for Ben Lerner
Seasonal graffiti crawls
up the overpass like ivy —
abstract names on concrete stanchions.
To the south, symbolic walls:
NO OUTLET signs along the levee,
idle river, idle tracks,
bypass, bluffside and the backs
of Potwin’s late-Victorian mansions,
flush like book spines on a shelf.
Drunk on your late-Victorian porch
you promised me that if elected
you’d have the river redirected
down Fourth Street, to make Potwin search
North Topeka for itself.
I told you to retire Ad Astra
Per Aspera and put For God’s
Sake Take Cover on the state
seal and flag — the license plate
at least, since we collect disaster
and death like they were classic rods:
’51 Flood; ’66 Tornado.
Even the foot-lit Statehouse mural
has a sword-bearing Coronado,
a Beecher’s Bible-bearing Brown
and a tornado bearing down
on its defenseless mock-pastoral,
The Past. The present was still wet
when the embarrassed legislature
resolved that it would never let
John Steuart Curry paint the future.
He never did, although Topekans
would learn to let bygones be icons.
* * *
On Thursday, July 12, the rain
relented and the water rose,
darkened and stank more. The stain
is just shy of the second story
in what used to be Fernstrom Shoes.
That entire inventory
spent five nights underwater, gaping
like mussels on the riverbed.
Fernstrom spent the summer scraping
gobs of septic-smelling mud
out of eleven thousand toes.
On Friday the 13th, the Kaw
crested at thirty-seven feet.
They thought it might have cut a new
channel down Kansas Avenue.
One Capital reporter saw
a kid reach up from his canoe
and slap the stoplight at Gordon Street.
Porubsky’s never did reclaim
its lunchtime clientele; the torrents
sent the Sardou Bridge to Lawrence
and there was no more Oakland traffic.
Business hasn’t been the same
for fifty years now. Fifty-two.
Ad astra per aspera: through
the general to the specific.
You do what you want to do
but I’m not using North Topeka
in conversation anymore
because there is no north to speak of;
there’s only mud and metaphor
— Eric McHenry
Eric McHenry received the Kate Tufts Discovery Award for his first book of poems, Potscrubber Lullabies (Waywiser Press, 2006). Waywiser will publish Eat Your Trees, his collection of children’s poems with woodcuts by Nicholas Garland, in 2011. McHenry teaches creative writing at Washburn University.
The Coop: A Poetry Cooperative 
This poem appeals to me because of its varied references to the state’s history as well as its mention of Potwin, that neat little neighborhood on the north side. I will surely have to revisit North Topeka on my next odyssey across Kansas.