Jan Wiezorek | Forests of Woundedness

Forests of Woundedness by Jan Wiezorek. Number 32 in our Robin Becker Chapbook Series, selected by series editor Steve Bellin-Oka.

[ cover image: Edward Steichen, “Night Landscape,” Oil on Canvas, 1905 ]

Publication:  January 17, 2026 [100 copies]
25 pages
/ISBN 978-1-960693-33-4
$ 12.00

Jan Wiezorek writes from Michigan, where he takes daily walks through the beech forests along McCoy Creek Trail. His work appears,  or is forthcoming, in The Broadkill Review, LEON Literary Review, Loch Raven Review, The London Magazine, Lucky Jefferson, and The Westchester Review, among other print and online journals. Prayer’s Prairie, his first chapbook, was published with Michigan Writers Cooperative Press in 2025. Wiezorek taught writing at St. Augustine College, Chicago, and his poetry has been awarded by the Poetry Society of Michigan. As a journalist, Wiezorek’s writing has appeared in the Chicago Tribune, and he is contributing writer for pan-o-ply Story & Art Michiana.

Inner Life

Inside a notebook of lung pulp,
father diagrams, with a wood pencil,
how bronchi might branch—
like trees breathing on a wood
plant stand—healing a bentwood
chair—or, balancing and tilting,
as a limb, an artist’s easel—he closes
the notebook, with no discovery
of what he might do with horizontal
scraps hanging above a basement
workbench—where so much of the feel
of wood goes into polishing and forgetting
its inner life—how it hides a crotch,
exposes a hole, offers a ring—I believe
a tree’s exterior rasp grows from inside
and fights on out, where it rubs skin,
peeling it against bark, how we battle
the negative natures we face—years later,
mother told me father had made for me
a worktable, and with his gift came a note
of assembly, inside, in his own hand,
describing how to place the top, legs,
lip, fasteners—his own notebook page
that still tears away at my insides. 

[ thanks to Active Muse for first publishing this poem ]