Flurry*

EMILY K. BRIGHT

Tue, 17 Mar 2009 10:31:12 -0500

THANK YOU

I love the parents waiting for their children at the bus, especially the ones who wait alone,
their hats pulled down, kicking out their limbs like cranes,

one mother in a defiantly red skirt. She shifts her weight, she bends her waist.
Her day packed and pressed aside, she gives room to this waiting.

Remember coming late from practice, Mom sitting with the car shut off to save gas?
January seeping in, she kneads a cold and aching foot, returns it to her boot.

Her eyes are fixed on your school door, on the forms that you will take. Any moment now,
you will emerge.

Emily K. Bright received her MFA from the University of Minnesota in May. Her chapbook Glances Back was published by Pudding House Press in 2007, and individual poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The North American Review, The Crab Orchard Review, and the anthology Imagine Peace.

ELIZABETH WEIR

Mon, 16 Mar 2009 10:31:08 -0500

“SHE HAS AN INFERIORITY COMPLEX”

I remember my mother saying that.
In Cheam, outside the fishmongers
and the greengrocers, to acquaintances:
“Elizabeth has an inferiority complex.”

I feel important. My mother knows.
She reads Ladies’ Home Journal.
Kindly people smile down at me,
shake their heads. Poor thing,
they say and turn to admire
my baby brother in his pram.

She spoke the phrase for years.
I wear it, winter in its folds.

Elizabeth Weir was awarded a 2005 SASE/Jerome grant, and her work most recently has been published in Alimentum, Out of Line and Main Channel Voices.

LINDA BACK McKAY

Sat, 14 Mar 2009 10:31:01 -0500

ACROSS FROM HAMMACHER SCHLEMMER

It may be better not
knowing what to believe
than to know
what is supposed
to be believed.
To weigh god and science,
reason and anarchy,
destiny and accident,
myth and history, is to fall
into the mind of the haunted
Chicago cab driver
who carries on the family
tradition of being alone.
One more person
out of the loop and the circle
closes like the spring
clasp of a bracelet.
My father died and that
causes me to question
why I ask.
It may be better not
to pinpoint believers
and non-believers.
The lines are long on both sides.
There will be good times,
there will be the rest of time.
Strange, how we can live
here and not know our way around.

Linda Back McKay is a Minneapolis poet, writer and teaching artist. Her work has appeared in Great River Review, Water~Stone, and elsewhere. Her poetry collections are Ride That Full Tilt Boogie (2001 North Star Press) and The Cockeyed Precision of Time (2007 White Space Press).

DENISE K. LAJIMODIERE

Fri, 13 Mar 2009 10:30:58 -0500

SUN DOGS

This poem is no longer available.

Denise K. Lajimodiere is a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa in Belcourt, North Dakota. She is an Assistant Professor in Educational Leadership at North Dakota State University, Fargo, ND, and lives in Moorhead, MN. Her poetry manuscript, Dragonfly Dance, was recently a finalist in Autumn Press poetry contest. Her poems have appeared in Yellow Medicine Review, North Country, and Sporting Words.

JESSICA FOX-WILSON

Mon, 9 Mar 2009 09:25:16 -0500

WHITE IS NOT THE ABSENCE OF COLOR

This is not the season’s first snow—it is the second. Shoveling narrow paths on city sidewalks; this is not how we want to spend our early evenings, but we do it anyways. This is not a perfect snowfall, yesterday’s polluted snow salt-and-peppers today’s fresh batch, mingling to dingy gray. This is not purity, not beauty, not truth in somewhat silence, in scraping of metal against black ice, frozen ground. This is not our destiny, our winter weight straining against this heavy burden. This is not enough exercise for our brittle bodies, not an excuse to spend time outside in a turquoise twilight. This is not our favorite chore, not breaking angry icicles clinging to gutters like grudges. This snow packed path I made for us to day is not an escape route, not an uphill battle,  twenty feet long and two feet wide, eight inches of snow on each side. It is only a ribbon-white shoveled path unspooling ahead, pulling us towards both ground and sky.

