MLK, Jr. Day 2017—the Day After by Charles Peek

Our trees’ bare twigs and branches,
Yesterday bearing the dust of a bitter harvest,
Costs rising, prices depressed,
Today borne down all around us
By the ice of our last storm,
Each crystal brightened by this morning’s
Rising sun, glistening across the blue sky,
Too soon to melt away, drip like rain,
The shining sight slipping slowly back
To winter.

 

Kearney, Nebraska
January 17, 2017

 

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.

Guest Editor Roy J. Beckemeyer is from Wichita, Kansas. He was President of the Kansas Authors Club 2016-2017. His latest book of poetry, Stage Whispers (Meadowlark-Books, 2019), contains “…handsomely crafted poems…Dense with images, intimate and honest…” (Kathryn Kysar). His chapbook, Amanuensis Angel (Spartan Press, 2018) comprises ekphrastic poems inspired by a variety of artists’ depictions of angels. His first poetry collection, Music I Once Could Dance To (Coal City Press, 2014), was a 2015 Kansas Notable Book. He recently co-edited Kansas Time+Place: An Anthology of Heartland Poetry (Little Balkans Press, 2017) with Caryn Mirriam Goldberg. That anthology collected poems that appeared on this website from 2014-2016.

 

The Trouble in the Way We Constellate — By Charles Peek

After Twyla Hansen

Some eyes see them better than others, even with the help of a sky-searcher app downloaded to your phone, even lying out in the backyard at night by your dad as he points out one and another by name. I confess I’m a sky-slacker. An eclipse is exciting, an equinox mildly so. The full moon, the harvest moon. Like everyone I guess, a falling star. Too much light, as always, makes it hard to see. My problem with constellations is we just get the nouns and never the verbs, a strange pidgin above the pigeons’ realm, like all stories haltingly told us in another tongue from another side of the universe, a place where split infinitives are famous but absent all action words. If I look, I see vain beauty easily enough but not the pain it inflicts on those less likely to appear in fashion’s mirror, not even the occasional awareness of its own futility. Perhaps, a Libra, I’m too balanced. Once I heard someone more audacious call my dad an “old goat,” and he didn’t even know about Capricorn, could not have known how many times we’d butted heads. No one ever sees the children being bitten by the scorpion, nor feels the bite that’s sharper than a serpent’s tooth. The swan was never an ugly duckling, nor a ride in the park with bench seats. Were there any heads poached just to be lionized in the den? The bull is never led from town for sacrifice, the goat is never scaped. Our heavenly hunter aims but never shoots, no creatures great or small, canine or ursine, ever feels the piercing arrow. Until he becomes a character in a book, Draco fails to do more than look draconian. The horse is not for riding, knows no trot or gallop, doesn’t really ever fly. And where are the pigs? A Semitic sky, where all will happen only when pigs fly, flight being what, in such fixed positions, pigs never manage. No wonder it’s more comforting to look up. Instead.

~ 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.

Guest Editor Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, Ph.D., the 2009-13 Kansas Poet Laureate is the author of two dozen books, including, most recently, Miriam’s Well, a novel; Everyday Magic: A Field Guide to the Mundane and Miraculous, and Following the Curve, a collection of embodied poetry. . Founder of Transformative Language Arts at Goddard College where she teaches, Mirriam-Goldberg also leads writing workshops widely, particularly for people living with serious illness and their caregivers. With singer Kelley Hunt, she co-leads writing and singing retreats. 

An Invasion of Turkey Vultures: An Allegory — By Charles Peek

At what must seem to them the “appointed time,”

Great numbers of turkey vultures arrive,

To occupy only the highest boughs of the tallest trees

Where everything below exists to serve their repast and repose,

The stray cats, the scampering squirrels, the pigeons and the voles.

 

Mighty in their size, fearsome in their fixed gaze,

Swooping and sweeping with their massive, wide wings

Each edged like a serrated blade, and those talons

As sharp as their sight, boasting a beak for a nose,

Pity the cats and squirrels, the pigeons and the voles.

 

Here, the lesser breeds are but vagrant beggars,

Poaching their subsistence from their larger neighbors,

Trespassers, debtors in a might makes right domain.

Take no prisoners, all each turkey knows, each a Kurtz

Exterminating the brutes: cats, squirrels, pigeons, and voles.

 

Nature’s grace: there such an occupation lasts only one short season,

Ergo each lesser breed’s good reason, to each species its own hope.

Turkey vultures, one day, all take to wing, what’s left can then regain

The terrain each instinctively know is theirs, even the crows,

Restoring the balance of cats and squirrels, pigeons, and voles.

~ Charles Peek

Kearney, Nebraska, April 4, 2017

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.

Pat Daneman has published poems and short fiction in many print and on-line journals. Her most recent work appears in the anthology New Poetry from the Midwest, Moon City Review, Stonecoast Review, Comstock Review and Bellevue Literary Review. Her chapbook, Where the World Begins, was published in 2015 by Finishing Line Press. After All, her first full-length poetry collection will be published in 2018 by FutureCycle Press.