Today's poem is by Grace H. Zhou

Kansas by Greyhound
       

We ride knife-cut roads across this back
of continent to the prairie's corn edge,
to a place where shadows limn loess,
and we stalk the grass for wind-tossed things.
Where Bennie croons a cowboy song
outside the Emma Chase Cafe
and townspeople circle, curious,
speaking of the ranch land, their amber
waves of bounty land, gill-snagged
gleam-bellied sunbass land,
where a dipper punches the velvet dark,
we draw lines through pinpoint stars—
lines drawn through us too, through Bennie
and Marie who lost two daughters too young.
We steady our hearts, knees pressed to earth,
against a purple sky that dares
to swing us open. In a curbside
motel of fat-seeded melons
and muted light, we laugh crowded, aching,
recalling the woman who touched Kristen's locs
in a one-room Strong City church house.
They ask me, where are you from,
though they don't mean it like chat, I think—
on this land where their plows broke the plain
and settled wheat corn sorghum in loam.
Here, in the Flint Hills, in these last
stands of big bluestem and Osage grass,
we pry up tangled nether drums of roots
and bury our elsewheres like cubers.

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Copyright © 2024 Grace H. Zhou All rights reserved
from Soiled Called a Country
Newfound
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission