issue 110
Verse WISCONSIN Founded by linda Aschbrenner AS FREE VERSE 1998
October 2012www.versewisconsin.org
$8
Features
Community inClusive: a PoetiCs to move us Forward
by margaret rozga
a Conversation with Frank X walker
CX dillhunt & drew dillhunt
At the Kitchen tAble: shoshauna shy talks with
mark kraushaar
Poetry by antler 7 linda asChbrenner
7 Peggy aylsworth 7 Jan ball 7 Jane-marie bahr 7 gerald beirne 7 Chloe
benJamin 7 linda benninghoFF 7 miChael biehl 7 kimberly blaeser 7 rose mary boehm 7 JeFF burt
7 thomas Cannon 7 robin ChaPman 7 Ching-in Chen 7 kelly Cherry 7 naomi CoChran 7 barbara Crooker 7 mary Cunningham 7 PhiliP daCey 7 holly day 7 sue dekelver 7
darren C. demaree 7 bruCe dethleFsen 7 riCk dinges 7 Joe Farley 7 mavis J. Flegle 7 Christa gahlman 7 daniel gallik 7
abby gambrel 7 hanne gault 7 david graham 7 taylor graham 7 barbara gregoriCh 7 adam halbur 7 karen haley 7 william wright harris 7 george held 7 lowell Jaeger 7 gary Jones 7 glenn kletke 7 mark kraushaar 7 riChard kresal 7 miChael kriesel 7 mike lane
JaCkie langetieg 7 estella lauter 7 tom lavelle 7 Janet leahy 7 norman leer 7 John lehman 7 JeF leisgang 7 Judy lent 7 maryellen
letarte 7 Pam lewis 7 sandra J. lindow 7 Joe massingham 7 P. C. moorehead 7 bruCe niedt 7 uChe ogbuJi 7 ann Penton 7 nanCy
Petulla 7 Charles Portolano 7 summer Qabazard 7 harlan riChards 7 Jenna rindo 7 Jeannie e. roberts 7 tess romeis 7 ChuCk rybak 7 g. a. sCheinoha 7 e. m. sChorb 7 anne shaw
7 Peggy shumaker 7 hal sirowitz 7 steven d. stark 7 a’yara stein 7 Carole stone 7 molly sutton kieFer
7 len tews 7 elizabeth tornes 7 Peggy troJan 7 Carolyn vargo 7 Frank X walker 7 mary
wehner 7 greg weiss 7 ed werstein 7 marie shePPard williams 7
2 Verse wisconsin #110 October 2012
Maybe most of you know that women’s collections of poetry, while they might see the light of day more easily than in the past, get reviewed less frequently when published, and, when reviewed, often by women, appear in less prominent/prestigious venues than men’s books. If you haven’t heard of Vida, an organization founded to support women’s writing, you can learn about it at vidaweb.org. One of the most important contributions Vida has made for the last several years running is “The Count,” which tracks statistics on male and female writers, reviewers, and books reviewed in high end publications. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the cards are stacked overwhelmingly in favor of men at these places—The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, Poetry, Paris Review, The Nation, etc. To hear some of their editors talk, you’d think women didn’t write much at all, especially not literary criticism.
So here are some facts about VW’s book reviews, which counter the idea that women don’t review or write criticism. For issues 105-109 (April, 2011-July, 2012) we published 122 reviews (that’s a lot of books reviewed, by the way). Of that total, 63—just over 50%—were books by women, which certainly bucks the trends documented by Vida. Maybe it takes women editors to publish reviews of women’s books? Also counter to Vida’s trends is the split in VW between male/female among reviewers, who are overwhelmingly women. In a typical issue we publish 17-18 reviewers, only 2 or 3 of whom are men. We’re delighted to publish reviews by women, but we’re concerned about what that imbalance suggests and why it exists. Where are the male reviewers? It’s not because our poetry community is more female. The balance of poets who submit and publish in VW hovers around 50/50. Is it because the men who write reviews—and there are plenty among our published poets who do—reach higher to publish them? Is it a compensation issue? At higher end venues, reviewers tend to get paid. At VW (and others like us), they do not. Is it the case that men don’t review unless compensated? At Rattle (which, like VW, also pays reviewers one print copy and runs reviews online), there’s a healthy mix of women/men reviewers and books reviewed, but it’s a more prestigious venue than VW and, perhaps not coincidentally, has a male editor.
No one that we know of is keeping a comparable “count” of reviews about and by writers of color. Our own record on representing a wider diversity of authors is not what we would like it to be. Of those 122 reviews, 11 books were written by non-white authors. We’d very much like to include a broader range of reviews about and by African American, Latina/o, Native, and Asian American authors, and we welcome those reviews from all of you. Besides helping to create a more open, welcoming space for all poets, wider knowledge will, we believe, benefit all of us as artists and individuals.
We both review for VW and sometimes elsewhere. Besides providing a service to other poets, reviews help us think about a book and learn from it. Your work becomes a window into my work and into poetry. Books come to VW from poets and publishers around the U.S., not just in Wisconsin. You can review someone whose work you’ve followed for years or never heard of. We welcome reviews of “Books Received,” as well as others. Publishers will often send a review copy if specifically requested. Writing reviews is one of the easiest ways to support other poets, while improving our own poetic craft. Creating a venue that other poets and publishers know as a reliable source of thoughtful criticism is also, we believe, one more way to raise the profile of Wisconsin’s poets. We invite all of our readers and poets to review. We’d especially like to see more of the men we publish writing reviews, and we invite all of you to read and review a greater
Editors’ Notes? ?
Co-EditorsSarah Busse
Wendy Vardaman
Advisory BoardLinda Aschbrenner
B. J. BestCathryn Cofell Ron CzerwienTom Erickson
FabuDavid GrahamAngela Rydell
Marilyn L. Taylor
Mem
ber o
f
Council of Literary Magazines & Presses
Prin
ted
by Th
ysse
Pri
nter
s, In
c., O
rego
n, W
I.
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Books Reviewed Online
Submission guidelines can be found at versewisconsin.org. Please send us a review copy of your recently published book or chapbook! Join us on Facebook for announcements & news.
Karren LaLonde Alenier, On a Bed of Gardenias: Jane & Paul Bowles, Kattywompus Press, 2012
Stephen Anderson, Chris Austin, Paul Enea, Elliot O. Lipchik, Steve Pump, Portals and Piers, Sunday Morning Press, 2012
Mark Belair, Walk With Me, Parallel Press, 2012David Blackey, Odessa, 2011Vittorio Carlie, A Passion for Apathy, The Press
of the 3rd Mind, 2012Jim Chapson, Scholia, Arlen House, 2011Lisa Cihlar, The Insomniac’s House, dancing girl
press, 2011Brendan Constantine, Calamity Joe, Red Hen
Press, 2012Maryann Corbett, Breath Control, David
Robert Books, 2012Fabu, In Our Own Tongues, University of
Nairobi Press, 2011Adam Fell, I am Not a Pioneer, H_NGM_N
Books 2011Eric Greinke, Conversation Pieces, Selected
Interviews, Presa:S:Press, 2012Barbara Gregorich, Jack and Larry, Philbar
Books [available through Amazon], 2012Ann Iverson, Art Lessons, Holy Cow Press, 2012Lowell Jaeger (ed.), New Poets of the American
West, Many Voices Press, 2010Lowell Jaeger, Suddenly, Out of a Long Sleep,
Arctos Press, 2008Lowell Jaeger, We, Main Street Rag, 2010Georgia Jones-Davis, Blue Poodle, Finishing
Line Press, 2012Athena Kildegaard, Bodies of Light, Red
Dragonfly, 2011Athena Kildegaard, Cloves & Honey, Nodin
Press, 2011Mark Kraushaar, The Uncertainty Principle
[Winner of the 2010 Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize], The Waywiser Press, 2011
Mike Lane, They Can Keep the Cinderblock, Exot Books, 2012
W. F. Lantry, The Language of Birds, Finishing Line Press, 2012
Mokasiya, Climbing a Mesa, Poetry from Sedona, rivertink.com, 2012
Ron Riekki, She Took God: A Memoir in 34 Poems, Gypsy Daugher ebook, 2012
Margaret Rozga, Though I Haven’t Been to Baghdad, Benu Press, 2012
Allegra Jostad Silberstein, Through Sun-glinting Particles, Parallel Press, 2012
Jeanine Stevens, Sailing on Milkweed, Cherry Grove Collections, 2012
Margo Taft Stever, The Hudson Line, Main Street Rag, 2012
Richard Taylor, Fading Into Bolivia, Accents Press, 2011
Scott Wiggerman & David Meischen (ed),Wingbeats: Exercises & Practice In Poetry, Dos Gatos Press, 2011
Gary Young, Bird of Paradise, Parallel Press, 2011
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Books Received January-April 2012 Publisher & author links available online
Tiel Aisha Ansari, High Voltage Lines, Barefoot Muse Press, 2012
Charles Bane, Jr., The Chapbook, Curbside Splendor, 2011
Catherine Barnett, The Game of Boxes, Graywolf Press, 2012
Ron Carlson, Room Service, Red Hen Press, 2012Robert Cooperman, The Lily of the West, Wind
Publications, 2012Robert Cooperman, Little Timothy in Heaven, March
Street Press, 2011Paola Corso, Once I Was Told the Air Was Not For
Breathing, Parallel Press, 2012Alice D’Alessio, Conversations With Thoreau, Parallel
Press, 2012Nick Demske, Skeetly Deetly Deet, Strange Cage, 2012Franki Elliott, Piano Rats, Curbside Splendor, 2011Chris Emery, The Departure, Salt, 2012Nausheen Eusuf, What Remains, Longleaf Press, 2011Dana Gioia, Pity the Beautiful, Graywolf Press, 2012Albert Goldbarth, Everyday People, Graywolf Press, 2012Nathalie Handal, Poet in Andalucia, University of
Pittsburgh, 2012George Held, After Shakespeare: Selected Sonnets, Červená
Barva Press, 2011Karla Huston & Cathryn Cofell, Split Personality,
Sunnyoutside, 2012David W. Landrum, The Impossibility of Epithalamia,
White Violet Press, 2011
W. F. Lantry, The Structure of Desire, Little Red Tree Publishing, 2012
Bradley Lastname, Insane in the Quatrain, The Press of the 3rd Mind, 2011
Carol Levin, Stunned by the Velocity, Pecan Grove Press, 2012
Micah Ling, Settlement, Sunnyoutside, 2012Leslie Adrienne Miller, Y, Graywolf Press, 2012Tom Montag, That Woman, Red Kite Press, 2012James Pollock, Sailing to Babylon, Able Muse Press, 2012D. A. Powell, Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys,
Graywolf Press, 2012Jo Sarzotti, Mother Desert, Graywolf Press, 2012Noel Sloboda, Circle Straight Back, Červená Barva Press,
2012Cynthia Spencer, In What Sequence Will My Parts Exit,
Plumberries Press, 2011Chelsea Tadeyeske, Heeldragger, Plumberries Press, 2012Jennifer Tamayo, Red Missed Aches, Switchback Books,
2011Lisa Vihos, The Accidental Present, Finishing Line Press,
2012Liu Xiaobo, June Fourth Elegies (trans. Jeffrey Young),
Graywolf Press, 2012Kevin Young, The Grey Album: On the Blackness of
Blackness, Graywolf Press, 2012Saadi Youssef, Nostalgia, My Enemy (trans. Sinan Antoon
and Peter Money), Graywolf Press, 2012
Books Received May-August 2012 Publisher & author links available online
Verse Wisconsin publishes poetry and serves the community of poets in Wisconsin and beyond. In fulfilling our mission we:
• showcase the excellence and diversity of poetry rooted in or related to Wisconsin• connect Wisconsin's poets to each other and to the larger literary world • foster critical conversations about poetry • build and invigorate the audience for poetry
mission statementBooks Reviewed & Noted Online
Grace Marie Grafton, Whimsy, Reticence & Laud: Unruly Sonnets, Poetic Matrix Press, 2012, by Trena Machado
Eric Greinke, Conversation Pieces, Selected Interviews, Presa:S:Press, 2012, by Tim McLafferty
Charles Portolano, All Eyes on US: A Trilogy of Poetry, Rockford Writers Guild (RWG) Press, 2008, by Estella Lauter
Charles Portolano, The little, lingering, white, lies we allow ourselves to live with, As Is Arts Press, by Steven C. Levi
Cecilia Rodríguez Milanés, Everyday Chica, Long Leaf Press, 2010, by Lucia Cherciu
Elizabeth Savage, Grammar, Furniture Press, 2012, by Sherry Chandler
Thomas R. Smith, Wisconsin Spring: Poems and an Essay, Lost Music Press, 2011, by Estella Lauter
Theresa Malphrus Welford (ed.), The Cento: A Collection of Collage Poems, Red Hen Press, 2011, by Chloe Yelena Miller
Scott Wiggerman & David Meischen (eds.), Wingbeats: Exercises & Practice In Poetry, Dos Gatos Press, 2011, by R. A. Davis
Review-Essay by Wendy Vardaman on books by:Robin Chapman, the eelgrass meadow, Tebot Bach, 2011Ching-In Chen, The Heart’s Traffic, a novel in poems,
Arktoi Books, 2009Fabu, In Our Own Tongues, University of Nairobi Press,
2011Nikky Finney, Head Off & Split, Northwestern University
Press, 2011Matthea Harvey, Of Lamb, paintings by Amy Jean Porter,
McSweeney’s Books, 2011Karla Huston & Cathryn Cofell, Split Personality,
sunnyoutside press, 2012Amy King, I Want to Make You Safe, Litmus Books, 2011Noelle Kocot, The Bigger World, Wave Books, 2011Julie L. Moore, Slipping Out of Bloom, 2010Jennifer Tamayo, Red Missed Aches/ Read Missed Aches/
Red Mistakes/ Read Mistakes, Switchback Books, 2011Lesley Wheeler, Heterotopia, Barrow Street Press, 2010
4 Verse wisconsin #110 October 2012
When I visited the Zora Neale Hurston Museum in Eatonville, Florida, several years ago, I could only imagine what Eatonville might have looked like shortly after the Civil War, at the time of its founding as the first African American town in the United States. For Harlem Renaissance writer and anthropologist Hurston, Eatonville was a “city of five lakes, three croquet courts, three hundred brown skins, three hundred good swimmers, plenty guavas, two schools, and no jail-house” (qtd. in Trubek). It was, according to writer Anne Trubek, a place where “black people lived unseen and unexamined by white people.”
Today Eatonville is less isolated. An exit from Interstate 4 put me right into the west central part of town. But I found at the eastern edge of the town what seemed to be a remnant of another era. On the east side of East Street, where Eatonville’s Kennedy Boulevard becomes Maitland, Florida’s Lake Avenue, there is a continuous low wall spanning the edge of the yards of the Maitland homes. You can see this wall on a close-up view in Google maps. It’s not an ugly wall as walls go. It’s not a tall prison wall topped by barbed or razor wire. When the wall was constructed and why, I could not discover. If the people of Eatonville and Maitland mutually concluded like the neighbor does in Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall,” that “good fences make good neighbors,” then my apologies to all. But for me, an outsider and a long-time civil rights activist, the voice of Frost’s narrator rang truer: “Something there is that does not love a wall.” Since the wall separates an African American town from its largely white neighbor, I had to wonder. It seems to symbolize exclusion and enforced separation.
Let me risk appropriating this symbol and transporting it in a minor key to the subject of this essay: the question of the lingering tendency to wall off “political” poetry from supposedly non-political, ego-centric poetry, and the lingering tendency to assume the latter is necessarily in a superior class to the former. In other words, if it’s political, can it be poetic? If it’s poetic, does it not have to shun the political? Are the two categories mutually exclusive?
First to consider definitions, what do we mean when we talk about the “political” in terms of literary content? And, of course, what is poetry?
Poetry rarely works within the terms of the narrowest definition of “political,” that is, the process of choosing one candidate for public office over another. More applicable is the term’s reference to watershed public events and to policy matters, especially policy matters that affect the well-being of people and of the world generally. Policy gets formulated in abstract and legal terms, often dry, sometimes incomprehensible, generally removing any trace of image from the language so that we do not see. Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell, for example, advocated for the passage of a state law that required women seeking abortions to undergo a “transvagin*l probe” without himself knowing what those terms signified. Other examples of political language that hide
reality abound: separate but equal; apartheid; incursion; correctional institution; no child left behind; defense of marriage; Senate Bill 10.
Insofar as poets are seers, we observe specifics in our lives, some of them the impact of poorly chosen policy, and we craft word images to express what we see. Of course, political commentary in prose can translate abstractions into concrete language and can give examples of individuals who are affected in particular ways by public policy. Sometimes it does so eloquently. To the extent it is eloquent, it is often called, yes, “poetic.”
Practicing poets work at their craft. Some develop the skill to take a step further the courtship of beautiful language and social concern. They are attuned to the music of language, the power of form, the way words look on a page, and they aim to marry the beauty and emotional power of language to their deepest and most profound concerns, including social, civic, or political concerns. Craft and compassion reinforce each other beautifully in Gwendolyn Brooks’ images of post-World War II segregated Chicago. Both craft and compassion are what make Lois Roma-Deeley’s signature poem “Apologizing for the Rain” a powerful expression of women trained to shoulder all the blame. Both craft and compassion make Yusef Komunyakaa’s “Facing It” with its depiction of reflections in the granite of the Vietnam Memorial so compelling in conveying the impact of the Vietnam War. Images that arise from the poet’s eye and heart attuned to political, social, and community concerns and shaped by the poet’s skillful hand have given us much excellent poetry.
Whether or not we intend our images and word music to affect a change in policy, the words become part of the experience of our audiences who are, we hope, somehow enriched, somehow empowered. At the heart of my poetic practice is the belief that we are more with poetry in our lives than we are without it. We are more with each other than we are isolated and alone.
The lonely poet working in isolation is an image ingrained in our culture. And it is true that because writing poetry requires concentration, it may be solitary. Many poets begin writing poems after the isolating experience of a failed romance. But all these factors do not mean that poetry must be focused on the isolated individual. Poets, like other people, have social networks and concerns: jobs,
friends, family, civic issues, and histories. Poets can and do write about individual experiences. They can and do write about falling in and out of love, about the role of art, about facing old age and death. But if poetry, defined most simply, is the art of using language most resourcefully, then why limit poetry to a handful of subjects? Writing that taps into a wide array of the resources of language ought to be free, will free itself, to explore a wide array of topics. Poetry can be egocentric, but it need not be exclusively egocentric. The “I” may be neither the center of the poet’s world nor the center of the poetic
Community Inclusive: A Poetics to Move Us Forwardby Margaret Rozga
Poetry can be egocentric, but it need not be exclusively egocentric. The “I” may be neither the center of the poet’s world
nor the center of the poetic world. A poet may find inspiration in others and in action, as well as in solitary contemplation.
VerseWISCONSIN.org 5
world. A poet may find inspiration in others and in action, as well as in solitary contemplation. Rather than be exclusively egocentric, poetry can be community inclusive.
People who share my views struggle to come up with a term that acknowledges a wider array of poetic interests and avoids the controversies set off by pairing the word “political” with the word “poetry.” The organizer at Woodland Pattern Book Center came up with the term “civic poetry” to use in the title of a workshop I led there. Split This Rock, a national poetry organization that sponsors a major poetry festival in Washington DC, identifies itself as an organization focused on “poetry of provocation and witness.” What these terms try to do is to reach beyond the narrow limits of the poetic tradition and practice we inherited from the first half of the twentieth century.
What we’ve inherited is a pervasive sense that the proper subject of poetry is poetry, that at some level and with some variation in the degree of subtlety and metaphoric approach, poetry is what poems should be talking about. George Orwell wrote in 1941 that writers from the 1890s onward focused on technique. T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Virginia Woolf “were far more interested in technical innovations than in any moral or meaning or political implication that their work might contain. The best of them all, James Joyce, was a technician and very little else, about as near to being a ‘pure’ artist as a writer can be.” These writers are still among the most frequently taught.
Wallace Stevens is another such twentieth century poet, an important one, cited in 1975 by critic Harold Bloom as “the best and most representative American poet of our time” (qtd. in “Wallace Stevens”). There is much to admire in Steven’s work, his descriptive skill, for example, and yet as poet Louise Bogan notes, his world is “strangely empty of human beings” (qtd. in “Wallace Stevens”). In fact, Stevens advanced the argument for an abstract, egocentric poetry. He wrote that “Life is not people and scene, but thought and feeling. The world is myself. Life is myself ” (qtd. in “Wallace Stevens”).
Such a solipsistic world may be rendered skillfully, perhaps even beautifully, but it is not the world in which I live, and so its artifice fails to engage me. Though I admire Stevens’ precision, I want to apply such precision to a wider range of topics. Mine is a world of students and colleagues, movements for social justice and human beings reading, writing, making plans, making friends and sometimes enemies, making art, planning parties, planning protests, engaging with the natural world and questioning their role both in that world and in the social worlds of which they are a part. Such challenges and excitement deserve being represented with all the resources of the language and all the skill of the poet.
To build a wall around poetry, to build a wall around certain subjects deemed worthy of poetry is to erect an artificial barrier that at best raises questions. At worst constructing walls to protect a supposedly “pure” and exclusive poetry from being debased may be what has led to the marginalization of poetry, to the loss of audiences beyond the select few. Poetry sales leave much to be desired. According to Laura Moriarity of Small Press Distributors, most poetry titles “sell between 50 and 250 copies per year” (qtd. in Nichols). But a fuller depiction of the contemporary world, not the accountant’s bottom line, is my concern here.
The confessional and the ethereally poetic are scarcely the whole poetic community. If we take down the walls that keep us from seeing, identifying with, and connecting to other poetries, we will realize how extensive, even within the Anglo-American tradition,
that wider community is: from the heroic Beowulf, to Chaucer’s fallible nuns, priests, and other pilgrims on their Canterbury trek with all the baggage of their lives, to Shakespeare who made dramatic poetry out of history, to England’s traditions of poets laureate including John Dryden who wrote the political satire “Absalom and Achitophel” and Alfred Lord Tennyson who wrote “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” to the work of Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, Wendell Berry, and Rita Dove, to the surge of public interest in poetry following the September 11th attacks in New York, to the outpouring of poems about the 2011 Wisconsin spring protests, so ably collected in Verse Wisconsin’s “Main Street” issue.
If it’s poetic, does it have to shun the political? If it’s political, can it be poetic? If it is ego-centered, does it get a bump up in poetic rank? These questions are a remnant of an earlier era, an outlived set of values and preferences.
Where in the world is poetry today? I’d like to see it everywhere. It’s already jumped the wall, and gone onto buses, into vending machines, onto the stage and into the streets. I see poetry moving beyond the exclusively ego-centric to become more community inclusive. Where it will go from here is the new question. As poets and as readers, we engage with this question every time we craft a poem and every time we choose one. As we think about and articulate reasons for our choices, we take the next steps towards a poetics in keeping with Wisconsin’s motto. Forward.
Works Cited
Komunyakaa, Yusef. “Facing It.” Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1993: 159. Print.
Nichols, Travis. “If No One Can Find My Book, Does It Exist?” Features. Poetry Foundation, 2011. Web. June 9 2012. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/179636
Orwell, George.”The Frontiers of Art and Propaganda.” George Orwell. Rutgers University. 1999. Web. June 9 2012. http://orwell.ru/library/articles/frontiers/english/e_front
Roma-Deeley, Lois. “Apologizing for the Rain.” NorthSight. Scottsdale: Singularity Press, 2008: 47. Print.
“Wallace Stevens 1879-1955: Biography.” Poems and Poets. Poetry Foundation, 2011. Web. June 9 2012. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/wallace-stevens
Trubek, Ann. “Zora’s Place.” Humanities 32.6 (November/December 2011). Web. June 9 2012. http://www.neh.gov/humanities/2011/novemberdecember/feature/zoras-place
The Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets, one of the oldest American poetry societies, sponsors local poetry events, semi-annual conferences, contests, and a yearly anthology.
WFOP offers Wisconsin poets opportunities for fellowship and growth.
See wfop.org for further information.
wiPoets
6 Verse wisconsin #110 October 2012
Autumn Meditation Look at fear directlyand pity the little mousegnawing in your gut. Now let him gorunningthrough your fingertips. Hold himon your lap,like a little Buddha. Be kind to yourself, he says.Winter is approaching. * Observe the morning mistlifting slowlyfrom the pewter lakelike an organza veil, an eagleforaging in the sky,a frieze of wingsagainst azure. In bird-silence,and mosquito-silence,watch the forest unfurlher brilliant autumn dresses. * Where have you been?says the creaky old poplarleaning over the road. It’s been monthssince I’ve seen you and your little dogwalking down this long black ribbon. You used to walkpast me every day, watchingthe clouds turn pink at dusk. The birds are molting,itchy for winter.They leave feather gifts in grassy tufts and brambles.They grace my branchesless and less these days. Prepare to shiver—I will be here with youall winter long.
Through blizzardsand ice storms,I will stand strong. My leaves are wavingin the sun, in the wind,a thousand golden hands. The smell of wood smokeperfumes the air.Welcome back to autumn,welcome home. —ElizabEth tornEs, lac dE FlambEau, Wi
A Town Where There Are No People
The path which sang home,canary yellow in my ear, spidery thin and opulent.
If I had been shakedown of wind, the lust of frost ghosts of the fleshin the years between –
transform I so when I brokeinto the town, the sounds of wings ahead.
I looked to a sky smooth as ice. Nobody to greet me. Okay,the doors were all open, the tables present and counted.
I counted myself weary in the town square,beside a fountain stained with sh*t.
Bowed my head,and prayed, don’t leave.
Don’t leave meyet.
—ching-in chEn, milWaukEE, Wi
VerseWISCONSIN.org 7
Insensate?
Who are we to say?A Jesuit priest
du Chardinwas nearly unfrocked
for his belief thatall things, stones, plants, all
have consciousness.
I had an umbrella tree once:big spreading leaves.
Little when Igot it, it
grew for me likecrazy, became
much tallerthan I was.
It committed suicide.
For me.Instead of me.
I took it with me
to a new placea new love
a big whitemagnificent
abode. Well.I hated that place.
It was too white.It was too clean.
The new love wasn’t
working either.
I thought I’ddie
there. Andmy umbrella tree
did die.
One by oneits great spreading leaves
turned brown,droppedoff. I got
the message.One day I sawed
it off at the dirt-line.The next day I
moved out.
I still have the stick.And I’m still
alive.
—mariE shEppard Williams, minnEapolis, mn
In the Beaten Rice Factory
Nobody knows we are here.When you wound down the canary road, I saw you arise from war. no oracle but song no message but fragment
A mother knows a son’s bruised body.
over-ripe peach dropping to matted grass slowly
a place of rest your right eye a wren seeing thewind
your elbow after the promised shoulder a mother behind the doorremoving the soulof the grain one by one down the chute
—ching-in chEn, milWaukEE, Wi
Downsizing
Our green factories have closed for the season.We’ve laid off all the chlorophyll, let the carotene take over, putting in one last shift as the days shorten and chill. Supple once, our walls and stems crinkle at the edges, turn crisp and brown. We hang on till November winds strip us from security, whip us through the frosty air. Unemployed, we assemble on the ground, a crunchy crowd of castoffs waiting for the inevitable, for the ones who will sweep us up, herd us into piles to be bagged, shredded, vacuumed, or God forbid, even burned. But we are expendable, and the trees are already rebuilding , waiting out the winterfor a new generation, a company of greenhorns,young upstarts who will restart productionand cast their shadows against the necessary sun.
—brucE niEdt, chErry hill, nJ
8 Verse wisconsin #110 October 2012
f*ckushima
(before)I spend the winterpicking my wayover iced surfaceslike a geishanavigating cobbled Kyoto streetson eight inch geta clogsmaking her way to a rendezvouswith Spring (after)Fingerless Sedna broods below the Arctic icerolling with the slow slush oceanf*ckushima, now, and she has no fingers to giveand wouldn’t if she had Nu Kua, who weaves the fabric of the universehas begun, Penelope-like, the slow unraveling As Mother Kali’s red road of a tongueunfurls down her chinOn her necklace of skulls there is alwaysroom for many more The Old Women are tired of this
—tEss romEis, cEdarburg, Wi
The Birth
As it happened, the Lord was not born in a mangerin the middle of an empty field coveredwith a light dusting of the purest whitest snow,surrounded by angels and wise menand a barn full of docile beasts of burdenwith proud parents looking on,
but was actually born in a noisy, overcrowded stablein the middle of a well-traveled deserton the outskirts of townjust past the marketwhere hookers tried to con married menout of their grocery moneyfor something they’d get at home anyway,a group of muggers and thieves looking on, chaste for the day.
and so it came that the Lord Jesus Christ was not bornin a noisy stable, cattle lowing in His ears, chickens cackling underfoot,drunk father passing out cigars to the assembled massof poker players he owed money to, mother knocked out on home brew(“Yes I know God said there’d be no pain but it ain’t you lying here,dammit, I really need something now”) but was actually birthed underwater
in a clear glass hot tub in Soviet Russia, mother nude save a white clothdraped across her forehead, proud father looking onworriedly, watching Son burst from Motherin a cloud of slow-moving blood, watching Sonbob to the water’s surface and take Hisfirst breath, His first scream, His first sipof Mother’s sparse colostreum-yellowed milk.
and so it came that the Lord Jesus Christ was not bornin the sterile confines of a twentieth-century first world hospital,white-clad attendants looking on and monitoring every breath, everyheartbeat, every muscle spasm in and out of place, but instead was broughtscreaming into the burnt-out remains of a South American battlefield,streamers of blackened Spanish moss clinging to the dying pillarsof napalmed cypress and magnolia, Mother stumbling
running
falling,
Father pulling “Come on, come on, I can hear them they’re still too close”Mother “The baby is being born now I can’t” scarlet and emerald parrotspause cackling to flutter low over Couple huddledin canopying low-hung branchesjavelins snuffle out of underbrush tusks lowered towards oncoming soldiersjaguar leaves rotting carcass of deer bloating thirty feet above the groundto stand guardover labor pains breath coming too fast soldiers stopping at clearingto stand guns lowered at ease curiousoffering K-rations and rifle clips to Parents in homage of the Son.
—holly day, minnEapolis, mn
The Turtles of Doom The turtles of doomAre slowly crawling towards us.The man with the sandals and robeKeeps shouting and pointing, But the crowd just nods,And says, ”Hell, that’s a turtle,I’ll be long gone when it gets here.” A youngster points and says“Daddy, can I keep him?” The pipe smoking business suited scionOf a nineteen fiftiesTelevision perfect familyReplies, “Yes, son, you can,You sure can.”
—JoE FarlEy, philadElphia, pa
VerseWISCONSIN.org 9
when you get old old ageis a placewhereyou willgo alonea precursorto death,a longwhite roomwhereyou siton a benchwearinga hospital gown. it is coldand no onelistens to youwhen you sayyou arestill alive
—JoE FarlEy, philadElphia, pa
Rope-Walk
Is it against the law to benomad? Bindle, bundle done up with rope. I’ll meet you behindthe used car lot. Billboards climb the hill that sheep once roamed. Financing Assistance. Feedlot.No Guarantee On Birds. We’ll walk the trestle past the shelter. A field for letting: circle of ropes below the mansion (Another Quality Home); rams at auction. When the last is sold, a feast fit for Gargantua, groaningtables. How far can a gypsy travel in five centuries? How far to our Sunset with a View? Night-fall, sound of traffic never stops. Nomad no-man. On the horizon, a caravan headed for a corner hay-shed, starred ceiling outside a ragged cottage, roof bound in bog-grass, corded down with ropes, a stone at the end of each. That one’s at the end of his.Last rope to a drowning man.
—taylor graham, placErvillE, ca visit VW Online for audio by this author
Flash Mob at Christmas I daydream in this run-down mall—greasy food court, failing stores,shoppers—gobbling pizza, guzzling Arizona tea. Those fragrant trees and little hands setting tinsel on each branchadrift in years gone by—I drank Santa’s beer,ate pretzels and the carrots for the red nosed deer. Listen! Someone’s singing ALLELUIA! And there’s another. ALLELUIA!and another.Who am I with tears in my eyes slipping into Christmas Carols. Quiet—voices gone—singers turn to shopping in the mall.Spritzed with Alleluia I buy a coffee, a cookie, and a gift for anyone at all.
—maryEllEn lEtartE, lunEnbErg, ma
random she’s randomyour daughter if I were you I’d sell herI saw this ad: we buy your kids why can’t we loveour kids on purpose?
—rosE mary boEhm, lima, pEru visit VW Online for audio by this author
The Myth of Sisyphus
I’m a leaf blower and no matter how hard I blow there’s always one m r o e .
—stEvEn d. stark.
10 Verse wisconsin #110 October 2012
On the First Snowfall
Coming across a snowflake ornament at Fleet Farm delights me. In honor of winter, I choose to put the clear thick plastic snowflake powered by sunlight on a slender aluminum pole to slide down a hole I drilled into the deck railing. I hope the flake, fading from green to blue to red to white, will glimmer for passersby glancing through the black branches along the road. For all the cold nights ahead, I am going to sit in my rocking chair and look out my patio door, watching for changes in the light.
—JanE-mariE bahr, mEnomoniE, Wi
Want
3:59 am on the day after saying thanksthey shift feet in the rain, faces pressingthe cold pane, desiring what’s just inside:commodities shimmering with promise,colored pictures now comfortingly real.
With a glance at watches and cells,they tongue the donut crumbs, crumple cups,paw the sacred ground, readying for the rush.When the shaking clerk looses the door,they are already moving.
The crowd surges past glass walls toward treasurenever before advertised in this box of boxes,its shelves heavy with plastic toys and tools.Sighing, exultant, it hurtles past electronics, home décor, footwear;past doorbusters, manager’s specials, sale blowouts,past today’s bargains, tomorrow’s garage sales.
When in unison the wailing, insomniac mob turns its frenzied gazeon the biggest bargains of any season, hands still cranberry-stickyflutter almost reverently; eyes dulled by screen glare ignite.Breath stillsas shoppers halt, rapt as immigrants surveying their new home.
Heaped before them is universal health care. Social services.Enough asphalt to fill every pothole in Detroit. Tax relief. Fair wages.That golden retirement.An end to war, hunger, fear. The Four Freedoms. It’s all there,limitless, requiring no rainchecks.
And passing around the goods to one another,they murmur how strange, how right it feels to share,how it lightens them,is enough.
—Judy lEnt, sEattlE, Wa
Half-Life
The earth swivels her hipsand tilts her head; falling
across it like a lock of hair, serpentinethe course of one river
named for a long-dead king.
This universe is winding downand our sun is burning up, flaring
intense, short-lived releases of energy.Radiation and charged particles spike,
solar winds spew out a continuous spray,red, green and purple in the northern sky
like god’s teenage showoff hickeys.
If there is a god; who knows?Who knows the things that survive us,
the crack pipes and the bone china cups,the poisoned seas and satellite junked sky
that will persist without us,though our own bones might endure
an eon or two and then: pure oblivion.
Is it then pure matter or mirrored anti-mattertransforming all its mass into the perfect fuel,
some hungry and relentless silence,overwhelmed by absolute blackness
that spreads like mercury across a palmslipping downward toward new spaces
through fissures and gaps to seek equilibrium.
Facing the long winter with idle hands— the cells minute planets in the space of me—
their literal slow, purposeful motions:I shed my skins inside and out;
trace elements gather around, warming.
