Tad Phippen Wente

CONTACT:
912 Noridge Trail
Port Washington, Wisconsin 53074
Email: tpwente@gmail.com
Website: https://tadphippenwente.wordpress.com/

BIO:
Tad Phippen Wente lives in Port Washington. She grew up on Lake Michigan’s beaches, married a Great Lakes surfer, and enjoys seeing Wisconsin by bicycle. She earned a M.A. in English/Creative Writing from UW-Milwaukee and frequents the Iowa Summer Writing Program at UI. Commuting to Sheboygan by car, not bicycle, she taught English, Creative Writing and Journalism for nearly 40 years, guiding student writers and publications. She helped found Étude High School, an innovative, creative public charter school where she is part of a student writers’ group. At Gallery 224 in Port Washington she served as a Poet-in-Residence and is a Writers’ Group member. Her poems have appeared in various Wisconsin publications, including Sheltering with Poems: community & connection during COVID, and she was one of the original staff members of The Cream City Review. She enjoys writing fiction as well as poetry, and a first, short YA novel is in the hands of a beta reader.

PUBLICATIONS:
Lunch on the Moon, available at Lulu.com.

Poetry

Blue Plums

Blue plums 
have fallen through the night
Summer (as kids we knew 
no months, no days)
in Mrs. Singer’s yard
next to the garden (from which
we rustled blue raspberries big as marbles)
and before wasp season
when every sweet thing
would be covered in sticky pain
We steal the plums
right off the tree
they dangle like ornaments
she chases us with her rake.

First published in Wisconsin Poets' Calendar 2018

Immersed

A figure on her back beneath the pond 
searches for the world through surfaces,    
distorted lenses
tearing disenchanted waterlilies 
from thin black moorings.            
Obscured, a heron hovers like a question mark.

In painted silt,
gold-white trout beside the rushes
refract in water,
sift like clouds torn from thin bright wind
cut on corrugated metal,
green bleeding over a lake,
an aperture closing.

Fire churns lighthouse red,
screams fall from ladders in orange light,
earth swallowing sunblood,
souls damp from rain,
burned before blessing.

In daylight tin windows invite breezes 
paging through storied structures
obscuring mermaids as they work,
little voices crying,
metal music,
his heart cut on corrugated wind.

But it is…
color.
She blinks familiar shapes eclipsing 
green old porch of a house nearby,
red barn wavering.
The swamp of her existence
pulls
a blackened handle gray door maze, 
pale aqua haze,
marble moving in slow water,
empty cavern a canvas of ocean 
resuming its flat gray field.

She lies on her back beneath the pond
searching for the world. 
Distorted lens. 
Her hair root black in pond growth,
in painted silt,
gold-white sunlight,
heron whisper.
She breathes
white rainbow.

She breathes
white rainbow.

First published in Responding: A Conversation in Color