Grace Cavalieri Presents Poems & Poets

Grace is Maryland’s Tenth Poet Laureate. She has 31 books and chapbooks of poetry and 26 produced short-form and full-length plays. Her newest poetry publication is The Long Game: Poems, Selected & New (2023.) Grace founded and still produces "The Poet and the Poem" on public radio, celebrating 48 years on-air. The show’s recorded at the Library of Congress and transmitted via Pacifica Network. She holds two Allen Ginsberg Poetry Awards (1993 & 2013), A Paterson Poetry Prize, a Pen Fiction Award, the Bordighera Award for Poetry, The CPB Silver Metal, the Associated Writers' Program George Garrett Award for 2013; and, Highest Recognition from The National Commission On Working Women.

Three O'clock, 1942

Elaine's father was a guard at the Trenton State Penitentiary.

Once in awhile, I forget how often,

she couldn't come out to play

because it was her daddy's turn to pull the switch,

and watch a prisoner die.

He'd stay inside feeling sick, but why the family

had to close the shades, I don't know, or

why, even if we knocked politely, her mother

sent us away, saying "Elaine can't come out today."

The rest of us little girls sat on my porch

In cool dresses. Three O'clock.

Mothers were in the kitchen setting spoons.

There were iced drinks and cookies,

powdered sugar, a confection of air;

not even fathers were coming home to break the silence.

The only sound is a boy on the tracks nearby

Who's caught a small animal and tramps through the weeds

carrying a cardboard cage, three holes for air.

The girls ask whose turn it is to make up a story.

We visit bright imagined countries and

in this way travel beyond swinging chairs,

white railings, a summer porch.

At Three O'Clock God mutes the trees

to listen. The only sound is a thrashing -

the biting and scratching as the boy falls -

the rustling and scrambling

of a small animal breaking free.

Nin Andrews

Nin Andrews is a farmgirl who loves and holds her animals close-- and whose poetry is an exemplar --craft, vulnerability, and skill--whose humor is worthy of the Mark Twain award--and, also, she casts light on other poets--but what I'd really like to say about Nin is, I wish she lived next door. —Grace Cavalieri

Nin Andrews is the author of the fifteen poetry collections including The Last Orgasm (2020), Miss August (2017), and Why God is a Woman (2015). She is the recipient of two Ohio individual artists grants, the Pearl Chapbook prize, The Wick Chapbook contest, and the Gerald Cable Award. Her poetry has been featured in numerous journals and anthologies including Ploughshares, Agni, The Paris Review, four editions of Best American Poetry, Great American Prose Poems from Poe to the Present, and The Best American Erotic Poems. Her poetry has been translated into Turkish, performed in Prague and anthologized in England, Australia, and Mongolia. She is also the editor of a book of translations of the Belgian writer, Henri Michaux. Her collection, Son or a Bird, a Memoir in Prose Poems is forthcoming in 2025 from Etruscan Press.

Little Pea

What I Shouldn’t Write

Sometimes I think I shouldn’t write about my past. So many stories, best kept to myself. But then there’s a summer afternoon in Virginia when memory opens like the pages of a book. And I miss being someone else. Or the child who picked peas with her nanny in the July heat of childhood. Who was carried in her large black arms back to the house where they shucked peas in the kitchen, a fan blowing fly strips overhead, the nanny, Miss Mary, humming hymns, calling her Little Pea, dragging her thumb down the open pods, the peas bouncing in a silver bowl. The girl asks, “Which little pea am I?” The nanny laughs and smacks her thigh. “You a funny little pea. The funniest, specialist little pea—that’s the pea you is.”

My Racist Memory

Who wants to read my racist memory—that begins with a white child in a black nanny’s arms? But isn’t that an iconic image from the history of the South? Can I forget it? Or how, in the morning we took breakfast scraps (“the nasty stinkin slop,” Mary called it) to the pigs, gathered eggs, dug potatoes in the garden, hung clothes on the line, me handing her the pins. Before eleven, she carried me upstairs for my nap and sat beside my bed sipping Pepsi. “Shut your eyes,” she said. And I did. When I peeked, she was open-mouthed, asleep, her breasts rising and falling inside her starched cotton dress. I’d play with my baby doll until she woke and said, “I just had me a little beauty rest.”

Damn White Folks

I remember another day in Little Pea’s life when her father caught her hiding in the loft after she snuck out of the house during naptime. Lying on her back on the top of haybales, she watched mud daubers build their clay nests, barn swallows flying in and out, straw in their beaks. “How many times do I have to tell you not to play up here?” her father shouted before dragging her down the ladder, pulling down her pants, and smacking her. Whap-whap. When she looked up, Miss Mary was running down the hill beneath the mimosa trees. “What you doing to my child?” she screamed and snatched her from her father’s arms and pressed her against her chest, her body slick with perspiration and rage. The whole way back to the house, she muttered under her breath, “Damn white folks—don’t even know how to raise they own chillen.”

Where Racism Begins

Is it racist to imitate Miss Mary’s accent and vernacular? Is there a point where racism begins and ends? A line I can be careful never to cross? I want badly to say no and then yes. I call Miss Mary back from the dead. She looks so tired when she arrives, her hair in a net, sweat beading on her forehead as she fishes ice cubes from her water glass and drops them inside her blouse. “Cooling my chest,” she called it. We had no AC in 1963. I think how hot it was.

Our Ritual

I know what you’re thinking. She wasn’t just a nanny. She was a cook, a laundress, a housekeeper, a savior, a saint. Writing now, I realize how much I needed her then, even after she passed. She was my protector, mother, first love and I felt her like a song, a longing, an ache. Now I’ve kept her with me all these years as a secret, close as my own breath. When I sit down to write, I ask her how she is, and she says, “I’m blessed, Child. I blesses you, too.” It’s a little ritual we do.

Asking Permission

But I think it’s time I asked her permission. “Is it okay for you to be here? In these poems and stories?” She stares at me aghast. “Good Lawd, child,” she says. “I’m 118 years old if I’m a day. An old southern ghost. You think I get to pick where I stays?” She shakes her head. “Ain’t nobody never choose the time, the skin, the heart you gonna live on in. Not me, not you, Little Pea. Not your daddy neither. That old SOB.”

I sit back and wonder, still unsure. But how can I help that Miss Mary’s here? In the steamy kitchen of my Virginia past. Deep inside my aging white heart?