Nancy’s work has been published in nine anthologies and over 50 journals including: Tupelo Quarterly, Feral, Museum of Americana, and the Colorado, Laurel, McNeese, and Sugar House Reviews.
Her first full-length collection, The Stoop and The Steeple, will be published in Fall 2024 by Frog on the Moon.
2023 photo by Joss Ettrick of the FO24 Charles Porter Phelps secretary c. 1800, Porter-Phelps-Huntington Museum, Hadley MA.
1753. . . . when the cock was placed at the top of the steeple Zeb Prutt . . . ascended to the summit, sat on the copper bird and imitated the crowing of a rooster.
—Sylvester Judd, History of Hadley, 1863
I can’t stop seeing Zebulon on the steeple, hearing his call singe the sky. I can’t stop knowing my own ancestors enslaved him.
Zeb cock-a-dooing over the churchgoers, bonnets and flattops askew, scuttling out of their fresh-hewn pews, the pine still pungent. Hands shading eyes, Look. It’s Widow Porter’s African man.
I picture him shining like the copper rooster, his sweat-bright skin dark against a white steeple. Do his thighs burn, clinging up there? Does the rooster screech, chafing on its iron rod? I want Zebulon heroic, crowing for freedom.
From bare shoulders, I want him to spring iridescent feathers—green, red, black. I want him to wing out his arms, swoop onto the breast of clouds. Soar beyond the honking vee of geese, down the Great River flashing blue. Fly, fly away Zebulon.
Irony is that he still serves me, shining and crowing in my head. Pries my voice from white pages. Demands I look at every pore and scar of my own skin, what I do to him, what we do to each other.
At my feet, a Rhode Island Red scratches in the dirt with yellow claws. Stirs the soil.
On Apple Valley’s long dirt road,
our geodesic dome, painted electric-blue.
We bought a beat-up hearse for a camper,
then bedded it with straw for our goose
after the fox killed his mate. Thought we hid
the pot plants between our corn stalks;
their spiky green canopied two feet taller.
Homemade root beer exploded in the pantry;
pink and blue fungus tentacled out of the root cellar.
I went to India for 6 weeks, leaving Mel
to wrestle our 4-year-old into his snowsuit
down the hill to the school bus, yellow beacon
in waist high snow. Long-haired friend, back
from Nepal, lived with us that winter, barefoot.
We built a teepee for a peyote meeting,
fed the fire, drummed and sang through the night—
first time I believed in god. Under a full moon
we rode the motorcycle, headlights off.
Startled the heifers by lying in their meadow
to look at the stars. They circled close,
black nostrils snuffing and blowing. Our heads
buzzed in the clover.
1659
Back when the 49 founders followed
their Calvinist gospel. Back when
they laid out 8 acre lots with care that no one
had better land than another. Back
when my ancestor Samuel Porter
built the modest house on Middle Street
and everyone’s cows grazed
in the Commons. Back then
they still honored the contracts with
the Pequot and Abenaki who sold them
the land. Welcomed them every spring
to plant corn, fish the Quinnecticut,
and a few stayed on, sold baskets and brooms.
1704
Back when the Sumptuary Laws forbade
gold rings and lace collars, lest God
punish them with war and pestilence. Back
when my forebears got rich trading furs
down the river. That’s when others
pointed fingers, named them River Gods.
Back when, one snowy night, the French led
Mohawk and Pocumtuck to attack Deerfield,
right next door. When they killed 48 townfolk,
captured 140 in under 2 hours.
1752
Back when Samuel’s grandson Moses acquired
600 acres beyond the Commons. Back when
he built his grand house, with a four-flued chimney
and rusticated cladding. Back when the Abenaki
returned to plant corn and found fencing
and dogs to run them off. Back when, two years later,
Captain Moses Porter was killed in the ambush
of Bloody Morning Scout.[i] And Porter’s Pequot body
servant delivered his sword to my 8th great
grandmother Elizabeth, who took to laudanum
and rocking in a darkened room.
I inherit Mom’s copy of Forty Acres when she dies at 98. Slim
volume, nevertheless it jams my bookshelf. Gramma’s cousin,
Jimmy Huntington, wrote it. Moses Porter, my 9th great grandfather,
built it, 1752. Said to be first house outside the stockade, that
protected our Hadley, Mass. founders. Forty Acres, towering elms
and single black shutters. 200 years we lived there, Cousin Jimmy
the last. I played on the verandah, rolled in the grass.
Genealogies, antiquities, I never cared. Until these words,
catalogued without comment:
an inventory for the Estate of Cap’t Moses Porter, March 8, 1756.
Cash 3£ 5s, Negro man £400… Zebulon Prutt, the son of Arthur, a
slave, belonging to the Reverend Isaac Chauncy, pastor of the
Church in Hadley… This slave boy must have been the property of the
parson’s daughter for she sold him to Moses Porter … 29th of July, 1745
Minister. Ancestor. Women. Buying and selling people.
And then, this:
“…. when the cock was placed at the top of the steeple, Zeb Prutt, a
young colored man, ascended to the summit, sat on the copper bird
and imitated the crowing of a rooster.”
