First cut of last year’s old growth
Shows a maze of field mice runs
Exposed to keen barn owl eyes and
Hungry hawks that leer for any sign
Of a sneeze of movement to release
Pandora’s Box of hurt from above
Yet last year’s grass keeps their lives
Near the cemetery, where the dead
Have a place outside town, from
Attack while raiding cut maize and
Corn rows for last summer’s forgotten
Grains, dangerous destinations
As is the pasture’s pond nearby
So their trails connect by Y’s like
Family trees branch, webs of roads
Roofed by rasping whips when wind
Exhales to show tunnels, crooked
As Russian rivers, the paths danced to
Bare earth by quick pads of paws as
If Greek music plays, scurrying beats
Of feet each day to socials, to burrows
While at night they cuddle in warmth
Covered and tucked-in to sleep under
Such grass in order to forget the sun
~ Dan Pohl
Dan Pohl instructs English composition at Hutchinson Community College in Hutchinson, Kansas. Woodley Press will publish his first book of poetry Autochthonous: Found in Place in late 2013. He lives in Moundridge, Kansas, and writes poems and prose poems. He judged the 2013 Nelson Poetry Book Contest. People can find his work published in two 2013 anthologies: Begin Again: 150 Kansas Poems (Woodley Press) and To the Stars through Difficulties (Mammoth Publications), both edited by past Kansas Poet Laureate Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg. A sampling of his poems is found online at <kansaspoets.com>.
Guest Editor: Izzy Wasserstein, a Lecturer in English at Washburn University, was born and raised on the Great Plains. Her first poetry collection, This Ecstasy They Call Damnation, was a 2013 Kansas Notable Book. Her poetry and prose have appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Blue Mesa Review, Flint Hills Review, and elsewhere.