—a’yara stEin, chEstErton, in
The Law of Diminishing Expectations We all want immortality,But will settle for immorality,And if we can’t get that,Well, maybe a new coat and hat.
—JoE FarlEy, philadElphia, pa
VerseWISCONSIN.org 11
Missing Children
I smile at the small boy with the large eyes and the dark hairthat lives in my refrigerator this week, make surethe cardboard quart is turned so thathe’s staring out of the refrigeratorwhen I open the door
and not the plain back wall. His name is Timothy,but I just call him Tab, because he looks like a Tab to me.“It’s been nice having you here, Tab,” I sayas I shake the container. There is just about enough milk leftfor one more day of coffee. “I hope you’ve enjoyed your stay.”
—holly day, minnEapolis, mn
Meditation #7 – A Black Book Full of the Horrors
Whatever way you look at it/it is an ugly bridge/not just a passageway buta link to the other side/foiled in its attempts by pragmatism/ since whendoes the mind share the enthusiasm of a retail strip hung above the earth
Bookstores and pedestrians/a Ponte Vecchio displaced/give to me insteada black book full of the horrors of this world/Polish professors murderedin a German concentration camp/a requiem mass that cannot account
for the facts/I see where you do not/ the cafe, the bookstore, the antique shop, my bones on sale as curiosity/the drop is but a vagueness later/the metre specific and the acoustic never greater.
—gErald bEirnE, FrEdEricton, nEW brunsWick, canada
OBS!
These I realize are notthe beautiful people checking out
all around me at OBS!Nor, logically, am I.
K-Marts were new when I was a kid,and it never crossed my mind
not to want molded plastic,the Dacron clothing,
almost every Blue-Light Special.Nobody I knew then
read Consumer Report.In a country without K-Mart,
which probably, for a time, trulydidn’t want what K-Mart offers,
OBS! is the next best thing.Turning bar-codes toward the scanner,
I wish we were the beautiful people.Not necessarily with figures like eastern-bloc gymnasts
or Italian loafers,or laser-guided haircuts,
but in line at OBS!we have bellies like shot-putter have,
our mouths pucker and wrinkle from smoking.Our kids cry a lot and some days
look like they eat only doughnuts.Too many adults limp
or slouch, and most of us look at our feet.Every election I vote against this.
I vote for eye contact at OBS!against plastic overcoatsand brittle housewares.
But little changes: the kids still whine,often, over candy
while we pack our shopping bags fast,with heads down, under the weight of commerce
and a series, they say, of free trades.
—tom lavEllE, stockholm, sWEdEn
The Grocery Critic
Swirling around from the cache of freezer packaged food, encountering a man determining the cost of items in a discount bin,growled, “they’re mine.”
Continuing checking the price of cuisine selecting the wrong item for a coupon,returning it back down the aisle, returning to check for the advertised productselecting more packages.
Confronting a woman who asked, “do you know how they taste?”
Coupons not redeemed, not a reduction for sandwich spread, nor two primroses for the price of one. Not one dollar off, no swallow of Greece.
—richard krEsal, grEEn lakE, Wi
12 Verse wisconsin #110 October 2012
Murciélagos
Near La Selva,orange bats skim low
to gaff with their hook-feetlive fish they like to eat.
With very long legsand enormous feet
their pupswait in sea caves
four monthsbefore new wings
can hold them up,four months
hanging aroundupside down,
nothin’ to do.Eat it all, bones
head, tail,fins, their parents
insist.They know
that barkingwith a full mouth
won’t echo,won’t reveal
ripples barelybelow the surface,
flash of scaleswhipping fins
skittery schoolof the colony’s
next meal.All night
while we readpromises
in field guides,promises
in dreams, youwhir below patios,
Spirit of the Bat
Hair rush, low swoop--so those of us
stuck here on earthknow--you must be gods.
Or friends of gods,granted the chance
to push off into sky,granted the chance
to hear so wellyour own voice bounced
back to youmaps the night.
Each hingein your wing’s
an act of creation.Each insect
you snick out of aira witness.
You transformobstacles
into sounds,then dodge them.
—pEggy shumakEr, Fairbanks, akvisit VW Online for more by this author
skim over lulls,enter our waking--
deja vú--don’twe know you?
Murciélagos pescadores—fishing bulldog bats.
—pEggy shumakEr, Fairbanks ak visit VW Online for more by this author
Pitch in the Pines Blades switchswerve green lean leftsway silver grass sweepsrolls right past pinelimbs lift bump birchtilt bisque toss yellowfall binds wind findsits pitch
—JEanniE E. robErts, chippEWa Falls, Wi
Blue River
The Daugava, on which Riga is sited,Flows serenely through the singing city.Thus that sweet but complicated cityIs, by that ancient river, bluely lighted.The opera house, so grand, so prideful andBeloved, presents symphonic masterpiecesOr otherwise entertains. In bits and piecesThe history of an often conquered landComes clear, or clearer: the Baltic barons; kingsOf Sweden; Soviet Russia’s heavy hand.They had to shake it off, that grasping hand.A country with a cultural tradition of singingBreaks free, the city to be itself, the riverTo sail cross country on its one blue wing.
—kElly chErry, haliFax, va
VerseWISCONSIN.org 13
At Louise
My sister found a Cecropia moth as if someone had placed origami in a tree.The town featured a nuclear power plant, a small statue of Blackhawk,corn and soybeans, and therefore Louise Quarry was full of the bodiesof local teenagers, bored and drunk, now sunk too deep to fish out. Shade and limestone forbade the land its grass, but there was sand, hauled inby whoever ran the place, and a tin waterslide attached with bolts to the quarry floor. Up above, a line of houses teetered over the beach, backlit, hazy.My grandparents lived in one of them. Because they might be looking,I wore my pink elastic water shoes, I watched out for broken glass. At Louise, the wonder of a giant silkmoth raising and lowering its wingstasted differently than wonder did at home. In photos, the water is gray. Stringy,shivering in our two-piece swimsuits, we are indistinguishable from the poor kids.
—abby gambrEl, madison, Wivisit VW Online for more by this author
Lost View
A rusty pole stretched between treesHolds a sagging tire swing.A crumbled red stone houseHides half buried in the earth,A blackened smoke house leans over.Weeds and wild flowers fill the yard.Silent voices ripple across the fallow fields.The cracked headstone with faded printA final summary of this natural processTowards disappearance—We tread quietly on rich residue.
—nancy pEtulla, mErill, Wi
Fishing, fish fries and dead-zones
Over the years, I’ve unintentionally killedarms full of undersized bluegills and bass.
Those dead-zone times I’d wait too longresponding to a nibble, the hook sets
mortally deep in the moist sponge of throat.
Too small to keep, I lay them down, bleedingfrom the gills, onto the surface of the lake
where they sink, slowly hammocking like falling leaves,
out of sight. On the back porch,where I separate the keepers from their heads,
I can’t help but stare, amazed at how many minutes
their mouths gape open then close,open then close, cursing me, one last time,
one last time,
one last time.
—mikE lanE, dElaFiEld, Wi
Snow Angel Dream
Saw a fox sleeping in a snow angel a child made in the snow along a frozen river,A fox sleeping in a child’s snow angel seemed like a good idea for a children’s story book with affectionate illustrationsEnding with the child inside asleep in her bed and outside along the river in the moonlight the fox sleeping in the snow angel she made.O fox! what dreams did you have in the snow angel’s arms?O child! did you dream you were a baby fox sleeping curled against your warm mother in her underground den in the dark?
—antlEr, milWaukEE, Wivisit VW Online for more by this author
14 Verse wisconsin #110 October 2012
Making My Apology to the Doe
In Kindergarten, when told to draw the animalyou would most like to become, draw a deer.With fat brown crayon on pulpy paper, fashionfour legs, a solemn face, innocent eyes. Stare at the doe feeding twin fawnswho startles as you bike the back roads.Her hooves clatter on asphalt as she runsinto underbrush. Snow-shoe the fields and look for the heart shapedhoof prints, the hollow hair, snow coated on herdun brown back. Notice the oval beds, single tracktrails, scat, dark drips of urine on snow. One new moon November night, drive homeafter a double shift. The deer appears, no white flag or graceful dash, just brakes, skidding, the impact of hidewith fender, the flight over hood and roof. Find the doe and kneel next to her, crumpled on theroad. Limbs once capable of nine footleaps now twist beneath as blood drips ditch iceto lace. For months have bad dreams. All shadows take theshape of doe running, or about to run. —JEnna rindo, pickEtt, Wi
At the Peace Watch
We dodge Bible quotes parading Main Street. Placards:It was Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve. January’s dark as the inside of a beer-can, cold taste of metal. We come inside and leave the door ajar as welcome to our world. How many chairs does it take to form a circle? We came in with the others; does that make all of us guilty? Moral Majority waits outside. Anti-War=Pro-Terror. Who cares about Polar Bears? I wish to believe there is not one word that can’t transform to song. Peace I ask of thee o river flows through a boy’s eyes as he sings. Late January. Only the nearer shoreline is ice.
—taylor graham, placErvillE, ca visit VW Online for audio by this author
Count me among the half-lives, freaks, crooked-beaked birds, bushy-tail trees, and my headcheese of mountain boarsoused with cesium137. It’s heaven. Pray,Father Plutonium, likea Zeus snap-crackle-pop overhead the high-voltage lines that runlike reason, nowhereto hide. Roll me hog-wild. Whip my meter.Make me lean, mean.
—adam halbur, la crossE, Wivisit VW Online for more by this author
Like Deer after Jean Nordhaus One winter I photographeda family of five deer who wereso starved they came straightto our deck for bird seed. I’d see them moving slowly throughthe trees, so I’d remove my shoes,find the camera, step quietlyto the window where the lightwas right that day, turn off the flashand wait—not for great photosthrough two panes of smudged glass,but to pay enough attention, to knowthe one who limped was healing,to see the coyote looking onand scare him away. I wish we could see our own pooras families whose lives are interruptedby bad weather, whose bodies mustsurvive with pride. I want to say,be gentle so their beauty thrivescomes out like deer to foodor a woman to love.
—EstElla lautEr, Fish crEEk, Wivisit VW Online for more by this author
VerseWISCONSIN.org 15
Occupied Town
This evening, rumors. Or is it the wind? Below your window, heavy footfall in the dark. Latchof door, click of safety, or shutter-release. Snapshots with a flash. In the distance drumbeat or simplythunder. Someone shuts a shutter fast. Rumors of moon-shot but the moon is black. Not a formal,synchronized step of shod feet, more like storm coming, a single drip magnified. A thousand drops will muffle dust. On the TV, All this for a crown. A dollar. Millions. On the commons, sparks into black sky. Fireworks? The people have none but words, their tongues. Lined up covering their eyes. At least five languages spoken here, only one declared legitimate. Pepper-spray as a food product. Each language conceals a word for brother. Rumors on the wind.
—taylor graham, placErvillE, ca visit VW Online for audio by this author
O Say
A lot of the policies that he’s [Barack Obama] talking about necessitate Americans taking personal responsibility, and that’s not something Americans are used to doing. —Annie Kisilewicz, undecided voter
For days now, I’ve been haunted by a photo in our newspaper: a polar bear,swimming north, looking for solid ice. She can swim 100 miles, tops,before she tires and drowns, but the ice pack has receded 350 miles.We pop into our SUVs to get a Slushie at the 7-11 a mile or so away.We forget to recycle, want to drill in the Arctic, think wind and solarpower are expensive fantasies. Give us more oil! Give us fastfood soaked in grease, and plenty of it! Let’s not think about futuregenerations. Let’s build bigger houses and crank up the AC. Wavethe flag if someone thinks we should change. And, while we’re at it,let’s make the seagull our new national bird; its call is just perfect:mine mine mine mine mine
—barbara crookEr, FogElsvillE, pa visit VW Online for audio by this author
Displacement
Perspective vanishesin a quandary of house
that pretends to bea neighborhood, somehuddled at hill’s crest,
others a diminishedslack in cul-de-sacs,all something morethan walls to those
inside who pull backdrapes just far enough
to peek out and seean undiminished concrete
plateau merged withmud puddles from over-
watered sod, no onestanding out in the open
to provide insightto the size of what we see.
—rick dingEs, lincoln, nE
Heeding Signs
He stands beneaththe sign that crosses U out,
another pole with blankface. Between two hands
he holds cardboard I donot read, only his face,
eyes focused straightahead to what lies
behind me. He needsa shave and I imagine
a bath. He neither smilesnor frowns. While the light
is red, I look at his eyes.He does not recognize
me. When the lightturns green, I start
forward again.I heed the sign.
I do not turn back.
—rick dingEs, lincoln, nE
16 Verse wisconsin #110 October 2012
Training Day
Every month, like a broken clockIs correct twice a day,It’s time for training day at Stanley.Laudable goal, progressive managing,Making sure staff areUp-to-the-minute in Techniques, tactics, tradition.
I don’t see it that way.Bi-monthly, we all get locked down,Confined to a concrete bunkerSitting on round steel platesAt cold steel tablesIn austere, sterile discomfortWhile the staff have a paid dayOf virtual vacation.
Nevermind paying them less,Just put them to work, Every day, Doing their jobs.
—harlan richards, stanlEy, Wi
Cold March
Winter has had its heyday. Its long succession of snows.Its drop-dead blues and whites. Its nights.Now, cracks emerge. It crumblesand will fall.Still iced-inin the basem*nt, we are bulbs:Within us, some sad node turnstoward the light. Listento our skins: the thin, dry husksrustle in their boxes, seemto move. Half sheath and halfdefeated animal, they grasp the vaguest notion, somethinggreen. Wherein a thought beginsto beat, almostinaudibly: notyet, not yet.
—annE shaW, chicago, il
As You Read on a Beach in Greece
the swamp, furred green with algae, opens and closesits mouth spits up white lotus flowers overstuffed
with flies from muck black-sticky as thought or philosophy perhapsand a log packed tight with bullfrogs slick at the water’s edge
above me the lisp of insects small things move in trees devourand are devoured this is a kind of devotion
quite unlike our own and what kind of blindness is ittaking a rusty stumble through the undergrowth
how to make things go again with legs and body heatmy breath attracts mosquitoes and this unsettles me
you tell me there will still be opportunities for joyin the aftermath the naught for which I have been asked to ask
—annE shaW, chicago il
Scrambled Yolks If Puss In Boots had played the fiddle, wouldthe cow have jumped over the hey, diddle diddle? How the tongues will cackle, the tongues willwag. As the great man falls, the small man brags. Once again, says the little red hen, I’m onmy own with no one to help I must plant alone. Jack will never be nimble or never be quick sincehe lost his head in that tumble-down trick. When the cupboard is bare no one will careif the drunk on the street has no bone or no meat. When three fine sisters came to town, one wore yellow,one wore brown, one ate an apple and wore a blue gown. —pEggy aylsWorth, santa monica, ca
VerseWISCONSIN.org 17
As You Read on a Beach in Greece
the swamp, furred green with algae, opens and closesits mouth spits up white lotus flowers overstuffed
with flies from muck black-sticky as thought or philosophy perhapsand a log packed tight with bullfrogs slick at the water’s edge
above me the lisp of insects small things move in trees devourand are devoured this is a kind of devotion
quite unlike our own and what kind of blindness is ittaking a rusty stumble through the undergrowth
how to make things go again with legs and body heatmy breath attracts mosquitoes and this unsettles me
you tell me there will still be opportunities for joyin the aftermath the naught for which I have been asked to ask
—annE shaW, chicago il
Veteran’s Day In the blaze orange of autumntall marsh grasses lie flattened. Close here where deer will bedI bend, sniff, search for other sign. This safety where I too have shelteredcast in the hollow of other lives. Burst milkweed pods spill whiteand burrs cling like unrecited prayers. Hunter’s air taunt now with expectation,and cardinal, too, wearing Christmas red for protection, as some crisp fear lingersever at the edge of boot steps and finite vision. This earth will always vibrate with absent namescalled in autumn and scented with gun shot. In glacial kettles old grasses reseed each season:where deer bed, some like wolves will wait.
—kimbErly blaEsEr, burlington, Wi
No need for trees
How we, as Americans,have now grown
to hate the tree-huggers,let’s pull their armsout of their sockets
for reaching deepinto our pockets;
who are they to getin the way
of our growing greed.“Go green,” they chant.
“No, go away,” we say;Go take a long hike,get some vitamin D,
go see a Fellini flick,for nature is a nuisance,
standing in our wayof any real progress.
Need to do some good?Go pick up all
the big gulp cupsalong our highways,
and while you are at itscrape up all those
dead critters thatlitter our roads
making us go bumpin the dark night,
but don’t you darestand in our wayof developing all
the God given landwe have on hand;
let us cut down tothe ground all the trees
that get in our wayof making money,
we can build machinesto clean our air and
make us our oxygen.
—charlEs portolano, Fountain hills, az
Tree Shadows(A reaction to Antler’s poem, “Winter River Sundown”) Tree shadows reach across the frozen riverlike a father reaches for his prodigal son, like a motherreaches for her daughter after a quarrel,like a Jewish widow reaches to comfort Palestinianparents who hold their injured child, a Samaritanhelps a Jew by the side of the road, a personcomforts a person, race unknown. Once I noticed a goose wait by the side of his injured matefrom sunrise when I first passed them until sunsetwhen I passed them again. Tree shadows reach acrosslike a bird reaches for his mate. Birds cross over rivers and trees. They see no borders. Birds cross overoceans and land suturing a scarred and hurting world. On a bird map,there is no South, Central or North America,no North or South Ireland,no Congo, no Serbia, no Timor, no kingdoms, no states,just rivers and trees and shadows reaching acrossto where borders are unknown.
