YellowJacket Press

from Florida Straits by Gregory Byrd of Clearwater,
Winner of the First Annual YellowJacket Press
Chapbook Contest for Florida Poets, 2005

Deer Hunting in the Everglades

The first time I saw my father smoke cigarettes
I was fourteen.
It was twenty eight degrees and raining in the Everglades.
I stood outside the bogged panel van
while my father smoked Camels to keep the mosquitoes away.
He blew smoke into my face, my hair, onto my whole body.
He smoked with a bachelor's ease
that made me uncomfortable and sad.
This man, so long distant, so far from me,
even in the house we shared,
was a different man and I imagined him smoking
cigarettes in Reno with his first wife
whose mention makes him retreat into his heart.
I imagined him in bar fights when he was in the service.
I imagined how he moved
before he had the burden of fatherhood.
In the morning, when rain had lifted
and the mosquitoes had been blown away
--or burned away by the sun--
we carried our rifles through the swamp
like a lost patrol.
We stepped over chilled rattlers
that had to be prodded to even
feign a strike.
As I walked behind my father,
I aimed my carbine at his head
and wondered if other boys
had done the same thing,
trembling and unable to squeeze the trigger.

“Deer Hunting in the Everglades” was previously published
in International Quarterly


from Night Windows by Susan Lilley of Orlando
Co-Winner of the Second Annual YellowJacket Press
Chapbook Contest for Florida Poets, 2006

A Woman and Her Car

Gone. Gone in a blaze of tail lights
and dust, that’s me,
dust swirling on the dirt road.
Better than horses, it roars—
my ally, weapon,
partner in crime.
Helps me to say, “I’m leaving,”
and really do it,
floor it,
miles in minutes.

There’s no sense in running after me.
So you don’t.
I exceed the limit,
but I won’t be stopped.
Patrolmen look into their coffee
when I streak by.
They, too, are terrified of angry women;
they don’t want to know why.
But my car is not afraid,
my chariot of fury,
my dented silver beauty!
My demons are released in little screams
with every curve.

Later, I’m back in your driveway
honking brazenly for forgiveness,
car idling nonchalantly beneath me.
I put on lipstick in the rear view
while I wait for you,
my laughter spilling out
through eyes washed blank with happiness.


from Music in Arabic
by Mary Jane Ryals of Tallahassee,
Co-Winner of the Second Annual YellowJacket Press
Chapbook Contest for Florida Poets, 2006

Music in Arabic

This bar is an orchestra pit full of empty chairs,
and maybe the bus to the plane will leave
me in this posh Moroccan hotel forever.

The staff, three men, arrajelo, speak some English,
no women (al marat) but me. I ask for al maa,
water, and a piece of paper, a pen.

The water chills my throat, and I draw
a flower, push it to the bartender, and he writes
al ward. I say cow, and the three of them puzzle.

I bellow Mrawoooo, and we all laugh,
and they nod al bakar as the bartender writes
from right to left in elegant sweeps and dots.

Here at El Andalus in Marrakech, the ceiling fans
keep turning, and I don’t ask the word for war, and
they shine bar glasses clear as African sky.

Buses are painted turquoise, and stop signs
are curliques on red octagons. Dawg, you ain’t never
seen a place like this, I think of saying to

friends back home as one of the staffers
gobbles like a turkey. We are laughing
so hard tears form, and the bartender

writes bibi. Donkeys are the Toyotas
of these streets. Perhaps we will soon need
carrots to run our cars. The al farah al himar

of al hobe is our al helm, I say. We laugh
like school kids at dreaming of the happy
donkey of love. Soft smell of mule ears

makes me want to stay another day, another month.
I will. I will buy carrots from the Medina


and feed every Toyota in the city. I don’t know
how to get to the airport. Maybe I can sing

my way on a camel to the ocean and swim
a song on the back of al hissan, a horse,

to Europe, because music is music
in Arabic.

“Music in Arabic” was previously published in Phoebe.


from Many Loves
by Michael Hettich of Miami Shores,
winner of the Third Annual YellowJacket Press
Chapbook Contest for Florida Poets, 2007

Housekeeping

Sunday mornings we walk around our house
collecting the turtles and frogs that have slipped in
during the week, while we worked too hard
to attend to such ordinary chores

and while we gather them we sing, and while we sing
mourning doves line up on the gardenia bushes outside
and look in at us, and listen; and while
we sing, our children sleep deeply, growing
fur and vivid senses

inside their bodies, in some other fragile world
that will vanish as soon as we wake them, which makes it
all the more precious and necessary

and so we sing softly, across their dreaming bodies,
of happiness we haven’t ever really known
but want to make possible for them, our children,

at least while they’re sleeping, by singing these songs
whose words we make up as we sing, and whose melodies
we compose like the wind composes in the trees,
simply by moving our bodies.


from Message on a Branch
by Sharon Scholl of Atlantic Beach
Runner-up in the Third Annual YellowJacket Press
Chapbook Contest for Florida Poets, 2007

EVENING WALK

On this gritty beach the old
year files itself bald,
featureless as porcelain.
Sea oats curl their backs
and shake like hissing cats,
stems hunched against the wind.

