The Mad Poet of the Year blog posts share the poetry of a long-time Mad Poet. This year-long appointment provides readers with a deep dive of the writer’s work and thoughts on poetry. We are thrilled to have Lisa DeVuono serve as the Mad Poet of the Year for 2024.
Mothers of Frontenac Street
wake before anyone else stops dreaming
the web that forms is their sleep in your eyes
they worry the day into being
their love is the dust settling on every sill
they hang laundry on Mondays in the shared alleys
ripped up by the sons and daughters
who drink beer, shoot caps, make out,
disappear into war, and drown in boats that die at sea
the mothers of Frontenac Street have buried their lives
in the basement of sorrow cemented with joy
their faces forever fixed in stone
years from now, those who live in these houses
will hear a ghost of voices
calling their children home
As Mother’s Day approaches, I am listening to David Darling’s music in particular his composition, “Remembering Our Mothers.” It’s a haunting piece and the two prints above were created as an intuitive response to his work. For this posting, I am coupling them with my poem “Mothers of Frontenac Street.”
I grew up in Oxford Circle in Northeast Philadelphia. There were lots of children to play with on Frontenac Street and the better part of our years was spent in each other’s homes under the watchful eyes of our mothers.
In this poem I was attempting to capture how mothers were part of the everyday fabric of our lives. They wore many hats: disciplinarians, breadwinners, caregivers. At day’s end with all they had to juggle, I wonder if they ever had a good night’s sleep.
They helped us to celebrate the joys and to weather the tragedies of those times.
The poem has a dreamlike quality, as I wanted to convey how they imbued everything from the daily tasks of doing laundry to the cracks in the walls to the sounds of their voices to the heartbreak of what it means to bear children and to let them go.
Even though most of the original neighbors have long passed on, I believe that their spirits linger in those row homes and saying their names here echo like a childhood lullaby: Katella, O’Riordan, Epstein, McCarty, Flynn, Friel, Higgins, Pickens, Cummings, DeVuono.
Lisa DeVuono is the 2024 Poet Laureate of Montgomery County. She was one of the founders of It Ain’t Pretty, a women’s writing collective that performed locally. She produced multi-media shows incorporating song, music, poetry, and dance, including Rumi in Song at the Sedgwick Theater; and Whole Heart Home, and Breaking Open Breaking Free, part of the IceHouse Tonight series in Bethlehem.
She led creativity and poetry workshops and has worked with teens in recovery and cancer patients. She wrote a peer-based curriculum Poetry as a Tool for Recovery: An Easy-to-Use Guide in Eight Sessions for facilitators working with persons living with mental health challenges.
In addition to the full-length manuscript This Time Roots, Next Time Wings, her poetry has appeared in the Mad Poets Review, Paterson Literary Review and the anthology Grit Gravity & Grace: New Poems about Medicine and Healthcare. She is the author of the chapbook Poems from the Playground of Risk published by Pudding House Press and was the recipient of an honorable mention in Passaic County Community College’s annual Allen Ginsberg Contest.
Recently retired, she has worked as an administrator, librarian, and lay chaplain.