—carolyn vargo, milWaukEE, Wivisit VW Online for more by this author
18 Verse wisconsin #110 October 2012
On Fahaheel It stands aloneIntersecting Fourth Ring Roadand Fahaheel Highway. White, bones crawling up blue wallswhose shadows bow, ghosts of thosewho were tortured there. Three passengers and Iscreech and bucklein my hand-me-down Volvowhose brakes sometimes work. Wind, a sick madrigal, taunts,schoolchildren havefor ten years. Touch fence, touch fenceyou die when you do. She reachesfingers to metala thousand oysters gasp at ustheir mouths wide open, hoping for a thrillthe girl shrieks an aria.
—summEr Qabazard, normal, il
At Wounded Knee
The bumblebee at wounded kneeDecants his nectar lazilyYellow lines dance into blackAnd when we dream we hear the crackAnd when we dream we see the flashWe shake from cold, we smell the ashOur houses like the honeycombDissolve when wintering creatures roamOur houses like the buried bonesRattle as the blizzard groansIn creature dreams our houses settleUnderground and lie quietThe whip-poor-will heard at the hillCalls to the friends and dancers stillThe bull who rests at wounded kneeTips nectar to the bumblebeeMenagerie at wounded kneeSits shivered from the landed free.
—uchE ogbuJi, bouldEr, co visit VW Online for audio by this author
Concealed Carry
concealed carryschnappson the bus stopsand loadsand co*cks off againI’ll caphis ass and rubs his Glockhe pats the pistolin his pants —michaEl kriEsEl, aniWa, Wi / Bruce Dethlefsen, West BenD, WI
VerseWISCONSIN.org 19
A Constitutional Right to Emote Surely melodrama’s deeper than mere tragedy,for the latter dries up tears,the former welcomes them with relish—like bouffant frosting on a chocolate cake,or bubblebath in hard water.So, a despairing love affairbecomes a wet nurse,a dying mothera fond indulgence—does that make us mere mortals unredeemable,this changing of the elements of sanctificationinto a dessert, like Cherries Jubilee?Does holiness, a diabetic, hate sugar that much,or are the holy ascetic aestheticians dead wrong? What’s wrong with garden gnomes, Barry Manilow,plastic pink flamingoes, and Elvis-on-Velvet?O, Lady, your husband has died,the old sod,don’t be afraid to keen, keen, keen.Weep and wail like Niobe, all tears!Mind not the frowns and knitted eyebrows,condemning your performance. Chew the scenery!No matter that a dried up mouse inside the wallsays it all. Go ahead and howl.Howl! Howl!
—michaEl biEhl, san Francisco, ca
The Poetess Balances
She’s a carnivorous poet, a kindOf dragonfly, but I don’t mind. I mind
Mosquitoes and flies; am glad she eats
Those pests. I find her perfection complete,
Her eyes, and above all the sublime skillBy which out of nowhere she makes a kill,
Then like a burning blue helicopter,
More dazzling than any lepidopter-
A, she rests on a twig over water—purling water. Former nymph she’s its daughter.
The water plummets, but she is tranquil:
four glassine wings held out straight & still.
—michaEl biEhl, san Francisco, ca
ode to pie a la mode for jack kerouac 15 ounces 9” pie crust the american night a blanket6 cups sliced apples jazz leaping off pages2/3 cup granulated sugar buddha found under a tree1 teaspoon ground cinnamon san francisco america reborn1/4 teaspoon nutmeg a holy hiking pack1 1/2 tablespoons corn starch boots mingling mud1 tablespoon unsalted butter drunk again a scoop of ice cream allergic to cans of tuna
—William Wright harris, knoxvillE, tn
Counting Calories
I finally ate my heart. I ran too thin on a diet
of the clear juices of pulling inward.
I hoarded me and snacked on the air of silence. I filled my belly
with empty calories on holidays,
when taking seemed more appropriate
than giving. Taking is a form of giving.
Loneliness and abandonment are great gifts.
They fatten the mind
with lit candles and processions, then cleanse the palate as they shoulder roll across tongues
of prayer--little stuntmen, all aflame.
—mikE lanE, dElaFiEld, Wi
20 Verse wisconsin #110 October 2012
a Conversation with Frank X walker
CX Dillhunt & Drew Dillhunt
DD: You’ve described poetry as an act of “conjuring.” Reading your work, it’s also clear that giving voice to historical figures—especially those who haven’t been fully or fairly represented in official histories—requires the painstaking work of a historian.
How do you think about the interplay between your work as an objective historian and a visionary poet? Is there a place where research ends and conjuring begins?
FXW: I’m always honored when schools and colleges use my Historical Poetry as supplemental textbooks when studying history or when looking for texts that can be used across multiple disciplines, but I have no illusions about the fictitious nature of my work. No matter how effective the speaking voice or individual poem may come across it is its roots and references to actual history that give these kind of poems legitimacy. And at the same time, it is the poetry that
gives it its emotional strength. In my opinion it is only successful if together they provide for the reader a sense of authenticity. Once the historical poem hits the page its history and poetry must live in the same place at the same time and communicate in a credible way.
There is absolutely a place where the research ends and the conjuring begins. The research always comes first. The poet/researcher must first exhaust themself with the details. They must become an expert on their subject before sitting down to write the poem. They must discover and know more about their subject than they ever plan to share in the overall narrative. CXD: You add a choir of supporting voices to the existing historical record—York’s hunting shirt and knife, the waters of the Columbia, and the bullet that ended Medgar Evers’ life. This seems to be an essential part of what you’ve described as “reaffirming the power of literacy and the role of mythology and storytelling in the exploration of the truth.”
Where do these voices come from? How do they work to help fill gaps in accepted historical narratives?
FXW: The idea of using multiple points of view to relate the story is old hat in fiction. When I began reading from the first York book and opened the floor for Q&A, I found that readers were already very interested in the voices that weren’t included. They wanted to know what his wife thought and they wanted a closer look at Sacagawea. When I sat down to write the York sequel I sat down looking for all the missing voices I could imagine. Voices I believed I wanted to hear from and that I believed would enhance the narrative.
Readers seem to enjoy the human voices but they really love the personification of
Verse Wisconsin in partnership with the Wisconsin Book Festival | Black Earth Institute | Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets | UW Creative Writing
Program | UW Office of Multicultural Arts Initiatives is pleased to bring
to the Wisconsin Book Festival, Madison, for these free events —Reading & Discussion of Historical Poetry, Nov 10
Coal Black Voices: Film Screening, Nov 11The Creative Side of Publishing (Panel), Nov 11
& with First Wave-UW: The Encyclopedia Show 2.0 & Performance Poetry and the Personal Narrative, Nov 9, & Passing the Mic, Nov 10
For complete information visit wisconsinbookfestival.org.
Frank X Walker
After Birth“Killing that nigg*r gave me no more inner discomfort than our wives endure when they give birth to our children.”
-Byron de la Beckwith
Like them, a man can conceivean idea, an event, a moment so clearly he can name it even before it breathes.
We both can carry a thing around inside for only so long and no matter how small it starts out, it can swell and get so heavy
our backs hurt and we can’t find comfortenough to sleep at night. All we can think about is the relief that waits, at the end.
When it was finally time, it was painless.It was the most natural thing I’d ever done. I just closed my eyes and squeezed
then opened them and there he was, just laying there still covered with blood, (laughs) but already trying to crawl.
I must admit, like any proud parent I was afraid at first, afraid he’d live, afraid he’d die too soon.
Funny how life ‘n deathis a whole lot of pushing and pulling, holding and seeking breath;
a whole world turned upside downuntil some body screams.
© Frank X Walker, Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting of Medgar Evers (University of Georgia Press, forthcoming May 2013)
Frank X Walker is the author of six poetry collections, including Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting of Medgar Evers (University of Georgia, forthcoming May 2013); When Winter Come: the Ascension of York (University Press of Kentucky, 2008); Black Box (Old Cove Press, 2005); Buffalo Dance: the Journey of York (University Press of Kentucky, 2003), which won the Lillian Smith Book Award in 2004; and Affrilachia (Old Cove Press, 2000). A 2005 recipient of the Lannan Literary Fellowship in Poetry, Walker is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Kentucky and Director of African American & Africana Studies, and the editor of PLUCK!, the new Journal of Affrilachian Art & Culture.
VerseWISCONSIN.org 21
objects that were already present in the story, i.e., York’s hatchet and his knife. It’s a slight deviation from the proverbial fly on the wall. Now I simply apply my mother’s saying that there are two sides to every story and then there’s the truth. I am finding that if I increase the sides to the story in a credible way, readers feel like it’s even closer to the truth.
DD: What is it that draws you to the particular his-torical figures you’ve chosen to conjure? How do ex-periences in your own life inform these choices? How important is it for a voice to come to you at a particular point in your life?
FXW: Now we’re getting deeper into conjuring, because I really feel like it’s a lot like dating in as much as the historical figures have to also choose. One of us could choose the other, but if we both choose each other you get something really special. I also think the poet has to be truly invested in the subject at an emotional level to really do it justice. I developed a personal stake in telling the York story because I was embarrassed that I had multiple degrees, considered myself well versed in Kentucky’s African American history, found out York had lived in the same city I lived in and yet I had never heard of him. Part of my personal motivation was to eliminate my own ignorance and deal with that embarrassment.
I believe that because I was raised by women, have been blessed with six sisters, and survived multiple failed relationships, I actually lived the research material I needed to create most of the authentic sounding female voices in my historical poetry. I know that spending real time outdoors in the northwest and along the Lewis and Clark trail allowed me to finish the book when it was clear something was still missing. That missing element was the landscape. I say all of this to say that the journey that is the combination of the research and teasing out the poems and building them into a whole narrative is not something that only exist on the page.
A poet’s real life will intersect with her work somewhere on the page and off the page in both unexpected and expected ways. The inner journey from the York narrative resulted in a buffalo tattoo and a chance to share the Nez Perce world with my teenage son and ultimately create a rite of passage for him. The Isaac Murphy inner journey resulted in a bicycle club called the Isaac Murphy Bicycle Club that rewards inner city kids who complete classes on bike safety, healthy eating, history with free bikes, helmets, locks
and organized opportunities to ride the local bike trail. I don’t know what Medgar Evers has in store for me, but given that 2013 is the 50th anniversary of his assassination and JFK’s as well as the March on Washington, I’ve got a feeling the activist in me is going to need an extra pair of shoes.
CXD: How does this historical conjuring com-pare to the writ-ing process you employ when working from personal experi-ence—as you do in Black Box and Affrilachia?
FXW: Historical conjuring takes longer than
writing from personal experience. Given that there is no requirement that the next poem have a relationship with the previous one, I have a lot more freedom when writing from personal experience. The personal poems are often born out of inspiration and contact with other people and the real world, I don’t have to stop writing one to work on the other. When I finished the Medgar Collection, I also had completed another manuscript of poems that will continue the Black Box and Affrilachia experience.
DD: You’ve described Byron de la Beckwith—Medgar Evers’ assassin—as the hardest voice you’ve ever tried on. How was it possible for you to inhabit de la Beckwith? What can you tell us about that process?
FXW: It was the hardest for me, because I’d like to believe we were really far apart especially when you consider our values. I really wanted to get inside his head and understand what fueled his passion, why he hated who he hated as well as why he loved what he loved. Unfortunately and fortunately there is no limit of research material on hate speech, the KKK, white supremacy, and so many images and so much material available that provided his own words. One of the devices I used to get into that space was to type in hate speech on YouTube and listen to as much of it as I could stand.
CXD: You coined the term Affrilachia, now an official entry in the OED. At the end of your poem “Affrilachia,” in the book of the same title, you write, “if you think / makin’ ’shine from corn / is as hard as kentucky coal / imagine being / an Affrilachian / poet.”
Here it is more than a decade since your collection Affrilachia was published. What’s changed? What hasn’t?
FXW: In the twelve years since Affrilachia I would say more people recognize, claim and use the word. I’ve lost count of how many colleges now consistently use the book in their
Appalachian Studies courses, but because so many places and scholars are still discovering the word and slowly recognizing the need to speak about the region’s true diversity it is still the best seller of all my books. What hasn’t changed is the need to continue working against the pervasive negative stereotypes and caricatures associated with the region or the need to educate people about important Affrilachians like Nina Simone, August Wilson, Bill Withers, Angela Davis, Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, James Brown and many others.
Sorority Meeting
Myrlie Evers speaks to Willie and Thelma de la Beckwith
My faith urges me to love you.My stomach begs me to not.All I know is that daymade us sisters, somehow. After long nervous nights and trials on endwe are bound together
in this unholy sorority of misery.I think about you every time I run my hands across the echoesin the hollows of my sheets.They seem loudest just before I wake.I open my eyes every morning
half expecting Medgar to be there,then I think about youand your eyes always snatch me back.Your eyes won’t let me forget.
We are sorority sisters nowwith a gut wrenching country ballad for a sweetheart song, tired funeral and courtroom clothes for colorsand secrets we will take to our graves.
I was forced to sleep night after night after night with a ghost.You chose to sleep with a killer.
We all pledged our love, crossed our hearts and swallowed oaths before being initiated with a bullet.
© Frank X Walker, Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting of Medgar Evers (University of Georgia Press, forthcoming May 2013)
This is an excerpt from CX Dillhunt & Drew Dillhunt’s interview with Frank X Walker. The full interview with video and photos is available at versewisconsin.org.
Historical conjuring takes longer than writing from personal
experience. Given that there is no requirement that the next
poem have a relationship with the previous one, I have a lot more freedom when writing
from personal experience.
22 Verse wisconsin #110 October 2012
Time Passes All Understanding
How does one feelwhen the ex-husband dies. Does the past dissolvewith all the recriminationsthat the divorce brought?When he phoned that dayand called you sweetheartdid he mean it and if sodoes this change the past?What about all the crapbrought up by the lawyers,the drinking, craziness, even the adultery?The phone conversationsof the past forty-five yearswere polite segues to talk to the son, who is nowover fifty. We have all aged,and the past is witheredlike stored angel hairleft in the Christmas boxand forgotten for years, thenbrought out to be rejuvenated. It’s the new century plus twelve and a new year; let’slet go of old angels and only countthe ones helping today. They are saccharine enough for anyholiday and beyond. If sweetheartcalls again, it will be a miracleand we’ve about run out of themfor this season.
—JackiE langEtiEg, vErona, Wivisit VW Online for more by this author
Food For The Fox
the seed left for the birdsspilled on the snow bringsthe night rabbitswhich leads to a spill of bloodthus food for the foxmy hand to fox mouthyet still I believeI live in a snow-white world
—tEss romEis, cEdarburg, Wi
Orchard Retrospect
I wandered my orchardsampling unnamed autumn windfallsbiting carefully in my knowledge of worms,and each taste brought a surprise:Snow? Golden Russet? Winesap?
But no aging Eve clung to my sideurging me to eat,only my black lab Baird behind mesniffing fruit suspiciously,frowning as I chewed,a disapproving priest,but I no longer had anything to confess.
—gary JonEs, sistEr bay, Wi
Ghosts
We are what exists between thoughts.
We are what didn’t happen because you missed the bus that day.
We are what you thought you saw before you looked again.
We are what makes you turn around when you think you’re not alone.
We are what shifts behind the eyelids between dreaming and waking.
We are what lies just beyond the fog.
We are the sound not heard the light not seen, the thing not touched.
We are the whisper behind the noise.
We are the creak in the wall, but only when you think we’re not.
We are the whistle in the graveyard.
We are not the wind but the silence when it stops. We move between glances, just beyond the corner of the eye.
We move like smoke, carried by currents of what you believe.
We try very hard to stay out of your way.
And we are tired, so very tired.
—brucE niEdt, chErry hill, nJ
VerseWISCONSIN.org 23
These are the days
These are the days of lack, the days of the question mark and run-on sentences,of thirst within the gentle rain,of hunger in the full grown field.
These are the days where the noose stops the swallow,of financial disasters and trillion dollar deficits,purchase by plastic and picked up pennies ------ heads up for good luck and enough to pay a sales tax…
the angry days, the days of tantrums, tears and runaways…of cars that break down, feet that blister, legs that ache and backs that break.
These are the days of tears wept but not wiped,nor stroked, nor gently kissed away,of x-ray vision and the magnifying glasswith the magic glare to scorch your mate, yes, your mate, her faults, your pain….
the days of unreturned phone calls, trolls at your window in the middle of the night---the bitter candy for the fallen child---the invisible ones whose persistence will breathebeneath blankets and stars on the park bench blind to season.
These are the days I see the world through your eyes, feel the pain through your heart and I remember that breath,that ultimate star…and you arched awaylike a firefly, love. The rose starts to blossom, love, but I’m so very cold. —christa gahlman, madison, Wi
The Extreme Double Cheeseburger
Saturday in early Januarycalls for one with fried onions
and a smart slab of mesquite mustardto be crushed into your mouth andyou sip on a thick chocolate shake,
ice cream like whipped clouds of icein front of the afternoon play-off game.
Your date sits next to younibbling at the goodness, his bright
white teeth raking through the lettuceand cheese like pitchforks.
It’s the season, remember whenyour ex-husband would sit with the phoneon his lap, call his friend Rocky every time
there was a good play, screaming intothe receiver, DID YOU SEE THAT JACKASS,
THAT’S WHAT DALLAS GETS, HA!Take a bite, suck the juices in at the sides
stare into the TV and remember whenpassion hung in the air like smoke.
—JackiE langEtiEg, vErona, Wivisit VW Online for more by this author
Partly Hidden
I wore a Lone Ranger mask,which only covered the space
around my eyes. Everyoneknew it was me. And when
I spoke the listener wasdoubly sure it was me.
because I had a distinctivevoice, slurring the harsh
consonants, masking my desires.
