Colors of Love Poems

One of February’s troubadours, love poems glimmer like candy hearts against a blue sky. Coming in all hues, like love itself, they have the power to adore, seduce, honor, bind, anger, grieve, forgive, appreciate, engage, mend, reconcile and more. From classic to contemporary, verses of love and passion inspire us to give voice to the seemingly indescribable. In honor of Valentine’s Day, we have assembled a collection of poetry submitted from area writers that will warm the heart of Saint Valentine himself.

 

These Days 

we walk slower,

hand in hand.

I miss my good

knees, the miles

I ran on blacktop,

on country roads

through fields,

always running,

moving, covering

distance as if that

would take me

anywhere—when

all I ever needed,

I see now, is you,

right here: this home,

our yard, my hand

in yours, on a

Sunday afternoon.

— Steve Cushman

 

 

 

The Savings & Moan

Maybe swinging a nine-pound hammer

in Hell, sweat hissing 

on pillow-shaped rocks

that break and bind,

mocking my stinging eyes,

I’ll lose track of Friday nights

when we were alone at the top 

of the savings & loan building.

 

Or stroke-addled, swabbing the floor

at the Mission shelter, I’ll drop the mop

to end a week, mutter past the wet floor sign,

false teeth clicking, and not want you —

tilting into our spell, then pulling back,

true to your computer.

 

But never in my right mind

will Fridays above the lights 

go blank, lovely Friend. 

— Michael Gaspeny

 

 

 

Tiramisu

When Julie says she wants Tiramisu

I do what husbands have done forever, 

go searching. First the Italian Bakery 

on Westridge, but they’re out, then Alex’s

Cheesecake downtown, but no luck there.  

I even try a couple chain restaurants but 

you guessed it they’re out. Finally, I asked 

the pastry chef at Cugino Forno and he said,

“Man, it’s National Tiramisu Day.”

 

Okay, so let’s add that to the list of things 

I don’t know.  Finally, I hit Bestway’s 

frozen food aisle and somehow they 

have a Sarah Lee two-pack, which I buy.

 

Julie smiles, says, “Thank you this is just what I wanted. 

But what took you so long?” 

I shrug, “There’s a run on Tiramisu today,” and she

laughs as we settle in to watch a gardening

show on Netflix. I wave away her attempts

to share the Tiramisu, tell her to enjoy

the whole thing, secretly hoping she’ll

save a little, perhaps a bite or two, for me.

— Steve Cushman
    
(*March 21 is Tiramisu Day)

 

 

 

Dried Flowers
& Other Crafts

Leaf through pages of my flesh, find quilt-comfort memories.

Read how the day before yesterday becomes three decades.

Showers together, coffee, cozy socks and couches.

Enough, for a time.  Peel back three pages from my book

of skin at shoulder, where muscle meets

gauze-white membrane, a spot that holds one dried iris

pressed between two black & white photos.  One shows

us hiking near Lolo Pass Road, between mounds of boulders,

before we found our almost-smooth meadow.

I will not speak of the second photo.  Not yet.

— John Haugh

 

July 12, 2007, Kitty Hawk, North Carolina

Full from ice cream and a sun-filled day my son

and I walk the half mile back to our rental house,

as the gulls circle overhead and the bikinied girls

pass us by on pink and yellow rental bikes. Of course,

I’d like to stretch this week at the beach out forever,

but I can’t.  Back home, there are rooms to be painted

and yards to be mowed, not to mention bills to be paid.

But for a few more minutes, Trevor and I are walking

barefoot on the hot sidewalk and when I turn to the left

I spot this dark-haired woman waving at us from a balcony

and as she waves I realize she’s my wife, and this is my

life, and I’m no doubt luckier than I have any right to be.

— Steve Cushman

 

 

 

Serenade

I promise

there will always be

sweet fresh sheets for you:

I have labored

to iron away the creases

of many solitary nights,

pledge that we will lie

on a new bed

with carefully sorted memories,

even as we crumple

toward our inevitable berths.

— Valerie Nieman

 

 

 

Power Outage

For three days the power was out,

so each night after work we huddled

close on the couch, under that thick blue 

blanket, reading books by candlelight, 

drinking wine, our legs intertwined.  