Jessica Fox-Wilson is a graduate of Hamline University's Master of Fine Arts in Writing. Her poetry has appeared in several journals, including Poetry Motel, qarrtsiluni, Epicenter and Rive Gauche. Her book length manuscript, Blameless Mouth, was a finalist for the 2005 Philip Levine Prize. She blogs at 9 to 5 Poet and edits Asphalt Sky, an online literary journal.

ERIC CHARLES HANSEN

Sun, 8 Mar 2009 09:25:35 -0500

WILD FEASTING

Two farm dogs find a carcass
at the side of the neighboring
freeway. I presume the family
does not know their retrievers
have their heads pocketed
inside a dead deer. I know how
it died, but how was the rib
cage opened? The dogs work
quickly like a farm woman
deboning a hen. Who taught
them their exact technique?
When nobody who matters
is looking, and opportunity
lies prone, close to open,
what will I remember to do?
How will the farm carry on?

Eric Charles Hansen teaches English at the Blake School in Minneapolis, and used to be a newspaper reporter.

LOUANN SHEPARD MUHM

Sat, 7 Mar 2009 09:25:31 -0600

HURRICANE

All morning, warnings
for the East and South.
Not here,
in the middle of things,
where the signs
are less clear--
a certain pressure in the head,
restless animals and children--
and the storms are colder,
as silent and white
as we are,
smugly buttoned
into our comfortable
Midwestern
reserve.

LouAnn Shepard Muhm is a poet and teacher from northern Minnesota. Her poems have appeared in Dust & Fire, The Talking Stick, North Coast Review, Alba, Red River Review, Eclectica, Poems Niederngasse, and CALYX. She currently serves as Poetry Editor at WomenWriters.net. Her chapbook, Dear Immovable, was published in 2006 by Pudding House Press, and her full-length poetry collection Breaking the Glass was published in May, 2008 by Loonfeather Press.

CONNIE WANEK

Fri, 6 Mar 2009 09:25:39 -0600

TRACKING SNOW

I didn’t need red snow to know
a deer died on this spot
between two small maples.
I heard shots
and thought of rifles lifted,
rifles steadied,
and I’d seen the deer-stand
newly re-enforced
with a few long nails,
and here along the trail
they’d dumped runty apples.
‘Twas the season.
The blood was frozen,
maroon, mixed with hairy
skin and maple leaves,
near a pool of stiffened guts.
I touched my abdomen.
They didn’t need tracking snow
to find their deer
where it had fallen, in sight
of our laundry line. Sometimes
snow just makes
easy things difficult,
and sometimes it buries a mess
that you can walk right over
all winter.

Connie Wanek lives in Duluth. She'll have a new book next year from Copper Canyon Press, entitled On Speaking Terms.

BECCA BARNISKIS

Thu, 5 Mar 2009 10:24:41 -0600

THE GREAT MYSTERY IS CRAZY

The dogs also snowblind. It was the harshest winter anyone could remember. 'Hungry for fresh meat' is how I recall it. Two who went up a hill were killed. The place where we winter camped got forgotten. All that spirit pouring out of our mouths, escaping into the brittle cold air. Horses came rushing, then wolves, then quiet. Thin dark shapes slipped among us. They carried an emblem everywhere (flag flopping from a stick). The man with the little face; the woman secret; the ones who could not eat a heart made a vow. Someone brought iron claws. Someone else built a house of rotten wood. A moving star appeared to roar. The other stars blustered, burned, stormed. We who have made a mess of things will die coming back; starve on the warpath.

Becca Barniskis lives in Minnesota where she works as a poet, teaching artist, freelance writer and consultant in arts education. Her poems have appeared in Conduit, Prairie Schooner, Blackbird, the Northwest Review and other journals.

This poem is inspired by the Lakota Winter Counts, an online exhibit of the Smithsonian (http://wintercounts.si.edu/).

SHARON CHMIELARZ

Wed, 4 Mar 2009 11:03:39 -0600

HERE AND THERE

He couldn’t sleep the night of the blizzard, the wind howled so hard.
She couldn’t sleep the first night on the beach, the ocean roared so.
He used ear plugs to muffle it.
She drank several martinis to forget.
The next day the sun came out, and the snow blinded him.
The next day she wore sunglasses against the water’s glare.

