Poetry
Howl somethingyou want heard,
guaranteedyou’ll be hunted.
Howl somethingsweet and it won’tmatter either.
Someone will starta murder club builtfor your friends,
In the sediment, years of beaten red granite, submissive to currentThe broken headlight lies.(The old woman, down off Highway 164, could tell youIt comes from a 20th-centuryGerman hatchback.
I never knew why you waxed gravestones.I remember you young with pigtails.
Then it started raining in the middle of AugustAnd everything that could scream was steaming.The wax melts, and looks like tears.
We worked in the meadowwhere all daythe haybine and rakeswove patterns in the greenquilted rows and stitched texturesof mown hay, now windrowed, drying
If we hedge along the deferential maybe,the suspension of a bridge,this length of edge,we still move.
My daughter in prison plays the piano.She plays from memory, eyes closed,her heart a violin stringing alongas piano notes fall like raindropssoft while cedar trees and tulipsbend to her allure
Take up hammer nails and pine Build one last coffin Name it Oppression
The Haskell Free Library straddles the U. S. / Canadian border between Stanstead, Quebec and Derby Line, Vermont. The border is marked by a line of black tape on the floor of the reading room.
My dear friendyou are wrong to saythere are only stories.
Stories need bodies—larynx, tongue and teethhands to scratch them down
My father keeps samara seedssafe insidesmall matchboxes.
He holds his handout to me,a seed in his bark-like palm.
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Wisconsin Academy Offices
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Madison, Wisconsin 53726
Phone: 608.733.6633
James Watrous Gallery
3rd Floor, Overture Center for the Arts
201 State Street
Madison, WI 53703
Phone: 608.733.6633 x25