When I give local readings I am often introduced as the garden poet, because I tend to see life through the lens of a natural setting and my poems often reflect my propensity for gardening.  Not surprisingly, the first of my poems to see print was in Fine Gardening magazine in 2001.  Since then I’ve been publishing routinely in the small press (Ibbetson Street, Atlanta Review, and Poetry East, to name a few).  I’ve authored 2 chapbooks which are listed on my website: lindamfischer.com    

Snow in January

                    
1.
Emissaries of cold,
ice pellets 
sting like angry 
bees as I trace
the thin path
marked by stones
treacherous as the weather,
winding from the house
to a desultory stretch
of trees behind.

2.
Sleet, the hiss
of distant artilleries— 
then the silence
of falling snow— 
volleys cascading 
out of pure gunmetal,
sovereign, absolute: 
above me, dynasties 
of branches topple
under heavy fire.

3.
Month of obsequies:
the syllables settle
like ashes, obliterating
a landscape burnt
white—no less
my idling bones
which turn on snow
and how it, but for
the slightest drift,
could as readily be sown.

-first published in Raccoon Afternoons


​
White


And so goes the glossy-leaved magnolia,
its midriff a ladder of compound fractures,
and so the symmetry and any hope of redemption.
Let the cry be havoc and the bitter pill rue— 
what I might have done after shoveling
had I wallowed through knee-high drifts
and found my Edith Bogue nearly buried.  
Come the plows and all across town
the surgical drone of chainsaws—bundles 
stacked curbside like corpses during a plague.  

Call it an offering to an implacable god— 
pain exacted from pleasure: pride in canopied 
streets and bowers, no less my magnificent tree, 
its ten-inch flowers a seductive white— 
white as bone china, white as gardenias,
white as lilies and orchids or the freshest of linens, 
a white only to be eclipsed by snow.

-first published in Hotel Amerika