He drove, sliding down the snow-packed street.
The sand was thick, deep, difficult for her to walk on.
He pulled down his earflaps against the cold.
Sweating, she wiggled into her swim suit.
By evening the sky promised more snow.
Late afternoon sky warned of rain.
He lost count of the boilermakers he drank that night before hitting the hay.
She wore ear plugs to drown party-noise from the next room.

Sharon Chmielarz’s latest two books are THE RHUBARB KING and THE OTHER MOZART, which had its premiere as an opera in January, 2009 in Baton Rouge.

SUSAN STEGER WELSH

Tue, 3 Mar 2009 10:59:00 -0600

3/03/03

like 47+74, and its sum, 121:
the same read backwards as forwards.
I saw the day coming

and remembered what I’d read
about palindromes: our generation
the first in a thousand years to live

aibophobia: fear of palindromes

through two palindromic years,
1991 and 2002. The expert
in superstition says

we’re crazy for patterns,
stitch meaning to numbers,
find threads of God or ghosts.

Do geese see God?

Easy to make your own, add two digits
and their reverse. Take any big number,
divisible by 11 --

that awkward number, the china
after one plate breaks, the disciples
once Judas had fled.

Never odd or even

Going to church, early morning,
I saw parallel tracks
pressed in fresh snow

leading out of a neighbor’s garage
and down the alley, thought only,
Charlie went to work early today.

Live not on evil

never imagining he would not
drive back up those same tracks
again that night. It’s true,
what the expert says, that we want to believe
the rare event is more significant
than the everyday. That we crave

symmetry. Massive, they said,
a heart forty percent larger
than normal. 53, just like his father.

Palindrome, from the Greek, meaning
running back again

SUSAN STEGER WELSH is a native Minnesotan who was awarded a 2008 Minnesota State Arts Board fellowship. Her first poetry collection, Rafting on the Water Table, (New Rivers Press, 2000) was a finalist for a Minnesota Book Award. Her essay, “My Good Bad Luck”, appears in Riding Shotgun: Women Write About Their Mothers, (Borealis Books 2008).

MADELON SPRENGNETHER

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 09:49:51 -0600

THIS SOFT FATE

Snow today. First of season. In pale drifts, hushing everything. White, it says, I am white. Unfathomable. You can resist—fingers clenched, capillaries shocked, pushing blood back to your knuckles--as you scrape the ice from your windshield. Sweeping mounds of crystal from the hood of your car. Turning the heat up on high. Or you can give in. Feeling the wheels now slip and swerve. This soft fate. Watching it come down.

Madelon Sprengnether is Regents Professor of English at the University of Minnesota, where she teaches in the MFA Program. She is the author, most recently, of Crying at the Movies: A Film Memoir, and a book of prose poems, The Angel of Duluth (White Pine Press, 2006). She is currently completing a new memoir titled Great River Road.

BRIGITTE FRASE

Thu, 19 Feb 2009 09:32:21 -0600

LOST

One fountain pen,
black for rigor.
Bracelet of emerald and gold
my mother gave me.
Letters I no longer receive
or send.
The name I can't recall
of my first best friend.

Five loves: two dead,
three squandered in anger
or accidents of geography.

Two books of Mother Goose rhymes
I read to my two sons
who have left their rooms
to no purpose.
Two phantom children
and the inland sea that spawned them.

But not, still not
the brother gone at thirty-three
who thrashes to the surface
of untended thoughts.
Changeless, abiding,
my familiar death.

Brigitte Frase is a poet and essayist. She was critic at large for Hungry Mind Review and its successor Ruminator. She reviews for the Star Tribune and Los Angeles Times.

JEN MARCH

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 09:32:18 -0600

BLIND YOU

winter is bound
to come to place cool thighs
against soft cheeks
feel the freeze feel the low
angles of sunlight cut
between blinds
i introduce you
into these lines
your window your room
your cheeks against
my winter thighs against my
low cut sunlight
blind you

Jen March has an MFA from Hamline University. She reads and writes poetry, and her work has most recently appeared in Mizna Journal and What Light: An Anthology of Minnesota poets. She currently teaches English at Minneapolis Community and Technical College.

