Previously published  in Yukhika-latuhse (She tells us stories), 2012

​Lillian sat poised above the cotton pillowcase, her hands trembling.  The newest of the girls at St. Anthony's, she was responsible for long straight seams on these sewing days, while the other girls had the more difficult aprons, skirts, and capes.  But she'd been warned.  Along with pillowcases also went the job of pacing the other girls.  The sewing machines were mismatched and each had a different sound, but when the girls sewed quickly, their machines sang out to each other.  On scrubbing days or laundry days, the nuns hovered, pointing out real or imagined flaws in the girls' work.  On sewing days, they lingered in the hallway, soothed by the hum of machines stitching clothes into creation.  

If Lillian sewed too quickly, the other girls were punished for not keeping up.  If she sewed too slowly, the girls were happy, but the nuns would replace her with one of the other girls who would sew faster, and then Lillian would have to scrub floors.  Her knees still ached from yesterday's long day of scrubbing floors.  

The girls were waiting for her to start.  Lillian studied the nuns gathered in the hallway awaiting their sewing machine choir.  Lillian pressed on the foot pedal and the other girls joined in as her feed dogs barked out cadence.  It was the cadence only an old dog would keep.

Previously published in Amsterdam Quarterly

Belle Plaine

Islands of trees
among long
prairie grass,
clear cut with a
strong Germanic
vision.

Hulda and William,
the root
of this family,
planted wheat
amid a siege 
of locusts.

Prairie
turned to grain,
then to black,
as swarms devoured
until stalks no longer
whispered in evening winds.

They were determined 
to start again, 
again, until those 
stems could pay 
the land's 
yearly toll.

But too close
to lost,
Hulda 
claimed it 
as only 
a woman could.

She wove 
each of her children
through those fields,
row by orderly row,
forever tied 
to that land.

Previously published by InterBoard Poetry Community, 2014.

Badlands

Ribbons of heat
lift a red-tailed hawk
to circle the crevasse.

Eleven trees,
branches bare, stand
gnarled and wind-worn.

Set the sun. Silhouette,
jagged and strange.
It’s too late. Seared.

Previously published by Yellow Medicine Review, 2011. 

Sleeping on the Train

How we remember being so anxious
to get the right train
and we bounced low speed across Slovakia
where machine gunned guards pounded our door at 2 a.m.
and finally we came into a hazed Hungarian dawn
filled with small cement homes
in towns whose names stuck fast to our lips.

And we forgot or maybe never knew
the orphan trains that left New York
with immigrant children
whose parents had to pray their child away
to a better life on a farm or in small towns
somewhere more centered.

And we forgot or maybe never knew
the native people put upon
the great metal beast that gashed through plains
where land and land as far as the eye could see
to what must have been the end of the world
where only water and water and more
and surely they’d never see home again.

And we forgot or maybe never knew
of camps created for those not trusted
it was Japanese and Germans then
who took their few belongings on the train
fingerprinted and removed to secluded locations
where to prove loyalty as the citizens they already were
they could leave camp to fight ancestral lands.

How we remember our adventure
sleeping on the train
expecting to come through night
into a different kind of day.