The Middlewesterner

SATURDAY'S POEM

AFTER SPEAKING TO TOM MONTAG
ABOUT PURCHASING ONE OF HIS BOOKS
WHICH HE WILL SEND ME
by Chris Creelman

I am trying to read.
Something I must do
this moment.

Bright blue catches my eye
and I glance out the window.

It is the last day of November
and rain has washed away the snow.

In the Crab Apple's
bare branches
a Blue Jay is hopping.

Just a glance
to know the distraction.
I read another line,

but my face turns again,
drawn to the blue creature
against a background of gray branch and sky.

It is dancing around
an abandoned nest.

Not its, I know that,
as I try to read another line
but give up,

helpless,
unable to watch
this beautiful bird

as we hobble towards Winter
already starved
for color.

Chris Creelman, who grew up in rural Massachussets, now lives in Rouses Point, New York, at the intersection of New York, Quebec, and Vermont. He works at the border as an Agriculture Inspector. While living for a while in Zumbro Falls, Minnesota, he and his wife once drove through Minnesota, South Dakota, and North Dakota "mostly off the interstate," and they "still talk of moving to North Dakota." Creelman has a broadside, "Going To War," from Bull Thistle Press.

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A NOTE TO THE POETS OUT THERE
I'm interested in considering your "poems of place" for publication in The Middlewesterner's "Saturday's Poem" feature; send two or three of your best in the body of an e-mail addressed to [email protected] . Put "Saturday's Poem" in the subject line. Then be patient. I will get back to you about whether I'll use your work or not. Send along a short biographical note and information about where your books can be purchased and I'll include that when your poem runs. There's no payment involved for having your work appear in "Saturday's Poem," but the feature is seen by some few high class readers. Click here for complete index of and access to "Saturday's Poems" poems published prior to September 18, 2004.

SATURDAY'S POEMS

WAITING TO DELIVER
by tony gallucci

Okay. Okay. 10 p.m. quiet on Sycamore Street. Long ago the window slid open, the screen easily pushed out, on the road to daydream-not daydream, hope-not hope, wishing, thinking-hard. Over the redwood fence, across the alley, across the whitethorn field to the cutgrass diamond, empty in the all-quiet of midnight, stars and moon and milky way, so far, so soon to the moon, so soon to hear on that same radio, "one small step for man," sitting in shadows, the church spire, the Lutheran cross, the big fingers of palms waving gently the night goodbye, the distant headlights of late night returners to dark houses, to sleeping german shepherds, the moribund porches, the flitting curtains, the windows open-not open, the sons home-not home, the days gone-not gone. The short walk in what's-left of brush-filtered moon to the house school and war built, on the edge of the town wishes built, to the bed on the edge of becoming-not becoming, wishing-not wishing, dreaming-not dreaming, one father waiting, stammering too for the fears we both held in the palm of our hands like a horsehide baseball waiting for a three-and-two count, waiting to deliver.

*

MY RADIANT SIN
by tony gallucci

Okay. After 10 p.m. Long after 10 p.m., out beyond Sycamore Street. Highway 83 going west, in a midnight blue blur at 148 miles-per-hour, flying over overpasses, skipping, barely controlled touchdowns, blowing west past Pharr, McAllen, Sharyland, Mission, La Joya, Sullivan City, past neon palm trees and still, dark orchards, wafts of 3 a.m. tortillas and donuts, and cops at coffee shops, past eastbound freight trucks and husbands hurrying home, past waddling 'possums and nighthawks, past thumbers and shiftless and sneaking north for the American Dream, past the race for time and the race for races, past drinking too young, and too late, and too much, past roaches and joints and all-night joints, and dusty dimlight backrooms Lord knows what goes on there smelling like murder, just pretending, like so much violence is just pretending, past constables can pick out something wrong at a quarter-mile and it drives a car with bad shocks and dingleballs on the mirror, and if that's you that's trouble, and if it's not don't make it your trouble, past trouble standing on the side of the road, past trouble in the County Line Market after hours, past trouble at Emilio's bar, and Emilio's trouble, past trouble running naked through Colonia San Miguel, ole San Miguel not doing a good job of being un santo, past trouble on a black-and-white flashing blue and red, past green slipping from one dark hand to another, past pretending, past the real thing, past lying in the gutter on Jackson Avenue real thing, past hands hard-cold-steel-cinched behind the back real thing, past real names hurled, thrown, spat, past los ojos del tigre, and coy kittens, past jade eyes and emerald, color of money, past eyes rigor mortis, color of bile, middle C note humming death, past archangels and Beelzebub, bubble baths and blood, past Henry and Maria, past Jamie and Julie and John and Jose and Jimi and Jehosaphat and Jennifer and Joseph and Jesus, oh sweet Jesus, past church doors open and chapel doors closed, past crosses and cruxes and calm, and screaming noise-not noise, and only the sound of wind in the window cracked open to bleed out the sin and hot stench of breath too hot for breathing, past windows hot breath fogged, past feeling, too hot to fuck, too cold to die, past dying, past past, past present, past future, passed by, passed by, oh radiant sin.

Tony Gallucci has worked with over 100 stage, film, radio, television, and concert productions. As a filmmaker, he's currently producing and directing nine projects - among them the documentaries The Extra Mile, Cold & Glass, War Canoe, and Ode to a River, and the feature film Diogenes/Dionysus starring Graham Douglass and Peter Navarra. Tony founded the scriptwriters group SevenSeditiousScriptSmiths and the award-winning student writers collective Locker Room Writers & Thinkers Workshop. He is beginning pre-production on The Perfect Dance Company, is a founding member of The Hill Country Players, and a charter member of Artists Without Frontiers. He was a musician with Lyle Lovett, Clint Brown and Brad Lind in his younger days, and now is sort of retired from a 25-year career teaching zoology and writing, and coaching high school and college soccer and football. He resides near Hunt, Texas where he does media production, chases bugs, and teaches kids at a boys summer camp. His chapbooks and tapes are all currently out of print but you can keep up through his blogs at http://milkriver.blogspot.com and http://tonygallucci.blogspot.com .

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A NOTE TO THE POETS OUT THERE
I'm interested in considering your "poems of place" for publication in The Middlewesterner's "Saturday's Poem" feature; send two or three of your best in the body of an e-mail addressed to [email protected] . Put "Saturday's Poem" in the subject line. Then be patient. I will get back to you about whether I'll use your work or not. Send along a short biographical note and information about where your books can be purchased and I'll include that when your poem runs. There's no payment involved for having your work appear in "Saturday's Poem," but the feature is seen by some few high class readers. Click here for complete index of and access to "Saturday's Poems" poems published prior to September 18, 2004.

SATURDAY'S POEM

YOU TRY TO DO ALL THE RIGHT THINGS

by Greg Kosmicki

Yet your wife lies crying in bed.
You think you know one or two of the reasons
the other hundred or so
you may never know.
She may never know.
You go on like that
with your life.
Your children grow up
or at least move away from home.
The day before yesterday it was summer.
So hot it seemed like hell.
Her mood was off that day too.
But you go on and do the little things
you do.  Some of them irritate her.
Some don’t.  Kids go off to college.
Then come back from college.
Then go again.
The holiday is over.
You ate too much and didn’t get enough.
Tomorrow is work again.
Only a week or two ago
it was so hot you couldn’t believe it.
No that that matters much
unless the air conditioning breaks down.
But everybody complains about the heat
as if somebody could do something about it.
Tonight there is a cool breeze
so you turn off the air conditioner
and open the windows.
The crickets are really slowed down tonight
but the cars
never stop hammering,
day and night, winter and summer.
The air tonight like it was those nights
you were a kid
maybe 18 or 19, didn’t know
shit, didn’t know you didn’t.
Just wanted to get drunk every night.
Didn’t even know why.

Greg Kosmicki is the editor of The Backwaters Press, and lives in Omaha. He grew up in Alliance, Nebraska, 400 miles west of Omaha. He is a social service worker for the state, just because he "can't make a living as a poet. Reading these poems will make it obvious why." He has published one fine-arts press book, 6 chapbooks, and one full-length book of poems. Still, he remains "unknown by just about anyone far enough away they can't hit him with a scoopshovel."

-----------------

A NOTE TO THE POETS OUT THERE
I'm interested in considering your "poems of place" for publication in The Middlewesterner's "Saturday's Poem" feature; send two or three of your best in the body of an e-mail addressed to [email protected] . Put "Saturday's Poem" in the subject line. Then be patient. I will get back to you about whether I'll use your work or not. Send along a short biographical note and information about where your books can be purchased and I'll include that when your poem runs. There's no payment involved for having your work appear in "Saturday's Poem," but the feature is seen by some few high class readers. Click here for complete index of and access to "Saturday's Poems" poems published prior to September 18, 2004.

SATURDAY'S POEMS

FOUR MORE "THAT WOMAN" POEMS
by Tom Montag

She is not
shadow, that woman.

She is not
the mist. She is

vapor at the blue
edge of flame.

*

That woman
walks. The wind

walks with her.
They talk.

They speak
of nothing,

everything.

*

She is the motion
she makes, that woman,
the gesture, the sound.

She is the silence
on holy ground.

*

All this shake
of day and night,
that woman says,

all the lay
of shade and light,
all the bounding

silence, the green
streak of earth.
All the sky.

Everything
today. Amen.

Tom Montag of Fairwater, Wisconsin, is a middlewestern poet and essayist who has published numerous books of prose and poetry since 1972. His most recent work includes: Curlew: Home (memoir, 2001), Kissing Poetry's Sister (essays about writing and being a writer, 2002), The Sweet Bite of Morning (poems, 2003), and The Big Book of Ben Zen (poems, 2004). Middle Ground (1982) serves as his collected earlier poems. The Sweet Bite of Morning is from Montag's on-going project, "Plain Poems: A Fairwater Daybook." Montag is preparing two more collections of essays for publication, The Idea of the Local and Personal Papers and he continues to work at his long-term exploration of the middlewest, "Vagabond In the Middle." He is currently teaching Advanced Composition for Lakeland College, Sheboygan, Wisconsin. Along with Paul Zimmer, he was a featured writer at Lakeland's Great Lakes Writers Program on November 4-5, 2004. In February, 2005, he was a Tom McGrath Visiting Writer at Minnesota State University in Moorhead. In October, 2005, Montag delivered a presentation about his Vagabond project at the Marshall Festival - Celebration of Rural Writers and Rural Writing in Marshall, Minnesota. He will be reading at the Beloit Public Library on April 22 and at the University of Wisconsin-Stout on April 27. He will also read at the Wisconsin Writer's Conference in Baraboo this June and will make a presentation there on "Lorine's Toolbox: A Working Poet Examines Niedecker's Poetics." In September he will present "Writing Poetry Successfully: 99 Propositions" for the annual convention of the Wisconsin Regional Writer's Association. Christine Townsend's interview with Montag, conducted in October, 2003, can be read here; Peter Stephens interview with him in July, 2004, can be read here.

-------------------------

A NOTE TO THE POETS OUT THERE
I'm interested in considering your "poems of place" for publication in The Middlewesterner's "Saturday's Poem" feature; send two or three of your best in the body of an e-mail addressed to [email protected] . Put "Saturday's Poem" in the subject line. Then be patient. I will get back to you about whether I'll use your work or not. Send along a short biographical note and information about where your books can be purchased and I'll include that when your poem runs. There's no payment involved for having your work appear in "Saturday's Poem," but the feature is seen by some few high class readers. Click here for complete index of and access to "Saturday's Poems" poems published prior to September 18, 2004.

SATURDAY'S POEM

HER HANDS
by Soen Joon Sn

Her hands were
the large kind, rough
hands

of a farm-
woman, which is
what

most of these
women are, if
not

the wives of
fishermen.

Soen Joon Sn is a Buddhist nun at a temple in South Korea. She blogs at: One robe, one bowl. This poem was casually tossed off in an e-mail to your Middlewesterner. She is currently on ha-ang-go or "summer retreat," but will return to blogging about the middle of June.

-------------------------

A NOTE TO THE POETS OUT THERE
I'm interested in considering your "poems of place" for publication in The Middlewesterner's "Saturday's Poem" feature; send two or three of your best in the body of an e-mail addressed to [email protected] . Put "Saturday's Poem" in the subject line. Then be patient. I will get back to you about whether I'll use your work or not. Send along a short biographical note and information about where your books can be purchased and I'll include that when your poem runs. There's no payment involved for having your work appear in "Saturday's Poem," but the feature is seen by some few high class readers. Click here for complete index of and access to "Saturday's Poems" poems published prior to September 18, 2004.

SATURDAY'S POEMS

CITY OF SHIPS
by Peter Fergus-Moore

There are no ships in the City of Ships,
or so very very few,
just gulls and and geese and log piles in the bothered harbour,
who misses them? No one I know,
but just once I'd like to see one of those few freighters,
maybe one called MS Socialism's Triumph,
or MS Prosperity for the Denied,
instead of the MS Owner's Nephew
or MS Paul Martin's Cash Cow;
those long lonely lakers, so long they're longer
than the Lake is deep in the shipping lanes,
so long they'd jut out of the water
if they went straight down like a crossbow quarrel
bow first into the mud,
but I don't want them down, I want one of them,
just one, to head out into Black Bay and turn around,
come about into a heading for the harbour and rev that engine,
the engine whose cylinders are the size of trucks,
whose exhaust could hold a Greyhound bus sideways,
put her on a heading and have those cylinders flail and pump
and heave that huge diesel power into the screws
and churn that water and run her
slowly at first as she builds up that gigantic reptilian momentum,
as she builds a bow wave the size of a dragon's wing,
the diesel fumes painting the air straight back of the stack
till the scared crew stands on the stern rail waiting to jump
as the MS In Your Face smashes through the breakwater
obliterates the cute little lighthouse built for the Wednesday yachters
roars right up the shore plowing into Prince Arthur's Landing
and on up, up, up she goes,
her bow wave now black soil and green grass,
crushed pavement flung as her bow shears away
the pedestrian walkway, sluices Red River Road,
up past the library and the old barn churches that say 'forever'
up past the Park that almost wasn't,
up, up, cresting the hill in one great movement,
the crew no longer afraid, climbing down from the rails,
accepting the waves and cheers of the people who run alongside,
the kids flinging stones, laughing, hearing the tinny clank
of their missiles against leviathan's plates,
the teen-agers throwing school lunches and
wrapped tacos up the side to the rails
for the less-than-minimum-wage crew is forever hungry
and maybe it was their idea to drive her up the street,
toward the highway, collecting the flung kisses of the women
and the raised arms goodwill of the men
like it was wartime and maybe it is
as the MS Imagination's Folly wheels on her keel
the helm held over hard a port by three sweating crewmen
as the great hull careens, crushing the hilltop towers of the rich
who usually get to see the best views of the Giant
with their morning coffee,
looking up from their National Post
as the bow slews around, on a heading down
High Street, no longer so high now that
the keel slices downward, downward toward
Memorial, where the old girl's plates groan and strain
against the tougher asphalt of the commercial artery,
along the busiest, fastest road, crushing SUVS
that don't get out of the way because
SUV drivers know that the road was made for them,
and she has barely got her speed, her 20 knots
times her tonnage throwing the street up, up, up,
fragments the size of small cars raining down
on the baseball diamond, the Auditorium,
the car lots and the hotels,
the minimum wage restaurant people rush out,
and recognizing their kin waving from the rails
throw them pails of coffee, barbecued chickens
and baked potato missiles,
splatted sour cream paints the laughing face of one of the crew,
who exclaims in Tagalog what a wonderful country
is Canada, where people rush to share their wealth
with people who traded their insecure homelands
for the secure decks of compassionately managed shipping lines,
as the MS Full Belly barrels further, further down, down,
past the boarded up Labour Centre, slewing into Sears and Intercity,
obliterating the walls, freeing the trapped air of commerce,
ploughing up all the clothes and jewelry and dvd players
made by the children of the crew
before heaving her great keel around,
across the MacIntyre floodway,
through the shoals of big box stores loyal only
to the same shareholders as the ones who once owned
this renegade ship, who now is alive somehow,
her crew letting the helm do what it will,
jamming the engine throttle on Full Ahead,
letting her have her head
while they munch flung food and gulp Slurpees,
their hair straight out like flags,
their laughter happy yet nervous in the way
those who have nothing to lose are nervous
that in a moment it will all be over,
but there is no 'then what?' yet
as the Canadian Tire implodes,
the perpetually exhausted staff finding unseen strength
to run before the vengeful bow,
remembering their humanity suddenly
as paint cans, wrenches, tvs and silk plants
fly skyward like confetti,
as the ship laughs in her turn,
ploughing through the Home Depot,
making her own floodway Lakeward
as the crew realize she's tired of the land
and smells her stall, and home beckons, wherever it is,
as the prow breasts the cold water once more and
you can almost hear her sigh,
as the crew look at one another, and, murmuring,
turn to, resuming shipboard chores
but wait a minute,
one of them happens to look back
and see that her route up, up, and down, down,
has carved away all that held the land together and that
a great hunk of the land has slumped into the Lake
with a bass splash that wakes the snoring
Sleeping Giant long enough to scratch his leg at Tee Harbour
and roll over, though they don't feel that
tremor of movement in Toronto,
but even so, the island drifts farther and farther
out onto the Lake, as the people who moments ago
cheered and threw benedictions
resume their lives, getting back in their SUVs
and speed-dialing their cell numbers and drinking their gourmet coffee
and one is wheeling a handtruck with a 3 metre-wide screen tv
to the 10 passenger crew cab Dodge truck
in the parking lot,
as they drift, and drift, and drift,
and, as in the time before the ship severed them
from the mainland,
they drift.
In the City of Ships.

"A rather sardonic take on an old nickname of Thunder Bay, Ontario, and present realities," Peter Fergus-Moore says of his poem. "Paul Martin is a shipping line owner and former Prime Minister of Canada. As for me, I am an adult literacy instructor with the Indian Friendship Centre in Thunder Bay, married to a United Church minister. We have one teenager and a black Labrador retriever at home. I have two poems published in Paradise Frost (1997), but work mostly in non-fiction (journalism). I blog at http://anothercountry.blogspot.com and http://walkerbyneed.blogspot.com .

-------------------------

A NOTE TO THE POETS OUT THERE
I'm interested in considering your "poems of place" for publication in The Middlewesterner's "Saturday's Poem" feature; send two or three of your best in the body of an e-mail addressed to [email protected] . Put "Saturday's Poem" in the subject line. Then be patient. I will get back to you about whether I'll use your work or not. Send along a short biographical note and information about where your books can be purchased and I'll include that when your poem runs. There's no payment involved for having your work appear in "Saturday's Poem," but the feature is seen by some few high class readers. Click here for complete index of and access to "Saturday's Poems" poems published prior to September 18, 2004.

SATURDAY'S POEMS

FIVE ABOUT SADNESS
by Tom Montag

The days,
that woman

says, are
numbered

sorrows
which come

and go.

*

Yes, sky, I will
give you my

sadness, that woman
says. How much

do you want?

*

Scrape your sadness,
that woman says,
as with a spatula

taking the last of the
last of the bowl.

*

The thing about hope,
that woman says, is not

hope, but harvest.

*

Your fierce darkness,
that woman says,

does not offend
the light. Give back

and take and let
yourself be lifted.

Tom Montag of Fairwater, Wisconsin, is a middlewestern poet and essayist who has published numerous books of prose and poetry since 1972. His most recent work includes: Curlew: Home (memoir, 2001), Kissing Poetry's Sister (essays about writing and being a writer, 2002), The Sweet Bite of Morning (poems, 2003), and The Big Book of Ben Zen (poems, 2004). Middle Ground (1982) serves as his collected earlier poems. The Sweet Bite of Morning is from Montag's on-going project, "Plain Poems: A Fairwater Daybook." Montag is preparing two more collections of essays for publication, The Idea of the Local and Personal Papers and he continues to work at his long-term exploration of the middlewest, "Vagabond In the Middle." He is currently teaching Advanced Composition for Lakeland College, Sheboygan, Wisconsin. Along with Paul Zimmer, he was a featured writer at Lakeland's Great Lakes Writers Program on November 4-5, 2004. In February, 2005, he was a Tom McGrath Visiting Writer at Minnesota State University in Moorhead. In October, 2005, Montag delivered a presentation about his Vagabond project at the Marshall Festival - Celebration of Rural Writers and Rural Writing in Marshall, Minnesota. He will be reading at the Beloit Public Library on April 22 and at the University of Wisconsin-Stout on April 27. He will also read at the Wisconsin Writer's Conference in Baraboo this June and will make a presentation there on "Lorine's Toolbox: A Working Poet Examines Niedecker's Poetics." In September he will present "Writing Poetry Successfully: 99 Propositions" for the annual convention of the Wisconsin Regional Writer's Association. Christine Townsend's interview with Montag, conducted in October, 2003, can be read here; Peter Stephens interview with him in July, 2004, can be read here.

-------------------------

A NOTE TO THE POETS OUT THERE
I'm interested in considering your "poems of place" for publication in The Middlewesterner's "Saturday's Poem" feature; send two or three of your best in the body of an e-mail addressed to [email protected] . Put "Saturday's Poem" in the subject line. Then be patient. I will get back to you about whether I'll use your work or not. Send along a short biographical note and information about where your books can be purchased and I'll include that when your poem runs. There's no payment involved for having your work appear in "Saturday's Poem," but the feature is seen by some few high class readers. Click here for complete index of and access to "Saturday's Poems" poems published prior to September 18, 2004.

SATURDAY'S POEM

CHEVROLET
by Chris Creelman

"Maybe that's why you got a divorce
and I'm still married."

I'm teasing my coworker
because he's never performed cunnilingus.

"No! You're just sick."

That's Kevin.

We don't get caught jawing
as much as we could
because he can pick out
the sound of Ike's truck
as it approaches the shop.

He tells me about women he meets at the bars.
There's always something not right;
too old, too young, too direct.
He wants a serious relationship.
He never does anything with them.
Until one day
he mentions Stacy
and how they made out
in the parking lot.

Two weeks later he's callilng her from work,
and afterwards I ask him,

"What if she expects more?"

He smiles.
The other day I'd drawn him a picture
of what to look for.

Ike's considering a new Chevy.
We drop hints about what a good one
he's already got,
and everyday I listen.
But to me it sounds no different
from all the other pickups
in this prairie town.

Chris Creelman, who grew up in rural Massachussets, now lives in Rouses Point, New York, at the intersection of New York, Quebec, and Vermont. He works at the border as an Agriculture Inspector. While living for a while in Zumbro Falls, Minnesota, he and his wife once drove through Minnesota, South Dakota, and North Dakota "mostly off the interstate," and they "still talk of moving to North Dakota." Creelman has a broadside, "Going To War," from Bull Thistle Press.

-------------------------

A NOTE TO THE POETS OUT THERE
I'm interested in considering your "poems of place" for publication in The Middlewesterner's "Saturday's Poem" feature; send two or three of your best in the body of an e-mail addressed to [email protected] . Put "Saturday's Poem" in the subject line. Then be patient. I will get back to you about whether I'll use your work or not. Send along a short biographical note and information about where your books can be purchased and I'll include that when your poem runs. There's no payment involved for having your work appear in "Saturday's Poem," but the feature is seen by some few high class readers. Click here for complete index of and access to "Saturday's Poems" poems published prior to September 18, 2004.

SATURDAY'S POEM

J.C. PENNEY HAIKU
by Michael Kriesel

Love songs repeating
and posters of pre-teens in
neon bikinis

*

bitching about men
and work they stay anyway
employee discount

*

pushing garbage cans
past the jewelry counter
totally happy

*

try explaining joy
to a girl with seven coats
or celibacy

Michael Kriesel is central Wisconsin's hermit poet. We visited the hermitage near Wausau last August and interviewed him, starting here. Kriesel is the author of Chasing Saturday Night: Poems About Rural Wisconsin published by Marsh River Editions. He has received three Pushcart Prize nominations, and the 2004 Lorine Niedecker Poetry Award from the Council for Wisconsin Writers. He serves on the Wisconsin State Poet Laureate Commission. His poems have appeared in The Progressive, Bitter Oleander, and Rosebud, and his reviews appear in Library Journal and Small Press Review.

-----------------------------------

A NOTE TO THE POETS OUT THERE
I'm interested in considering your "poems of place" for publication in The Middlewesterner's "Saturday's Poem" feature; send two or three of your best in the body of an e-mail addressed to [email protected] . Put "Saturday's Poem" in the subject line. Then be patient. I will get back to you about whether I'll use your work or not. Send along a short biographical note and information about where your books can be purchased and I'll include that when your poem runs. There's no payment involved for having your work appear in "Saturday's Poem," but the feature is seen by some few high class readers. Click here for complete index of and access to "Saturday's Poems" poems published prior to September 18, 2004.

SATURDAY'S POEM

INTO THE EARTH
by Rachel Barenblat

I always plant during Sukkot.
First I unearth stones, the natural crop
of New England soil, then swap in
bulbs, like oversized cloves
of garlic, pointy ends facing up

to catch the snowmelt, signal
it’s time to awake and arise
like the daughters of Jerusalem
in white May-apple dresses
dancing their way to prayer.

Everything shifts at this season.
The signs read “apples” now,
“cider,” “shallots,” not “zucchini”
or “butter and sugar corn.”
Even the trees change clothes.

I’ve worked hard to stockpile
the year’s supply of hope
safely. Birds peck kernels
from the roof of our sukkah, as if
they know where we’re headed.

Rachel Barenblat is the author of three chapbooks of poems, the skies here (Pecan Grove Press, 2000), What Stays (Bennington Writing Seminars Alumni Chapbook Series, 2002), and chaplainbook (Laupe House, 2006).She holds an MFA from Bennington. She is also a student in the ALEPH Rabbinic Studies Program, with hopes of eventual ordination. She blogs at www.velveteenrabbi.com .

-------------------------

A NOTE TO THE POETS OUT THERE
I'm interested in considering your "poems of place" for publication in The Middlewesterner's "Saturday's Poem" feature; send two or three of your best in the body of an e-mail addressed to [email protected] . Put "Saturday's Poem" in the subject line. Then be patient. I will get back to you about whether I'll use your work or not. Send along a short biographical note and information about where your books can be purchased and I'll include that when your poem runs. There's no payment involved for having your work appear in "Saturday's Poem," but the feature is seen by some few high class readers. Click here for complete index of and access to "Saturday's Poems" poems published prior to September 18, 2004.

SATURDAY'S POEM

WET HIKE
by Phyllis Wax

Past the mayapples curled tight
Against the cold April rain, past
The delicate yellow wildflowers,
The shy white ones, almost unseen,
Past the cloud-bound oaks, the greening
Meadow where the beating sleet pushes
Us close in mutual mock protection,
Off the path to inspect a fox skull
Gnawed bare, not so subtle reminder
Of what we all hike toward

Down a hill and round a bend
To placid Lake La Grange, where a lone goose
Is the decoy that draws us to this place
Where mist hangs like the haze of Hades
Luring us past the unsettled borders of propriety

"Wet Hike" first appeared in the July 2003 issue of Free Verse.  It was also included in Nature/Poetry, Poems Responding to Nature, published by Red Hot Momma Press in 2004. Phyllis Wax's work has appeared in Porcupine Literary Arts Magazine, Wisconsin Academy Review, Montserrat Review, Thema, and Wisconsin Poets at the Elvehjem Museum of Art. As a member of The Sparks, she reads on The Sparks Look at News, Weather and Sports, a compact disk available by contacting Wax at 414-765-2330.

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A NOTE TO THE POETS OUT THERE
I'm interested in considering your "poems of place" for publication in The Middlewesterner's "Saturday's Poem" feature; send two or three of your best in the body of an e-mail addressed to [email protected] . Put "Saturday's Poem" in the subject line. Then be patient. I will get back to you about whether I'll use your work or not. Send along a short biographical note and information about where your books can be purchased and I'll include that when your poem runs. There's no payment involved for having your work appear in "Saturday's Poem," but the feature is seen by some few high class readers. Click here for complete index of and access to "Saturday's Poems" poems published prior to September 18, 2004.

SATURDAY'S POEM

45
by Ralph Murre

Forty-five degrees - the temperature,
forty-five degrees - the latitude,
southernmost edge of Up North.
Degrees of separation – impossible –
on our little island at the end of March.

At the end of a long, forced march,
desperate to hear a different drummer,
wet boots are thrown in corners;
thrown in, like towels at prize fights
that have gone bad.

Down for the count.
Down comforter airing on the line.
Putting it all on the line,
erring on the side of spring,
men push motorcycles through snow,
launch boats through ice.

How long the dark, they mumble,
and short the light.

Forty-five years - licensed to drive,
forty-five years - on the road,
earlymost edge of really Old Guy;
cousin to Kerouac,
brother of Tom Joad.
I’m glad, now, to be by the fire,
hearth and home finally grasped.
Soil of our own, and ours, these trees;
our snow, our ice, our mud.
Ours, too, the hope of summer;
and ours, the fears unspoke.

How warm the day, I mumble,
and cold the night.

"45" appeared previously in The Cliffs' Soundings. Ralph Murre is innkeeper over at the Arem Arvinson Log. He is an architect, mariner, poet, and dreamer who proudly wears the blue-and-gold jacket of the Former Farmers of America as he resides near the shore of Lake Michigan. He has recently begun to inflict his poetry upon the unsuspecting and has found acceptance in several little magazines. He anxiously awaits publication of his first book of poems, due out later this spring.

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A NOTE TO THE POETS OUT THERE
I'm interested in considering your "poems of place" for publication in The Middlewesterner's "Saturday's Poem" feature; send two or three of your best in the body of an e-mail addressed to [email protected] . Put "Saturday's Poem" in the subject line. Then be patient. I will get back to you about whether I'll use your work or not. Send along a short biographical note and information about where your books can be purchased and I'll include that when your poem runs. There's no payment involved for having your work appear in "Saturday's Poem," but the feature is seen by some few high class readers. Click here for complete index of and access to "Saturday's Poems" poems published prior to September 18, 2004.

SATURDAY'S POEMS

FIVE "THAT WOMAN" POEMS
by Tom Montag

That woman -
her solitude,

what she says
of sorrow.

*

If I could
believe there's

nothing I need,
wouldn't she

agree with me,
that woman?

*

That woman
knew silence

was almost
enough.

*

"When you walk," that woman says,
"why do you race your sorrow?"

*

These conversations
with that woman who is not there -

what is she teaching?

Tom Montag of Fairwater, Wisconsin, is a middlewestern poet and essayist who has published numerous books of prose and poetry since 1972. His most recent work includes: Curlew: Home (memoir, 2001), Kissing Poetry's Sister (essays about writing and being a writer, 2002), The Sweet Bite of Morning (poems, 2003), and The Big Book of Ben Zen (poems, 2004). Middle Ground (1982) serves as his collected earlier poems. The Sweet Bite of Morning is from Montag's on-going project, "Plain Poems: A Fairwater Daybook." Montag is preparing two more collections of essays for publication, The Idea of the Local and Personal Papers and he continues to work at his long-term exploration of the middlewest, "Vagabond In the Middle." He is currently teaching Advanced Composition for Lakeland College, Sheboygan, Wisconsin. Along with Paul Zimmer, he was a featured writer at Lakeland's Great Lakes Writers Program on November 4-5, 2004. In February, 2005, he was a Tom McGrath Visiting Writer at Minnesota State University in Moorhead. In October, 2005, Montag delivered a presentation about his Vagabond project at the Marshall Festival - Celebration of Rural Writers and Rural Writing in Marshall, Minnesota. He will be reading at the Beloit Public Library on April 22 and at the University of Wisconsin-Stout on April 27. He will also read at the Wisconsin Writer's Conference in Baraboo this June and will make a presentation there on "Lorine's Toolbox: A Working Poet Examines Niedecker's Poetics." In September he will present "Writing Poetry Successfully: 99 Propositions" for the annual convention of the Wisconsin Regional Writer's Association. Christine Townsend's interview with Montag, conducted in October, 2003, can be read here; Peter Stephens interview with him in July, 2004, can be read here.

-------------------------

A NOTE TO THE POETS OUT THERE
I'm interested in considering your "poems of place" for publication in The Middlewesterner's "Saturday's Poem" feature; send two or three of your best in the body of an e-mail addressed to [email protected] . Put "Saturday's Poem" in the subject line. Then be patient. I will get back to you about whether I'll use your work or not. Send along a short biographical note and information about where your books can be purchased and I'll include that when your poem runs. There's no payment involved for having your work appear in "Saturday's Poem," but the feature is seen by some few high class readers. Click here for complete index of and access to "Saturday's Poems" poems published prior to September 18, 2004.

SATURDAY'S POEM

INCOMING
by Mark Vinz

For weeks, predictions change each day -
who really knows how high the river's going to
rise this time? Everyone has a theory -
wet fall, early spring, the threat of ice jams
and new storms moving in. All over town,
the cries of bulldozers pushing up dikes,
crews of sandbaggers hurrying by in trucks.
Every station on every dial sends out
the call for pumps and volunteers.

Today, the national guard troops fan out
through neighborhoods with evacuation alerts.
Basement floor cracks ooze the water
rising from beneath us. Up river,
more rumors and reports are massing.
It's all we know, all we talk about,
filing from our houses, transfixed by
darkening skies, the fierce black choppers
bursting just above the tossing treetops.

"Incoming" is from Mark Vinz's just released collection, Long Distance, published by MWPH Books, PO Box 8 Fairwater, WI 53931. Vinz was born in Rugby, North Dakota, and is a true son of the prairie. Since 1968 he has taught at Moorhead State University. His poems and stories have appeared in numerous periodicals and anthologies. His other books include: The Weird Kid, Climbing the Stairs, Mixed Blessings, Late Night Calls, Minnesota Gothic, and Affinities. With Thom Tammaro, he co-edited Imagining Home: Writing from the Midwest, which was discussed in these pages. I interviewed Mark for my Vagabond project on March 20, 2004, at his home in Moorhead, Minnesota.

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A NOTE TO THE POETS OUT THERE
I'm interested in considering your "poems of place" for publication in The Middlewesterner's "Saturday's Poem" feature; send two or three of your best in the body of an e-mail addressed to [email protected] . Put "Saturday's Poem" in the subject line. Then be patient. I will get back to you about whether I'll use your work or not. Send along a short biographical note and information about where your books can be purchased and I'll include that when your poem runs. There's no payment involved for having your work appear in "Saturday's Poem," but the feature is seen by some few high class readers. Click here for complete index of and access to "Saturday's Poems" poems published prior to September 18, 2004.

SATURDAY'S POEMS

VISITING THE GRAVE OF COLONEL SANDERS
by Michael Kriesel

I'm drunk enough to think
Kentucky might be heaven
bouncing around in the back
of the truck like an empty

I think I might be dead
and this might be my ride
into the afterlife
miles of perfect grass
and marble monuments
bright as heaven's sidewalks

we go in circles for a while
until the gods are kind
and we find his tomb
his bust in bronze
though our bladders make us weak

soon we have to leave
the next day I'm driving
back to Wisconsin
on the way I pass a cemetery
and I laugh and lick my fingers

Michael Kriesel is central Wisconsin's hermit poet. We visited the hermitage near Wausau last August and interviewed him, starting here. Kriesel is the author of Chasing Saturday Night: Poems About Rural Wisconsin published by Marsh River Editions. He has received three Pushcart Prize nominations, and the 2004 Lorine Niedecker Poetry Award from the Council for Wisconsin Writers. He serves on the Wisconsin State Poet Laureate Commission. His poems have appeared in The Progressive, Bitter Oleander, and Rosebud, and his reviews appear in Library Journal and Small Press Review.

-----------------------------------

A NOTE TO THE POETS OUT THERE
I'm interested in considering your "poems of place" for publication in The Middlewesterner's "Saturday's Poem" feature; send two or three of your best in the body of an e-mail addressed to [email protected] . Put "Saturday's Poem" in the subject line. Then be patient. I will get back to you about whether I'll use your work or not. Send along a short biographical note and information about where your books can be purchased and I'll include that when your poem runs. There's no payment involved for having your work appear in "Saturday's Poem," but the feature is seen by some few high class readers. Click here for complete index of and access to "Saturday's Poems" poems published prior to September 18, 2004.

SATURDAY'S POEMS

THREE, OF WIND
by Tom Montag

The grey
sky. God-

clawing
sorrow.

We plead
for mercy.

We get
the wind.

*

Wind, ah - not

as fast as
the stars - you

will still be
here tomorrow.

*

Where is it, wind,
you chase the darkness?

Tom Montag of Fairwater, Wisconsin, is a middlewestern poet and essayist who has published numerous books of prose and poetry since 1972. His most recent work includes: Curlew: Home (memoir, 2001), Kissing Poetry's Sister (essays about writing and being a writer, 2002), The Sweet Bite of Morning (poems, 2003), and The Big Book of Ben Zen (poems, 2004). Middle Ground (1982) serves as his collected earlier poems. The Sweet Bite of Morning is from Montag's on-going project, "Plain Poems: A Fairwater Daybook." Montag is preparing two more collections of essays for publication, The Idea of the Local and Personal Papers and he continues to work at his long-term exploration of the middlewest, "Vagabond In the Middle." He is currently teaching Advanced Composition for Lakeland College, Sheboygan, Wisconsin. Along with Paul Zimmer, he was a featured writer at Lakeland's Great Lakes Writers Program on November 4-5, 2004. In October, 2005, Montag delivered a presentation about his Vagabond project at the Marshall Festival - Celebration of Rural Writers and Rural Writing in Marshall, Minnesota. He will make a presentation on "Lorine's Toolbox: A Working Poet Examines Niedecker's Poetics" at the Wisconsin Writer's Conference in Baraboo in June, and another presentation in September titled "Writing Poetry Successfully: 99 Propositions" for the annual convention of the Wisconsin Regional Writer's Association. Christine Townsend's interview with Montag, conducted in October, 2003, can be read here; Peter Stephens interview with him in July, 2004, can be read here.

-------------------------

A NOTE TO THE POETS OUT THERE
I'm interested in considering your "poems of place" for publication in The Middlewesterner's "Saturday's Poem" feature; send two or three of your best in the body of an e-mail addressed to [email protected] . Put "Saturday's Poem" in the subject line. Then be patient. I will get back to you about whether I'll use your work or not. Send along a short biographical note and information about where your books can be purchased and I'll include that when your poem runs. There's no payment involved for having your work appear in "Saturday's Poem," but the feature is seen by some few high class readers. Click here for complete index of and access to "Saturday's Poems" poems published prior to September 18, 2004.

SATURDAY'S POEM

ON MEETING THE ARAWAKS
by Thomas Whigham

And Amerigo told me
of the many flocks of herons,
rising, like clouds
along the green shoreline of Venezuela.
Of the flying fish that jumped and jumped again
at the surface of the water.

And he told me
of the red savages who,
in the distance,
danced.
And with a fervent passion
beckoned to the men of the Santa Marta:

Ashore! Ashore! Here is where your dreams lie -
cast aside your woolens and your armor,
your baubles and your harquebuses.
Come and paint your loins with bands of black and scarlet,
smear your forearms with beeswax, with charcoal,
and with camphor.

Dance now. Dance with frenzy and delight.
Dance.

The sun will hide among the western mountains.
The shadows of the night will become as demons
and still will you dance. And by the beat, beat,
we will know you.
The soundings of the drum will grow louder.
Your muscles will shine with sweat.
We will consume you,
taste the saltiness of your blood
and marrow.

We will become you,
and take your name, o foreign ones.

And Amerigo told me
how the Santa Marta sailed on.
It did not touch land.

Thomas Whigham is a fourth-generation San Diegan, which would appear to give him the right to claim southern California as his "ancestral homeland." This affiliation has provided an unusual sort of spiritual roost in a life spent far afield from the American southwest. In the early 1970s he worked as a medical volunteer in the rural zones of Guatemala, Honduras, and Paraguay. He returned to the latter country to do research for his doctoral dissertation in history at Stanford University. The publications that followed from this work include The Politics of River Trade: Tradition and Development in the Upper Plata, 1780-1870 (University of New Mexico Press, 1991); La yerba mate del Paraguay (Asuncion: CPES, 1991); The Paraguayan War: Causes and Early Conduct (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), and most recently, I Die with My Country: Perspectives on the Paraguayan War (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2004).  He is a member of the Paraguayan Academy of History as well as Professor of Latin American History at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia.  This is his first foray into poetry, and appropriately, it deals with an age of innocence and brutality in which Europeans still thought the New World inhabited by Amazons, Blemmyes, and hippopodes.

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A NOTE TO THE POETS OUT THERE
I'm interested in considering your "poems of place" for publication in The Middlewesterner's "Saturday's Poem" feature; send two or three of your best in the body of an e-mail addressed to [email protected] . Put "Saturday's Poem" in the subject line. Then be patient. I will get back to you about whether I'll use your work or not. Send along a short biographical note and information about where your books can be purchased and I'll include that when your poem runs. There's no payment involved for having your work appear in "Saturday's Poem," but the feature is seen by some few high class readers. Click here for complete index of and access to "Saturday's Poems" poems published prior to September 18, 2004.

SATURDAY'S POEM

KNIFE, CUP, AND STONE
by Chris Creelman

Here is a knife,
now I put it to bed,
its dreams cut through moonlight.

This cup holds water,
and with this stone builds a slurry
that sharpens the edge.

I put these dreams to bed also.

Tomorrow the sun arrives bleeding,
and the frost thicker
shall last longer on the windows.

I say to my wife
at the end of the day,
let us gather the loved ones

and head into the night's
forest of dreams.

Chris Creelman, who grew up in rural Massachussets, now lives in Rouses Point, New York, at the intersection of New York, Quebec, and Vermont. He works at the border as an Agriculture Inspector. While living for a while in Zumbro Falls, Minnesota, he and his wife once drove through Minnesota, South Dakota, and North Dakota "mostly off the interstate," and they "still talk of moving to North Dakota." Creelman has a broadside, "Going To War," from Bull Thistle Press.

-------------------------

A NOTE TO THE POETS OUT THERE
I'm interested in considering your "poems of place" for publication in The Middlewesterner's "Saturday's Poem" feature; send two or three of your best in the body of an e-mail addressed to [email protected] . Put "Saturday's Poem" in the subject line. Then be patient. I will get back to you about whether I'll use your work or not. Send along a short biographical note and information about where your books can be purchased and I'll include that when your poem runs. There's no payment involved for having your work appear in "Saturday's Poem," but the feature is seen by some few high class readers. Click here for complete index of and access to "Saturday's Poems" poems published prior to September 18, 2004.

SATURDAY'S POEM

FEBRUARY
by Michael Kriesel

All winter
the sky's a gray hammer

when I'm outside
I stare at the ground

so it won't hit me

Michael Kriesel is central Wisconsin's hermit poet. We visited the hermitage near Wausau last August and interviewed him, starting here. Kriesel is the author of Chasing Saturday Night: Poems About Rural Wisconsin published by Marsh River Editions. He has received three Pushcart Prize nominations, and the 2004 Lorine Niedecker Poetry Award from the Council for Wisconsin Writers. He serves on the Wisconsin State Poet Laureate Commission. His poems have appeared in The Progressive, Bitter Oleander, and Rosebud, and his reviews appear in Library Journal and Small Press Review.

-----------------------------------

A NOTE TO THE POETS OUT THERE
I'm interested in considering your "poems of place" for publication in The Middlewesterner's "Saturday's Poem" feature; send two or three of your best in the body of an e-mail addressed to [email protected] . Put "Saturday's Poem" in the subject line. Then be patient. I will get back to you about whether I'll use your work or not. Send along a short biographical note and information about where your books can be purchased and I'll include that when your poem runs. There's no payment involved for having your work appear in "Saturday's Poem," but the feature is seen by some few high class readers. Click here for complete index of and access to "Saturday's Poems" poems published prior to September 18, 2004.

SATURDAY'S POEM

POEM
by Robert Schuler

this morning     mad
with winds     cold     north
splintering    shivering    shattering
heaps of leaves
toppling the matchsticks of fences
scouring dust
off the streets
and the faded red bricks
the skeletons of the city
the roar in the mind
the scraping away
to the clean sanity of things
blow the man down

Robert Schuler appears in two major anthologies of midwestern writing, Imagining Home and Inheriting the Land, both published by the University of Minnesota Press. His eleventh collection of poems, In Search of "Green Dolphin Street," was published by Marsh River Editions in 2004 and is available from the author, [email protected] or E4549 479th Avenue, Menomonie, Wisconsin 54751, for $9.00 including postage. Juniper Press published a collection of Schuler's recent work last year. And Schuler's collection of poems about love, Songs of Love, is being published this coming Tuesday by Tiger's Eye Press of Eugene, Oregon.

-----------------------

A NOTE TO THE POETS OUT THERE
I'm interested in considering your "poems of place" for publication in The Middlewesterner's "Saturday's Poem" feature; send two or three of your best in the body of an e-mail addressed to [email protected] . Put "Saturday's Poem" in the subject line. Then be patient. I will get back to you about whether I'll use your work or not. Send along a short biographical note and information about where your books can be purchased and I'll include that when your poem runs. There's no payment involved for having your work appear in "Saturday's Poem," but the feature is seen by some few high class readers. Click here for complete index of and access to "Saturday's Poems" poems published prior to September 18, 2004.

SATURDAY'S POEM

THE DERBY
by Chris Creelman

Even folks who don't normally fish
are ice fishing at the derby today,
pretending they know what they're doing.
Pabst Blue Ribbons, joints, venison,
everybody's ripped.
My crazy neighbor
biting the head off a Northern.
Our town's annual
ice fishing derby
wintertime blues
begone.

Chris Creelman, who grew up in rural Massachussets, now lives in Rouses Point, New York, at the intersection of New York, Quebec, and Vermont. He works at the border as an Agriculture Inspector. While living for a while in Zumbro Falls, Minnesota, he and his wife once drove through Minnesota, South Dakota, and North Dakota "mostly off the interstate," and they "still talk of moving to North Dakota." Creelman has a broadside, "Going To War," from Bull Thistle Press.

-------------------------

A NOTE TO THE POETS OUT THERE
I'm interested in considering your "poems of place" for publication in The Middlewesterner's "Saturday's Poem" feature; send two or three of your best in the body of an e-mail addressed to [email protected] . Put "Saturday's Poem" in the subject line. Then be patient. I will get back to you about whether I'll use your work or not. Send along a short biographical note and information about where your books can be purchased and I'll include that when your poem runs. There's no payment involved for having your work appear in "Saturday's Poem," but the feature is seen by some few high class readers. Click here for complete index of and access to "Saturday's Poems" poems published prior to September 18, 2004.

SATURDAY'S POEM

PICTURE FOUND AT A FLEA MARKET
by Michael Kriesel

You're the classic girl next door
in a sky blue dress
hair an ordinary brown swept
off your forehead
yet mysterious
the back of the photograph blank
imagination's slate
though your pink carnation
and pearl necklace say graduation
or maybe you were a bridesmaid that day
your face an oval of happiness
smiling with the kind of lips
that women buy these days

it looks like the 40s
or maybe the 50s
there aren't any clues
only white siding behind you
a strip of green lawn at your feet
and some kind of bush with small leaves
curtains and a half-pulled shade
frame a little darkness to your right
there are pools of silver
where the shadows used to be
your face is clear but some
of the colors have blurred
and the folds of your dress
are dissolving like blue
cotton candy melting
reminding me this picture
has nothing to do with you
though you could be alive somewhere
your hair a talcum powder wisp
ghostly as this girl you were

The idea for this poem was suggested by Linda Aschbrenner, editor of Free Verse magazine. Michael Kriesel is central Wisconsin's hermit poet. We visited the hermitage near Wausau last August and interviewed him, starting here. Kriesel is the author of Chasing Saturday Night: Poems About Rural Wisconsin published by Marsh River Editions. He has received three Pushcart Prize nominations, and the 2004 Lorine Niedecker Poetry Award from the Council for Wisconsin Writers. He serves on the Wisconsin State Poet Laureate Commission. His poems have appeared in The Progressive, Bitter Oleander, and Rosebud, and his reviews appear in Library Journal and Small Press Review.

-----------------------------------

A NOTE TO THE POETS OUT THERE
I'm interested in considering your "poems of place" for publication in The Middlewesterner's "Saturday's Poem" feature; send two or three of your best in the body of an e-mail addressed to [email protected] . Put "Saturday's Poem" in the subject line. Then be patient. I will get back to you about whether I'll use your work or not. Send along a short biographical note and information about where your books can be purchased and I'll include that when your poem runs. There's no payment involved for having your work appear in "Saturday's Poem," but the feature is seen by some few high class readers. Click here for complete index of and access to "Saturday's Poems" poems published prior to September 18, 2004.

SATURDAY'S POEM

THE WATER WITCH
by Larry Gavin

Mother says
It began with a dream
At seven.
Be that as it may
to this day
I imagine myself a child
held out to a thunderstorm.
A gift, my mother calls it,
but I know it is less a gift
and more an inclination.
I incline toward water
pure and simple,
deep and cool.
My blood somehow translates
the secrets of seepage
shifts in geography
as subtle as the way
some tell weather by the morning
clouds. I take a Spring cut apple bough
forked
one branch in each hand
and walk.
The feeling I get
here in the chest
is what could most be called a gift.
And after,
when the circle is scratched
in the dust
and the farmer offers a cold drink,
as he always does,
I tell him no.
Water, or the sense of water,
fills me up.
If the farmer has a child
it will look at me and cry.
They all do.
I am accustomed to it,
which may be why I never married
Mother says it’s because
I’m set in my ways:
the ways of water.
As for religion,
I don’t need it.
I have the creek behind the house
and the willow tree for shade.
The Lutheran farmers
around here will tell you
God is stingy with his presents
and giving away whole days
to water
is trying business.
I need my tea
a bath
and the cool grass under
that willow tree
where I’m free to dream of rivers rising
and sense the silent tug
of a full moon.

Larry Gavin is a poet from Faribault, Minnesota. His poetry, essays, and stories have appeared widely in outdoor and environmental magazines, including Fly Rod and Reel, Gun Dog, and Minneapolis Star Tribune. He has had several poems in Minnesota Seasons: Tales of a Life Outdoors. His book of poems,Necessities, is available from Red Dragonfly Press or logjambooks.com .

-----------------------------------

A NOTE TO THE POETS OUT THERE
I'm interested in considering your "poems of place" for publication in The Middlewesterner's "Saturday's Poem" feature; send two or three of your best in the body of an e-mail addressed to [email protected] . Put "Saturday's Poem" in the subject line. Then be patient. I will get back to you about whether I'll use your work or not. Send along a short biographical note and information about where your books can be purchased and I'll include that when your poem runs. There's no payment involved for having your work appear in "Saturday's Poem," but the feature is seen by some few high class readers. Click here for complete index of and access to "Saturday's Poems" poems published prior to September 18, 2004.

SATURDAY'S POEM

THREE SHORTS FROM STONEY POINT
by Chris Creelman

Heron
The day we awaited Winter
the heron
lay in the swamp
graceful
alongside home furnishing's
past participle
of mattresses, recliners, and stools.

Goose
The goose swims away with
the breadth of infinity
measured
( at last )
on its broken wing.

Ice
On the lake
drifting snow confuses the spot,
but there is a fish in the ice
tail turned
as if motion
still existed.

Chris Creelman, who grew up in rural Massachussets, now lives in Rouses Point, New York, at the intersection of New York, Quebec, and Vermont. He works at the border as an Agriculture Inspector. While living for a while in Zumbro Falls, Minnesota, he and his wife once drove through Minnesota, South Dakota, and North Dakota "mostly off the interstate," and they "still talk of moving to North Dakota." Creelman has a broadside, "Going To War," from Bull Thistle Press.

-------------------------

A NOTE TO THE POETS OUT THERE
I'm interested in considering your "poems of place" for publication in The Middlewesterner's "Saturday's Poem" feature; send two or three of your best in the body of an e-mail addressed to [email protected] . Put "Saturday's Poem" in the subject line. Then be patient. I will get back to you about whether I'll use your work or not. Send along a short biographical note and information about where your books can be purchased and I'll include that when your poem runs. There's no payment involved for having your work appear in "Saturday's Poem," but the feature is seen by some few high class readers. Click here for complete index of and access to "Saturday's Poems" poems published prior to September 18, 2004.

SATURDAY'S POEM

HOW I'D GO ABOUT IT
by Phil Hey

There would be nothing grand
or romantic about it at all.
I'd want only to lay in your hand
the kind of thing you might find
in your grandmother's jewelry box
if she was a saving sort of person –
a baby tooth of great aunt Ellen
for which the tooth fairy left her a nickel
the same year their mother died,
a spare key to the Chevrolet
he'd worked so hard to save up for
then had to leave to go to the war,
even a wishbone from the chicken
that won first prize at the state fair
just before the farm went under.
These little things, that's how I'd go
about it, how they'd break your heart.

Phil Hey is the author of How It Seems To Me: New & Selected Poems (MWPH Books, 2004; available from Tom Montag, PO Box 8, Fairwater, WI 53931 for $12.50 + $2 s&h). He has been writing and teaching at Briar Cliff University since 1969, and he is now a professor in the English/Writing Department. He received a B.A. in English at Monmouth College in 1964 and an M.F.A. at the University of Iowa Writers Workshop in 1966. He also studied creative writing under Gwendolyn Brooks at the University of Wisconsin. In 1992 he won Briar Cliff's Duff Award for the Pursuit of Excellence, and in 1998 he was given the Literacy Award for college English teachers by the Iowa Council of Teachers of English and Language Arts. Published in numerous magazines and anthologies, Phil has several earlier collections of poetry: In Plain Sight, Reorganizing the Stars, Plain Label Poems, A Change of Clothes, Ballads & Songs. His poem "Route 39 south of Pittsville" won a Rainmaker Award from Zone 3 magazine. He has also received a dozen commissions for poems, most recently from the Sisters of St. Francis in Dubuque. As an editor, Phil has co-edited the Iowa Poets series with Zachary Pearce of Pterodactyl Press, including Michael Carey's The Noise the Earth Makes, Ann Struthers' Stoneboat, and James Hearst's posthumous A Country Man. He also edits for Celestial Light Press and The Briar Cliff Review, Briar Cliff's national prize-winning magazine of writing and art. He assisted Michael Carey in the editing of Voices on the Landscape: Contemporary Iowa Poets (Loess Hills Books).

-------------------------

A NOTE TO THE POETS OUT THERE
I'm interested in considering your "poems of place" for publication in The Middlewesterner's "Saturday's Poem" feature; send two or three of your best in the body of an e-mail addressed to [email protected] . Put "Saturday's Poem" in the subject line. Then be patient. I will get back to you about whether I'll use your work or not. Send along a short biographical note and information about where your books can be purchased and I'll include that when your poem runs. There's no payment involved for having your work appear in "Saturday's Poem," but the feature is seen by some few high class readers. Click here for complete index of and access to "Saturday's Poems" poems published prior to September 18, 2004.

SATURDAY'S POEM

DRIVING ACROSS THE SALT FLATS
WHILE LISTENING TO HOMER'S ODYSSEY
by Justin Evans

A full Utah moon—
yellow, fattened,
rises behind me
in the last moments of day,
before dusk is erased.

Slowly, the moon sheds its onion skin
becomes a worn silver dollar
as it slides parallel, hovers
over the basin of this ancient lake:
silver light reflecting salt,
salt reflecting back.

Beneath the black night, sagebrush
rooted in the alkaline flats
sways like sea anemone
back and forth
in the gentle desert breeze.

Millennia have passed since water
has graced this small pocket of earth,
but at night a person can become lost
within the depths of this wine dark sea,
only headlights and the constant mirror
of the moon to show the way.

"Driving Across the Salt Flats Listening to Homer's Odyssey" is from Gathering Up the Leaves, an as of yet unpublished chapbook manuscript. Evans was born and raised in Utah. His previous chapbook, Four Way Stop, was published by Main-Traveled Roads in 2005, and focuses on his hometown of Springville. It should be available for order through the author at [email protected] this year. He was nominated for a 2005 Pushcart Prize by the Green Hills Literary Lantern, and has been teaching English and reading in Nevada for the past six years.

-----------------

A NOTE TO THE POETS OUT THERE
I'm interested in considering your "poems of place" for publication in The Middlewesterner's "Saturday's Poem" feature; send two or three of your best in the body of an e-mail addressed to [email protected] . Put "Saturday's Poem" in the subject line. Then be patient. I will get back to you about whether I'll use your work or not. Send along a short biographical note and information about where your books can be purchased and I'll include that when your poem runs. There's no payment involved for having your work appear in "Saturday's Poem," but the feature is seen by some few high class readers. Click here for complete index of and access to "Saturday's Poems" poems published prior to September 18, 2004.

SATURDAY'S POEM

THE HAY STACK
by Tom Montag

The stack of bales in our far west forty must have been an emblem of some sort. It was a great pile of hay, fifteen or twenty feet wide, fifteen or twenty feet high, almost an eighth of a mile long sometimes. Mostly the hay was alfalfa, the best kind, stacked like the best kind of firewood, oak. The hay stack was our message to winter: we are ready.

Yes, we put a lot of hay into our haymow - the rope and pulley system and the great hay knives lifted eight or ten bales at a time into the dark mow. Yet some winters a haymow full of hay is not enough. Some summers the hay field kept producing, four crops of it, once five, the final crop in late September. A prudent farmer doesn't leave good hay standing in the field.

It was large work, throwing bales off the flat rack onto the pile of hay and stacking them, higher and higher, as high as the sun, hay dust clinging to sweat, sweat running in your eyes, stinging, burning summer heat and the smell of alfalfa.

A fellow doesn't grumble stacking bales outside when a breeze blows his way: it is always worse in the heat of a haymow where it's dark and humid and so close you get claustrophobic, you kind of panic, and you can't breathe.

We'd put the sharp, cut edge of the bales down to the earth, knowing at the start the bottom layer always takes up some moisture and would likely be spoiled. The cut edge was always more square, solid, firmer. Then we'd criss-cross bales in layers, fifteen or twenty layers, bales laid over each other and interlocked to keep the pile held together. How good the hay pile stands, that's how good your sons are. Have to shore up a leaning pile right out there in the open where the neighbors could see? Not if my dad had anything to say about it.

On Saturdays in winter, I might be sent out to that hay pile in the west forty to bring some feed up for the cattle. I'd start moving bales, carrying them from the hay pile, stacking them on the flat rack. And then - despite the 20-degree temperature, despite the blinding whiteness of snow stretching into the distance - all of a sudden I'm caught in my summer work. An intensity of alfalfa in the fresh winter air. A sear of deep, pulsing greenness. The smell of hay, a summer's day. Suddenly the Saturday in winter was not quite so cold, the day's work not quite so long. You'd stand there wasting the moment, transported.

"The Hay Stack" is a prose piece, actually, from Tom Montag's memoir of growing up on an Iowa farm, Curlew: Home. Montag, Fairwater, Wisconsin, is a middle western poet and essayist who has published numerous books of prose and poetry since 1972. His most recent work includes: Curlew:Home (memoir, 2001), Kissing Poetry's Sister (essays about writing and being a writer, 2002), The Sweet Bite of Morning (poems, 2003), and The Big Book of Ben Zen (poems, 2004). Middle Ground (1982) serves as his collected earlier poems. The Sweet Bite of Morning is from Montag's on-going project, "Plain Poems: A Fairwater Daybook." Montag is preparing two more collections of essays for publication, The Idea of the Local and Personal Papers and he continues to work at his long-term exploration of the middle west, "Vagabond In the Middle." In the spring of 2006, he will be teaching Advanced Composition for Lakeland College, Sheboygan, Wisconsin. Along with Paul Zimmer, he was also a featured writer at Lakeland's Great Lakes Writers Program on November 4-5, 2004. In October, 2005, Montag delivered a presentation about his Vagabond project at the Marshall Festival - Celebration of Rural Writers and Rural Writing in Marshall, Minnesota. Christine Townsend's interview with Montag, conducted in October, 2003, can be read here; Peter Stephens interview with him in July, 2004, can be read here.