Salt-froth scallops eddies
like blanc mange peaks of omelets.
They are the solitary décor
in this sere landscape, like lace
curtains dangling from shack windows.

Gulls lash sky to sand
by filaments of flight, descending
in gray clouds to swoop bread
from my outstretched hand.
My fingers melt like sugar
in a smear of wings.

Southward lie clipped gardens,
tamed flowers in smug pots,
brick walks tying carpet grass
in thick green bundles.
Southward lie latticed driveways
straight as accountants’ columns.
Garage doors yawn in unison
cracking their metal jaws.

But I am walking north,
my footprints deep as coal pits,
gulping spray and sand.
I lean against the wind,
knees pumping to its elemental
dance. I am walking north
toward gleam and bluster,
into grainy clouds congealing
under the day’s blue roof.


from Our Keen Blue House
by Michael Trammell of Tallahassee,
Winner of the Fourth Annual YellowJacket Press
Chapbook Contest for Florida Poets, 2008

Deer Beneath Torreya

We think we see a near-extinct torreya tree
in the dense woods of our property,
so our kids convince me to make a camp.

Little Ariel brings mangoes, Dylan
a kit to make a fire fast.
We set a site where no one

will ever pitch a tent, except, maybe,
ghosts; and as they sleep, I do see two
astride one deer,

enough to stir a weeping willow bluff
to tears. I awake no one, but recall
how I’d steered our car

one night to a parking lot one mile from here
and spied three deer two years ago.
Dylan cried the brakes! the brakes!

because these three had crossed our path
in a delicate, sad-hoofed trot. At dawn
while my kids still doze,

I rise and see two does
heft shadows, ghosts with skin white as antlers
who sing a distant rumble, a faded tune.

These two shades, men who’d worked
this land, the Keen’s fields and orchards,
greet me.

My two awake and run fast as deer,
chase one fawn--all brittle hoofs
and thin-boned knees. The ghosts

are gone, but home. And so are we.


from Mystery of the Root
by Robert S. Carr
Runner-up in the Fourth Annual YellowJacket Press
Chapbook Contest for Florida Poets, 2008

Ghosts
"A Hot Steam's somebody who can't get to heaven, an' if you walk through him, when you die you'll be one too, an' you'll go around at night suckin' people's breath."
"How can you keep from passing through one?"
"You can't," said Jem.
— Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird


A cold front rushes down Hazel Street.
Walking in moth-light without a wand,
I watch ghosts summon themselves
like signposts out of the dusk:
Here in the notary’s yard I was wed
to a wife. In this other house we lived,
loved under moons, fought in hot rooms
as sun scalded the kitchen, spotting
our mistakes. Now the house’s time
jumps back into place: New wall,
new paint, siding, a fence
fend off the apparition.

Not enough that these scenes
stalk me like Hot Steams in the road:
my own words enwrap me.
Can’t I stroll an autumn night
without passing through shadows
not only of myself but of poems
pecked from Dad’s Remington?
One says flowers fall into madness,
another that a woman steps
from trees that brush the green,
a goddess afloat on pine needles.
Last, that a letter burns memory in air
crisp as this thin blue November’s.
Have I grown so long in this earth
that, as for marigolds in the bed,
time has come to lose my head,
go down glowing into grass, go dark?
How hard could it be to brave this lane
on a frigid, blue-eyed night, strained
through sieves of selves, shades long laid,
songs made, mourned, left to the moon?

My shadow’s long, my trunk
has many rings, and I have lived
to sift the ashes of my own leaves.


by Founder and Editor of YELLOWJACKET PRESS,
Gianna Russo.

Thursday Night Poetry

The night of the Cuban cigars, the room we ravished with poems
tilted on its one good corner, that dingy corner where
the smoke was legendary and the wineglasses smudged with our best lost lines.
In the one livable room in that house on Platt Street,
our wet shoes huddled with the shadows of our feet tucked inside.
The smoke was an absinthe of the air, green fairy gifting us
with the words we lived for, the new ones,
quivering on the pages in our hands, each with its island of breath.
After every fresh verse the night turned ravenous for talk,
there in the silent country of the one livable room.
We roused all our beloved poets from their slumber,
and summoned them through empty doorways,
spreading rumors about certain rhythms, debating the coup of each line break.
We stood metaphors in front of a firing wall:
some escaped with their lives; others crawled off as similes.
This was every happiness we could imagine.
In the word-crammed dust, the smoke was a nosegay of Old Havana.
A window peeped out on the nefarious alley,
and the porch pondered the drugged-out underbelly of the bridge,
before the neighborhood grew tulips and strode off in its Brooks Brothers suits,
before Platt Street unraveled into years leading us away from then, then, then.


ALL POEMS COPYRIGHT OF THE AUTHOR.