 

Later, in bed, even if we didn’t make love 

we reached for each other, for warmth, which 

at times felt more intimate than lovemaking.  

 

When the lights flickered on the third day 

I closed my eyes and thought no, not yet,

as if my thoughts had the power to do 

anything, and she cussed, dammit. 

 

In the morning, we woke under so many 

layers, both of us covered in sweat as if a fever

had broken and what was ahead might be 

better days, the start of something new.

— Steve Cushman

 

 

 

Secret Admirer

Whoever set the bouquet at your door,

in a vase with pink bows double-knotted

around its glass throat,

doesn’t know you well. You hate pink.

Maybe whoever, approaching so intimately

with sex and death in hand,

breathed in the faint scent of (pink) carnations,

but probably just the funereal odor

that clings to every petal,

eucalyptus and vinegar.

Vinegar that you pour at the feet

of gardenias so the leaves will be green

and the flowers so sweet

before they jaundice and fall.

Cut flowers, bright in their dying,

daisies, asters, roses, carnations.

Casting messages around like pollen,

innocence/patience/pride/love.

Hardly any fragrance to flowers anymore

except for chrysanthemums;

your cousin’s funeral put you off them forever,

the way your mother hated gardenias.

Why gardenias?

Another woman’s perfume,

perhaps, she herself favoring Chanel No. 5

when she could, thick with jasmine.

Gardenia is named jasminoides,

yet not even kin, like someone pilfering

a dead child’s name.

Such sniffery.

You wait for another delivery.

Whoever, maybe.

— Valerie Nieman

 

 

 

Sizing Up

The carpenter

in the Craignure Inn,

carrying still his flat pencil

in its narrow pocket,

looks my way now and again,

gauging this accidental bird

alighted at his local.

A small man precise as his work,

measure twice and cut once;

he has a curved nose

and not a spare bit of flesh,

the plane having worked him

close to the bone.

His vest is joined neatly,

his ginger hair clipped.

I unfold myself from the low chair

like a carpenter’s rule,

near six feet of well-fed American

woman, and go to settle up.

Behind me at the bar,

I don’t see him but I feel

him quietly slip away.

— Valerie Nieman

 

 

 

Popover

I had never heard of Yorkshire Puddings

until my wife made them.  Julie’s British,

says her family ate them every Sunday

growing up, along with a baked chicken,

some potatoes, roasted carrots or green

beans.  Sometimes she calls them

Popovers.  That’s the name our son

uses for these overgrown muffins

of oil and flour and egg, puffed in the

middle, so that a fork or knife can send

them toppling in on themselves.

What I’m trying to say here is I can’t

imagine my life without these treats 

from across the ocean and my son,

if you could see the way he ravages

them, you would know, feels the same.

— Steve Cushman

Sticking With It

How Englishman John Broadhurst walks his talk with art that harks to home

By Maria Johnson   •   Photographs by Bert VanderVeen

Pick a special stick and tell about it?

John Broadhurst nods and steps to a rack bristling with walking sticks that he has hewn by hand. He heaves one up and catches it midair. The staff is ash, the rigid stuff of baseball bats, but this branch is way slimmer than a Louisville Slugger, and it still wears the tree’s dove gray bark, lightly varnished. The stick’s handle, warm with hues of coal and butter, is wrought from ram’s horn, worked into a cursive “n” and buffed to a high gleam.

“It’s a big thing to make a ram’s horn handle in England. It’s a common thing for shepherds,” says the 74-year-old Broadhurst, whose British accent shrouds his words like the winter fog of his hometown, the western port city of Liverpool. His mother often put him on a train headed due east, to a station near her parents’ home in the lamb-dabbed hills of Lincolnshire.

When his fox-hunting uncles rode to the hounds, young John followed on a bike, pedaling furiously over the hills, cementing with sweat and a pounding heart the joy of being outside, of moving through the open air whether by horse or by bike or — the most common means — by foot.

Then and now, he says, most people in the countryside carry a chest-high stick, the flag of a culture built on walking. “You go to these farm markets, and I’d say 95 percent of them have a stick. It’s a way of life, and it helps you so much,” he says.

