Showing posts with label asylum. Show all posts
Showing posts with label asylum. Show all posts

Tuesday, April 22, 2025

I’m From Chicago Poet Asserts Elizabeth Marino—National Poetry Month 2025

 

Elizabeth Marino.

Elizabeth Marino may have been born into a Puerto Rican family in Chicago but the circumstances of her unique childhood and upbringing made her more creature of her city than an ethnic. Chicago was and is a town where neighborhoods can be little realms of their own and where travel between them often seems like it should require passports and stamped visas. A keen memoirist, she recalls that world and as an adult dared to adventure even wider while honoring her roots. 
 
Marino was born to a Puerto Rican couple in Chicago’s old Hyde Park barrio and was raised in an Italian/German American family in the southwest Chicago suburbs, famed for musicians and gangsters. She holds a Master of Art from the University of Illinois at Chicagos Writers Program and a BA from Barat College in addition to studying English literature and history at Oxford University. She works as an itinerant adjunct instructor of English at various Chicago area colleges preferring to stay in the city than pursue possibly more secure employment elsewhere. 
 
She is also an actor/director, working under her stage—and birth name, Micaela Mastierra. She published her first poem at the age of fifteen in the Illinois English Bulletin. Marino’s poetry has appeared in the anthologies Between the Heart and the Land/Entre el corezon y la tierra: Latina Poets in the Midwest published by MARCH/Abrazo Press in 2001, Breaking Mirrors/Raw Images by 4:30 Poets and College Poetry Review, and Dark Waters Speaking from La Onda Negra Press. Non-verse and Non-fiction anthology collections include Building Socialism. Magazine publications include Moon Journal, After Hours, Strong Coffee, Nit & Wit, Envisage in the United Kingdom, and the NAB Gallery Pamphlet Series she also has appeared on the spoken word CD Elements of Life, Love & Action with the improve troupe She Laughs. She has published creative non-fiction, interviews, and articles in The Chicago Journal and S.H.E. Her collections include the chapbooks Debris: Poems and Memoir issued by The Puddin’head Press in 2011 and Ceremonies from dancing girl press in 2016. Her full-length collection Asylum was published by Vagabond in 2020. 
 
 
                                      Many of Marino's Chicago memoir poems appeared in the chapbook Debris: Poems and Memoir
 
Where Are You From? 
 
I am a poet from Chicago. 
If music can be carried place to place 
and one constantly moves, it’s hard 
to hold what is needed. Objects drop 
from my hands. I am from the Americas. 
You say you have people here? 
 
Home to home, each time something 
 is lost and almost replaced. A drumbeat continues. 
Things gathered up and held to the bosom 
slip through fingers as you set down 
objects. Everything does fall away 
in spite of holding tight and a long reach. 
 
Music can be carried place to place 
a melody holding a footfall, a half- 
remembered lyric re-asserts itself 
differently each time. Learn to mix 
adobo at home. A drumbeat continues. 
You say you have people here? 
 
Music can be carried place to place 
Yellow shock of forsythia bush 
irrupts in front of the red brick two-flat. 
A cobblestone stamped Illinois Brick 
under your feet. I am from the Americas. 
 
Music can be carried place to place 
a last full blossom on the peony bush 
the blink of spring, the shock 
of stillness on the edge of Eternity 
that carousel, the turning called a revolution 
of the lost musical cake server. 
 
 —Elizabeth Marino  


A '47 Harley like Marino's father had. 

My Father’s Last Harley 
 
 A yellow photo curls in my hand: 
my dad, 
leaning against his ’47 Harley 
muscular arms across white T-shirt
 brass Golden Gloves belt buckle 
catches the sun 
crossed ankles and sharp grey pants--
no trace of Interstate mud at 17 
or Army drab—trousers nearly fit 
for a married man. 
 
I’d remembered him as always looking for his red truck. 
His shadow, I’d walk endless used car lots with him 
and witness his haggling with salesmen. Always, the 
perfect red pickup would be just on the next lot, 
further north or south on Western Avenue. 
 
“Don’t you never volunteer for nothin’,” he’d say 
Ex Cathedra, rising from in front of the TV 
and shuffling off toward the bedroom; and I, at 16, would walk 
all 30 miles of the Hunger Hike. After: 
“That’s one tough kid I’ve got.” 
 
