Margot Wizansky
POET & PAINTER
ABOUT
Margot Wizansky, a poet and painter, does much of her writing in a little cottage by the sea on the south coast of Massachusetts.
Her first chapbook, Wild for Life, has just been published by Lily Poetry Review Press. Her poems have appeared in many journals, such as Poetry East, Lumina, Inkwell, Quarterly West, Potomac Review, American Literary Review, and Spillway. She has edited two anthologies: Mercy of Tides: Poems for a Beach House, and Rough Places Plain: Poems of the Mountains. In Don’t Look Them In The Eye: Love, Life, and Jim Crow, she transcribed the oral history of her friend, Emerson Stamps, born in 1923, a grandson of slaves and son of sharecroppers. Her original poems accompany his story.
POEMS
Seven poems were featured in The Missouri Review’s summer 2018 issue. The editor, Speer Morgan, wrote in his introduction, “Margot Wizansky’s poems tell the story of Emerson Stamps, the grandson of slaves and the son of sharecroppers. Stamps was a friend of Wizansky’s, and with his permission, she writes about his life. Racism and resilience are powerful themes in this elegant, spare work.”
Her poem, “From the Beginning,” is on The Missouri Review website.
Margot read her poem, “Before There Were Women,” on the Cape and Islands Public Radio station.
Her poems about baseball, “If the Goddam War Hadn’t Happened,” “It’s Like Baseball,” and “Signs,” appear on the Baseball Bard website.
She had a pantoum, “the Boys,” published on Solstice Literary Magazine’s website.
HERE COMES LOVE
its fragments, its phases,
its four letters settling
simply on the plain,
in a nice font: Baskerville
Old Face or Perpetua,
the “L” standing straight
like it needs nobody.
“O” curls up, a dog
on its back, stroke me here.
“V”, a balancing act—
if you push, it so easily
collapses, like a certain storm,
the kind you didn’t plan for,
that takes the house, the car,
the willow in the front yard,
the nights you lay
with your head on love’s lap.
Love becomes Lose,
Unstoppable,
like sickness or death,
the last sliver of sun
at the horizon spreading
before you, emptied
of the great miracles
you travel a lifetime to know—
icebergs, meteors. “E”
is always beginning to leave,
back to business,
coat over its shoulder,
one foot out the door.
TO SWIM WITH DOLPHINS
She wanted that,
all summer in the hospital,
a pod of machines sounding her,
pumping in, sucking out,
her legs faint ripples in the sheets.
She loved to sail
to the eye of the wind, close-hauled,
taunting the rip-tide,
rolling with any wave who’d have her,
reduced to this puny adventure.
I stare at the city turned cadmium orange,
and wish she’d leave like sunset,
incendiary, streaks of fire her wake,
instead.
TOEHOLD
Every day you make the choice
to live on the slippery ledge,
where you almost always fail
to find a toehold, mesmerized
as you are by the gelid clarity
of water or the far-off blow
of some blue-green radiance,
the steely whistle
of work and money,
the softer mist of love,
everything draws you—
the cold burn seizing
anyone who stands up
in the boat. Paddle through
the irresistible archway.
Take a piece of the iceberg
to chill your cocktail.
It can roll over you.
Virtue will carry you
only so far and help
never comes fast enough.
PAINTINGS
Animal portraits
Oil paintings by Margot Wizansky completed 2009 - 2015
Apr.
15
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Nov.
02
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