Kimberly Blaeser & Amber Blaeser-Wardzala  

4 Years, 471 Miles Later

Every stroke of a paddle
the ripple of longing.
Here pictograph spirits
ochre and ancient
dance across moving water.
Hegman Lake too will disappear;
nothing new to be found.
 
We are in memory of noodin--
yes, wind carries each howling,
carries us, ma’iigan, ajijaak.
 
Water songs still rise and echo.
​

Choose A Side in the War 

In the static of telephone wisdom
and cramped postcard graffiti,
you blow me reminders:
 
How I am no daughter of Eve
wear no inheritance of small greed--
our hungers, you say, have always been larger.
 
How in the place where water and sky meets
we become the snatch of eagle’s claws
leave trace or map—this skeletal memory.
 
There, you say, the ancient rain
wipes away disguises.
 
Yes, we live lonesome; we live joined--
each breath, collected and transposed.
​

The Timbre of Astral Voices

Ledge rock nights we swim soul deep in stars
moved by a sky of lights already switched off.
In another place we too are cold darkened bodies
but laud the streaks we leave in our lonely wake.
 
This brilliant blaze we paint with our limbs
trembles at last into holy nothingness,
leaving a clean canvas of neither water nor sky--
this place where stories began no space of opposites. 
 
Ancestral whispers, tiers of Anishinaabeg sky--
our seasons filled with Wintermaker, Mang, 
Ojiig and Mooz—celestial tracings of tribal light,
mythic bodies. Our lips, too, mouth a song of survival.





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Kimberly Blaeser is the author of three poetry collections—most recently Apprenticed to Justice; and the editor of Traces in Blood, Bone, and Stone: Contemporary Ojibwe Poetry. She served as Wisconsin Poet Laureate for 2015-16. Her scholarship, creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry have been widely anthologized. A Professor of English and Native American Studies at the University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee, Blaeser is also on faculty for the Institute of American Indian Arts low rez MFA program in Santa Fe. Blaeser is Anishinaabe, an enrolled member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe and grew up on White Earth Reservation. A fourth collection of poetry, Copper Yearning, will be released from Holy Cow! Press in fall 2019. 

Amber Blaeser-Wardzala is a Creative Writing and Studio Arts student at Denison University. Her poetry and photography have been included in several regional publications and her short fiction piece “Realism” was adapted for an orchestral performance. She has been involved in various theatre productions, appearing on stage from Albuquerque to Milwaukee. In summer 2019, she will join an ensemble to adapt and stage Nahoonkara, a novel by Peter Grandbois. Amber is Anishinaabe from White Earth Reservation and grew up in rural Lyons, WI.