All Were Limones: a Reckoning of What Is

Title: All Were Limones

Author: Luisa Caycedo-Kimura

Publisher: The Word Works

 

 

Copyright:  2025

Number of Pages: 74

Special Honor: winner, The Hilary Tham Capital Collection

Blurbs by: Jennifer Franklin, Jennifer Oakes, Robert Pinsky, Dean Radner

Key Descriptors: Latin American culture, multicultural family, nature, celebration, loss

First Sentence: “If I’m a tree planted by streams/why is my tongue dry  my roots//unquenched”

Last Sentence: “Last night, I almost held berries/ for it in my hands.”

Comment: Life reveals itself in all its harshness and simple pleasures. Nothing is guaranteed but unexpected delights happen. For example, “Fireflies pan the garden nightly in search of you.”

The Naked Truths of Margo Stever’s Bareback Rider

 

Title: Bareback Rider

Author:  Margo Taft Stever

Publisher:  Broadstone Books

 

Copyright:  2025

Number of Pages:  26

Blurbs by:  Sarah Arvio, Susana H. Case, Mervyn Taylor

Key Descriptors: horses, dysfunctional family, climate change

First Sentence:  “Only a few humans.”

Last Sentence: “She died/ trying to save/ a bug.

Comment: In this compact collection of 15 poems, forward motion fuels this work, even when a barricade jump fails and horse and rider fall. This is a set of poems garnished with risk, including the eye-popping image on the front cover that shows a naked woman riding bareback.

 

Diana Tokaji’s Flight out of Mad Gravel

 

To a full house in the Bethesda, Maryland Writer’s Center Reading Room on April 17, 2024, Diana Tokaji explored through dance, poetry, and music how to fly despite obstacles. The  Dresser noted that the obstacles included a tremor in her hands, vocal issues, and the loss of a dance partner through A.I.D.S. What shone through was an indomitable  spirit with the ability to literally move her audience in a very well thought out  and engaging program.

 

Twelve pieces divided in three sections comprised Mad Gravel & Other Life Stories, an hour-long program. “Limping Dance with Ripe Persimmon”  provided an upfront confession of onset disabilities though not all, like limping and stuttering were personal disabilities. Using a colorful flowing scarf, the dancer demonstrated her ability to flow and move gracefully though there are moments like limping and shaking that interrupt.

 

Her introduction to “In the Hut” revealed to the audience that the repetitious poetry of this piece was detrimental to her voice, so she was going to cut it from the program. However, people around her raised a clamor, so she enlisted her Artistic Assistant Margaret Riddle to recite the poetry  while sitting on a stool as she, the dancer, stood behind and used her arms to sculpt the dance.

 

The next several pieces brought birds and trees into view. She asked the audience to picture themselves as a tree and to tell a nearby seatmate what tree. Then she asked everyone who was able to stand up, to cross their limbs with their seatmates, to sway and to feel the sun shining on them. She said (and maybe this was part of a poem) “these woods are improv.” Whether this was a particularly sympathetic audience or her ability to engage is just that powerful, most people in the room readily complied, including the Dresser who has a deep-seated love of trees.

 

The second section dealt with the importance of “small moments,” a “Loss of Words,” and what activities were still negotiable—“Are You Still XYZ?” The XYZ potently refers to dance (among other things)—Are you still dancing? The answer comes in a video within a video. Tokaji is shown dancing with both her dance partners: Linda Ellis Rawlings who is in the main video with Tokaji and Daryl Lloyd who is in a projected video behind them. Lloyd is the partner who died of A.I.D.S.

 

The last section gets the audience involved again as she asks everyone to consider what they would bring in a small boat as part of her presentation of “Poem of Trust. Poem of Fearless.”  Then she presented a taste of her dance opera Mad Gravel and her poem “Post-Assault Prescription When I Fear My Spirit Dying.”  This is the poem which was published by Washington, DC’s Split This Rock poetry festival and which was dedicated to Coretta Scott and Martin Luther King, Jr. Today, the poem profoundly looks at what the dancer is capable of  as she strives for justice that may never be achieved:

 

 

Post-Assault Prescription When I Fear My Spirit Dying [excerpt]

Here in the mud
of my history
beneath the rage
is counsel.

