#gretchen marquette

[spudcity]

Ode to a Man in Dress Clothes

When I see a man in a dress shirt, I want to walk up behind him, place my hand between his shoulders, to rest it there for a moment. I think about his socks, how he chose one pair that morning and the rest are still at home in a drawer.  And his shoes— god those shoes, they break me, especially when they’re polished, what does he do to make them shine like that, yes, all it takes is a pair of shiny black shoes and such a wave of tenderness collapses over me that I see his ties, at rest on their little carousel, imagine that he held them up in the mirror at the department store, unsure.

– Gretchen Marquette

[violettesiren]

At the May Day parade, my mask made of moss and bark, my hair full of flowers, my friend beside me, her pretty red mouth under the hawk’s beak of her mask of green sage.

At the children’s pageant, music died in the speakers. The shadow of a crow passed over. My hair a crown of flowers, yellow and red roses large as fists, flowers on which I’d spent my last $20 at the mercado.

But beauty wasn’t enough. Being admired by strangers was not enough.

I saw a girl, wandering, looking for her mother. I knelt down, lowered my mask, showed her my face. She’s looking for you too, I say. She tries to spot her mother’s yellow dress. A gold dog passes, happy and white-faced, wearing pink nylon fairy wings. The girl points and laughs; the hard part of her day is over.

The people I’m looking for—I don’t know where they are. I don’t know the color of their clothing. From across the park I see the dark windows of my apartment.

Spring has arrived. Let me not despair.

Song for the Festival by Gretchen Marquette

[ruknowhere]

I wanted. I wanted to go on

wanting. Is this any different

than any animal want,

to go on breathing

in order to love someone?

Nobody wants their life

to become unrecognizable to them.

Gretchen Marquette, closing lines to

"Split," Midway Journal (vol. 9, no. 1,

2015)

What we are given is taken

away,

but we manage to keep it

secretly

We lose everything, but make

harvest

of the consequence it was to

us. Memory

builds this kingdom from the

fragments

and approximation. We are

gleaners who fill

the barn for the winter that

comes on.

-Jack Gilbert,

ending of "Moreover"

Let your soul stand

cool and composed

before a million

universes.

- Walt Whitman

[kafk-a]

Gretchen Marquette

[hallohartje]

Gretchen Marquette - Deer through a Boutique Window

"Why are some of us lucky? And some of us / not?"

[marnz]

the poetry substack I subscribe to had a beautiful entry today if you are looking for something small and tender and good 💜

[hypnotistcollectors]

Painted Turtle

Summer road the ring around the lake, we drove mostly in silence. Why aren’t I your wife? You swerved around a turtle sunning itself. I wanted to go back. To hold the hot disc of it and place it in the grass. We were late for dinner. One twentieth of a mile an hour, I said. Claws in tar. You turned the car around. Traffic from the direction of the turtle, and you saw before I did, the fifty bones of the carapace, crushed roman dome, the surprise of red blood. I couldn’t help crying, couldn’t keep anything from harm. I’m sorry, you said, and let it hurt. The relief, always, of you in the seat beside me, you’ll never know. Driving that road next winter, you remembered that place in the road. Your turtle. During hibernation, a turtle’s heart beats once for every ten minutes. It cannot voluntarily open its eyes.

(-Gretchen Marquette)

[rabbit-light]

Poem for a Rabbit

Beside my car this morning, heart like a cooked cherry, string of pink gut, tuft of fur. A rabbit is watchful, all softness and nothing to defend with. Imagine living in seasons, pulling clover through teeth, hazard on the move from all directions— snake and fox, hawk and dog. All those eyes, looking for you, body born as food for other bodies, fine muscles made to enrich something that creeps back into the brush when morning comes— does it matter, that after recoiling what I felt was relief, that nobody new was looking to take my heart and abandon it in the street?

Gretchen Marquette

[fluttering-slips]

Split

He kneels, hand on my sternum.

I forget how soft you are, he says. After two days, I forget.

To preserve – the inclination to.

If I could have, I would’ve slipped away

on thin legs, become invisible at the tree line.

Nobody wants their life to become unrecognizable to them.

I wanted. I wanted to go on wanting. Is it any different

than any animal want, to go on breathing

in order to love someone? Gretchen Marquette

[slackville]

I wanted. I wanted to go on wanting. Is it any different // than any animal want, to go on breathing // in order to love someone?

Gretchen Marquette, closing lines to "Split," Midway Journal (vol. 9, no. 1, 2015)

[finita-la-commedia]

You arrive at my altar with no idea what it means to worship  — to adore.  You haven’t even learned it: ecstasy and suffering            make the same face.