-------------------------

A NOTE TO THE POETS OUT THERE
I'm interested in considering your "poems of place" for publication in The Middlewesterner's "Saturday's Poem" feature; send two or three of your best in the body of an e-mail addressed to [email protected] . Put "Saturday's Poem" in the subject line. Then be patient. I will get back to you about whether I'll use your work or not. Send along a short biographical note and information about where your books can be purchased and I'll include that when your poem runs. There's no payment involved for having your work appear in "Saturday's Poem," but the feature is seen by some few high class readers. Click here for complete index of and access to "Saturday's Poems" poems published prior to September 18, 2004.

SATURDAY'S POEM

FOREIGN EXCHANGE
by Mark Vinz

Benny Martinelli used to tell stories
about the North End. When I gave
him a ride home after work one day
we had to tour his neighborhood -
every house where a relative lived,
which was every house for blocks.
His mother said I looked like a
good boy, but his father only
wanted to know where I came from.
When I mentioned going away to
college in the fall, all conversation
stopped. What the hell did he know
anyway? his father said. Just a
lousy cobbler, but he had friends.

Benny told me later not to worry
about it - things had been hard for
his family. Next time, he'd come
to my house out in the suburbs,
bring his camera and take some
shots of the places my people lived.
I had to tell him there weren't any,
and then it seemed time for me to go.
His mother waved from the steps,
his father stayed inside, and Benny
snapped a picture as I drove away,
shouting for me to smile, that he'd
send me a copy if anything turned out.

"Foreign Exchange" is from Mark Vinz's Long Distance, forthcoming in Spring, 2006, from MWPH Books, PO Box 8 Fairwater, WI 53931. Vinz was born in Rugby, North Dakota, and is a true son of the prairie. Since 1968 he has taught at Moorhead State University. His poems and stories have appeared in numerous periodicals and anthologies. His other books include: The Weird Kid, Climbing the Stairs, Mixed Blessings, Late Night Calls, Minnesota Gothic, and Affinities. With Thom Tammaro, he co-edited Imagining Home: Writing from the Midwest, which was discussed in these pages in my "Reflections on Books." I interviewed Mark for my Vagabond project on March 20, 2004, at his home in Moorhead, Minnesota.

-----------------

A NOTE TO THE POETS OUT THERE
I'm interested in considering your "poems of place" for publication in The Middlewesterner's "Saturday's Poem" feature; send two or three of your best in the body of an e-mail addressed to [email protected] . Put "Saturday's Poem" in the subject line. Then be patient. I will get back to you about whether I'll use your work or not. Send along a short biographical note and information about where your books can be purchased and I'll include that when your poem runs. There's no payment involved for having your work appear in "Saturday's Poem," but the feature is seen by some few high class readers. Click here for complete index of and access to "Saturday's Poems" poems published prior to September 18, 2004.

SATURDAY'S POEM

BALLGAME
by Phil Hey

Snow weighs on the ballfield like a tarp.
No game, no boys poised or running
at the sudden click of bat and ball.
But a zoetrope of seasons turns me back,
white|green|white|green|no game|game today,
and there they are again awaiting me.
Boys, I say, can you use a second base?
It’s been a while, but I still know how to throw
that gentle toss to first, or cover first
when he’s gone in to field the sacrifice.
I’m ready again, just let me show you how.
Silence.  The wind kicks up the snow
around the pitcher’s mound. A rabbit moves
from first along the basepath, only to turn
and retrace his steps, and a solitary crow
wings across the diamond with his shout
Safe, Safe, Safe and is gone.  No game today.
I put my gloves back on and walk away.

Phil Hey's How It Seems To Me: New & Selected Poems (MWPH Books, 2004) is available from Tom Montag, PO Box 8, Fairwater, WI 53931 for $12.50 + $2 s&h. Phil has been writing and teaching at Briar Cliff University since 1969, and he is now a professor in the English/Writing Department. He received a B.A. in English at Monmouth College in 1964 and an M.F.A. at the University of Iowa Writers Workshop in 1966. He also studied creative writing under Gwendolyn Brooks at the University of Wisconsin. In 1992 he won Briar Cliff's Duff Award for the Pursuit of Excellence, and in 1998 he was given the Literacy Award for college English teachers by the Iowa Council of Teachers of English and Language Arts. Published in numerous magazines and anthologies, Phil is the author of several earlier collections of poetry: In Plain Sight, Reorganizing the Stars, Plain Label Poems, A Change of Clothes, Ballads & Songs. His poem "Route 39 south of Pittsville" won a Rainmaker Award from Zone 3 magazine. He has also received a dozen commissions for poems, most recently from the Sisters of St. Francis in Dubuque. As an editor, Phil has co-edited the Iowa Poets series with Zachary Pearce of Pterodactyl Press, including Michael Carey's The Noise the Earth Makes, Ann Struthers' Stoneboat, and James Hearst's posthumous A Country Man. He also edits for Celestial Light Press and The Briar Cliff Review, Briar Cliff's national prize-winning magazine of writing and art. He assisted Michael Carey in the editing of Voices on the Landscape: Contemporary Iowa Poets (Loess Hills Books).

-------------------------

A NOTE TO THE POETS OUT THERE
I'm interested in considering your "poems of place" for publication in The Middlewesterner's "Saturday's Poem" feature; send two or three of your best in the body of an e-mail addressed to [email protected] . Put "Saturday's Poem" in the subject line. Then be patient. I will get back to you about whether I'll use your work or not. Send along a short biographical note and information about where your books can be purchased and I'll include that when your poem runs. There's no payment involved for having your work appear in "Saturday's Poem," but the feature is seen by some few high class readers. Click here for complete index of and access to "Saturday's Poems" poems published prior to September 18, 2004.

SATURDAY'S POEM

SEA'D SAGA
by suzanne nixon

I.

in this lifetime
I have lived not by the sea
yet the sea has lived in me
in my head
aslosh and tide driven
and shriven
in the bone white chalice
of my skullduggery

beginnings.
I am proficient at beginnings
every inhalation from that first one
an instance of another inception

every flutter of the valves
within my heart
until the flutter stops
and soul departs

every cascade
up and down
and back and forth
from hemispheres
to fingertips
and toes
from and to my eyes
my nose
from throat to ears
in sounds heard and composed

impulse and current flows
upon the spinal river
the leap and seepage
from node to node
moves my limbs
informs my tongue
gives voice to thought
puts substance to dream

midway on the Shattemuc
the river that flows both ways
as close as I ever have lived
to the sea    this Hudson
that flows both ways
up from the briny sea
and down the Feldspar Brook
out of the Lake Tear of Clouds
joined by the Opalescent
in the headwater mountains
north of the here
that is now and

as close as I’ve lived to the sea

except when I dwelled
in the mother sea

I am proficient at beginnings
a Sunday child
hauled out of my mother
sleeping her Twilight Sleep

[O scopolamine,O morphine
I dream
in vivid hues of unseen things
henbane wolfbane nightshaded poppy
the dueted song in flight
solanaceous papaver somniferum blues
in roseate mansions I dream to forget
the dropping of my body fruit]

on a midwestern winter evening
beneath a full moon
a freshwater infant
delivered from the amniotic sea

uncurled and stretched
still wet
held upside down by my heels
spanked into taking first breath
giving forth first wail
in much the same way
  sheets are hung on the line
  spanked by the wind
  sun dried

the moment so auspiciously right
avant garde I arrived
still    now
many wheelings later
  around the mooncycle
  incompletely ripe

dredging the newborn self
up from
deep memory from
time before
words
became mine

when I ceased to be
small creature of the sea
when I left the sea behind
in marginalia of celestial time
moonlit slipping into the borderlands
between star stippled constellated signs
of earthy Goat
and airy Water Bearer

from water come
the flame of spirit lit
breath of air
touch of earth
    and

II.

the dirt beneath my nails
is midwestern dirt

so far removed
in time
from the places
that first dirtied my hands
and smudged my face

where I learned to look
and to crawl
and then walk
and to talk
to observe the dirt
and its dwellers

began to accumulate
the sediment of memory
shot through    ignited
with wonder

one seed slips from the mother plant
hare brained genes gone awry
a mutated reversion
revisioned
something    perhaps
in the soil where it fell
and took root on its own
not planted

or perhaps a remnant
in the blood     taken up by the cells
from that swaddling
of Twilight Sleep

ear to the earth
  to catch fragments of the subliminal singing
  nightcrawler sung    a miner’s song

on the straw between rows
  in the strawberry bed
  anchoring the skittering runners
  severing umbilical threads

plunging pudgy fingers
  into friable soil
  to make the hole
  to plant the seed
  to watch it grow
  to smell the flowers
  to pluck the pods
  to eat the peas
  raw

on my knees in the dirt
and dirt
  beneath my nails
and smiling
for everything has voice
and they    all
sing to me

my nails    now
with their illusion of
apparent clean
these hands
serpentine barrowed
the midden heaped pulse of blood
snakes toward my fingertips
cached in the unseen dirt
of my childhood
lodged
in my bones
in my soul
the feral song
of self sufficiency

taken up from the dirt
from the sky
from the clouds   flocked and fleeced
shepherded by light-hearted breezes

taken in
in the eating
of sour red fruit from the cherry tree
foraged morsel by morsel
from huckleberry
shrubs as they plink
as they hit the tin
of my bucket
purple up my fingers
dye my muted tongue

census count from the ohio corner
  of paradise:

legless   rooted
all four-feet
  on the grounders
on the wingers within reach
  of my out-stetched arms
flutter byes
night lighting green bellied
  fireflies
alien beauty of
io and luna moth

and sighted higher
much higher
jays robins and
crows oooo crows
in gleaming
black and wise eyed
(how fine I’d be if I dressed like that)
keen eyed knowing
hawks soaring
higher than the wingless fragile kites I fly

bidden and seated
hidden
beneath the willow tree
who like Rapunzel
let down her emerald hair
for me
fingers dappling in the
sometimes flow
of my stuttering
creek

kiss a frog
stroke his cheek
relieved to see
he remains
webbed footed leaper
squatting on the moss
and smiling over
amphibian arcana
he shares with me

"child child, come to me
beguiled grow wild
come   look
and see"

on the domestic front:

chicks hatch   bunnies born
all grow and are eaten
puppies and kittens
are born
and put up for adoption

I remove the skin
from peaches   tomatoes
in canning season

and beneath the roof
my mother
bathes me clean
every night
scrubbing the dirt from beneath my nails

and the amusement machine
a wooden arched philco radio
plays on Saturday morning
and Sunday night

let’s pretend
this is the inner sanctum
(how the door squeaks)
and only the shadow knows

-------------------------

suzanne nixon, to date sans chapbook
(but one coming in the near future)
in her spirit, a Middlewesterner,
born in Michigan
and from Ohio/Illinois/Wisconsin;
now living in upstate New York
where she spins yarn
writes poetry
and carries on passionately
with words

she blogs  words and images at
http://suzannagig.journalspace.com
some of her poems are also here:
http://heretics.bravehost.com/sn.html

-------------------------

A NOTE TO THE POETS OUT THERE
I'm interested in considering your "poems of place" for publication in The Middlewesterner's "Saturday's Poem" feature; send two or three of your best in the body of an e-mail addressed to [email protected] . Put "Saturday's Poem" in the subject line. Then be patient. I will get back to you about whether I'll use your work or not. Send along a short biographical note and information about where your books can be purchased and I'll include that when your poem runs. There's no payment involved for having your work appear in "Saturday's Poem," but the feature is seen by some few high class readers. Click here for complete index of and access to "Saturday's Poems" poems published prior to September 18, 2004.

SATURDAY'S POEM

REMEMBERING BATTERY
by Margaret Stewart

1.
Writing from the deck of the cattle boat
He took to England
Michael sent letters
Postcards came from the Tate
A girl in blue by Rosetti
Hair parted in the middle
A blonde like me, in blue.
He loved me, he said.
But I remembered the violence and the fear
And I stayed silent,
Hidden in Calgary,
Breathing the pristine prairie air,
Alive.

2.
Michael drove across Canada
In that red Volkswagen.
Looking for me.
The same little red car he drove, one night,
To some field north of Uxbridge,
Off the Ninth Concession
Where he planned to kill me.
I talked him out of it, I assume,
By making him believe that I loved him,
Forty years later I realize that I was to die that night.
I had bought a ticket on CPR’s The Canadian.
Got off at Calgary with $75.00
And my life. A bargain.
He passed by Calgary in the red car
To look for me in Vancouver
The place where all artsy-craftsy girls flee.
He stood on the corner of Georgia and Granville,
Sure that I would come by on my lunch hour
(he’d found me that way many times before)
But I was hiding in Calgary
Performing in plays,
Meeting ordinary people,
Hoping to learn to live
Hoping just to live.
So, how odd it is to be grieving him
This day, November 30, 2003.
I have outlived him.
And it’s hard to say which one of us
I grieve for the most.

Margaret McIntyre Stewart’s first poetry was published by The Fiddlehead, in 1964. While her daughter was a toddler, writing had to be squeezed in between playtime and the dayjob and, in 1972, Margaret produced a national radio show for the CBC, and a budget cookbook. She even wrote for Flash Confidential in those days, interviewing the girls at "Le Strip", for a feature on Toronto’s first strip club. Margaret wrote and hosted radio and television shows following a move to the West Coast of Canada in 1974. She was a radio pioneer of a sort, becoming the first female DJ to have her own morning show on Vancouver Island. Her book, "Radio Ladies", c.2003, profiles 30 women pioneers in radio broadcasting from 1925 to 1975. The book has been requested by the Canadian Museum of Radio Broadcasting, and the Royal Provincial British Columbia Museum, for their collections. Margaret Stewart holds a degree in English Literature from Simon Fraser University. She is working on a book of poetry - "Magnetewan Suite". The Magnetewan River runs through the bleak, worn-down granite mountains of Northern Ontario. The power and beauty of the river and the northland has sustained this writer all through her life. She now lives in Vancouver.

----------------------------

A NOTE TO THE POETS OUT THERE
I'm interested in considering your "poems of place" for publication in The Middlewesterner's "Saturday's Poem" feature; send two or three of your best in the body of an e-mail addressed to [email protected] . Put "Saturday's Poem" in the subject line. Then be patient. I will get back to you about whether I'll use your work or not. Send along a short biographical note and information about where your books can be purchased and I'll include that when your poem runs. There's no payment involved for having your work appear in "Saturday's Poem," but the feature is seen by some few high class readers. Click here for complete index of and access to "Saturday's Poems" poems published prior to September 18, 2004.

