Sherry Rind is Ephemera's March Poet

(4 Poems & More)

Welcome readers!

We’re happy to introduce Sherry Rind, our selection for March’s Poetry at Ephemera. Thanks to Sherry and everyone who submitted in January. Per usual, we have some great poets and writers who submit to us and found it very rewarding to read yet difficult to select. If you’d like to participate, we will be fielding submissions each month to publish one poem per issue from the same poet for the month. Each poet receives a $200 honorarium. For full rules and more info please see our designated post about Poetry at Ephemera. You can also submit via the button:

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Introducing, Sherry Rind!

Writer Bio

Sherry Mossafer Rind is the author of six collections of poetry. She has received grants and awards from Anhinga Press, the Seattle and King County Arts Commissions, National Endowment for the Arts, and Artist Trust. Her most recent books are Between States of Matter, Poetry Box Select, 2020, and The Store-House of Wonder and Astonishment, winner of an Eyelands International award, published by Pleasure Boat Studio, 2022. Her Website is here.

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Artist Statement

People love monster movies. In the summer of 2020, human monsters had power, and the people protested. Enter real movie monsters, and a poem begins.

After working intensely on a book based on old natural histories, I’ve been following wherever a notion leads. Lately overwhelming realities of war and election terror have flattened the playfulness necessary to pluck words and images out of nowhere for a poem. I need that playfulness to make unexpected connections and follow where they might lead. A poem begins in urgency as well, even when I don’t know what’s urgent until it’s on the page. It begins with the confidence that the poem matters. Each poem has its own purpose.

I approach a larger subject by directing an intense focus on one morsel, even a molecule (literally or figuratively) and explore how its structure embodies a larger reality. I’m saying, “Consider this.” Consider this quiet day in the kitchen. Or what grows from an old photo? People do hug trees. What if they get themselves and their emotions out of the way? Just know the tree before starting to write.

My four poems here have little in common. I chose tones of gently sardonic humor, subdued anger, and wistful loss, the emotions kept low so that readers can go their own way. I wonder if, in a poem at least, you have to give up something to gain something else. Or is that in fairy tales?

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Poems

Each issue of Ephemera spanning March will feature one poem from Sherry Rind. After each issue drops, the poem from that issue will then appear here as well. In this case, we’re launching part of Sherry’s first poem below as a preview before the full issue comes out. This post will remain on our Substack, free to view, for the year.

Poem 1 of 4

Biblical Summer

I long for the days of simple faith
when King Kong and Godzilla duked it out,
stubbing their toes on skyscrapers
and breaking off radio towers like twigs.
Oh, the joy of screaming until we puked.
And then it was over.

They’re real enough.
Instead of evolution’s organic soup,
Godzilla bathed in nuclear muck.
I’d be angry, too,
with those radiation keloids.

Say he wasn’t shot off Empire State
Kong would’ve gone like Ishi
or the last passenger pigeon
housed in a museum
until death from a white man’s disease.

We know, even before they loom into sight
there’s always some hotshot
who blows his load and becomes a just dessert
and always a man who says wait
and a beautiful woman everybody loves
for being kinder than god or man
and the extras who get trampled—

those would be us.
But we know ways of escape
in helicopters or sewer system or the London underground.
We are as ants to those monsters,
yet we sweep them away every time
and love them so much that we bring them back
so we can win again.

Previously published in Between States of Matter, a Poetry Box Select book, ©2020

Full poem tomorrow in issue March.1 of Ephemera

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Poem 2 of 4

Preserving Lemons

Appears in the March.2 Issue

Poem 3 of 4

Tree Hug

When the poet from the desert visited rainforest country where I live,
she hugged a tree, and her friends thought her drunk. Because
this happened before my time, I do not know which tree she hugged
as closely as a beloved friend not seen in years.

She believed a tree feels
in its cells and sap; and even a human being, a creature running
on words, could for one or even two seconds stop
percolating and know how it feels to be rooted, unknown
to words, in one place but nodding with the wind.

After she discovered the tree lived with the indifference of another world
she told her students the story, spreading her arms in a balletic pose,
wanting to teach them against their natures,
not to grab the next beautiful thing.
All this air held in my arms,
she said, this nothing gives everything.

Appears in the March.3 Issue

Poem 4 of 4

A Box I Packed Twenty Years Ago

and left to the changeable weather of the garage
contained my son’s entry card
from his eighth grade trip to China
eight months after
his father died

and a receipt from the headstone
marking the ashes.
I wanted a place
where my son could go
later, to retrieve his father
in whatever clips of memory remained.

There’s a photo of the boy in a parka
on a brown sandy shore, not our rocky Pacific home.
Indian Ocean? China Sea?
Someone caught him unselfconscious,
right arm forward with hand curved after a throw,
right heel lifted to step back
from oncoming waves,

horizon curving at the photo’s top
in a thin, powder blue line
barely separate from sky.
Face still unformed,
he thinks only about skipping
the rock, flicking his wrist just right,
a bright blue figure against the mist
watching a stone leap away.

Appears in the March.4 Issue