Michael Kriesel photo
Charles Nevsimal photo

Michael Kriesel

BIO:
Michael Kriesel is a poet and reviewer whose work has appeared in Alaska Quarterly, Antioch Review, Crab Creek Review, Rattle, Small Press Review, Library Journal, Nimrod, North American Review, Rosebud, and the Progressive. He served on the Poet Laureate Commission from 2006-2008, and won the 2004 Lorine Niedecker Poetry Prize from the Council for Wisconsin Writers and the 2009 WFOP Muse Prize.

READINGS:
Featured poet for the 2010 Great Lakes Writers Festival on November 4th and 5th at Lakeland College in Sheboygan, WI.

and the WFOP 2010 Fall Conference November 5th–7th at the Holiday Inn Conference Center in Stevens Point.

PUBLICATIONS:
Moths Mail the House (sunnyoutside, sunnyoutside.com/releases/035/o.html, 2008), chapbook; $10.00

Soul Noir 23 pages of prose poems & justified poems
$5.00 ppd, available from Platonic 3way Press, POB 844, Warsaw, IN 46581

Feeding My Heart to the Wind (Selected Short Poems 1999–2005), chapbook, 2006; $6.00

Chasing Saturday Night: Poems about Rural Wisconsin, chapbook, 2005; $10.00

Please add $1.00 postage per order.

H16550 State Hwy. 52
Aniwa, WI 54408-9618

(715) 446-3645
mkriesel@wausau.k12.wi.us

    POEMS:

The End

The man who is writing
the end of the world
began like this

he sat down in a chair
beside a window
closed his eyes
& waited for the steam
to finish rising from
a cup of coffee

pen & paper resting
on the window sill

darkness spreading
from behind some trees
outside the window

the trees are aquamarine

what kind of trees they are
is unimportant

what's important
is the way it's already
begun

how every night
behind his eyes
a few less stars
come out

Sailor on a Greyhound

Riding home from boot camp I’ve got ten days leave
before Indianapolis and journalism school
I'm on my way from Great Lakes Illinois
to northern Wisconsin’s gravel roads and woods
sitting with this girl who started out in Florida
the sunlight wants to live in her red hair
she says she’s been riding so long
she can’t feel her ass anymore
I tell her it’s still there and we both laugh
trying to finish a 6-pack before it gets warm

I used to ride the bus a lot when I was in the Navy
I’d have a cigarette in every town we stopped at
talking to the driver and the other smokers
I used to love watching the Midwest go by
I’d read and sleep and daydream
sometimes think about my life
while I was in between places

twenty years later
the windows are tinted too dark
and you can’t open them
you can forget about having
a drink in the back of the bus
or a quick smoke in the john
I mourn a bit though I quit smoking years ago
and drinking quit me more than I quit drinking
riding from Wisconsin to New York to visit friends
I think about that sailor who survived himself
night falls and he’s beside me
like a faint reflection in the window
riding on the waves of corn
that chase the moon that coin of dreams