Jan Chronister

CONTACT:
Email: janchronister@yahoo.com
Website: www.janchronisterpoetry.wordpress.com
Featured Author: https://bequempublishing.com/authors/authors-c-d/jan-chronister/

BIO:
Jan Chronister spent much of her life in the classroom teaching one thing or another, but mostly writing. Now retired, she teaches occasional poetry classes through community education programs. When weather permits, she is outside in her flower and vegetable gardens where she finds endless metaphors. She is currently serving as president of WFOP. Her poems have been published either in print or online by Rat’s Ass Review, Word Fountain, NonBinary Review, Outrider Press, Main Street Rag, Holy Cow! Press, and others. She is a three-time winner in the Lake Superior Writers annual contest and has won first place in both the Muse and Triad contests of WFOP.

PUBLICATIONS:
Decennia (Truth Serum Press, 2020)
Distanced: Poems from the Pandemic (chapbook), 2020
Bird Religion (chapbook, honorable mention in WFOP 2020 Chapbook Contest)
Caught between Coasts (Clover Valley Press, 2018)
Casualties: Poems of the Holocaust (chapbook) 2017
Target Practice, 2009 a Parallel Press chapbook

Poetry

Robert Burns Recalled

Hayfields along the highway are cut.
Some lie in sun like quiet waves
Some raked into windrows
radiate sweet heat.

I ride by my neighbor’s fragrant crop
as machinery expels a round bale.
It rolls to a stop, spaced out among others
soon hauled past our house
to feed cattle destined
for the jerky plant.

Shorn land attracts predators-
a fox digs, gulls from Lake Superior
circle, hawks dive. Reaping reveals
plans of small creatures
that live in tall grass.

Men count on profit
they can store for winter
unless a bolt breaks, a wife
sickens, a son loses a hand.

Second place in 2019 Muse Contest
published in Decennia

Selection

In July I thin parsnips,
pulling pale taproots
too small, too crowded.
Twinged by conscience
I retrieve the best,
scrub and dice them
for a salad.

At Auschwitz nothing
was wasted.
After the harvest of hair
the healthy went
to slave labor.
Children, the old, the infirm
were sent to the showers.
Almost 100 kilos of gold
was collected from corpses
in less than 65 days.
Warehouses filled up
with suitcases, clothing
and shoes.

After the first hard frost
I dig up broad-shouldered roots,
find a pair left too close together.
Entwined, they refuse to separate
and are cooked as one.

First Place, 2011 Muse Contest