Kimberly Blaeser

cantfindit

Kimberly Blaeser, past Wisconsin Poet Laureate, is the author of five poetry collections including Copper Yearning, Apprenticed to Justice, and Résister en dansant/Ikwe-niimi: Dancing Resistance. Blaeser edited Traces in Blood, Bone, and Stone: Contemporary Ojibwe Poetry and authored the monograph Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition. A Professor at University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and MFA faculty for Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, Blaeser is also founding director of In-Na-Po—Indigenous Nations Poets. She lives in rural Wisconsin; and, for portions of each year, in a water-access cabin near the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in Minnesota. Source

About Standing (in Kinship)

We all have the same little bones in our foot

twenty-six with funny names like navicular.

Together they build something strong—

our foot arch a pyramid holding us up.

The bones don’t get casts when they break.

We tape them—one phalange to its neighbor for support.

(Other things like sorrow work that way, too—

find healing in the leaning, the closeness.)

Our feet have one quarter of all the bones in our body.

Maybe we should give more honor to feet

and to all those tiny but blessed cogs in the world—

communities, the forgotten architecture of friendship.

Published:

2021

Length:

Shorty

Literary Movements:

Children's

Anthology Years:

2023

Themes:

Body & Body Image

Friendship

Literary Devices:

Extended Metaphor

a metaphor that extends through several lines or even an entire poem