Foot of the Lake Poetry Collective

Marilyn L. Taylor, Ph. D., was appointed Poet Laureate for the State of Wisconsin by Governor James Doyle in November, 2008. Her award-winning work has appeared in a number of poetry journals and anthologies, including POETRY, The American Scholar, MEASURE, The Ledge , The Atlanta Review, The Cream City Review, Able Muse, Smartish Pace, and Dogwood, among many others. She is the author of eight collections of poetry, including Subject to Change (David Robert Books, 2004) which was nominated for the 2005 Poets Prize; and a new chapbook titled Going Wrong (Parallel Press, 2009).

For many years, Marilyn was an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she taught for the Department of English and later for the Honors College. She was appointed in 2004 to a two-year term as Poet Laureate of the city of Milwaukee, and continues to lead poetry workshops locally as well as statewide under the auspices of Lawrence University’s Bjorklunden Seminar Center in Door County, Redbird Studios in Bay View, and AllWriters Studio in Waukesha. Marilyn has also served as visiting poet at venues in Iowa, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Florida, California, Colorado, Oregon, and elsewhere. She is currently a Contributing Editor for THE WRITER magazine, where her articles on poetic craft appear bi-monthly.

The Blue Water Buffalo
One in 250 Cambodians, or 40,000 people,
have lost a limb to a landmine.
—Newsfront, U.N. Development Programme Communications Office

On both sides of the screaming highway, the world
is made of emerald silk—sumptuous bolts of it,
stitched by threads of water into cushions
that shimmer and float on the Mekong’s munificent glut.
In between them plods the ancient buffalo—dark blue
in the steamy distance, and legless
where the surface of the ditch dissects
the body from its waterlogged supports below
or it might be a woman, up to her thighs
in the lukewarm ooze, bending at the waist
with the plain grace of habit, delving for weeds
in water that receives her wrist and forearm
as she feels for the alien stalk, the foreign blade
beneath that greenest of green coverlets
where brittle pods in their corroding skins
now shift, waiting to salt the fields with horror.

Poetry website:   http://www.mlt-poet.com

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