A Poem by Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg

The Night John Prine Died



The pink full moon rose over the pandemic
singing through the tree, “Hello in there. Hello.”

We listened, all children grown old, but always
looking for something to hold onto, even angels

of the old rivers of our hearts’ journeys, 
grown wilder in their holiness, forcing new channels

like the holy is prone to do, especially when everything
changes. What is there to do but stand here,

willing peaceful waters to calm us, sometime 
in the future, as if that’s where paradise lay?

But John Prine knew there’s a hole in the world. 
We can only glimpse it now while time changes us,

if we’re true, into souvenirs of this life,
talismans of something perennial as leaves

beneath the tree of forgiveness the moon climbs.
Come on home, come on home, come on home.

Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, Ph.D., the 2009-13 Kansas Poet Laureate is the author of 23 books, including Miriam’s Well, a novel; Everyday Magic: A Field Guide to the Mundane and Miraculous, and Following the Curve, poetry. Her previous work includes The Divorce Girl, a novel; Needle in the Bone, a non-fiction book on the Holocaust; The Sky Begins At Your Feet, a bioregional memoir on cancer and community; and six poetry collections, including the award-winning Chasing Weather with photographer Stephen Locke. Founder of Transformative Language Arts at Goddard College, Mirriam-Goldberg also leads writing workshops widely.

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Two Poems by Pat Daneman

Thanksgiving Morning in the Park
 
I’ll be having the sunrise this morning,
with a side of clouds blue as mussel shells.
I’ll breathe in the extravagant steam
 
from the pond’s cauldron,
redolent of algae and rot, peppered
with last night’s rain. The geese
 
are complaining, always unhappy
customers. But I sit on my bench with a patience
that feels sated, surrounded by good company—
 
men who bend to share scraps with their dogs,
mothers who speak slowly
to their children about manners.
 
 
The Work of Night Weather
 
Morning reveals what happens overnight—a rose a fraction farther
up a fence, cities sinking. My skin has been soaking up sun and rain
 
for decades, an old coat that I shake out and smooth around my bones.
Change creeps—a sparrow with a new edge in its chirp, a yellow petal
 
fallen. The sea has lost the fight with its yearning for the land, but can’t stop
repeating its cold opinions. I can bear it—I won’t outlive the end—
 
a fence gone gray but not yet fallen, a grove of maples giving up
seeds to the wind, the wind breaking apart against rocks.

Pat Daneman’s poetry is published or forthcoming in Poet’s Touchstone, Lakeshore Review, Gyroscope and Wild Roof. Her full-length collection, After All, was first runner up for the 2019 Thorpe-Menn Award and a finalist for the Hefner Heitz Kansas Book Award. She is author of a chapbook, Where the World Begins and co-librettist of the oratorio, We, the Unknown, premiered by the Heartland Men’s Chorus. She lives in Candia, NH. patdaneman.com

Guest Editor, Morgan O.H. McCune is a native Kansan and now lives in Topeka. She holds a Master of Fine Arts in Poetry from Washington University in St. Louis (1991) and a Master of Library Science from Emporia State University (2002). She was a Cataloging Librarian/Professor at Pittsburg State University for 15 years before retiring in 2022.

Bird-Honest by Tyler Robert Sheldon

The birds have begun their sweeps over the neighborhood
today before half its residents have stirred themselves
from sleep. Before the mowers and roosters, 
beating the paperboy to the punch. Significantly 
it’s not just the blue jays, whom you and I would think of 
as the most likely suspects. No, even the mockingbirds 
have taken up this unknown cause, streaming down 
from up on high and screaming like firetrucks. This is not, 
they insist, to entertain the occasional wayward cat, 
so many of whom howl and paw up the trees at them. 
More than this they refuse to specify, but 
about one thing they’ve been honest: Look out,
they say. Be sure of what you’re fighting for,
because all the birds are preparing for war.

Poet Tyler Robert Sheldon is the author of five poetry collections including Driving Together (Meadowlark Books, 2018). He edits MockingHeart Review, and his work has appeared in The Los Angeles Review, Pleiades, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and other places. A Pushcart Prize nominee and winner of the Charles E. Walton Essay Award, he earned his MFA at McNeese State University. He lives in Baton Rouge. www.TylerRobertSheldon.com. Tyler’s newest book is When to Ask for Rain (Spartan, 2021), a Birdy Poetry Prize Finalist. He edits the journal MockingHeart Review, and his work has appeared in The Los Angeles Review, Quiddity, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, and other places. He earned his MFA at McNeese State University, and is working on his PhD at LSU.