I know this church. The steeple, 90 feet high.
Gramma never told us these stories, no Zebulon on the steeple.
Never, even when I married an African-Jamaican man. Mother
never said our cow-milking, broom-corn-planting, Harvard-
attending family were also slave-owning. Even when we raised a
son only miles away. I must tell him, his children. I spin like the
rooster. Us, enslavers. A man crowing. A man who hoed the sod
where we just buried my mother.
[My ancestor] Michael St. Agnan was drowned while bringing back to Trinidad a cargo of African slaves from the mainland of Latin America. This tragic event…[ii]
Michael, I refuse to let you curl
silent on the ocean shelf, brass buttons
turned green, beneath black bodies strewn
among rusted chains and rum barrels.
I haul your ghost up from the brine
stretch your shade out on the sand.
Flies swarm, all these years waiting
for you to surface.
Drowned 1821, you smuggler, you
black marketeer[iii]. Let the sun parch
your skeleton dry as the brown cursive
of your human ledgers, promissory notes.
Cousin Jimmy elides this part, brags about
your luster pitcher, tortoise-shell combs
rimmed with gold, deep-toned mahogany
on dusty display at Forty Acres.
No matter how I swat away the buzz
tormenting me on kelp-striped sand,
your ridged coins keep multiplying
deep in my pockets.
Ice, miles-thick, the world groaned under it. No life moved. A crack, an ooze. The ice began to melt and like a turtle from the mud, the earth rose, barren as the turtle’s shell. Creamy-blue was Lake Algonquin that grew from glaciers’ flow, so cold no fish could survive. Beavers big as black bears, Pocumtuck legend tells, dammed the lake, before it drained away creating the River Quenecticut. Lichen, spruce, deer found a toehold. Pequot ancestors followed, 11,000 years ago. To the place called Nonotuck “midst of the river,” they walked, pitched their wigwams in the meadow Capawonk, caught trout in the clear waters of Nepasoancage running down Mt. Quunkwattchu. They planted corn in Wequittayyngg. Honored their dead below Mt. Wequomp, the blocky prominence resembling a giant beaver. A man-eating, insatiable beaver who ate all the plants until the people complained to god Hobomok who clubbed it with a tree trunk so it died in the great lake and turned into their stone mountain. Hunt, fish, move on after reaping chestnuts, year upon year. Until their sachems Chickwollop, Umpanchella and Quonquont sold the land to John Pynchon and the strange white men, my ancestors, moving up the river.
Once we lived among apple trees.
Tapered ladders tipped into two-toned leaves.
Red fruit, we twisted stem from branch,
set each side-by-side in canvas bags.
Never drop them or they’ll bruise
the farmers warned us.
Our son, tee-shirted in a red wagon
flew too fast down the rutted hill
catapulted into air.
You leapt in time, rolled him in your arms.
Grown father grown son How did you spin apart?
Forty years on you slipped each other’s hold
barren space between you
no gathering bag.
after Mary Koncel, The Weeping Icon
What about Infection? the doctor casts fear into the cramped office. In
case the lump reappears under my right jawbone where it manifested
from the ether at seven this morning. I don’t want to believe her.
Yet here I am, stomping into CVS between aisles of laxatives and
sunscreen, behind the inchworm line of supplicants clutching
prescriptions. Why do I always wait ‘til 5:00?
I think about the 5-toed bear claw, ebon sheen worn smooth in the
deerskin pouch strung on the shaman’s neck. Water ladled on hot
rocks. The cackle, then a dervish of steam. Lying on a blanket staring
up at the stiff-flapped opening of the teepee.
We don’t need golden pagodas. Just settle between the roots of the
Jurupa and be with the ants hauling mountains on their necks. Then
your ears will grow long like the Buddha’s and the pharmacist will call
your number.
White-coated daveners scurry behind the counter, offer with
upturned palms Penicillin in its amber cylinder, runic symbols
wrapped around. Should I accept? What if my globule contains a
koan or ground ore from the Wolfsegg Iron?
Chokecherry branches poke bare through New England snow, not even a purple nub crowns.
Gramma’s sweater unknits itself at the elbow, the day my mother in labor, speeds icy roads.
I present my red infant self, backwards.
De-planing in Mumbai 5:30 AM, ninety degrees hits me hard as a doctor’s slap.
Loads tower, tilt on lorries, despite their web of lashing.
Lug my suitcase to the guest house, fall into a narrow bed, cramped room off the kitchen.
Don’t worry, we'll be fine, my back-injured husband and our three year-old, at home in the snow.
Cows dodge pedaling rickshaws and lean men spit betel juice in purple-red splats.
Breeched, my son’s spine knobs my flesh like a winter branch.
His buttocks stuck tight, we strain like snowdrops pushing through frost.
I can’t recall silver, the metal tongs, that twisted my breeched body from an etherized mother.
I bury my jet-lagged face crosswise in the pillow.
Don’t eat the berries, warns Gramma who rocks me in her canvas hammock.
Her garden purples my longing to curl up like a sowbug under the violets.
Chokecherry stains everything it touches.
7,000 miles from home, I uncurl an arm, a leg.