 He didn’t say much 
when I left the South Side for the North Shore—but that winter 
when he saw Tevye wave 
his eldest daughter off to Siberian exile, 
Mom said he cried in his popcorn. 
 
 —Elizabeth Marino 
A Cal-Sag barge tow at Blue Island.  Marino and friends waved to the bargemen from the shore. 
East of Ashland 
 
There, just east of Ashland 
with its potholes, busted Budweiser bottles, 
rusted stop signs, and Augie’s two-pump gas station, 
I lead the caravan of bicycles 
down towards the docks of the Calumet-
Saginaw Canal. We stopped, and mapped out 
other journeys for ourselves. 
 
We named them angels—those bargemen 
who waved and kept going. 
We each kept one eye cocked, 
meaning to leave Blue Island far behind. 
 
We lived further west than Ashland, 
among the south bank of the Canal— 
where our teacher said 
you could still find Indian arrowheads— 
but east of Gypsy Town and the trailer park 
lit up like a dime store Bethlehem by Clark Refinery. 
 
Cheryl headed out first, and went south--
Southern Illinois University—and I trailed her overland 
to visit, no seats on an overbooked “City of New Orleans.” 
Her college friends gathered, showed us 
the rock formations of Granite City National Park 
the white and green river town of Cape Girardeau. 
 
 Both of us really weren’t surprised by the sites;
 we’d always known they’d be there 
when we’d dreamed on the banks of the Cal-Sag Canal 
\down there, east of Ashland. 
 
Elizabeth Marino

Thursday, April 21, 2022

I’m From Chicago Poet Elizabeth Marino Said—National Poetry Month 2022

Elizabeth Marino.

Elizabeth Marino may have been born into a Puerto Rican family in Chicago but the circumstances of her unique childhood and upbringing made her more creature of her city than an ethnic writer.  Chicago was and is a town where neighborhoods can be little realms of their own and where travel between them often seems like it should require passports and stamped visas.  A keen memoirist she recalls that world and as an adult dared to adventure even wider while honoring her roots.

Marino was born to a Puerto Rican couple in Chicago’s old Hyde Park barrio and was raised in an Italian/German American family in the southwest Chicago suburbs, famed for musicians and gangsters. She holds a Master of Art from the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Writers Program and a BA from Barat College in addition to studying English literature and history at Oxford University. She works as an itinerant adjunct instructor of English at various Chicago area colleges preferring to stay in the city than pursue possibly more secure employment elsewhere. She is also an actor/director, working under her stage—and birth name, Micaela Mastierra.

She published her first poem at the age of fifteen in the Illinois English Bulletin.  Marino’s poetry has appeared in the anthologies Between the Heart and the Land/Entre el corezon y la tierra: Latina Poets in the Midwest published by MARCH/Abrazo Press in 2001, Breaking Mirrors/Raw Images by 4:30 Poets and College Poetry Review, and Dark Waters Speaking from La Onda Negra Press forthcoming). Non-verse and Non-fiction anthology collections include Building Socialism.  Magazine publications include Moon Journal, After Hours, Strong Coffee, Nit & Wit, Envisage in the United Kingdom, and the NAB Gallery Pamphlet Series she also has appeared on the spoken word CD Elements of Life, Love & Action with the improve troupe She Laughs. She has published creative non-fiction, interviews, and articles in The Chicago Journal and S.H.E.

Her collections include the chapbooks Debris: Poems and Memoir issued by The Puddin’head Press in 2011 and Ceremonies from dancing girl press in 2016.  Her full-length collection Asylum was published by Vagabond in 2020.

                                    Many of Marino's Chicago memoir poems appeared in the chapbook Debris: Poems and Memoir

Where Are You From?

I am a poet from Chicago.

If music can be carried place to place

and one constantly moves, it’s hard

to hold what is needed. Objects drop

from my hands. I am from the Americas.

You say you have people here?

 

Home to home, each time something is

lost and almost replaced. A drumbeat continues.

Things gathered up and held to the bosom

slip through fingers as you set down

objects. Everything does fall away

in spite of holding tight and a long reach.

 

Music can be carried place to place

a melody holding a footfall, a half-

remembered lyric re-asserts itself

differently each time. Learn to mix

adobo at home. A drumbeat continues.

You say you have people here?

 

Music can be carried place to place

Yellow shock of forsythia bush

irrupts in front of the red brick two-flat.

A cobblestone stamped Illinois Brick

under your feet. I am from the Americas.

