Aug.
01
2025
My poem about my mother’s final days, “Transformative,” is the featured poem for August in the beautiful online journal Thirteen Bridges. I am so thrilled with the presentation and honored to be included in this impressive literary magazine.
This is the link to see it live: Joanne Clarkson | August 25 Poem | Thirteen Bridges
I also wanted to include the poem itself:
Transformative
From the kitchen where I am
washing a week’s worth
of dishes, I watch my mother
watch television. Become herself
through someone else’s
script. She squints, lips parting.
Once at a séance, I saw a Medium
take on another being. She changed
her features to become a woman’s
dead sister. With messages. As if
those who have passed know us better
than we know ourselves. Where
we put the misplaced thing.
I watch my mother take back
the animation that so often leaves
her face now. She resurrects in artificial
light. Calls me by my name,
not her mother’s or her sister’s.
For about ten minutes we have
a conversation about real Christmases.
All human faces look basically
the same, until they don’t. Slope
of cheek bone, arch of lip
utterly individual. Today for an
instant, my mother transformed
into someone thirty years younger.
I stood behind her at the mirror
combing her thinning hair. Her brows
arcing into mine. The blue-hazel
of her eyes becoming the recognition
of two women sharing a life.
Jun.
26
2025
My poem “Asymmetry” is in the Summer 2025 issue of Humana Obscura. This is an especially gorgeous journal because of the large amount of art and photography that accompanies the excellent writing. Here is the link to the online journal: www.humanaobscura.com. The poem is below:
Asymmetry
Firs are not symmetrical.
Neither the maple. Cedars like gods’ arms
crooked to every season of forgiving.
Each pine a lightning strike.
Each willow a map toward water
the way a break in the heart might look.
The trunk of a single tree
is a natural atlas. And bones of oak
become violins in a wind storm.
No one book contains the names of all
the leaves. No single illustration
gets the skeletons right.
Barren and white, poplar becomes
a landmark, its roots the true asymmetry,
paths the deer might follow
traveling last year’s rain.
.
Jun.
19
2025
One evening on Jeopardy there was a question about butterflies in the Amazon that drank turtles’ tears. I looked this fact up and found that it was true, along with additional details. I thought this just had to be a poem. So I wrote “Turtle Tears” which has just appeared in the Spring/Summer 2025 of the literary journal Ep;phany. The edition is beautiful and I am so proud to have my work included with the other poems, stories, non-fiction pieces and art. Here is the poem:
Turtle Tears
A humid morning, and the slow
reptile makes her way toward
a flat stone above currents
heavy with leaves and debris.
A butterfly alights on her yellow
spotted forehead. Then two, and three,
lingering like afternoon light,
harvesting clear honey.
Not myth, but health: butterflies
of the interior Amazon, drink
turtles’ tears. Less-than-thread-width
legs balance on lids
while a tendril of tongue sips.
The turtle, intent on river mud,
barely notices as if touched
by nothing more
than the tail of a rainbow.
One theory has it that the winged ones
seek salt, existing as they do
so far from the ocean. Sodium,
the mineral of heartbeats.
Another suggests tears produce
medicine, universal serum
to ward off disease
since vision and wings
are keys to survival.
Neither insects or reptiles ponder
such things, just companions
on a river healing each other
within the grief of a vanishing world.
Jun.
17
2025
My poem, “Heel,” is in the current issue of Lips Magazine 2025, Issue 61/62. This is a true story that occurred when I was teaching writing classes at men’s medium/maximum security prison in Illinois. Generally the experience was positive – except for this one heartbreaking incident that has stuck with me for 30 years.
We met in the prison library
that autumn into winter I taught
the medium security men.
In December, the librarian
who had worked there
for twenty-five years
and called the thieves and murderers
her boys, brought a small
Christmas tree from home.
Before we started our writing session
the twelve men stood around
the tiny green fir with its tinsel
and most of them wept.
Then the assistant warden stormed
through the door, threw down
the little symbol and ground it
under his soles.
We never celebrate here.
They froze, became wooden.
The librarian swept up the needles
and glitter, her broom straw
making a sound between a hiss
and hush. No one heard a word
of the lesson, season teetering
forever between boot heel
and her kindness.
Feb.
26
2025
Two of my poems are in the print edition of Peregrine, Volume XXXVII, The Caregiving Issue. This is the publication of Amherst Writers & Artists Press. Seventy-three writers are represented here and the issue is so varied, addressing every aspect of tending to the dying, the disabled, the fragile and the difficult patient.
One of my poems is “The Necessary Piece,” about when I advocated for a Hospice patient’s wife whose washing machine broke down at a critical moment during end of life care. Often it is the simple things that loom large. And how hard we have to fight to achieve a good outcome.
