Sara Lynne Puotinen
Sara Lynne Puotinen lives in south Minneapolis, near the Mississippi River Gorge, where she reads and writes and tries to be upright and outside as much as possible. She earned a B.A. in religion, an M.A. in ethics, and a Ph.D in women’s studies, which all inform her experiments in paying attention and her playful troubling of what it means to write while moving, to move while writing, and to do both while losing her central vision from a degenerative eye disease (cone dystrophy). Her writing has appeared in Poemeleon, Hearth & Coffin, Longleaf Review, and The Account, among others.
The Swans
Too big for this small lake,
six giant swans glide
beside the far shore
in a slow march of magic
& menace. Each time I breathe
to my left they appear.
Sometimes I ignore them,
sometimes I race them, and
sometimes I believe
they’re not boats.