In my dream, we are driving at night
through a hard rain on a country road.
At each crossing we come to, the waters seem deeper,
until we come finally to a section where we can’t go any further,
where what is in back of us seems worse now
than when we were there,
where we can’t see a way ahead and begin to feel the road
shifting beneath us,
and we aren’t sure what to do next or how the hell we got here
in the first place
and we hope for any solid ground that holds some promise
of preventing us from drifting helplessly away,
of supporting us amidst whatever it is
the water has already carried away
in the dark.
~ Charles Peek
Charles Peek blogs, writes, and protests from Kearney, Nebraska. His Breezes on the Way to Being Winds won the 2016 Nebraska Award for Poetry. Together with his wife, Nancy, he spends a good deal of time trying to stop the Keystone XL Pipeline form ruining Nebraska’s land, water, and culture.
June Editor Bio: Ramona Vreeland McCallum is the author of a collection of poetry entitled Still Life with Dirty Dishes (Woodley Press, 2013). She earned her MFA from UMKC in 2017 and her Master of Arts in Teaching from KSU in 2018. She lives in Garden City, Kansas where she teaches 5th grade English Language Arts and co-parents six children with her husband, Brian McCallum. For June’s poems, Ramona selected work whose avian and weather imagery convey metaphoric and dichotomous themes of restlessness & peace, anxiety & security, and which communicate the power of presence when reflecting on the past and looking toward the future.