Anne Marie Holwerda Warner: Poems and Photography

Chicken & Stars

the iconographer’s ambulance of red

first the riser then the tread

riser, tread / riser, tread

the people mover \ an elected body \ Aldi toilet tissue \          noon-thirty bed of bobbie pins \
button jar of Jewish Chicago doctor’s wife born in 1923 /           junco knocking seeds from
​what’s dead & dormant—felling breakfast into snow \ 

The problem was the agitator dogs or the harmonics of           what she said in Mandarin?  Squid
​pro quo comes with all you see here.

We didn’t see Hamilton in those days but did eat glitter—        watched its drain-bound dirty-
​water fall from mop bucket to steely basic sink basin en           route to unknown depths of street. 

child’s pose / cobra / I like a pretty back. Gaze to the ceiling.          now into corpse /

Bay of Kalamata \ impermeable surfaces \ the foot of Mount           Ida \ pony bead deposition
day / demagogue & mall walker / chicken & stars \ the tortoise &         the Roomba \ dog & pony
​pinto bean \ scrotum, vellum, & scrollwork \

A word is not quiet.

empty tomb of unmade bed

riser, tread / riser, tread

Shift

“The wealthy have almost all departed leaving the poor to shift for themselves.”
—Sister Ruth, Memphis, yellow fever epidemic, 1878

going, yet nearby
       mobility over some small distance
              cloth falling straight from the shoulders
                     like a novelist through time
                            lateral automotive gear adjustment | one notch to another
                     with darts around the bust
              some kind of toggle of necessity
       ​not budging up or down 
shlepping, albeit side-to-side

The Work of the People

Splinter, spoon, macramé macaroon.
Lockdown drill bit. Break the bread and fish 
as the divine householder does with waves.

Be the zither, the black and white brick rubble,
the searchlight in the sewer, the balloon man, 
the manhole, Baby, but never the Ferris wheel. 

The sound of your car in neutral over magnolia 
petals in my gravel-driveway mind: the pressure, 
the imprint, the bruise, the resulting fragrant offering.

Tailgating wide loads of windmill blades on the freeway. 
A mellow drama is not a melodrama. 
Nor is a mellow llama a melollama.

Outside, a hopeful collective in stereo: desperate drone of 
honeybees metabolizing hyperdrive diligence, packing 
pagoda dogwood pollen into saddle bags in a delicate raid.

tsk tsk tsk It’s dive-bomb swallow season. 
We’ll never get him in the Russian zone. 
Candy-coated chocolate shells and Prosecco.

We are daughters dunking chickens in a five-gallon bucket of hose water 
and wild violets for their lavender bath. We are affairs confessed from a 
snake-bite hospital stay, a wrongly-assumed death bed. 

Porch sitters beware the stay-at-home mystic. 
Especially if you are both the porch sitter 
and the stay-at-home mystic. 

It’s an augmented fourth. A Russian robo-call.
You’ve been right here but I’ve missed you. 
Cook until fragrant.

Wash me in the creek that flows behind Lowe’s.
Sur la fable. In backup cameras we trust.
Think of a tender resolution.

Pulling thorax up from sand 
on bent needle legs, 
you hatch. You are emergence.

Self-Addressed Sentence Poem for Walt Whitman

This self is a
milk-glass marble 
of songs for stairwells
bottlenecked at a one-lane bridge 
and a hive bequeathed of wild phlox 
inside a blood moon cave cricket’s prayer.

Anne Marie Holwerda Warner is a Chicago carpenter's daughter perched in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Her poetry has appeared in The Bitchin' Kitsch, Moonchild, Ghost City Review, Q/A Poetry, Earth & Altar, The Hour, Global Poemic and Harbinger Asylum.