Gretchen Marquette, from “The Offering”

[finishinglinepress]

FLP CHAPBOOK OF THE DAY: A Mobius Path by Jean Fineberg

TO ORDER GO TO: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/a-mobius-path-by-jean-fineberg/

RESERVE YOUR COPY TODAY

Jean Fineberg is a professional jazz saxophonist and composer with an M.Ed. degree from Penn State University. She has studied with celebrated poet Kim Addonizio, and her poems have been published in more than 20 journals.

She has received grants and fellowships from the NEA, Chamber Music America, The Doris Duke Foundation, IntermusicSF, ASCAP, Meet the Composer and others, and served as artist-in-residence at nine art centers around the USA. She is currently at work on her second chapbook, tentatively titled “Memoirs of a Mean Sax.”

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR A Mobius Path by Jean Fineberg

What elegant, ruminative poems these are, calling up memories—of lost loves, lost mothers, lost cities—with a clear-eyed wonder that leaves the reader frequently breathless. Whether it is the melancholic nostalgia of “We Never Made it to London”, the formal inventiveness of “Light Blue”, or the lyric playfulness of “Ode to My Ballpoint Pen”, Jean Fineberg’s debut collection reminds us that joy is a sibling to grace, and memory a mother to wisdom.

—Kareem Tayyar, author of The Prince of Orange County and Immigrant Songs

In her poem, “The Cha Cha Walk, the speaker asks her aging mother, “Do you know who I am?” Her mother responds, “Someone who loves me.” It’s clear that the speaker in these poems loves her mother deeply, just as she loves the world in all its complexity. With a companionable voice as confident as it is vulnerable, the speaker catalogs her life and emerges as an expert, both in observing the world as it exists in real time, and as the keeper of a world that others are beginning to forget. Her memories spark with color and texture as she shows us all the different ways love has informed her – love across generations, love that has burned through its fuel, love between humans and animals, and love that has lost a part of its memory. The speaker holds all of it, and gifts it to her lucky readers in these sharp, shining poems that remind us that sometimes the best way to explain who you are is to say who and what you have loved.

–Gretchen Marquette, author of May Day

Please share/please repost [PROMO] #flpauthor #preorder #AwesomeCoverArt #poetry

[ruknowhere]

I wanted. I wanted to go on wanting. Is it any different // than any animal want, to go on breathing // in order to love someone?

- Gretchen Marquette

What we are given is taken away, but we manage to keep it secretly. We lose everything, but make harvest of the consequence it was to us. Memory builds this kingdom from the fragments and approximation. We are gleaners who fill the barn for the winter that comes on.

Jack Gilbert, "Moreover

Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for insects as well as for the stars. Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper.”

- Albert Einstein

And what is life if one can only learn, and of what one learns give nothing?

-Etsu Inagaki Sugimoto

[yesthatssadirichardslove]

Democrats facing tough slog in 2022 governor races

WASHINGTON

Republicans are increasingly optimistic about flipping governor's offices in key battleground states next year, buoyed by President Joe Biden's sagging approval ratings, Democratic infighting in Congress and better-than-expected results in elections in Virginia and New Jersey.

Democrats were already steeled for tough races, but the upset loss in Virginia's governor's race and a close win in deeply blue New Jersey's confirmed the difficult conditions ahead. In both places, the party was largely caught off guard by the potency of culture-war debates over schools and struggled to stop voters once turned off by former President Donald Trump from migrating back to Republicans.

“Biden’s approval is pulling down Democrats everywhere,” said Charles Franklin, the pollster at Marquette Law School, which released a survey this week showing Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers ' approval rating had slid even more. “There’s no question national forces are playing a big role.”

Democratic incumbents will be playing defense in much-watched Michigan and Wisconsin, and trying to hold an open seat in Pennsylvania. The three governorships are seen as Democrats’ best chance to slow the GOP’s ascendancy in the Rust Belt. The GOP currently holds the governor's office in 27 states, compared with Democrats' 23. Thirty-six are up next year nationwide.

Those races are poised to become expensive and intense contests, as voters and political parties have increasingly relied on state leaders to advance — or block — consequential policy. Evers and Democratic Govs. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan and Tom Wolf of Pennsylvania have emerged as major national figures, credited with stymieing Republican-controlled legislatures' efforts to add restrictions on voting and to curb precautions during the coronavirus pandemic.

Democrats see added urgency in holding the three governorships, in part because of their role in presidential elections. Trump and his backers last year pushed swing-state governors to name electors who would cast votes for Trump in the Electoral College, even though Biden won their states. All refused, but a new crop of more Trump-friendly governors could act differently should the next presidential race’s results be similarly disputed.

Flipping Michigan and Wisconsin and winning Pennsylvania — Wolf is term limited and can't run again — would also likely give Republicans a boost heading into 2024 whether that year's election's results be ultimately challenged or not.