 

Music can be carried place to place

a last full blossom on the peony bush

the blink of spring, the shock

of stillness on the edge of Eternity

that carousel, the turning called a revolution

of the lost musical cake server.

 

Elizabeth Marino

 

A '47 Harley like Marino's father had.

My Father’s Last Harley

 

A yellow photo curls in my hand:

my dad,

leaning against his ’47 Harley

muscular arms across white T-shirt

brass Golden Gloves belt buckle

catches the sun

crossed ankles and sharp grey pants –

no trace of Interstate mud at 17

or Army drab—trousers nearly fit for

a married man.

 

I’d remembered him as always looking for his red truck.

His shadow, I’d walk endless used car lots with him

and witness his haggling with salesmen. Always, the

perfect red pickup would be just on the next lot,

further north or south on Western Avenue.

 

“Don’t you never volunteer for nothin’,” he’d say

Ex Cathedra, rising from in front of the TV

and shuffling off toward the bedroom; and I, at 16, would walk

all 30 miles of the Hunger Hike. After:

“That’s one tough kid I’ve got.”

 

He didn’t say much

when I left the South Side

for the North Shore—but that winter

when he saw Tevye wave

his eldest daughter off to Siberian exile,

Mom said he cried in his popcorn.

 

Elizabeth Marino

 

A Cal-Sag barge tow at Blue Island.  Marino and friends waved to the bargemen from the shore. 

East of Ashland

 

There, just east of Ashland

with its potholes, busted Budweiser bottles,

rusted stop signs, and Augie’s two-pump gas station,

I lead the caravan of bicycles

down towards the docks of the Calumet-

Saginaw Canal. We stopped, and mapped out

other journeys for ourselves.

 

We named them angels—those bargemen

who waved and kept going.

We each kept one eye cocked,

meaning to leave Blue Island far behind.

 

We lived further west than Ashland,

among the south bank of the Canal—

where our teacher said

you could still find Indian arrowheads—

but east of Gypsy Town and the trailer park

lit up like a dime store Bethlehem by Clark Refinery.

 

Cheryl headed out first, and went south –

Southern Illinois University—and I trailed her overland

to visit, no seats on an overbooked “City of New Orleans.”

Her college friends gathered, showed us

the rock formations of Granite City National Park

the white and green river town of Cape Girardeau.

 

Both of us really weren’t surprised by the sites;

we’d always known they’d be there

when we’d dreamed on the banks of the Cal-Sag Canal

down there, east of Ashland.

 

Elizabeth Marino

 


Saturday, April 4, 2020

Jed Myers—National Poetry Month 2020

Seattle Poet Jed Myers

Jed Myers was born in Philadelphia in 1952 to parents of Eastern European Jewish heritage. He studied Creative Writing with an emphasis in poetry at Tufts University, graduating in 1974, and went on, after medical training, to pursue a career in psychiatry.  He settled in Seattle, where he and his wife raised three children. He maintains a solo therapy practice and teaches at the University of Washington. Meyers kept writing poems, but did not seek publication until the events of September 11th, 2001. Since that time, his work has been widely published. For several years now he has been active in maintaining a consortium of music-and-poetry open-mic cabarets called Easy Speak Seattle.  

Jed Myers, on drums, often performs with Band of Poets including John Burgess, Anna Jenkins, Ted McMahon, and Rosanne Olson sometimes joined by other musicians and poets.  
I first encountered Myers’s work last summer in in an on-line collection of work in response to the humanitarian immigration disaster on the Mexican-American border and the Trump maladministration of jettisoning traditional legal avenues of claiming asylum , forcibly turning back border crossers,  separating families, and indefinitely detaining most who got across in virtual concentration camps.  He commented about his contribution:

For all its shocking immediacy, an image of tragedy on our southern border seems to embody our burned-out distance. The drowned father and little daughter are casualties of our country’s deep currents of fear. The truth that we’re all Americans north and south is lost in the hubbub of nationhood. We take the river as border, denying our deeper unity. I hope my poem holds and conveys the embarrassment of our self-distancing.
The image of the bodies of asylum seekers Alberto Ramirez and his toddler daughter Valeria in the Rio Grande briefly caught the attention of Americans and shocked the shockable.


American Border Study—Two Bodies in a River

Oscar Alberto Martinez Ramirez and his daughter, Valeria, Rio Grande, Matamoros, Mexico

We’ll recall her small arm on his neck.
We’ll forget them there in the shallows.

