Philly Poetry Chapbook Review is pleased to present three original poems by poet-scholar Shelli Rottschafer as our second biweekly featured poet of the Winter 2025 issue.
Poems
America Could Be, Crowned
**As we approach January 20, 2025 when the 47th President will be sworn into office, I question what are these united States?
Ideas of what America could be:
Oh, change is coming. We need more rebellious daughters!
They’ve moved in full view of world that’s agreed – and confounded these United States,
five times ten. Fifty. So, we must resist closure and soldier.
Face uplifted, reckoning this unknown. Life belonged to her alone.
Lore passed down provides a truth of its own, enough to color her entire body.
Rising to resolve a future beyond, these stories make like thunder, crash becalmed.
Ignites scarring charcoal memory donned. Smell is to senses as pine is to frond.
Arbors don’t always perish from bloodlettings but – ash, greys grief.
Fertility lives again each season. Needle’s timely whirled-shedding winds our words, and then!
Queen bursts through waxen honeycomb quiver to quest.
“Do you understand your own language sung?”, amid shivers and clenched fingertips.
How many is she willing to give up, for what she believes heartfully disrupts.
A dream once imperiled, soon brings relief.
Even laws of nature can bloody leaves.
As if it were they, had only begun to cast pearls to the multitudes.
A sum of their choices, blurred lines of fading foliage fly past.
Gaze gloomily at dark turgid waters ‘til moon and stars invisible sky cast.
Because We Remember
Because we remember a migration from north to south
Youth rebels while establishment riots
Swells in with dogs, streams water hoses, pushes changing tides
Seduced that Spring as daffodils sprout
The police trill whistles and protestors bugle loud horns singing “We shall overcome.”
Because we remember
They gathered collectively
Met by riot gear, batons, and bull whips
Paddy Wagons herd those who chose to speak
Hunkered down, bloodied foreheads caved in as eyes met eyes
Blue and black withered winter soul conflicts with idealism
Because we remember
To belong, does not mean to blend in.
Expose those ruffled feathers of riotous colors
Exclaim with voices strong, “We shall all be free someday.”
Move through the crowd, not like a riot of robins
whose red bleaches across their breast like a wound to the heart
Instead, be a tiding, a cacophony of magpies
Whose caws exalt, there is a time for every season.
Because we remember
All roads lead back to that house
So build it on rock, not on sand.
Create community under the premise that “We shall live in peace.”
Because these times make necessary the causing of good trouble
and when that happens
on a road like this, you are never alone
Because we remember
in the telling of our lives,
We give so much of the after
The consequences of what we have learned
We need to be reminded to also give the before
The impetus, our inspirations
Even if only for this moment
We are together
And because of that we are not easily made separate.
Because we remember…
Note: Written Monday January 16, 2023 – Martin Luther King Jr. Remembrance Day
Today We Are Stargazers
The Old Farmer’s Almanac says she will parade most brilliantly
Five planets gravitationally tied by a stardust umbilical cord
Aligned along an invisible diagonal plane
Mercury casts light, a bipolar changeling as it orbits
Venus spins her opposite directions
While Mars raises his bellicose crown of oxidized rust-red and Jupiter thunders
Uranus, in its distance is not alone,
his moons flitter like fairies.
Today we are stargazers
Reveling in stories told
perspectives clustered like constellations
above western vantage points.
Today we gaze upon those stars
reeling in mourning.
This time three adults. Three children.
Now dotted carmine, not with Astro-dust
but blood speckled white shirts, blue slacks and skirts stained crimson.
Today we remember the primer
That morning began with bowling class
Hurled anxieties thundered down the lane
A Milky Way of Adderall snorted in order to confidently take that next leap into oblivion
Thirteen dead, twenty wounded, two more sacrificed in the end.
Today we hover in wooded shadows
A threat called in
mimicking a Southern Madman who took thirty-two before his last breath
If it were real, we would have been lined up like yellow ducklings at a county fair
launched backward in the air
as the bb made its mark.
Today the spectacle continues, uncommon in her apparition
Patterned sherds dance as Venus twinkles
up above the world so high
like a diamond in the sky
aloof in her glamour, estranged from what is happening below.
Those shooting stars play with our wishes
Their arched trajectory glides toward an unknown destination.
Unlike yesterday whose direct shots rang out
echoing cries lofted in prayer.
Today, long past the ides of March
we wonder will she answer her stargazers’ plea?
Or wait, arms wide-open
welcoming to her celestial womb
they who were once her
stargazers.
Note: Originally written March 27, 2023. Upon this night there was a unique astrological event in which five planets aligned with the moon. The theme is anti-gun violence as it was written in response to the Covenant High School Shooting March 27, 2023 in Nashville, TN. Within the poem, I mention other shootings: Oxford High School November 30, 2021 (of which some of my college students were then high school students at that school and underwent lockdown). As well as precursors such as Columbine High School April 20, 1999 and Virginia Tech April 16, 2007, which instigated a copy-cat threat at Aquinas College where I was teaching at the time and therefore detail in the poem.
About “Because We Remember”
“Because We Remember” was first written January 16, 2023 in remembrance of Martin Luther King Junior Day. This docu-poetics protest poem nods toward the need for Peaceful Protest and the right to use our voice for Social Justice. This is as true now as it was then on Bloody Sunday, in Selma at the Edmund Pettus Bridge Peaceful Protest that turned brutal. It reminds us of our dreams for the future, knowing good trouble often is necessary, because our lives matter. Like Kamala Harris mentioned in her concession speech November 6, 2024: Even when our hearts feel full, we dare to act for the betterment of others. “Only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars.” Her challenge to us in this next political era is, “Let us fill the sky with a brilliance of stars.”
Author Bio
Shelli Rottschafer completed her doctorate from the University of New Mexico in 2005 in Latin American Contemporary Literature. From 2006 until 2023 Rottschafer taught at a small liberal arts college in Grand Rapids, Michigan as a Professor of Spanish. Summer 2023 Shelli returned to graduate school to begin her low residency MFA in Creative Writing at Western Colorado University. She will graduate July 2025 with a concentration in Poetry and additional coursework in Nature Writing.
Shelli’s home state is Michigan, yet her wanderlust turns her gaze toward her new querencia within the Mountain West where she resides in Louisville, Colorado and El Prado, Nuevo México with her partner, photographer Daniel Combs and their Pyrenees-Border Collie Rescue.
Contents
Book Excerpt: Further Thought by Rae Armantrout
Read the featured Excerpt Poem of the Month for January 2025, “Further Thought” from Go Figure by Rae Armantrout, along with a few words from the poet.
Read five poems by poet A.L. Nielsen, our first biweekly poet of the Winter 2025 issue, along with a few words about the poem “When We Walked”.
Chapbook Poem: The Poem as an Act of Betrayal by Benjamin S. Grossberg
Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for January 2025, “The Poem as an Act of Betrayal” from As Are Right Fit by Benjamin S. Grossberg, along with a few words from the poet.
Jan. ‘25: Year One: What worked, what didn’t, and what to expect
Editor Aiden Hunt looks back at our first year and discusses changes to Philly Poetry Chapbook Review in 2025.
Three Poems by Shelli Rottschafer
Read three poems by poet Shelli Rottschafer, our second biweekly poet of the Winter 2025 issue, along with a few words about the poem “Because We Remember.”