Muriel Nelson
Window of Equinox
In Memory of Charles Simic
Spiders are rehanging maple leaves
high where they'll twirl in a breeze.
A flurry of bushtits joins them
and dangles upside down.
Our thermos, trying to balance
inside with out, whistles,
and now showing on that window marquee
is the one about the sun caught halfway up a tree.
Bio
Muriel Nelson's publications include two poetry collections, Sightsinger (Encircle Publications) and Part Song (Bear Star Press, Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize), and two chapbooks, Please Hold (Encircle Publications, Poetry Chapbook Award) and Most Wanted (ByLine Press, ByLine Chapbook Award). These and three book manuscripts were shortlisted in four national contests and finalists in seventeen. Nominated five times for the Pushcart Prize, Nelson's poems have appeared in Guesthouse, Hayden's Ferry Review, Hunger Mountain, New American Writing, Painted Bride Quarterly, Ploughshares, Triggerfish, and other journals as well as in several anthologies. Two of her poems have been set to music. She holds master's degrees from the University of Illinois School of Music and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.