Broadhurst demonstrates by centering a stick at his sternum and leaning over it: When chatting with friends, he says, you can use the stick as a kickstand to take some weight off your feet.

 

He thrusts the stick forward, planting it as a cross-country skier might. When going uphill, you can stab the incline and pull yourself up.

He eases back the top of the stick: Going downhill, you can brace yourself against gravity.

He jabs at imaginary teeth, knee high. If an aggressive animal comes at you, you have a weapon.

“Your stick is a companion as well, you know,” says Broadhurst, who’s as spare and straight as one of his canes. “You got your dog and your stick, and you can go where you like, you know what I mean?”

He worked city jobs as a teen, learning stone craft on construction sites before yielding to his boyhood love of the countryside. A professional terrierman, he followed fox hunters in a Land Rover, carting the Jack Russell terriers that flushed quarry from their burrows, a practice that’s now illegal. He weathered winters by sorting and shaping the dried hardwood branches that he’d sawed off a couple of autumns earlier when the leaves and sap were down. He developed an eye for spotting straight segments, about five feet long and as thick as a man’s thumb, still live on the trees and often spiraled with still-green honeysuckle vines.

Blackthorn.

Hazel.

Crabapple.

Oak.

He chose an ash limb to complement his first ram’s horn handle. An older guy had shown him how to work the bony spikes of a Jacob sheep, a black-and-white breed known for having two sets of horns, one curled beside the ears, another pronged atop the head.

When John saw a ram’s head at a slaughterhouse where he’d gone to pick up food for the dogs, he asked for a curled horn.

Back in his shed, he heated the horn with a blow torch to make it pliable, then wrapped it around a steel form to set the distinctive shepherd’s hook shape. It was wide enough to snare a sheep by the neck but gentle enough, with a curlicued end, not to dig in.

“It’s a long process,” Broadhurst says. “You’re messing with it and messing with it, you know? Once you get the shape, you can start polishing it, sanding it, filing it and finishing it off with wire wool.”

He points to the subtle pits in the ebony surface: “This wasn’t a real good horn, you see, but it was good enough,” he says. “You gotta take what you find, you know what I mean?” He joined handle and stick with a threaded steel rod. A white spacer of deer horn, found in the wild, bridged the gap, adding ornament and strength.

Ever keen to improve, he honed his knack for sticks and hounds. He managed a champion pack of hunting beagles on foot until a rogue and riderless horse trampled him in 1997, mangling his left leg and ending his time with the hunt. He fell back on the trade he’d learned as a teenager, laying stone. He kept his hand in the dog game by judging shows around the world.

He met his wife, Susan, the manager of a veterinary clinic, at a Jack Russell terrier show in Mocksville. She was handling. He was taking note.

Today, they live south of Winston-Salem, in a double-wide mobile home that John has clad with a handsome yellow knock-off of chiseled English Yorkstone.

He’s trying to retire from stone, but folks keep calling him about chimneys and patios and gate piers. He still judges dog shows. And he still plays with hardwood in the stretchy hours of winter evenings, when the pens of Plott hounds and Jack Russells that he and Susan keep and call by name have piped down.

He’s gotten pretty good at making walking sticks, he allows, but he’s a novice compared with stick makers in England. He springs up from a chair and returns with a small, slick magazine published by the British Stickmakers Guild. On the cover is a finely carved handle painted in jewel tones. A peacock’s head. He flips to likenesses of rosy rainbow trout and dagger-beaked woodcock. He shakes his head in awe of the craftsmen.

“Some of them lads, that’s all they do, you know what I mean? Some of them are absolutely brilliant,” he says.

There aren’t many stick makers in these parts, he adds with a crooked smile, so it’s easy for him to look good. He makes maybe 70 sticks a year and sells most of them — at prices ranging from $85 to $170 — at hound shows and steeplechases. He also sets up at WGHP-TV’s Roy’s Folks Craft Fair that’s held in High Point whenever COVID is in check, which hasn’t been for a couple of years now.

Buyers marvel at the variety of his designs.

