Reinhabit — By Laura Madeline Wiseman

Not like I thought or remembered. Not prairies or worms. Not afternoon thunderstorms. Not braless aunts, tribes of topless kids hiking in boots, frayed red laces, trees, paths, all that long hair. Not a park of girls squealing and cupping water balloons, We’ve got boobies! We’ve won the booby prize! Not magic. Not fay villages in every fallen trees. Not a walk of unmeasurable distance. Not fields of dandelion, clover, frisbees, grills, open coolers. Not picnickers or overnight tents. No bare feet, bottles, pipes, or humidity. It’s a place with a name I forgot. You touched my hand, a map in your phone and another memorized—the one you pointed at in the air as if I could see. My map, part bewilderment, part retold story. Our map together, once torn, but now mended, a new chart to unfold.

~ Laura Madeline Wiseman

Laura Madeline Wiseman is the author of 25 books and chapbooks and the editor of Women Write Resistance, selected for the Nebraska 150 Booklist. Her collaborative book Intimates and Fools is a Nebraska Book Award 2015 Honor Book. Her latest book is Velocipede. She teaches at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Guest Editor Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, Kansas Poet Laureate Emerita, is the author of 23 books, including Miriam’s Well, a novel; Needle in the Bone, a non-fiction book on the Holocaust; and a forthcoming book of poetry, How Time Moves: New and Selected Poems. Founder of Transformative Language Arts, Mirriam-Goldberg also leads writing workshops widely, coaches people on writing and right livelihood through the arts, and consults with businesses and organizations on creativity. 

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Magic House — By Laura Madeline Wiseman

For every house on our block there’s a tree
bearing, fruiting the lane’s tract line.
If I could bake a muffin for every hand not open

in the wave of hello, I would never tell
how our nieces would knock on each door, for a cup
of brown sugar, an egg, or a teaspoon of soda

to borrow from cupboards everything they lacked,
when the berries for a pie and the cash required
for buying desserts burned faster as the months wore on,

where here, among the flailing middle class, puddings
are instant, fruit juices are ten percent, and cookies
come in plastic. Yes, the songbirds are common, but still

I savor every dark yard apple, juicy as summer,
purple fruit of shrub trees with star-shaped clusters
in the thousands. Every current of sweetness, each mouthful

sustains, overflowing paper cups hot from the oven.
I remember how our nieces stirred what they borrowed,
baked for her when she could not. He’s not home yet. I’ll wait.
From An Apparently Impossible Adventure (BlazeVOX [books] 2016).

First appeared in Illuminations, Vol. 17 2016.

~ Laura Madeline Wiseman

Laura Madeline Wiseman is the author of 25 books and chapbooks and the editor of Women Write Resistance, selected for the Nebraska 150 Booklist. Her collaborative book Intimates and Fools is a Nebraska Book Award 2015 Honor Book. Her latest book is Velocipede. She teaches at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Julie Ramon is an English instructor at NEO A&M in Miami, Oklahoma.  She graduated with an M.F.A from Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky. Among writing, her interests include baking, sewing, traveling, and garage sales. She is also a co-organizer of a Joplin, Missouri poetry series, Downtown Poetry. She lives in Joplin with her husband, daughter, and sons.

Candy, Cigarettes, and Fairies–Laura Madeline Wiseman

At the free special exhibit opening on contemporary fairy folk art at the university art museum, I’m sure fairies are hiding behind the trees in the photograph, behind the girl, the one like your sister, with the candy cigarette. This is America, the late 1980s of outlandish white ruffles, plastic wristwatches, hair sun-bleached and wild. We let summer turn our skin tawny. We say we want boys because that’s what the movie girls say—heroes, stone mansions, big plastic boobs, shiny SUVs. All of us have kid sisters, some brother climbing the ladder, blurred in our background. We face the flickering of Do it! because that’s what girls do. This landscape, fairies, girls, and ladder-brother, that is meant to be us, meant to be America, is everything I remember—fountain drinks, nickel candy from the bottom shelf, bubble gum tattoos, fairy lip balm. America, do you believe in fairies? America, put your queer girl shoulder right here. Snap your fingers. America, don’t die.

 

[From An Apparently Impossible Adventure (BlazeVOX [books] 2016). First appeared in Toad the Journal, 5.2, 2015. Also appeared in also appeared in the anthology Circe’s Lament: An Anthology of Wild Women. Bianca Spriggs & Katerina Stoykova-Klemer, Eds. Accents Publishing, 2015.]

