Bardic Trails: Madison Gill

 

Madison Gill was our Bardic Trails featured reader for June.  

She received her bachelor’s degree in English from Colorado State University-Pueblo. As a student there, she was involved with and first published in the university’s student-run literary magazine, Tempered Steel. 

Following her graduation, Madison worked for a short time as a freelance reporter and then Assistant Editor of an independent news publication in Pueblo. In that role, she founded and independently managed the publication’s first ever poetry submission column where members of the community could submit their work for publication -- often for the first time.

Her first acceptance outside of an academic platform came in 2019 from a Denver-based journal called From Whispers to Roars. Since then, she has gone on to build her publication history both in print and online with such local, national and even international publications as: The Write Launch, Tiny Spoon, Anti-Heroin Chic, The Bitchin’ Kitsch, Sledgehammer Lit, and Pocket Lint among others. She continues to submit her work for publication and share her poetry in person at local readings and open mics. Most recently, her work is forthcoming in a mental health anthology entitled Tea With My Monster published by Beyond the Veil Press.

In 2021, Madison was named the winner of the Cantor Prize awarded through the Telluride Institute’s Talking Gourds Poetry Program -- judged by Donald Levering of New Mexico -- with her poem, Urraca (magpie in Spanish):

Urraca

In the yard, two magpies

fight over the still-warm carcass

of a less fortunate and nameless

bird. Their shrieking uncoils

like barbwire from my mother’s flinching ear. Meanwhile my lover’s

eye glazes over, no longer here

but far from here on one of many custody-arranged road trips

back and forth from Wichita

in the backseat of his grandfather’s car with his brother

scouring the skies and splintered fence

posts for a flash of yin and yang tail feathers. “Urraca!” they’d cry, and grandfather would award them both a quarter

for their retained Spanish – grandma laugh- sighing on the passenger side.

Now my lover and his brother

are older – his brow furrowed

in a wrinkle deep enough

to stick a coin in. And the quarters in his grandfather’s pockets,

if there were any, have long since dropped

onto the cold hospital floor

as a nurse folded them the morning after lightning struck in his chest and took him to the next world. Meanwhile the magpies

go about their brutal business –

softened in the memory of a child. Their long tail feathers like a bridge between worlds – my lover standing at one end, arms outstretched, crying: “Urraca! Urraca! Urraca!”

Light in the shape of his grandfather reaching back from the other, pulling a quarter like a silver tooth

from the mouth of the sun. 

Madison likes to reference William Faulkner’s 1950 Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech when describing the nature of her work as: “the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself.” She is a self-proclaimed love poet. Most of her work is deeply rooted in her personal life and includes themes of relationships, family, mental health, spirituality, social justice, and the natural world. A few poets whose work Madison feels has greatly influenced her own include Joy Harjo, Mary Oliver, Frank O’Hara, Ken Arkind, Carrie Rudzinski, Andrea Gibson, and Buddy Wakefield among others. You can find Madison on instagram at @sweetmint_poet where she mostly celebration-posts her publication acceptances and occasionally shares excerpts of her recent work.

Here is A  VIDEO RECORDING of her Bardic Trails  zoom reading.

Broadside created by Daiva Chesonis

Poster by Joanna  Spindler