Poems Published in Figments of Imagination 2011

So I submitted some writing to the Bismarck State College literary publication called Figments of Imagination while I was going to school, and a bunch of it got selected and published! Yay! Here are the three poems that were chosen:

Mittens

When it's cold out, I put on  my mittens
and imagine a woman in Bangladesh
or India or Hong Kong or Honduras
hanging over a heavy black machine
stitching stitching mittens together
mitten after mitten after mitten
is she very hot? I wonder
how useless these mittens seem
to this woman or if she hates them

I wonder if she knows I think of her
in the spring when I pack away my mittens
with my other warm winter things
as she sits leaning leaning over her work
sewing together mitten after
mitten after mitten after mitten
do season change for her? I wonder
if her hands ache from her work
like mine do sometimes from the cold

in the fall I take my mittens out again
turn them over in my hands
note the thinning fingertips
the holes the fraying edges worn out
from so much honest usefulness
does the woman cry? I wonder
whether she every blames me secretly
as I go to the store for another pair
and perhaps even now she is still there

still sewing sewing mittens
did she ever imagine my hands
inside the mittens the way
I imagined her hands making them?
did the mittens deliver me her sweat
or the oils from the food she ate?
does she have food to eat? I wonder
do her children have food to eat? I wonder
do her children make mittens too?


Haiku

I want to say some
there are not enough syllab
I can never fin


Big View

Jen points far off toward the horizon:
that's our land out to those trees
and up to the river that way.
Not those hills. That's where the coyotes live.

The wind makes waves in the wide leaves
that look like moving water for miles,
and I pretend that the prairie is an ocean,
that this gravel road is an arcing beach.

From here you can see how the glaciers' mammoth
hands smoothed and rippled the solid ground,
where, long ago, enormous pebbles slipped
through giant ice-crusted fingers.

My hands become giant, too,
and I can shape the hills and push them back.
I can scoop up mounds of clay
and build a castle between the corn fields.