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Meet Our May Massachusetts Poet in the Spotlight: Heather Treseler
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 Heather Treseler, winner of the Frank O’Hara poetry prize (2016) and runner-up for the Missouri Review’s Editors’ Prize (2017), is an associate professor of English at Worcester State University, where she teaches creative writing and American literature.
Her poems and essays appear in Boston Review, Harvard Review, Iowa Review, Pleiades, Boulevard, The Worcester Review, The Missouri Review, Notre Dame Review, The Weekly Standard, and Southern Poetry Review, among other journals. She has also published essays in four scholarly books about postwar American poets Elizabeth Bishop and John Berryman, among others.
In 2017-18, she will be a Visiting Research Associate at the Brandeis University Women’s Studies Research Center, finishing a collection of poems that recasts stories from classical mythology.
Her work has received support from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
http://www.worcester.edu/Heather-Treseler/
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Poetic Profession
"Language is our organic instrument, the harp and the Harley Davidson, the delicate strings and the drive shaft, our means of reckoning a way forward. Without words, we are homeless, and I think of poems as offering us provisional shelter and provocation when we are most in need of what can be found there. "
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Persephone’s Postcard
The dead, they are always descending
like mustachioed men in Magritte’s
painting, so many bowler hats sailing
through a pale blue Belgian sky.
Heavy souls—freighted with evil,
leaden sorrows, or the insomniac
stare of bald regret—crash all night
against the stone gates of Hades
and stumble, wrecked, along the neon
strip mall on the far side of Styx,
a tinsel town where hawkers sell
the newbies musky perfumes,
condensed from their memories,
and half-hour holograms of any
one beloved thing: pets or dill pickles,
a niece or a ball glove, something
to cop one last recessional feel. All
night, unhappy shades rain on
the earthen roof of the root-cellar
boudoir I share with my husband
who promised, after snatching me
from behind, from the white flowers
of Nysa, that I’d grow used to traffic
of the dead, the continual thump
of souls in the night, above my head,
like the asphalt slap of a slowly
deflating basketball. He promised,
wielding his bird-tipped scepter,
to make in me another music in which
I’d hear myself without my jealous
mother’s cautionary antiphon. In truth,
though Hades stole me to his lair,
he gave me to my pleasure, enticing me
to be greedy, to take and take his potent
seed into my store until I glowed dark
with satisfactions. His lust and coy
protest at my departures came to mark
time, to cadence more than our seasonal
passions. Between the knock of souls
above and our tender, mock-Bartók below,
small sprays of earth fell almost nightly
from our ceiling. Most mornings, I wake
to the taste of summered grass, soil raked
through my hair, a snail burrowing
his glistening trail into loamy blankets
where Hades turns, each winter night,
for the press of my lips and obliging limbs
to receive him, his almost mythic want:
thanatos seeking eros to spring him to life
again, granting some vital answer
to death’s absolute value of Zed.
Once Demeter’s obedient daughter,
cosseted to her buxom pride, now wife
to a god of night who bears it all
away: I tell you, friend, in our green
unruly nocturnes, often mistaken
for raw shades’ rueful laughter, there’s
this reminder: Hades husbands
a fertile knowing beauty, but I
remain death’s regnant queen.
previously published in The Missouri Review, Spring 2017
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The Worcester Review is the annual literary magazine of The Worcester County Poetry Association. Since it's inaugural issue in 1972, it has evolved to celebrate the rich literary history of Central Massachusetts, enhance it with work from beyond that region, and serve as a conduit to promote that richness to a national audience. We are all-volunteer organization, independent from any university or other institution. All submissions are read by our editors; we don't prescreen submissions. You can learn more at our website: www.theworcesterreview.org
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Official media partner of Mass Poetry.
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