—hal siroWitz, philadElphia, pa
Some Things I’ve Plucked
right out of thin air and other places,too, I can tell you, like
the make and modelof that car that sped by;
I know there’s no Ford Faberge,but maybe you didn’t,
and what mortal can resistthe luscious fruits of fabrication;
I didn’t mean to say that I madeartisanal cheese in my bathtub
but when I consider the genuine curdsof scum, well, who wouldn’t turn from the
dried up raisin of reality to the gorgeousgrapes in the vineyards of the unverifiable;
and that bit about collecting shrimp forksfrom every country on the planet,all I can say is truth is a hard nut,
a no-frills filbert sort of thing.Some things are just so succulent to say.
—pam lEWis, madison, Wi
24 Verse wisconsin #110 October 2012
Reliquary
Under the midnight aurora in a northern flannel-sheeted bed,beneath the weight and wild colorof a yarn-tied crazy quilt,amid the whispers, tickles, and shushingof brown-eyed, pony-tailed girl cousins, I have slept with suicide.
With my bare feet swinging in timeto baking-powder-biscuit stories,and men spitting watermelon seeds the shape of my dime-store mood ring,while truck-driving nomads lift amber bottles in an everyday larger than Dick and Jane, I have held danger’s bruised moist hand.
On the spinning stools of small town dinerswhere hopeful adolescents wear school colors like a cattle brand,after February basketball chantswhere platters of gold or just-cut french friespass among friends and Friday night foes,I have eaten manna with military killers.
In a crowded copper four-doorwearing swimsuit under cut-offs and cover-up,singing radio oldies along Indiana’s highwayson a pilgrimage to any infinity of sand,driving desires aimless and older than the continentunder the water mirage of the ancient August sun,I have flirted with the murdered.
Along the simmering sidewalks of Chicago nightsin close jealous crowds that jostle lovers,weaving between street sleepers and dark-eyed panderersamid the retractable leashes of urban dogs,where jazz songs rise against honking trafficand pencil-thin girls spill like light from doorways,I have kissed smoke spent from mafia mouths.
Amid the photographic relics of gone bodies on the darkening veneer of a beside stand,in a digital world of light emitting diodes,as age clocks its way toward another transformation where barely remembered voices count iambic heroic deathand students twitter meaning in 144 characters or less,I clutch delicate stories—old, never told.
—kimbErly blaEsEr, burlington, Wi
Boy in Pajamas
Boy in pajamashand on the mousejumps to the actionof the online world.
The collector of badges
powers up with coins and weaponseach level up provides more armor.
The believer in magicwants you to conjure
and dispel everything,just to experience the charm.
But your parental spellsare the only misdirection.
Like the Superman
on his top,you try to be a hero
because he believes.He believes so much so
that you try to collect powersfor a figmentary cache
to protect him.
But you are not supermanyou are not an avatar.
Your weapons areonly what you already failed with.
—thomas cannon, oshkosh, Wi visit VW Online for video by this author
More Juice
If she was a chair,she would be on fire
& the people of the townwould marvel
at the flamed colorsof her face
& hide their earsfrom the violent crackle
of her demandsto never be put out.
Juice, appleenough to give sin
to the collapsing world,Isabelle is not a chair
& with her palmsshe rips the cup
out of my fingers.The world
is put back together,with the slightest singe.
—darrEn c. dEmarEE, columbus, oh
VerseWISCONSIN.org 25
Reality Rides a Yellow School Bus
and as students move toward the backthey learn more, the flashing blue LED on the roof
a lodestar guiding wise guyswho offer exposes of Santa and Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy
who provide vocabulary lessons in vulgaritywho introduce Gray’s intimate Anatomy
who explicate intricate reproductive ritualswho entertain with risque jokes and bawdy ballads.
Hopeful mothers wave good-bye to innocence
blowing kisses in the wake of childhoodsending babies to the warm embrace of Miss Teach
with her American flag and happy-ever-after storybooksher posters of kittens and puppies and springtime bloom
a cupboard of graham crackers and cartons of milk
mothers unaware that learning most profound occursnot in the heart of a classroom
but in the bowels of Jonah’s busthe laboratory of raw democracy
guppies swallowed one by one,and spit out created equal.
—gary JonEs, sistEr bay, Wi
Food Court
Just a bunch of high school boyswell-behaved, talking about
noisy music, sports and girlsI suppose. It doesn’t seem to bother
them that they are all hyphenated -
Mexican- African- Asian- or Euro-AmericansThere are no gated minds here, just some
dudes zeroing in on lunch.
Restless, not quite knowingwhere their feet are, they wear
baggy pants and shirts, and baseballcaps on backwards, or sideways.
But somebody screwed their headson straight. Unaware of their place
in a new America, they cleartheir plates. If they noticed me at all,
they probably think I am history -
an old Albino-Rhinoceros-Americanthe kind they learned about in biology class
that’s on the endangered species list.
—lEn tEWs, oshkosh, Wi visit VW Online for more by this author
Advantages of Autism Insists on zippers zipped, pant legs downmittens on, hat over ears.No “I want that” during toy commercials.Peanut butter sandwich lunches are easy to make.You get to learn sign language.The cats get their exercise.Darting brown eyes suddenly meeting yours.every sound mimicked,every correct flashcard given,Every moment of imaginative play fills you with hope.You learn that a hug is worth a thousand I love yous.Gained patience from a screaming childinsisting on being held.Peanut butter sandwich suppers are easy to make.You may not get adored like other parents,you may not hear the words “I love you,”but you are the only safe haven when needed.No cries when you leave.A gradual sliding over to you when you get home.Home therapy visits require you to clean the house.He makes you take one day at a timeand enjoy the hell out of it.Motivation to get involved in politics,education laws, medical advancements.Learning not to care what others think at the grocery store.Compassion for others getting judged at grocery stores.Aversions to slimy stuff.Peanut butter sandwich snacks are easy to make.Older siblings and cousins become a linkfor they don’t know what is normal,they only know family is for spending time together. With my eyes always on him to watch for danger, for a sign,I get to experience the moment, every moment,the gift of not missing, of not forgetting,beauty in the small.
—thomas cannon, oshkosh, Wi visit VW Online for video by this author
A Beautiful Stranger
Today, looking out the back of our house,I see a cat with the exact markings as Sylvia,the fluffy, mostly white, ball who lives in ourbedroom. The stranger is somewhat thinner.
Later, from the window, Sylvia hisses at him,the brother who was never there for her, orthe ghost of a feral cat she could have been.
—John lEhman, cambridgE, Wi visit VW Online for video by this author
26 Verse wisconsin #110 October 2012
Monday Morning in Kindergarten Like reporters delivering the news, theyarrive bursting with storiesWe start with journals, a holding placefor week-end adventuresCedric is quiet today, makes a pictureof a man and a small boythe man looks sadthe boy is crying Who’s in your picture I ask my daddy Cedric answers he’s sad cause he’s in prison see the bars around him And the boy . . . that’s me Cedric says we went to see my daddy yesterday I took my library book, he read to me I want him to come home
—JanEt lEahy, nEW bErlin, Wi
The Nature of Man
Pelicans meet in parliamenton the rocks. A bird leaves the flockto plane the surface-water’s sky,wing-spread firmament,double bird to watching eyes.
Men arrive, heavethe advancing earth back into the Pleistocene lakestone by stone by stone,until a rock is lifted and thrownat the pelicans, just to see.
—chuck rybak, onEida, Wi
Small Change
The silent cross-shaped mouthreceives my coins, the communion wafersof the Salvation Army.Do this in remembrance of me.
My daughter’s milk moneybecomes another’s food and shelter.Do not be anxious for tomorrow,for tomorrow will care for itself.
The kettle is chained,unattended,easily ignored.When you give alms, give in secret.
My pocket is empty;I have nothing left for communion withthe blood-red abyss of the other army.Do not kill.
Ten million dollars an hour,to destroy another’s food and shelter.As much as possible,live in peace with one another.
—naomi cochran, hayWard,Wi
The Winter of Two Hundred Turkeys From my home-office window, I watchmy wild yet amiable neighbors scratchand gobble in the depleted soybean field. Not cuddly like kittens or colorful like goldfish,wild turkeys offer a no-cost, no-maintenance,free-range escape from computerized news. These turkeys do not blow one another upor mow one another down. They do notplunder pension plans or lie to constituents. If they absent-mindedly wander up my drive,a tap on my garage door opener sends themtrotting back to their safer side of the street. They settle their own territorial disputeswith a back-off flutter and ten-second chase.Like the lilies of the field, they neither sow nor reap, yet each spring, they strut and puffin primitive seduction, requiring no pop-upsor flashing sidebar icons to meet a mate. Once nested, hatched and fledgedthey resume their familiar scratchand gobble, gobble and scratch.
—suE dEkElvEr, brussEls, Wi
VerseWISCONSIN.org 27
Monday Morning in Kindergarten Like reporters delivering the news, theyarrive bursting with storiesWe start with journals, a holding placefor week-end adventuresCedric is quiet today, makes a pictureof a man and a small boythe man looks sadthe boy is crying Who’s in your picture I ask my daddy Cedric answers he’s sad cause he’s in prison see the bars around him And the boy . . . that’s me Cedric says we went to see my daddy yesterday I took my library book, he read to me I want him to come home
—JanEt lEahy, nEW bErlin, Wi
Do It
Leander did not love Hero and brave the roiling Hellespont
because he preferred his own space.
Because Paris stole Helen, Menelaus launched the ships of Greece,
sacked Troy, laid all to waste.
Marvel did not urge his coy mistressbe coyer still: he fathomed
that love runs a fiery race.
Plunge into the water,rush the rugged fortress
jump into the fire — lift loveto first place.
—barbara grEgorich, chicago, il
When
Yesterday I was walking through fieldsbut today won’t let me in though I disciple
and I can’t smell and tonight’s potatoes with butter, salt, and pepper only aroma,
let’s dance to “I Just Can’t Get Enough,” “That’s Why I Love You So,” “Bring It On
Home to Me,” teach me to play the sawand I’ll instruct you on time management.
Morning ducks into her shell. Let’s lie on the beach and share headphones, let’s get
two slices of pizza and two beers apiece after your shift, shopping carts rattling in
the parking lot while the moon dreams a hot,hot tangent of noon, breezy, can’t control it.
—grEg WEiss, clEvEland hEights, ohvisit VW Online for more by this author
In Which My Lover and I Win a Seaton the First Space Shuttle to Greet Life The constellations outside swirled an oil spill of color, and we came bearing the signs of our race—a camera,our faces: aged boats drifting on stringsfrom their docks. Those days and nights we spent roped to the wall,and tried to imagine an other with noquality we’d ever known. We carried with usthe inheritance of every way to say hello—each language, the sounds of all animals,plates of carved image in rock. Evenchimpanzees greet each other with hugs,but the question was whether we’d leftbehind touch. We said perhaps they smell likesound. When you look at them, they taste the colorof a bubble being blown. We wanted the approvalof a being who could not have conceived of us.A show of fingers, you say? A hand?Ask us to dance, and we’ll do it again.Please believe we have done incredible things,and sometimes we even believe it ourselves.The threads in our lungs stretch thousandsof miles, and in six months one mancould repopulate the earth. We have gaugedgoodness and worth, and we have decidedwe could not want to find those who did not wantto find us. In the ship, our bodies were carried apartuntil we pushed from the walls toward each otheragain. Years passed, but still we believedin magnets. Still we had memories of kneeling,scabbed with childhood, in piles of leaf litterand searching for crickets. Of lying moistened in the backs of cars and making splinters of ourbodies. There is a reason, we realized, that loverswere chosen to see something that has nothing of our world. We knew the glow that came beforeash, and ground. Many times we had not recognizedourselves. Many times we had returned to earthafter having seen elsewhere. —chloE bEnJamin, madison, Wi
28 Verse wisconsin #110 October 2012
Goodbye Mister Bop When Chips left the Old School he wore its tieand was carried out with his Wellingtons on.But no way Mister Bop, the Burnt-Out Prof.Things definitely ain’t what they used to be.Bop gets to retire on something like a 401(k);but not yet, as St. Augustine put it, not quite yet;I’m not ready for retired sainthood yet!The syllogisms from which Aristotle deduced the validare not complete. In American institutionswe fail upward to glory, and I expectto be the mad head of the English Department beforeI wallop my last tennis ball to cardiac arrest,or do my last imitation of Johnny Weissmuller.“Thanotopsis” is not my favorite poem. —E. m. schorb, moorEsvillE, nc
Midlife in Mexico (“Quintana Roo”) I was in a state.A state I calledkin tahn a ru, kint anna rooh, kintana rue.Akin in sound and spirit totan kangaroo, Winnie the Pooh,an ocean view, antenna too.My name for what I saw thereon license plates of Mexican “Bugs”and other cars.But then of Spanish, I didn’t know much. Years after Yucatan, Webster’s wisdom pronouncesI wasn’t in that state at all.He tells me I was closer to: keen tah nahr oh-oh“keen,” not “kin” —no family?— andnot cute, like “ooh”, but “Oh-Oh”. “kin tahn a rue,” “keen-tahn-a-row-o”Well, what does he know? Somaybe I was in a childish fantasy,escaping from the recent realityof becoming the oldest generation,no longer having a parent.It was Christmas — my first Christmaswithout a mother — the motherwhose birthday was also on Christmas Day.The first Christmas I had no family presence. If I wanted a tan toy kangarooand my stuffed grey panda bear, a sandy beach,some playful tunes, and tales of Winnie the Pooh,at midlife in Mexico, why not? Who would wish to stop meif saying the sing-song makes me happy? Kin Tanna Ru! Kin Tanna Ru! Kin Tanna Ru!
—ann pEnton, grEEn vallEy, az
At Schoolhouse Beach
Limestone layers carried far by glaciers,tumbled, tossed, and broken up,knocking together like geologic billiard balls,polished for centuries by a surging inland seauntil steadfastly smooth and hand-perfect. This is where you come in, love. Wobble-stumbling to the water’s edge,our two-year-old daughter attempts to tossone substantial stone after the other back intothat icy blue bay—the echoing clock and clackof rock on rock, the occasional kerplunk.
Worrying she will crush a foot or herbrother’s head, as he stands obliviously close,absorbed in his own stony obsessions,we yell our cautions into the weightless wind,weighing something heftyin our minds a momentbefore letting it go.
—JEF lEisgang, Fort atkinson, Wi
Checking in at the Lost Baggage Counter I find the young girl’s battered suitcases,all matching, in a Black Watch plaid,still packed with purple angora sweatersand pleated wool skirts and the travel-weightOlivetti typewriter and the paperbackHistory of Math and the art folios from Italyand inchoate hopes: everything she ownedonce. Last night’s dream tutors the truthof the writer’s lot: we’re reading our wordsin an amphitheatre made of fallen logsin a backwoods forest, at play amongthe leaves and moss, full of happiness,and the artists are painting backdrops.
—robin chapman, madison, Wivisit VW Online for more by this author
VerseWISCONSIN.org 29
At Schoolhouse Beach
Limestone layers carried far by glaciers,tumbled, tossed, and broken up,knocking together like geologic billiard balls,polished for centuries by a surging inland seauntil steadfastly smooth and hand-perfect. This is where you come in, love. Wobble-stumbling to the water’s edge,our two-year-old daughter attempts to tossone substantial stone after the other back intothat icy blue bay—the echoing clock and clackof rock on rock, the occasional kerplunk.
Worrying she will crush a foot or herbrother’s head, as he stands obliviously close,absorbed in his own stony obsessions,we yell our cautions into the weightless wind,weighing something heftyin our minds a momentbefore letting it go.
—JEF lEisgang, Fort atkinson, Wi
Christmas songs
The older children are still singingin the piney choir loft, so we youngerones wait shivering beside the heavy
door for the final deo gratiasin the smooth church foyer,
snow boots puddling on speckledmarble, our new snoods from Grandmacovering our little ears, one of the only
non-sock or underwear gifts underthe tree this year, and grade sevenbegins “when blossoms flowered
‘neath the snow” as we hear anotheramen but this time accompanied bythe whoosh of a thousand elephants
exhaling and the far aisle door creaksopen for the first Christmas Catholic
already tapping the bottom of a LuckyStrike package and just as Sister Modesta
is heading back to our class from whereshe was peeking through the little glass
window at the finish of the mass, MaryEllen Pickens snickers and points
her skinny little finger at my twin and meand then it seems that all the girls are
tittering about our new scarf-hatsfrom Grandma but grade seven is now
thumping down the choir stairs and SisterModesta is shushing us and lining us up
two-by-two like soldiers to climb the choirstairs and sing our own Christmas songs.
—Jan ball, chicago, il
History is important The Liberty Grove Town Boardis finally thinking about cleaning upthe trash at the Val-A Motel. Seems the local business communityfear contamination by Mr. Olsen’scollection of rare junk. Every spring they leave encouraging noteson his door, even offer him a dumpster in which to keep his treasures. But Mr. Olsen contends that his stuff hashistoric value just like the rusty old truckacross the road by Gus Klenke’s garage placed there by the ladies of the Ellison BayHistorical Society and decoratedeach season with appropriate adornments and with winter and snow coming,Mr. Olsen says that his collectionwill look almost as picturesque. The ladies of the Historical Society are not amused.
—hannE gault, Ellison bay, Wi
my father’s boxy girl
My father draws the buttons down the frontof the boxy jacket, then sketches the straightskirt, his face puckered in concentration as ifhe were threading a needle in poor light notclutching a pencil at the fluorescent kitchen table.Below the skirt he draws vertical lines for the calfto ankle and shoes that look like horse’s hooveswith a little strap over the instep. At five, I titter,whether with the excitement of having my dad’scomplete attention or derision at his boxy girl, sohe, always mercurial anyway, erupts like a faucetwith a broken washer, spraying saliva on me as heshouts, “I’ll never draw anything for you again sinceyou don’t appreciate it,” turning me into a blenderwith the electricity of his anger, but that was longago. Today, I appraise myself before the beveledmirror in the mahogany French armoire, my sturdyshape twisting to and fro in the pencil-thin lightof early morning, opening and closing the metalbuttons of my blazer, smoothing my skirt before Iwalk into another day, my father’s boxy girl.
