Puppets
On the Edge of Tomorrow, BHC Press December 2017
I can’t focus. I lay on my bed, literally fuming. I am listening to old Pearl Jam. My feet are sticking out, Converse sneakers still on. My hands, with bitten nails, are clenching and unclenching. I just want to be left alone. That's what my life is- being alone. It works for me. Our cat, Oreo, struggles onto my bed and nuzzles my face. My mood is even too dark for Oreo. I pull away, and with that physical gesture, drag myself up and off the bed. I walk straight out the door to the long corridor, down the white carpeted staircase, through the sterile kitchen and out the front door. I know where I am going.
(Excerpted from “Puppets”)
How a Stuffed Animal Helped Us to See Our Child as More Than a Diagnosis
It’s a special kind of hell to know, or to think you know, there is something wrong with your child even before they are born…
A Sister Whose Suffering Takes Her Deeper Into Life
The Philadelphia Inquirer, May 22, 2005
Maryellen Nerz-Stormes of Strafford was selected as the archdiocese's May Queen earlier this month based on an essay about her that was written by her sister, Maggie Nerz of Fairmount. As queen, she had the honor of crowning the statue of Mary as part of the Archdiocesan May Procession in Center City. Nerz-Stormes, 46, is a senior lecturer in chemistry at Bryn Mawr College. A condensed version of the contest-winning essay, "Why My Sister Should be May Queen/' follows.
My sister Mary and I are two of seven children, she being the oldest girl and me being the youngest, with 11 years in between us. Because of her position as oldest girl, Mary was often called upon by our mother to help mother the younger children
Besides baby-sitting us and changing our diapers, she taught us to pray, disco dance, told us about high school and college, took us to movies and out to eat, and gave us advice about our own lives. Since Mary was a straight-A student who went on to get her Ph.D. in organic chemistry and a natural athlete who played golf, field hockey, and basketball, she was someone we as little girls really wanted to be.
Throughout every phase of my life, through high school, through college, through graduate school, she has guided me and given of herself for me. In college, she helped me decide about where to go to graduate school. In graduate school, she let me live with her family and gave me a car to drive. In my working life, she has given advice and support.
Like the Blessed Mother, whose love is often an invisible force of support, my sister's care is like the air I breathe, always there in abundance, whether I know and appreciate it or not.
The most current chapter in my sister's life and the life of our relationship is perhaps the most poignant reason why she should be May Queen. My sister was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer four years ago. When it was discovered, the cancer had already spread from her breast to her lymph nodes, bones, and now brain. She has · undergone aggressive chemotherapy, receiving two drugs a week, every week, since her diagnosis. She has had the two tumors in her brain treated with radiation twice.
Throughout her illness, she has kept her job as a teacher at Bryn Mawr College, teaching hundreds of students organic chemistry while , suffering with the many side effects the different drugs have caused. She has taught with constant stomach problems, with her fingernails falling off, with her bones aching, with ~he permanent loss of her hair, and with the constant anxiety, and days of hopelessness brought on by fighting an incurable disease.
My sister has been a fearless and active participant in her treatment, realistically facing the implications of her prognosis and working with her doctor to make the· choices that will extend her life the longest. She has taught herself oncology and how to read her own scans, reads medical journals voraciously, and researches the different treatments out there to the best of her ability. Her sole purpose is to extend her life for her two sons, a blessed mother in her own right, indeed. On top of all this, she has taken what she has learned to advocate for others, and seriously sees this as part of her mission.
Like the Blessed Mother's famous "Yes!" to the request made by the Father to bring Jesus into the world, my sister has also said "Yes" to the call of God by letting her suffering take her to a deeper experience of life. She has spent more time with her sons, reading with them, advocating for them, mentoring them, loving them. She has joined her church choir, volunteered at a free clinic, taught her students how to knit, become an extraordinary and prolific painter, and is working on a book about her experiences. She has translated her more palpable sense of lack of certainty about the future into what she calls "cancer time," an excuse to give more abundantly and generously; more impulsively and fearlessly. If you know my sister, you know that a gift of flowers, a hand-knit scarf, a b1·ownie, a donation of time or money, a hug, a kind word, a direct and caring look in the eye, a loving note, is probably in your future.
