Sarah Busse

Sarah Busse is a flirt, a feminist and a restless heart, as well as co-editor of the poetry magazine Verse Wisconsin, Cowfeather Press, and the 2013 Wisconsin Poets' Calendar. She is a contributing scholar to the Mezzo Cammin Women Poets Timeline project, and the author of two chapbooks: Quiver (Red Dragonfly Press, 2009) and Given These Magics (Finishing Line Press, 2010). Her first full-length collection will be published by Mayapple Press in 2012. Her poetry has appeared in a wide variety of journals and received the WFOP Chapbook Prize, as well as a Pushcart Prize, in 2011. She received her MFA in 2003 from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her two children are enrolled in the Madison Public Schools and she currently co-chairs the bake sales at their elementary school. She continues to search for a good recipe for pear pie and the missing Monopoly game pieces presumably hiding under the couch in the family room.

Don't Call It Heart

A lacey space, a meaty deep,
a beaten silence beating. A forced
fist in a long-locked chest.

A muscle glob, a dearth of death,
a crumblestuff of dust, an artichoke,
a common garden thistle.

A tart, a hurt, a dust, an earth.
First, last, flooded, ever
and ongoing (I'm pushing here) birth.

from Given These Magics

Prescribed Burn in a Prairie Region

Where I live, spring is a burning season.
It appears in patches around town: here
a stretch of ditchbank, there someone's backyard.
Big, hand-lettered signs on the curb reassure,
"Prescribed Burn Today." This is planned.
This is safe fire. And when it is done, in the space
of an afternoon, the field is flat and soot.

These days new leaves cup the sun's light
and let it spill so that it too seems young,
completely breakable, already broken.
My daughter sings in her carseat

Twinkle little little star
Wonder wonder wonder are

Give up whatever burnt offering you are
but recall also the speeding ticket received
on this road just months ago. Go slow
(everything happens at once) as you drive past
the silver sliver spears of brand new grass
already hatched to catch light, already
chuffing their heat.

Oh silent conflagration, perpetual
blessing, perpetual fire at 25 miles per hour.

from Quiver