Foot of the Lake Poetry Collective

Mary Wehner is the author of …or the opposite, a letterpress chapbook edition by Red Hydra Press in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Her letterpress broadside, The Chinese Painting, was also published by Red Hydra Press. She was a featured poet in the online journal Zinkzine, and has published poems in Southern Indiana Review, Wisconsin Trails, The Writer Magazine, Red River Review, Arbor Vitae, and other literary publications.

Her poem “Broken Shells at Dusk” was published in 2009 as a lithograph in collaboration with Cuban artist, Pollyanna Fernández Fernández, a Cuban artist at Taller Experimental de Gráfica, Havana, Cuba, with the Spanish translation by Maria Vargas. Steve Miller designed the 16 x 24 letterpress edition. It is available through Red Hydra Press. Wehner is a founding member of The Foot of the Lake Poetry Collective and active in the Arts community in Fond du Lac. She was poet in residence at Penland School of Craft in North Carolina for a two week summer session in 2007, and has taught classes in poetry at various community facilities and schools, as well as the Windhover Center for the Arts.

Pre-Dawn

A sudden shadow,
a crow skimming the trees

barely there—whispers, whispers
creeping through the light

small sounds in high trees
gray mixed with black mixed with flutter.

Small in the way of flutter, whisper
of childhood—wallpapered room, sagging bed

too small for two sisters, sweet smells
up from the yard, the slap of a shade at the window.

from …or the opposite

Renting

It was a new world
this swelling of spring.
Middle aged, urban, she
was accosted by its smells
damp, bucolic, musk thick.
Daily she walked the trails
and was brought down
by the pale sprouting nakedness.
The man she shared the house with
was new to her life and new
too to this rapacious land
but when they climbed out of bed
and watched the April light cut
through the oaks, against the river
with its long blue ice shoves
he was the first to feel
the restlessness, how it grew
and grew in shifting furrows of light
across the fields, the line-bent trees.
They tried to brush it off
as sentimentality but found
they touched
and nodded more than before.

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