In my own relationship with the Blessed Mother, I often meditate on the mere fact that Mary was asked to bring a child into the world and then asked to share him with all of humanity, and then asked to watch him not only die, but be killed. I often focus on the level of giving up the Blessed Mother was called to live out, and I try to comfort myself by thinking of Mary's sacrifice, when I struggle, as my sister does, with not wanting to give up the smaller things I am asked to give up.
I think I was most drawn to writing this essay because of a conversation my sister and I had just two nights ago. We were talking about the month of May and the Race for the Cure and the breast-cancer awareness so much of us hear about through the media. We were talking about what it means to be a survivor. According to the · media-driven world, a survivor is someone who has defeated cancer, a blond woman with a tan who is bounding off the tennis courts, triumphant over death. My bald sister is not the picture of a survivor the media want to advertise, yet she is the ultimate survivor to me. · So much of what we are called as Christians, particularly as Catholics, is countercultural, and I think my sister's form of being a survivor is countercultural, even and especially within the world of cancer, where it should be most valued.
So much like the Blessed Mother, whose unhesitant "Yes!" changed the history of the world without anything in it for herself, my sister has said the same kind of "Yes!" again and again and has redefined surviving for me, and hopefully the other people who have had the luck to experience her bright-shining, never-dimming light of a life.
Maryellen Nerz-Stormes (right) of Strafford was named the archdiocese's May Queen on the recommendation of her sister, Maggie Nerz (left) , who wrote of her older sibling’s early guidance and recent struggles with breast cancer.
Small Craft Warnings Collection
Published in Small Craft Warnings (Swarthmore College), 1999, 2000
Season (1999)
It gets dark fast this time of year
the old man behind me said as
we moved together backwards
approaching the city center
We hate darkness, I thought
especially that which comes early
We hate rising in it and retiring in it
seeing light only through panes
begrudgingly
We hate summer too, we say,
the heat that leaves us sweating
slouched on platforms
fanning ourselves slowly
In winter we are only death at our desks
Pushing white paper around
The trees have been brown too long we yawn
Spring spring we chant, looking forward
to that which is warm, colorful
Searching for tiny purple buds edging the path
from the station we point and
say there’s one excited energized
by daylight we earned
we saved for so carefully
Close (1999)
In the heavy heat of almost summer we walked without destination,
city block by city block, roaming the interior of our neighborhood.
North south east west we walked pavement lying flat or cracked
in need of replacement in places or shifted like mismatched lips.
Looking up through sodden air I noticed the sky still blue,
daytime with the lights turned out,
saw the clouds move in bunches surrounded by this strange night blue,
The starless sky has clarity without light, I thought.
Processing in this lightless light we entered alleys,
saw white roses spilling out over the tops of fences,
looked up at your old window, watched the hyacinths growing
From a flower box outside a rowhouse door.
Entering and exiting smells, the flowers, exhaust, the bodies passing,
restaurant food cooking, the garbage in dumpsters rotting,
snug in the humid air, the airless air,
passing through it slowly, as it required,
we walked the middle of streets,
looping around behind buildings standing straight
or crouching beside lampposts above blacktop,
returning to the same conclusions again and again.
We crossed at lights, stop signs, when we wanted to in between.
We talked, pointed at places we knew.
We walked in silence
moved further into our neighborhood,
inside the heat, circling the center,
peering in to what is hot about heat.
Lights, garish convenient store lights,
Sirens, car alarms, voices from tables
defined our small exchange,
our purposeless journey.
