Thursday, April 4, 2023: Two poems and artwork by Ann Tweedy

Ann Tweedy's first full-length book, The Body's Alphabet, was published by Headmistress Press

in 2016. It earned a Bisexual Book Award in Poetry and was also a finalist for a Lambda

Literary Award and for a Golden Crown Literary Society Award. Ann also has published three

chapbooks, Beleaguered Oases, White Out, and A Registry of Survival. Her poems have

appeared in Rattle, Literary Mama, Clackamas Literary Review, Naugatuck River Review, and

many other places, and she has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and two Best of the NetAwards.

A law professor by day, Ann has devoted her career to serving Native Tribes. She

currently teaches at University of South Dakota Knudson School of Law. Read more about her at

www.anntweedy.com.

Axis

I remember how it was to be strung

along a highway that held all my aspirations–

for fifteen years rooted at different points

in that zooming, crawling, 1,400-mile

frenzy, always within an easy drive to the magnificent,

unthinkable coast. Lonely in each spot,

wherever I missed most, the moving target of my heart,

was somewhere north or south.

I drank the comfort of those single-digit shields

unknowingly from each base. Berkeley, Salem, Seattle,

San Diego–I traveled and transferred and rebuilt,

but for fifteen years kept myself pinned

to the same path. I knew in what direction my longings

aimed themselves, self-confined to the simplicity

of north-south. Now, another 5 stares me in the face

between Gaylord and Stillwater whose plain square signage

makes me want to cry or shout.

Its 86 miles east-west

are a sham beside the entire west coast. My heart sends out

tendrils in search of some slice of past to fasten onto as the truest

life, but they spiral around nothing–

the hulking highway that held every mystical city,

each appreciated best in retrospect, has escaped

to a firmly-in-the-past past, a consciousness outside my grasp,

wherever I want to be most

no longer a straight shot, a split-second decision away, a dream-life

that’s not a dream, that’s reachable

on a couple of tanks of gas.

© 2023 Anne Tweedy

place setting

(first published in Lavender Review, issue 34 (Dec. 2012)

i crave the comfort of unpolished

granite, especially the thin, domed tablets.

the dead do not ask me to understand

their torment. never have they

slammed my doors or spun my hanging

plants to show their presence.

when the seemingly endless plots

stretch from all sides--a compact city

emptied of activity--the stillness

waiting within feels pleasant.

even in Rio, the cemetery with its huge

above-ground stone coffins, its trellis

vines and Jesus statues, embraced like a

warm cousin. i could carry my pink glow,

my painful vocabulary, my yellowed hair

and be not familiar, but welcome.

remember: no matter where you go

or stay, no matter how many closed faces

you must plead with in a lifetime,

finally a door will open

© 2023 Anne Tweedy