

                                                            of Genesis. Our second-lines stomping


                                                             two-by-two through the Flood, with faith

                                                 our johnboats can hold each of us and the family

                                   dog. Above us, the dove


                  or more likely the heron, circles

                        the swells until subsumed by salt, her babies

                                          still tucked in the bulrush. Or babies


                                                    flown North to safety as the Atlantic

                                          spins carnivorously counterclockwise.

                          One Christmas, I came home with a man


   from New York who didn't know how to swim,

              and Mama gave him a life jacket to keep in his Camry

                       just in case. My sisters laughed, and we all


                                      moved North to drier land where no one

                       needs a johnboat. Where we can pretend

    creation purls clockwise, and more time


is all we need—but when I see the rainbow

                  on TV reverse our blue-green swamps

                                            to yellow-orange-red-black, I know


                                                                                         it will end with Mama

                                                                in her helmet, alone

                                       in the bathtub, holding

                 her little dog.
from the book A HISTORY OF HALF-BIRDS / Milkweed Editions
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I was living overseas when Hurricane Michael hit my hometown. It came quickly and unexpectedly in the middle of the night; for days, my sisters and I had no way of reaching our parents, or knowing if they were okay.

 Watching everything you love collapse in the dark, from a distance, incurs a grief mired in guilt—the guilt of leaving, of even having that choice. This poem confronts the future via memories as it grapples with the inevitable consequences of our warming planet.

Caroline Harper New on "The Bathtub"
Color photograph of some of Volodymyr Vakulenko's publications and a head shot of the author
Volodymyr Vakulenko Buried His Manuscript Under a Tree

"Best known in Ukraine for his cheerful and lyrical children’s books, Mr. Vakulenko was seething with anger at Moscow’s occupying forces. As his village lost cellphone service and news from the outside world dried up, he filled his new work with reflective, sometimes morose, descriptions of life under Russian control: people neglecting their flower beds, cooking on campfires as utilities failed, and even fraternizing with the Russians." His body was later found in a mass grave.

via THE NEW YORK TIMES
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What Sparks Poetry:
Lloyd Wallace on Language as Form

"As the poet attempts to bring their past into the present, into the poetic medium, attempting to make it a keepable artifact, we can see it being buried by the world, by outer artifice, just as the past is buried by the present. The key pathos—the beauty—of this poem is that as we see the poet speaking, we also see them disappear. So, to amend a previous statement: yes, the poem is full of evidence that the poet has lived. But it’s also evidence that she is disappearing, too."
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