Carol Lee Saffioti-Hughes

CONTACT:
Email: darrochfarm122@gmail.com 

BIO:
Poetry is her 911. A Professor Emerita of the University of Wisconsin, Parkside, she has been a librarian in a log cabin in the north woods, and a volunteer EMT—but always a poet. She has published a textbook, literary analysis, and poetry in four countries.  Among her academic roles she served as the advisor for the Native student organization, Sacred Circle, at UW-Parkside while teaching and helped the students organize the first-ever pow wow there.

Two time nominee for the Pushcart Prize for Poetry in consecutive years, she has been nominated for “Plein Air” nominated by Cyberwit Press,  and  for “Planting Flowers in a Minefield,” published in Awakenings Review. Journals that have published her work recently include The San Antonio Review, Dos Gatos Press, The Greensboro Review, Ekphrastic Review, Poetry Hall, Moss Piglet, Of Rust and Glass, Feral, among others. The Root River Voices anthologies contain her poems in the annual and collective publications She is also in the anthology, Unsettling America, published by Penguin Books, New York, and is a prize winner in the 2023 Rosebud poetry competition. Member of the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets, she is a member of the former Root River Poets as well as the Spectrum School of the Arts and Gallery in Racine.  Her most recent chapbook, When Wilding Returns, is available from Cyberwit Press (elsewhere online and at Woodland Pattern, Milwaukee).

PUBLICATIONS:
When Wilding Returns, Cyberwit Press.

Poetry

This is Your Poem, Rabbit                                                      

I remember asking you
was it a coyote
but I knew
he would have carried you off.
I came closer
you couldn't run
I nudged you
there was no blood
your ears laid back
and I stroked that soft inner space
between my fingers.

I never thought
the wildness in you
would ever let me hold you
but there we sat a while
you in my lap.
I felt the length of you
no breaks
and no leaping away in pain.

It was early spring
I remember a racing under your ribs
your chest rising in quick half breaths
the shed door swinging
in the March wind.

Did you get in there
find something
as I pondered
the rage of every argument
unresolved
stuff to kill still in the shed?

Your eyes opened
as if to see if I was still there
and mine closed
as if shutting out the world
could make it go away