After by Diane Wahto

He says, if you die

before I do, I will cancel

the cable, get an antenna,

rabbit ears.

I will move our money

to a credit union

I will put a basket on

my bike, ride

it to the grocery

store, shop daily

for my food,

European style.

She listens, thinks of

the void her absence

will make, the hole in

the world they inhabit,

clawing their way to

get to this place.

She thinks of the

shadow that would fall

on her if he would go

before. Thinks,

but does not say,

does not want to say

such a thing aloud

into the lamp-lit room.

She turns her face

to the dark outside

the window, to the

quarter moon.

~ Diane Wahto

Diane Wahto, a retired Butler Community College English instructor, lives with her husband, and two dogs in Wichita. Her three children and five grandchildren live in Lawrence and Shawnee, Kansas. Recently, her poems “the Conspiracy of Coffee” and “After the Storm” were published in Active Aging.

Ronda Miller, March’s Guest Editor, is Poetry Contest Manager for Kansas Authors Club and their District 2 President. Her goal in both positions is to encourage people from all backgrounds and ages to appreciate and write poetry. As a Life Coach who specializes in working with those who have lost someone to homicide, she appreciates the multitude of voices and the healing power of the written and spoken word. Her quote, ‘Poetry is our most natural connection among one another’ best exemplifies her belief in poetry. Her words can be found in Begin Again: 150 Kansas Poems, To the Stars Through Difficulties: A Kansas Renga in 150 Voices, Going Home: Poems from My Life and online in The Shine Journal – The Light Left Behind, Zingara Poet, Kansas Time + Space, and hard copy publications such as The Lawrence Journal World. She authored documentary The 150 Reride of The Pony Express and created poetic forms Loku and Ukol.

After the Storm by Roy Beckemeyer

The old pear tree
was on her side,
root fingers still grasping
the dark, wet earth
they had relied upon
for so many years.

We pulled the starters
of our chain saws,
bared her heartwood,
sent plumes of sawdust
to scent the air – incense
for a funeral.

As I paused at the crotch
where her most massive arm
still curved with aching grace,
I recalled the feeling of bark
rough against my back,
how I sat with my left leg dangled free,
and my right knee bent, foot
braced against that solid arc,
mind adrift on the fresh
intensity of ripe pear flesh.

We inhaled air taut with
the odor of sweet wood.
My dad wiped sweat from
his brow, looked at me,
and said, pointing,
“Cut that branch off
right here.”

- Roy Beckemeyer edits a scientific journal and writes poetry and finds it curious and satisfying that the two are not mutually exclusive. He is the Vice President of Kansas Authors Club and a member of the Wayward Poets, a small, egalitarian group of Wichita writers who meet weekly to read and write out of a sense of commitment to one another, an effective antidote against writer’s block.

Ronda Miller, March’s Guest Editor, is Poetry Contest Manager for Kansas Authors Club and their District 2 President. Her goal in both positions is to encourage people from all backgrounds and ages to appreciate and write poetry. As a Life Coach who specializes in working with those who have lost someone to homicide, she appreciates the multitude of voices and the healing power of the written and spoken word. Her quote, ‘Poetry is our most natural connection among one another’ best exemplifies her belief in poetry. Her words can be found in Begin Again: 150 Kansas Poems, To the Stars Through Difficulties: A Kansas Renga in 150 Voices, Going Home: Poems from My Life and online in The Shine Journal – The Light Left Behind, Zingara Poet, Kansas Time + Space, and hard copy publications such as The Lawrence Journal World. She authored documentary The 150 Reride of The Pony Express and created poetic forms Loku and Ukol.