Christmas Poem
For Mom and Dad
You do not know about
the lights on Rittenhouse Square
the way none of us saw them coming
and a few of us suggested they were a miracle
They hover in the trees-multi-colored spheres
I search to see if they line the entire park
My heart feels all there is to feel
when one is overwhelmed
by excess, but still wants more
No, you do not know about
the lights on Rittenhouse square
or my throat gone tight as it does
by the silliest things
the moon in a sliver or
perfectly round and orange
the bus coming when I want it to
an arm's smooth stroke through water
when, in that first feeling moment
I think of telling it
of how to tell someone about it
I think of telling you about it
Maybe I will forget to tell you
about the lights on Rittenhouse Square
How they remind me of everything
and nothing at once
how they seem to be like small planets
I can imagine reaching for
to cup in pale hands
How they take my eyes in their possession
pulling them upward
pushing heat through my chest
like hot water through pipes
revealing for a second
life turning slowly
dangling from something a
as fragile as a branch
Ferris Wheel (2000)
The ferris wheel across the bay
was spectacular at night.
I could not detect its movement
from the dock where we swayed
in the tumultuous wind we marveled at,
were slightly afraid of.
I held hope that it was something great
to see moving slowly, consistently,
something so perfectly round and
brilliantly lit.
The man who was here
a few days ago
was the first I heard mention it.
Pointing a broken telescope its way, he said
Let’s see if we can catch that ferris wheel.
My ears perked up instantly,
not caring at all for broken telescopes
you said were broken your entire life.
It was the words ferris wheel that caught my ear.
I did not see it until three days later,
at night,
with raw eyes, without magnification.
Surprising myself at feeling sad
and alone seeing the lights so far away,
feeling the wind again blowing hard,
knowing all the miles of ocean and beach
darkened and deserted were close,
the families I do not know by the dozens
coming and going.
The waves have always brought forth in me this
precious sadness
Longing thoughts of a perfect like, b
ig things with smallness beside them.
A house by the sea.
I have had to take deep breaths, hold my throat tight,
Emotion matching the tireless
disappearance and return of the bay.
The ocean is a thing that doesn’t change,
yet is always changing
nags, whispers in ears again and again
There is something else here, something else,
Either surrounding, holding us up to float, or
hitting hard, salt water waves breaking, or receding
skulking out to sea,
draining the bay into thick mud,
Small puddles, leaving
tiny flies that sting or the
worms that you pointed out,
poking their heads up,
first one then hundreds,
visible from the light
of the house behind us. PASTE POEM HERE
Commonspeaking Collection
Published in Commonspeaking (Swarthmore College), 1999
A Sleeper Car (1999)
You are asleep with your small glasses folded up, grasshopper legs.
I squint out the window to see flat land, shadows of darkness,
am convinced that I have never known anything about this country.
There is the steady chug of the train moving forward in the night,
your steady breathing filling the car, your relaxed knee, bare foot,
moonlight reflected from the ring you never remove.
Another train passes so I could reach out and touch it,
headed someplace faster it seems. Somewhere where
they are not I suppose sleeping time away, meandering down
narrow corridors unsteadily, chewing slowly, digesting well.
I see your shirt hanging on the door
swaying slightly as the car rumbles onward
convincing me that I never knew anyone before you.
I let the curtain fall, smothering the moon,
the wide light that pulled me
from sleeping beside you
Salad Days (1999)
For my parents
We had a strawberry patch in our big
green, brown, and forsythia yard
beneath the pealing blue moon with
white trim and dark eyes
We lived above a tennis court never built,
left an ambiguous pit overtaken by daisies
The pines bowed courteously
beneath their skirts we dined,
silverware, bright pink and green
plastic baskets left over from Easter,
baby dolls with heavy eyes
We had a banging back door,
cracked wooden steps
The ground felt uneven beneath our feet
The grass held hidden treasure
The weather, sometimes grey and sometimes blue
sometimes warm and sometimes cold
We knew no schedule
The woods, soldier friends lined up
A tree house held low in a crook
an arm snapped
Injury never healed
A path meandered downward
dotted by protruding tops,
buried bottles
Memory reflects the shimmer of metal
A colander in the late spring, early morning sun
We picked our berries knowing
the devouring would wait
past pump, past blackeyed susans, a pear tree
a hose wrapped up like a snail
We returned to the moon which awaited us,
disappearing, fading into its cool shadows
Redtree Collection
Published in Redtree (Bryn Mawr College), 1994, 1995
Tomatoes, Elvis, and the Beatles (1994)
Tell me you were
not always dead.