ERIC CHARLES HANSEN

Tue, 17 Feb 2009 09:32:13 -0600

RESURGENCE 2008

A woman walking by outside
lifts her head to the sun.
Another woman wears an Eskimo
hood. The sun fills this café
diagonally. The people in coats
close their eyes like sages.
Except me, watching to learn.
How long the human face
is! Everyone’s stronger now.
Winter doesn’t dim them.

Eric Charles Hansen teaches English at the Blake School in Minneapolis, and used to be a newspaper reporter.

NANCY DEVINE

Mon, 16 Feb 2009 09:32:07 -0600

SUN DOG

A dog
splayed on frozen water
cannot gather himself
into a whole
skating on the ice.

Against his belly,
round and pink,
cold licks and chews
and drags a heavy tongue.

How it must sting to bark,
to freeze, his only companion:
an arc colored in sky.

Nancy Devine teaches high school English in Grand Forks, North Dakota, where she lives with her husband and their two dogs, Whitey and Yo-yo. She co-directs the Red River Valley Writing Project, a local site of the National Writing Project. Her poems have appeared in online and print literary magazines. Her essays have appeared in Matter, a Colorado-based literary magazine.

JOYCE SUTPHEN

Wed, 11 Feb 2009 09:46:29 -0600

SILO SOLO

My father climbs into the silo.
He has come, rung by rung,
up the wooden scar that scales
that tall belly of cement.

It’s winter, twenty below zero,
and he can hear the wind overhead.
The silage beneath his boots
is so frozen it has no smell.

My father takes up a pick-ax
and chops away a layer of silage.
He works neatly, counter-clockwise
under a yellow light,

then lifts the chunks with a pitchfork
and throws them down the chute.
They break as they fall
and rattle far below.

His breath comes out in clouds,
his fingers begin to ache, but
he skins off another layer
where the frost is forming

and begins singing, “You are my
sunshine, my only sunshine.”

Joyce Sutphen grew up on a small farm in Stearns County Minnesota. Currently, she teaches literature and creative writing at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota.

KATE LYNN HIBBARD

Tue, 10 Feb 2009 09:32:44 -0600

O HOLY SNOW

the way it shadows the
trees, even in the heat
of summer

some mornings
I look outside and see
February’s ermine
world

that it kills, demands
respect, numbs, warms, blinds, burns

exertion exposure
avalanche

slang for too
much flattery

hollow
column stellar dendrite
fern crystal latticework

translucent hexagon
reflecting falling light

each has its own soul the
surface soft yet frozen

difficult to predict
difficult to measure

your six-fold symmetry
prism halo

silence
of snow gunmetal sky
before it comes tinny
and clean pleasure coming
in from it

smell of wet
wool pools melting beneath
caked boots

fluffy champagne
powder corduroy wet
hellish picturesque

the sound of shovels scraping
morning clean

depth hoar firn
the accumulation
graupel rime
accretion
ablation

the sheer wet
decoration

blizzard
squall you suspend all time

the silence the silence

Kate Lynn Hibbard won the 2004 Gerald Cable Book Award, and her poetry collection Sleeping Upside Down was published by Silverfish Review Press in 2006. She teaches writing and women's studies at Minneapolis Community and Technical College.

MATTHEW NIENOW

Mon, 9 Feb 2009 01:44:15 -0600

Sorry, this poem is no longer available on FLURRY.

COLIN McDONALD

Sat, 7 Feb 2009 09:33:05 -0600

NO ONE HAS ASKED ME

No one has asked me
to stay off their grass,

but today some neighbors I haven't met
asked me

to stay off their connection
to the Internet.

So, our things are aware of one another,
able to ask questions.
I never have been.

What do you say to being thrown at?

What do you think when you're not that person
who's about to stand up?

All of it:
Posters that keep hanging for bubble tea,
news ordered months in advance
of Nebraskan gunshots,

came at night, expecting to be understood.

Last night, because of where I was, a plastic
lamb looked—not alive, but learning
to hold its breath. Not to put it on anything
or to want necessarily to appear.

Who is making me look for them?
I asked myself, while I made the sound of my boots
with my boots on the not yet
shoveled sidewalks. In

one house I saw what looked like a woman
trying to chew silently.

Colin McDonald is an MFA candidate at Hamline University, where he is Poetry Editor of Rock, Paper, Scissors magazine. His poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and he is the recipient of a 2007 Hearst Writing Award. He lives on top of a law office, in Saint Paul.

