Don and Darkness by Steven Hind

The boy at the wheel has lost

his twin to suicide. His sister

sits between us as he barrels up

the narrow chute of old #36

with his brights on. He passes

a second car as I see the hint

of lights over the crest ahead,

and he is talking about guns, the kind

of gun he would choose to kill a man.

And I am certain he will kill us all

in this old truck he bought with his

brother to throw the morning paper.

He swerves back into our lane as

a car blares past, and I thrill

to the breath passing my lips.

~ Steven Hind

Steven is a retired teacher and part-time farmer whose personal experiences over seventy years in Kansas have inspired efforts at self-expression, often taking the form of poetry. His books include, Familiar Ground (Cottonwood), That Trick of Silence (CKS), In a Place with No Map (CKS/Woodley), and The Loose Change of Wonder (CKS/Woodley).

Tyler Sheldon is a graduate student in English at Emporia State University. His poems and articles have appeared in Thorny Locust, I-70 Review, Coal City Review, The Dos Passos Review, and in the anthology To The Stars Through Difficulties (a 2013 Kansas Notable Book). Sheldon is an AWP Intro Journals Award nominee and has been featured on Kansas Public Radio.

William Sheldon lives in Hutchinson, Kansas, where he writes and teaches. His work has appeared widely in little magazines and small press anthologies. He has two books, Retrieving Old Bones (Woodley) and Rain Comes Riding (Mammoth), and a chapbook, Into Distant Grass (Oil Hill). He plays bass for the band The Excuses.

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114. Mobile #Twenty-One

West of El Dorado a windmill spins its rusty

flower in an air that might be dreaming Dakota.

A tanker rounds the bend with its flexible load

of fire as new grass deepens a prairie pasture

where forty cows graze, muzzle deep in growth.

A black Baldy raises her face to bawl out a call

for the calf taken from her side. She gets no joy

from her cropping, her big baby hauled off to

Whitewater’s feedlot to grow thick in the stink

of a thousand of his kind. The black cow bawls

again, then lowers her head to the new grass.

The tanker shifts gears, wisps of exhaust smoke

trailing away, the sky inhaling the black breath

of the Peterbilt, its fat tires spinning over

the blue trail past the cows to the Whitewater

bridge and west past the feedlot where the calf

noses grain, his hooves splayed in the muck.

A buzzard rides the air that wafts the stink

and spins the windmill’s rusty flower and fans

the black cow in her distress west of El Dorado.

— Steven Hind

Steven Hind divides his time between Hutchinson where he taught for three decades and the family farm on the eastern edge of the Flint Hills near Madison.  His collection, The Loose Change of Wonder, was selected as a 2007 Kansas Notable Book.

57. Beside a Country Road

She had dug her den wisely

where the turn of a driver’s

gaze would have to slot into

a second’s synchronicity

or the grass and the rock would

keep her secret, as she knew.

I had slipped through the crack

in a moment’s privilege and kept

her secret. Such confidence is

salvation in a world burning

with our hungers. – You out there

in your den, let me hold you close

in the cool darkness where your

tongue laves the little ones to life.

— Steven Hind

Steven Hind divides his time between Hutchinson where he taught for three decades and the family farm on the eastern edge of the Flint Hills near Madison.  His collection, The Loose Change of Wonder, was selected as a 2007 Kansas Notable Book.