Where grace
expands like the air
under a bird’s wings
all day it seems,

rising
soaring
gliding.

Willingness
to take the air
and ride it
is grace.

Riding,
being lifted
by air
is grace.

I seek grace now
as my rage deepens
exponentially
to hate.

As I see my own dreams –
the day ones
the night –

and witness my capacity
to do to another
real harm.

I return to silence
I am not saying
it is easy.

I return to silence
I am not saying
I will be quiet.

I return to silence
I am not saying
I won’t shout my grief
from the rooftops.

Diana Tokaji’s program had many helping hands including Jess Harris, audio Visual Technician, Denaise Seals of Slingshot Video, camera operator Yegide Calhoun, photographer Angelique Raptakis, costume designer Rachel Knudson, and Artistic Assistant Margaret Riddle. Proceeds from this show were donated to Ella’s Gift: Yoga Therapy Scholarship Fund for Women. There will be a video forthcoming from this performance.

 

Photos by Angelique Raptakis

 

The Breakables of The Glass Studio

 

 The heart is the fragile part

            that allows things to break

   from “The Flaw”

 

 

                                                     L e t  t h e s e  l I n e s  b e  s t r o n g e r

t h a n  t h o s e  b r o k e n  a t  e v e r y  s u p e r m a r k e t ,

b r o k e n  w i t h  p e o p l e  h o a r d I n g

   from “Cognitive Overload Virtually Invites Disaster — 19”

 

 

he broke my mother’s body

                to create something sacred

   from “The Glass Studio: I must go back”

 

 

                                                             …as if it were

 

my body, it broke. But I forgive you for the miracle

of everything you shatter.

   from “Oracle”

 

 

                                         not comprehending

                                   what glass stood for: breakable,

                       unbroken, seamless, flat.

   from “Properties of Glass”

 

The Dresser notes that broken and fragile things are featured in Sandra Yannone’s The Glass Studio, a collection of poetry published in 2024  from the Irish press salmonpoetry. Some of the broken things are massive—New York’s Twin Towers and the people who perished there during the terrorist attack of 9/11, the Titanic ship that hit an iceberg sending its passengers into icy waters, the mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, where 49 people died and 53 others were injured. While all the poems employ the word glass, over half of the poems in this collection use some version of the word break, including the last poem “The Glass Studio — Glass eyes, glass flowers, glass attics and floors”, which ends “Now go home to your glass house and unpack every glass mirror you forever hoped to break.”

 

This work is about the fragile proposition of living and finding connection through love. The opening poem “Cut Glass” makes this clear as the “I” narrator, presumably the poet, gives her lover a jar of tap water and sea glass “worn down/by years/of turbulent waves/and rocks.” In a way, this odd gift is like a snow globe meant to be shaken. But unlike the scene of snow falling over an idyllic landscape, this jar when disturbed  floats glass that cuts, has cut the poet marring her once perfect skin.

 

What is perfectly intact is this intelligent and sensitively arranged work of 36 well-sculpted poems presented in four sections, most prefaced by a quote on glassmaking and each ending with a poem entitled “The Glass Studio.” Variety prevails in terms of poetic forms used but also includes a sestina in every section. Other forms include sonnets, prose poems, quatrains, couplets, tercets, a variety of indented and interleaved poems where alternating lines hug the left and then the right margin.

 

A less familiar form occurs in “Cognitive Overload Virtually Invites Disaster — 19”, a pandemic lockdown poem where even the letters of the words observe “social distancing.” Toward the end of “Cognitive Overload…”, comes this line: “W I l l  t h I s  p o e m  b e  m y  f I n a l  l o v e r ?” Here this meta poetic question elevates the plight of the poet by superimposing a capital I (to emphasize the first-person point of view) in the words wIll, thIs, and fInal. It is part of the poet’s cognitive overload. Cognitive overload occurs when the brain gets too much information and stops working. Not all the i’s in the poem are capitalized and the Dresser guesses that not every reader will notice the emphasis the poet is placing on the letter I.

 

Poetry of merit deserves rereading, and, in that rereading, one hopes to discover something new. The Glass Studio is a book to slowdown for, to let its letters, words, forms, and meanings have time to coalesce as the making of a stain glass window might. In other words, Sandra Yannone practices careful craftsmanship in her glass studio.

