Philip O'Brien

Susan Roney-O’Brien is one of the editors of the Worcester Review, and has been published in Prairie Schooner, Deros, Yankee Magazine, Beloit Poetry Journal, Potpourri and others.  She received her M.A. in Education from Anna Maria College, her M.F.A. from the Warren Wilson program, and she teaches at the Thomas Prince Middle School in Princeton, MA.

Susan’s collection of poems, Farmwife, won the William and Kingman Page Poetry Book Award and is published by Nightshade Press.
 

A sample of the poet’s work:

Click on one of the links below to hear the poem, as read by Susan during her OpenMike Poetry feature:
ASF audio ("streaming" audio, lower quality sound)   [alternate ASF audio]
MPEG-3 audio file (larger file, higher quality sound)
(more info on audio links)
 
My First Language
 

My first language was not words but
hesitations.  Caught beneath
the needle, song
skips, repeats a phrase,
slips back,
repeats—
each word, a fishbone
coughed into white bread
at my parents’ dinner table
where my father intones,
“Think twice, speak
once,” and I cannot
get my mouth to open
at all.

I sit, unable
to finish cold peas,
mashed potatoes,
silent.  By the time
I want to break
through the circle,
both words and most family
had gone—
my brother to homework,
sister to her room—
but Mother and I
waiting for me
to finish the food or ask
to be excused, face each other

from opposite sides of the table
in the dark.
 

                                          (as published in Potato Hill Poetry)

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     Notes on the audio links:  The audio links for the poem lead to different file-format versions of the same audio content.  The "ASF audio" link will generate "streaming"-type audio which will download and play at the same time (no waiting!)  This seems to work best with Internet Explorer.  To play "ASF" files you'll need to have installed version 6 (or later) of the Microsoft media player, which can be downloaded from www.microsoft.com.
     With some browsers, clicking on the "ASF audio" link will still bring up a "Save As..." window (even after the version 6 Microsoft media player is installed.)  If this happens, use the "Save As..." window to pick a location on your hard drive to save the file (which will end in ".asx") into; then find the file with the "Windows Explorer" and double-click on it to download and play the content.  (Granted, this is not the most elegant work-around; but it's still faster than waiting for the entire audio download to finish before playing it.)
     The "MPEG-3 audio file" link allows you to download a higher-quality MPEG-3 version of the audio (but you have to wait until the download is complete before playing the content.)  The version 6 Microsoft media player will play MPEG-3 files.  The Winamp player will also play these.  (The smaller-sized "alternate ASF audio" files can also be played using MPEG-3 players.)
     The "ASF" file was generated using the Windows Media Encoder found in the Media Tools which can be downloaded from www.microsoft.com.