Oceans of Kansas by Roy Beckmeyer

For Mike Everhart

In western Kansas plesiosaur bones snake through Cretaceous chalk scattered with shark’s teeth under skies dry as drought. Pterosaurs with skulls as ornamented as Hussar helmets once flew here, the salty spray of breaking waves splashing their long beaks.  Now eagles, talons extended, wings draped to catch at the scorched air, pierce clouds of dust kicked up by jackrabbits.  Ocean silt and mountain rock ground to sand mix here, and the sun reflects just as brilliantly from this pale earth as from those old seas.   These hills and valleys and drainage cuts look like arid, lost-water casts of waves and curls. A prairie rattler s-curves over the dusty ground, sculls along as if it could feel oceans swelling up from the past, slips unknowingly through this sea lizard’s arching skeleton, sets the bones to dreaming.  For just a moment the plesiosaur is swimming again, pulsing with power, exulting in every surging thrust against the rolling waves of its undulating life, roaming once more the lost and ancient waters of Kansas.

~Roy Beckemeyer edits a scientific journal and writes poetry and finds it curious and satisfying that the two are not mutually exclusive. He is vice president of the Kansas Authors Club and a member of the Wayward Poets, a small, egalitarian group of Wichita writers who meet meet weekly to read and write out of a sense of commitment to one another, an effective antidote against writer’s block.

~February’s Guest Editor, Laura Lee Washburn, is the author of the Palanquin Prize chapbook Watching the Contortionists, and March Street Press’s This Good Warm Place, a poetry collection.  She directs the creative writing program at Pittsburg State University in Pittsburg, Kansas.  http://www.pittstate.edu/department/english/  You can find her work here https://www.facebook.com/notes/laura-lee-washburn/websites-where-my-work-appears-how-to-buy-my-book/10150158859391115

Boys from Shaw, Kansas by Claudia Mundell

Consolidation closed rural township schools,
Brought the Shaw boys to town.
Swaggering down locker lined halls,
Wearing button down Madras and smelling of Brute,
Their flushed, sun freckled faces
Tossed flirty smiles at glancing girls
Like horseshoes shooting for a ringer.

Muscled thighs squatted under football pads
Before skillful sprints took down half backs
And linemen in late summer practices
While wiry arms grappled teammates
Easily, like cottonwood and hedge pieces
Heaved into cords near a farmhouse.

Once afternoon buses rolled them home again,
The young studs threw hay off pickup trucks,
Cultivated standing soybeans,
Checked bulls fenced on a back forty,
Plowed up Osage arrowheads and
Pottery shards hiding in wheat stubble
While riding red tractor stallions
Across Neosho River bottom dirt.
Shaw boys returned to actual life
On the Big Muddy–
Just like before consolidation.

~Claudia Mundell grew up in Kansas with work life in Missouri. She has memories from each state that work their way into fiction and poetry. Since retiring, she writes for pleasure—and maybe for profit someday. Her work appears in MidRivers Review, Yellow Medicine Review, Rosebud, TEA, Oklahoma Review, and several anthologies.

~February’s Guest Editor, Laura Lee Washburn directs the Creative Writing program at Pittsburg State University in Pittsburg, Kansas which offers undergraduate and graduate emphases in creative writing. She is the author of the Palanquin Prize chapbook Watching the Contortionists, and March Street Press’s This Good Warm Place. You can find her work in journals such as The Journal, The Sun, Valparaiso Poetry Review,, and at The Broadsided Press website.

Ride on by Kevin Rabas

Ride on

Only a few Dems in this town, and Susan & Jason

have the bumper stickers to prove it, back of

the Ford Ranger, Kansas Dems, a blue circle.

Every season we gather, eat pizza and fruit salad, share

greens we’ve carted from Lawrence, next town, blue

town–dot–in red rectangle Kansas; here in Emporia, we
were once Progressive; Wm Allen White ran
against the Klan; I remember coal-colored CJ being called to play
with us at the Methodist church, only under-21 bassist in town,
and the tune goes: “Who’s got a robe that’s long and white…
Ride on, Ride on,” and all I can say is, “I think they mean
the Jesus, and hope they don’t mean the others
on horses, with the wicked pointy hats,” and we laugh, but not
because we know, but because we fear; something of those old
nights of fire and tall crosses, nooses, runs into land we now walk,
dirt fed by blood, and those damned knotted trees still stand.

*William Allen White ran for governor in 1924 in an attempt to expose the Klan’s prejudices (The Emporia Gazette).