Tell me I was careful-
I picked your face
ripe and fat,
a tomato from
a drooping caged vine.
Insist I pulled it
plump, that I spoke
so softly, that I refused
to risk the slightest
impression.
Tell me your
red skin was once
that supple, that
sensitive.
Did I,
in some
spoiled fit
kill you?
With a twist so
sharp, with a hand
so huge, I crushed you
and squeezed
you shapeless.
Could it have been me?
Was I the culprit
who poked and
peeled you
to a splotch,
a puddle of
seeds and pulp?
Perhaps you were
neither alive
nor dead, you
were a seed
I forgot to plant, you
were the flash-fear
of a potential
stain, you were
green and window
sill bound.
Yes, you were
neutral and I
was indifferent.
I imagine having
not picked
killed, or ignored you.
I fantasize you
fallen, wasted
overripe, a taste
bitter and
dark, gravity your
only murderer,
a merciful undoing.
Tell me it is
good that you
seemed always dead
(like Elvis) or
always broken
(like the Beatles)
that I found you this way.
Our relations could be
a sighting,
a flash of sequins,
a cape, an impromptu
reunion,
so singular, fantastic,
and unreal
that they exist
forever in
dispute.
Linzer Hearts
puff up so big and white in this heat,
voluptuous, untouchable.
Back on countertop they withdraw
to factual selves just a
little better than disfigured.
Reality has set in and has
relaxed them to disappointment,
rationalized them to rightness.
They lie on wire racks,
cooling in cooperation, never
resisting jam spread between
their doubled selves, sides
which have somehow failed.
And as brown edges deflate,
awaiting a shower of white
felt like rain on a roof two
stories above, a subtle
shock on top, memory slides and
perfection reaches a pleasing distance.
The jam, a sweetness without teeth,
the remnants of the young woman stuck
inside who knows her body has not lasted
who knows all were is really is
the warmth of sun across
one’s face when clouds
come apart.
Miss Rumphius
Living to be old enough to have
little children circled around your feet,
crumbs dangling from their lips,
eyes wide and fearful and reverent,
you sleep alone and easy at night,
knowing you always kept your options open.
Looking down at a body laid out wake-
straight, covered like a good story-book
lady in patchwork, topped off with a head
of skunk-striped hair, you are blue
from the day in day out of watching
the sun and moon switch places.
Their consistency mocks your options,
their push and pull of the seasons,
the waves, puts the freedom
felt from globe-trotting
to shame.
No island king or fresh fruit could
keep you, your body nagged and you came
back, the sea which spat you out
swallowed you whole, the roses and
purples and violets invited you,
intoxicated, and put you to bed.
The third thing, which you
placed hesitantly on
a back burner, did not need
you, came to life on its
own, blended in to
the clock-work of stars and water
right under your window
sill, beneath your nose,
seeds blown by a wind stronger
than any body, any suitcase full
of souvenirs.
Large and legendary,
it is your name which
precedes you, outrageous
amongst the sparseness of a
small house by the sea.
Having accomplished your tasks,
having lingered above the dusty skies,
the backgrounds you filled in long ago,
sitting solid amongst these colors so
real you could eat and drink them,
you look as though this was not a
matter of choice, that there
were no real options.
You remain here as if only to
prove that a whole summer spent
throwing seeds to the wind is
not a whole summer
wasted.
Scraping Plates
Published in Musomania (Bryn Mawr & Haverford Colleges), 1994
Scraping Plates (1994)
This is love -
common as a sink
full of soap and water,
warm and rubbery,
soiled and lovely,
awful and diminishing.
