Vivian Wagner
Map of Creation
—For Diana Tillion
A woman captured
octopuses in the
cold, swishing pools
by her home,
injected syringes into
them, and pulled out ink to
paint sepia houses and glaciers,
spruce trees and orcas,
bears and berries,
waves and octopuses.
At a certain point, the
ink became the world,
the world the ink, and the
woman an invisible line
between the two.
Vivian Wagner is the author of the poetry collection The Village (Kelsay Books, 2017) and the memoir Fiddle: One Woman, Four Strings, and 8,000 Miles of Music (Citadel-Kensington, 2010). Her work has appeared in Muse /A Journal, Forage Poetry Journal, Pittsburgh Poetry Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Creative Nonfiction, The Atlantic, The Ilanot Review, Silk Road Review, Zone 3, Eyedrum Periodically, 3QR, and other publications. Wagner is an associate professor of English at Muskingum University in New Concord, Ohio.
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