Episode 43: Suzanne Frischkorn

YourArtsyGirlPodcast

Suzanne Frischkorn is a talented and prolific poet living in Connecticut, my home state. Listen to her explain how she got into poetry and the poetry scene and what influenced her work and the many similarities that we shared "growing up" in CT as women writers and poets in our formative years.

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You can purchase Girl on a Bridge here: https://mainstreetragbookstore.com/product/girl-on-a-bridge/

Poem from Girl on a Bridge ---

Great Lash

You wear too much eye makeup. My sister wears too much. People think she's a whore.

Our cornfields were paved in asphalt, sulfur lights snuffed our stars. When one of us had no shoes, we went barefoot, walking streets laid with tar. First we coated lashes blackest black from tubes of green and pink, our eyes lined kohl. If it was Thursday we found boyfriends and waited by the liquor store for anyone to buy us Smirnoff. Anyone at all. We were not sweet girls.

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We were not sweet girls, yet we wore silver chains with silver hearts & crosses, onyx rings, blush, lipstick, powder. Hair flipped by vent brush before entering a night without stars. Our parents were line dancing, were bank tellers, were absent. We were a family that knew nothing about its members.

*

We cut school and watched Foxes. We cut school and drank vodka. We cut school and got stoned, did our makeup, walked the streets. One of us got out. One of us ran into our connection working a shoe store, one of us glimpsed another with a baby, one of us marries her Thursday night boyfriend and shatters her image.

*

We were not sweet girls, no. If there had been corn, or stars? Maybe the deep sweet girlness would have surfaced ― dreamy fresh-faced girls ― petals listening to rain.

You can purchase Lit Windowpane here: https://mainstreetragbookstore.com/product/lit-windowpane/

Poem from Lit Windowpane--

Window

A damp windowsill means nothing— it’s no bird tapping

on a pane— I am waiting

for the swallow’s stone, the anodyne

to illness brought by sparrow song.

This morning rain gathers in still puddles and the songbirds

sing without percussion― loud notes echo

the empty street— they sing and

sing and sing. No owl has brushed its wing

against our windowpane and sunlight

overcomes the clouds.

Thrush birdsong: lacey throated stars. The April

of our fifth year reeds withered around the pond.

Last summer I painted the porch ceiling

robin’s egg blue. Spring now and the sparrows

weave a nest in our dryer vent.

I watch you ladder your way into their world, lift

bits of twine and sticks and string, yet

you know they will return. How I love you

then— how I should have loved you all along.

BIO: Suzanne Frischkorn is the author of Lit Windowpane (2008), Girl on a Bridge, (2010) and five chapbooks. Her honors include the Aldrich Poetry Award for her chapbook, Spring Tide, selected by Mary Oliver, an Emerging Writers Fellowship from the Writer’s Center, and an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism.

Visit her website: https://suzannefrischkorn.com/