The 2017 Art Farm Anthology

For two weeks this past August-September, I was a resident at Art Farm in Marquette, NE. While there, I worked on revising poems and assembling a chapbook manuscript, which I completed and have since sent off to several presses. 

In the meantime, Five Oaks Press, edited by 2017 Art Farm resident Lynn Houston, recently published an anthology of the work of 2017 Art Farm residents. My poem, "Unnamable Voices," was published in this anthology alongside an illustration I did of one of the farmhouses on the property. 

Unnamable Voices 

I spent entire dinners imagining

the white of our house 
inhaling and exhaling

broken glass
candy wrappers
fallen feathers.

A shiver would pass through me

a strange gentle wind 
in the house like a chorus

like a breath of souls 
in worn mountains

crawling up thunderstorms

the wind on my neck
a current ruffling the swallows

stirring unnamable voices

old forgotten songs 

glorious under the eaves.

"Unnamable Voices," in a different form, was originally published by Two Cities Review in December 2014, and is a found poem created from Paul Harding's Tinkers (2010, Bellevue Literary Press).

Pictures of my time at Art Farm:

Seasick

She wasn’t prepared for how her body

would deceive her

how her own flesh would be so quick

to give away

hunger meant to feed her soul.

We underestimate

the undertow of the universe

how it pulls

our corporeal thingness far from shore

            to the primordial

so that we may swirl below surface

with life first arose

and how small we are in the company

 of such a force.

Her body succumbs to exhaustion

deforms, feels pain

as the new life gains presence, strengthens

takes shape.

It must feed off her and she must submit

to the current

let it do with her what it will

bob with the nausea

trust she will stay afloat in this space

where her body

is not hers and the being not complete

that time will

one day wash ashore two wholes.

First published: ESME, 12 Sept 2017. Web.