Thanksgiving Poems from Accents

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We want to give thanks to the brilliant voices that Accents has published over the years. We are also thankful of the wonderful people who have contributed their poems, whether through contests or as a part of Lexington Poetry Month.

Below are some Thanksgiving-themed poems from our amazing Accents family.

Familial Cannibalism

I watch this family on Thanksgiving
cut into their steaks. There is
a beautiful violence to their eating
flesh. It makes me hungry for
my own family. I bring them refills.
They are my last table before
I go drink at the only bar that serves
servers. The children drown their plates
in ketchup and A-1. The parents
talk over them as if their language
is a secret. They talk to each other
like their lives are secret. One hopes
his wife doesn’t catch him
eyeing the sixteen-year-old hostess.
He doesn’t catch her undressing
the bartender. I’ve seen both naked
and admire their tastes. The only
old man at the table pecks at his plate,
sits quietly. I ask if his steak is good,
if he needs me to sell him anything else.
Everyone is on sale here, sadly. He asks
for a box. His steak is the only family
he will have until Christmas.
I pack up this treasure for him
and curse them for staying a minute
past close. I’ve no family left to eat.

-Dan Nowak,
Of a Bed Frame, Accents Publishing

Dan Nowak’s first book, Recycle Suburbia, won the 2007 Quercus Review Poetry Series Award. He also has a chapbook, Burning the Arson Dictionary: Poems for Thomas McGrath published by RockSaw Press. Dan is co-founder and co-editor of Imaginary Friend Press and an editor for New Sins Press. Dan lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and enjoys that Lakefront Brewery is less than a mile from his home.

from Lexington Poetry Month 2014:

poem 11

Carrie and Roland divorced. Do you remember how mad she was when the stirs for the wedding printed Carrie and Poland? Maybe she should have paid attention to that missing line. The one that holds up the R. Without it, the letter falls apart. And do you remember our last Thanksgiving
because I don’t. I know I cooked, but I forget the turkey and am sure the gravy too thin. Two weeks later, you left. A note scrawled, waiting on the trunk we used as a coffee table. A dust shadow from the cigar box you took. The rest I packed into totes and stored in the basement next to crates we never unpacked when you first moved in. Take them all away now. Break
a window when you steal my dreams. Wondering how to fill the space in my mind once devoted to you, I sew new curtains and pretend I would have eventually left you.

–Elizabeth Beck

Elizabeth Beck is a writer, teacher and artist.

Taming the Wilderness

“Meat to the people . . .,” Increase Mather

On the seventeenth day of August
in the year 1676,
Plymouth Colony observed a day
of thanksgiving to mark their triumph
in King Philip’s War: sermons, prayer
meetings, dinner on the ground, and King
Philip’s severed head stuck on a pole
in the town square. Thus those Puritans
established the first American
War Monument. Definitively
as a howitzer on the courthouse
lawn, Philip’s impaled head proclaimed the
Victory of Civilization
and, incidentally, proved that God
was on their side. A generation
later, Cotton Mather journeyed to
that shrine, his version of the summer
car trip to take snapshots of the kids
with the majesty of Mount Rushmore
in the background. Cotton wanted to
see with his own eyes the skull of the
Wampanoag sachem Metacom,
called King Philip by the Puritans.
He stole the jawbone, first recorded
instance of a second time-honored
patriotic custom, pilfering
for souvenirs. His vandalism
may have been meant to silence Native
peoples for good, a third long-standing
true-blue American tradition.

But this is a rant, not a poem.
I glanced out the window just now, eye
drawn by the flow of a white-tailed buck.
He was the poem,
walking through our old orchard toward
some urbanite’s need for a trophy.

-Sherry Chandler

Sherry Chandler has been retired for a year at the end of June. During that year she has taken many naps and celebrated the publication of her second book, The Woodcarver’s Wife.

Thanksgiving

It was the writing
that opened
me up
unsaid words
spewed and fell
across lines
over margins
up interior spines
hand scribed
from my heart
priceless words
in a dollar book
random rants
useless pleas
coming to terms
with being me
writing taught
that I hold my own key
I have the power and
I am free

-Marta Dorton

Marta Dorton is a writer and visual artist living in Lexington. She writes memoir and arts articles, creates acrylic paintings at her LAL studio and printmaking pieces at the BPC.