Welcome to “Poetry at The Arts Fuse.” A new poem every Thursday

Wind (Iceland 10)  For Jennifer Marie Bartlett

She said “Wind is my favorite weather.”
Icelandic wind hurts like a blast of truth we don’t expect.
Like a hole in the ice, nearly fatal.
Like listening to someone’s wailing, shaking and tumbling,
backwards in time. Wind and darkness, reasons to bless the sky.
She hears a door bang against the washing machine.
Windows, moorings, garbage bins rattle.
Up to 100 kilometers an hour.
A spell or sword that cuts through skin.
She said “Wind is my favorite weather.”
Loki, in Norse mythology, changed into a falcon.
He turned a female Giant into a nut.
The wind carried the nut into the sea.
She spouted an island that became the windiest place
in all of Iceland, the Westman islands.
Expanding back to her original size, wind
flying off her dancing shadows in the waves.
She said, “Wind is my favorite weather.”

Cheryl J. Fish’s debut novel Off the Yoga Mat was published by Livingston Press/UWA in 2022. She is the author of The Sauna is Full of Maids, poems and photographs celebrating Finnish sauna culture and the natural world, and Crater & Tower, poems reflecting on trauma and ecology after Mount the St. Helens Volcanic eruption, and the terrorist attack of 9/11. Fish has been a Fulbright professor in Finland and is a co-editor with Farah Griffin of A Stranger in the Village: Two Centuries of African-American Travel Literature. Fish’s poems have appeared in Hanging Loose, Maintenant, Terrain, Mom Egg Review, Response, New American Writing, Reed, Santa Monica Review, ISLE and Poetics for the More-than-Human-World. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Mom Egg Review. Fish is a creative writing editor at the journal Ecocene and curates the new reading series VillageStorySalon at New York Public Library. She has recently taught workshops at Queens Public Library, Art in the Basin, Hobart Festival of Women Writers, and the San Miguel de Allende Writers Conference.

Note: Hey poets! We seek submissions of excellent poetry from across the length and breadth of contemporary poetics. See submission guidelines here. The arbiter of the feature is the magazine’s poetry editor, John Mulrooney.

— Arts Fuse editor Bill Marx