Of Love and Monsters

 

 

 

The desire to be held looms large in T. De Los Reyes book of poetry And Yet Held. The fruition of that desire comes despite obstacles.

 

                                     …you looked at me from

across the room in a way that made me feel held.

Oh, how I am but skin fragmented by touch, from

which a little flower blooms amidst all the wreckage.

And, having been found, waits to be kissed.

[excerpt, “Debris”]

 

 

                                  …Can you hold me when I am

unbearable and especially then. What I mean when

 

I say thirst is your eyes drinking me in, telling me

you’ll dig through bones and cinders just to be here,

 

wherever here is.

[excerpt, “Forest Fire”]

 

 

                          …Wasn’t I scared of dying

…

collision, accidental fires, earthquakes…

…

I am terror struck by the monster living under

my skin…

And hadn’t you draped your shadow around

my shoulders saying, I will hold you, I will hold

you now and always…

[excerpt, “Umbra”]

 

And Yet Held is a love story with monsters and some of those monsters like the one named in “Umbra” reside in the narrator. In her seven-part poem “Monsters”, the poet deals with an all devouring and wild love which she compares to possibly a one-night stand that made the narrator feel the shame of racism and not being seen. The wild lover makes the narrator feel equally monstrous in a good way: “I am your/ leviathan among the woods” and unafraid of being seen: “No one can stop me/ from holding your hand,/ not even the demons that/ corrupt their heart.”

 

In this time where many poets, writers, and ordinary people speak of loneliness and heartbreak, this beautifully produced book with a hand touching flowers on its predominantly blue cover  (Durham, NC: Bull City Press, 2024) explodes with the galactic light of love:

 

                  …What I love about a ship going

to deep space is the proximity near light

and darkness and the reluctant decay of

days and years. When you kiss me I forget

my name. I forget myself. I recognize only

the skin and bones that house this body.

Permission to disturb the gods in slumber.

Permission to scatter, as if hundreds of fish

in the warm sea, as if an exploding star.
[excerpt, “Near Light”]

 

 

T. De Los Reyes, a Filipino poet and designer, is author of Woeman, a poetry chapbook. She has been published in such journals as Crazyhorse, Hobart After Dark, and Pleiades.

 

 

Woman at the Crossing: Heart, Home, Healing

 

Susan Okie’s Woman at the Crossing, winner of the 2023 Off the Grid Poetry Prize, shows the complexity of everyday living and the choices we make…or don’t. The Dresser sees this in the book’s title poem where a doctor (yes, Susan Okie is a medical doctor) examines a woman in pain, prescribes an x-ray, then departs in her car. Stopped at a traffic light, the doctor notices a woman on the street with a sign professing her pain—hungry, lost my job, three kids:

 

…

The light changes and I

 

drive on behind safety glass.

This woman at the crossing:

desperate soul, racketeer, both?

One day I’ll park, walk back

to speak with her.

 

In this face-paced 21^st century life, we are often haunted by things we do not do as well as decisions we make sometimes too impulsively. In “Willy of Kisumu, Kenya, 1992,” Okie lets Willy, a young street boy into her home to play video games with her similarly aged sons. Willy makes her sons “uneasy” and her boys ask her not to let Willy in again. Before he leaves, he says he will go back to school if only Okie gives him money for books. She knows he sniffs glue and most likely won’t go back to school but gives him money anyhow.

 

I hand it over and he disappears. Next time,

 perhaps, a new story, but the same questions

and the eyes that freeze me, old as stars.

 

Other instances that haunt permeate the collection. In “The Life of Secrets,” Okie finds relatives that her family hoped to hide:

 

This year, I found my tia-abuelas,

two old ladies, Mexican half-sisters

of my grandmother from a marriage

 

that my gringo family tried to erase.

Their house in Cuernavaca is filled

with sunlight, saints, dark paintings.

 

In “My Father in Mexico City, 1921,” the poet writes from the perspective of her father as a six-year-old who,  while waiting for his lunch in the beautiful bird-filled courtyard of his home,  witnesses his grandfather sneaking a woman into the house:

 

Rapping at the door. A shout: grandfather.