~ Associate Professor Dr. Kevin Rabas (MFA, Goddard College; PhD, KU) co-directs the creative writing program at Emporia State and edits Flint Hills Review. He has four books: Bird’s Horn; Lisa’s Flying Electric Piano, a Kansas Notable Book and Nelson Poetry Book Award winner; Sonny Kenner’s Red Guitar; and Spider Face: stories. He also writes regularly for Jazz Ambassador Magazine (JAM). His work has been nominated for four Pushcart Prizes, and Rabas is the winner of the Langston Hughes Award for Poetry, the Victor Contoski Poetry Award, the Jerome Johanning Playwriting Award, and the Salina New Voice Award.

~ February’s Guest Editor, Laura Lee Washburn, is the author of the Palanquin Prize chapbook Watching the Contortionists, and March Street Press’s This Good Warm Place, a poetry collection.  She directs the creative writing program at Pittsburg State University in Pittsburg, Kansas.  http://www.pittstate.edu/department/english/

1968 by Lori Baker Martin

My house that summer
was full of boilings.
Dead soldiers in the papers,
but no jobs.

It’s monstrous, Mother
would say. Was it the war
or the jobs she meant?
I never knew.

Sundays meant the scary
matinee. Daddy reclined,
and Mother cried,
Quiet, quiet, until

there was no room
for me inside. I covered
my feet and legs in sulfur
and sulked to the swings.

The grass in the yard
swayed like the sea,
green and deep,
to my knees,

and overhead, clouds
tumbled, shoved
by a belligerent wind.
From the house,

Godzilla roared
and Tokyo screamed.
I swung back and forth,
ever higher, my feet

in the clouds and the wind
at my back. It would end,
as it always did: Tokyo in ruins
and Godzilla subdued.

Mighty, like Mothra, with chains
in my hands, I soared,
above it all, and swore,
I would never come down.

~ Lori Baker Martin

Lori Baker Martin lives and works in Southeast Kansas where she is currently teaching English at Independence Community College. She’s had both poetry and fiction published in magazines like Prick of the Spindle, The MacGuffin, The Little Balkans Review, Room Magazine, Midwest Quarterly, The Knicknackery, Grass Limb, and in a Kansas Notable Book poetry collection To the Stars Through Difficulties. She’s been awarded for her work in The Cincinnati Review and Kansas Voices. Martin is a graduate of Iowa Writer’s Workshop where she was named a Truman Capote Fellow and received the Clark Fischer Ansley Award for Excellence in Fiction.

~ February’s Guest Editor, Laura Lee Washburn directs the excellent Creative Writing program at Pittsburg State University in Pittsburg, Kansas which offers undergraduate and graduate emphases in creative writing and takes pride in graduates like Lori Baker Martin. Laura Lee Washburn is the author of the Palanquin Prize chapbook Watching the Contortionists, and March Street Press’s This Good Warm Place.

Leap of Faith by Diane Wahto

Leap of Faith

 

The back yard, crisscrossed with paths you have created

with found bricks and dried mud, opens breathing space

for magic, spreads out beyond the wood fence across

the alley to infinity. I walk to the back gate, new moss

under my feet, in the warm sun of a late spring morning,

through blooms that left us impatient with their coy malingering.

 

On the window sill, succulent leafy stems

of kalanchoe turn their heads to the stream

of late afternoon sun, brilliant just before

it disappears in the rose-orange sky, more

oil painting than an exhibition of nature’s

synchronized dance, a circadian surety

 

that we never doubt or question. Yet

Kierkegaard says of belief if we have no doubt

we cannot believe. He never looked into your face

when dusk mutes the blaze of each bright day’s

progress into summer, and I know, certain

as the sun will rise, that I doubt in vain.

~ Diane Wahto

Diane Wahto, a retired Butler Community College English instructor, lives with her husband, and two dogs in Wichita. Her three children and five grandchildren live in Lawrence and Shawnee, Kansas. Recently, her poems “The Conspiracy of Coffee” and “After the Storm” were published in Active Aging.