K. ALMA PETERSON

Fri, 6 Feb 2009 09:46:24 -0600

WINTER INTERIOR

Hard pressed
to taste the green
delirium of spring
even in the coriander
garnish –

Our loose
leafed lives settling,
upswirling, sinking: dregs
of all the tepid tea we care
to drink.

K. Alma Peterson is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Hayden's Ferry Review, The New Orphic Review, Skid Row Penthouse, Perihelion Review, qarrtsiluni and others. In 1999, her poem "Between Us" was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She lives in Rosemount, MN.

JOHN EARLY

Thu, 5 Feb 2009 09:33:00 -0600

CHRIST, THE WEATHER

In North Dakota, ruled by democracies
of level, even winter is Christian.
The gray, patient, suffering skies
amuse themselves with promises to shun
that harlot summer’s blue-constructed lies.

Late April. Thirty-one degrees. But shameless
spectacles of sun, and wind gone quiet.
This latter coalition makes a momentary mess
of guilt, but it, composed again, resumes a diet
gray with sleet, ashamed for wanting more, not less.

We don’t deserve a summer’s hope, its light.
The bliss of yes is jacketed, coated, capped,
its green desires mostly out of sight.
So if your parka’d shoulder’s ever tapped
by grinning fools of happy weather, fight

the limping beauty of their whistled tune;
don’t listen when they say it’s been but seven
months. I promise summer, the lame balloon-
man shouts, and it will be heaven—
but not here, not now, not even very soon.

John Early teaches in the MFA Creative Writing Program at Minnesota State University Moorhead. His poetry and fiction have appeared in a number of journals, and his novel Flesh and Metal was published by Carroll & Graf.

MARY BUTLER HARPIN

Fri, 23 Jan 2009 08:50:18 -0600

THE WAY WE LOVE

I edited in a cube all day.
Went to yoga at lunch
to escape the post-its
a million e-mails
and other
hyphenations.

It’s dark when I get home.
I switch on the fire.
Get wool socks.
I see you haven’t made the bed.

One pillow is flat and bowed,
the other accordioned into the first
where it curves.
The comforter—
our linens—
spread out like frosting.

Ah, yes,
this morning.
I long to hear
your key in the lock.

Mary Harpin is a poet and health writer in Minneapolis. Mary received a Prairie Poetry prize in 2007, and the Tom Collins House emerging writer's award in 2008. Her work has appeared in Dos Passos Review, Bellowing Ark, Confluence and elsewhere.

DALE JACOBSON

Thu, 22 Jan 2009 08:49:03 -0600

IN THE CENTER OF THE CLEARING

And there
in the sun-blazing perfect snow,
one dark oak, still alive
but twisted against its habits.

It must have exploded.

Lightning, a fiery beast
older than myth,
came to inhabit this tree
and threw out crackling claws
that blew the wood apart!

It was an excavation of night,
unsealing the distance
and devouring all the silence,
its only tracks a smoky residue,
an odor of origins...

It left a charred signature
and required no witnesses.

Dale Jacobson, 59, has published nine volumes of poetry. His work has appeared in American Poetry Review and other journals and anthologies. He is an honorary poet laureate of North Dakota (2005). His latest book (2008) is entitled Metamorphoses of the Sleeping Beast, from Red Dragonfly Press. He lives in Minnesota with his wife, Therese, a painter who teaches art.

TIM NOLAN

Tue, 20 Jan 2009 08:41:02 -0600

THE SADNESS OF EISENHOWER

That day in January 1961—he stood hatless—
a white scarf around his neck—the wind—
sharp and blowing—it was black and white—

I felt bad for him—I didn’t want him
to go—his ordinary voice—
the cranky up and down of it—

The wind was bracing—he seemed sad—
as if he had failed—maybe
he had failed—at what?—I didn’t know—

I was too young to know anything—
the black and white of it—the bright sun—
the sharp cold—it was time—for him to go—

Tim Nolan has an M.F.A. from Columbia and a law degree from William Mitchell College of Law. He is an attorney with McGrann Shea in Minneapolis. Tim’s poems have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, The Nation, Ploughshares, and Water~Stone. Garrison Keillor often reads Tim’s poems on The Writer’s Almanac on National Public Radio. The Sound of It (New Rivers, 2008) is Tim’s first book of poems.

