“America has a broken heart and poetry can help heal it.”
– Joy Harjo

Poets of Place is similar to a poet laureate program. It seeks to be representative of the rich and diverse cultures of poetry in the region. Once again, ArtReach St. Croix is pleased to present five St. Croix Valley poets who are advocates and ambassadors for poetry and creativity in the lower St. Croix Valley.

Poets of Place and the 2025 season of ArtReach St. Croix’s Mobile Art Gallery is supported by the St. Croix Valley Foundation and RBC Foundation. This activity is also made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant to ArtReach St. Croix from the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund.

MP Flandrick

MP Flandrick is a natural ambassador who promotes poetry every day, seeking to connect anyone and everyone to its beauty, relevance and joy. She wears POETRY bannered across the back of her winter jacket and spring hoodie. MP co-founded Women Poets of the Twin Cities in 1970 when women were unseen, rarely heard or written off as “confessional.” She earned a BA in Creative Writing and a teaching license in Language Arts from Macalester College. She has been an apple picker, a teacher, outreach worker, drug/alcohol counselor and more. Recently, she was an invited participant in Ekphrasis, The Phipps (2021) and TractorWorks (2024/25). An Ekphrasis is the sister arts: poetry in conversation with visual arts. MP is from Old Little Canada, Frogtown, East Lake Street Minneapolis and for 48 years Stillwater. Home is the rivers, creeks, and neighborhoods of her lifetime and wherever she is now. MP resides near the St. Croix River at Brown’s Creek on the North Hill.

The Future Isn’t What It Used To Be

[Yogi Berra]

It was a Moments day in shade filigreeflutter laceleaves
Breeze and the kind of stories hearts tell each other
under walnut trees
The way Summer used to be – 1955, say
And so little cancer
I could taste it all the way to then Little Canada
Eating it real slow this time: tomato raspberry muskmelon
Hot dogs. Juicy. Dripping from my chin
Granpa Durand still alive in his used-to-be boxcar house
Packing my dog Duke’s fighter sores with
Union Leader Tobacco shreds, the red can
Now lying rusty in Granma Myrtle’s snapdragon roots
Glen’s fingers find a heart he’s cut from rust
A bleeding heart
bush shyhiding in weeds
And I say
My heart’s rusting too
Waiting for wingshimmer Hope to
A light

Place: Julie’s House

Julie
I made this scarf
– linked sunflowers –
from a large round doily I bought
at the estate sale your husband held
after you died.

In the rooms in your house I was never in:
spools of thread, your sewing machine,
a pieced almost ribbon skirt, your costume
from Norwegian Language Camp.

Later that evening
I talk art with a woman in The Brookside
Where I’ve stopped for directions
And when she admires the scarf
I tell her, “I can’t crochet.
I can’t make things from scratch
but I can spend a dollar,
cut like the surgeon who saved me.
save Julie’s doily
from the dumpster out back.”

Doily into sunflowers I can wear
make into a poem.

Daniel Kilkelly

Daniel Kilkelly is a Youth Services Librarian at Somerset Library where he actively encourages early literacy, creativity, and a love of reading. He has a BA in Literature – Creative Writing from Southwest Minnesota State University and is pursuing his Masters in Library and Information Science at St. Catherine’s. He had poetry published in Digital Americana and SMSU’s literary magazine Perceptions, of which he also served as Poetry Editor. While his other publications have mostly been short stories, he aspires to publish novels someday. Daniel is a resident of Stillwater.

Hag Stones

Bright red cauldron, filled with smooth stones,
Carbide, coarse grit, pellets, old bones.
Hag Stones, Hag Stones, crater-humbled,
Spoil the lot when they are tumbled.
Grit caught in those pesky craters—
Rocky lesions, greedy traitors,
Vomit course grit in fine batches,
Riddle maiden stones with scratches.
Jealous of the smooth-faced beauties
Free of nature’s harshest cruelties,
Pampered in the tumbler’s rolling,
While the hags grow dusty, molding.

Hag Stones twist like broken noses,
Knobby elbows, awkward poses.
Rather than a full moon glisten,
Languish in unpolished prison.
But at least they keep their figure,
Tumbling makes the stones no bigger!
Only robs their curves, their edges,
And that quartz the seller says is
Amethyst is just a liar!
Soaked in purple, tricks the buyer.
Hag Stones’ trusty brown or gray:
Never withers, dulls away.

As Soon as the Ice Melts

I’ve known pickers who jealously
guard their secret spots. Mine
are more freely shared.
Dirt parking lots. Gravel
Roads. And one pebble beach
just north of the Stillwater Lift Bridge.

A finger of land reaches out from Wisconsin
to meet the great green walking bridge—
once grey and rusty and clogged with
traffic piled up into hilly Stillwater
to let the river boats pass beneath.

This jutting manmade landmass
creates a small bay where nature drops off
small stones aplenty. You’ll find me there
the moment the ice melts, in a straw
hat and tie-dye, back bent at a right angle,
my roving eagle eye on the hunt.

I found my second largest agate here (my first
from a dirt lot, recently paved), a blue
and white beauty, about half a fist.
Did you make this, Superior? I didn’t know
they came in sky and cloud, when most
are berry red, lozenge orange, ghostly white.

You can walk the shoreline.
There’s too much beach for me
alone, and nothing quite like
two pickers sharing a smile.
The giddy show and tell.
A sunny day’s most precious finds.

Adam Pieri-Johnson

Adam Pieri-Johnson is a poet who grew up in Minnesota and has lived in the St. Croix river valley for the last 20 years. Currently, he lives along the river in Osceola, Wisconsin. Adam draws inspiration from the St. Croix River and its surroundings. He loves the simplicity of the poetic form and the complexity of capturing the essence of it in few words. Recently, Adam has begun the intimate adventure of sharing his poetry for publication.

