The Zingara Project

Tag: Jeanne DeLarm-Neri

The Thin Veil
Duende generally refers to a spirit folklore and literally means “ghost” or “goblin” and believed to derive from the phrase dueño de casa, which means “owner of a house” in Spanish.

Today’ prompt is to write a poem that imagines what the ghosts of our ancestors discuss among themselves and what they spend their time doing on the other side. Situate them in a house — one they lived in or one they moved into, maybe even your house. Consider the following questions as you write:
- Do they have parties?
- Do they Quarrel?
- Are they happy, depressed, anxious?
- Do they concern themselves with the quotidian?
- The banal? Or only the sensational?
- What are their opinions on their living relatives? The condition of the world?
- What would they like to change?
- If they could be reincarnated, would they? What would they come back as? Why?
Poems for Inspiration:

“Where the Dead Go” by Denise Low, Zingara Poetry Review

“Do the Dead See?” by John Brugaletta, Zingara Poetry Review

“Alternate Life Number Two” by Jeanne DeLarm-Neri, Zingara Poetry Review
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April 14, 2025
Alternate Life Number Two by Jeanne DeLarm-Neri
In which girls whose poplin skirts
stand straight out on stiff crinolines
point my path up Haystack Mountain
where I will taste a boy’s tongue.

Before giving up my name, I scan
orange leaf trees below, for an outcast
with my hair. She lurks under that canopy
where sun fights to ray itself in.

I mask my face in a journey from hamlet
to outskirts of cities and their gates.
Stay in the trees, clad as I am
in patches of gleaned leather.

In which I sell or give away belongings:
wax flowers fit for bisque doll hands.
Push that box off my shoulder,
wake up atop a bed of pine needles.

I am not dead, but playing possum,
white skin a camouflage for meat
of mushrooms, rocks that glow in the gloam.
In which a lean-to serves as my home.

—

Jeanne DeLarm-Neri writes from a house built by a ship captain in 1853 in a Connecticut shore town, which she shares with her husband and antique dolls. Her poems have been published in various journals, one being nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She received an MFA from Fairfield University.
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April 6, 2018
Amber by Jeanne DeLarm-Neri
Before the boots wore out we found
a vast ridge of desert hills to cross,
villagers to meet, other hands to hold.
We talk like we did at fourteen,
tucked under blankets miles separated,
at three a.m. Back then, the phone cord
stretched to the end of its coil.
We stayed quiet as mice in walls
but not quiet at all – stop that scurrying!
Sleep now. The unconscious has surfaced.
Blood pumps DNA –it twists, dances.
We’re ancients, you and I.
The liquid of us received the fall of gnats
and wasps – their wings fell into us,
fossilized. These chunks of amber
once flowed free. We forget how blocks
form, how eons compress into the size
of postal cartons till we feel the rush
that made them, when sap oozed
and plasma shimmered in its puddles,
back when the exciting conduit transported
the minerals of what we’ve become.

—

Though Jeanne DeLarm-Neri has written poetry and stories for her entire life, she also earns a living in other fields, particularly as a bookkeeper at a private school, and as a vendor of antiques. Her poems and short fiction have been published in two anthologies (In Gilded Frame 2013 and Poems Of The Super-Moon, 2015), and several literary journals, one of which, Slipstream, nominated a poem for the Pushcart Prize. In 2014 and 2015 she was a contributor at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She’s currently working on a book of poems and a novel.
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August 24, 2016
Seeing a Picture of 2 Guys I Knew 40 Years Ago by Jeanne DeLarm-Neri
I knew them like fluid,
like we were all connected,
linked by our roaming molecules,
like we shared the same skin cells,
bumped arm to arm in sparks.
Like cigarettes lit, glowed, burned,
light one with the suck of the other.
You could smoke in the diner then,
and at night we sat in a bar
which burned down last year.
Drinks included crème de menthe.
Its sweet child body slipped down cool
and came up hot and undigested,
baby puke, no bits of stomach lining,
no pieces of the pulmonary system.
Though as I inspect the picture of these two,
slender, hair to the shoulders,
dressed in chinos and moccasins,
one smiling under a mustache
and the other worried, keys in hand,
I believe that a cardiologist
may detect a nick or two
missing from my aorta—
pieces of me left behind
on an Ohio lawn, should a machine
be invented that could measure
the weight of a moment lost.

—

Though Jeanne DeLarm-Neri has written poetry and stories for her entire life, she also earns a living in other fields, particularly as a bookkeeper at a private school, and as a vendor of antiques. Her poems and short fiction have been published in two anthologies (In Gilded Frame 2013 and Poems Of The Super-Moon, 2015), and several literary journals, one of which, Slipstream, nominated a poem for the Pushcart Prize. In 2014 and 2015 she was a contributor at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She’s currently working on a book of poems and a novel.
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April 20, 2016