Robert Miltner | Tomas Tranströmer Comes to Ohio

Tomas Tranströmer Comes to Ohio. Poems by Robert Miltner, selected by Ron Mohring as Number Two in Volume Thirteen of our Summer Kitchen Chapbook Series.

Release date:  July 25, 2025 [49 copies]
24 pages
$12.00

Cover: Natalya Kiseleva, airbrush on cotton, 55 x 71 cm,1927-29. Russian Museum of Decorative Arts, Moscow.

Robert Miltner is the author of fifteen poetry/prose poetry chapbooks, including Against the Simple (Wick Poetry Center Ohio Chapbook Award), Eurydice Rising (Red Berry Editions Summer Poetry Chapbook award), and Horse Skull Moon (SurVision Press/James Tate Poetry prize); as well as three full-length poetry/prose poetry collections: Hotel Utopia (New Rivers Press Poetry award), Orpheus & Echo (National Poetry Series finalist), and Always the Geography Leans in on Me (Press 53 Poetry Prize finalist) forthcoming from MadHat Press.

Turning Over the Garden

When a quake, shovel, shift,
or tectonic plate causes a rift

we stare into earth’s dark heart.
We see what it is: serious intent,

specific forms of foreshadowing,
the next step in the only sequence.

Eventually we will be clutched tight
as a diary shoved into an obscure

pocket, kept as secure as a secret.
We’ll become un-blooming bulbs,

the half of the tree no one sees,
our movements only horizontal.

With any shovelful a farmer turns,
an inference; each time plows till,

deeper implications get unearthed.
We toil on, keeping topsoil deep,

tenant farmers indebted to time,
hands holding tight to the ground.

[ Our thanks to Birminghan Poetry Review for first publishing this poem ]