Athena Kildegaard
Divining by Ice
She tried to keep her mother tethered
to this world.
Held her hand as if it were the feathers
of a downed thing,
stroked the skin along the veins
and talked of a trip
they'd taken together years ago
when a blizzard
trapped them in a cheap motel room
along the highway
and they'd spent the long afternoon
watching geese
in their harried flight behind the snow.
But her mother didn't
remember any of it until she mentioned
the fur-lined glove
her mother had dropped outside
and found
in the morning, the sky clear, the glove
frozen to gravel.
Divining by Charts
We haven’t chanted Ban the Bomb
in years
and war’s become a techno
wonder
so removed from this life here
on the prairie
that we’ve almost forgotten
the 60s.
Once you traveled to St. Paul
to protest
and that was important and right
but now
when you look back on that time
how fragile
the memory, like fake snow
flurrying
under a plastic dome, how fragile
and almost lost
that time. You can’t even conjure
the passion
you felt then. Look, you say, that’s where
I lived,
just there (pointing on a map) at
the crossroads.
Divining by Mettle
for Gerald Stern
Your feet, first one then the other,
rested
in my lap, ankle nestled between
my thighs.
I was clipping your nails.
Clipping
with a studiousness I'm now
embarrassed
to admit of having chosen then.
My reticence
halted what now I like to think
I'd do
instead: kiss the toes, warming each
with my lips
and then lick the soles of the feet
that have tap-
danced with you across the ocean
of the century,
under peach trees in bloom and bluer
skies,
under the stars and moons with you
singing.
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| AUTHOR BIO |
| Athena Kildegaard was born in Wyoming, grew up in
Minnesota, and has lived in Sydney Australia, Chicago,
Austin, Texas, Oxford, Mississippi, New Orleans, Roskilde,
Denmark, and Guanajuato, Mexico. She now lives in Morris
out west there a ways in Minnesota where she directs a
non-profit cultural organization, is a roster artist with
COMPAS/Writers and Artists in the Schools, and
occasionally teaches at the University of Minnesota,
Morris. Her book of fibonaccis, Rare Momentum, was
published by Red Dragonfly Press, a lively independent press in
southeastern Minnesota. Her poems have appeared widely in
journals and a few anthologies including the forthcoming
Letters to the World, coming from Red Hen Press.
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| POETRY CONTRIBUTORS |
 Mary Kathryn Arnold
Barbara Crooker
Josephine Jacobsen
Elizabeth M. Johnson
Athena Kildegaard
April Lindner
Ann Michael
Joyce Wilson
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| Meredith Bergmann: My work has always seemed cut out for me. I give myself assignments or I take commissions to find challenges to make heroic work in which the themes must be expressed with beauty and with irony. Light touches on dark subjects help me break away what's monolithic or opaque. No thing, for me, embodies mystery, gives life to clay, or conveys narrative enduringly as can the human form. Loving to sculpt and to manipulate ideas, I'm happiest when I can give new meaning to old urges, or can warm a concept into art that's worth its weight. |
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