As if you could control the wind, make the walnut tree’s
blow of green orbs that bounce through the land’s edge
slow, pause the gutter of the pin oak across the levy from
its deep bow, still the sliver maple at fence line to stay
another limb from crashing down. As if you could turn the
wind’s direction, dial back its gusts, prevent the swirls that
sweep from ranging plains through city. As if storms moved
by your hand, tornadoes landed where you pointed, hail
drilled where you cast your gaze. As if you need only to rock
and roll down to it, draw your knees against your belly,
squeeze knees to chest, and all the wind everywhere would
rip through prairie land fast, then stop dead. As if the
muscles of the body were nature made, as if the land’s heat
was also flesh, as if the moon’s tidal pull tugged the mind,
and all of it together could whip a hurricane into life,
a windstorm, a breeze, your breath.
Laura Madeline Wiseman is the editor of two anthologies, Bared and Women Write Resistance, selected for the Nebraska 150 Sesquicentennial Book List. She is the recipient of the 2015 Honor Book Nebraska Book Award, a Wurlitzer Foundation Fellowship, and an Academy of American Poets Award. Her book Drink won the 2016 Independent Publisher Bronze Book Award for poetry. Her latest book is Through a Certain Forest (BlazeVOX [books] 2017). Her book Velocipede (Stephen F. Austin State University Press), is a 2016 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award Finalist for Sports.