Author: poetryfest

Performed by Val Cole

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The Shape It Leaves

Grief does not arrive like thunder.
It seeps
through the quiet crack of an ordinary morning,
in the space where a voice should be.

It teaches absence its own language:
a chair pulled out but never used,
a name that echoes longer than it’s spoken,
a phone you still expect to ring.

At first, it is heavy
a stone you carry in both hands,
impossible to set down
without feeling like you’ve let them fall again.

Later, it changes shape.

It becomes the way you pause
before telling a story they would have loved,
the way sunlight feels almost like permission
and almost like betrayal.

People will say it softens
but that’s not quite true.
It sharpens into memory,
into moments so clear they almost breathe.

And somehow, you go on.

Not because it’s easier,
but because love, unfinished,
refuses to end where a life did.

So grief stays
not as a wound alone,
but as a quiet proof:

that something mattered enough
to leave a shape
even after it was gone.

Of people: In terms of healing, growth, and the “choosing me” syndrome.

—

Performed by Val Cole

Performed by Val Cole

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POEM:

Liars “Country Club” , by Linda Oconnell

dedicated to all the snakes—you know who you are

Snakes have lying eyes.

You’re all predators hiding in the grass.

You betray another for your own gain.

You’re trying to save your own skin.

You’re all predators hiding in the grass.

You’re the ones crossing your fingers behind your backs.

You’re all trying to save your own skin.

But your skin keeps shedding for all to see.

You’re the ones crossing your fingers behind your backs.

You’re all in cahoots with each other.

You’re the ones thinking you got away with it. (Ha!)

But your skin keeps shedding for all to see.

It’s written all over your quivering faces

It couldn’t be any clearer.

You’re the ones thinking you got away with it.

What do you see when you look in the mirror?

You’re all trying to save your own skin.

(You’re the type of men with no spine.)

You’re all in cahoots with each other.

Snakes have lying eyes. (just ask their ex wives)

Guess what? You didn’t get away with it.

You type of men are the weakest.

You betray another for your own gain.

We all know your secret.

Performed by Val Cole

—–
POEM:

LAST DOCTOR’S VISIT
Every visit started with the check-in process
Age, name, doctor, and time of appointment
Have a seat
Elinor says; silly girl I’m in a wheel chair I’m
Already sitting.
Fill out this form
We know the drill
All these years it hasn’t changed
I fill out the form
We wait.
Last night Jennie and i made Greek soup
Which is lemon, eggs, chicken, rice and celery
For some reason I brought a large container
Of the soup for elinor to take home
To eat during the week
She was hungry
Needed something to eat
I gave her the cold soup
She loved it
Jennie an I were happy
She loved it
So sad she ate as if she hadn’t eaten for days.
They called her name
To get her blood drawn
Four attempts to get into her vein
Screaming with each try
The nurse was unable to take
Blood from her port
Finally, they stopped trying
Doctor was ready to see her
Dr. Citron hugged her
He sat, she was in a wheel chair
And didn’t need to sit.
A wheel chair
She hated the wheel chair.
He typed in all her complaints
Looked away from the computer
Moved his chair very close to Elinor
So close their noses were apart
By a few hairs
Elinor, the pain you feel is the cancer progressing
It’s the same cancer that started us
On our journey thirty-four years ago
If the pain is more than you want to tolerate
Take another pill
They are for you to take for pain
Do not worry about how many you take.
You know Elinor, there is no more I can do
She looked into his eyes
Not a word
He said no more blood test
No more ports
No more infusion of iron
“No more anything”,
She said
I know every time I came
There was something, new drug
New procedure
Not this time.
Elinor wanted Dr. Citron
To give her what she wanted
To live
That simple.
They hugged
You know Elinor, you have been with me for thirty-four years
And you always wore black
No, sometimes I wore dark brown.
We laughed
They hugged once again
And he left.
Us alone in the examining room
We gathered our stuff
Walked out without checking out
They will call if we owe them money.
One request
Let’s have lunch
So we ate
Our last lunch
At the hospital lunch room.

Performed by Val Cole

—-
POEM:

Doppelgänger

They say a name is just a word
until someone is hunted by it.
My great-grandfather carried Herman Jager
like a lit match
small, bright,
but dangerous if seen.

In the camp,
an Aryan spoke it
Herman Jager
and for a second
the name split open.
Two men,
opposites
one holding the gun,
one inside it
but the same sound
passing between them the day they were born
and all the days after.
As if the fire
was unsure which one
it was meant to consume.

After the camps, the name learned
how to blend.
It crossed water,
shed its weight,
smoothed itself
Herman to Henry.
This is how survival sounds:
quieter each generation.

And there is a third name
that never left.
Tzvi.
Deer.
Not a name
a state of being:
to listen for what hunts you,
to move before a branch snaps,
to vanish before extinction.

I answer to Henry.
I inherit Herman.
But Tzvi is the moment
the hunted
becomes the thing a fire can
never consume.

Performed by Val Cole

Visual Designer & Editor: Kaitlin Manalili

Produced by Matthew Toffolo

—-

Inheritance

Dear Son,

Even before you arrive,
before your name means anything to the world,
there is something
the world will expect you to understand.

