Saturday, November 9, 2013

Medicine Poet Erin M. Bertram

Here, now, a poem from the beautiful Erin M. Bertram. 

Erin is the 2013 recipient of a John Woods Scholarship from Prague Summer Program and the author of nine chapbooks, including Body of Water(winner of the 2007 Frank O’Hara Chapbook Award),Inland Sea (winner of the 2009 Robin Becker Chapbook Prize), and Memento Mori and The Vanishing of Camille Claudel (both forthcoming in 2013).  A former teaching fellow at Washington University in St. Louis, she has received awards and fellowships from Split Rock Arts Program, Lettre Sauvage, Augustana College, and the Academy of American Poets.  She currently teaches English and Women’s & Gender Studies at Augustana College along the Mississippi River, where she co-coordinates the campus Safe Zone Program. 


Pilgrimage


Gray-gauzy light, the edges manic & tired, & at night, head tilted back, a welter of stars invading kindly.

                                 The dust-driven trail drives the hiker to query the miles stacked in her boots—sylvan confessional, autumn’s ochre hum.

                                                                                              Pocket-knife, tin cup, ferro rod, afterimage of last night’s hurrah still warm in her hands.

                                                                                                           And the wind nuzzles its maw like a filly at a gate.

                                       Where does what has left us go?

                                                                                                     If I make of my hands a temple—incense, votive, blocks of cool stone, the vocal bow chanting makes of the air—who, then, will reach, unstumbling, for the braided rope, coax the rusted metal to sing its tiny room?

                Tall grass taken by snow, rain tumbling coins from the sky’s torn black jeans, a wind that bays—I am willing to follow it anywhere.

                                                                                                  Of quietude, the body, in time, adjusts to the added weight.


Wednesday, November 6, 2013

Medicine Poet Jodie Toohey

Hello all. Today, a poem from Jodie Toohey. Jodie is the author of two poetry collections, Crush and Other Love Poems for Girls (2008), and The Other Side of Crazy (918studio, 2013), which contains “Out of the Blue," first place winner of Bettendorf Public Library’s Love Poem Contest in 2012. Her novel, Missing Emily: Croatian Life Letters, was published in 2012 and she has two entries in Midwest Writing Center’s Creative Writing Primer.  Thank you Jodie!


NO END


So there will not be an end
To the story,
I will write my life,
The days, the hours,
The moments of awakeness,
Drip-dried and drunk,
Rain plastered hair
Beneath LED lighted billboards,
Free and unfaltering.

I’ll take it all,
The tears, the joy,
Unnecessary lies crept over
And pulled under
In purgatory slumber,
Let it wash over,
Clean and captivating.

I will write it all,
The dreams, forgotten scenes,
Saved and unsacrificed
Until the last day
My pen struggles and withers,
Evaporates off the page
So I will not be lost,
But forever there,
The last word.