The birds dart off. You keep still,

listen to the rapid Spanish, catch a whiff

of perfume. He crosses by the fountain

with someone whose skirts rustle

as her hurries her upstairs.

 

Occasionally, what haunts also mystifies. The Dresser wonders whether “In Hades” is a nightmare or something that actually happened. Here are excerpts:

 

I’ve gone under.

My thoughts dart

like small blue fish.

It isn’t safe

to speak. I’ll be

sliced open…

 

…

 

I see a man—vast,

dark. He pins

my arms, wrestles me

to the ground. I watch

myself fall.

…

 

My eyes are bandaged.

One is torn inside…

 

Someone unwraps them—

a detective shows me

photos. Men’s faces

swim past.

 

…

 

“In Hades” is preceded by “interior with Young Woman” which concerns a young woman who is taken to a borrowed house by a man she doesn’t know well. When he comes on to her, she “recoils” and becomes an abstract painting in the style of Picasso. “In Hades” is followed by “A Doctor’s Eye: Thy Bed of Crimson Joy.” While the poem concerns a recalcitrant patient who has been told that alcohol will speed his death and it does in the most horrific way, what catches the Dresser’s attention is the sub-title of this poem. Thy Bed of Crimson Joy comes from this short poem by William Blake:

 

The Sick Rose

 

O Rose, thou art sick:

The invisible worm,

That flies in the night

In the howling storm,

 

Has found out thy bed

Of crimson joy;

And his dark secret love

Does thy life destroy.

 

Of course, the sick rose can stand in for that patient who gets his mother to sneak in beer and then has an incident where blood gushes from this throat and the doctor attending him who must be an inexperienced medic cannot get any other doctor to help because the man has flagrantly brought on his own death and cannot be healed. It could also be a suggestive touchstone for the women in the two poems coming before “A Doctor’s Eye”—these women who may have suffered some degree of molestation.

 

In Woman at the Crossing, finding a comfortable and safe place known as home is a recurring theme in this collection. It manifests largely in section 4 which most often concerns love and care for the environment and our place in the cosmos. The dramatic cover art, “Cathedral Rock” by Walter Weiss (Okie’s husband), confirms the importance of finding home on our planet. On this topic, the poem that resonated the deepest for the Dresser—“Love’s Austere and Lonely Offices”—narrows down to the love the poet had for her father who was plagued by some kind of stomach ailment but who was working on “a musical about Odysseus, the man who loved/ home but couldn’t seem to get there.” Section 4 is the only section of the book prefaced by a quote. Section 4’s quote is “Never say you know the last word about any human heart.” by Henry James. The heart weighs heavily and earnestly in this carefully written and presented first full-length collection by Susan Okie.

 

Meet Gary Stein, Poet Raconteur

 

Gary Stein has a new poetry collection in 2023 from Finishing Line Press entitled Getting to Heaven [And Other Miracles]. This chapbook presents beautifully with cover art by Susan Makov and contains many accomplished poems published in such prestigious journals as Commonweal, The Atlantic Review, and JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association). The Dresser has been following his publishing accomplishments since 2003 when Cabin Fever, The Word Works anthology he co-edited with Jacklyn Potter and Duane Rieves was launched. The Dresser offers the following interview in attempt to expand Gary Stein’s audience.

 

1.     Your background: Tell us about your literary background and philosophy of writing.

Answer:

 I was an avid reader as a child and got encouragement for my stories from a sixth-grade teacher.  In college I took elective courses in satire and playwriting.  A one-act play I wrote in the 60’s was performed and positively reviewed in The Washington Post (under the name “Gary Allen”). I was admitted to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop for fiction writing based on a trio of short stories I submitted.  While there I worked on a novel and lived with poets who became quite successful. We read and heard lots of poetry and hung out with poets including Galway Kinnell and Richard Hugo. Following Iowa, I managed to publish a couple of short stories, failed to publish my novel, but began writing poems. After a couple of years, journals began publishing some of my poems. 

 

2.      What does writing do for you? What motivates you to write? Why is poetry the genre of choice for you?

Answer:

I’m embarrassed to say that I’m not aware I have a “philosophy of writing” other than writing to entertain and/or enlighten myself.  Perhaps I’ve chosen poetry as a genre because I enjoy creating condensed images. While practicing law for many years, it was easier to complete a poem than a lengthy work of fiction.

