Two Poems by Kathryn Lorenzen

04/27/202304/04/2023 Individual Poet2 Comments

Last Visit to the Ladies’ Room at Shorty’s Just Before It Closed Forever

Five days before Shorty’s closed forever
I made my final pilgrimage, pay my respects to 
Marge, retiring to Arizona after keeping 
the place open years past making money.

Her pillowed arms warmed me, brought me beers.
I sat on my regular stool, which was my dad’s before me,
his generation in nursing homes or gone ahead.
My generation and younger ones needing other kingdoms
and preferring the TGI Friday’s by the interstate.

After three drinks it was time to visit what 
I really came to see, walking past the shafts
of sun slanting through the back windows,
glinting off the neon Miller Lite sign, and into
the ladies’ room, walls and stalls covered
with memorabilia, a collaged chronicle:

County fair posters featuring B-list recording artists,
photos of 4-H Club contest winners with prize 
calves and pigs, ads promoting tractor pulls 
and garage sales, announcements for Knights of
Columbus dances and church potlucks, defaced 
political bumper stickers, carved and magic-markered 
hearts and arrows claiming sweethearts forever,
notices of free kittens, page of an Avon catalogue 
with Donna’s phone number, pictures of prom 
kings and queens, a battle of the bands postcard,
program from the school play fifteen years ago,
jokes from Reader’s Digest, laminated obituary 
of Shorty’s first owner Phil, autographed posters 
from musicians that played the back room stage.

I snapped photos on my phone,
knowing I would never again be 
enveloped by the life of my town.
Then did my business and washed my hands,
staring down at the grubby drain.


The Four-Poster Bed

My father leans against the pillows on 
the four-poster bed. I have something
I haven’t told you, he said. Your mother
came to me in a dream. I woke up
and she was sitting right beside me.
She said nothing, just looked at me 
and smiled, as young and beautiful 
as she ever was.

He is old now, in this bed that has
been with him his entire life. He was
conceived on it in Dorrance, Kansas, 
where the KKK burned a cross in his yard 
after my grandfather the mayor
welcomed a black family to live there.
He could see it, huddled on the bed 
with his mama.

Now there is a different light shining 
in my father’s eyes, the light of belief
that my mother has visited him,
reassuring him, inviting him. She has not
been gone long and he will follow her 
soon, after his last night dreamless
on the four-poster bed.

Kathryn Lorenzen is a singer-songwriter, poet, and career and creativity coach. With an earlier career in marketing and recruiting, she coaches freelance writers and artists seeking livelihood in support of their art. Kathryn co-leads Your Right Livelihood with Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, and she serves on the Board of Transformative Language Arts Network.

Photo by Stephen Locke

Guest Editor Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, the 2009-13 Kansas Poet Laureate is the author of 24 books, including How Time Moves: New & Selected Poems; Miriam’s Well, a novel; and The Sky Begins At Your Feet: A Memoir on Cancer, Community, and Coming Home to the Body. Founder of Transformative Language Arts, she is offers writing workshops, coaching, and collaborative projects YourRightLivelihood.com with Kathryn Lorenzen, Bravevoice.com with Kelley Hunt, and TheArtofFacilitation.net with Joy Roulier Sawyer. CarynMirriamGoldberg.com.

Two Poems by Beverly Bagelman

04/23/202304/04/2023 Individual PoetLeave a comment

The Extremities are the First  


The dam gates slam shut, as this side of the lake 
shrinks, our backyard cove calcifying like a bony finger. 

The extremities are the usually the first to go;
Things down-river, down-hill, down-wind. 

In East Palestine they need answers; lungs and eyes still 
burning, as tons of toxic waste are trucked away;
A place just outside my nephew’s town supposedly 
so remote, it’s sure to be an ideal dumping place. 

Here, a new city ordinance just passed, as downtown tents, 
carts and sleeping-pads are packed, carted off by city trucks, 
as now it’s deemed illegal for the homeless to be seen.  

We drive the golf cart down into the gullies, veering 
onto emerging peninsulas, spinning sand.  

