Adrienne S. Wallner

CONTACT:
Adrienne S. Wallner
P.O. Box 16
Hazlehurst, WI 54531
Email: adrienne@inkinthebranches.com
Website: https://inkinthebranches.com        

BIO:
Adrienne S. Wallner (Jaeger) has held a variety of positions including youth advocate, teacher, wilderness instructor, editor, National Park Ranger, marketing writer for a non-profit arts center, and contract grant writer. Her poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and can be found in the Aurorean, Stoneboat Literary Journal, Straight Forward Poetry, Uncommon Core: Contemporary Poems for Learning and Living, Minerva Rising, New Verse News and elsewhere. Adrienne lives and writes in the northwoods of Wisconsin with her husband Derrick. She enjoys camping, hiking, hula hooping, traveling, and making art.

PUBLICATIONS:
To the 4 a.m. Light (Finishing Line Press, 2021) 

Poetry

Disquiet

Solar storms and stomachaches
feeding anxiety, encouraging mistakes.
Drawing anger out, shoveling worry in

every night’s sleep seems to wake
as soon as it begins. Drenched in sweat,
I am boiled awake hours away

from a lucid state. My eyes snap open,
I hurl my covers aside and fumble
for my phone to check the time.

The unnatural blaze of cellular light
that we now completely accept
as just a part of our life informs me

that it’s three in the morning -
Why the fuck am I awake?!
As usual, checking the phone was a mistake.

The luminescent rabbit hole that tempts
to trivial and text as we numbly type
and swipe to the next and the next.

I didn’t have to look. What difference did it make?
I still wish I was fucking sleeping and I’m still awake.
But these days, who still lies still in sleeplessness’s dark embrace?

Who doesn’t reach for their personal distraction database?
How have we arrived in this place where our eyes thirst
for screens and our hands are constantly occupied

by gleaming machines? This desire for answers
sooner than instantly, before immediately and
quicker than now has left us less able

to comprehend somehow that our addiction
to knowing is not as intelligent as it seems
as ideas give way to updates and devices replace dreams.

Originally published in To the 4 a.m. Light

Hydrangea

In December the white heads nodded to me
through the fractured kitchen window.
Ice-bound stalks bowed
beneath winter’s weight and splayed
across the snow as though an
invisible cat had settled in their center.
January’s white-out winds
sent blossoms flailing like
a clutch of wind-whipped balloons.
In February drifts mounted
against the garden fence,
confining the hydrangeas in
static soundlessness – the mute
white noise of immobilized air.
Now in the reach of Spring,
crisp brown globes balance
on rigid sun strengthened stems,
blossoms bob sleepily
beneath the first tepid rain.

Originally published in the Aurorean.