The Long Apprenticeship

poems by

Malaika King Albrecht

~76 pages, $14 (+ shipping)

Projected Release Date: January 2027

An Advance Sale Discount price of $8.50 (+ shipping) is available HERE prior to press time. This price is not available anywhere else or by check. The check price is $12.50/book (which includes shipping & sales tax) and should be sent to: Main Street Rag, 12180 Skyview Drive, Edinboro, PA 16412. 

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Malaika King Albrecht is the author of five poetry collections, including The Stumble Fields (Main Street Rag, 2020), finalist for the 2021 Eric Hoffer Book Award. Her books have also received recognition from the Brockman-Campbell Book Awards and the Oscar Arnold Young Awards. She served as the inaugural Heart of Pamlico Poet Laureate and is the founding editor of Redheaded Stepchild, an online journal devoted exclusively to previously rejected poems. Her work has appeared in journals and anthologies including Verse Daily, Pedestal Magazine, SWWIM, and Asheville Poetry Review. She lives on Freckles Farm in Virginia with her family and several herds and flocks, and works as the programs and outreach specialist at Richmond County Public Library.

“What does the heart want?” Malaika King Albrecht asks in The Long Apprenticeship. It’s a question that echoes throughout this stunning collection. How complex, this business of learning how to be human and in relationship with ourselves and others. It’s part cartography, part dance, and a lot of balancing act, “mapping your way / without pretending you were never lost.” And isn’t this what life is, a long apprenticeship, with all its joy, sorrow, wonder, mystery? So come, learn from these poems how to “love any way.” ~Pat Riviere-Seel, author of Because I Did Not Drown

Ted Hughes once wrote that poets are usually at their best talking about wind. These poems take their cue from a horse’s whiney, made of “flesh and wind” and the implied thunder of hooves: poems of passion and wit and the hard love of life beginning appropriately with a 5-ear-old’s love of a horse, that creature most bound to us, heart to heart, if sometimes only in the thunder of dreams. Love poems. Survivor poems. Masterfully made. ~Michael Jennings, author of The Look Back, New and Selected Poems

“Do not surrender your right to breathe” the poet Albrecht tells us in these artfully constructed poems. This collection takes us through human journeys of family, medical strife, motherhood, nature, and memory. Through it all, the poet guides us to “learn how to lean into the forest.” The poetry takes us to fireweed and ferns, a rusty gate, and a braid of rivers. In each exquisite poem you will find “the music of cantering horses singing to the sky.” ~Connie Post, author of Prime Meridian and Between Twilight

The Long Apprenticeship captures so much that is often ungraspable. This collection praises the sublime and connects soul to soul by expansive imaginative verse. Malaika King Albrecht ushers in the broom sweeping a path home as self-portrait, myth, and unbridled truth… if its hard to sing with a piece of the universe caught in your throat… you can hum. The Long Apprenticeship explores the wilderness of the soul, conscious memory, the spirit as pilgrim, as well as erasure and chronicles of bewilderment and uncertainty. These poems are a vibrant invitation to interior spaces rooted in celebration, prayer, and the wonderment of endurance. ~Jaki Shelton Green

Is There Singing at the End of the World?

“While you live, shine / Have no grief at all / Life exists only for a short while / And time demands its toll.”

From Seikilos Epitaph, the world’s oldest known musical composition

They say one spring there will be no blessings.
No bees sleeping in the yellow throats
of daffodils. No spring peepers heralding rain.

Silence. I know there are ways to exit a body
that look like standing still. There should not
be ways to enter my body uninvited.

One daughter once asked, Should I hide
in a locker if there’s a shooter at school?
My other child legally changed their name,
and these words put them at risk.
We have had more mass shootings than days this year.

It’s eighty-five seconds to midnight on a doomsday clock,
and has been for years, but today is Valentine’s Day—
which means my sister will be busy
as a magistrate dealing with domestic violence.

I’ve written obituaries for several versions of this world—
perhaps it’s as my friend said after returning from war:
We are always at both ends of the gun.

When I listened to the oldest melody in the world—
Hurrian Hymn No. 6 written almost 4,000 years ago—
I thought about how long we’ve been writing the ending.

Oh, sacred geometry of dandelions, you’ve caught us
scratching our matchsticks on the sidewalk again.
If it’s hard to sing with a piece of the universe
caught in your throat,
you can hum.

Praise Resilience Even if it Isn’t a Cure

Some truths can’t find
words. They choose
the body instead:
rib, palm, the soft hinge

of the knee. Maybe
the tender butterfly
of your thyroid.
A childhood lodged

deep in a belly
with weight, cold
or an ache that changes
how we walk or sleep

or if we sleep. We learn
early how to hold
what can’t be dropped,
how to make a shape

with our breath
and call it a lock box
for the unspoken.
Until one day

a fist opens
like a bud in spring,
and with the unfolding,
a key in a newly

opened hand, even
as we know
survival isn’t the same
as being spared.

When a Doorway is an Ambush

for Tony, 82nd Airborne

When you’re in the shop,
the gritting sound

of the metal grinder
flinting fire into the air,

or the arc of light flashing blue
hot above the weld pool

to form a joint,
I stand outside the open doorway,

calling your name,
waiting for you to turn fully

and lift the dark shield
of your welding helmet,

to see me, not
an enemy, before I cross

the threshold toward you.