Casting (Baiku #49)
September 8, 2019
Overcast skies cast over / this lake, my unquiet mind / the fish dart away /
Author: Jill Madden Melchoir
Poet, cyclist, mother, lawyer, daughter, nature-lover, wife, photographer. Fan of Yeats, John Irving, Margaret Atwood, Wes Anderson, the Impressionists, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Martin Luther, Jesus. Not in that order.
Eye of the Day
September 3, 2019
One common tern hovers high above Lake Michigan, then dives under the waves and back again, its path a ragged stitch from sky purpling like a bruise into water smooth as a mirror, and then back to sky again, pulling together heaven and earth like the closing of a weary eye.
An Old House, These Woods
August 27, 2019
An old house, these woods / sunlight drips through leaky trees / on the forest floor /
Night Market
August 23, 2019
When I look over my shoulder to change lanes on the Leo Frigo bridge high above the bay, I see her reaching over to smooth his long hair – my son’s girlfriend – and it’s as though he’s been cracked open and I’ve seen his heart beating for the first time. It’s crowded, so we … More Night Market
At The Mellen Township Board Meeting
August 22, 2019
It’s the melancholy tail end of summer, a Wednesday night with waning light when I walk into the basement meeting room of the fire department on County Road 342. It smells like 50 years of bureaucracy and a musty bathroom and my claustrophobia tells me there is only one exit but I sign my name … More At The Mellen Township Board Meeting
The Fourth Generation of Monarchs Remember the Future
August 13, 2019
Three generations of monarchs unfurl their wings right where they emerge, dazed, to mate for hours while the world pitches and yaws, dusk to dawn – six weeks spent locked in an off and on fluttering embrace, drifting in circles of lazy lust just along overgrown highways of the driftless area (Trempeleau, Pepin, Eau Claire) … More The Fourth Generation of Monarchs Remember the Future
Cathedral Pines
July 28, 2019
Cathedral pines rock – in this ocean of green waves – I roll through and drown.
Interstitial
July 10, 2019
Five-thirty’s afternoon light fades from the Menominee where this water bug zig-zags northward over the glassy sturgeon-black surface of the river; a needle pulling threads of silver-speckled sunlight together, close as lovers, stitching a narrow pocket into which I slip secretly the ruins of another unmatched summer’s day.
An Alligator Dreams of Heaven
July 2, 2019
Cumulus alligator drowses in the lake of the summer sky – dreaming of wings to fly by
The Nest (Or, a Father Considers the Odds of Raising Successful Small-Mouth Bass Offspring)
June 24, 2019
That afternoon at the cabin we sat by the river after I had cut up those small trees that you dropped at my feet with the tractor – (an offering, a challenge, one that I tore through haphazardly with the new chainsaw, black and yellow like a drunken, terrible bumblebee). It was quiet after all … More The Nest (Or, a Father Considers the Odds of Raising Successful Small-Mouth Bass Offspring)
Halfway North 