Verse Wisconsin 113-114 | Susan Elbe, Marilyn Annucci, Robin Chapman, Sara Parrell, Alison Townsend

Bread Line

Philip Evergood, Lily and the Sparrows, 1939. Oil on composition board, 30 x 24 inches. Collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Purchase 41.42. Photography by Sheldan C. Collins.

No one knows what gladness eats from our hands,
how hope troubles and shudders the empty air.

We wake to the red song of hunger, nibble, share—
and from these wrecked hands, dark wings

still struggle, a memory of song trapped in our wrists.
But soon the holy will come, uncage us all,

bald grimy-fingered children lost in rapture,
fraught with flutter under the blurred blue.

In every history, this shared language of appetite
and luck opens, waits for heaven to descend,

begs for the telltale rustle of rain. Through this window
of lipstick-bricked Spring, the soul strikes memory

to a slow flicker of plenty. Ravenous, burning
aviary, this heat rising through the house of the body,

this chimney of smoke, weather opening to morning
though we live hand to mouth, window to sky.

Marilyn Annucci, Robin Chapman, Susan Elbe, Sara Parrell, and Alison Townsend

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Marilyn Annucci is the author of Waiting Room (Hill-Stead 2012), winner of the 2012 Sunken Garden Poetry Prize, and LUCK (Parallel Press 2000). Her writing has appeared in various journals online and in print, as well as anthologies—including Aethelon: The Journal of Sport Literature (XXIX:2) and Echolocations, Poets Map Madison. She is an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.

Robin Chapman’s most recent collections are the art portfolio Dappled Things, a collaboration pairing 23 of her poems with Peter Miller’s photogravures; and One Hundred White Pelicans, poems of climate change. Her work appears recently in Ascent, Diode, Fourth River, Proximity, Spillway, and Terrain and in the anthology Echolocations, Poets Map Madison.

Susan Elbe is the author of The Map of What Happened, winner of the 2012 Backwaters Press Prize, Eden in the Rearview Mirror, and two chapbooks, Where Good Swimmers Drown, winner of the 2011 Concrete Wolf Press Chapbook Prize, and Light Made from Nothing. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in many literary journals, including Ascent, Blackbird, Diode, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, and on Verse Daily.

Sara Parrell’s work has appeared in Crab Orchard Review, qarrtsiluni, Wisconsin People and Ideas, and she co-curates The Bridge Poetry Seriesat the Chazen Museum of Art. She was awarded first prize in the 2008 Poetry Center of Chicago’s Juried Reading for her manuscript Psalms of New Orleans, and received the Leo Love Poetry Merit Award in 2012 from the Taos Writers’ Conference. Sara is faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Nursing, and a member of the Madison Metropolitan School District’s mental health team.

Alison Townsend has two books of poetry, The Blue Dress: Poems and Prose Poem and Persephone in America, which won the Crab Orchard Open Poetry Competition. She also has two chapbooks, And Still the Music and What the Body Knows. She has received a Pushcart Prize, a fellowship from the Wisconsin Arts Board, and the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater’s Chancellor’s Regional Literary Award, and publication in Best American Poetry. Recent essays are included in Brevity, Feminist Studies, Flyway: A Journal of the Environment, Quarter After Eight, Parabola, The South Dakota Review, Upstreet, and Zone Three, among others. She is an award-winning professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.