What Light: This Week’s Poem: Cindra Halm
"What Light: This Week's Poem" is a feature sponsored by Magers and Quinn Booksellers that brings you a poem every week by a Minnesota poet, selected by a panel of writers and publishers. This week, we present the work of Cindra Halm.
Public Square
or tetrahedron or sun dimension opportunes angles like arms intersecting. Sectioned: a patch of bald on the lawn. A table for checkers or chess. Net. What if authority weren’t nostalgic? The dream of locate: I mean you. Stable structure, the shape of dust is one and many stationed. Strolling in a place collates. Need to be on court; where is the free game? The dream of frame: I have you. In sight, in the park, you take my arm. Anyone might perceive a gentleman.
Poetics
Why write? Because words call; I hear words first, in their sounds and rhythms, in their textures. Ideas need to be shaken and stirred; they need bodies with which to dance, to sing, to move. I write to make worlds; I’m interested first and foremost in compositional elements, in feeling and
revealing patterns. My job as a poet is to populate the specific world I’m attending, to understand what kind of flora and fauna live there, what laws of physics and forces of nature function in that world. To move ideas through imagination through medium to embodiment.
Biography
Cindra Halm’s chapbook of poems, Inflectional Weather, is published by Press of the Taverner here in the Twin Cities. She has published poetry, prose poems, fiction, essays, book reviews and articles in The Bellingham Review, Paragraph, Arts & Letters, The Rake, The Book Group Book, Rain Taxi, A View from the Loft, and City Pages, among other venues. She teaches at The Loft Literary Center and is a Wedge Co-op worker and member. She loves Lake Superior, the Blue Ridge Mountains, dance in all forms, and rhythm and sound everywhere.
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