Dark sticks and light sticks.

Sticks with resin handles cast in the shape of dogs’ heads.

“Thumb sticks” with notches at the top.

Sticks capped with deer antler, cow horn and burled wood.

Sticks that end in wooden whistles.

He blows a cheery note. “People use them to call their dogs and the like,” Broadhurst says.

The special stick, the one with a ram’s horn handle, will never sell because he’ll never offer it for sale. “You keep your first one like that, you know?” he says.

He’ll never use it, either. His favorite stick to use is what he calls a “nothing stick.” He pops out of his armchair again — he and stillness don’t mix well — to another rack of sticks. He hikes up a white-elm rod topped with twist of spalted maple. The handle is dark with the oil of his hand.

“That’s my favorite stick,” he says grinning like a boy who’s riding his bike after the horses and hound songs. “Just nothing at all.”  OH

To learn more, contact John Broadhurst at jjbluebear70@gmail.com.

Maria Johnson is a contributing editor of O.Henry. She can be reached at ohenrymaria@gmail.com.

Almanac

By Ashley Walshe

February is a creature from an ancient myth, a wise old woman, a mystical crone goddess. 

At first glance, she is homely, haggard and frightening. Her face is gaunt. Her garments, threadbare. Her skin like gray, crinkled paper.

There is nothing soft or warm or pleasant about her. Time and the elements stripped her of her beauty long ago. She lurks in the shadows, a bag of bones with sunken eyes, crooked fingers and limbs like wind-swept trees. Her icy breath swirls through the air like a ravenous arctic wolf. 

Few have dared to approach — let alone understand — her. Most avoid her like the plague.

She does not require your favor. And yet, should you dare to gaze upon her, she will offer a wisp of a smile. A mysterious light will shine from her deep-set eyes, and while she will not speak with words, you will hear her, clear as a bell in the night: follow me.

Into the darkness you’ll trudge, cold air burning like poison ivy, frozen earth crunching beneath your feet. Rows of naked trees reach toward a grim, abysmal sky, and you wonder how life could possibly grow in this barren landscape, this pregnant silence, this bitter womb of winter.

As she walks, the crone slips her wrinkled hand into her cloak pocket and withdraws a rusted skeleton key. At once it is clear: This is no forsaken beast. She is the chosen one: the gatekeeper between death and life, the end and the beginning, the black of night and the first blush of dawn.

You begin to notice what was already here: early crocuses bursting through the frosty soil; milky white snowdrops and fragrant wintersweet; a host of sunny jonquil. A great horned owl screams out.

The crone does not glow like a young maiden or a new mother. But as you softly gaze upon her, you see the grace of a soul who has witnessed many seasons — a wise one who knows that spring is ever on the silvery horizon. That the only way to it is through it.

Feed the Birds

It’s been a long winter for everybody — especially our winged friends. Feed the Birds Day is celebrated each year on February 3. If ever you’ve wondered where St. Francis of Assisi, patron saint of animals, came up with his “For it is in giving that we receive” line, consider that he’s often depicted with a bird in his hands.

You think winter will never end, and then, when you don’t expect it, when you have almost forgotten it, warmth comes and a different light.

— Wendell Berry

 

Space and Time

According to EarthSky.org, one of the most anticipated sky scenes of 2022 happens 40 minutes before sunrise from February 11–16, when Venus, Mars and Mercury will all be visible in the darkest spell of morning.

Another scene not to be missed this month: The “Winter Hexagon,” a prominent group of stars comprised of Rigel (in Orion), Sirius (in Canis Major), Procyon (in Canis Minor), Aldebaran (in Taurus), Capella (in Auriga) and Pollux (in Gemini). Also called the “Winter Circle,” you can find this asterism by first looking for Orion’s brightest star, Rigel, the bluish star at the lower right (in other words, below the belt). From here, draw a line straight up to Aldebaran, then continue following the bright points counterclockwise until you complete the circle. 

