~
Self-Portrait as Barn Seen from the Freeway
I am a floating apparition
against the marrow of a fading sky.
As far as the crow flies and a slow screech
of raptor from the rafters.
Swallows pierce my heart from rift to rift.
Grackles patrol the floorboards. Pitched
and partially tabernacled, I am as high
as a loft, solemn as a tack room.
Part basilica part sanctuary part stockyard
and partly dead. Almost but not quite…
a dilapidation of hope. Alone but not lonely
in my Poseidon stance –
here in the grasslands that wave
between the interstate and my many splintered flanks.
A hanger of dereliction – I am a passing notion, an aspect
of the rural lowlands; I occupy a lesser wilderness, I waver
as a drunkard, old-world throw-back, cautionary tale, pyre
about to burn, ashen America novel
on the great American prairie. So soon
to have every trace of me effaced.
~
Tina Schumann is a Pushcart nominated poet and the author of three poetry collections, Praising the Paradox (Red Hen, 2019) which was a finalist in the National Poetry Series, Four Way Books Intro Prize, and the Julie Suk Award, Requiem. A Patrimony of Fugues (Diode, 2017) which won the Diode Editions Chapbook Competition and As If (Parlor City, 2010) which was awarded the Stephen Dunn Poetry Prize. She is editor of the IPPY-award winning anthology Two Countries. U.S. Daughters and Sons of Immigrant Parents (Red Hen, 2017.) Schumann’s work received the 2009 American Poet Prize from The American Poetry Journal, finalist status in the Terrain annual poetry contest, as well as honorable mentions in The Atlantic and Crab Creek Review. She is a poetry editor with Wandering Aengus Press, and a graduate of the Rainier Writing Workshop. Her poems have appeared widely in publications and anthologies since 1999, including The American Journal of Poetry, Ascent, Cimarron Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Midwest Quarterly, Nimrod, Parabola, Palabra, Poetry Daily, Poemeleon, Rattle, Verse Daily, and read on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac. www.tinaschumann.com