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Click title to open microchap
Cover art by Vivian Wagner
‘Birch Neurography 2’
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Communion
Birches stand like
undiscovered saints
out my window, patient
and calm, even as
a wintering wind
blows through them.
They bow and bless,
forgiving the trespasses
of ravens and red squirrels,
while a magpie flashes
a waft of indigo incense,
and the moon shifts
slightly in her seat.
Wooded
Mountain hemlock trees
grow amongst the birches,
adding green to white and gray,
filling spaces between spaces.
Together they form a wall
out each window, and yet
a wall itself made of
windows and doors,
places to peer through,
places to escape.
They change and shift
with the wind,
with the imperceptible
addition of cells and sap.
Nothing is fixed.
Everything must finally
let light through.
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Winter Waiting
Birches sway
in the wind
and prepare
for sap to flow.
They want
to understand,
but it’s built into
their fibers that
they never will.
The wind, though,
whispers all
they need
to know.
Spring-ish
Is it baseball season?
You wouldn’t know it here,
with the snow and birches,
and the wind still
remembering winter.
Spring, though, will come;
even those birches
know the score.
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Birch Talk
Sap will run soon,
carrying winter’s store
to spring’s leaves,
earth’s minerals to
air’s ears;
trees speak
of the stones
at their feet.
Xylem
This morning, the birches
tried to escape, leaning
away from the wind,
branchy arms reaching.
Roots stopped them,
but inside their bark,
sap stirred and ran.
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Vivian Wagner © 2022
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Click title to open microchap
Cover art: Girl Playing in Mud
by Vivian Wagner
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On Drawing a Wine Glass
Filled with Water
Graphite on a page gives
an illusion of clear,
the feeling a glass lives
in its own space, dear
enough, close enough
to touch. It fades,
though, disappears, a rough
approximation, made
of erasures and lines,
shading and sparks,
a magician’s fine
attempt, a lark.
This, the only hope of art.
This, a start.
Girl Playing in Mud
As wedding parties swirled around her,
best men and bridesmaids, grooms and brides,
the flower girl sat in mud, ignoring the whir.
She hummed and dug. She knew what abides.
Her pink dress draped gracefully into the dirt,
her hair caught up in a ponytail.
She shaped for herself a complex fort,
that was, I’m certain, the opposite of frail.
Sometimes in the middle of roses and sun,
a fountain spewing wealth into the air,
we create what we can, homespun,
speaking something that sounds like prayer.
The clay at a tree’s base is cool and calm,
the closest thing we’ll ever find to balm.
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Catchlights
An eye's glint
gives voice to
forward light, a hint,
almost taboo.
Even dark graphite
creates an illusion
of presence, a bright,
forgiving occlusion.
Look at the blank spot,
and you'll see
the soul, a dot
become scree.
So the spirit's caught.
So by rough hands wrought.
Fruitless
I mix persimmon and raspberry,
trying to create tomato,
blending light and shadow,
color and form, knowing it will be
nothing like the real thing I see.
How can we turn wax lines, so
two-dimensional, into
a living form we can believe?
And why try?
I have one on my counter
now, alive and bright.
I’m not sure if I
should render
or just bite.
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What Friday Night Looks Like
Sometimes, late, you make round
doodles, coloring them in,
listening to the sound
of your thoughts, of what has been.
The feel of wax on paper
helps you understand something
of the universe, how fear
inhibits the swing
of creation, how the swirl
of atoms hopes to become
something more, how the curl
of DNA turns into home.
We draw ourselves into being,
catching this: what's fleeting.
Evolution
A crow's not flat black,
shines, instead, with pink and gold,
blue and white, his back
luminescent, frank, and bold.
I spend hours trying
to capture that particular glint,
with layer after layer of wax and ink.
Finally, almost despite my stint,
he begins to emerge, full-formed.
Perhaps this is what it means to create:
it's a happy accident, born
of repeated failures, a pretend fate.
All those finches, all those beaks
at last one start to speak.
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VIvian Wagner © 2018
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Vivian Wagner’s work has appeared in Slice Magazine, Muse/A Journal, Forage Poetry Journal, Pittsburgh Poetry Review, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Gone Lawn, Gastro Obscura, The Atlantic, Narratively, The Ilanot Review, Silk Road Review, Zone 3, Bending Genres, and other publications. She's the author of a memoir, Fiddle: One Woman, Four Strings, and 8,000 Miles of Music (Citadel-Kensington); a full-length poetry collection, Raising (Clare Songbirds Publishing House); and four poetry chapbooks: The Village (Aldrich Press-Kelsay Books), Making (Origami Poems Project), Curiosities (Unsolicited Press), and Spells of the Apocalypse (Thirty West Publishing House).