MARGARET HASSE

Mon, 19 Jan 2009 08:17:16 -0600

MY HAPPINESS EMBLAZONED

in another woman came on board the bus today carrying a string bag of blood oranges, her lips like red cuffs on the sleeve of her throat.

Commuters in our winter coats sit like spools of black and blue thread, the shock
of a Monday workday freezing our morning faces. I envy her, wrapped in a woven shawl of colors like a choir of crayons in a cardboard box. For months, I’ve tried to pull my heart up like a heavy stone from a well of disappointment.

Standing, she flirts with the driver in a foreign language that clicks like knitting needles. Her animated voice fills the corridor with warmth that might melt the blue slush on the floor mats. Laugher opens her mouth to a diva’s O plucking a high C
like a cherry from a tree.

Down the aisle she comes, floating by our plastic pews. As if happiness has a hand
on her breast, as if happiness is taking her body apart in pieces of dazzled joy, and putting her together again before our eyes.

Her fragrance is summer in the deep South—jasmine blossoms white as the snow on
roofs of empty buildings. She is rickrack on a funeral dress; a peacock’s tail fanned against a gray wall; a handful of bright corn to feed the wild birds.

She carries my happiness with her. She smiles with a candle’s lick of flame
that doesn’t leave when it lights another.

The sun shoots golden arrows through the dirt-pocked windows. I stand; I stop the bus with a tug on the white cord; sail out the accordion doors, shoulders back. On my lips, what she gave me—the bulb of a smile to plant in another stranger passing through
our harried and hopeful world.

Margaret Hasse, originally from South Dakota, makes her home in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Margaret has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Minnesota State Arts Board, and the Jerome Foundation, as well as two fellowships from the McKnight Foundation through the Loft Literary Center. She has published several books of poems, included Milk and Tides (Nodin).

DEBORAH KREUZE

Sun, 11 Jan 2009 11:51:50 -0600

I HAVE YOUR SKELETONS

My privilege, this afternoon,
to have your skeletons:
to see through you to everything
your greening otherwise obscures.
Soon snow will muffle all. But now,
your furrowed desiccated hides,
tendrils scrubbling pewter sky,
creaking curling twigging pith,
I have. Your skeletons.

Deborah Kreuze is a writer and editor living in Minneapolis. She holds a bachelor of science in music from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She began writing poetry in 2007. In 2008 her poetry was nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize.

PHILIP DACEY

Sat, 10 Jan 2009 11:36:52 -0600

COUNT

The snow has cancelled the count of New York’s homeless,
who are sinking under the weight of the snow.

A thousand volunteers stood ready to tally
the denizen-shadows of a shadowy world,

but the snow, that drifted homeless between earth and sky,
has sealed the volunteers inside their homes,

though the homeless have volunteered to count
the flakes of snow as it falls around them.

The count was to be the most complete ever
of the five boroughs, but now only the snow is complete,

which seeks in vain to fall on the faux homeless,
who huddled here and there to test the accuracy

of the count, for the pretenders escaped
to their real homes and counted themselves lucky.

The snow is not faux but real, like the homeless,
who fall through their cancelled days untallied,

the snow that is a great blank page on which
no names of the homeless appear--

a single page, like this one, that doesn't count.

Philip Dacey's latest book, his tenth, is Vertebrae
Rosaries: 50 Sonnets (Red Dragonfly Press, 2009). For 35 years a resident of Minnesota and English professor at Southwest Minnesota State University, Marshall, he moved to Manhattan's Upper West Side in 2004.

LESLIE ADRIENNE MILLER

Fri, 9 Jan 2009 11:34:00 -0600

CORM

The trance of earliest morning, all birdsong gone,
and the slam of pipes offering up clumsy warmth.
Then the fled seasons thrive in mind only,
the way the young rhododendron furls each leaf
lengthwise as the temperature drops, then pops
its parasols up in the few hours of white light
the middle of a day tosses down. What you cannot love
you try, anyway, to live beside until familiarity fills
the gap. Even when the day’s down to a trickle
in the hard corm of winter, we have lamps
sucking the sockets for gold skirts under which
we huddle with books and the latest wooly technology,
also perhaps, tea, which we don’t love either,
though for honey, the warm spoon, the way the steam
of a rolling boil rounds up into a veritable soft fruit
in the palms. So too the little prickle of fever
years after the marriage has gone cold-- the scent
that rises out of the child’s clean head-- so exactly that
which once made us fierce enough to pull him
from the last green channels buckling in ice.