Pine Logs

Stacked round pine logs,
Set between two balsam trees.
Nothing smells as sweet
as burning pine logs
on a summer campfire.
Pine logs crackle gently,
a perfumed micro explosion
of heavenly combustion,
releasing the forests secrets
in a language of scent.

Its release accompanied by red glowing ashes
that fade to gray before our eyes,
as they ride the thermal lift
into the dark skies.

There the big dipper bends down
to fill our wanton cup,
filling our hearts and minds
back to that place
of equipoise.

Cornerstone

In a room
Such as this
Filled with people
Such as this

I find
The more we talk
The more
I am alone

We share
So many things
Our breath from the same air
We drink from the same fountain

How is it
The more I hear
The more
I am alone

I find myself
At these times
When reality is a negotiation
I go deep within

Within myself
There is solid ground
A cornerstone
That is of this Earth

A post and beam
Whose mortise
And tenon holds
My bones

The laws of physics
Inform these lands
The earth and sky
The heavens above

These are truths
Noble as Grandma’s hands
Noble as your feet, my love,
Awash in earth sand

I thank you
I thank you all
Who have taught me
To know myself

Here in this place
There is no negotiation
It is what it is
Here history cannot be rewritten.

Kate Seitz

Kate Seitz is a poet, creative communicator, and community builder. She is a co-founder of Arrow Broken Poetry Collective based in Marine on St. Croix, which offers monthly open mic events, poetry cohorts, and workshops for underserved communities. After getting a B.A. in English & Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and after years of quietly writing poems only for herself, Kate spent 5 months in a 12-person poetry cohort led by Rosetta “Rosie” Peters in Marine on St. Croix. This gave Kate a fundamental poetic skill, the ability to perform her poems. Kate and Rosie went on to co-found Arrow Broken with Suzi Hudson. Kate lives in May Township with her husband, writer Greg Seitz, and their two children. When she’s not writing or reading poetry, she enjoys canoeing, hiking, volunteering, and baking.

Late Arrival

Write what you know,
They say,
I know they say these things to
Help me feel like less
A failure
When I fail to write like
Oliver, Frost and Angelou.

Morrison was in her 40s
Before her Bluest world was born
They say,
As if this is a
Lifeline for me,
Well into
My lifetime.

The roads I’ve taken so far
Have led me to
Woods and rivers,
Through exhaust fumes on
Freeway overpasses
While passing over childhood,

College, first job, and marriage.
A child, then a second.

During that time,
My bookshelf was growing,
Overwatering me.
Now I’m a potted plant suffering root rot,
Needing a way to drain the excess but
Keep the good.

How do I sift through the
Grief and love
and tame my desire to
Be on your bookshelf next to
Ocean, Olds and Limón?

I think you can help.
Tell me what you know.

What I know is that
I am late to this party
But I showed up.
And I am here to stay.

We Play Hooky

On your first day of school,
After we’re certain you’ve entered the old brick building,
Your dad and I cast off work and
Pontoon to a sandbar.
Sly smiles playing on our lips,
Giddy with our freedom, we anchor.

He stays aboard to read but
I am drawn to the
Dunes of bronzed flakes
Simmering under a September sun.

While you sit at your wooden desk
Under false white light,
I lie in my burrow,
Let the sun caress my back,
Travel the canyon of my body and
Burn like an ember that I coax into fire,
Until the flame falls and I sleep.

Shadows of
Switchgrass sundials grow longer.
Breath of autumn nips at my skin.

I awaken, unmoored and mired in guilt.
Worrying we will be late,
We motor against the current,
Dock with haste.

When I pick you up from school,
I am grateful for your adolescent lack of curiosity
or innate courtesy that lets you talk about your day so that
I may keep the secret of mine.

Aaron Sparby

Originally from Thief River Falls, a small Minnesota prairie town, Aaron Sparby currently calls Stillwater home. Aside from reading and writing, Aaron enjoys fishing, hunting, playing hockey and golf, cross-country skiing, as well as listening to and playing folk and classic country music. Aaron studied history at Carleton College in Northfield, and later earned his masters degree in teaching at the University of Chicago. Along the way, he worked as a political organizer, a shipping coordinator, a furniture mover, an interpretive naturalist in the Boundary Waters, and as an elementary and middle school teacher. New to publishing attempts, his poetry has been featured in the northern Minnesota journal Talking Stick.

Grosbeaks

Like spry, frail old men
resigned and content to gather early
and wake their voices over coffee

the birds assort themselves each morning
in the same tall handful
of leaf-bare aspens

Their soft whistling chatters
not in the least as loud
as the silhouette of color
they have hung for us
wintergoers starved of flowers

Sight speaking reminders
of how silent December can be

Hiding Out

What seems now like half the summer
For years
We climbed up into that prismic canyon
Stacked precisely but not evenly
So we could always find
a safe depression
in the heap
Nestled in, and sat to talk
Just us two
It is hard now to say what about
We were children then
—on the plains
Carving somewhere out for ourselves
Beyond the same flattened regime of sight
That burdens everyone around
With the task of noticing everything
for miles

Years later I caught word
that the hayshed went up in flames
The old paradox of bales too wet
Volleying a twisted cone of smoke
into the late autumn sky

I have envisioned being there that night
to watch it all glow
and crack in the dark
Before the firemen arrived
Before anyone
Awoke or noticed to call
I would have let some secret go then
with it
And traced its tumbling skyward
as so much more than something lost