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Michaela Kahn

Michaela Kahn is currently an artist in residence at The Wormfarm Institute in Reedsburg, WI. (Wormfarm is a working farm and non-profit that seeks to nurture the interstices between culture and agriculture through residencies, outreach programs, an annual Puppet Festival and much more). She has a background in sustainable communities and English lit and received her MFA from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. Work has appeared at 2River, Big Bridge, Puerto del Sol, Sentence, and others. She guest edited the December 2006 edition of Santa Fe Poetry Broadside. This fall she will be an artist in residence at the Ora Lerman Trust at The Church at Soaring Gardens.

Plum & Daughter

from Winter's Book

Michaela Kahn

I've forgotten the number
of times I've eaten
forbidden fruit.

The tree whose roots knot
pebbles, around the lost daughter,
the plum that winks out at night
and breathes at morning-even now
does it bear purple fruit
with bitter skin?

The lost, the let go. Breath comes
from those fruits, lives in the bodies
of strangers. Damp petals paper
flagstones pale pink.

You must be careful of the numbers,
count how many
seeds and jewels you
take, count the trees that woke
with you on cold mornings.

Rio Gorge

from Winter's Book

Michaela Kahn

Such lips the moon reaches
down to the desert. Down into
pocket red of gorge
sand, lichened unlikely green, the violet-
rust edge,
the Rio dark coils
round a bear, a deer: rocks that
say things to you.

Whittle-stone, the lone
raven becomes two
ravens when snow spirals
thin through late-light
from clouds across the salt-brush
far mesa where it
left a long cold channel in a
cragged side.

You slip
a handful of ice
into my coat
pocket. Our boots ring
rio, rio, on lava-stones.

In a coyote scat nest,
chipped bone whiter
near the edge.

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