“Having Republican governors in key presidential battlegrounds like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan can be worth a point or two on the presidential ballot," said Phil Cox, former executive director for the Republican Governors Association, who is advising GOP gubernatorial candidates for 2022. "Republican governors can be difference makers in 2024.”

Republican strategists say Wisconsin and Michigan are among their best pickup chances next year, along with Kansas — a normally deep-red state where Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly narrowly won a three-way 2018 race. Nevada, Maine and perhaps New Mexico could be within reach, they say.

GOP candidates across the country will likely try to energize conservative parents by denouncing schools adhering to “critical race theory,” an academic framework about systemic racism that has become a catch-all phrase for teaching about race in U.S. history. Defending “parents' rights” to push back against school districts' efforts to teach about things like institutional racism helped Republican Glenn Youngkin win the governor's race in Virginia, a state Biden carried by 10 percentage points just last year, and could further resonate in toss-up states.

"When you’re talking about governors, you’re talking about people who are actually in charge of what’s going to wind up in our kids’ schools,” said Rick Hess, director of education programs for the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “For senators and members of Congress, it’s a little more difficult. But this is such a gut-level, values-driven conversation, it will absolutely still motivate.”

Democrats, meanwhile, see pickup opportunities in open governorships in Maryland and in Arizona, where Biden last year became just the second Democratic presidential candidate to win since 1948.

Marshall Cohen, the Democratic Governors Association’s political director, said the party is also eyeing Ohio and Texas, where former Senate and presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke is expected to challenge Republican Gov. Greg Abbott.

Both parties, meanwhile, are also focused on Georgia, which narrowly went for Biden in 2020 and elected two Democratic senators in January. Incumbent GOP Gov. Brian Kemp faces the potential of a primary challenge from a Trump-backed Republican.

“No one knows what the environment’s going to be like in the fall of 2022,” Cohen said. “These races are not being held tomorrow.”

For now, though, Biden’s approval rating has slumped since the early months of his presidency, falling to 48% in an October AP-NORC poll from 59% in July.

That, plus the party being slow to pass its domestic agenda, may be a drag on governors' in-state accomplishments. Congress approved a White House-backed $1 trillion infrastructure package late Friday, but it came too late to help the party during elections in Virginia and New Jersey.

“Many of the things that we are seeing and hearing about in the Build Back Better infrastructure are things that Democratic governors have already been doing in their states,” Wendi Wallace, deputy executive director of the Democratic Governors Association, said, referencing a spending bill endorsed by the White House which has yet to clear Congress. “Our in-state efforts are sometimes overshadowed by what’s happening in Washington.”

Biden's trouble, meanwhile, could increase pressure on Democratic governors facing tough reelection fights to distance themselves from the White House in coming months. That's mostly not happened, though reactions to Biden's vaccine mandate for all Americans who work at companies of more than 100 employees could offer some hints that schisms are possible.

Polls show that such requirements are popular among Democrats and unpopular among staunch Republicans — but governor’s races are likely to be decided by independent and swing voters.

In Kansas, Kelly argued that mandates like the Biden administration’s vaccine requirements for larger businesses “tend not to work." Whitmer and Evers have said little about the policy.

A former Wisconsin state school superintendent, Evers beat two-term Republican Gov. Scott Walker by fewer than 30,000 votes in 2018.

The Marquette Law School poll taken last week showed 45% of respondents approve of Evers’ performance, a metric weighed down by approval among independents and in line with pessimism among roughly half of registered voters about the direction the state is headed. Still, a majority of registered Wisconsin voters approve of the job Evers has done handling the COVID-19 pandemic, the poll found.

Whitmer won her first term comfortably in 2018 and became a national face of imposing restrictions to slow the pandemic's spread last year. But she’s softened some in recent months.

Democratic strategist Amy Chapman said Whitmer has long known that, given the backlash she and other Democratic governors have faced over efforts to control the spread of COVID-19, 2022 would be a challenge. Whitmer was the subject of multiple threats and a kidnapping plot foiled by federal authorities.

“I don’t think there was ever a presumption in Michigan that this was going to be easy,” said Chapman, who was Barack Obama’s state director in 2008 and a senior adviser in 2012. “The governor has known that she really has to be vigilant about this.”

[rabbit-light]

Poem for a Rabbit

Beside my car this morning, heart like a cooked cherry, string of pink gut, tuft of fur. A rabbit is watchful, all softness and nothing to defend with. Imagine living in seasons, pulling clover through teeth, hazard on the move from all directions— snake and fox, hawk and dog. All those eyes, looking for you, body born as food for other bodies, fine muscles made to enrich something that creeps back into the brush when morning comes— does it matter, that after recoiling what I felt was relief, that nobody new was looking to take my heart and abandon it in the street?

Gretchen Marquette