Laura Madeline Wiseman is the author of 25 books and chapbooks and the editor of Women Write Resistance, selected for the Nebraska 150 Booklist. Her collaborative book Intimates and Fools is a Nebraska Book Award 2015 Honor Book. Her latest book is Velocipede. She teaches at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Guest Editor Roy J. Beckemeyer is from Wichita, Kansas. His poetry book, Music I Once Could Dance To (Coal City Press, 2014) was a 2015 Kansas Notable Book. He recently co-edited Kansas Time+Place: An Anthology of Heartland Poetry (Little Balkans Press, 2017) together with Caryn Mirriam Goldberg. That anthology collected poems that appeared on this website from 2014-2016. His latest book, Amanuensis Angel (Spartan Press, 2018) contains ekphrastic poems, inspired by a variety of artists’ depictions of angels, that “resound and sometimes subvert expectations” (Tyler Robert Sheldon), that provide “a kaleidoscope of history, art, culture, the sacred and the everyday” (Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg).

Local Weather — by Laura Madeline Wiseman

Our neighbor tells me it dropped for days

until even the sun could not lift the mercury

from cold, but today all the black squirrels sit

on haunches munching morsels unearthed, robins

step the yards like kings eyeing court favorites

and cardinals trumpet encouragement from the trees

to every living thing that has failed to notice—the warmth,

the crocus, the daffodils, the laid off who stare from curtains,

unconvinced. All afternoon I wait and I watch this space.

One by one, neighbors arrive home from work, open windows

to let the breeze chatter the blinds. They shirk from Carhartts,

kick off boots and sit stoops and lawn chairs in the day’s heat.

Yes, such balm might only be for today, but it’s ours.

~ Laura Madeline Wiseman

 

From An Apparently Impossible Adventure (BlazeVOX [books] 2016).

First appeared (as “First Thaw”) in Sugar Mule, Issue 41, 2012

Laura Madeline Wiseman is the author of 25 books and chapbooks and the editor of Women Write Resistance, selected for the Nebraska 150 Booklist. Her collaborative book Intimates and Fools is a Nebraska Book Award 2015 Honor Book. Her latest book is Velocipede. She teaches at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

William Sheldon lives in Hutchinson, Kansas where he teaches and writes. His poetry and prose have been published widely in such journals as Blue Mesa Review, Columbia, New Letters, and Prairie Schooner. He is the author of two books of poetry, Retrieving Old Bones (Woodley, 2002) and Rain Comes Riding (Mammoth, 2011), as well as a chapbook, Into Distant Grass (Oil Hill, 2009). Retrieving Old Bones was a Kansas City Star Noteworthy Book for 2002 and is listed as one of the Great Plains Alliance’s Great Books of the Great Plains.

Returning to this American Gothic — by Laura Madeline Wiseman

I’m on the wrong side. You’ve forgotten your pitchfork. I’m not scowling at you, wearing a dress, or posing as your wife when really I’m your sister. You’re not wearing the bibs you don’t own. You still have all your hair. The trees behind us are not the shape of orbs and the house is one in which we never lived. We buy a magnet. We consider donning costumes. The gardener who is also the photographer who is also the cashier doesn’t mind the humidity, the cicadas’ song, the drone of tractors, or maybe semis, maybe the highway we took to get this picture. I’m looking for Rosanne Barr’s ex-husband who bought a house here once, rode a bicycle on RAGBRAI, any proof of mists that divide, impossible deaths, a possible life. You’re looking at the map in your head, the one you point to in the air showing me where we’re going next. I’m listening, practicing that magic. You’re telling me you’re the hero of this Midwestern American tale. I nod because today you are. Here we stand, side by side in Iowa, fecund and green, no pitchfork between us, just our hands.

~ Laura Madeline Wiseman

From An Apparently Impossible Adventure (BlazeVOX [books] 2016).

Also appeared in California Ekphrasis, January 2016.

Laura Madeline Wiseman is the author of 25 books and chapbooks and the editor of Women Write Resistance, selected for the Nebraska 150 Booklist. Her collaborative book Intimates and Fools is a Nebraska Book Award 2015 Honor Book. Her latest book is Velocipede. She teaches at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Guest editor Dennis Etzel Jr. lives with Carrie and the boys in Topeka, Kansas where he teaches English at Washburn University. He has two chapbooks, The Sum of Two Mothers (ELJ Publications 2013) and My Graphic Novel (Kattywompus Press 2015), a poetic memoir My Secret Wars of 1984 (BlazeVOX 2015), and Fast-Food Sonnets (Coal City Review Press 2016).