Landscape with Two Sisters

On the way home from the Black Hills
Father bought us dolls – Native American
women with brick red pigtails. Each doll
straight as a totem, a desolate stare 
from brown iris dots of painted eyes.
Soft doe-skin dresses with fringe.
You were three and I was five. 
Mom dressed us in matching jumpsuits,
although we really needed jeans to climb.
You scraped your toe on a foothill’s jagged rock.
I hated how easily you opened yourself in a cry.
Red drops mixed with tears, 
flecked the soil a deeper red.
I comforted you, my arms around your waist.
Eye to eye, I saw our childhood lives dissolve
into something neither of us would name.
You quieted then. Behind us the wind discovered 
a crevice to bite. Its’ sound softened 
as it prowled off into the distance. 
We stood together several moments.
Winded, cut, thirsty. Two lost figures. 
Our fates sealed in the foothill’s rocks. 
If I had held you longer would we
still be friends? But our lives separated on the foothill.
Your crying warned and held a goodbye. 
Sister of a different path. 
Stubbed-toe towhead with sky-colored eyes. 
Flowered, scrimshawed sister.
I remember our jumpsuits 
had violet flowers printed 
on a white background.
I remember I left you crying on that hill.



Fortune 500

Inside the windows on the nineteenth floor
the company’s culture wants
folded hands atop the table.
Meetings, 50 hour weeks, volunteer. 
Volunteer even if you have less time 
to see your family. Volunteer.
Yes, I will do that; yes I will do that too.
Yes, of course I will.

Working late (again) on a Friday night,
my coworker and I finish writing and grouping
copies of reports – only 15 – but five of them
placed atop each other are two feet high.
I told her she had young hands,
her stress left her mouth in tonal oboe notes.

Saturday, two hours troubleshooting
more reports that must go out Monday.
Finally I leave the glass sky tomb
and walk a nature trail. Two deer 
under the outmost folds of a stand of maples
the only division between them and me 
is a tall chain link fence. 
A dog barks. The deer know
the canine cannot rise above or filter through 
the metal mesh that separates them. 
It’s early summer so the deer are less watchful –
no hunters this early with two months until fall.

It’s Monday; I come in early and add addendums
to the reports. I ‘do good work’ as Garrison Keillor puts it.
But can he imagine the confusion
of who may be downsized out next, the hyperawareness
in each face I pass? Got to look good, got to do more.
Got to be seen. Yes, yes I will. Yes, I can do that.

My coworker casually mentions
‘in October … I’ll be gone for a few days.’ 
When she returns it will be early November.
I wonder if I will be here to welcome her back.




After Reading Rumi’s Bonfire at Midnight

Squall at sunset; inside for six days,
silence wears worn slippers.
Our clipped wings itch more than ache.
Thunderstorms pass over all week- 
today softer rains from two storms.
Five years of marriage yin and yang.
We fight fair, if at all – little nits.
Your inattention, my inattentiveness.

Still, attraction for each other. 
Distraction in the rain; a feeder band off Lily.
We eat supper and plan our business trip. 
The squall moves through - threat of
a tornado passes, the weather channel 
cancels the alert; erases its red letters.
Danger passed our house once more -
do others consider their last day?

I envision it dressed in simple warmth;
not bathed in warnings and thunders.
Fountainbleu’s live oaks’ sun-splotched,
leaves holding droplets after showers.
You ask me if we should keep the
storm shutters attached – I ask you what 
you think – and down they come since 
we will not leave town until next month. 
For now we wish to view the sun together.




Dust Bowl

With a pointing finger Grandma described the depression, 
the acts committed to feed a family. “You don’t know hunger.” 
No one kept the innocence that full stomachs afford.
Decades laid hunger to sleep. We were sate.
Grandma planted red zinnias beside vegetables.

I handed grandma clothespins as she hung laundry 
in her small suburban yard. The clothes froze 
in the October winds. In my hand she placed a pod
filled with black specked poppy seeds.

Grandma told of cattle in a storm of lost top soil, 
farmers walking livestock to slaughter 
at a nothing profit. Her Irish daughter learned 
the trap flesh held inside her milky skin. 
Black and white snapshots bought a sack of flour.

Zinnias are an ‘old’ flower the young no longer plant. 
The clothesline is idle; it sags over the patchy lawn. 
The untilled garden turns to parched clods. For years 
I kept the poppy seeds in a trinket box. Rattled carelessly
until the pod broke, spilling peppery dots. 
An infertile legacy. Both box and seeds lost.



Silueta

"I have sent myself within the same elements
that produced me, using the earth like my
linen cloth and my soul like my tools."
----- Ana Mendieta

Ana in exile. Landlocked 
in the gouged hills of a new land. 
Sent by parents with her sister from Cuba, 
Mother and father remained behind,
island of no escape. 
Give our children better lives. 

Ana walked an Iowa footbridge. 
Art campus on one bank.
Steps above flowing water.
Each trip a rebirth of Ashe’s force.
The current knows her name - 
woman who spirits earth to art.

Ana carves granite into silhouette. 
Hands work rock with chisel and mallet. 
Her form emerges. Her shape altered 
into curved womb. Hard child-bearer, 
body cathedral. Ana scatters sacred flowers. s
Petals fall like sangre onto stone. 
Ana of Cuba. Iowa orphan. 
Mothered anew in effigy. 

First Iowa lay immersed in Ana’s ocean. 
Then marshlands formed. Glaciers cut 
rolling hills. Tall grasses thrived, burned. 
Crops planted in rich black loam. 
This was the land Ana knew.
Fertile body feeding the world. 
Bluestems survive on hidden prairies.
The wind still whispers over them.