Home Altar. Poems by Janine Certo, selected as Number 24 in our Keystone Chapbook Series.
Publication: June 26, 2023 [100 copies]
29 pages
ISBN 978-1-960693-00-6
$ 12.00
Janine Certo is the author of four books, including three full-length poetry collections: O Body of Bliss, winner of the Longleaf Press Poetry Prize; Elixir, winner of both the New American Poetry Prize and the Lauria/Frasca Poetry Prize (New American Press and Bordighera Press, 2021); and In the Corner of the Living, runner-up for the Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award (2017). A winner of Nimrod International Journal’s Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, her poems appear or are forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review, Mid-American Review, New Ohio Review, Poetry Northwest, Shenandoah, and others. She has also been a featured poet in Italian Americana. Janine grew up in the town of Elizabeth, PA, on the bank of the Monongahela River fifteen miles from Pittsburgh. She lives in East Lansing, Michigan where she is an associate professor at Michigan State University. Her website is at janinecerto.com.
Ode to Children at the End of the World
The boy on Wildwood kneels
to tap my dog, Maddox’s, crown,
lift his right then left paw with a dignity
becoming of a knighting ritual. Quarantined,
we exchanged letters—ones we seal,
march down the street. He calls
himself Laserboy, emitting beams
to fight for justice. I’m drawn
to kids like him who care children
are separated at the border
like zoo cubs; kids who pen a wide-ruled
manifesto to our President to call him
mean. In red caps, unmasked,
white supremacists sling rifles;
plot to attack the State Capitol;
kidnap the Governor, while an eight-
year-old designs a Black Lives Matter
sign. The president says nothing,
opens a steakhouse menu, rolls
back environmental regulations,
while a boy opens the wings of trifold
like the lungs of planet. He animates
a science project, knows how to protect
shrimp from losing their eyes, that owls
make a three-quarters of a revolution
with their heads. Bowed, I can’t keep
children from the devastating
blaze of hundreds of thousands
of fallen leaves. I feel the swell
of grief: the five-year-old
in Detroit, Skylar Herbert, first
Michigan child who died of covid,
daughter of EMTs, smile with a lost
tooth in front, “a girl,”
her mother said, “who would run over
and hug you.” All through the pandemic,
the boy halts from me as he should.
He remembers the name Maddox
means good & true. A letter arrives
from the near-humanless
outside, & this is what
I lean into: a child
across the street meanders like a delta
knowing the answer to every question
is as unpolluted as a sky
under which he’s finished
Zooming, heading out to meet
with a pod like all the others
scattered like photons. It’s beginning
to rain, but the youth aren’t breaking.
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