Poem

Long Homestead in Winter

— Las Cruces, circa 1932

Not in any literal sense

a homestead: it was purchased

you learned from an old deed

sent you by a cousin. And in this

winter photo, strange with magic

of the never seen, a study in

whites and grays, foreground

trees and background barn shading

towards true black, porch windows

canvas covered against the cold,

original adobe brooding behind, just

one slender strand of air, smokey

warm you guess, rising from a single

flue suggests habitation, warmth

inside. No one living knows

its history now, when the barn

was built; porch facing pristine snow

now fades into surrounding silence. What

was the day like when someone, your

father perhaps, had hiked out the

back door around towards the railroad

track to capture the snow before it turned

to mud underfoot; foot sodden you suspect

later that morning when indoor

voices might have called to breakfast,

but leave your boots outside. All

gone wherever memories are stored —

you never saw the place in winter

but you slept many a summer night there

on that porch already mythical, heard the Santa Fe

hoot by, carry the present away.

—  Julian Long

Julian Long is the author of Reading Evening Prayer in an Empty Church.

The Magnolia Network

Historic haven reimagined as a vibrant motel

By Cynthia Adams   •   Photographs by Amy Freeman

Photograph by Aura Marzouk
Photograph by Aura Marzouk

 

How did two hip interior designers, Gina Hicks and Laura Mensch, approach an historic project reeking of cultural significance — specifically Greensboro’s 1889 Magnolia House Motel — given their trade signature is youthful, contemporary and anything but stodgy?

The short answer is vividly.

The duo, who owns Vivid Interiors, leans into exuberant, artsy, color-saturated decors, which are not exactly standard fare for a venue that’s as much a museum as a dining destination and inn. (One of the pair sports a tattoo.) The Magnolia is an historic hybrid, reopened in late 2021, that was once a landing place for some of the hippest of the hip, who once rocked a packed house, singed a baseball with a thwack, thrilled with a knockout in the ring or seared an audience with discourse.

Famous motel guests included Ray Charles, Satchel s and James Baldwin. Athletes, intellectuals and musicians rested their heads at 442 Gorrell Street.

Only a year ago, Hicks and Mensch pored over photographs for clues and provenance, immersed in the likes of Ike and Tina Turner, former Magnolia guests when it was listed in the “Green Book” (more about that later). They reimagined the house’s rooms infused with the blue jazzy vibes of Miles Davis, the pink hotness of Turner or Gladys Knight, the cerebral white heat of James Baldwin or the leathery sports-cool of a Jackie Robinson.

Slowly, the brilliance of legendary figures who stayed there bled into the reimagined interiors, coaxed into being by Hicks and Mensch. Their creative guide was the historic property’s manager, Natalie Miller, who channeled the history with her father, owner Samuel Pass.

Miller wanted to recapture visual, visceral elements that cultural legends experienced within the Magnolia’s walls, which were now 133 years old.

“We will never look at an historic property the same way,” Mensch admits. “We’ve worked on older properties. But . . .” Nothing they had done, she says, was so absorbing, artistically meaningful, as this.

“Natalie helped us see it.”

“We said we’d love to help a year ago, not knowing how far it would go,” Hicks says. “Initially thought we’d set up a room for some photos. But once you get in it, you have to go through with it.”

First, some background. The house, which features four en-suite guest rooms, was small but history-packed. Originally the private home of Daniel D. Debutts, it was converted to an inn 60 years later after purchase by Arthur and Louise Gist. The Magnolia was variously called a hotel, motel and inn. It appeared in The Negro Motorist Green Book from 1955 to 1957 and 1959 to 1961. The guide ceased publication in 1966.

In 1995, Pass, who had grown up nearby, bought the house from Grace Gist, widow of state representative Herman Gist. (Keen to own the place he had admired from youth, Pass removed the for-sale sign and placed it in his trunk, according to the Magnolia House website. He later drove straight to Grace Gist to settle on the price.)

Lying within the South Greensboro Historic District, the property, which opened to the public in late December, is listed in the National Register of Historic Places.

As the Magnolia receded with the end of the Jim Crow era, it might have disappeared, as did most Green Book properties. According to Miller in recent interviews, it is among only four or five such N.C. sites that are “structurally replicated and functionally replicated.”

Mike Cowhig, who works with historic preservation for the City of Greensboro, says the city wanted to prevent its disappearance.

