January 28: Nomination, Vote, Teaching

Sorry I've been away a couple days.  There's been shows and book clubs and work that got in the way.  I'm in my university office right now, getting ready to teach.  So, I don't have much time to blog this evening, but I just wanted to share some good news.

I am a finalist for 2019/2020 Poet Laureate of the Upper Peninsula.  I found out this afternoon through a flurry of texts and Facebook shares.  So, I'm going to shamelessly plug myself, which is not something I'm very comfortable doing.

Please vote for Saint Marty.  He promises to build a wall around the Upper Peninsula if he wins!

 https://sooeveningnews.gatehousecontests.com/UP-Poe…/gallery.

You can vote once a day!  

For Matthew James

Born February 15, 1995

by:  Martin Achatz

He’s celebrating his zero birthday in an incubator, not moving, trying to give himself the present of a breath.  From the moment I found out he existed, I called him tadpole.   That was before I knew his sex, when all I pictured was the collision of egg and sperm, the wild instant of beginning.  For nine months, I imagined some amphibian man, a creature from the womb-lagoon, able to breathe fluid.  This morning, when the doctor split his heaven open with a scalpel and reached down to deliver him, he gulped one last liquid breath.  “It happens all the time,” the pediatrician tells his father and mother, “nothing to worry about.”  In this world of air, he is a netted fish, a mer-baby threatened by the foam in his lungs.  We stand by the nursery window, watch a nurse come in a touch him.  He quivers, his leg bent in a birth plie.  His chest rises, falls, stops.  Rises.  Stops.  Falls.  Stops.  The nurse withdraws her hands.  He begins to remember his lungs again, remembers the measured bites of air, the occupation of breathing, his life-long inheritance.