Nance Van Winckel's fifth collection of poems is No Starling (U of Washington P).
She is the recipient of two NEA Poetry Fellowships and awards from the Poetry Society of America, Poetry, and Prairie Schooner. New poems appear in The Pushcart Prize Anthology, The Southern Review, Poetry Northwest, Crazyhorse, Field, and Gettysburg Review, and new collection of poems will appear in 2013 from the University of Washington Press. She is the author of three collections of short fiction and the recent recipient of an Isherwood Fiction Fellowship. New short fiction can be found in AGNI, The Massachusetts Review, and Kenyon Review. She was the 2009 Stadler Poet at Bucknell and currently teaches in the MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her primary interest lately is Poetry-Off-the-Page, and she has had work in several juried art shows of her “pho-toems” (photo collage with text). She will have a solo show (Jan-Feb, 2012) at the Robert Graves Gallery in Wenatchee, Washington. See www.nancevanwinckel.com for samples of poems, stories, and visual art.
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Dandelion Wine Was Only Good at a Certain Time
I walk through the cellar, dark heart-core.
Catacomb of cobwebs—I can't see them
but duck past them. I know where each one is.
Rusty wires, dead wires, broken breakers.
Here trysts were imagined between the wash
and dry, voyages completed across a ripped map.
Furnace-sighs and fuse-box ticks: that
Don't Touch one learns young and late and
all points between. Blink once. Think twice.
The Tiny Tears doll wrapped and hidden,
rewrapped, and put by. Wasn't she once
tipped on her head and made to cry?
Up in the green world, what tender frond
might I clip from the stalk and eat? A life
gets planned down here I know not how.
I Lie Down in My Dream
It’s built: another
walled city
amid the unwalled
outward-growing metropolis.
To get from one
to the other, the goods-toting traders
take the tunnel that
is me. Into a foot,
out my mouth. Home
by the same route.
The footfalls, the brightly
bobbing torches—everyone quiet
right here, this sharp detour
around the ear-shattering,
jack-hammering
heart.