A desert iguana escapes the talons of a hawk 
by abandoning its tail; the sacrificed appendage, wriggles, 
alive; more vibrant than the frog-like 
reptile now crouched behind the rock.


Praise for the Alcoholic 

And the rides they take us on. 
For deep thirst, dark wells, 
and frayed ropes.
For each tumbling and crashing. 

Praise for ground level perspective,
and the parietal cortex that orients 
our limbs in space.

Praise for this step. 
And this step. And this one.

Praise for dung beetles’ 
green sheen and birch leaves, 
For trail heads and their trails, 
and black wings circling.

Praise for things to look out for 
And out from. 
For carpet stains and black burn holes.
For broken windows and people. 
For full bottles and empty rooms. 

Praise for mosaics and mortar, 
for fault lines that run through families. 
For research and sentences like: 
“Cause of death: intemperance"
and flashes of understanding. 

Praise for images both still and moving.
 
For bones covered in dirt or skin, 
for shovels and prayer, 
and metaphors like “wind shear” 
for devices that elevate and lift.

Praise for words like “alcoholic.” 
For boxes to contain things.  
For things cracking open, 
and black wings rustling. 
 
Praise for things that rise and leave, 
For things that catch light, 
this one blue -black feather 
floating down to the page

Beverly Bagelman was Winner of the 2017 Animal Passion Award through Austin Poetry Society, and has been published in Austin Best Poetry and Ocotillo Revie. Her debut chapbook Fossil Wings is being released by Finishing Line Press in April 2023.

Photo by Stephen Locke

Two Poems by Patricia “Trix” Watts

04/18/202304/04/2023 Individual Poet1 Comment

I Go Back To the Tale of Charlotte’s Web

My third grade classmates seated around me, 
desks in neat rows and columns, as if each one 
of us were a number on a multiplication table. 

No one knows what we’ll amount to yet, 
but there’s that one boy with a cowlick
who picks at a scab, knocks clods of dirt
from his sneakers. He’s wrapped up in a drama
of his own while the rest of us listen.

We are sons of butchers, daughters of farmers,
some of us runts like Charlotte, at least 
one of us with words unspun inside herself.  

Mrs. Orwig turns the page and I hang my hope 
on the thread Charlotte spins. Something good 
for Wilbur, please. And for the cowlick boy, too, 
I think as my fingers roam the underbelly of my desk 
and land on a lump of gum, hard as death.

When it’s Charlotte who dies, only my tears spill. 
Fingers point, the butcher laughs, even the teacher
has shut the book ready for the next lesson. 
Still I sat, emotions spooling, trying  
to thread us all together.



The Ride


I could have said my father was one, too: 
a truck driver, a man who ferried goods—
corn by the bushel, hogs by the head,
radioactive waste by the barrel--to wherever
it was headed next, places like Sandusky, Ohio
if you happened to be a hog penned for the ride.

A man with the mind of a map and eyes
as blue as the sky who felt the engine roar 
through the thick soles of his boots. All roads
lead somewhere--grain elevators, slaughter houses,
or big holes in the earth: anti-wombs where 
the waste no one wants to be born again lies buried.

Once I watched his big rig roll down the highway, 
one lone barrel chained to the flatbed trailer--a pariah 
of contaminants inside—the scene oddly reminiscent
of a beauty queen waving from the back of a convertible 
except more sinister, this ride to de-throning.

I could have said my father was one to the trucker
on the bar stool next to me, his outstretched hand
a route of deeply paved lines and calloused mounds 
of flesh. But I gripped my stool instead. 

His steely eyes racing with Trucker Speed, his ear 
too close to my mouth, as if the hum of the road 
we were on in that bar were so deafening that 
he’d never hear what I already knew about the ride.

Patricia “Trix” Watts is a retired ESL teacher and language program coordinator, finding her authentic voice writing fiction and poetry. This is among her first non-academic publications.