—Jan ball, chicago, il
Love Has To Do With Babies
She said xo and the old mandidn’t know what that meant.
So, he ate the idea and didnot say a word. Later, he
kissed her and admitted it.She left him. The old man
thought. This’s what I getfor being honest? But deep
down he knew it had more todo with how ugly he was. &
a lack of money and honesty.Later that yr. she wrote to
him, Larry, thanks for beingso sweet and honest. I am
with a teen who lives in Auk-land and he lies to me all
the time. We will speak ourvows before you receive this.
—daniEl gallik, chagrin Falls, oh
30 Verse wisconsin #110 October 2012
Two Poems in the Voice of Jo Hopper
Office at Night Two checksbeside a black typewriterwait for the managerto sign. My hands stuckin the drawer,I’m filing papers, turned from the green cabinetto look across the roomat him. Concentratingon an invoice,he doesn’t notice me. I want to go his desk,where he is adding upblack numbers,and let himtouch my breasts. I want to pull downthe window shade,so inside that roomwe’ll be a couple.
Four Lane Road I’m really sickof being out in the stickswith this guy, a facelike carved granite,his sleeves rolled up,white undershirt, vest.He only wears a tiefor church. All day long,he sits in his deck chairholding that mushy cigarhe never puts in his mouth,while he waits for a Fordpickup to pull in for gas. Here on this county road,the way it would bewith any man, he demands I feed him.I look out of the station window,my apron on,to call him to lunch.I could yell all day. —carolE stonE, vErona, nJ
Two Portraits of Adams County
Chet
Hands blacked by printer’s inkin white porcelain
like salamanders on sand,white pumice soap
a bleached rock between them,he whistled flexing the apples
of his arms, the crown of his headshiny as any star.
Afraid to breathe,afraid the rising, falling beat
of my heart might stir him,I hid in the corner, watched the vocables
he had scraped together takenby water and towel, the hard black
magic of the trade taken swiftly,the hour of setting the alphabet
backwards lost in the easyscan of the eye
over the drythick paper.
Pete
Today I step from a foggy stoopand through the phantom walls
of grist mills gone twenty years,the ghosts of farm boys shooting
hoops on the red storage shed,peg-leg O’Brien and his Boston Braves
pillaging the piers of Milwaukeefor two pennants before heading south.
Wild ferns dampen my pants.Morning glories obscure the stumps
of elders and oaks.Feeling is not heartfelt, but sensual,
vision like unnoticed breathing,sustaining and pure.
Rural life passes, a life the historiansnow write did not exist but did not
because like spirit it is morethan existence, not the American dream
but the soil and river of our mythos,a passing plain and painful.
Once, a significant man,peg-legged O’Brien,
stood on his porch and swungthe ash of his limb at an errant ball,
his ears in the summer light,like large questions on the sides of his face.When the sun was behind them they’d turn
magenta like a boy’s ears afterfrostbite, or the petals of a rose.
—JEFF burt, mount hErmon, ca
Born Josephine Nivison in 1883, Jo Hopper married Edward Hopper in 1924 when she was forty-one and he forty-two. Childless, they remained together for forty-three years until his death in 1967. An artist who studied at the New York School of Art, after their marriage she continued to paint, but went unrecognized, Edward Hopper’s work overshadowing hers. Resentful of his artistic success and that his studio dwarfed hers, she nonetheless became her husband’s collaborator and promoter. Eventually, she became his sole model. The title of each poem is the title of an Edward Hopper painting; the details are largely, though not entirely, based on the work.
VerseWISCONSIN.org 31
Eating a Danish Bagel
1This is your world, but I love
being with you on gaagaden in Vejle,
the European windows windingbehind us as we share a Danish
bagel filled with shrimp and eggs
at Cafe Egestrand. With sunshine
for a week, the street is fullof people. Carved faces peer
from cornices with ancient
Viking eyes. A Muslim woman
looks for summer dresseson an outdoor rack; two Swedes
sit behind us, speaking English,
and a reggae singer, probably
American, plays for change, and letsa young Dane try out his guitar.
2Politics should help us shape
the spaces where we come together.
Now, with the meaning gone,the endless empty theater goes on.
We feel locked out, fear each other,
while the actors play their sad
and callous games. I cannotwatch my own country anymore.
3At night, I rub your back, glad
you’re here to touch and be with.
Sleep comes slowly; I dreamof helplessness. Awake, I see
the gold and purple light,
so new and hopeful, the colors
with a muted clarity I needto make myself remember.
—norman lEEr, madison, Wivisit VW Online for more by this author
Once in a while
Let the unlikely happen.
Let my neighbor become content to feed the birds andthat squirrel.
Let the chips fall where they usually don’tperhaps on my numbers for a change.
Let all the home team’s hits fall fairand all foul balls be caught by surprised children.
Let the moon rise full each night for a monthand sunsets linger for hours.
Let Christians be required to speak their deeds aloudbefore receiving communion.Let the leftover bread feed the hungry.
Let all soldiers return to hometowns unchanged.
—Ed WErstEin, milWaukEE, Wivisit VW Online for more by this author
Lunch Guest, 1939 Mom, who’s that man on the steps? Just somebody passing through.Why is he here? Because he was hungry.What is he eating? A fried egg sandwich.And coffee? Yes, and coffee.Why is he eating out there? He said he liked it outdoors.How did he know where we lived? I guess they tell each other.Where is he going? Back to the train, I think.Is he ever coming back? Probably not.Why did he call you “Ma’am”? I think he was just being polite.
—pEggy troJan, brulE, Wi
Dear Diary
There are no freedomsno other viewpointsallowed withinthe compound;these blank pagesquickly filled withbarbed scrawl,a hard coveredsketchbook stalag.No guard towersor concertina wirerequired. If you’re lucky enough toslip in, read,then under the fence,undetectedand escape, unscathedby the brush againstthis smudgedand stained despot,her fingers blackenedfrom all the reputationsshe’s strafed,count yourselfamong thefew, notquite proudsurvivors.
—g. a. schEinoha, EdEn, Wi
32 Verse wisconsin #110 October 2012
Nose-Me-Downs
We had three of them:all plaid but different colors, different lengths.They were scratchy, fringed, well-worn.Proper technique: tie around your neck,and pull up over your nose before going outside.
Where did these three winter wool scarves come from?Were they ever new?Were they ever washed? Did they nose-warm four familiesof cousins before they became ours?Did we ever think of buying new scarves?Never! Not once!
We wore those three scarves winter after winter, from age one to eighteen.They were as much a part of our wintersas snowbanks, snowmen, frosted windows,and runny noses.
—linda aschbrEnnEr, marshFiEld, Wi
Night Barking
Village dogs bark, bully, bluster,in the hot summer dark.
I know a huge muscular dogwill climb our TV antenna,knock out the screen, leap
in our second floor bedroom.I already see the dog’s teeth and cry.
My older sisters can’t sleep. Judy asks what’s wrong.
I tell her about the dogs, the TV antenna.She bravely gets out of bed,
pulls aside the curtain, and raises the shade.From my bed I see her in baby-doll pajamas
scrutinizing faraway Rib Mountain, then, our driveway under the window.
Judy turns to me.It’s okay. No dogs are loose.
I believe her. She is ten. I close my eyes. We are safe.
We will not be murdered by dogs.At least, not tonight.
—linda aschbrEnnEr, marshFiEld, Wi
Windmill on the Farm
The farm where dad grew upin Michigan’s UP had no power linescoming to the house.Back in the 30s and 40sthe farm had a windmill. It clanged and banged,chirped and whirled,as it pumped waterfor the sauna.
The windmill also generated electricity for the little radio.When the windmill started turning,we would run to the saunato watch cold, sparkly waterflow into vats. It was likemusic playing—magic.
—mavis J. FlEglE, rothschild, Wi
Coffee Time
3:30 on a rainy afternoon.The smell of coffee perking.The table set with cinnamon rolls, sugar cubes, real cream.Dad coming home from work,all the kids from school.Time to talk and unwind.Memories from the coffeepot.
—mavis J. FlEglE, rothschild, Wi Maryland, NY
How did this hamlet get the same nameAs a state? It’s confusing: whenever I sayI’m going up to Maryland, people squint
And say “Up?” After all, Maryland is southOr “down” from New York City, so I have to say
It’s a hamlet upstate, near Oneonta,And most New Yorkers have a vague idea
Where Oneonta is, somewhere in the middleOf the state, somewhere around Cooperstown,
Somewhere the green hills roll and summer fieldsWave corn and milk cows graze and barns
Sag and cave in the broiling sunAnd the withering economy, and now
Maryland, pop. 200, might loseits post office, the heart of a hamlet
with no business district, no main street,no traffic light, but with the name of a state.
—gEorgE hEld, nEW york, ny
VerseWISCONSIN.org 33
Change Finds My Hometown Not that I mind them being here, that’s not it.Just wanna know why they drive better carsthan mine. Somebody give ‘em them cars,why don’t they give me one? I worked hard all my life and nobody give me sh*t.Why these Chinese get all the favors?Not Chinese, Dad, my sister says, they’re Hmong.Mom chimes in from the kitchen: So much crime we got now. Just read the papers. Can’tfeel safe nowhere. Maybe these Hmong that comeover here aren’t so bad, but their kidsare mean. They got gangs beatin’ up on kids who been born here. I’m listeningfrom the easy chair, pretending to watch TV.My first visit home in years and I’m stumblingto navigate the family. It’s changed, I say loud, can’t deny it. What did you expect,my sister says, the world is shifting and won’t stop.She’s right. She’s up close with Hmong enrolleesin her classroom and their families after school. She’s big-hearted to a fault. Wants us allto get along. It’s Mom and Pop I can’t figure;they used to walk evenings up and down the blockvisiting neighbors till past dark. Now they’re locked in their own home. It’s hard, my sister says.You bet it’s hard, Mom says and bites her lip.Yeah, Dad says with a sigh. It’s never been easy,he says, never been easy for nobody.
—loWEll JaEgEr, bigFork, mt
Raising Windmills
She counts the timed red flickersagainst a calculated swing
in the parsed-out fields where rollinghills have ceased their rolling.
He watches the steel shadows
like spinning armies march and pulse;the cattle hunch, the chicken scatter
in the hum-hum drumming.
So, they made a few extra bucks;who can blame them in this hard-clay world,
a little extra help for the tired old farmerwith un-tillable land.
The company came unannounced
to do the deals. No one loses, they said;they all shook hands. It was in the winter months,
no one saw them leaving.
Smart guys who tipped their chairs backat the yellow kitchen tables, loosened their ties,
pencil marked the land here and theredown the road. It was an easy calculation.
It’ll make clean, cheap power
for the folks far away as Chicago,some left over for the locals. Good for you
good for the country, no one loses.
Now the farmers don’t talk cows,their wives don’t share recipes.
They mostly lie awake nights countingthe once close neighbor’s sky-blade rotations.
—mary WEhnEr, Fond du lac, Wi visit VW Online for audio by this author
On My Way to Slinger, Wisconsin
I see a white swan, up ahead, nestledin green grass along the road, watchingeach car drive by with a quick turn of itsneck. Closer, I see it is an empty plasticbag for a kitchen wastepaper basket.I will never forget that swan.
—John lEhman, cambridgE, Wi visit VW Online for video by this author
Drought Breaks
Cattle stand, staring at the water,willing it to rise and slake their thirst.
Wagtails flick their skirts,skimming from bush to water and back again.
God’s in his heaven and, the farmer hopes,working out fair water allocations.
—JoE massingham, chisholm, act, australia
34 Verse wisconsin #110 October 2012
The Sessions of Sweet Silent Thought
Of course you can go home again,only when you get thereit’s not homeanymore. A crushed paper cupin the gutter, old woman in an upstairs windowlooking you over. It even smellsalien, like someone else’s closetor a friend’s dog.Grandmother is gone,gone so longthey’ve named a street for herand thusentirely erased her breathfrom this greening earth.I remember mainly my own memoriesat this point, if I am lucky—first taste of lemon ice cream,time I threw my trikethrough a winter windowjust to see glass splinter and gleamlike ice, and the sleety windrushing in.But my brother still swearsit was hetossed the trike, and Iwas just told about it.Could be, could be,but I supposeto be awake and aliveon a chill December morninglistening to doors openingand closing, hearing car enginescough to lifeand neighbors leaving for work
—to be awake stilland notice, yes, that is lucky enough.
—david graham, ripon, Wivisit VW Online for more by this author
Rain for Rent North of Brainerd we pass a buildingthat says “Rain for Rent,” nothingbut snow banks surrounding, no explanation.Irrigation equipment comes to mind,but also various reasonably pricedpackages for theatrical rain: Singin’ in the Rain requires downpourKing Lear rains horizontallyand employs a wind machine. Cemeteries include rainy optionsin the price of burials. Novelistsrent drizzle for Noir inspiration,and party packagesprove popular with lake house sets:programmable confetti showersfor birthdays and anniversaries,with concluding cloud bursts,rainbows extra,for sending the perseverant away. Rain is transient and can’t be sold.Catch it in gauges, barrels, bowlsand it transforms immediately, losingsomething essential and definitive;rain exists through falling alone.As the sun sinks toward Winter Solstice,I sit in the back seat of a Jeepwhose plates read “Ever After,”hands commandeering clouds,seeding their silver linings,precipitating summer and home.
—sandra J. lindoW, mEnomoniE, Wi
The Phrase
for Fay
As I’m once again, in the spirit of“naked we come, naked we go,”jettisoning something from my life—
old photos, a troublesome friend,movies even—my daughter accuses meof another “minimalist living frenzy,”
and I’m so happy to have the phraseI proudly start telling my friends about it,although, of course, without intending
to do so she has given mea gravestone epitaph—“Here he liesenjoying his final and best
minimalist living frenzy”—and I know I’ll never jettisonher phrase, will be holding tightly
onto only it at the very endsince language is always light,sometimes even lighter than air,
like her phrase, which, as it rises, I grip,frenzied and minimal,in order to rise with it.
—philip dacEy, minnEapolis, mnvisit VW Online for more by this author
VerseWISCONSIN.org 35
A Bad Path
After we caught and arrested him for slashing tiresin the basem*nt parking lot of a famous luxury hotel
we hauled him to the police station, slammed himin a tiny cell to think about what he had been doing
then yanked him for an interview under glaring lightswhere he told us he had not the slightest bit of remorse
that his actions were deliberate and fully explainablesince he was in the middle of trying to defile his souldo something nasty so that in his next reincarnation
his imperfection would insure he got another chanceto reappear rather than being swept nirvana-like into the fold of some eternal being, he taken with making
as many stops as he could wrench from the grand wheelbefore he got swept into the center, we doing our best
to warn him that he could return as a termite, a raccoonblind fish, whale, beetle, limping horse, mad dog, skunk
a terrifying range of eccentric options that pleased himmore than he ever imagined, then lowering his voice
he confessed that his greatest fear was to return as usas people bent on doing good in the world, a bad path
since it would hurl him into the hub of bright oblivion.
—glEnn klEtkE, kanata, ontario, canada
Guided Tour
Step gingerly.The streets wear coats of glass.
Jagged pieces like ice. Powder like snow.We speak here of the city of broken windows.
Build of wood decades ago in order to float away in a flood.But when the flood never came, the frustrated citizens
opened their doors, broke their windows, deserted their houses.New residents began to move in.
First sunlight, moonlight, starlight.Then wind, rain and snow, eager to shelter themselves somewhere.
Next mosquitoes, houseflies, butterflies, dragonflies, anything that fliesincluding birds delighted to have food and shelter combined.
Mice came too, rats, raccoons, skunks and squirrelshappy to dwell in rooms that predators had vacated
dogs and cats running off with their owners.Step gingerly.
You are the first human equivalent to return.Notice collapsing walls, holes in roofs, crumbling foundations.
Time will soon disassemble and level the city, call upbeetles, worms, ants, centipedes and earwigs
underground citizens to witnessthe spectacular heaven soon to fall upon them.
—glEnn klEtkE, kanata, ontario, canada
Drift Every six months,I have to be biopsied for Thyroid cancer.The doctors stick needles in my throat,and so far, the resultshave been borderline.
This winter there has been little snow.The deer come into my yard,and food is free and easy to have.I know they are being shot,but they seem weighty and lanky,take up the frame of the photograph,so that I cannot dispute their reality.
Many deer come; many muscles moving.My dog gets excited.I wonder how can I go on living,the winter earth turning overin its mind snow and rain,when, like these deer, I seem bentbackward and forwards into nothing.Yet I watch them turn hooveslike tapdancers,take gently the sap and bark of trees,loving the little green left on the February earth,raising tails in joy. —linda bEnninghoFF, lloyd harbor, ny
Eating Rice With Thich Nhat Hanh
A sunny morning in mid-March.I read Fragrant Palm Leavesby Thich Nhat Hanh.
He describes how, as a young man,he helped build a Buddhist monasterywhile living in a Vietnamese forest,loving the sounds of nature there, including amonstrous rain storm, which heaved trees to the ground and blasted the windowwhere he stood and watched with awe.
Later, he and I make eggs with riceand soy sauce. We absorb the peaceful quiet after the storm’sconflagration.
—mary cunningham, madison, Wi
36 Verse wisconsin #110 October 2012
Home
A feast of breasts:the moon-ripe fruit of breastupon breastupon breast.
The fruited feastof breast upon breast:this fruitful time,this happy season.
These fruited fields of home.
—p. c. moorEhEad, north lakE, Wi
Almost
When the car stumbledonto that patch of ice, all I could think
to do was say I’m so sorry. And I said his name.
And I listened to whathe told me to do: turn into it, don’t hold the brake—
we were both so calm, how could that be?
The dogs’ heads sprung forwardand our baby whirred in her straps.
I saw the drop. I knew what was coming,
that inertia, the way the wheels pausedbefore denouement,
that long, terrible cartwheel.
