Let me tell you what I’m looking for: A skein of dyed wool. A recipe for preserved meat. Practices I can grip from the roots. Songs sung around solstice time, stories woven from so many seasons in one place. Flags of bright-patterned fabric from before the spangled banner. My father’s father left the fjords to become a soldier. I was told he only ate eggs on the train from New York to Seattle. It was the only word he was sure of in English. He became American but still longed for salty fish. All the questions I never got to ask hover in the evening air. I wish he could tell me about the tall fields of summer grain what he knew of farming, what seeds he stitched into rows each spring, what songs our ancestors sang when they went out to fish, whether he liked the sound of wool spinning into yarn. I’m looking for a scrap of cloth to hang in the window without stealing from anybody.
Emilie Lygren is a nonbinary poet and educator whose work is grounded in curiosity and reverence. She’s taught writing in a variety of contexts: classrooms, research stations, graduate programs, parks, libraries, and beyond. Emilie calls on her years of experience as an outdoor educator and curriculum developer to help students connect with themselves, one another, and the places they find themselves in. Emilie’s poems have appeared in numerous journals and magazines, including the Alaska Quarterly Review, Wayfarer Magazine, and Crab Creek Poetry Review (where her poem was a semifinalist for the Crab Creek Poetry Award). Her first book of poetry, What We Were Born For, won the Blue Light Book award was chosen by the Young People’s Poet Laureate as a monthly book pick from the Poetry Foundation. Emilie is currently an outdoor educator, a professor of creative writing, a poet in the schools, and at work on an anthology of poems on mental health for teens and youth. She lives on Coast Miwok land in San Rafael, California. Find more of her work and words at emilielygren.com.