Photo by Stephen Locke

Two Poems by Ben Weakley

04/15/202304/04/2023 Individual PoetLeave a comment

A Boy Shouts Help	
						
and this time the wolf is real.
Real canine teeth. Real paws and fur.
Warm breath and beating heart,
pulse quickened at the scent of prey.
But no one in the busy little village
beneath the amber hillside dotted with sheep
looks up from their toil to notice the slaughter.

Somewhere a mother latches a sucking mouth 
to her naked breast. Outside some children 
chase each other around the well
while a boy pumps water into a pail. 
An old man stoops low over his garden, 
a miller goes on turning grain 
at the grinding wheel, and a blacksmith rings 
the day’s rhythm into his glowing iron.

We’re told that no one believes the liar, 
even when they’re telling the truth.
But I think Aesop gets it all wrong – the story 
and its lesson. I think the people in that village
are just like us. They hear the frightened shepherd 
every time. The children run inside. The mother 
locks the doors and shuts the windows. The miller
and the blacksmith drop their tools
to run wolf-crazed into the burning afternoon,
torches glowing and pitchforks glinting in the sun.
		         
They know there’s no monster to be found,
but the village needs a wolf to believe in
as much as a bored and lonely boy needs them
to believe in something dark and terrible 
prowling the shadows beyond the edge of the woods.

Mausoleum
– May 2016, Giza, Egypt.

People forget the monument’s builders
were not slaves. They revered Pharaoh, their god,
enough to make the labor reasonable.

An ample gratitude for the Nile. For miracle
harvests of grain. An obedience to myth
shown in these stones hewn from the quarry

with blunt copper, stacked in steps to a golden ratio,
now exposed where the smooth alabaster veneer
submits to the rule of sand, grit, and time.

When Pharaoh Khufu ordered the architect killed
to bury knowledge of the tomb’s secrets,
the man met his death with joy, our Egyptian guides tell us—

apocryphal plot meets willing audience.
Hollywood. 1955. Land of the Pharaohs,
starring Jack Hawkins and Dame Joan Collins.

Yet, the builder’s likeness carved into a tomb’s wall
shows closed fists for the satisfaction
of a life’s great work, completed at death.

At the end of his life, the Pharaoh Hor-aha, named 
for the sky god Horus, the son of Isis and Osiris 
in the flesh, bore the glyph of a bird as his sign 

and compelled the sacrifice
of thirty-six attendants. These chosen 
went to his grave over the horizon, honored 
to serve him in the next life.

Their bones were found with the bones of lions.

Ben Weakley grew up in Clarksville, Tennessee and is a U.S. Army veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. His first collection of poetry, HEAT + PRESSURE was published by Middle West Press in 2022. Ben’s poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and won the 2019 Heroes’ Voices Poetry Award and the 2021 Col. Darron L. Wright Award from Line of Advance. His work is published in Sequestrum, Cutleaf Journal, and Wrath-Bearing Tree, among others. He lives in Kingsport, Tennessee with his wife, Stefanie, their two children, Abby and Jack, and one well-meaning, but poorly-behaved hound-dog named Camo.

Photo by Stephen Locke

Two Poems by Ruth Farmer

04/11/202304/04/2023 Individual PoetLeave a comment

Lifting the Veil

I stand in a forest, a dense gray cloud over my shoulder,
a bridge before me, a light at the opposite end.

The light transforms from steady yellow to red, 
blue, green flashing, morphs into a human form.

I want to cross, yet each time I step onto it,
the bridge buckles. At one point it collapses. I dangle.
 
Over and over, my mind rebuilds the short wooden span 
perched over a roiling river that I am determined to cross.
 
The indigo shape walks toward me, knowing I’m afraid 
the bridge will collapse again. We meet halfway. It lifts me.

Like bride and groom we laughingly move 
toward the other side. Before stepping off together, 

our minds connect. I say, I have to finish this journey 
on my own. I did. The bridge held.

My friend greeted me as I reached the other side. 
It has been a constant companion, a shining body. 

Sometimes I’m happy, sometimes not, but always 
the light is with me and always I am free.


