Before the expiration date
I renew my passport
as if I could travel again, as if
the skies, as if a crowded plane,

as if Scotland—the shepherd’s cottage—
as if Barcelona—Montjuic, the Miró Museum
and Tuscany—the surprise of a choir competition
in the small church near our bed and breakfast,

and Istanbul arm in arm to Taksim Square, simits
from a street vendor, a ferry across the Bosporus
to another continent—

There is the way a dream pulls no into maybe,
maybe into why not, why not into yes. Yes, now
dream travel real—Iceland, Senegal. New Zealand.

Margaret Rozga served as inaugural artist/scholar in residence at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee at Waukesha Field Station in 2021 where she hosted Write-Ins and poetry workshops open to all. She curated Our Field Station and the Earth, a campus exhibit of the year’s work. As 2019-2020 Wisconsin Poet Laureate, she facilitated generative workshops on writing social justice themed poems, edited the chapbook anthology On the Front Lines / Behind the Lines and co-edited the anthology Through This Door: Wisconsin in Poems. Her fifth poetry book is Holding My Selves Together: New & Selected Poems.