The other is called “Emergency Number,” a true story about a caregiver at her breaking point. Lack of sleep and constant worry can break a person. I learned that caring for the Care Giver is as important – and as challenging – as tending to the patient!
This is a deeply important collection for anyone with a sick loved one or work that involves providing care. It provides a realistic insight in love at it most difficult, and its most rewarding. Go to amherstwriters.org.
Dec.
13
2024
The Calendula Review: A Journal of Narrative Medicine published two of my poems in their Fall 2024 issue. The theme was “Inhale/Exhale.” You can read the whole journal at Http://www.thecalendulareview.com. Then look under ‘issues.’ Here are the poems:
Whale Watching
I know the black-and-white
of being alive when I hear
the explosive breach of breath:
Orcas rear
from sea-living into the glorious
necessity of air.
Breathing is a choice. Different
from the automatic heartbeat.
The winds teach us to believe
in the power of the invisible.
We point and cheer as the tour boat
idles the required distance
from the carousel pod
performing its dance
of living in two worlds.
At the rail, we don’t realize
we are holding our breath
until we let it go as they rise
again, open
the tops of their heads
in a waterfall of spectrums
before they again inhale clouds, stars,
a random feather
and dive deep, deeper, leaving us
a souvenir of air,
the moment of our collective Aaahhhh….
Looking Glass
There is life only silver can see. Aunt Sophie
had stories of accompanying a country doctor.
In those long-ago days, a nurse
carried three things in her pocket:
a thermometer, a scissors and a small, round
mirror. Once, she told me, after a difficult
birth while the doc attended to the mother,
she turned to the infant, blue and silent,
left in a basin on a window ledge.
For some reason, she slipped out her mirror,
held it under the tiny nose. Watched,
unbelieving at first, as the flat surface blurred
with the faintest hint of fog.
Immediately she pressed her thumbs against
the tiny chest. Gently parted the still lips
and whispered in her own breath
until the body found its rhythm.
To this day, as a nurse, besides my stethoscope
and blood pressure cuff. In addition
to my computer. I carry a small mirror.
At the beginning and in the final hours,
there are souls only silver sees.
Dec.
11
2024
The 2024 edition of Peregrine, the journal of Amherst Writers, is focused on caregivers and caregiving. I am so proud to have 2 poems included in this beautiful, moving anthology. Both my poems are about difficult situations I experienced as a Hospice RN. The first one titled, “The Necessary Piece,” is about a broken washing machine. Often it is one seemingly small thing that matters extraordinarily. The wife of the patient had worked so hard through his illness and decline to keep her husband comfortable, clean and dignified. This included a lot of washing. One day when I visited, I saw her in tears for the first time. A repairman had come to repair her washer and told her it would take a week to get the part to fix it. We only had a week or so left. I got on the phone to Sears immediately and requested, if not the part, then a loaner washer. It took me four managers until I found someone sympathetic to the situation. Then, miraculously, a second repairman appeared in an hour with the exact piece we needed!
The second poem, “Emergency Number,” is about a dialog I had with a caregiver who had totally lost it with her demented and uncooperative husband, as I raced to her home. This was a heartbreaking situation, but one that did finally resolve. I hope the message in the poem is how very, very difficult caregiving can be, especially over time.
Peregrine hosted a Zoom reading for us to share our work. I loved connecting with the other writers this way, many of them caregivers. This volume is a must-read for anyone dealing with a sick loved one or somehow involved in such care. Thank you, Amherst Writers, for recognizing the ones who stand and serve.
Oct.
28
2024
My poem “The Ghosts of Beautiful Selves,” about how our dead loved ones come back to us, is up now in the Fall 2024 issue of the journal Months to Years. You can read the whole edition at http://monthstoyears.org/Fall-2024. This beautiful publication is full of moving stories, poems and artwork dealing with grief and loss. I am so honored to have my work included. It is sometimes difficult to picture those who have crossed over. And how they do come back within our visions and dreams is not always how we expected. Here is my poem:
The Ghosts of Beautiful Selves
I can no longer picture my mother,
last memory of a face
erased. I can study her fading photos.
I can bring back the timbre
of her voice, her common sayings
but her expression flickers, quick
sequencing too fast to capture.
How many years has it been?
How many false apparitions?
I once heard a Seer say
ghosts always come back
as their most beautiful selves.
Healed of both wounds and aging.
Retro-fitting their youth with touch-ups
as if mirrors hold forever
a stash of fashions
and every shade of blush.
My grandmother described
her daughter as the prettiest girl
in a time before she ever dreamed of me.
My mother was never the person
in the sickbed. She rejected such a body
decades ago. I press my eye against
a kaleidoscope of old circumstance.
Grief reforms into crystal beads
the way, at a distance, colors coalesce
into a landscape, a village,
one new yet familiar face.