“Around 2000, the city, recognizing the importance of the house, used federal redevelopment funds to award a grant to the owner, Sam Pass, for restoration plans, a business plan, and for a new roof and other stabilization measures to keep the house from deteriorating further,” he recalls. “N.C. A&T also made a grant toward the stabilization of the house around that time.”

Then, Hicks and Mensch met Miller through Launch GSO, a chamber of commerce entrepreneurial program.

Miller had assumed the mantle of managing the property and realizing her father’s vision to approximate its heyday. Miller wanted Vivid to handle the interior decoration. By early 2021, the inn was on the cusp of a new chapter.

“When we first started working with Natalie, they were offering the shoebox lunches and history tours,” Hicks says. “There were a few other Green Guide places that were doing this.”

With the house 85 percent restored, Miller anticipated the critical finishing touches on the part museum/part inn project, engaging a new generation of guests. As the design duo contemplated the interior design, they needed to channel its creative history while adapting needed creature comforts.

“How do you design a space to invite people and honor the past? Some people are purists and want everything preserved,” Hicks says. Mensch adds, “A house still needs to feel fresh and right for the time.”

They developed a creed: “Honor the present and look to the future.”

“Then Natalie asked us to watch a movie called Sylvie’s Love, a modern movie based on a 1950s musician, for the colors, scenery,” Hicks says. She captured screen pics and researched the film sets.

But there was a hiccup: no budget.

Interior design wasn’t a line item. The designers agreed to work pro bono but were offered $1,000 from people invested in Launch, “which would cover about 5.4 hours,” Hicks says with a laugh. It was not long before they logged more than 500 hours.

They considered ways to engage others for material products and, with Miller’s help, decided to look for interested sponsors.

“We jumped into this going backwards,” Hicks says. But she also had an ace: a neighbor, Kathy Devereux.

Devereux was a member of the planning group for High Point X Design, a group seeking to keep High Point showrooms open year-round. After HPXD held an event, the Vivid designers were stunned that everyone wanted to help.

Circa Lighting, reseller of the Visual Comfort line, offered a great deal on lighting. Thibaut, the nation’s oldest designer of wallpaper, sponsored wallpaper and fabric. Sherwin Williams offered paint. The list of help expanded.

Mensch says they had to figure out how to organize all that largesse: How was it going to fit, to look? “It was a little different from a regular project.”

“We had zero budget, but we started with what we loved,” she adds.

They designed it, and it began to coalesce.

In the meantime, with every visit to the site, the designers, who had worked with few historic properties — the Julian Price house and another on Church Street — knew this was their oldest and most complex.

Miller planned adding a museum annex and more rooms. This was more than an inn.

Then, too, there was the omnipresence of famous guests: James Baldwin, Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, Jackie Robinson, Ike and Tina Turner, Ray Charles, Duke Ellington’s band, James Brown, Gladys Knight, Louis Armstrong, in addition to artists and sports figures.

“It means a lot to us. It’s in the community,” Hicks says. “We were glad to be involved with this project. We put our hearts and souls in it. And we will have an eternal connection to it.”

“For the ‘Kind of Blue’ room, it was kind of the culmination of characters. Miles (Davis) and Buddy Gist (son of Arthur Gist) were friends. The design team mined details, seeking to give the rooms names and themes.”  Now the Carlotta room honors “queens of soul,” and the Legends room honors sports guests. The Baldwin room honors African American intellectuals.

Mensch recalls sitting in the living room for the inn’s soft opening. “It felt so good! It was a great mix.”

Hicks agrees: “It came to life.” She mentions “designing for a difference.”

When Gladys Knight performed at the Tanger in November, Miller gave the designers tickets. As they thrilled to Knight’s performance, they felt re-inspired by the project as it was winding down.

“There are so many things I like about so many spaces there,” Hicks reflects. “It feels cohesive, even while trying to honor so many different people. There’s a rhythm in there. A general mood in the house.”

Then she smiles. “Rich! Deep. And smooth!”

As Ellington sang, “It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.”  OH

Cynthia Adams is a contributing editor to O.Henry.