SATURDAY'S POEM

HAIKU: A SERIES
by Larry Gavin

1
In autumn - geese spell
Loneliness into the mist
Black lines on paper.

2
In all this water
Fish have no trail to follow
I think of my home.

3
Desperate gestures
Point to the point of nothing
Like the way I wait.

4
Snow falls hard all day
And wind comes from way out west
Your sick bed spills white.

5
At winter’s dark
Moon through hospital window
Sleep leads into sleep.

6
A funeral breeze
Rustles my hair - real earth
Under plastic grass.

Larry Gavin is a poet from Faribault, Minnesota. His poetry, essays, and stories have appeared widely in outdoor and environmental magazines, including Fly Rod and Reel, Gun Dog, and Minneapolis Star Tribune. He has had several poems in Minnesota Seasons: Tales of a Life Outdoors. His book of poems,Necessities, is available from Red Dragonfly Press or logjambooks.com .

-----------------------------------

A NOTE TO THE POETS OUT THERE
I'm interested in considering your "poems of place" for publication in The Middlewesterner's "Saturday's Poem" feature; send two or three of your best in the body of an e-mail addressed to [email protected] . Put "Saturday's Poem" in the subject line. Then be patient. I will get back to you about whether I'll use your work or not. Send along a short biographical note and information about where your books can be purchased and I'll include that when your poem runs. There's no payment involved for having your work appear in "Saturday's Poem," but the feature is seen by some few high class readers. Click here for complete index of and access to "Saturday's Poems" poems published prior to September 18, 2004.

SATURDAY'S POEM

HARVEST, NEW STYLE
by Phil Hey

This last year’s was different, in a way.
While we were getting the combine ready,
the old man looked up and made a remark
as to how it just didn’t seem right anymore
to go back and forth across the field
the same as he’d done for forty years,
and the field ought to know better by now.
And how this year he was going to stand
in the middle of the field and let the corn
come to him. And so he said, and so he did.
He just walked off to the near field,
chose his spot, and began to tell that corn
to be about its business. Now, we knew
from before, it wouldn’t be a lot of use to reason
with him, and it wasn’t. He kept on regardless.
We couldn’t help but listen, of course, considering
how good a farmer he’d been up to that point.
It seemed only right to let him go on, then,
and keep that particular field to himself.

At the end of the season, when all the rest
of us had our corn in the bin — but were dogtired
from it as usual — we had to admit
he’d gotten his speeches down pretty well.
Eloquent, you might say, though we couldn’t see
that any of the corn had moved. Still,
listening there, if you let yourself go a little,
you could almost get convinced he was right.
That corn should have had the good sense
to come when it was called.

Phil Hey is the author of How It Seems To Me: New & Selected Poems (MWPH Books, 2004; available from Tom Montag, PO Box 8, Fairwater, WI 53931 for $12.50 + $2 s&h). He has been writing and teaching at Briar Cliff University since 1969, and he is now a professor in the English/Writing Department. He received a B.A. in English at Monmouth College in 1964 and an M.F.A. at the University of Iowa Writers Workshop in 1966. He also studied creative writing under Gwendolyn Brooks at the University of Wisconsin. In 1992 he won Briar Cliff's Duff Award for the Pursuit of Excellence, and in 1998 he was given the Literacy Award for college English teachers by the Iowa Council of Teachers of English and Language Arts. Published in numerous magazines and anthologies, Phil has several earlier collections of poetry: In Plain Sight, Reorganizing the Stars, Plain Label Poems, A Change of Clothes, Ballads & Songs. His poem "Route 39 south of Pittsville" won a Rainmaker Award from Zone 3 magazine. He has also received a dozen commissions for poems, most recently from the Sisters of St. Francis in Dubuque. As an editor, Phil has co-edited the Iowa Poets series with Zachary Pearce of Pterodactyl Press, including Michael Carey's The Noise the Earth Makes, Ann Struthers' Stoneboat, and James Hearst's posthumous A Country Man. He also edits for Celestial Light Press and The Briar Cliff Review, Briar Cliff's national prize-winning magazine of writing and art. He assisted Michael Carey in the editing of Voices on the Landscape: Contemporary Iowa Poets (Loess Hills Books).

-------------------------

A NOTE TO THE POETS OUT THERE
I'm interested in considering your "poems of place" for publication in The Middlewesterner's "Saturday's Poem" feature; send two or three of your best in the body of an e-mail addressed to [email protected] . Put "Saturday's Poem" in the subject line. Then be patient. I will get back to you about whether I'll use your work or not. Send along a short biographical note and information about where your books can be purchased and I'll include that when your poem runs. There's no payment involved for having your work appear in "Saturday's Poem," but the feature is seen by some few high class readers. Click here for complete index of and access to "Saturday's Poems" poems published prior to September 18, 2004.

SATURDAY'S POEM

YES, THESE ARE MY PEOPLE
by Marjorie Saiser

I point to my bagel in the box of bagels, warm,
steaming up the plastic, point to one with a raisin bump.
The clerk is young, big-boned, round-cheeked,
big overalls, dark hair, plenty of it, plenty of

everything. I'd say she'd be the face in a European
painting of a certain era, if I knew such things.
If I knew such things, I'd place her in a certain
painting by a certain European master, but I place her
here, at least for now, my town, my sidewalks,
my cold skies, my kid in two layers of coat,

both unzipped, on his way to school. My pickups
coasting up to the stop sign, my bell hanging out the door
of the coffeeshop, ringing me in, ringing me out.
My people, my town, my bread. The spaces in the
bagel, the circle of it - two circles of it - toasted.
The dark soft raisin, the tough crust.

I chew. I'm home.
My men at the construction site across the street,
their yellow hardhats, their gray sweatshirts,
the arms of one signalling to the truckdriver backing in.
The truckdriver trusting only what he can see:
the semaphore arms, the come-hither gesture
of the gloved hand.

This poem is reprinted here by permission of the poet; it appeared in Marjorie Saiser's collection, Lost in Seward County (The Backwaters Press, 2001; available from Backwaters Press, Greg Kosmicki, editor/publisher, 3502 N. 52nd Street, Omaha, NE 68104-3506 or www.thebackwaterspress.homestead.com .) Saiser is also the author of Bones of a Very Fine Hand (Backwaters Press, 2001). Saiser is co-editor of an anthology of poetry and prose by women of the Great Plains, Times of Sorrow, Times of Grace, as well as of Road Trip (Backwaters, 2003), a book of interviews with writers, including US Poet Laureate Ted Kooser.

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A NOTE TO THE POETS OUT THERE
I'm interested in considering your "poems of place" for publication in The Middlewesterner's "Saturday's Poem" feature; send two or three of your best in the body of an e-mail addressed to [email protected] . Put "Saturday's Poem" in the subject line. Then be patient. I will get back to you about whether I'll use your work or not. Send along a short biographical note and information about where your books can be purchased and I'll include that when your poem runs. There's no payment involved for having your work appear in "Saturday's Poem," but the feature is seen by some few high class readers. Click here for complete index of and access to "Saturday's Poems" poems published prior to September 18, 2004.

SATURDAY'S POEM

YOU JUST THINK THE LAST TIME

by Greg Kosmicki

You just think the last time

you saw your Uncle down
at the alleys, his hair
still all there, big silver
pompadour style slicked straight
back, nice leather jacket,
brown, new shoes— you just think
doggone ‘ol Uncle Bill
looks good for eighty-four!
He turns and says something,
you can’t even think what.
You wish you could, you wish
you had gotten his joke.
He was an uncle like
all your others: always
joking. He said something,
everybody there laughed,
you laughed too—hell you love
your uncle!  He’s one of
the last of the brothers—
you’ve got your Dad,  Paul, known
as Sandy,  Uncle John,
known as Jeep, and  Uncle
Bill (real name is L.P.
for Leonard Paul), and he’s
here at the bar at the
bowling alley, your friend
Tim is talking to him,
there’s a joke made, you laugh,
he laughs, Tim laughs, but you
can’t remember the joke,
you didn’t quite hear it.
The last thing your Uncle
said to you the last time
you saw him, and if you
had known you could have said
Hey Uncle Bill say that
joke again I might not
ever see your ugly
mug again and he would,
he would have repeated
the joke, he would have said
it over and over
for you as long as you
stood there listening, he
would still be there today
amid the mild cursing
of the billiard players,
rancid tobacco smoke,
whir of English on cloth,
the soft clink of the balls.

Greg Kosmicki is the editor of The Backwaters Press, and lives in Omaha. He grew up in Alliance, Nebraska, 400 miles west of Omaha. He is a social service worker for the state, just because he "can't make a living as a poet. Reading these poems will make it obvious why." He has published one fine-arts press book, 6 chapbooks, and one full-length book of poems. Still, he remains "unknown by just about anyone far enough away they can't hit him with a scoopshovel."

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A NOTE TO THE POETS OUT THERE
I'm interested in considering your "poems of place" for publication in The Middlewesterner's "Saturday's Poem" feature; send two or three of your best in the body of an e-mail addressed to [email protected] . Put "Saturday's Poem" in the subject line. Then be patient. I will get back to you about whether I'll use your work or not. Send along a short biographical note and information about where your books can be purchased and I'll include that when your poem runs. There's no payment involved for having your work appear in "Saturday's Poem," but the feature is seen by some few high class readers. Click here for complete index of and access to "Saturday's Poems" poems published prior to September 18, 2004.

SATURDAY'S POEM

YEAR OF THE FLOOD
by James A. Collins

That was the year of the 34th street flood
when the creek overflowed
when Cousin Jenni put on her one-piece bathing suit
and swam across the street.

I was repeating first grade
and walking the curb to school
when I didn't say I was sick
so I could run wild
on the west side of Will Rogers' Park.

Dave was attending Taft,
and later would go to Classen.
You know, Classen is a magnet arts school now.
Dave was studying wrestling
and would come home to show me some moves;
I claimed he was beating me up.

I was such a brat, that year.
The year of the flood.

Dad was a hobby photographer
and would develop the film in the kitchen
late at night
when the moon was dark.
The house smelled awful.
I complained and held my nose,
and dad suggested I go to bed.
But I wanted to stay near him.

That was the year
John Glenn spun the world
and
I lay on my bunk bed
dreaming of peppermint.

That was the year after the divorce
That was some time
after my six month captivity.

I tried to sneak in after bed time
to catch forbidden TV:
Alfred Hitchcock, Twilight Zone.

That was the year of the flood.
All years flow into that year.

I walked secret paths between houses
and across the slender bridge
to get to my cub scout meeting.

Misshapen soapbox derby car.

That year.  The year of the flood.

Most afternoons after school
I would stay with the neighbor.
One afternoon, I came straight home.
Decided to make dad some coffee.
I couldn't get the top burners lit,
so I turned on the gas oven
and threw in a lit match.

It blew itself out.
My eyebrows were signed.
Blisters on my hands and arms.
I watched Dick Van Dyke as I was healing.

That year.

The year of the fated Dealy Plaza
and
the president has been shot
and
the world was never the same
and
my birthday was never the same.

That year, the year of the flood.

The year of fauve finger paints.
The year of Superman and the Lone Ranger.
The year of school yard taunts
and midnight haunts.

The year the creek that ran behind the houses on the north side of the street overflowed
and the waters came as high as our porch
and Cousin Jenni put on her one-piece bathing suit
and swam across the street.

James A. Collins was born under the sign of the archer in 1955 in Oklahoma City, OK.  He maintains a web-log, Love During Wartime at http://jacsongs.blogspot.com.  An electronic chapbook, "The Saturn Sequence", is available at http://moon.ouhsc.edu/jcollins/Saturn/Index.html, and more recent poetry is collected at http://moon.ouhsc.edu/jcollins/.

----------------------------

A NOTE TO THE POETS OUT THERE
I'm interested in considering your "poems of place" for publication in The Middlewesterner's "Saturday's Poem" feature; send two or three of your best in the body of an e-mail addressed to [email protected] . Put "Saturday's Poem" in the subject line. Then be patient. I will get back to you about whether I'll use your work or not. Send along a short biographical note and information about where your books can be purchased and I'll include that when your poem runs. There's no payment involved for having your work appear in "Saturday's Poem," but the feature is seen by some few high class readers. Click here for complete index of and access to "Saturday's Poems" poems published prior to September 18, 2004.

SATURDAY'S POEM

from
"NIGHT PLOWING"
by Tom Montag

What a wondrous thing is the four-bottom plow. The steel tooth of it. The plow takes a fair swath of landscape - four or five feet wide, six or eight inches deep - and turns it bottom to top. The shredded corn stalks are turned into the soil. Tender soil is turned to the surface for next year's crop. The circle of life. The turn and return.

The field is a half mile long. You plow from fence to fence. You bring the plow out of the ground at each end of the field, drive the headland to find the furrow heading back the other direction, set the plow back into the soil.

The tractor moans as the plow bites in. The tractor moans and roars. Slow, rhythmic, up the field and back, up the field and back. Though you cannot see it, the stripe of dark soil grows wider. The plow bites into the soil and the earth shudders and hums. Shudders and hums. Deep in the darkness, deep into the night.

You plow until midnight. You plow through the darkness. You cannot begin to imagine all that you are part of. The earth shudders and hums.

This excerpt is part of the essay "Night Plowing" from Montag's memoir, Curlew: Home. Tom Montag is The Middlewesterner; he is The Vagabond In the Middle; he is the author, most recently, of Curlew: Home (Midday Moon Books, 2001), Kissing Poetry's Sister (Joint Venture, 2002); The Sweet Bite of Morning (Juniper Press, 2003); and The Big Book of Ben Zen (MWPH Books, 2004). On-line interviews with Montag appear here and here. Montag is at work on a poem-series called Plain Poems: The Fairwater Daybook and two collections of essays, The Idea of the Local and Personal Papers. He and Mary, his wife of almost thirty-six years, live in the cinnamon-color house in Fairwater, Wisconsin, where Washington Street bends into West.

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A NOTE TO THE POETS OUT THERE
I'm interested in considering your "poems of place" for publication in The Middlewesterner's "Saturday's Poem" feature; send two or three of your best in the body of an e-mail addressed to [email protected] . Put "Saturday's Poem" in the subject line. Then be patient. I will get back to you about whether I'll use your work or not. Send along a short biographical note and information about where your books can be purchased and I'll include that when your poem runs. There's no payment involved for having your work appear in "Saturday's Poem," but the feature is seen by some few high class readers. Click here for complete index of and access to "Saturday's Poems" poems published prior to September 18, 2004.

SATURDAY'S POEM

THREE DAYS IN THE BRICKYARDS

by Fred Garber

One time I got mad at my boss at the retread shop.
It was 1968 and some of the guys liked George Wallace.
George was running for President of the United States.
He had been the Governor of Alabama.
They said that they liked him because he was gonna stop
all that racial integration and all those protesting hippies.
Somebody had to, they said.
You guys are nuts, I said.
Well my hair was getting a little long by then
and I was feeling more and more uncomfortable
hearing their crazy talk during breaks.

So, I went out to the brickyards.
They are in those hills south of town.
On the other side of the railroad tracks.
I did not have a car in those days.
I got a ride with this guy I knew.
They hired me on the spot.

