By Jenny Mueller

(Editor’s Note: When viewing this post on a phone, please turn cellie sideways/horizontal or to portrait/landscape mode.)

After the Gold Rush

A lady of Alaska
remarked the cottonwoods, remarked
about the cottonwoods, once she had had
a sweater just like them, sequined.

Another’s mother killed her mice
with antifreeze and a bait-smeared can.
By the tens they would drown
with jewel-red eyes.

---

From Postcards

“Beautiful Lonesome Lake,” NH, 1967

(5.5″ x 3.5″, horizontal)

There might
have been rain lightly pacing
around loon cries,
rain fumblingly circling
a family shore.
She would have known her sister
as a diving & a surfacing
else, a floating up off somewhere
intact.  Two sets
of rules running her
she knew: rules of games
liquid-stony, unfastening

cruelly, flinging her out
to halt her, then the rules
of her parents straight as houses. She cried
trying to follow;
she cried in the shade
of that structure.
                                       There nights
were frictionless magnifications,
would not have been buzzing & crowded
like home.  She would have grown
a split vision, like the excavated
Nefertiti head she'd once been shown:
one eye illustrative, involved
with detail, and one
emptied earth-smelling eye.

---

In a Watershed 

to slip, thin-shoul-
dered as water
shifts thru captures —

to be soluble, 
sprung. 
	  Water held 
privately grasped

or as common
glosses its locks
like houdini,

dreams heartlessly
how to dry.
	         Divines

the god who drops
tongues. You can hear
them now — rising

a shrilling ring
out the wetlands:
revivalist

herons barking,
frogs 
	neighing &
cracking pulses

(turtles alog
in the middle,
lined five-in-file

like hitched horses),
& proteus
dipped within reeds

bubbles his small
muddy body,
noising a spring-

colored stretching transparency

---

From “On Static”

---

– – – ssl – – –

Jenny Mueller is the author of two poetry books, State Park and Bonneville, both from Elixir Press. She is currently working on her third book of poetry and a collection of essays. Jenny edited Moonie, a posthumous poetry e-book by Brian Young (Fence Digital, 2017). She is currently archiving unpublished work by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Lisel Mueller, who was Jenny’s mom. Jenny lives in St. Louis and teaches at nearby McKendree University.

Arthur Norton-Shapiro, the editor’s 11-year-old son, created the horizontal triptych above when he was 6 years old.

Kathryn Remillard-Norton, a teacher and painter who lives near the water, painted the wavy water directly above the In a Watershed poem.

Editor’s Note: I worked with Jenny at a small Illinois university for 20 years. I know this number only because I would occasionally query Jenny on this subject. She knew the answer because we had started working at the university at the same time, and she would always graciously email me the answer. While Jenny has always been generous in her answers to my sometimes trivial questions, I always felt a bit guilty. She writes so well, so precisely, so beautifully, that I shuddered to think of her wasting her “writing juice” on anything but more lofty matters. I particularly felt this when she would partake in the multitude of mundane and often petty squabbles and perfunctory involvements inherent to scholastic bureaucracy. What a waste! Jenny could have used that ink – electronic or otherwise – to pen another poem.