I stoop to loosen a thread of wild clover woven tight through my spotty lawn, and recall the morning I knelt on my small patch of yard and pulled stretch after stretch of unwanted stem, made room for grass in the barren spaces, my belly eight months full, pulling, pulling at home in the Jersey […]
Ann E. Wallace
Ann E. Wallace is Poet Laureate Emeritus of Jersey City, New Jersey and host of The WildStory: A Podcast of Poetry and Plants. She is the author of two poetry collections: Days of Grace and Silence: A Chronicle of COVID's Long Haul (Kelsay Books, 2024) and Counting by Sevens (Main Street Rag, 2019). Find her online at AnnWallacePhD.com and on Instagram @annwallace409.
Piñata Nights
Through my daughters’ childhoods, late August meant birthdays and late nights— the house silent, the dining table cleared, I would slip on an old shirt, tear inch-wide strips of newspaper, mix a paste of flour and water, and begin—shaping a mermaid, a rose, a pufferfish where once there had been only an idea. A decade […]
To Live Deliberately
When I walked ‘round Walden Pond on a warm March day, I traced the foot- print of the small cabin and wondered about Thoreau and his solitude, deliberate yet close to all he held dear. Days later, home in my city, my eldest simmered and coughed. I gathered her and her sister, pulled the […]