 

3.     Talk about your book and chapbook achievements and where your latest chapbook Getting to Heaven fits into your overall plan for yourself.

Answer:

   Thanks to Poets and Writers and “Duotrope”  I’ve been fortunate in learning of and entering competitions permitting me to win first prize for Touring the Shadow Factory, a full-length collection (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2019), and be named a chapbook finalist for Between Worlds (Finishing Line Press, 2014). Earlier this year Finishing Line Press also published my second chapbook, Getting To Heaven (And Other Miracles) which contains some of my older but hopefully more amusing poems.  My “overall plan” is to keep writing poems as long as what I’m capable of producing does not embarrass me.

 

4.     If you could only pick one poem from Getting to Heaven to read, which would it be?

Answer:

   Good question.  I might pick the opening poem, “A Bough Falls” because like so many of my poems it tells a story concisely, portrays my Catholic background, and uses imagery I like to think is successful.  If I had a second choice, it would be “Why My Wife Should Let Me Have A Dog” because I think it’s funny.

 

5.     In Getting to Heaven, who are your influences, and could you talk about your process, possibly in conjunction with the one poem you would favor in the case of being asked to pick only one poem from this collection.

Answer:

    Although I’ve identified as a Quaker for over 35 years, based on the subject matter and book title, my Catholic childhood and education (from grammar school through college) are strong influences on my subject matter.  Also, having a sense of humor, even about important subjects like religion and spirituality, are reflected in many of these poems. Finally, my life-long love of narrative fiction is reflected in poems that frequently begin with a story. Good examples from the new chapbook include “Crossing El Rio San Pedro, Puebla, Mexico,” “A Bough Falls,” and “Note To My Father As I Near The Age Of His Death.”  My process often begins with a specific event or experience from which I keep writing until I discover its deeper meaning.

To complete the picture of Gary Stein, the Dresser ends with “A Bough Falls.”

 

A BOUGH FALLS

 

Cut loose, betrayed by air it lands

like a lost gift on silent

indifferent earth until found

 

by a man of faith in an afterlife,

perhaps a priest in his black cassock

who later in a lonely rectory marries

 

imperfect oak to bundled kindling.

His match, a splinter of grace,

sparks petals of persistent light

 

into bloom and spreads healing

heat while wood whispers

like an angel in the quiet night.

 

Isn’t fire just another prayer offered

to cure the darkness in time? 

But every clock winds down

 

and wood turns to ash, and air

in the chimney chokes

on its smoke. The priest believes

 

that only when a soul is freed

from its body, like vapor

from the charred log, will it rise.

 

—Gary Stein

    (first published in Commonweal, May 2022)

 

Spoken Word Club Features Poet Barbara Goldberg

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If the Dresser were allowed only five words to enter the poetry of Barbara Goldberg, the Dresser would choose danger, death, sex, psyche, and fairytale.

 

Take “Furlough,” the first poem in Goldberg’s Breaking & Entering: New and Selected Poems where the first line begins with sexual attraction:

 

I love to see those tall, lean, muscular men

 

The next several lines depict danger, possibly verging on death

 

I love to see those tall, lean, muscular men

with their clean-shaven heads and digital

 

watches toss their kids in the air. And I love

to see them drop, not weightless, but light

 

as grenades.

 

As we learn more about this type of man, we see his soldierly discipline, the mind controlling his behavior, his bodily actions, the essence of his psyche, and we enter a story landscape, possibly an untold fairytale for those children tossed so casually in air.

 

as grenades. This how children learn that fear

can be fun. And fathers, that this too is hand

 

to hand combat. To cradle or kill—what story

do we tell ourselves to justify. …

 

Six sections of Breaking & Entering provide heart-stopping imagery and lyrical allure. Finish reading “Furlough” in the New section.

