By Eileen Wingard
SAN DIEGO — We are thrilled to announce that Michael Mark, a member of our Jewish Poets-Jewish Voices Committee, just won the prestigious Rattle Chapbook Prize for his chapbook, Visiting Her in Queens Is More Enlightening than a Month in a Monastery in Tibet.
The poems are all inspired by his mother, who suffered from Alzheimer’s disease during the last years of her life. His father served as her caregiver until she died at age 90, after nearly 65 years of marriage.
In the title poem, a poignant reflection of what it is like to interact with a dementia-afflicted parent, he writes:
I wash my dish and hers.
She washes them again. I ask why.
She asks why I care.
Before bed she unlocks and opens
the front door. While she sleeps
I close and lock it. She gets up. Unlocks it.
“What I have, no one wants,” she says.
I nod. She nods.
Are we agreeing?
One of my favorite poems, Losing My Parents in a Small CVS Drug Store, concludes with:
They move up from deodorants and toothpaste in slow motion. Each pushes
a cart for stability. Store workers cheer. Customers clear a path for their carts—
empty except for his Mrs. Potato Head and her Mister, for which they have
a two-for-one coupon.
“Did you find everything?’ the cashier asked. “Did we?” my father asks my mother. My mother asks back, “Did we?”
Spoiled, one of the most moving poems, is about the author himself. Here is an excerpt:
I know worship and gratitude. I know love taught by tender example and backs of hands, thrift. And that I am a spoiled child at sixty.
Because, until three days ago, both my parents
were alive, and as long as both your parents live, old
as you get, you are not an adult.
Michael Mark has a special way of capturing the commonplace, the mundane, and making it poetic in a unique, quirky and relatable manner.