The Blue Horse by Lori Baker Martin

The side door bangs open

and bangs closed.

Dust walks across

the wooden floors.

There’s nothing here for me

since the twister came

and collected the hazels

and the barn

and the cows

and the chickens.

It even scraped at the dirt

with blunt knuckles,

gouging away grass

and flowers

and corn.

It tore off the roof

and took everything inside

but me, in the rank water,

in the basement.

Afterward, in the silent dusk,

I crawled out

to the mud

and the splinters

and the death.

A few sparrows began to sing.

The blue horse came up

from the pasture

like a miracle, he stood

at the fence and tossed

his long head.

I wiped away the mud

From my face

And opened the gate.

The bird songs were sweet.

And here was the blue horse.

I reached for him,

but he exhaled,

and blew out dust

and inhaled and drew

in sparrows

and flew away,

the last of the sun

glinting off his black hooves.

~Lori Baker Martin

Lori Baker Martin is assistant professor of English at Pittsburg State University. She’s had both poetry and fiction published in magazines like Prick of the Spindle, The MacGuffin, The Little Balkans Review, Room Magazine, Grass Limb, The Knicknackery, Midwest Quarterly, Kansas Time + Place, 150 Kansas Poets, and in a Kansas Notable Book poetry collection To the Stars Through Difficulties. Martin has taught creative writing at the University of Iowa, Pittsburg State University, and Independence Community College. She has worked as a reader for both The Iowa Review and NPR. She is a founding member of the Astra Arts Festival in Independence, KS, and was director of the visiting writers’ series at ICC. Martin has won awards for her work in The Cincinnati Review and Kansas Voices.  She 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.

Stephen Meats, recently retired from teaching and administration at Pittsburg State University, is the author of a mixed genre collection of poems and stories, Dark Dove Descending and Other Parables (Mammoth Publications, 2013) and a collection of poems, Looking for the Pale Eagle (Woodley Press, 1993; expanded edition, Mammoth Publications, 2014). His poems, stories, and scholarly writings have appeared in numerous print and online publications, including more than two dozen articles on Whitman, Faulkner, and other writers in The Literary Encyclopedia. He has been poetry editor of The Midwest Quarterly since 1985. For his guest editorship, in addition to poems with Kansas associations, he asked contributors to submit work dealing with shore birds and water birds, if moved to do so, in recognition of his and his wife Ann’s recent move to Florida.

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