Prartho Sereno -- prartho@juno.com
website:  http://www.prarthosereno.com

Prartho wins Word Works Poetry Prize (read article)

Prartho Sereno was relieved when she discovered, somewhere in middle school, that someone else had noticed how much depended on the red wheelbarrow. It was just enough to push her over the edge, where she has scrambled through an odd labyrinth of life-hoops - psychologist, cab driver, head cook, single parent, housecleaner, palmist, phys. ed. teacher, Poet in the Schools - happily making poems along the way, buoyed by a sense of secret camaraderie.

Prartho is also a watercolor artist whose work has been chosen for book covers and CDs, and has an illustrated book of poems forthcoming from Mansarovar Press in October 2007: Causing a Stir: The Secret Lives and Loves of Kitchen Utensils . Her full-length poetry manuscript, Call from Paris, won The Word Works' Washington Prize, and will be released in January 2008. Her other publications include a chapbook of poems, Garden Sutra, a song/ poetry CD, Salt, and a book of essays, Everyday Miracles. She Prartho was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2005 and received a Marin Arts Council Individual Artist Grant in 2003. Her poems have appeared in such journals as the Atlanta Review, Comstock Review, Runes, Rattle, and Chautaugua Review.

Soup Spoon

If you listen, you might hear her laughing
up there, grandmother of the top drawer.
Laughing about the way life slipped from her
like a chicken noodle. In another time
she was the bright-eyed floozy of the dining room,
but her heart was too big, she gave it all away.
Now she spends long hours in the crumb-lined corner,
remembering her days with the delft blue plate--
how they ran away together and caused
such a stir, the cook jumped over the moon.

But he was fragile, the delft blue, fell to pieces
at a family bash, leaving her alone. Oh, she's
had her flings since then--taken out to serve
rice and beans or lift the green from an avocado.
And one autumn she went to the garden
to make holes for a hundred tulip bulbs.
But in recent years it's the grandchildren--
their small hands reaching for her on rainy afternoons.
She still gives all she has, her tarnished face
beneath the golden broth--a mirror to soften our world.

from Causing a Stir: the Secret Lives & Loves of Kitchen Utensils
Mansarovar Press, October 2007

Slow-Motion Mambo

  For our next spin round the sun
let's bring down the tempo,
commit ourselves to a slow sauté
of shuffle, swoop, and glide.

Let's fall in with the polar-bear's lumber,
the newt's wobble,
the sea turtle's heavy-lidded blink.

We will devote entire days
to sweeping the walk; give way
to beetles as they cross,
to leaves as they color and fall.

Let's tune ourselves to the wind harp,
shake out the sheets till they're fragrant
with jasmine, string up a hammock
under the blossoms and not get up
till the peaches are ripe.

Let's take back roads home,
moonwalk the children to school,
cobble a life of gaze and hum  
and back-stoop story.

We'll stop saving time and spend it--
lob in the towel and freefall through honey.
We will learn to wait till the mountains
bow down and the rivers come home.
Until the lines of our bodies are almost
erased, so that light wanders through us
as if we were Saturday morning.

from Call from Paris
The Word Works, January 2008

Juvenile Hall

Giovanni is not in poetry class today.
He's in lock-up , chants my wayward
Greek chorus, and for a moment
he's conjured up out of the hole,
standing there in his orange sweats,
all seventeen years, six and a half feet of him.
Cock-eyed grin, incandescent globe of hair,
hands dangling like shoes
tossed over a telephone wire.
Funny how the freedom riders
always gallop full-steam into lock-up.
The ones whose poetry we love,
who can turn the sky into rainbow trout,
serve it up with a hot sauce of snow.
Funny how his presence tastes more like wind
than a room with no mattress
or windows.
More like a gust of laughter
so sweet and clear even the guards
close their eyes to hear.

from Garden Sutra
Finishing Line Press, 2005

Call from Paris

Whistling down the wires
   that string together the worlds,
   your voice: It never stops
   raining here , you say. Paris
   is an ocean of chatter and smoke,

a sea of umbrellas. You tell me
   the phone booth is a glass-bottom
   boat, the Seine keeps flooding
   her banks, and last night
   at dinner you couldn't think

of a thing to say. You tell me
   You are part of something
   old now. You cannot believe
   the way the sky opened
inside the cathedral, the way

the chants lifted you up
   like a waterwheel, broke you
   into a thousand shining pieces  
   and sent you raining
   back to the world.

From Call from Paris
The Word Works, January 2008

 

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