Leslie Adrienne Miller's collections of poems include The Resurrection Trade (Graywolf, 2007), Eat Quite Everything You See, Yesterday Had a Man In It, Ungodliness and Staying Up For Love. Her poems have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies including Best American Poetry 2007. Professor of English at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, Miller holds degrees in creative writing and English from Stephens College, the University of Missouri, the Iowa Writers Workshop, and the University of Houston.

TODD PEDERSON

Wed, 7 Jan 2009 10:35:27 -0600

WASHINGTON AVENUE BRIDGE,
JANUARY 7th

after John Berryman

Gray & half-frozen & one
hundred feet beneath,
the fine stones
& sturdy waters are my sudden
comeuppance. I find them & thyself
altogether willing.

Ask me
what I was with strong
women, bottles & rivers—my last three
seconds flashing along at the larger
thereafter; its chilly blue
friendly—
this present decline. Days

so empty, or too full. A reckoning
(shatter) does arrive. Receive me,
O trees, to your wint’ring
tit—these bad thoughts & wooly
socks; this crust of toast & twisty
spot of reddest wine.

Todd Pederson is a student in the MFA program at Hamline University who has twice been named a finalist in The Loft’s Mentorship Series for poetry. His recent works have appeared on mnartists.org, in What Light, an anthology, and in The Rake: 10,000 Arts. Todd works as a technical writer for a biomedical research corporation in Chaska, Minnesota, and lives in Eden Prairie with his wife and two children.

LINDA BACK McKAY

Sun, 4 Jan 2009 22:08:40 -0600

THE MORNING IS QUIET

As white is soft, as touch
is stone worn smooth

As love is wordless
as wind-blown pines

As generosity leans
convex and concave

As the world rewards us
for playing along

Such quiet, this scent
of creaking hardwood

This language we almost
remember

This white blow of snow
this ghost of clarity.

Linda Back McKay is a Minneapolis poet, writer and teaching artist. Her work has appeared in Great River Review, Water~Stone, and elsewhere. Her poetry collections are, Ride That Full Tilt Boogie (2001 North Star Press) and The Cockeyed Precision of Time (2007 White Space Press).

PATRICK HICKS

Sat, 3 Jan 2009 21:54:37 -0600

SUMMER IN JANUARY

If my wife ever started a business
that’s what she’d call it:
“Summer in January”.

Suspended downstairs,
in little jugs of time,
is an entire fruit tree.

Each glass jar is sealed

waiting

to be foomped open,
fork stuck in,
thick juice of a peach
slicking off a plump wedge.

If you close your eyes
there is a taste
of sunlight, and bees

even as snow twirls off the roof,
the thermometer sinks,
and icicles knife the fence—

the peach tree,
naked and shivering,
watches the slow chewing
of the husband inside,

how he licks his lips,
and dunks his finger
back into the sweetness

again and again

Patrick Hicks is writer-in-residence at Augustana College. His work has appeared in numerous journals including Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, and Poetry East. His latest collection is Finding the Gossamer (Salmon, 2008). He lives in South Dakota.

RIKI KOLBL NELSON

Thu, 1 Jan 2009 14:07:26 -0600

JANUARY FIRST

Indoor day of no sunshine
over candles we hold
a spoon with melted lead
flip it into cold water

Shapes foreshadow
this year’s karma:
fortune, travel, love

For now we forget
the empty chair
the absent spirit

We lift champagne
may we live well
may we prosper
may shadows stay away
may friends be near

Co-founder of Penchant, a.k.a. Northfield Women Poets, Riki Kölbl Nelson holds an MA degree in English literature from the UNC and an MFA from the U of M. Publications include a bilingual collection of poems, Borders/Grenzen and a chapbook, the Fall Heart.