They called me a picker.
My job was to pick up bricks one in each hand.
Then stack them on a pallet.
After an hour my arms were killing me.
Bricks are not so heavy one at a time.
But after awhile the muscles just want to give out.

Bricks are made of water and clay.
They got the clay from the hills behind the plant.
They are called loess hills.
Loess hills are some kind of rare type of hill.
Now clay is just dried up ocean.
Full of dried up clams and fish.
Full of dried up plants.
Full of dried up time.

Now they mix the clay with water.
Then they pour it into a mold.
Then it is fired in a kiln.
Then it comes out.
Then we would pick it.
Then it would dry in the back somewhere.
Then they would ship it somewhere for a building.
Then the salesman would get a bonus.
Then the owners would...
Well I don't know exactly what they would do.
I only worked there three days.

My picker crew was the fastest crew there.
They said that I slowed them down.
They knew that I was new.
There were three brothers
that kept to themselves.
Two guys on work release
from the county jail.
And one guy that lived in an old boxcar outback.
The bosses knew he lived there.
He had a still where he made his own booze.
Well these guys could all work
maybe twice as fast as me.

On the night of the third day  at the brickyards,
my old boss at the retread shop
calls me on the phone.
He says that he wants me back.
Offers me a twentyfive cent an hour raise.
Sounding good.
I tell him no.
But inside I am thinking
that I could be making a buck fifty an hour.
Holy Shit! I'd be rich!
Then he says he was sorry about
all the wierd political talk
about Wallace and such.
Well I said that I was glad that he was sorry
and that he had seen the error of his ways.
He probably still voted for Wallace
or maybe Nixon.

The final part of the offer was this.
I would be running the tire mold room
from four in the afternoon
till one in the morning.
I would be alone from five o'clock on.
I accepted the offer.

See I could walk to the retread shop
in fifteen minutes.

The brickyards were always hot.
The heat from the kiln.
The summer sun.
I lost five pounds in three days.

The mold room at the retread shop was hot.
A fourhundred and fifty square foot room.
There were seven passenger tire molds
and four truck tire molds.
Each of them hot enough to melt the rubber strips
that were glued to the old tire casings
that were in the molds
that would inprint
the new tread design.
Each mold took five minutes to change.
The truck molds maybe a little longer.
Sometimes a tire would explode.
And I would get behind.

But at one I was done.
And on Friday nights
Billy the Fox would drive by
and pick me up
and hand me an ice cold beer.

And once in awhile I would think about
how I sold myself for
a twentyfive cent an hour raise.

Fred Garber lives in Columbia, Missouri. He has had work published at www.poetsagainstwar.net and in the Fourth Street Review, where he won fourth place in the magazine's writing contest. "My prize was a pizza," he says. Garber works as a paralegal for a law firm; he's married with children and a grandchild. He maintain a blog of some of his poems at www.factorytown.blogspot.com.

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A NOTE TO THE POETS OUT THERE
I'm interested in considering your "poems of place" for publication in The Middlewesterner's "Saturday's Poem" feature; send two or three of your best in the body of an e-mail addressed to [email protected] . Put "Saturday's Poem" in the subject line. Then be patient. I will get back to you about whether I'll use your work or not. Send along a short biographical note and information about where your books can be purchased and I'll include that when your poem runs. There's no payment involved for having your work appear in "Saturday's Poem," but the feature is seen by some few high class readers. Click here for complete index of and access to "Saturday's Poems" poems published prior to September 18, 2004.

SATURDAY'S POEM

DRIVING HOME AFTER WORK
by Greg Kosmicki

Construction on the bridge slows all traffic down.
Listening to the classical station like always and Brahm’s
Lullaby comes on.  My mother’s in the rest home and getting
addled way bad, and she’s been a tough old one to love
the last few years.  Everytime I call her lately
she’s so confused she thinks it’s the ‘Thirties
and all her old friends back on the ranch
are having babies, and there’s always some problem
like she can’t cash a check in her own hometown
where she just ate and why are they doing that to her
who’s cashed checks in Denver and Chicago and anywhere
she pleases all her life and now here in her own hometown
they won’t cash her check to pay for the meal she thinks she ate
in Ellsworth, a little town east of the rest home thirty miles
that hasn’t had  a restaurant in fifty years
she’d eat at anyway, hasn’t actually had a town there
for twenty, where she thinks I’m talking from to her on the phone.

Well, anyway, the lullaby came on.
I’m dodging makeshift concrete walls,
construction workers, orange barrels and signs,
and I thought of all the times I fell or banged myself up
or otherwise got injured , or took a nap,
her steady hand patting me on my back,
singing some old fractured words to that song
she had learnt wrong, and sang to us all
whenever we needed fixing way less than
any of us could ever guess she’d need someday.

Driving into the sun.
Guess that’s why my eyes hurt me
clear across the Missouri River.

Greg Kosmicki is the editor of The Backwaters Press, and lives in Omaha. He grew up in Alliance, Nebraska, 400 miles west of Omaha. He is a social service worker for the state, just because he "can't make a living as a poet. Reading these poems will make it obvious why." He has published one fine-arts press book, six chap-books, and one full-length book of poems. Still, he remains "unknown by just about anyone far enough away they can't hit him with a scoopshovel."

-----------------

A NOTE TO THE POETS OUT THERE
I'm interested in considering your "poems of place" for publication in The Middlewesterner's "Saturday's Poem" feature; send two or three of your best in the body of an e-mail addressed to [email protected] . Put "Saturday's Poem" in the subject line. Then be patient. I will get back to you about whether I'll use your work or not. Send along a short biographical note and information about where your books can be purchased and I'll include that when your poem runs. There's no payment involved for having your work appear in "Saturday's Poem," but the feature is seen by some few high class readers. Click here for complete index of and access to "Saturday's Poems" poems published prior to September 18, 2004.

SATURDAY'S POEM

HUSK
by Rex G. Walton

for Amy

She tells me, corn husking,
near West Point, Sunday,
and I can see her:
checking the sky for sign,
checking the honed edge
with the hard light
of a Sabbath afternoon,
taking a long pull
on cold water.

A thin dust flies through, cutting the air
with sandpaper, down here in the rows.
Tall dusky beige sentinels, parallel
columns forty inches on center, give
no rest in shade, give grasshoppers
in spades, with no wind, no respite
from the long sun overhead.

She tells herself, steady: don't think speed,
think smooth as throwing the rope,
encircling mare's neck gently, at the instant
she settles in mid-stride, so rope caresses her
as much as captures the beautiful mare
into the path of halter, bit, blanket, saddle.

She tells herself, as the shout of the judge
barks a beginning, to flow quick
into that first raspy tan handful of husk,
watch the ungloved hand grab,
watch the hook sing through,
see the yellow-white cylindrical ear
float strings over niblets in that smooth arcing flight
that goes out of sight behind her shoulder,
as the hand finds another,
the hook rips,
the bankboard calling out the hit,
even as the next ear, open to light,
glistening soft in this humid air,
sets off from the soft pocket
of the fragile skinned fingers.

She begins to not count anymore:
she settles into a rhythm that brings dust as a tan haze,
sweat as a glistening, a sheen, a reward, a mark of progress.

Boring ahead into the beige valley of shimmering corn,
black-silk-laden, with her hands ripping open, letting blood
adorn the sheen of yellow-white, with her body swinging
dancing into a haze of perspiration and grace,
with her body full and ripe as this corn,
corn dancing in pirouette - pinwheel
on a swift track for the bankboard,
a final carom into the pile.

This goes on for a long time: forever, maybe.
She settles into a rhythm that fits her body
like dusty flannel, and warms her through and through.
Even with the frantic explosions of husk, and ear, and breeze,
and blood, and sky, she dreams:
pieces of dreams interspersing a bit of this ear
with a patch of that vision of herself loose in the saddle
on the roan, leaving the ground with rhythmic precision,
saddle a big hand cupped under her, firmly tossing her
fragile body slightly closer, slightly closer to the invisible stars.

Even as time winds down, and the wagon fills, and the sun
ratchets slightly further on it's western journey, her shirt
fills with chaff, and daze, and glisten. And she dreams.

Words tumble through her beautiful sky. She is too tired to look
at the actual, too caught in a final rush of adrenaline-ripped muscle
thrusting for the final grasp, ripping the final husk, tearing more skin, anointing this
     corn with her very self, slinging that last missile
on it's predictable arc.

When will she again find this peace?

What valley will open under her body, as the sun anoints
and blesses her union with the green and glistening mind
of her own presence, strong and carrying her to a new end,
a new beginning?

When will this journey of the long rows, the immortal sky,
the shepherding cloud, the ointment of the air moving
over her, into every space, on the soft skin under her eyes,
across her forehead, the rouge-glow cheek, drying perspiration
as if it were tears, of laughter, tears of sheer joy?

As if the softest hand imaginable holds that breeze lightly
between two fingertips, and takes the tears away,
makes them part of the air again, a piece of itself:
an anointing, a parting, a cleansing, a joining,
a celebration of someone whole again,
and clean with the fine dust of absolute forgiveness.

She gives the permission of celebration, of oneness,
of a fulfillment of the very order of things.
There is gracious acceptance.

By way of biographical note, Rex Walton sent us this: "I began writing as an answer to a fellow student, in 1966, Flint, Michigan. This fellow wrote music, and poetry, and was exceedingly strange, and somehow very correct in his stretch for understanding. Dylan, and the Beat Poets, and Whitman, and Lowell.. Oh, what a wonderful opening to peer through - into the core of the real world, that one beyond my small-town origins. 1985 sent me back to school for more questions, and clues, and a plan for happenstance and ambiguity to take hold, and give me back my true self, if there was such a person left. I spent such glorious, frivolous, exacting times with Greg Kuzma, Charlie Stubblefield, Mordecai Marcus, Marcia Southwick, and Warren Fine, to name a few. That, and a few hundred books of poetry, and prose. So, I've been writing more and more, for longer than I could have imagined. My life continues to turn, and shift, and open. I'm glad to be fully here, at times, and catch a piece of writing going by - mine, or others' - no matter. It is a challenge and a dare, and a privilege to live this way."

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A NOTE TO THE POETS OUT THERE
I'm interested in considering your "poems of place" for publication in The Middlewesterner's "Saturday's Poem" feature; send two or three of your best in the body of an e-mail addressed to [email protected] . Put "Saturday's Poem" in the subject line. Then be patient. I will get back to you about whether I'll use your work or not. Send along a short biographical note and information about where your books can be purchased and I'll include that when your poem runs. There's no payment involved for having your work appear in "Saturday's Poem," but the feature is seen by some few high class readers. Click here for complete index of and access to "Saturday's Poems" poems published prior to September 18, 2004.

SATURDAY'S POEM

APPLEFEST
by Peter Whalen

Let’s use delicious,
descriptive words
to talk about apples
of the red, green or yellow variety,
not adjectives or adverbs
or other boring stuff like that:
just juicy, tangy, sticky tart,
cold on your teeth, crisp
when it’s cold,
bad one of the batch, sour apple,
I never liked
‘til I was twenty-four,
tired and thirsty, walking through Horicon Marsh:
the cattails, floorboards, Canadian geese,
no match for the hot exhaust
under my hunting jacket…

An orchard store, where I sort out the standards:
Northern Spy, Granny Smith, Golden Grimes,
and Big Mac himself, there to be consumed,
the only thing there

so I bite into
the thin red veins on white,
taste buds burst,
then reach my heart,
and I have loved apples ever since.

Peter Whalen's poetry appears in several journals including Free Verse and the WI Poets Calendar 2005. Formerly the Editor-in-Chief of The Cream City Review, he now teaches English at UW-Waukesha.

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A NOTE TO THE POETS OUT THERE
I'm interested in considering your "poems of place" for publication in The Middlewesterner's "Saturday's Poem" feature; send two or three of your best in the body of an e-mail addressed to [email protected] . Put "Saturday's Poem" in the subject line. Then be patient. I will get back to you about whether I'll use your work or not. Send along a short biographical note and information about where your books can be purchased and I'll include that when your poem runs. There's no payment involved for having your work appear in "Saturday's Poem," but the feature is seen by some few high class readers. Click here for complete index of and access to "Saturday's Poems" poems published prior to September 18, 2004.

SATURDAY'S POEM

SPAM SAYS THE MOON IS FOR SALE
by Kelly Madigan Erlandson

Outer space, including the moon and other
celestial bodies, is not subject to national
appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means
of use or occupation, or by any other means.
                         --UN Treaty, January 27, 1967

Millions have already land grabbed. Thirteen
hundred major corporations own large tracts. Two former
U.S. presidents. The registered owners are from176 countries.

Last night two women walked from the riverbank
to the car, packing out camp chairs, flashlights,
driftwood. Mars had rotated above them
from its rising point in the southeastern sky,
making it seem like a new planet,
equally as heavy and crimson. Their small fire
had flushed and incensed the shoreline
while rabbits rustled in their hutches
and coyote loped the prairie. Their jackets
stowed wood smoke home.

As they left, light appeared
behind the tree line. The whole moon
slipped its collar of dark branches and rose.

"Spam Says the Moon Is For Sale" appeared previously in South Dakota Review. Reprinted by permission of the poet. Kelly Madigan Erlandson's work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Crazyhorse, The Massachusetts Review, Talking River Review, CALYX and Puerto del Sol.  Her manuscript "Born in the House of Love" won the Main-Traveled Roads Chapbook Award in 2004.

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A NOTE TO THE POETS OUT THERE
I'm interested in considering your "poems of place" for publication in The Middlewesterner's "Saturday's Poem" feature; send two or three of your best in the body of an e-mail addressed to [email protected] . Put "Saturday's Poem" in the subject line. Then be patient. I will get back to you about whether I'll use your work or not. Send along a short biographical note and information about where your books can be purchased and I'll include that when your poem runs. There's no payment involved for having your work appear in "Saturday's Poem," but the feature is seen by some few high class readers. Click here for complete index of and access to "Saturday's Poems" poems published prior to September 18, 2004.

SATURDAY'S POEM

THE RIVER
by Natalie d'Arbeloff

Out of the mist and winds
Carried upon the river's back
I made small entrance
Taking nothing with me
Save the fast forgotten past
Trailing clouds of dust
Into my eyes.

Having crossed the river once
I left the blanket at its side
And rode into my own
Naked on the hard silk
Of the horse's naked back.

Others came after me in time
In time they came and went.
The last wore sandals and carried
Their necks high, piercing
The coconuts with their eyes.
They picked the fruit and ate
Their fill. And in time they too
Swept the river from their feet.

In the season when water was dry
And sand a luxury to be had in measured doses
I came to stay. And when I came
The water lapped my feet and licked my cheek
And the dogs took turns remembering my scent.

I too in time
Swept the river from my feet
But not before the sigh imprisoned
In my breast heaved and sighed. I sighed
And then the waters lifted
And before the river I took account
And rendered to it my solemn years.

