Gleaning with Claire Millikin

Gleaning with Claire Millikin

Into houses narrow as closets,
gleaners bear the wounds of the fields,
remnants unwanted,
and the girl also will come in with the gleaners,
across fields rutted, scaled by thin ice.
Gleaners do not turn from what’s ruined,
they salvage her,
against their scars they take her wounds,

their hands singed with tobacco’s tinge.

from “The Wounds”

The Gleaners - Poems by Claire Milikin

The Gleaners – Poems by Claire Milikin

On Fluency

I have a hard time stopping writing. It always seems to me that the most interesting thing to see is yet to be discovered and the way to discover it is through words, through what words see, and that if I keep writing I will see the things I want or need to see. It is something of an addiction, the way that when I was younger I used to ride trains up and down the eastern seaboard convinced that the place I should stay was there somewhere, in the South (where I am from) or in the North (to which I escaped from the South). Instead, I lived on trains, which is an exhausting place to live but also does let you see a lot, not necessarily pretty scenery but burned out factories, nuclear plants, weird rubble that you’d never see from highways or roads, the backs of people’s yards, the depths and distances from which one writes. — Claire Millikin

“I admire Claire’s work for its quiet austere music and its metaphysical dignity, and the subtle threads of Faulknerian danger and damage, running beneath the poised surfaces” Wayne Koestenbaum, author of Blue Stranger with Mosaic Background

Order The Gleaners for $8 per copy. Send check or MO to:

Tiger’s Eye Press
PO Box 9723
Denver, CO
80209
Crossposted from Tiger Tracks.
Other Books of Poetry, all published under the name Claire Millikin
After Houses- poetry for the homeless, published by 2Leaf Press, May 2014
Motels Where We Lived, published by Unicorn Press, April 2014
Museum of Snow, published by Grayson Books, September 2013
Sodium Glass, a chapbook forthcoming in September 2014