About the landscape 
behind me ... I mean the peaceful 
composition of my body against the bucolic scene, 
diagonals of the tile floor 
elegant, me 
framed before chaos and disharmony, I mean, nature. 
Green umbrella keeps my thoughts separate from 
ham-fisted slabs of land crowded 
in the background, like nature’s 
junk pile, coat closet, attic. I can’t 
know this haphazard 
landscape. I mean, it jilts me in my brain 
making order and husbandry obsolete, 
not gone but ... is this Italy or eastern 
Oregon, full of cash crops and 
poplars standing up to the winds? 
Questions? Yes, 
reasons for the disorganization of soils 
start with the meandering river 
turning fields into islands. 
Until the umbrella, I could not collect my thoughts. 
Very few remained unaffected by the chaos of nature. 
Why do I continue to work here? 
Xeriscaping fascinates me. I mean I realize I haven’t 
yet mentioned it. I just learned today it doesn’t start with 
Z. 

Kerlikowske’s abecedarian poem was written after the painting Asleep, She Dreams by Mary Hatch, which appears below with her permission.

Asleep, She Dreams (oil on linen)
Copyrighted © by Mary Hatch. All rights reserved.

Mary Hatch

is an artist and printmaker who received her B.S. and M.A. degrees at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, where she currently resides and creates. She is co-author with poet Elizabeth Kerlikowske of Art Speaks: Paintings and Poetry (Kazoo Books, 2018). Hatch’s work has been shown in more than 30 one-person exhibits in as many years and is included in more than 300 public and private collections throughout the US and Canada.

For more information, and to see more of her work, visit her website:
https://maryhatch.com/

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Featured Artists Mary Hatch and Elizabeth Kerlikowske in KYSO Flash (Issue 9, Spring 2018); includes half a dozen of Kerlikowske’s ekphrastic prose poems and micro-fictions inspired by Hatch’s paintings

Elizabeth Kerlikowske’s

new chapbook is The Vaudeville Horse (Etchings Press, 2022). Her first full-length book of poetry, Dominant Hand, is available from Mayapple Press, and she is co-author with artist Mary Hatch of Art Speaks: Paintings and Poetry (Kazoo Books, 2018). Other books by Kerlikowske include The Shape of Dad (a memoir in prose poems), Last Hula (winner of the 2013 Standing Rock Chapbook Competition), and Chain of Lakes.

She has been publishing her poetry and fiction for more than 20 years in such journals and magazines as Encore, Cincinnati Review, Passager, and Poemeleon, among others. Her work is also anthologized in Nothing to Declare: A Guide to the Flash Sequence (White Pine Press, 2016); The Female Complaint: Tales of Unruly Women (Shade Mountain Press, 2015); two of the annual KYSO Flash anthologies, Accidents of Light (2018) and Earth Hymn (2019); and in the Michigan writers anthology published by Western Michigan University (WMU).

Formerly an arts activist, Kerlikowske was president of the Poetry Society of Michigan, and she served for 30 years as president of the Kalamazoo Friends of Poetry. She’s retired from a teaching career at Kellogg Community College. Currently, she’s working on the community poem for the Kalamazoo Poetry Festival, finishing up a grant, and not looking for trouble but finding it.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ If my grandfather walked toward me with two arms, I wouldn’t recognize him, micro-CNF by Kerlikowske in MacQ-11 (January 2022); nominated in September for Best of the Net 2023

⚡ Into the Oak, prose poem by Kerlikowske in MacQ-9 (August 2021)

⚡ Three in Prose by Kerlikowske in DIAGRAM (Issue 5.1): “Forty Winks,” “The Girls’ Room,” and “Midway”