Gumball Poetry - Poetry by Sonya Feher

w Gumball Poetry - Poetry by Sonya Feher

Sonya S. Feher

Before Thirteen

The field below Vom Dorp's cabins,
thigh high full of preteens who
lost their shoes at 1 a.m.
Between cowpies and cactus, it wasn't
important to make rules or tie laces.
No one carried a flashlight
and our hands were washed too rarely.

The glen arroyo side, where
we played house, was fortressed
from dirt clods, and overlooked
the Playboy tomb - garbage bags,
full and lost, sent twelve year-olds
carrying shovels and searching.

Off the lower dirt bridging,
next to the gas tank I ran into,
round Volvo, sister wasn't hit
nor did the car meet the precipice.
This was my testing ground,
bike naked of training wheels,
as Peter said, "Falling is part of riding."
Seventeen feet of loose soil and rocks,
the two foot round, eight foot long tunnel
for hiding and flooding, filled only
with dead groundhogs and mice
puffed in a back float. My elbow was
a torn plum, my head a passion fruit.
Dad took over the bike lessons.

God slept in the glens where a horse
could be ridden attached to a tree,
cut off branch tilted for a neck,
and his barky mane was hugged
for safety. We tied him up while
we ate s'mores or chased our thongs,
one wooden plank a diving board,
the next a rescue point, last dunk before
a waterfall or we chased barefoot
lanced by pine needles.

Sonya S. Feher has been published in Lilliput Review, Analecta, Horae: A Women's Book of Hours, O!Zone and other small press journals. She is the former Managing Editor and Publisher of Manana Magazine. Currently, she teaches Creative Writing and English at Lanier High School in Austin, Texas and will begin her MFA in poetry this fall.

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04.05.2000
Miss Marlys from Coventry, England

Lyrical and Visceral!
The Playboy tomb is so fabulous and weird. I like that this is less about nostalgia and more about meditation. The details are very wonderful.

(GBP switched dating around - reviews below are chronological. Above are reverse chronological)

Eliam Kraiem

yeah it seems bout right
Oh sconet, i like the Poem. Although i think the Romaticiztion of childhood is perhaps a dangerous thing. We look back and rember simply what was no less a compilcated life than the one we live today. But I liked it. It was only after thirteen that I got to know that precipice and the culvert full of dead things. by the time I got there we were more interested in ciggaretts and talk of drugs and sex than of floating boats through trecherous ditches. thoses do ideed sound as if there were good times... out there sixteen miles from a light that no longer blinks...

cardhu (Cardhu@bigfoot.com) from Coventry, England

cool but not real
the words are most pleasurable, and the imagery very pleasing. However it seems to me that whenever one looks back one puts todays inflection upon reality. The past had more than it's fair share of mundanity and yet we forget. but then maybe that's why.

cArLy rObErTs (robertscarly@hotmail.com) from Cola, SC

"Making the ordinary seem strange..."
Yeah, I think we grew up in the same town. I can so remember those lazy days of exploring. This poem touched me because I have this same imagery about my childhood--the happy safe place that no one can change or harm. I could really see what she is saying--the whole point in good writing (poetry), understanding.

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