I Dream of Pyramids

Tombs that open to reveal
dusty riches, cobwebs of civilizations
I can never know, diamonds
mined just for me.

When I look into clouds I see
faces that frighten with their
grand size and smooth placid
demeanors. I am used to
eagle talons and frizzled tresses.
The birds have whispered legends to me.
I know now I should have listened.

I dream of treasures as I swim
beneath blue oceans where I am the only
fish buried then revived, the red clay still
clumped to my locks but only those looking 
can tell I can breathe underwater.

I am a resurrection, a reflection
of past memories, an amnesiac
chased across millennia, running
from my own stories. When I stop
catch my breath, still my palpitating
heart, I hear an unrecognizable voice
saying things I cannot, will not, dare not
decipher or the ignorance which
has kept me safe will explode
revealing a universe filled
with galaxies starred by truths
that open my eyes, cure my deafness,
bring my voice to life.

Ruth Farmer is a poet, essayist, and fiction writer. Ruth’s prose and poetry appear in various publications, including her blog, ruthfarmer.com. Her most recent book is a collection of poems, Snapshots of the Wind (Rolling Moon Press, 2022). Ruth lives in Bristol, Vermont.

Photo by Stephen Locke

Two Poems by Julie Martin

04/08/202304/04/2023 Individual PoetLeave a comment

Antidote for Heartache

Account for all the different trees on this small tract of land:
blue spruce, red pine, juniper, maple, hemlock. 

Create a mandala with twigs, berries, pinecones, purified air,
then stand back and watch as the squirrels testify.

Summon the spiders: cat-faced, starbellied, comb footed, wolf,
marbled orb-weaver, parson, recluse, jumper.

From silky filaments, classify the structure but leave the web undisturbed:
funnel, tangle, triangle, spiral?

Scan indexes of field guides; see if you can name your sorrow.



Ravelry

“Term derived from revelry and ravel. 
A knitting or crocheting party or celebration.” - Urban Dictionary

Resilient, versatile, elastic, like spider’s silk, 
ink secretes across the page, 
mind radiating out through strands
beyond the limits of the body.

Multiple lines cast into the wind,
carried upwards by electrostatic currents.
Wait, see if any take hold. Follow one, 
and then another to see where it leads.

Dangle on the bridgeline. Begin to scaffold,
secure anchor points. Dance in auxiliary spirals,
circle after circle of tenacious thread.
Tighten the filaments until the reverberations

become an extension of your senses
and a map of your memories.

A poet and public school teacher, Julie Martin lives near the confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota Rivers. Her work has recently appeared in the following journals: The Talking Stick, Plants and Poetry, Optopia, Mothers Always Write, and Thimble Literary Magazine. Visit her blog, Sphinxmothrising.blogspot.com to see more of her work.

Guest Editor Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, the 2009-13 Kansas Poet Laureate is the author of 24 books, including How Time Moves: New & Selected Poems; Miriam’s Well, a novel; and The Sky Begins At Your Feet: A Memoir on Cancer, Community, and Coming Home to the Body. Founder of Transformative Language Arts, she is offers writing workshops, coaching, and collaborative projects YourRightLivelihood.com with Kathryn Lorenzen, Bravevoice.com with Kelley Hunt, and TheArtofFacilitation.net with Joy Roulier Sawyer. CarynMirriamGoldberg.com.

Two Poems by Diane Silver

04/04/202304/04/2023 Individual Poet3 Comments

The Sisters' Journey 
 
After Joseph Campbell

Given that the journey of a boy hero starts in the ordinary, 
in a village, perhaps, quiet and peaceful, where do we,
The Sisters of the Wound, begin?
 
Besieged from our first cry, we’re born into locked lands,
held down by men in our own homes, encircled on streets, 
we’re told it's our fault if we don't survive. 
 
Given that a boy hero receives a call to adventure, what 
are we, The Sisters of the Shattered, supposed to hear? 

Is it a pile of stories that smell of mold, fill us up with wet
cold, proclaim we must be silent as we sink into a flood? 
 
