All in by Athena Kildegaard
by Athena Kildegaard
A cardinal in a lilac beside the parking lot
snapped its insistent note. The air was damp.
My brother settled a box of half-eaten pies
into the back of his dark blue SUV, laughing
at something someone nearby had said.
We’d come out of the community center, all of us,
family, friends, some we hadn’t seen since 1973,
full of pie and remembrances of our father,
and my brother would drive his long drive home,
nothing anywhere on the calendar ever
to bring us together again. He would have
driven off without saying goodbye—just as
my stepmother and stepsister had done—
a blunt clapping closed, a locking up. But
I insisted and hugged him, not a hug of care
or even of sadness, a simple shuttering, as if
a light rain had begun or as if a middle-aged
man had passed pushing a wheelbarrow
of manure. Something had to be protected.
Dignity, perhaps. The cardinal had flown.
The air was damp with the smell of lilacs.
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Athena Kildegaard is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Prairie Midden (Tinderbox Editions), winner of the 2023 WILLA Literary Award for poetry. She teaches at the University of Minnesota Morris.
by Athena Kildegaard
There is that within—a burl, a knot, a lie—
that gets in the way of forming a perfect union.
But just as the onion contains itself within itself,
hidden, so does each of us hide within our union.
At breakfast the children tell crude jokes, and laugh,
and spit seeds. This is the consequence of union.
In the orchard, the orange grower speaks of scions
with whispered pride and strokes the bud union.
Aspens wear their wedding clothes and clack
in the wind. Between ice and cloud, an uncanny union.
“Behind the door you pull on the rope of longing,”
wrote Nelly Sachs. How rash the desire for union
and how persistent. It wears a hair shirt and a cloak
of dew held together by silk thread—a taut union.
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Athena Kildegaard's sixth book of poems, Prairie Midden, has just appeared from Tinderbox Editions. Her poems have found homes in Beloit Poetry Journal, december, Ecotone, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. She teaches at the University of Minnesota Morris.
by Athena Kildegaard
My mother kept a saucepan with no handle
and a tarnished spoon for her wax.
Wax the color of pond muck
more brown than yellow, but green
the color of having once been organic.
The pan she'd set on a low flame
and when the wax had melted, she'd lift
the spoon, the convex part up-facing, covered
with wax, which would begin to congeal
and this thin smear she'd wipe onto
her upper lip, one swipe above the left side
and one above the right. Then she'd light
a cigarette, a filtered Raleigh purchased by the carton,
the S & H Green stamps set aside for a matching
platter to the table-settings for eight
she'd already amassed. She'd deal us each
six cards and we'd play cribbage. She would claim
my missed points, didn't care that I was eight.
She liked to win. Her eyes squinted when smoke
flared upward. When she'd beaten me, she'd
tear the hardened wax away in two swift yanks.
Two curled petals, smooth on one side
and hairy on the other. Two little animals.
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Athena Kildegaard book of poems, Prairie Midden, is due this fall from Tinderbox Editions. Her poems have appeared recently in Prairie Schooner, december, Poetry Northwest, Beloit Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. She lives and teaches in western Minnesota.