This world was made by killers.

Troy.
Thermopylae.
Tours.
Waterloo.
Gettysburg.
Stalingrad.

Each place a moment
when the world narrowed,
words ran out,
and history bent to will
because men chose not to step aside.

All of this
happened before you.
But none of it
relieves you.

You are my heart.
Not my pride.
Not my ambition.

Because of that,
I will not lie to you.
Remember this.

Protect your mother,
for she carried you
from dark into breath.
That crossing binds you
long after you have a name.

Protect your sister,
for in her safety
our house is judged.
What reaches her
reaches the name you will carry.

Protect your wife,
not as possession,
but as the one who keeps you standing,
when love becomes work,
and work becomes vow.

Protect your children,
for they are tomorrow
watching you now.
What you do not hold,
they will be made to bear.

So, son,
when the moment comes
hold the line.
Stand fast

Poem by Rhonda Yates

Voice Over by Val Cole

Visual Design & Editor by Kaitlin Manalili

Produced by Matthew Toffolo

Performed by Val Cole

—–
POEM:

“The gods envy us. They envy us because we’re mortal, because any moment may be our last.” ~ Achilles, Troy.

they said the gods once pointed out atmosphere,
days, imagination & then, they created love.
“a sturdy object, love” they said.

then they created poets since poems
compose conundrums & sympathize
themselves into selves, never bare

of moments, of mercies, & the problem
horizons caused by endings like impassable
boulders.

& yet, they had no answers for her. no answers
for her dying way too young. to them, she
was nothing more than a decorative piece.

but to me, she captured daylight, just like the gods,
but maybe that was the problem? maybe it was
jealousy? so they worked slowly, stripping away at her

because the gods always work slowly when they want
to maximize the pain & agony. distant, shadowy, & always
working backwards, unfolding the ruins

of history – all of it like some strange fairy tale
titled, “the small regret that is the human body.”
but i ask you, dear reader: are humans just bodies?

no. we’re homes. we’re voices in almost-vibrant
Kodachrome. the loft of our voices bringing
us relief & because of this, we grow to love

this new body part. in this new fairy tale separate
from the gods where a clock never ticks its incoherent
code in the background, cramping all the air

inside the room. why couldn’t the gods
gift us two instead of one, like hearts?
why when their ears ring with our cries

do they not respond, “we hear you”?
it’s only then we notice they want us to look
at them, catch them in the corners of our

eyes, the way you’d look at a man holding
a gun at your temple. that’s when we turn gray-ish
like fingerprint dusting powder.

can’t you see, dear reader? it’s only then we
realize this fairy tale, our lives, that it’s not about embracing.
them. it’s about embracing ourselves, embracing each other,

embracing time, embracing one’s death in those eyes,
those envious eyes of the gods, & never wanting to escape
one’s self or each other because the ticking, that ticking

you still hear, no matter what of that ticking, if you keep
listening to it the way the gods listen to our heartbeats,
too closely, you’ll realize that ticking all along

came from a bomb strapped to our bodies
given to us by the gods.

Poetry by Val Cole
—–
POEM:

you sometimes said.

We knew about your aneurysm for the last
twenty-five years, that bulge in your heart

and chest that could swell with blood,
and like a balloon, burst at any time,

killing you in less than nine minutes, you explained.
They told us it was inoperable.

So there was nothing for it but to be constantly afraid
or forget it and live, which we did,

while it ballooned beneath our radar for years.
Until last fall, when your legs and arms began to swell

–even then we did not realize that this meant
your heart was failing–

but there was to be no quick death.
as your heart began to leak blood

into you lungs and chest,
releasing the pressure but slowly smothering,

choking you,
and so your swollen aneurysm grew,

in the last weeks,
like a foreign body,

–yet also a living part of your heart–
until it carried you breathlessly away

in the middle of the night
and you left me on the shore

of a January morning,
alone in the early mourning light.

Performed by Val Cole

—–
POEM:

written after the Syrian crisis

It doesn’t matter where we go
Or even where we stay,
We are all immigrants

Some leave home
To arrive as immigrants
Some stay in place
But feel displaced

Who is Turkish these days?
Who is American?
What is a Londoner?

i visit Ellis Island where my grandparents landed
Today In Krakow, Berlin, New York survivors remember

Immigrants run from oppression
Aim for freedom
Some make it
Others don’t

Who are these displaced people?
Who will receive them?
Who will listen?
Let alone who will welcome them?

What am I supposed to do?
Does anything I do matter?
Exhaustion overwhelms while babies cry

Are you listening God?
Are you there?
Kindly pick up the fucking phone
I am calling you!

So many deaths
of ideas,
hopes,
futile whispers trying to be heard

Come now, my friends,
How bad does it have to get
To wake up compassion

Drugged we walk the streets
Drugged we sit and wait for something unknowable to happen

I read Allan Kaprow’s essays on the blurring of art and life
Can poems and still lives heal us
One artist, one storyteller, one poet at a time
Put their souls on the page, the stage, the canvas

Create a minute,
A breath to a quiet the mind

A space, a place,
to be
present to the heart beat