Episode 83: Goodnight, Mary Magdalene (REISSUE)

Goodnight, Mary Magdalene first aired in June 2020 and features three poems by Vasiliki Katsarou, a poet and publisher. In 2023, Vasiliki published a short collection of poetry Three Sea Stones with Solitude Hill Press and a second collection, The Second Home, with Finishing Line Press. It’s a great time to revisit Vasiliki’s work.

Dear Slushies, join the PBQ crew (which includes a freshly-tenured Jason Schneiderman) for a pre-pandemic recording of our discussion of 3 poems by the wonderful Vasiliki Katsarou’s work. Be sure to read the poems on the page below as you listen.  They’ll require your eyes and ears– and “a decoder ring.” The team has a grand old time explicating these artful poems. The muses are sprung and singing in us as we read and decide on this submission. Katsarou’s poems teach us to read them without projecting too much of ourselves and our current preoccupations onto them. We’re reminded to pay attention to what’s happening on the page. But synchronicities abound! Before we know it we’re ricocheting off of the poems’ images and noting the wonderful convergences the poems trigger –  we hear traces of Wallace Stevens “Idea of Order of Key West” or Auden’s Musee de Beaux Arts. (But first we check in with each other, cracking each other up in a pre-pandemic moment of serious lightness. We’re heard that “Science” shows Arts & Humanities majors make major money in the long run. Kathy reports that “the data on success” shows that participation in Nativity Plays is a marker for career success. Samantha confesses she played Mary Magdalene in a Nativity Play. Marion might have been a Magi. And many of us were reindeer.. Also, Donkeys do better than sheep over time (which may or may not have been claimed on “Wait, wait… don’t tell me!”).  Editing a Lit Mag shouldn’t be this much fun, Slushies. Listen through to the discussion of the 3rd poem’s deep magic and craft. And listen to our editors’ cats chime in).

Addison Davis, Jason Schneiderman, Samantha Neugebauer, Kathleen Volk Miller,  Marion Wrenn, and Joe Zang

Vasiliki Katsarou grew up Greek American in Jack Kerouac’s hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts. She has also lived in Paris, France, and Harvard, Mass. She is the author of a full-length poetry collection, Memento Tsunami, and co-editor of two contemporary poetry anthologies: Eating Her Wedding Dress: A Collection of Clothing Poems and Dark as a Hazel Eye: Coffee & Chocolate Poems. She holds an MFA from Boston University and an AB in comparative literature from Harvard University. She read her poetry at the 2014 Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, and is a Teaching Artist at Hunterdon Art Museum in Clinton, New Jersey. Her poems have been published widely and internationally, including in NOON: Journal of the Short Poem (Japan), Corbel Stone Press’ Contemporary Poetry Series (U.K.), Regime Journal (Australia), as well as in Poetry Daily, Tiferet: A Journal of Spiritual Literature, Wild River Review, wicked alice, Literary Mama, La Vague Journal, Otoliths, and Contemporary American Voices.  She wrote and directed an award-winning 35mm short film, Fruitlands 1843, about a Transcendentalist utopian community in Massachusetts. Vasiliki’s website: https://onegoldbead.com/, Twitter: https://twitter.com/cineutopia , Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/vasiliki.katsarou, and Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cineutopia/

 

The Future Arrives as a Redhead

They talk of mothers in law
but not of outlaw daughters

her sun and her moon is our son
her cool paleness, reflected

in an eye that looks like mine,
follows her curves along the shoreline

her hair like copper coils
from beneath a straw hat

a Maisie or Daisy, a woman of Stem
for whom we stem talk of servers,

thumbprint keys, on an ancient island
now we are all code-changers

the future arrives as a redhead
green, green love lays a glove

on us, we no longer count
in threes, a quaver

sounds, and the future
all sharps and flats

 

*

 

Wedding, Key West

A stitch in throat saves time
Infernal cough
speaks through me
@ the bride and groom
On sand they stand
to create a sand souvenir
from this empty glass vessel
Sunset drips from the lips
of the bride
As the prey is plucked from the air
between her palms
In the gulf beyond
the photographer’s camera,
a capsized sailboat,
but no one’s looking–
The Key light bedazzles
and defeats us all
Mouth tightly shut
clench in the solar plexus

 

*

 

 

Waited

you waited with me as the house
next door emptied of its guests,
then its owners, fairy tale turned animal farm

minted with ash and wishes
you were my kitchen elf
my second thought

my echo’s echo
cocked ear, cracked oasis
your absorbent embered orbs

that morning of the supermoon
setting behind the barn
you were quiet, then quieter still

white fog settling into the hollows
and a thin coat of frost everywhere
and this, the simplest death

you trained me well, M.
I listen for your listening