Mike White is a poet who hails originally from Montreal, and has lived in Salt Lake City for the past two decades. He is a graduate of McGill University, the University of Toronto, and the doctoral program in literature and creative writing at the University of Utah. White has published two prize-winning poetry collections: How to Make a Bird with Two Hands and Addendum to a Miracle. His work can be found in magazines including Ploughshares, Poetry, Rattle, The New Republic, The Iowa Review, The Threepenny Review, The Yale Review, and Kenyon Review Online. In recent years, he has devoted time to learning to read and write haiku, and has published in some of the leading journals in the field, such as Modern Haiku and The Heron’s Nest.
Work
Alley in Winter
Alley in Winter
May the body
of work be
beautiful
as the fire
escape is
beautiful
dazzled in ice
after the fire
From Addendum to a Miracle, 2017
Wind
Wind
Not a remarkable wind.
So when the bistro’s patio umbrella
blew suddenly free and pitched
into the middle of the road,
it put a stop to the afternoon.
Something white and amazing
was blocking the way.
A waiter in a clean apron
appeared, not quite
certain, shielding his eyes, wary
of our rumbling engines.
He knelt in the hot road,
making two figures in white, one
leaning over the sprawled,
broken shape of the other,
creaturely, great-winged,
and now so carefully gathered in.
From How to Make a Bird with Two Hands, 2012
Piano
Piano
To the movers
paid in pizza
and sweating
in a darkening stairwell,
no moonlight sonata,
but a moon, of a kind, imposing
its shadowy grandeur and girth,
its unrelenting pull upon the earth
felt along make-do ropes, straps,
lines that quiver and work
deep into the flesh, deeper
groans, mother-of-gods, and another
concerted heave to surmount
a single step, this
slow inglorious agony
of ascension.
From Addendum to a Miracle, 2017
Angel
Angel
I was out of candy.
It said
my halo blowed off,
my wings is really for pretend,
my boots is not the kind they wear
except when it’s raining.
It said
I seen your light.
From Addendum to a Miracle, 2017
Bibliography
How to Make a Bird with Two Hands (Word Works, 2012)
Addendum to a Miracle (Waywiser, 2017)