—molly sutton kiEFEr, rEd Wing, mnvisit VW Online for more by this author
Filling
I carved a piece of pumpkin pie.It was so lustrous and gold—
I thought it was silence.My knife cut
through the pieso dense.
It held together,as I placed a piece on my plate.
O silence,you are that pie—
so dense, so quiet,
so held together,filling my plate
and leaving roomfor no other.
—p.c. moorEhEad, north lakE, Wi
Words
Realistic hardly stretches any edges standing far too close to status quo.
That’s not to say compromise isn’t called for but cede only ground that you can live without.
Hope for an adversary that respects strength and purpose.
Then grandiose whittled down to size becomes a plan for action,
a starting point for peace.
—karEn halEy, WauWatosa, Wi
Gardener in Japan
When the black waveclawed away our village,
I was in Tokyo, finishing some workI thought would pay the bills.
To return took many days,
and even thenI could never go home.
I confess I have ceased to look for you,
but not to watch for you.Somehow spring wedges up
between bits of waste and sand,rolling bitter green over the tortured land.
I see, but cannot bear to watch it.
I watch for you.
And for the first time,what plants I have salvaged
I don’t know how to root, or where.
—Judy lEnt, sEattlE, Wa
VerseWISCONSIN.org 37
Mark Kraushaar of Lake Mills, Wisconsin joined Shoshauna Shy for a conversation about his poem “Lester and Helen.” Fix yourself a cup of tea, pull up a chair, and listen in.
MARK: I’ve worked briefly as a high school English teacher, a cab driver, a welder on the coal and grain barges of the Mississippi, and a pipe welder at Ingalls Shipbuilding. I am now an RN and work in Madison, which I’ve done since the mid-80s.
SHOSHAUNA: And I’d say that your current occupation feeds into “Lester and Helen” from your new book The Uncertainty Principle which won the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize in 2010 and was published by The Waywiser Press in 2011. The poem
seems to be constructed on what I think of as a family legend—a tale savored and passed down from holiday table to table. Could you speak to what planted the seed of inspiration for this poem?
MARK: The truth is, I never met Lester and Helen. They were my father’s parents, as I say in the poem, and were killed in a train wreck shortly after my parents were married. Actually, what inspired the poem was just how wildly unlikely, and yet strangely inevitable one’s arrival on Earth seems to be. The phrase for God, “It just happens,” seemed wonderfully plain, mysterious and apt all at once, and I did overhear this one day on an elevator in the hospital where I worked.
SHOSHAUNA: Yes, I believe your epigraph—something overheard—contributes nicely to this poem, presents another dimension to it, and the way you echo the epigraph in the final line clicks everything into place. The fact that the words overheard were in an elevator—and not just any elevator but a hospital elevator —really works well. That said, do you remember when you selected this epigraph—in other words, did you have the poem written already, or did the epigraph precede the writing?
MARK: “Lester and Helen” had been marinating for awhile when I heard this; it wasn’t a poem that came
very quickly, I remember. That phrase was a help in getting the poem moving again, and seemed the sort of mystical (but not very helpful) definition of God provided in the Old Testament – you know, “I am that I am.” So, I thought wow, great!
And that the conversation with this bit of speculation in it took place in a hospital elevator gave it a lot of resonance—the three or four family members all looked a bit stricken, and were apparently trying to make some kind of sense of a health care mystery that was beyond understanding.
SHOSHAUNA: Well, the implication here is that you wouldn’t have been born—and be who you are—if that collie’s leash had stayed
intact or your grandfather didn’t forget his wallet that morning. Both of these seemingly insignificant things contributed to your birth, and that’s where “Lester and Helen” has universal appeal. In my case, my dad’s former fiancée saw this blonde jitterbugging at a camp picnic, and told him, “There’s the woman for you!” My father agreed, broke up with his fiancée, and dated the dancer instead who subsequently became my mom.
MARK: I bet there’d be a good poem to make out of the ex-fianceé’s conversation with herself after that!
SHOSHAUNA: Well, please write it because I want to read that poem! But getting back to “Lester and Helen,” I am wondering what more you might know about that “cold plate” which comprised the first meal your parents ever shared, at least in the poem. If it is factual, when and how did you learn about it? Then again, if it wasn’t really a cold plate that they shared, perhaps you might explain why you chose to use it in this instance. I have to say it gives me a chill, especially when I get to that line “…forty years later they finally divorce.”
MARK: I thought I wanted to create something, some image having to do with this scene that seemed as specific as it did mundane. What could be duller than the cold plate, maybe egg salad?
SHOSHAUNA: No, bologna on rye! Seriously, what strikes me about the last two lines is the juxtaposition of two separate concepts: one references an absolute precision; the other serendipity. Together, they make for an inexplicable magic that I didn’t in any way anticipate. Is that the effect you were after?
MARK: I think they’re both true, these separate concepts, I mean, that this and this and the other happened…but how we each arrive here beyond anything understood is what I was after. I mean, that we’re kind of beached by the same wave as our family and friends seems simultaneously impossible and inevitable. I like that.
SHOSHAUNA: What a terrific image, Mark —getting beached! Maybe save that for your next poem, OK?
If you’d like to contact Mark Kraushaar to continue the conversation about this poem, you can reach him here: [emailprotected].
Lester and Helen
Maybe that’s what God is: It just happens.- Overheard in a hospital elevator
A man steps out to buy bread and arrives at the storeto find he’s left his keys and his walletlocked away in his room.Maybe later he’ll say, It just happens,but for now he walks around downtownand gets lost and spends the dayin a park where a young woman’s chasingher best friend’s collie. Since Lester has a waywith animals he and Helen round up the collieand talk dogs a little.The leash broke, Helen says.It’s chilly, so Lester offers his coat.They laugh and have coffee, and Lesterasks can he see her again. They go to the show,hold hands, marry and have two sons, Bill and Jack.And this is not magic.Or no more than how we picture bothboys in knickers and place them in school.Imagine the 30s.Black, wide-fendered cars line the streets and the boyswear caps and Jack carries his books in a green canvas bag.Bill carries his with a strap.In a few years Bill’soff to college where someone says,One day I’ll introduce you to Margaret.Bill’s shy – first he will, and then he won’t.And then he will.So they meet and they order the cold plate, talk,talk, talk: Bill loves science, Margaret loves books,and they marry and forty years later they finally divorce.Still, whatever they say and however eventscome together and dates add up, thisis where my own life starts.The truth is it couldn’t have happened otherwise.And that it just happened.
© Mark Kraushaar, The Uncertainty Principle, The Waywiser Press in 2011
At the Kitchen Table
Shoshauna Shy Talks with Mark Kraushaar
38 Verse wisconsin #110 October 2012
Antler, former poet laureate of Milwaukee, is the author of Selected Poems, Ever-Expanding Wilderness, Deathrattles vs. Comecries, and Exclamation Points ad Infinitum! His work appears in the recent anthologies Poets Against the War; Poetic Voices Without Borders 2; Best Gay Poetry 2008; Comeback Wolves: Welcoming the Wolf Home and Wilderness Blessings. p. 13
Linda Aschbrenner lives in Marshfield and is presently lost in the 1950s as she works on a book of family memories with her two sisters, Elda Lepak and Mavis Flegle. p. 32
Peggy Aylsworth’s poetry has appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, The MacGuffin, Ars Interpes (Sweden), Chiron Review, Rattle, and is forthcoming in Poetry Salzburg Review and in numerous other literary journals throughout the U.S. and abroad. Recently, one of her poems was nominated by The Medulla Review for a Pushcart Prize. p. 16
Jane-Marie Bahr lives on the edge of a marsh in northwestern Wisconsin. When not reading books or writing poems, she tends to her late husband’s perennial gardens. She has an MST degree from UW-Whitewater and taught high school English at Whitewater HS. p. 10
Jan Ball teaches ESL at DePaul University in Chicago. She was a nun for seven years in Milwaukee. Since then, she has married, raised a family, written a doctoral dissertation, and published her poems in multiple journals and magazines. A member of the Poetry Club of Chicago, her chapbook Accompanying Spouse is available from Finishing Line Press. p. 29
Gerard Beirne was born in Ireland and now lives in Canada. He is a past recipient of The Sunday Tribune/Hennessy New Irish Writer of the Year award. His collection of poetry Digging My Own Grave was published by Dedalus Press, Dublin. His collection Games of Chance: A Gambler’s Manual is forthcoming from Oberon. He has published two novels; his short story “Sightings of Bono” was adapted for film featuring Bono. (www.gerardbeirne.com) p. 11
Chloe Benjamin is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Currently, she teaches in the English department at Edgewood College. She is at work on a novel. p. 27
Linda Benninghoff was most recently published in Canary, a journal of the environmental crisis and Poets and Artists. She has an MA in English with an emphasis on creative writing from Stony Brook. Her book, Whose Cries Are Not Music, was reviewed in Verse Wisconsin. p. 35
Michael Biehl’s poetry has appeared in Image: A Journal of the Arts and Religion, Callaloo, The Comstock Review, Snail Mail Review, and a number of other magazines. Currently he is an instructor of English as a Second Language to foreign university students and business executives. p. 19
Kimberly Blaeser, a Professor in the English Department at UW-Milwaukee, teaches Creative Writing, Native American Literature, and American Nature Writing. Among her publications are three books of poetry: Trailing You, Absentee Indians and Other Poems, and Apprenticed to Justice, as well as the edited volume Traces in Blood, Bone, and Stone: Contemporary Ojibwe Poetry. p. 17, 24
Rose Mary Boehm is a German-born UK national who lives in Lima, Peru. All the native people in Peru would have come across the Behring Street at one moment during the Wisconsin Glaciation. And she married one of them. Her first poetry collection, Tangents, was published in 2011. p. 9
Jeff Burt was born and raised in Wisconsin in small towns, spent several years in Adams County, and graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. p. 30
With a bachelor’s degree in English from UW-Stevens-Point, Thomas Cannon has been writing for many years while working as a special education teacher and living in Oshkosh. He has had poems published in Literary Mary, Leaf Garden, The Poetry Explosion Newsletter, and Wisconsin Poets’ Calendar. His short stories have been widely published as well. p. 24, 25
Robin Chapman is author of seven books of poetry, most recently the eelgrass meadow (Tebot Bach). She is recipient of the 2010 Helen Howe Poetry Prize from Appalachia. Her poems have appeared recently in Alaska Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, and Wilderness. p. 28
Ching-In Chen is the author of The Heart’s Traffic (Arktoi Books/Red Hen Press) and co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities (South End Press). She is a Kundiman and Lambda Fellow, part of the Macondo and Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation writing communities, and a past participant in Sharon Bridgforth’s Theatrical Jazz Institute. p. 6, 7
Kelly Cherry’s newest collection, The Life and Death of Poetry, will be published by L.S.U. Press in spring 2013. She is formerly Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia and a member of the Electorate of Poets Corner at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. p. 12
Naomi Cochran lives in northern Wisconsin near Hayward. p. 26
Barbara Crooker’s books are Radiance, which won the 2005 Word Press First Book competition and was a finalist for the 2006 Paterson Poetry Prize; Line Dance, (Word Press 2008), which won the 2009 Paterson Award for Literary Excellence; and More (C & R Press, 2010). She lives and writes in rural northeastern Pennsylvania, but has a fondness for Wisconsin writing, based on the excellence she found when she judged the Lorine Niedecker and the Posner awards. p. 15
Mary Cunningham lives in Madison with her husband, one daughter and that daughter’s two dogs. Previously a computer programmer and analyst with a busy volunteer life, she now reads a lot, paints occasionally, keeps up friendships and writes poetry. p. 35
Philip Dacey is the author of eleven full-length books of poems, the latest Mosquito Operas: New and Selected Short Poems (Rain Mountain Press, 2010). His awards include three Pushcart Prizes, a Discovery Award from the New York YM-YWHA’s Poetry Center, and various fellowships. The author of whole collections of poems about Gerard Manley Hopkins, Thomas Eakins, and New York City, Dacey recently returned to Minnesota (Minneapolis) after an eight-year post-retirement adventure in Manhattan. (philipdacey.com) p. 34
Holly Day is a housewife and mother of two. Her poetry has recently appeared in The Oxford American, The Midwest Quarterly, and Slipstream. Her book publications include Music Composition for Dummies, Guitar-All-in-One for Dummies, and Music Theory for Dummies, which has recently been translated into French, Dutch, Spanish, Russian, and Portuguese. p. 8, 11
After living in rural Brussels for 15 years, Sue DeKelver firmly believes it’s her perfect place for gardening, writing and just being. p. 26
Darren C. Demaree is living in Columbus, Ohio with his wife and children. He is the recipient of two Pushcart Prize nominations, and his first full collection, As We Refer to Our Bodies, will be released this winter by 8th House Publishing House. p. 24
Bruce Dethlefsen plays bass and sings in the musical (he hopes) duo Obvious Dog, the name taken from Wiscosnin Poet Laureate Marilyn Taylor’s description of a poem “beyond resuscitation.” His most recent collection is Unexpected Shiny Things (Cowfeather Press, 2011). p. 19
CX Dillhunt is the assistant editor of Hummingbird: Magazine of the Short Poem; he’s a tutor for elementary school writers workshops in Verona, and an American Red Cross volunteer at the Veterans Hospital. He was named a Commended Poet by the Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission in 2010. pp. 20-21
Drew Dillhunt is author of the chapbook 3,068,518 (Mudlark, No. 39, 2010). His writing has appeared in Eclectica, Jacket2, Tarpaulin Sky, and VOLT. His manuscript, Materials Science, was selected as a finalist for the National Poetry Series. He’s released two albums of songs, including one with the band Fighting Shy, and is a member of the Seattle art-music collaborative The Blank Department. pp. 20-21
Richard Dinges, Jr. has an MA in literary studies from University of Iowa and he manages business systems at an insurance company. Slant, Concho River Review, California Quarterly, Sunstone, and Miller’s Pond have most recently accepted his poems for their publications. p. 15
Joseph Farley edited Axe Factory for 24 years. His books/chapbooks include Suckers, For the Birds, Longing for the Mother Tongue, and Waltz of the Meatballs. p. 8, 9, 10
Mavis J. Flegle enjoys gardening, Antique Club, writing, and jaunts around the Midwest with longtime friends. Her first chapbook, Just Another Day, came out in 2010. p. 32
Christa Gahlman was born and raised in rural Wisconsin with a great appreciation for the intimacy of the woods, wide landscapes, and textured fields. She is the mother of two incredible daughters and one amazing son. She now resides in the city of Madison, and writes...and writes. p. 23
Daniel Gallik has had poetry and short stories published by Hawaii Review, Nimrod, Limestone (Univ. of Kentucky), The Hiram Poetry Review, Aura (Univ. of Alabama), Whiskey Island (Cleveland State Univ), and various online journals. A novel, A Story Of Dumb Fate, is available at amazon.com. p. 29
Abby Gambrel’s poems have appeared in Cream City Review, Orion Magazine, Crab Creek Review, Georgetown Review and elsewhere. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and received an MFA from University of California, Irvine 2008. p. 13
Hanne Gault has been published in the Wisconsin Calendar, The Pulse, and Free Verse. She won third prize in the Joanne Hirshfield poetry contest. p. 29
David Graham has taught writing and literature at Ripon College in Ripon, WI, since 1987. He is the author of six collections of poems, most recently Stutter Monk (Flume Press), and an essay anthology co-edited with Kate Sontag: After Confession: Poetry as Autobiography (Graywolf Press). p. 34
Taylor Graham’s ties to Wisconsin include a cousin in Wonnewoc, helping instruct at a search-and-rescue dog school in Osceola, and appearances in Verse Wisconsin. Otherwise, she lives in the California Sierra with a husband, a dog trained for SAR, an untrainable cat, and four sheep. p. 9, 14, 15
Barbara Gregorich’s most recent titles are Sound Proof, an adult mystery set at a Midwest music festival, and Jack and Larry, the free-verse nonfiction story of Jack Graney and his bull terrier, Larry. She is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin and resides in Wisconsin part of every month. p. 27
For his first book of poems, Poor Manners (Ahadada Books, 2009), Adam Halbur was chosen the 2010 resident poet of The Frost Place, the Robert Frost homestead in Franconia, New Hampshire. His work has also appeared in the anthology Never Before: Poems about First Experiences (Four Way Books, 2005) as well as in various journals. p. 14
Karen Haley has lived in Wisconsin most of her adult life, and raised five children here. p. 36
William Wright Harris’s poetry has appeared in six countries in such literary journals as The Cannon’s Mouth, Ascent Aspirations, and Write On!!! He’s a student at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, where he’s been lucky enough to study poetry in workshop settings with such poets as Jesse Janeshek, Marilyn Kallet, Arthur Smith, and Marcel Brouwers. p. 19
George Held, a seven-time Pushcart nominee, publishes widely online and in print, and Garrison Keillor has featured his work on NPR. Held’s most recent books, both 2011, are After Shakespeare: Selected Sonnets (www.cervenabarvapress.com) and a children’s book, Neighbors (www.filsingerco.com), illustrated by Joung Un Kim. p. 32
As founding editor of Many Voices Press, Lowell Jaeger compiled Poems Across the Big Sky, an anthology of Montana poets, and New Poets of the American West, an anthology of poets from 11 Western states. His most recent poetry collections are Suddenly Out of a Long Sleep (Arctos Press, 2009) and WE, (Main Street Rag Press, 2010). He is the recipient of fellowships from the NEA and the Montana Arts Council and winner of the Grolier Poetry Peace Prize. Most recently Jaeger was awarded the Montana Governor’s Humanities Award for his work in promoting thoughtful civic discourse. p. 33
Poet Gary Jones lives with his wife of many years on Wisconsin’s Door Peninsula where he enjoys reading, gardening, and silent sports. His verse has appeared most recently in Rosebud, Pearl, Verse Wisconsin, Knock, Peninsula Pulse, and Clutching at Straws. Jones, who is an award-winning poet, teaches poetry writing workshops for both high school students and adults. p. 22, 25
Glenn Kletke’s poems appear in the recent edition of ARC (Poet vs. Poet) and In Fine Form, a guide to structured poetry. He has won several poetry and prose contests. Glenn is a member of the Field Stone poets, and a sampling of his work can be found in their recent collection, Whistle for a Jellyfish, published by Bookland Press. p. 35
Mark Kraushaar is an RN in Madison. His work has appeared in the Hudson Review, Ploughshares, Alaska Review, Gettysburg Review, as well as Best American Poetry, and the website Poetry Daily. He is a recipient of Poetry Northwest’s Richard Hugo Award. His two collections are The Uncertainty Principle (2012, Waywiser Press), and Falling Brick Kills Local Man, (Felix Pollak Prize, UW-Press, 2009). p. 37
Richard Kresal worked in Hotel/Casino revenue audit and lives in the Town of Green Lake, WI. p. 11
Michael Kriesel’s poems have appeared in North American Review, The Progressive and Rattle. He’s written reviews for Small Press Review and Library Journal, and has won the WFOP Muse Prize, the Lorine Niedecker Award from the Council for Wisconsin Writers, and the Wisconsin People & Ideas John Lehman Poetry Prize. Books include Chasing Saturday Night (Marsh River Editions); Feeding My Heart To The Wind and Moths Mail The House (sunnyoutside press). p. 19
Mike Lane has lived in Delafield, Wisconsin, for almost 40 years, with his wife Kathy. Mike’s poems have appeared previously at Soundzine, Third Wednesday, Echoes and Poetry Super Highway. His first chapbook of poetry, They Can Keep The Cinder Block, was launched by Exot Books in March 2012. p. 13, 19
Jackie Langetieg has three books, White Shoulders (Cross+Roads Press), Just What in Hell is a Stage of Grief, and Confetti in a Silent City (Ghost Horse Press). A fourth book, A Terrible Tenderness awaits publication. She lives in Verona, WI with two black cats and her son, Eric. p. 22, 23
Estella Lauter is Professor Emerita at UW-Oshkosh and lives in the Door Peninsula. Her first chapbook, Pressing a Life Together By Hand (2007) appeared in the New Women’s Voices series from Finishing Line Press, and was nominated for two Pushcart prizes. The Essential Rudder: North Channel Poems was released by FLP in 2008. Her poem “Gaza, January 2009” tied for first prize in the 2009 Barbara Mandigo Kelly Peace Poetry Contest; it appears on www.wagingpeace.org. p. 14
Tom Lavelle, a native of Pittsburgh, lived in Milwaukee between 1981 and 83. Since then he’s visited sporadically. He lives today in Stockholm, where he teaches and writes as he has done since 1992. It’s not colder than Wisconsin, but darker. p. 11
Contributors’ Notes ??
