MONSIEUR POINSETT by Eve Drewlowe

Gift of Eve Van Ek (Drewlowe)
Courtesy of the University of Iowa Museum of Art

New Forms: The Avant-Garde Meets the American Scene, 1934-1949, Selections from the University of Iowa Museum of Art, edited by Kathleen A. Edwards

Snow Bridge

We laid her on the driftwood pack

and watched its uneven break
sawing against the horizon.

How did you protect her?
The willows woven into the basket were budding.

(I pictured her feet against the ambulance doors
each time they stopped.

I ran through the yard, to wean the hounds
from their mother.)

As we climbed the mountain pass
we lost our switches in the snow,

and the gently arcing trail of a hare,
copied in the pattern of the lace.

We were walking through the snow
to clean the hobbles

which were bent, as if to run.
She left

a needle, glinting from the cross-stitch:
a silo for the grain;

bare fields
in the cross-stitch, winter scene;

and these are
the stitches left by a golden larch

Ascension Theory, by Christopher Bolin

High-Top Shoes

I had to wear a pr of high top shoes one Winter. Oh how I didn't want too but some one gave them to us. They came nearer fitting me than anyone so I wore them. No one else wore them at School.

Others Had It Worse: Sour Dock, Moonshine, & Hard Times in Davis County, Iowa, by Vetra Melrose Padget Covert and Chris D. Baker