Linda Plahitko-Gosnell
I have authored over thirty published poems and magazine articles, including those written for my column, Life in the Blender, which appeared regularly in an Indianapolis newspaper between August 1998 and August 1999. My first book, The Nursing Home Poems, was published in November of 2007. I am currently seeking a publisher for a second book of poems and am working on a novel that I hope to have in final draft by the beginning of 2010. I continue to seek a home for a children's picture storybook that I wrote and illustrated with the help of my youngest son years ago, and have begun submitting some recent children's story ideas as well. I am a graduate of both beginning and graduate courses at the Institute of Children's Literature, member of the Writer's Guild (1996), and have won awards through Toastmasters (1979), Half-Priced Books (Bedtime Story Contest 1995), National Library of Poetry (1996), and the International Library of Poetry (2007). I also write and perform my own classical and gospel music, and find that much of my poetry is birthed by my music.Samples from The Nursing Home Poems:
Excerpt from back Cover: "As a gift, someone put a blank-paged book into Linda Plahitko-Gosnell's nerve-damaged hand after a life-altering accident remanded her to a hospital for eight months and a state-operated nursing facility for what she was told would be the rest of her life. Unable to accept such terms, she used this precious gift to practice the simple act of writing again and eventually began penning her journey from despair to stoic faith in God and herself in the poems she calls simply The Nursing Home Poems�"
THE SHATTERING
I see them running flagrantly spouting their catechisms:
malignant words turned to toiling, useless euphemisms,
Tugging at the tissue of my organ donor's heart.
I swim in the sea of my nomadic displacement and beg God
to take me anywhere but here.
Somewhere where love does not equate to loss.
I want to shout to these opinionated mongrels
that no dose of irony can disband, "It is not over yet.
Kindly don't dismiss me like the useless carnage I became
long before metal fused with sinew."
I turn the pages of my Bible and find a passage underscored in red:
For God so loved the world�
and realize I am not awake.
It is all too clear what I must do as I pack up to leave,
my confidence laboring to remain in tact:
Ask and it shall be given to you.
I ask for a miracle.
We are alone in this world, I remember thinking
before slipping behind the wheel.
And where was God in this happenstance life?
I picture him now, quietly waiting in the dark recesses
of a dresser drawer.
He speaks behind the drawer pull: "Reach in and take me out."
I turn the key again and again, step on the gas as I leave the solace
of freedom of choice.
God loves those who love themselves, I think, turning
the rearview so I can take a good look at me.
But I am already gone.
"That was a beautiful car," someone spouts in my
organ donor's ears.
I wonder just for an instant, is it too vain to ask-
Would God take offense if the last words on my lips were:
"Do you think I was beautiful, too?"
THE OPPOSITE CONVERSATION
Dirty rain sluices the snow;
Grimy fingers begging to be clean.
She dances on the cellophane covering
Pulled tightly over her memories.
Sweet palms buoy in tainted sunlight,
Wave as a flag in a silken southern breeze.
She rises and pulls down the shades.
How far from Hell does one have to be
to find comfort?
Ebony night stream, candles light the sky.
Whirlwind maple seeds chop the air.
She opens her robe to reveal no sinew,
Her bosom an empty, lifeless tomb
for her heart.
Up in the high rise of mountain fury baling
A buck in earnest awaits his tambourine
bullet fire.
She steadies the stock against her shoulder,
Feels the steel contrast, cold to warm.
The animal's blood pumps, anxious.
She closes her robe and dances on the pavement.
She knows she was alive herself once.
It is written on the tablets of her reveries-
Pale letters, marked by time: I was.
WHERE IS WALTER?
His bottle-cap eyes are colorless.
He stretches bowed knees for comfort.
Arthritis has bent him like abstract art.
We are watching Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.
He believes we are watching a commercial.
I can see his frustration as he pops a piece
of popcorn into his mouth,
Forgetting he has no dentures in.
Our aide hands him a glass of lemonade;
Tasteless stuff, void of sugar.
He thinks it's beer.
Commercial break.
Veined temples pulsate.
Saucer eyes stare through rheum.
Wilford Brimley discusses diabetic supplies.