Given that a boy hero crosses a threshold and begins
his travels, where can we, The Sisters of Fury, go?

Should we stay at home? Cry out alone? Beat ourselves 
against all the hard surfaces until the walls and floors 
bear the bloody hollows of our lives?
 
Given that a boy hero reaches an ordeal where he could die, 
what can we, The Sisters of Still Alive, say?
 
We have been here always.
We were born here.
We will not stay.
                                                                    
The reward for the boy hero is a medal.
The reward for a girl is a path.
 
The road back for the boy hero is to go home.
The road back for a girl is to walk away.

The magic the boy hero receives is a special sword or a boast. 
The magic a girl seizes is a mountain risen within. 

She will carry her mountain to The Sisters of Not-Yet Begun.
She will show them where the climb begins.


Prophecy 
 
In the ashes of our lives a day will come
when every mother screaming at her daughter,
every father punching his son, every soldier
taking aim, every crook rifling through 
somebody’s bank account, every minister 
or priest hectoring a queer in their church,                                  	
every cop pointing a gun, every CEO
pocketing a bonus for separating people
from their jobs, every man delighting
in a woman's fear, every person sneering
at someone with skin darker than their own, 
every bully on every playground in the world, 
all of us all at once will stop.
 
Mouths will shut. Fists will unclench,
Guns will be put down. Anyone standing
in front of anyone they've badgered
into crying or trembling or looking
even a tiny bit ashen will step back.
Some of us will search for Kleenex.
A few old-fashioned souls will take
handkerchiefs out of pockets or purses.
Wet eyes will have to be wiped before
we've collected ourselves enough
to turn to each other and say
I am so sorry.
 
Days will pass, months, then years.
All the needle-tipped words, all our panic
will dissolve into puddles that will evaporate. 
Someday someone will win a Nobel Prize 
for discovering that what we assumed 
were the ropes of our captivity were actually 
the threads of our cocoon. By that time, 
the sky will be filled with fluttering. 
Our wings will carry us everywhere.

Diane Silver is an essayist, journalist, and Pushcart Prize-nominated poet whose work has been published in Ms, The Progressive, MockingHeart Review, Kansas Speaks Out: Poems in an Age of Me Too, and many other publications. Her books include the Daily Shot of Hope meditation series. http://www.dianesilver.net

Photo by Stephen Locke

Two Poems by Kelly Hams Pearson

04/01/202304/04/2023 Individual Poet1 Comment

Teatime

“A watch pot never boils child!” Grandma warned. 
I stood in her linoleumed kitchen 
breathing in the sunlight, Lysol, and vinegar.
Saturday, a day of chores, we’d cleaned 
the countertops and stove, left them gleaming, 
earned ourselves a teatime.
I waited on the kettle’s whistle to begin its serenade.
Through the doorway, on the center of the 
dining room table ham salad sandwiches quartered 
and crustless, homemade tea cakes,
sweet butter and sand plum jelly preened with perfection,
softly called our names

Today it was a table set proper, 
porcelain cups and saucers, Wedgewood, 
the good stuff passed through Ms. Anne’s kitchen
down to the help, my grandmother,
who’d been dutiful for more than three decades 
for five dollars a day and car fare.
The linen tablecloth pressed, starched, 
welcomed everything in its place,
including the azaleas from the garden 
sitting center in their crystal vase.
There was space at the table for everyone, 
Momma, Aunt Trudy, Cousin Kay, 
Ms. Iva Jean from two doors down
and the perennial guests of honor, 
blue-eyed Jesus and JFK, both adorned 
in polished wooden frames from their place 
on the wall over the sideboard.

After an eternity, the copper kettle yielded 
its stubborn stance, water 
began its dance leading to the serenade, 
the signal that it was time to sit and be served.
The rising steam of brewed jasmine and earl grey
mingled with gossip and soft laughter.  
For a few moments we claimed deliverance.  
The chores would keep as teabags 
and four generations of womenfolk steeped 
in the comfort of each other’s company.