Guest Editor Lori Martin is associate professor of English at Pittsburg State University. She’s had both poetry and fiction published in magazines like Prick of the Spindle, The MacGuffin, (parenthetical), Room Magazine, Grass Limb, The Knicknackery, The Maine Review and upcoming in The Tampa Review.  Martin is poetry editor for The Midwest Quarterly.

Next Year’s Garden by Pat Daneman

Is it flowers we are wishing for
when we loop jewels around our necks,
string up colored lights in winter?  
What strange blooms do we imagine 
 
as we rest
our heads against a window white with fog,
feel the train wheels churning? Nothing is less
concerned with beauty than a flower.
A bee rises from a dusty dream,
 
a bead of rain 
rolls like a kiss around a petal’s curve
and we forget last year’s frost. Too heavy
for its stalk, a blossom bows to earth.
 
Fragrance, blind, sweet, 
slips beyond the gate.

Pat Daneman’s recent poetry appears in Atlanta Review, Freshwater, Bryant Literary Review, and Typehouse. Her collection, After All (FutureCycle Press 2018), was first runner-up, 2019 Thorpe-Menn Award and finalist, Hefner Heitz Kansas Book Award. She is author of a chapbook, Where the World Begins.

Guest editor, Denise Low, Kansas Poet Laureate 2007-09, is winner of a Red Mountain Press’s Editor’s Choice Award for Shadow Light. A new book of poetry from Red Mountain is Wing. Other recent books areThe Turtle’s Beating Heart: One Family’s Story of Lenape Survival (a memoir, U. of Nebraska Press); A Casino Bestiary (Spartan Press); and Jackalope, fiction (Red Mountain). She founded the Creative Writing Program at Haskell Indian Nations University, where she taught and was an administrator. Low is past board president of the Associated Writers and Writing Programs. She has won 3 Kansas Notable Book Awards and recognition from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Sequoyah National Research Center, Poetry Society of America, The Circle -Best Native American Books, Roberts Foundation, Lichtor Awards, and the Kansas Arts Commission. Low has an MFA from Wichita St. U. and Ph.D. from Kansas U. Her literary blog is http://deniselow.blogspot.com.

Poem for Early Crocus by Laura Lee Washburn

Sun full on, popcorn’s best butter-
-y oil soaking the red-striped waxed bag,
cup small girls hold to their chin
and the reflection on skin, bright stamen
threading cloudless days into white rice,
the million wares of the Ponte Vecchio, the painted 
tromp l’oeil of the Ponte Vecchio on the Ponte Vecchio,
eyes of the domestic cat caught in darkness,
the squeaking toy’s dog-bit serenade, how
honey dreams of itself in the comb, how the world
moves even while folks shiver in drafty
offices or windowless workrooms, backlit
silk whispering China, whispering India, 
whispering home: the crocus promise, the crocus
accepts its bed of dead oak leaf, the crocuses 
wet and fold, and each small fist of gold shrivels
over its own bent but still green stem.

Editor-in-Chief Laura Lee Washburn is the Director of Creative Writing at Pittsburg State University in Kansas, and the author of This Good Warm Place: 10th Anniversary Expanded Edition (March Street) and Watching the Contortionists (Palanquin Chapbook Prize).  Her poetry has appeared in such journals as TheNewVerse.News, Carolina Quarterly, Ninth Letter, The Sun, and Valparaiso Review.  Harbor Review’s microchap prize is named in her honor.

Guest editor, Denise Low, Kansas Poet Laureate 2007-09, is winner of a Red Mountain Press’s Editor’s Choice Award for Shadow Light. A new book of poetry from Red Mountain is Wing. Other recent books areThe Turtle’s Beating Heart: One Family’s Story of Lenape Survival (a memoir, U. of Nebraska Press); A Casino Bestiary (Spartan Press); and Jackalope, fiction (Red Mountain). She founded the Creative Writing Program at Haskell Indian Nations University, where she taught and was an administrator. Low is past board president of the Associated Writers and Writing Programs. She has won 3 Kansas Notable Book Awards and recognition from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Sequoyah National Research Center, Poetry Society of America, The Circle -Best Native American Books, Roberts Foundation, Lichtor Awards, and the Kansas Arts Commission. Low has an MFA from Wichita St. U. and Ph.D. from Kansas U. Her literary blog is http://deniselow.blogspot.com.