We wonder at the black cloth they share.
We don’t get it was how he held her.

We see clearly her short red pants.
We miss the pink disposable diaper.

We note the bamboo stalks on the shore.
We grow our bamboo along the link fence.

We see sun in the river’s slow ripples.
We have no fierce current here in the frame.

We’re touched their dark heads wind up together.
We are spared their still-eyed stare.

We’re shocked the camera shot them in the back.
We’re not especially surprised.

We’re living the lives they might have.
We haven’t been breathing water.

We understand it’s father and daughter.
We don’t have our noses in the mud.

Jed Myers
from Poets Respond
June 30, 2019

This deeply personal poem won the 2013 Literal Latte Poetry Award.

Going to Bed

These nights I slip down into sleep 
in minutes, freed from a lifelong
ritual, the slow obsessive surrender
of my vigilance. Some nights it took hours

to check all measures on the interior
monitor — savings, the kids’
immunizations, endangered birds,
the boy down the block gone to war….

Now, it isn’t that peregrines nest
again on the Hudson’s bridges (they do), 
nor that the detainees are released 
from Guantanamo (they are not).

I know the cisterns of Hanford are fractured
and bleeding our cancers into the river.
I know the immigrants wait in the culverts
to cross into Texas. I drift anyway.

I’m sure it’s not that when I lie down  
in my bed, no one else is there 
in the flesh who will press the points
of the thorns of the day. And I’d swear

it isn’t that I am eased to know 
my children, nomads now on their own
in this carbon-hazed wilderness, succeed
in trading the gold of true affection.

It’s just that I slide into silence,
into the soil of sleep, down dream’s 
rivulets, with no resistance, knowing 
this: a few I’ve loved have descended

for good, from air into earth, left
the world still pressing its weather east,
spring's blackberry stalks infiltrating
the beach paths, mosquitoes drinking

the sweet sera of lovers asleep
in each other's arms at dawn…. We go on
crossing over our mingled lost,
our footfalls on the sun-stained grass

a comfort to them if they listen in 
their sleep (they can’t, but they haven't gone
far). We have our dark-hour meetings
(in topsoil? synapses?) — they thank us

for breathing, as we still play the leaves
while they take to the roots (a comfort 
to us as we draw the sheets like first
layers of dust up to our cheeks).

Last night my father and I took our seats
at a cafe table in part of the city
I’d never seen. His eyes gleamed
as he piped up Let’s eat. So it was

and it wasn’t real. He looked serene — 
not rushed as he’d always been
(in his vigilance). Dawn pressed
its way through the slats, and I surfaced.

He lingered. So I’ll sink
again tonight, in trust,
into the under-life, a surrender
to depths off the monitor, to the silt

where my mother’s father still picnics
and holds a baby girl up to the sun
by a Western Pennsylvania river —
where, a closed-eye blink later,

a thin boy in Lithuania runs
from a house on fire, toward America,
into the immeasurable brightness of love.
It’s this: up from the loam of devotion,

out of the night, some will return,
by the human xylem of heartwood
and vine, to gather actual sun, 
here in the blood's branches creaking

in time; some will remain in the night,
out of reach of the light's last fingers,
beneath our prisons, bridges, beds,
in the intricate unconscious mulch

where the world dreams its births, riots,
blooms, monsoons — a matter of inches
deep, under the lids of our eyes,
in this one tissue that sleeps and dies.

Jed Myers

And finally—

Poem for My Country

Not far from my city, I walked under tall trees
by a river whose name soon escaped me.

Silty-green eddies, white froth dressing
the rocks, flat current over what I thought

must be the depths, a riffle dazzled
the shallows. I lost perspective

to the strobe of the wind-shaken maples’
foliage fringing the shore. Were they swallows

who sped and veered, who caught the living
dust of the hovering bug constellations?

A few splashes some yards upriver,
little eruptions of silver, what might be

a fish, I bent for a better look under
a branch, and saw on the edge up ahead

a kid spin a flat rock to skip, and it did.
What country is this? A moment in wonder,

no answer. The water coursed past
in and out of the bright and the dark, I heard

the elements’ vigorous frictions, dignified
groans of the cedars and firs, and imagined

the current grinding away at the stones.
What country is this? Perhaps it is known

to the singing boughs spread over the banks,
to the stones, or the invisible fish.

—Jed Myers