Rowing Your Boat
by Rachael Ikins
You float through the gray. Row your boat. Brimming. Bird with more space in an oven than in factory farm, you flap wings without feathers, white squirrels scale out of reach sunflowers. You float in your boat. Fog. Snow expected for the next hour. Drive to the grocery store, chocolate almond milk, mask in your pocket cries for your mother. Songs sing past on the radio, a decade that disappeared into its own fog - why weren’t you paying attention? When we were us. You want your mother. You float without words. After all this time a slot machine of words clangs to a stop. After all this time. Lemon sunset sifting through maples’ nakedness. Nest on a branch backlit, a squirrel ready for sleep. Moon shreds mares’ tales, wears a necklace of a hundred geese. You have no words to explain all of this only a pang in your gut that translates to I want my mother.
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Rachael Ikins is an activist 2016/18 Pushcart, 2013/18 CNY Book Award nominee, 2018 Independent Book Award winner, & 2019 Vinnie Ream & 2019/2021 Faulkner finalist. A 2021 Best of the Net nominee, 2023 Editors Choice Award from Studio B. October 2023 2nd prize and an HM from Northwind Writing Competition sponsored by Raw Earth Ink, Alaska. 2024 HM Northwind Writing and three Pushcart nominations.
A graduate of Syracuse University with a degree in Child and Family Studies Ikins worked as a sign language interpreter for deaf students ages K-12 and also as a veterinary technician before devoting herself full time to writing.
Fellowships: Colgate Writers Conferences for poetry (3) and young adult literature.
She founded and moderated the feature/open mic event bimonthly Monday Night Poetry at a sushi Blues 2008-2011.
Honorarium from Finishing Line Press for a week long workshop in Lismore Castle, Lismore, Ireland 2014. While there she worked with Patricia Smith, Jane Smiley, Ethel Rohan and others.
June 2014 she juried into Marge Piercy’s Poetry Intensive workshop, Cape Cod. Post Covid she studied via zoom with Craig Czury for several years.
Ikins is a Fingerlakes born author/illustrator of multiple books in multiple genres. Her work appears in journals such as the Muddy River Poetry Review, Owl Light, Literary Turning Points,The Mason Street Review, Broadkill Review, Fly on the Wall Press UK, Synkroniciti, the Red Wheelbarrow, S/tick, Dragon Poet Review, Indigo Blue online UK, Cider Press Review, Syracuse Poster Project, The Healing Muse, The Pen Woman Magazine, Avocet, Moonstone Press, anthologies from IndieBlue Press, The Brave (Clare Songbirds Publishing House), Spontaneity Review, Ireland, and many others. Her poetry has been translated into Gaelic.
Her visual art and photography have won prizes and have hung in galleries from CNY to Washington DC and appeared on local television stations and on many journal covers. She is a member of NLAPW and The Sage Creators Collective. She works as associate/contributing editor at Clare Songbirds Publishing House and has signed with October City Press, Chicago.
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