Push into the Mumbai glare, slow train to the ashram in Poona.
Sandals crunch up the dusty hill to the tomb.
Its heavy air, garlands of jasmine and marigold weep.
Prone for hours on cool stone, alone save for the mosquitos’ soprano.
The floor of me loosens, I turn.
Head toward the murmur of women.
I still don’t know if I am a falcon, or a storm, or a great song. Rainer Maria Rilke
Gravel skids wordless into the abyss
where the chocolate-dark Colorado shoves
the cliffs. Six comings and goings of the Pacific,
a fossil trace and shards of shell.
Mother and daughter, we know
about wearing down, about patterns
fingernail-scraped in bedrock.
We stroll the rim, slow into a ritual:
meals, naps, bed by nine. Live
with the distance.
Cottonwoods blink green, relieving
the sun-blasted rock.
Silence wraps us, what we do not say.
The condors come
winging us with cool shadows,
stripping away the last raw bits
from what is already dead.
The two of us
pick at imperfections as if we could whittle
each other down to clean bone.
There’s a child whose name I’ve meant all winter
to recall: in my dreams at night, gray eyes shyly
turn away: at noon, bright and blue—It’s as if
a trace of her that I’ve ignored bounds into being,
sturdily, a sense I’d forbidden before, and now
I’ve welcomed. It is easy to hide, a ghost in one’s
own closet. Now light glints into every corner.
Petrified is what we were, I’m sure, and
then bold though it rarely broke the surface.
You closed your ears, eyes down, you opened,
you cracked a smile.
The once-in-a-while amaryllis
thrust erect, rosy surprise from the arid patch by the road.
Cicadas grind on, sow bugs shrivel, who
are gray…curled and gray.
I: the granite that everything, even breath, assaults.
I who will be the rolling fog that
always freshens,
pours over the crags
for you.
says my brother absently rubbing
his carpenter hands, always cold now.
He’ll die before the month is out.
For hours, I’m tending, touching
not my brother in the house asleep, not
my brother too busy dying to let me visit,
but scores of bushes, by the patio, the barn,
around every shingled corner of his old house.
I missed their lavender, fuchsia, white
when he was still up and about.
The bloom, this afternoon, sucked into brown splotches
huddled in the crotch of a branch. I stoop and stretch,
down to the ground, deep into the center.
No petals, only the sprong of filaments
empty as fingers that just let go.
Snap them at their source. What’s left,
a cream-colored indent, round as a cervix.
Baby green lurks, new sepals.
How dare they sprout?
Forget your parents’ tangled Gods.
Worship your own, the ones
living in the muck of Flax Pond,
the bovine slurp of afterbirth.
Find them in marshland’s ample arms
among newts and rivulets, seed flying
in the wind, chirps and whirrs.
Bend your ear to the ground.
Hear them when you yell
Coo-Weee off a cliff
and distant granite
returns you to yourself.
Face the black flap of vultures
ripping a strewn carcass.
Expect the avalanche
to thunder down.
When you despair,
rest your back on redwoods.
Drink in Aunt Anne’s blowsy roses
until your frozen furrows unclench
in the slow hand of spring.
But she rants everywhere are cliffs that
by their nature, she knows, prove the existence of god. How not
chisel away at least a bit?
Unless we walk the edge
the two of us—thumbs pressing along fissures, motes dissemble in the heat,
rays sometimes. Mesquite roots deep against the wind.
∞∞
Therefore she said the totality is fire
fed each minute by faggots, kindle of your own making. You cannot
undo what keeps on being done.
The flare in her pupil locks mine.
I blister at the unquenched stockpile she dips into,
tosses, never not. Snow hour by hour, quiet and wet.
∞∞
Besides, he dropped, jelly candies are nirvana, all desire
ceases forever if you never stop. Excuse me, what sense
am I to make?
Maybe I’ll count up, drop
by drop, his appetite—chin sugared in the kitchen, purple
spittle on the divan. Forty clowns in the car, all smiling.
∞∞
Maybe she asserts everywhere is sunshine that
even in the dark glistens on your skin. What’s the real
answer to a belief like that?
I slink away,
alone—contemplating the interior of a cupboard and
whether, if ever, the door is open. Breathe bread yeasty from the oven.
∞∞
Why not, they lie, the world a parchment fanned out for
one day each being to mark any way they want. Imagine
the geography?
They flew off
garments heaped on the ground—stunned by the beating of wings
ripe flesh we looked away, or not. Mushrooms under a great oak.
∞∞
No, he never hid, anywhere was snow dazzle that
in time would maybe blind him. Is that why
I only watched,
mother always—planted in my slippers, at the window
was it at least the porch? A twig frozen in a cascade, late to thaw.
Some are wild to trust any story. Some
will choose only the truth, even trussed
and gagged. The jungle, then as always, more
big-leafed than green, more green
than haloed—arcing exponentially
between mud and cloud
where everything twines except
what doesn’t. Rampaging over tributaries and
cliffs, thorn and flower until it dissolves
in humid mist. Turns from the path into
a mindless cancer of leaves
and lianas. Why tell it at all
with roots in your mouth?
