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Sheila Packa
USA  Sheila Packa has four books of poems, The Mother Tongue, Echo & Lightning, Cloud Birds, and Night Train Red Dust. She was the poet laureate of Duluth, 2010-2012. Her poems have been featured on Writer's Almanac, American Public Radio and in several literary magazines and anthologies, including Good Poems American Places (Viking Penguin, 2011), Finnish-North American Literature in English (Mellen Press, 2009) Beloved of the Earth: 150 Poems of Grief and Gratitude(Holy Cow Press! c2009) and To Sing Along the Way: Minnesota Women Poets from Pre-Territorial Days to the Present (New Rivers Press, c2006). She has received several writing awards, including two Loft McKnight Fellowships in both poetry and prose. Vermilion Trail (from The Mother Tongue) I am leaving the Mesabi Iron Range on the same trail that a gold prospector came in on with a compass gone awry and red dust on my boots. Me, the daughter of a cat skinner born on the Divide. I can say we got by. In my pocket is the copper penny of my childhood once I reforged it on the DM&IR track south of Biwabik. My father hung a lead pipe between two pines in the yard, the somersault around the pole was “skin the cat.” I was good. I never crossed a picket line, never scabbed. Worship was in the union hall. In the open pit, if we got a raise, that was why. Payday was playing a jukebox in the bar, dancing with a pool stick. Whiskey was a life waiting for somebody to marry it. I laid myself off packed my trunk picked up where my immigrant past left off —
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Sheila Packa. |