VerseWISCONSIN.org 39
Janet Leahy gleans some of her poems from her experience as a teacher in Milwaukee. She is on the board of the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets. Her poems appear in various journals and on Your Daily Poem. p. 26
Norman Leer is Professor Emeritus of English at Roosevelt University, Chicago. He has published a critical study of Ford Madox Ford, a chapbook and two books of his own poems (I Dream My Father in a Song, and Second Lining, Mellen Poetry Press, 1992 and 1997), as well as poems and articles in several journals. In 1990, he received the Illinois Significant Poet’s Award from State Laureate Gwendolyn Brooks. He and his wife Grethe live in Madison. p. 31
John Lehman is the founder of Rosebud magazine and the poetry editor of Wisconsin People & Ideas. p. 25, 33
Jef Leisgang’s poems have previously appeared in Verse Wisconsin, Free Lunch, Plainsongs, Flint Hills Review, Steam Ticket, Wisconsin Review, and elsewhere. In addition to the poem featured here, he hopes to publish a children’s book he wrote about the unique geology of Schoolhouse Beach on Washington Island in Door County, one of his family’s favorite destinations for many years now. p. 28
A visit to a cousin in Madison, though pleasant, wasn’t enough to connect Judy Lent, a Seattle editor and writer, to the land. The Wisconsin Uprising, however, a hopeful sign of a receding tide of complacency, has permanently imbedded Wisconsin’s people in her heart. p. 10, 36
MaryEllen Letarte’s father was born in Pepin, WI. He matriculated at the University of Wisconsin until WWII. Her sister Christine graduated from Marquette University and lived most of her adult life in Wisconsin. MaryEllen lives and writes in Lunenburg, MA, where she developed, and now directs, the Louise Bogan Chapter of the Massachusetts State Poetry Society. p. 9
Pam Lewis is a psychologist, recently retired from UW-Madison, where she worked for 13 years. She lives in Madison, and likes to compare and contrast things like crossword puzzles and poetry. p. 23
Recently Sandra J. Lindow fell down awoodchuck hole (only one foot thanks to yoga) while trying to murder box elder bugs with insecticidal soap. She lives in Menomonie, Wisconsin, where she writes, edits, and teaches part-time at University of Wisconsin-Stout. p. 34 K.R. (Joe) Massingham was born in the UK but has lived the second half of his life in Australia. Major employment has been as a Navy officer, university student from first degree to PhD, tutor, lecturer and Master of Wright College, University of New England, NSW. He retired early because of cancer and heart problems and now spends time waiting to see medical practitioners, writing poetry and prose and smelling the roses. He has had work published in Australia, Eire, India, Nepal, NZ, UK, and USA. p. 33
P. C. Moorehead moved to Wisconsin from California’s Silicon Valley. She appreciates the beauty and quiet of the woods and the inspirational environment which they provide for her writing and reflection. p. 36
Bruce W. Niedt is a “beneficent bureaucrat” from southern NJ whose poetry has appeared in Writer’s Digest, Writers’ Journal, The Lyric, Mad Poets Review, and many others. His awards include the ByLine Short Fiction and Poetry Award, first prize for poetry at the Philadelphia Writers Conference, and a Pushcart Prize nomination. His latest chapbook is Breathing Out from Finishing Line Press. p. 7, 22
Uche Ogbuji is an immigrant from Nigeria who studied at Milwaukee School of Engineering, married a girl, Lori, from Twin Lakes, and settled with her in Boulder, Colorado where they now raise four children. Uche is a computer engineer and entrepreneur whose abiding passion is poetry. His poems have appeared in sundry journals, and he is editor at Kin Poetry Journal and The Nervous Breakdown.. p. 18
Ann M. Penton, Green Valley AZ (& recently WI) is connecting with the AZ writing community including the renowned U of A Poetry Center. She was invited to submit and read a poem at Saguaro National Park for the BioBlitz, a species-counting event sponsored at one park annually by National Geographic and the National Park Service. p. 28
Nancy Petulla lives in a 150-year-old farm house. She began writing poetry at age 65. She works to envision with words life, aging and death. She is a retired minister to the elderly, ill and dying. Her poems have been published in Free Verse, Verse Wisconsin, and in the 2013 Wisconsin Poets’ Calendar. p. 13
Charles Portolano started writing poetry 16 years ago to celebrate the birth of his daring, darling, daughter Valerie and preserve the memories. Valerie was born with many obstacles to overcome giving him much to write about. Valerie is doing great now; she is quite the young writer. He has a new collection of poetry out, The little, lingering, white, lies we allow ourselves to live with. p. 17
Summer Qabazard is a poet who grew up in Kuwait and now lives in Normal, Illinois where she is a PhD student at Illinois State University. Her poem “All Hands Bury the Dead” appears in The University of Missouri-St. Louis’s literary magazine, LitMag. She likes Wisconsin cheese. p. 18
Harlan Richards came late to his penchant for waxing poetic, beginning on his 56th birthday in 2010. Since then, he has had poems accepted or published in Samsara, Italian-Americana, Love’s Choice, Alimentum, and other venues. You can read more of his poems, along with political essays, at betweenthebars.org\blogs\637. p. 16 Jenna Rindo’s work has recently appeared in Crab Orchard Review and is forthcoming in Calyx, Crab Creek Review, and Blood and Thunder: Musings on the Art of Medicine. She lives in rural Wisconsin with her family, and small flocks of Shetland sheep and Rhode Island Red hens. She teaches English to Hmong, Kurdish, Vietnamese and Spanish students. p. 14
Jeannie E. Roberts won first place in the Green Bay Symphony Orchestra’s Music Alive statewide poetry contest. Her work has appeared in the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets’ Museletter, Wisconsin Poets’ Calendar, Verse Wisconsin and elsewhere. A lifelong visual artist, she is also the author and illustrator of Let’s Make Faces!, a children’s book (www.RhymeTheRoostBooks.com). p. 12 Tess Romeis is a Wisconsin native who tends to hover over, and ferret about, the Lake Michigan shoreline. She is a proud member of the Stone Kettle Poets. p. 8, 22
Margaret (Peggy) Rozga has published two books of poetry, the award-winning volume about Milwaukee’s fair housing marches, Two Hundred Nights and One Day and a collection responding to her Army Reservist son’s deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, Though I Haven’t Been to Baghdad. Inspired by her small garden, she is currently completing work on a new manuscript, Justice Freedom Herbs. pp. 4-5
Chuck Rybak lives in Wisconsin and is currently an Assistant Professor of English and Humanistic Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. He is the author of two chapbooks, Nickel and Diming My Way Through and Liketown. His full-length collection, Tongue and Groove, was released in 2007 by Main Street Rag. Poems of his have appeared in The Cincinnati Review; Pebble Lake Review; War, Literature & the Arts; The Ledge; Southern Poetry Review; Verse Wisconsin; and other journals. p. 26
G. A. Scheinoha thought about becoming a private detective, later, a bounty hunter. He never imagined he’d follow in his father’s tracks; a series of blue collar jobs. Where their lives differed was instead of marriage and family, he wrote a million words over thirty years, some of which have recently appeared in Avocet, Bellowing Ark, Bracelet Charm, Echoes, Floyd County Moonshine, and Verse Wisconsin. p. 31
E. M. Schorb’s work has appeared in The American Scholar, The Sewanee Review, Southwest Review, Poetry Salzburg Review, The Yale Review, The Chicago Review, The Iowa Review, Carolina Quarterly, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Antioch Review, Stand and Agenda (England), The Notre Dame Review, and New York Quarterly, among others. p. 28
Anne Shaw’s collections of poetry include Undertow, winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky Poetry Prize, and Shatter & Thrust, forthcoming from Persea Books in 2013. Work of hers has also appeared or is forthcoming in Harvard Review, New American Writing, Black Warrior Review, Indiana Review, and Hotel Amerika. Her website is www.anneshaw.org. p. 16
Peggy Shumaker is Alaska State Writer Laureate for 2010-2012. These poems are from Toucan Nest (Red Hen Press, 2013). Her lyrical memoir is Just Breathe Normally (U. of Nebraska Press). Shumaker is Professor Emerita at University of Alaska Fairbanks and teaches in the Rainier Writing Workshop at PLU. She edits Boreal Books, publishing literature and fine art from Alaska, and the Alaska Literary Series at University of Alaska Press. Please visit her website at www.peggyshumaker.com. p. 12
Shoshauna Shy is a member of the Prairie Fire Poetry Quartet. In May 2004, she founded Poetry Jumps Off the Shelf. Her poems have been published in numerous journals and magazines including The Seattle Review, Cimarron Review, The Briar Cliff Review, Rattle, Rosebud and Poetry Northwest. Her collection titled What the Postcard Didn’t Say won an Outstanding Achievement Award from the Wisconsin Library Association in 2008. p. 37
Hal Sirowitz’s closest connection to Wisconsin was getting accepted into the University of Wisconsin at Madison Doctoral Program in Literature. But he went to a local university to become a public school teacher. He’s the author of 4 poetry books. p. 23
Steven D. Stark is the author of four books and has written frequently for a variety of publications including the NY Times and Atlantic Monthly. He recently won the Clapboard House short story contest. p. 9
N. A’Yara Stein was a finalist in the 2011 National Poetry Series for her manuscript, Saudade. She is a grant recipient of the Michigan Art Council and the Arkansas Arts Council, among other honors. She’s recently published in The Mayo Review, Ping Pong: The Journal of the Henry Miller Library, The Delinquent (UK), among others. She lives near Chicago with her sons. p. 10
Carole Stone, Professor of English Emerita, Montclair State University, has published seven chapbooks and three books of poetry, Lime and Salt, Carriage House Press, Traveling with the Dead, Backwaters Press, and American Rhapsody, CavanKerry Press. Her work in journals includes, Chelsea, Nimrod, The Beloit Poetry Review and Southern Poetry Review. She is a recipient of fellowships from The NJ State Council on the Arts and residencies at Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for Writers in Scotland and Chateau de Lavigny in Switzerland. p. 30
Molly Sutton Kiefer’s chapbook The Recent History of Middle Sand Lake won the 2010 Astounding Beauty Ruffian Press Poetry Award. Her work has appeared in Harpur Palate, Berkeley Poetry Review, you are here, Gulf Stream, Cold Mountain Review, Wicked Alice, and Permafrost, among others. She received her MFA from the University of Minnesota, serves as poetry editor to Midway Journal, and curates Balancing the Tide: Motherhood and the Arts | An Interview Project. She currently lives in Red Wing with her husband and daughter, where she is at work on a manuscript on (in)fertility. More can be found at mollysuttonkiefer.com. p. 36
After Len Tews’ retirement as a biology professor at UW-Oshkosh, he took up the writing of poetry. He lived in Seattle for fifteen years but has now returned to Oshkosh where he is participating in the poetry scene in his home state. He has several chapbooks. p. 25
Elizabeth Tornes’ chapbook Snowbound won First Prize in the WFOP 2012 Chapbook Contest. Her poems have appeared in The New Republic, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She lives in Lac du Flambeau, WI.and has also published a book of Ojibwe oral histories, Memories of Lac du Flambeau Elders (UW Press, 2004). p. 6
Peggy Trojan, retired to the north Wisconsin woods with her husband. Published her first poem at seventy-seven. Member of WFOP. Published in Dust and Fire, Wilda Morris Challenge, WFOP calendars, Talking Stick, Echoes, Finnish American Reporter, and most recently, in Migrations, Poetry and Prose for Life’s Transitions. p. 31
Carolyn Vargo is a Regional Vice President for WFOP, a substitute teacher in West Allis – West Milwaukee, a retired teacher from Milwaukee Public Schools, an organizer of readings at People’s Book Cooperative, a teacher of the Urban Echo Poets at the Urban Ecology Center, a bird watcher, and a grandmother. p. 17
Frank X Walker is the author of six poetry collections, including Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting of Medgar Evers (University of Georgia, forthcoming May 2013); When Winter Come: the Ascension of York (University Press of Kentucky, 2008); Black Box (Old Cove Press, 2005); Buffalo Dance: the Journey of York (University Press of Kentucky, 2003), which won the Lillian Smith Book Award in 2004; and Affrilachia (Old Cove Press, 2000). A 2005 recipient of the Lannan Literary Fellowship in Poetry, Walker is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Kentucky and Director of African American & Africana Studies, and the editor of PLUCK!, the new Journal of Affrilachian Art & Culture. pp. 20-21
Mary Wehner is the author of …or the opposite, a letterpress chapbook by Red Hydra Press, which also published her broadsides “The Chinese Painting” and “Broken Shells at Dusk.” Her work has appeared in Red River Review, The Writer Magazine, Verse Wisconsin, Southern Indiana Review, Wisconsin Trails, qarrtsiluni and other publications. She is a founding member of Foot of the Lake Poetry Collective and is a board member of the Council for Wisconsin Writers. p. 33
Greg Weiss is the founding editor of Intentional Walk, the only literary journal devoted to sports poetry (www.intentionalwalkreview.com). His work has recently appeared in Boston Review and Southeast Review. p. 27
Ed Werstein spent 22 years in manufacturing and union activity before his muse awoke and dragged herself out of bed. His sympathies lie with poor and working people. He advocates for peace and against corporate power. His poetry has appeared in Verse Wisconsin, Blue Collar Review, Mobius Magazine and a few other publications. p. 31
Marie Sheppard Williams’s mentor for poetry is Thomas R. Smith, a WI poet and essayist. She has had poems published in The Sun, Poetry East, Ted Kooser’s newspaper column, and another issue of Verse Wisconsin. She has published seven story collections, and has won the Pushcart Prize twice. p. 7
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“It’s Political” Poems/Visual Poetry/Art & More | Extended Conversation with Frank X Walker, CX Dillhunt & Drew Dillhunt | “Alan Dugan and Discontent,” by Adam Halbur | “In Defense of Political Poetry,” by Estella Lauter | “Poems for Politicians,” by Gillian Nevers | “Enrichment and Repair: How Poetry Can Refresh Our Vision,” by Thomas R. Smith | “swaggacity in the heart land,” by Wendy Vardaman | “notes
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Bill McConnellBNB McMurryRichard MerelmanMarilyn MeyerJames B. Nicolaayaz daryl nielsenRobert NordstromJoe “Pepe” OulahanKathleen PhillipsKen PoboTara PohlkotteJeff PoniewazCharles PortolanoJean PrestonJim PriceEster PrudloMonica RaymondMegan ReetzDustin RenwickRon RiekkiTony RiveraNydia RojasHoward RosenbergMary C. RowinMargaret RozgaSaneleVoxRobert SchulerNancy ScottLynley Shimat LysPeggy ShumakerNeil SilberblattJohn H. SimeJ. D. SmithThomas R. SmithAngela SorbyDavid SteingassMatthew StolteMolly Sutton KieferJudy SwannMargaret SwedishLen TewsDon ThackreyCharles TrimbergerCarolyn VargoPhilip VenzkeLisa VihosMoisés Villavicencio BarrasRon WallacePhyllis WaxEd WersteinMarilyn Zelke-Windau
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