Jane Wiseman

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Interior with View from a South-Facing Window

We flow over the dun rumple of land with the clouds.

That time we sat in the dim kitchen morning
licking the crumbs from our fingers. Our father had lost his words.

Nonetheless, the spikes of iris rise from their cold spring beds.

However much you grudge it, the light begins to fade.

Floorboards of this house, spackled by soles of the generations.
The shelling of peas, their plump spatter into the metal bowl.

I am compelled to tell you of the songs of worms.

How the green selvage of the field tucks under the shoulder of the nearest hill,
how the mists beneath the trees roll out in a low-lying fog.

It is said she pieced the quilt from her mother’s wedding dress.

Just there, do you hear it? The clock in the hallway striking the number of their hours.

Jane Wiseman, a transplanted Southeasterner, now splits her time between the rural Sandia Mountains of New Mexico and very urban south Minneapolis. Her chapbook "Morning of the World" was published last month. Her chapbook The Bee Telephone won the 2024 Jonathan Holden prize. Her poetry has appeared in The Headlight Review, Southern Poetry Review, Euphony, Main Street Rag, and other journals.