Elizabeth Kate Switaj teaches English at Shengda College in China's Henan Province.  She has previously taught ESL in Brooklyn and Japan. Her writing reflects her travels and the things her students have taught her using the language she teaches them, and it has appeared in numerous small press publications, including Gratitude with Attitude, Lines and Stars, Xelas Magazine, Hamilton Stone Review, Euphemism, and Diagram.  Her chapbook, The Broken Sanctuary: Nature Poems, is published by Ypolita Press.  She edits Crossing Rivers Into Twilight.




Katushika Hokusai's Nineteenth View of Mt. Fuji

in the Totomi Mountains

Men plow the frame that I set up

        One from beneath

            to be crushed

    One from above

pulls his saw down for seed

-lings to climb straighter

than he climbs now

                   --bent back & bare feet

 

My beam & its A-frame legs

share duties with the ground

that rolls to hide the witch

whose potions wrap our Fujisan

in smoke with penciled curls

 

              The frame takes longer than our mountain

            to paint if not to climb

          & hikers will not share tatami mats

      with artists



www.elizabethkateswitaj.net