Puckerbrush Press

Of Claiming, Patricia Ranzoni writes: "Learning how I've descended from Mayflower passengers, then Cromwell's Scottish deportees, "witches" and clergy, revolutionary patriots and loyalists, farming and seafaring families, woodsmen and women, papermakers, schooled and unschooled musicians and artists from coastal, upriver, and downeast Maine; and how I was honored in the womb with Native lullabies by a Penobscot Nation Medicine Man, Ii see why I could no more keep from claiming the rhythms rising from eleven generations of life in Maine territory than I imagine any other creature long here could. That knowledge being the whole of my qualification to try to write this place as I have known it, one of many Maines, into poems. Having no greater hope for this collection (ordered here more by season and story than when written) than to help record and testify to my people's language and ways, I offer Claiming--from first native folks notes to recent, more practiced pieces--as regional voice: from as well as about.

Housekeeping of a kind
Once in a great while this house reeks
with remembrances of Wild Rose rage.
The payday cheap gallon kind.
The silent supper kind.
The don't pay attention to your father
when he's drinking kind.
The fist on the kitchen table pounding kind.
The maybe if I listen he'll like me kind.
The sinks into Kem-tone coverups
and scats along once-a-year-painted
battleship gray, worn to the black,
linoleum floor kind.
The wraps around frozen pipes and spills up
through cracked ceilings
and out leaking roofs kind.
The thirty years later
has to be reminded it was renovated out kind.

Such a stubborn stain.