To an Indiana editor, 2023, in a Northwoods bog, 2011, and Four Trees, a Confluence, and an Owl, in The Marsh, edited by Brandon Menke and Sarah Dimick, Post45: Contemporaries, February 29, 2024.
I contributed three poems to a poetic companion to the Locating Lorine Niedecker essay cluster in Post45: Contemporaries. Immersion in Lorine Niedecker’s work—especially her New Goose project of the 1930s and ’40s, but also the (not very) long poems she wrote in the 1960s—gave me permission to embrace spareness and lyrical sonic play in poems of specific places and times that chart my own psychogeographies in Indiana and Wisconsin. I include one of those poems here.
Four Trees, a Confluence, and an Owl
Garfield Park, Indianapolis, Fall 2022
hairy hatted
acorn
mast
ten thousand
thousand
make it last
*
Ginkgo stink
sidewalk’s crushed
berries
memory’s thin
sticky
reparatives
*
persimmon
summons
pudding
persists
rot’s
required
for the sweet
I list
*
marcescent
effervescence
hold on
too long
*
where bean creek
flows into
pleasant run
“who cooks for you?”
“who cooks for you
all?”
at leech of
sun
Michelle Niemann 