THOM TAMMARO

Wed, 31 Dec 2008 21:40:42 -0600

WHEN WE DECIDE TO LOVE

Even in sorrow and regret, it is never too late.
In the fine dust on the stone floors of cathedrals,
I find the love of the sculptor.
And in December, on the morning
When we wake to the gauzy white of winter
Unrolled across the face of the earth.

Thom Tammaro lives in Moorhead, Minnesota. Red Dragonfly Press published a letterpress edition of his poem, 31 Mornings in December, during the 2008 winter solstice.

PATRICIA KIRKPATRICK

Wed, 24 Dec 2008 21:32:56 -0600

WINTER VISIT

after Hsiang Hung (1940-)

My head is white, my hair
cut short now.
When I look in the mirror
I hardly know who I am.
But that has been true for some time
even before I was sick.
I know you came to visit.
I don’t remember what we said.
“Fresh flowers,” you noticed
when I brought tea to the table.
I was happy the whole time you were here.
When you left,
I held the door open,
winter moon lighting snow
as you went.
Spring will come.
I don’t know if you’ll visit again.
On my desk for days
I’ve left the cup of oolong
your lips touched.

Patricia Kirkpatrick is the poetry editor of Water~Stone Review, and has poems forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Poetry East, and as part of the “Everyday Sidewalks” project of Public Art Saint Paul. Her most recent book of poems is Century’s Road, from Holy Cow! Press.

DAVID ALLEN EVANS

Tue, 23 Dec 2008 20:36:42 -0600

LESSONS FROM THE TREES

I look up
at the multitudes
of spruce and
aspen shrouding
the mountain on
a clear winter day,
and think: Not
one tree seems
to be straining,
as if on tip toe,
to reach beyond
itself. And yet
I know that—
deep inside its
marrow—
every single
living thing
wants a place
in the sun
(as the cold
sunlight and
colder shade
keep changing
places among
the trees, under
the passing clouds).

Stand tall,
I tell myself—
be like the spruce
on the hills, and
the aspen by
the frozen stream.

David Allan Evans was appointed poet laureate of South Dakota by the governor in 2002. He is the author of many books and chapbooks of poetry. He’s gotten writing grants from the NEA and the Bush Foundation, and has been a Fulbright Scholar twice to China. He lives in Sioux Falls.

SUSAN SOLOMON

Mon, 22 Dec 2008 13:37:33 -0600

BALANCE

From the old brown couch just under the sill,
gazing across to the Star jasmine vine,

I watch the plant frame the window, pressing on light,
looking outside to the solstice;

a snow sculpture on blue garden glass,

and in the quiet Sunday sunrise
I hear you sleep-breathing –
completing this world.

Susan Solomon is currently a student in Hamline's MFA program. Her work has been published in the SUN Magazine and Rock, Paper, Scissors.

MORGAN GRAYCE WILLOW

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 21:19:00 -0600

THE GARDEN AT SOLSTICE

Heart
purple
as kale ornaments
among rocks
and cascading juniper.
Flowers all
gone under
for winter.
Snow and frost
create shadow
where there is no moon.

Unmoving
through the continuing
night,
it holds its pulse
like a secret
while the sun
stands
still
on the opposite side
of earth.

Morgan Grayce Willow’s poetry has earned fellowships from the Minnesota State Arts Board and the McKnight Foundation. Her chapbooks include Spinnerets, Arpeggio of Appetite, and The Maps are Words. Her collection Interstitial, which includes “The Garden at Solstice,” is forthcoming from Nodin Press in 2009.

SUSAN THURSTON HAMERSKI

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 21:06:51 -0600

SOLSTICE

Let this be the winter of removing never.

Fling it through the window into the snow
Deep among shadows
Where it belongs.

To celebrate
Set before us
Warmed wine

And that bowl of olives
Not one of them alike
Each of them

Splendid and slick
Stuffed with surprises
Salted and ready

Nearly first on the list
Of perfect delicacies for the mouth
Coming just after your kiss.

Welcome this glittering season of always.

Susan Thurston Hamerski is a writer who lives in St. Paul with her family. Her work has been published in numerous periodicals, including Minnesota Monthly, Nimrod, and Fox River Review, and in several anthologies, most recently Penchant (Heywood Press, 2007).