Eyeglasses get slipped from shirt pocket.
Gaze grows steady behind a template of scratches.
"Where's Walter?"
All fingers point to the screen,
Bony ones, fat dimpled ones.
Some so crooked they look like hooks.
"Naw. That's not him."
Laughs and jeers, sneers and audible vexation.
Seven brothers return to dance with seven brides.
He gapes at the affair as if asking what it all
has to do with diabetic supplies,
Rolls out of the room, confused.
"Where's Walter?" he asks me on his way out.
"Walter who?" I ask, trying not to reveal
my own exasperation with him.
"Cronkite, dummy." Rheumy eyes try to
adjust to hall light.
"He was supposed to go back to the moon today...
wasn't he?"
Samples from my recent book of poems, Voices in the Hourglass:
CHILD INSIDE AN HOURGLASS (1974)
It is so difficult for me
To explain the pain
Of having one half of my body
In one half of an hour,
And the other
In another.
It is as if time were a contraction
Preceding crystal life,
And I were its embryo
In breach position.
My head spins earnestly
Awaiting its journey
Through the painful distance
Between ten and twenty minutes.
Soon I will be passing
Through the final seconds of an hour.
And the painful part of it all is that,
In order to get back up to the top,
Someone has to turn me upside down
Again.CODA
The air lifts me.
Timeless journey I breathe, lyrical wave riding,
Soul joined to nothing, no longer ransomed
by heart lifted weightless.
Severed nerves reunite, past and present-
commingling spirits.
They give way to indifferent planes of
mortal thought.
Saucy, searching, laughter light;
Canoodling benefactors of harmonies
free, tainted meaningless.
I think me this world to be the grandest
I've ever seen,
And my merriment is neither timid nor restrained.
I am Marie Camargo and Marie Salle in the gratis
sphere of pas de deux.
Free from shoes at last.
HORSE TO MAN
His eyes I somehow know are the same color
as mine-
Two creatures on a hill sensing each other's
anxiety in the rain.
I discern something familiar in the way he looks
at me-
At his feet.
I, too, do this when I am in need of help with
something I do not fully understand,
Such as now.
We share the same master-
Not one waiting with bridal in hand,
But the one responsible for this moment in the rain
we both innately know we should run from.
Run because we are longing for something else.
Something primal.
Let us both loose from our tethers and I will run
from the binds that keep me subdued.
He will remain, frightened as he is, because
his surroundings are familiar.
We both feel a need to belong somewhere,
To be counted among others of our kind.
He reaches out to me, eyes kind: Don't be afraid of me.
And his pain seems lessened by my eyes' lamenting:
Do not confuse me with man.
Forehead to my shoulder, he accepts my
gentle calming.
We are one, if only for this moment that we hold in
strictest confidence.
He wipes the dampness from his face
And circles me, ignorant that he has disturbed the
tree limb that holds my tether.
We stare into each other's eyes, long and deep,
Both instinctively knowing that in a moment I
will be gone,
And he will be alone.
For this moment, however, we are linked,
He accepting his not belonging without a second
thought,
And I accepting my impending liberty without a
solitary first.
Something new:
SOLACE
See me plain, Calcutta, broken and bruised:
Harsh realities fixated on denominators of hopelessness,
fear, and survival. Pain is ordinary.
See me in your brothels, dirty and poor, bedlam of
cockroach virility sanctioned by an atmosphere
of disregard. Has God left you?
See the starvation in my eyes; see the colorful rags
you adorn me with as I prostitute myself before
your secret defilers. They are not so secret.
See in the early shame of morning as your whiskey
breath and soiled undergarments rake the salt
of your sight,
My effortless machinations to deliver water to you
to swill 'round your dirt-encrusted mouths.
What reflection do you see there? What jury sentenced
me to your stronghold?
Do you see me plain, Calcutta? For it is my fondest
wish not to be seen at all. When you parade me
before your harlots and degenerates, just remember
God knows my name.
Remember, Calcutta, as you abuse my already scar-
striped body-
God hears the lament of children. God has a place
even for blemished sheep. God understands the
voice of the voiceless.
God sees me plain, Calcutta.