 

Not to be missed in section II—Berta Broadfoot and Pepin the Short is “Aliste Speaks with Double Tongue.” In this poetic story about a nursemaid who substitutes her daughter Aliste for the royal girl Berta set to marry King Pepin, Goldberg offers a poem written in two columns that can be read as two columns or line by line across the two columns. Here are the first three lines:

 

                               I couldn’t stand    this fact: they were torturing her

                                     I couldn’t sit   I could hear her shrieks

                       I paced, a wild thing    She couldn’t save me now

 

Section III Cautionary Tales recounts Goldberg’s versions of Little Red Riding Hood. The Dresser is loath to pick just one poem when there is “Teeth”—We all live in dread of our teeth…; “Née Maggie Malone”—She didn’t shave her legs or underarms…(winner of the first Word Works Washington Prize) and “Night at the Opera”—Although Aida and Rhadames are buried alive/in a crypt…(as told by the eight-year-old author) and much more.

 

Without a doubt, Section IV Marvelous Pursuits demands that an out loud reading of “Ballad of the Id” which begins I am your rose hips and bunting and bootleg.

 

In section V The Royal Baker’s Daughter, the Dresser favors the three-part poem “My Father’s Mistress”—She of No Name who wore sensible shoes unlike the narrator’s mother, Herta who lived in a rustic chalet, or Lily who was a Marlene Dietrich look alike.

 

The title poem by the same name of section VI The Kingdom of Speculation is certainly the Dresser’s favorite where

 

Eggs coddled or poached are the food

of choice in the Kingdom of Speculation

 

this is where the rich eat eggs and the poor, heavy-in-the-stomach dumplings.

 

Why not request one of these poems when Barbara Goldberg is featured in a virtual reading on May 23, 2023, at 4 pm Eastern from Spoken Word Club. Bring a poem of your own for the open mic. Here’s the link: https://www.facebook.com/events/1433183454098878/?acontext={"ref":"52","action_history":"[{\"surface\":\"share_link\",\"mechanism\":\"share_link\",\"extra_data\":{\"invite_link_id\":792016829159657}}]”}

 

 

A Debut Poetry Collection from a Master Teacher—Cathy Hailey

 

 

A lot is packed into Cathy Hailey’s Finishing Line Press chapbook I’d Rather Be a Hyacinth. All the poems are haiku sonnets. She tells us she learned about this form in The Poetry Gymnasium by Tom Hunley. With a few words to each line, she constructs Shakespearian sonnets with four haiku (most stanzas following the five-seven-five syllable count in three lines) and one rhymed couplet.

 

Most of the poems deal with nature, either the physical world or human nature as in behavior. There are also ekphrastic poems, the greater number of these describing dance performances. “Under the Sun,” her opening poem about a vase invokes movement and sensation in most lines, a call to find life in seemingly still manmade art.

 

Under the Sun (an excerpt)

 

Helios ascends,

bursting urns of golden fire,

glazing graceful winds.

 

Rhapsodizing lyre

song, strummed by Apollo’s hand,

transcends bound canvas.

 

…

 

The overall title of the collection is found in her last poem of section II.

 

In Life…

 

Hyacinths, Purple—

baby blooms adding stress, weight—

instinct maternal.

 

Tulips variegate

orange-yellow, dancing, coy,

above troupes of green,

 

singular pride, joy

even with no breeze.

In life, I’d rather

 

be a hyacinth,

embrace the role of mother,

live the labyrinth,

 

loved by a brood of florets—

barycenter of orbits.

 

The poet sees the hyacinth as a mother figure which transcends earthly boundaries as the “barycenter of orbits,” an outer space phenomenon where two or more bodies orbit one another. Elevation and transcendence are what the poet has her creative eye attuned to.

 

This brings The Dresser to the stunningly beautiful image Cathy Hailey created for the cover of I’d Rather Be a Hyacinth. The image combines a rosebud with the hint of a human profile, butterfly wings as shoulders, a lush display of purple leaves (looking like a ballet tutu), and a pair of stems that seem to represent legs and feet in ballet toe slippers.

 

But there is one more thing to notice and that’s the final poem and the only poem in Section III entitled “Afterword”. Hailey makes a swipe at “long-winded verse in “In Closing”. The ending couplet redeems:

 

In Closing (excerpts)

 

To curb long-winded

verse—haiku, haiku sonnet—

excess rescinded.

 

…

 

There’s magic in condensing,

precision in expressing.

 

Like many William Shakespeare plays, Hailey provides an epilogue to her collection of haiku sonnets. I’d Rather Be a Hyacinth is a notable first collection from a poet who is gathering her power after years of teaching others about poetry and writing.