Miriam Sagan
After Mari Sandoz, 1896-1966
her father beats her,
she becomes a writer,
along the upper Niobrara
Crazy Woman Creek,
a place called
Hanging Woman,
“the coming of barbed wire
the walking plow
a curl of smoke
coffee boiling at sundown”
everything
in the universe is round—
sun, moon,
time
except for stone
try this in the first person
Miriam Sagan is the author of 30 books, including the novel Black Rainbow (Sherman Asher, 2015) and Geographic: A Memoir of Time and Space (Casa de Snapdragon). Winner of the 2016 Arizona/New Mexico Book Award in Poetry. She founded and headed the creative writing program at Santa Fe Community College until her retirement in 2017. Her blog, Miriam’s Well, has a thousand daily readers. She has been a writer in residence in two national parks, at Yaddo, MacDowell, Colorado Art Ranch, Andrew’s Experimental Forest, Center for Land Use Interpretation, Iceland’s Gullkistan Residency for creative people, and another dozen or so remote and unique places. Her awards include the Santa Fe Mayor’s award for Excellence in the Arts, the Poetry Gratitude Award from New Mexico Literary Arts, and A Lannan Foundation residency in Marfa.