Welcome to National Poetry Month at The Other Pages. My name is Steve Spanoudis and I curate the series each year, with help and contributions from Bob Blair in Texas, Kashiana Singh in Chicago, and (Nelson) Howard Miller in Georgia. I’m coming to you from Coral Springs, Florida, on the eastern edge of the Everglades.

It’s generally easier to write free verse or blank verse than it is to write highly structured, rhymed poems, but forms with structure and repeating patterns can often be far more memorable and impactful. Sometimes, as in today’s piece by American poet Maria Nazos, the same structure can reinforce the message and resonate on many levels. Today’s poem was originally published 2019, in the Winter/Spring issue of TriQuarterly.

The title, Waitress in a Small Town Seaside Tavern, may suggest you are in for a rustic character sketch. Nope. That idea is thrown out after the first stanza. Maybe even after the first line. It starts out:

Maybe a surfboard hit her, you say.

Though folks whisper, her man beats her,

and there are no waves today.

Her eye is black and sealed like a shutter.

Clearly domestic abuse is the thing we’re going to talk about. Just from these four lines you understand that the locals are aware of the violence, but do nothing. You (the perhaps narrator) Try to think of a plausible excuse (the surfboard?) but your own conscience refutes that (“there are no waves today”) and the black, swollen eye is physical evidence that is hard to ignore.

Everything here in the first stanza sets up patterns that run throughout the piece. Those patterns of rhyme and repetition echo and reinforce all of these issues - the recurring cycle of violence, attempts to hide or dismiss or excuse the issue, despite all evidence to the contrary, and the painful fact that the victim is trapped in this cycle, just as her own eye is “sealed like a shutter.”

She continues:

We've all heard, her man, he beats her.

Still, we look at her and then look away,

her eye is sealed like a shutter.

(There are no waves this week; the sea is calm today.)

The second stanza both reshuffles and reinforces the first. You might “look at her and then look away,” but the repetition implies that neither the problem, nor this message, are going away. And things may appear calm (in parentheses) you already know that isn’t true. This structure is called a pantoum, and like a villanelle or a sestina, it uses a specific pattern of introduction and repetition to reinforce ideas. 

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(Waitress in a Small Town Seaside Tavern is © 2019 and © 2020 by Maria Nazos, all rights reserved worldwide, reproduced here by permission of the author.  Maria’s 2011 collection, A Hymn that Meanders is available from Amazon, and her 2016 chapbook, Still Life, is available from Dancing Girl Press.

You can learn more about her, and follow her blog on her website (https://www.marianazos.com/)