The photo is of an oil painting Natalie d'Arbeloff did "a long time ago," entitled "Storm Sky, San Antonio Paraguay." She says, "You can just see the river - the Rio Paraguay - a sliver of light behind the palm trees." d'Arbeloff is an artist/writer/cartoonist/blogger who was born in Paris and raised in Europe, South America, and USA. She lives in London. She is the ego part of the alter ego Augustine, a cartoon character who lives at http://www.nataliedarbeloff.com/blaugustine.html . Both are currently working on a graphic novel, http://www.nataliedarbeloff.com/blaugarchive.html when not busy interviewing God, http://www.nataliedarbeloff.com/interviewgod.html . Some of Natalie's limited edition artists' books can be seen at http://www.nataliedarbeloff.com/books.html . Her politically incorrect but true satire "The Joy of Letting Women Down - Secrets of the Worshipped Male" (Robson Books, UK, 2000) can be ordered at Amazon UK: http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/reader/1861053762/ref=sib_dp_pt/202-0440440-8062258#reader-link

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A NOTE TO THE POETS OUT THERE
I'm interested in considering your "poems of place" for publication in The Middlewesterner's "Saturday's Poem" feature; send two or three of your best in the body of an e-mail addressed to [email protected] . Put "Saturday's Poem" in the subject line. Then be patient. I will get back to you about whether I'll use your work or not. Send along a short biographical note and information about where your books can be purchased and I'll include that when your poem runs. There's no payment involved for having your work appear in "Saturday's Poem," but the feature is seen by some few high class readers. Click here for complete index of and access to "Saturday's Poems" poems published prior to September 18, 2004.

SATURDAY'S POEM

DOOR COUNTY IN BLACK AND WHITE

by Kathleen Hayes Phillips

1920

I see my father at 19,

young-man I never knew -

aquiline nose, strong, black eyebrows,

long, thin arms and legs in work-clothes

I had never seen

He stands before a simple cabin

comfortable, at ease in this space,

this strange cropped space, all straight lines and angles

rectangular roof, squared wall panels, flat-line stoop

Only his figure breaks the pattern

My father's shadow falls behind him

across the planked-wood floor, up the slats

to the small window showing only treetops,

the slightest hint of the cherry orchard

where young men balanced awkwardly

on shaky ladders to pick ripe red fruit,

stretching and straining to fill metal buckets,

coping with sunburned backs and long hours 

delighting in cherrypit fights and plunges into the bay

My father was far from home,

on the Door for the first time

Captured by a Brownie box, he smiles

1945

The camera of my imagination

also focuses on life beyond the treetops

I know the future

the young man, a father now,

brings his family to the cherry orchard of his youth,

making bedtime stories come true for his children

His shoulders provide a secure ladder

We need no buckets

Stretching and straining, I pick red, ripe cherries

reach down to put one into his open mouth

Captured forever in memories,

laughing

Kathleen Hayes Phillips is a 69-year-old wife, mother, grandmother, and poet who lives and writes in Waukesha, Wisconsin. She says her poetry draws on her family, life in rural Wisconsin and travels to Celtic lands. Her work has been published in Free Verse, Bardsong, Windy Hill Review, and the Wisconsin Poets Calendar.

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A NOTE TO THE POETS OUT THERE
I'm interested in considering your "poems of place" for publication in The Middlewesterner's "Saturday's Poem" feature; send two or three of your best in the body of an e-mail addressed to [email protected] . Put "Saturday's Poem" in the subject line. Then be patient. I will get back to you about whether I'll use your work or not. Send along a short biographical note and information about where your books can be purchased and I'll include that when your poem runs. There's no payment involved for having your work appear in "Saturday's Poem," but the feature is seen by some few high class readers. Click here for complete index of and access to "Saturday's Poems" poems published prior to September 18, 2004.

SATURDAY'S POEM

SMALLHOLDER
by Phil Hey

And I take my tedder out to the field
and drag the hay into big piles. Then
back to the truck where the fork awaits,
forking into the piles to load them
into the back of the pickup, each forkful
about the size of a county fair prize-winning
pumpkin. A fork’s better than a rake for that,
loading it in "in bunches like big birds’ nests,"
says Robert Frost, and he’s right, and maybe I am
"some good perhaps to someone in the world"
for having learned it and bringing good hay
to the horses, even this old fashioned way.
I’ve baled, yes, and gone to bed with aching arms
for throwing a hundred bales onto the wagon,
but now how much sweeter it is to imagine
the vault of an ancient barn stuffed with loose hay
not built into a wall of solid bricks
but gently laid for air to circulate
as it will, a nest for cats or a mid-day nap.
But that will have to wait. It’s ninety now
and perfect weather to put up any hay,
though I swear I sweat enough to wet it down
even weeks away from any rainy day.
But at last the truck is full to drive on back
to the low-roofed barn we’ve made to serve
once as a goat milking parlor and stall,
now our horses’ hayloft and granary.
We make the most of it we can, I think,
and at the end of loading down indulge myself
with cold water and reclining on the hay,
and think of how good life can be and is,
for a moment free of regret and the constant need
to turn back to work, another field to tend,
something else to fix, old projects hanging over
my head. Damocles with a hayfork not a sword.

Phil Hey is the author of How It Seems To Me: New & Selected Poems (MWPH Books, 2004; available from Tom Montag, PO Box 8, Fairwater, WI 53931 for $12.50 + $2 s&h). He has been writing and teaching at Briar Cliff University since 1969, and he is now a professor in the English/Writing Department. He received a B.A. in English at Monmouth College in 1964 and an M.F.A. at the University of Iowa Writers Workshop in 1966. He also studied creative writing under Gwendolyn Brooks at the University of Wisconsin. In 1992 he won Briar Cliff's Duff Award for the Pursuit of Excellence, and in 1998 he was given the Literacy Award for college English teachers by the Iowa Council of Teachers of English and Language Arts. Published in numerous magazines and anthologies, Phil has several earlier collections of poetry: In Plain Sight, Reorganizing the Stars, Plain Label Poems, A Change of Clothes, Ballads & Songs. His poem "Route 39 south of Pittsville" won a Rainmaker Award from Zone 3 magazine. He has also received a dozen commissions for poems, most recently from the Sisters of St. Francis in Dubuque. As an editor, Phil has co-edited the Iowa Poets series with Zachary Pearce of Pterodactyl Press, including Michael Carey's The Noise the Earth Makes, Ann Struthers' Stoneboat, and James Hearst's posthumous A Country Man. He also edits for Celestial Light Press and The Briar Cliff Review, Briar Cliff's national prize-winning magazine of writing and art. He assisted Michael Carey in the editing of Voices on the Landscape: Contemporary Iowa Poets (Loess Hills Books).

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A NOTE TO THE POETS OUT THERE
I'm interested in considering your "poems of place" for publication in The Middlewesterner's "Saturday's Poem" feature; send two or three of your best in the body of an e-mail addressed to [email protected] . Put "Saturday's Poem" in the subject line. Then be patient. I will get back to you about whether I'll use your work or not. Send along a short biographical note and information about where your books can be purchased and I'll include that when your poem runs. There's no payment involved for having your work appear in "Saturday's Poem," but the feature is seen by some few high class readers. Click here for complete index of and access to "Saturday's Poems" poems published prior to September 18, 2004.

SATURDAY'S POEMS

AUGUST 14th
by Robert Schuler

a hummingbird dips in
whirls round
the scarlet disks of beebalm
above a red-tailed hawk dives
sideways
wide wings hanging
suspended in
the sun-shimmering woods

*

AUGUST EVENING
by Robert Schuler

the woods absolutely still
enclosed
the air sweating
the moon drowned
in the haze
this is an evening for love

Robert Schuler appears in two major anthologies of midwestern writing, Imagining Home and Inheriting the Land, both published by the University of Minnesota Press. His eleventh collection of poems, In Search of "Green Dolphin Street," was published by Marsh River Editions in 2004 and is available from the author, [email protected] or E4549 479th Avenue, Menomonie, WI 54751, for $9.00 including postage. A new collection of his work is forthcoming from Juniper Press in February, 2005. Schuler's collection of poems about love, Songs of Love, will be published by Tiger's Eye Press of Sacramento, CA in August.

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A NOTE TO THE POETS OUT THERE
I'm interested in considering your "poems of place" for publication in The Middlewesterner's "Saturday's Poem" feature; send two or three of your best in the body of an e-mail addressed to [email protected] . Put "Saturday's Poem" in the subject line. Then be patient. I will get back to you about whether I'll use your work or not. Send along a short biographical note and information about where your books can be purchased and I'll include that when your poem runs. There's no payment involved for having your work appear in "Saturday's Poem," but the feature is seen by some few high class readers. Click here for complete index of and access to "Saturday's Poems" poems published prior to September 18, 2004.

SATURDAY'S POEM

AT THE END OF THE ARGUMENT
by Kelly Madigan Erlandson

We drive out west of town
and you note liking the places
where birds are, and I soften,
begin to think of other things you like:
                      tart tree cherries
                      little towns where guys know your dad
                      the smell of old books cracked open
                      my small hands.

I untie the rusted wire
that traps the graveyard gate, and we bend
under the green roof of branches,
crickets spreading out before us at each step.
We wander the ruins of markers
crowded with spent iris.

You romance about our remains
bordering each other on a hill
that will be shouldered by cornfields
and riddled with black crickets,
loud and thick every August nightfall.

Tonight I'll press against you as you sleep,
attending to each warm breath;
the quiet pause between them,
the longest pause, ahead.

"At the End of the Argument" appeared previously in Plains Song Review. Reprinted by permission of the poet. Kelly Madigan Erlandson's work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Crazyhorse, The Massachusetts Review, Talking River Review, CALYX and Puerto del Sol.  Her manuscript "Born in the House of Love" won the Main-Traveled Roads Chapbook Award in 2004.

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A NOTE TO THE POETS OUT THERE
I'm interested in considering your "poems of place" for publication in The Middlewesterner's "Saturday's Poem" feature; send two or three of your best in the body of an e-mail addressed to [email protected] . Put "Saturday's Poem" in the subject line. Then be patient. I will get back to you about whether I'll use your work or not. Send along a short biographical note and information about where your books can be purchased and I'll include that when your poem runs. There's no payment involved for having your work appear in "Saturday's Poem," but the feature is seen by some few high class readers. Click here for complete index of and access to "Saturday's Poems" poems published prior to September 18, 2004.

SATURDAY'S POEM

SEA GULL'S GAMUT
by Don Melcher

White luminosity hangs on the wind,
Aerial grace, rippled wing,
Hovering, lifting, dipping, side-slipping
Down to whitecaps skimming the spray,
Deft tilt of pinion, banking away.

Above, an azure cloud scudded sky,
Below, treacherous chop of the bay.
Curled crests of emerald breakers roll in,
Thundering seawall! – exploding melee!
Daring sea gulls dart into the fray!

Free spirits of morning on sun gilded wing,
Mother-of-pearl ablaze with light,
Wheel and whirl fantastic arcs,
Rise and soar to zenith height,
Beat furious reaches to distant sight.

From time immemorial the vast inland sea
Fills her cup – the green brimmed bay.
Aeons heard the gulls refrain,
Plaintive dissonance haunts the shore,
Raucous cries above the surf’s roar.

Don Melcher is a retired engineer from the city of Chicago. He has had work published in California Quarterly, Windhover, Bread of Life, Romantics Quarterly, Free Verse, Poetry Motel, the Peace of the Valley anthology from 'Epidemic Peace Imagery,' and the Catholic Worker newspaper. He says he has painted, played the piano, and written poetry most of his life.

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A NOTE TO THE POETS OUT THERE
I'm interested in considering your "poems of place" for publication in The Middlewesterner's "Saturday's Poem" feature; send two or three of your best in the body of an e-mail addressed to [email protected] . Put "Saturday's Poem" in the subject line. Then be patient. I will get back to you about whether I'll use your work or not. Send along a short biographical note and information about where your books can be purchased and I'll include that when your poem runs. There's no payment involved for having your work appear in "Saturday's Poem," but the feature is seen by some few high class readers. Click here for complete index of and access to "Saturday's Poems" poems published prior to September 18, 2004.

SATURDAY'S POEMS

JUST BEFORE SUNSET,
BARABOO, WISCONSIN
by Robert Schuler

summer heat sinking
smoky gray
under the high leggy white florets of yarrow
the lavender spikes of bergamot gaudy
orange Turk's caps
nestling into the notched shadows of the western hills

*

LATE JULY, DEVIL'S LAKE
by Robert Schuler

at noon a dozen turkey vultures
ride the ridges
circling one another spiraling upwards
dancing down air
just above the tumbled
lavender     pink     and dark purple stones
and the pines that spring
miraculously from them

Robert Schuler appears in two major anthologies of midwestern writing, Imagining Home and Inheriting the Land, both published by the University of Minnesota Press. His eleventh collection of poems, In Search of "Green Dolphin Street," was published by Marsh River Editions in 2004 and is available from the author, [email protected] or E4549 479th Avenue, Menomonie, WI 54751, for $9.00 including postage. A new collection of his work, dance into heaven, was published by Juniper Press in February, 2005 (and reviewed here). Schuler's collection of poems about love, Songs of Love, will be published by Tiger's Eye Press of Sacramento, CA in August.

-----------------------

A NOTE TO THE POETS OUT THERE
I'm interested in considering your "poems of place" for publication in The Middlewesterner's "Saturday's Poem" feature; send two or three of your best in the body of an e-mail addressed to [email protected] . Put "Saturday's Poem" in the subject line. Then be patient. I will get back to you about whether I'll use your work or not. Send along a short biographical note and information about where your books can be purchased and I'll include that when your poem runs. There's no payment involved for having your work appear in "Saturday's Poem," but the feature is seen by some few high class readers. Click here for complete index of and access to "Saturday's Poems" poems published prior to September 18, 2004.

SATURDAY'S POEM

TURNER TURNPIKE
by Ashley Martin

She closes the trunk,
the blue LTD,
she is going home

an abbreviated odyssey,
florescent lights,
Howard Johnsons--
no sirens

but rain,
in hitches, before
Oklahoma storms
coax them roadside,
and she waits
behind the wheel,

keys in her lost, blue lap,
watching water
slap the glass:
a final slip that ends

rain and road

cannot
head back,

so much
behind,
soaked
with wet,
blindness.


Ashley Martin says she grew up on and lives in a corner of Oklahoma that is psychologically and emotionally, if not geographically, midwest; and she is increasingly preoccupied with her idea of Oklahoma, both as her home and as its own awkward and confused person. She is "in love with the Plains" and plans to stay there with her family and animals as long as possible. This is Ashley's first attempt to publish her poetry.

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A NOTE TO THE POETS OUT THERE
I'm interested in considering your "poems of place" for publication in The Middlewesterner's "Saturday's Poem" feature; send two or three of your best in the body of an e-mail addressed to [email protected] . Put "Saturday's Poem" in the subject line. Then be patient. I will get back to you about whether I'll use your work or not. Send along a short biographical note and information about where your books can be purchased and I'll include that when your poem runs. There's no payment involved for having your work appear in "Saturday's Poem," but the feature is seen by some few high class readers. Click here for complete index of and access to "Saturday's Poems" poems published prior to September 18, 2004.