This is all that has
happened between us-
trapped in the forever
shallow end,
continuously waiting for
the plug to be pulled,
innocently admitting a
tendency to run
away as quickly as
It came.
Come in come in
it calls to
weak hands which
obey each time.
Opposed twins,
reaching for the
same things,
simultaneously they
recall the truths:
the blue of two fixed eyes
the sorrow of second best,
the sincerity of sadness
all over again.
If words do not work,
sensations will.
A squeeze of a sponge
soaked with these waters,
a trickle of pitiful heat
across a stiff back,
all that is needed to
swallow the shiver which
startles straight through
This water is mine, I swear,
contained in square, submerged
in countertop.
I appear in the clear left over
when suds separate.
I indulge in the elusive
putrid and vibrant of bubbles,
colors which stain memory.
With my hands in the thick
of such love I could forget
the huge of the house around
me, the fact that water always
washes somewhere, and warmth
inevitably fades to cool.
I am fixed to this spot.
I am a creature with two
good legs and garden hoses of
veins and intestines all my own.
I am fixed.
This is
love
this flood,
winding its way
around fingers,
threatening circulation.
This is all that has
happened between us,
this steam rising to face like
fever, addictive
and agonizing,
consistent in its
promise to
break.
Dye Job
Published in Uses (Villanova University), 1992
Dye Job (1992)
Get a dye job-
a polident, liposuction
dye job.
Take those strings woven
into your ritzy wig and
get a dye job.
Dye red-a deep, fire
Lucille Ball-technicolor
red.
I’ll do it for you.
I’ll rub that bloody goo
into your scalp and we’ll
watch it swirl down
the drain.
The dye job should
go without a hitch.
So get a plastic pump
transplant-get your veins done.
Scream over the
vibrating boob tube
from the kraftmatic adjustable.
Curl up in a tanning bed
-bake at 375-
you’ll come out lovely,
lovely and brown,
as brown as your
dye job is red. PASTE POEM HERE
Manhattan Magazine Collection
Published in Manhattan Magazine (Manhattan College), 1989, 1990, 1991
I am stupid (1989)
and yes you are pretty
and what a grand job we did
fishing with hooks of pure
vanity.
We have caught dinner tonight
full of ourselves when
we put ourselves down
caressing each word
Of their reply
grabbing each compliment
and running away.
They’ve called it insecurity,
it just looks like
vanity
to me.
In Retrospect (1991)
It was all so very imperfect.
I was chatty and I believe you said catty and
don’t forget insecure.
You chose your words right:
You were truthful, a noncomformist,
you suffered so as a child and now
you want to sleep with your mother.
How suburban, you yawned, my middle-American ideas.
I wasn’t the artist you thought I was so
I apologized profusely.
It was all so imperfect, the nights entwined
uncovered truths.
We just did not know what to do with it all.
Babies in 95, you said.
Sex will be sublime, you said.
Whatever you say, I said.
I was old hat in two weeks’ time.
You were consistently never home.
I was steadily silly, and innocent.
With breath hot, canned, and sticky I
hissed into the aftershave embalmed telephone.
I stripped.
I begged.
You let me off the hook.
Clothed, I sat on a bowl
and heard the shuffle around my stall.
My palms grew wet as the enfolded my
aching face.
In the future we spoke-
it was as if we never met.
Just the way you liked it.
All gone-all
in retrospect.
Now, you and I are
perfectly
safe, separate.
PASTE POEM HERE
Good-Bye (1990)
Don’t know where, I will begin
white desert of
fresh paper
stretching forth
(a vulgar sin)
Heart knows just what to say?
Steady, dull, thump
thud
bumping
Brain is reeking with crud, decay
Taillights flicker
I stand
where you used
to be
(for the worse?)
Red, white, and blue truck
brings me to you,
Looping ink
into
shapely
words-
Glue taste on my tongue, tasty goo.
Missing you, helping me to be what I like
better than before.
Taillights flicker into black tomorrow.
I stand alone in dim today.