Verse Wisconsin 105| Kate Sontag

Two Poems

Buoyancy

What keeps this sentence afloat
like a body in water
is your refusal to stop
until we run out of breath

like two bodies in water
backstroking with the moon
until we run out of breath
once the sun comes up

backstroking with the moon
my fingers on fire
once the sun comes up
an extended foreplay

your fingers on fire
in love with my form
an extended foreplay
holding you

in love with my form
is your refusal to stop
holding me
what keeps this sentence afloat?

Solar Sestina

Sing
to
me
solar-
powered
laptop.

Laptop
sings
powered
to
solar
me.

My
laptop,
solar
singer
to
power,

empowers
me
too.
Laptop
sings
solar:

solar-
powered
songs.
My
lap topples
into

two
solar
laptops,
powers
me
singing

to power
solar. My
laptops sing.

—Kate Sontag, Ripon, WI

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Kate Sontag’s recent work appears in Prairie Schooner, Seattle Review, Verse Wisconsin, and EXPRESS milwaukee.com. Her work has been featured in Valparaiso Poetry Review and appeared in anthologies such as Boomer Girls, Are You Experienced?, and Sweeping Beauty (U. of Iowa). She is co-editor of After Confession: Poetry as Autobiography (Graywolf) and teaches at Ripon College.

More work by Sontag appears in the print issue of Verse Wisconsin.

"Buoyancy": This poem is a marriage between two forms I have always been fairly obsessed with: the pantoum and the one-sentence poem. I love testing how much sentence structure will bear before toppling over on its own weight. This one turned out to be more or less a meta-poem about that very subject.

"Solar Sestina": I wrote this in a poetry writing class when I was trying to teach my students the sestina form. The exercise was simply to write one-word lines to learn the order and potential flexibility of the six repeating words. It was fun and silly and useful. (At the time, my husband had just bought a solar laptop--the deal was that another one went somewhere in South America to a teenager who couldn't afford a computer.)