I Am

the red maple waking from frigid winter’s sleep
re-adorned in my crimson coat of tender leaves.

I am the cacophony of robin and sparrow song
returning from southern roost on morning breezes.

I am a swirling dervish of dried leaves dancing
upon the surface of moss-covered forest floors.

I am fragrances of honeysuckle and salt
wafting over rocky ridges to meet the sea.

I am the needled beak of a black hummingbird
savoring nectars from the blossoms’ cores.

I am crazy quilt flung over a front porch rocker
past lives concealed and revealed in scraps of cloth.

I am fresh churned butter on a kitchen counter
ready to surrender to warm bread from the oven.

I am gospel shape note hymns hanging in the air
piercing and permeating a chapel of weary spirits.

I am the translucent poofs of flowered dandelions
rising to meet the sun’s rays as they angle
in descent from the heavens, like me, like you, 
like us all, here to stay but for a little while.

Kelly Hams Pearson is located close to the river’s edge where the Missouri meets the Kaw in Parkville, Missouri. Her writing serves as divining rod. Her keen interest in social and restorative justice intersects with mystical truth and personal discovery as she celebrates ancestors, guides, and historical sages through words.

Photo by Stephen Locke

God Willing — By Antonio Vallone

10/22/202101/04/2022 Individual Poet1 Comment

my mother used to say

for minor events I’m sure

an omniscient, omnipresent

god had little concern for.

I’d say, “I hope I don’t have cavities”

or “I hope I get a raise this year.”

“God willing,” my mother said, hoping

herself, I suppose, the god she believed in

a little more near the end of her life

would, for the briefest moment,

stop juggling universes and look our way

while whole galaxies–

planets, moons, stars–

hung spinning in the sky.

~ Antonio Vallone

Antonio Vallone, associate professor of English at Penn State DuBois, founder of MAMMOTH books, poetry editor of Pennsylvania English, co-founding editor of The Watershed Journal Literary Group. Published collections: The Blackbird’s Applause, Grass Saxophones, Golden Carp, and Chinese Bats. Forthcoming: American Zen, Blackberry Alleys: Collected Poems and Prose. In progress: The Death of Nostalgia.

Guest Editor Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, Ph.D., the 2009-13Kansas Poet Laureate is the author of 24 books, including How Time Moves: New & Selected Poems; Miriam’s Well, a novel; Needle in the Bone, a non-fiction book on the Holocaust; The Sky Begins At Your Feet: A Memoir on Cancer, Community, and Coming Home to the Body. Founder of Transformative Language Arts, she leads writing workshops widely, coaches people on writing and right livelihood, and consults on creativity. YourRightLivelihood.com, Bravevoice.com, CarynMirriamGoldberg.com

Lexicon — By Roy Beckemeyer

10/15/202101/04/2022 Individual PoetLeave a comment

“…somewhere

someone speaks in a tongue I will never know”

—Kevin Rabas, “Translation”

Speaking this wordless language

of decades and seasons,

shared glances and barely

perceptible smiles,

brushings in passing,

looking up from a scene

to see it imprinting in each

other’s cascade of memories,

knowing we are both

descending that staircase,

lifting left feet over the same

scuffed patch of carpeting,

relaxing our fingers’ grip

at that splintered bit of railing,

seeing the sun spattering through

leaves into the dark corner

of the stairwell, opening

the door through which

we stepped together,

that first time, so many

years ago, when we inscribed

the initial entries in love’s lexicon

of lives lived long together.

~ Roy Beckemeyer

Roy Beckemeyer’s latest book is Mouth Brimming Over (2019, Blue Cedar). Stage Whispers (2018, Meadowlark) won the 2019 Nelson Poetry Book Award. Music I Once Could Dance To (2014, Coal City) was a 2015 Kansas Notable Book. Roy Beckemeyer has designed and built airplanes, discovered and named fossils of Palaeozoic insect species, and once traveled the world. Beckemeyer lives with and for his wife of 60 years, Pat, in Wichita, Kansas.