GAS Featured Poet: Jan Wiezorek

 

Jan Wiezorek writes from Michigan. His debut poetry chapbook, Forests of Woundedness, is forthcoming this fall from Seven Kitchens Press. Wiezorek’s poetry appears, or is forthcoming, in The London Magazine, The Westchester Review, Lucky Jefferson, The Broadkill Review, LEON Literary Review, and elsewhere. He taught writing at St. Augustine College, Chicago, and authored the teachers’ ebook Awesome Art Projects That Spark Super Writing (Scholastic, 2011). Wiezorek’s poetry has been awarded by the Poetry Society of Michigan.

Not the One to Ask

 

I am not the one to ask about that. 

And I don’t know why life goes 

as it does, or where to put emotions, 

how they fit, if they do, in my brain 

like omens from a brown hawk called 

Northern Harrier, circling around, 

circling back, ten feet off the ground, 

as prayers heard in the sometime 

heights of me—where I can’t seem

to relax on a page of word-wings—

no, I am not the person to ask omens 

to show us how, partially, and then 

in full confusion, winging, dipping 

our way, shaking the limbs, no one 

asking why because we’re not 

the ones to ask. Even so, even if you 

were, how could you speak the words

—or even tell me what they mean?

With Evidence

 

After weeks with no evidence

of activity, I removed twigs

from the wren house. I cleaned

and rehung it outside the gazebo

near the back porch. It caused 

the wrens to sing and, it seems,

to panic. So many sticks to fill 

the house again. So many hours 

of fidgeting with the smallest 

pieces, to fit them through the hole. 

This is what celebration is in song

—like dryer lint traded for spider’s 

egg sack. But, I hope, it will be

a fit home. With so many dummy 

houses—wrens filling birdhouses 

with twigs so other birds can’t use 

them until such time as this—

maybe this is the time and place 

for birds to live here—so we can 

make writing the social act it is 

meant to be. You read and listen, 

and I sit with you, on a porch 

—with evidence.