Live Encounters Poetry & Writing June 2025
The Grotto in My Bedroom, poems by LaWanda Walters.
The Grotto in My Bedroom
Some nights the moon would fasten her reflection,
wavering like some live thing in water,
upon my closet door. I was afraid a vision,
like one of the Virgin Mary, might gesture
toward me if I looked. I had just seen The Song
of Bernadette on the television set, there in
my room which once had been the den.
Even though I was thirteen and Southern
Baptist, God might be interested. I was terrified
to look at that shimmery orb on the door of my closet—
what if it commanded me to be a saint?
I pulled the covers over my head, even though I’d sweat.
I stopped watching movies when they starred Jennifer Jones,
disliking her goody-goody, bovine eyes that saw my sins.
What, to Any Sane Being, Is the Fourth of July?
(borrowing from Frederick Douglass)
The etymology for fuck is “strike.”
And it’s strike, hit, bang all night
tonight, as if this were patriotic.
Our neighborhood resounds
with its hill and ravine
like an amphitheater.
Our dogs, our cats, our birds
must think it’s Halloween twice
a year. What I hear
are the pows and bangs Roy
Rogers and Roy Lichtenstein
put into their art. Exclamation points
everywhere, the decibels high
and sudden, like bombs must have sounded
in London. It’s the night to play war
and if you’re only far away enough
to hear—not to see the fountain splashes
in the sky, you can see it this way—Bang! Thwack!
Pop, pop, pop! When Lichtenstein tried
to make fun of war his art looked ugly—
not swooning, curvy, love-hungry girls
but machine guns—un-curvy,
spitting out inky blotches on the canvas,
jagged edges, pointed spikes, viruses.
It doesn’t stop until way past two a.m.
And what I hear, mostly, is the rat-tat-tat
and whack of a whipping, of that scene in
The Misfits when the old man in the Reno bar
gets Marilyn Monroe to try his grandson’s paddle
ball. She’s good, she’s really into it,
and her drumming serve, over and over,
repeats the polka-dot pattern of her dress—
the camera shoots her rump
as she wiggles to keep that ball in the air
and a leering old man has his hand right there
like he’s spanking her. That scene is what I hear,
and what, I think, our dogs must hear.
The world is beating and we’re
being beaten, that’s all.
Grant Wood’s Portrait
What came first into his mind?
The minor Gothic aspiring of a window
too proud for a small house in the country?
The medieval allegory unconsciously framed
into the American pattern? And then his sister
and his dentist the only arbiters, there,
in the shrinking town in Iowa,
which he was too noble to desert?
He’d been to Europe, got on there,
had friends. But his mother wasn’t well.
He returned to his home, to his judges,
their supreme distaste for his kind.
A little German castle in the cornfields
swept by rake and broom.
© LaWanda Walters
LaWanda Walters earned her M.F.A. from Indiana University, where she won the Academy of American Poets Prize. Her first book of poems, Light Is the Odalisque, was published in 2016 by Press 53 in its Silver Concho Poetry Series. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Georgia Review, Southern Review, Nine Mile, Antioch Review, Cincinnati Review, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, and several anthologies, including Best American Poetry 2015, Obsession: Sestinas in the Twenty-First Century, and I Wanna Be Loved by You: Poems on Marilyn Monroe. She received Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Awards in 2020 and 2024. She lives in Cincinnati with her husband, poet John Philip Drury.