The dog can’t help it—she tracks mud in from the yard. Damp crumbs fall from in between her toes. I sweep, look up and see that dust has drifted over every table, fingers have left smears on walls and windowpanes, lips printed the rims of cups. There is a crust of wine in the bottom of the glass I poured last night, a spatter of coffee across the stove. But isn’t dirt a bargain price to pay for breath—the privilege of wandering the dawn every morning, leaving footprints?
Pat Daneman’s poetry is recently published in Moon City Review, Poet’s Touchstone, Atlas & Alice, and Typehouse. Her collection, “After All,” was first runner up for the 2019 Thorpe-Menn Award and a finalist for the Hefner Heitz Kansas Book Award. She lives in Candia, NH. Pat Daneman
Guest editor Denise Low, MFA & Ph.D., was Kansas Poet Laureate 2007-09. She won the Red Mountain Press Editor’s Award for Shadow Light. Other books are Wing (Red Mountain), Casino Bestiary (Spartan), and The Turtle’s Beating Heart: One Family’s Story of Lenape Survival (U. of Nebraska Press), a Hefner Heitz Award finalist. At Haskell Indian Nations University she founded the creative writing program. She is a contributing editor to Essay Daily’s Midwessay project.www.deniselow.net
The Coop: A Poetry Cooperative 