Standing Water in Central Nebraska | By Tyler Jacobs
A dragonfly swarms callow fields; Paint on a calm, vast canvas.
About the Author:
Tyler Michael Jacobs currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of The Carillon. He is the recipient of the Wagner Family Writing Award Endowment. His poetry has appeared, or is slated to appear, in The Carillon, Poached Hare, The Hole in the Head Review, Runestone, The Magazine, Rumble Fish Quarterly, The Whorticulturalist, East by Northeast Literary Magazine, White Wall Review, HASH Journal, Funicular Magazine, and Aurora: The Allegory Ridge Poetry Anthology.
A man woke to find his face on a gold doubloon, & then it was his no more, but was exchanged in a white water river of dream & contempt, each person who touched it changed by the long trail of barterings & dissemblings, palterings & misgivings.
To get what it must was the first & foremost urge of woodchuck & woodpecker & of the toad with the brilliantly elastic tongue, rolled up in its mouth like a window blind.
The snail, the quail, the town’s thousand feral cats: each a guileless opportunist, not one with an ounce of human subterfuge, not one with a shred of human obliquity.
Everyone knew the man’s stolen face but no one knew him. & when he begged them to return his face, they bruised his chest & broke his hands.
Other people went to work & got married & had children, & pursued their ever- retreating dreams, admitting, in moments of quiet clarity, their grand goals were becoming thinner, more transparent, more improbable & unlikely. His life was fixed & unchanging. Soon no one remembered him.
Yet everyone wanted the coin bearing his face. When friends gathered, they told stories of it. When lovers met, they saw its gleaming silver face. Children dreamt of it. Old men & women spoke of it with their dying breaths. It inspired poets & mathematicians, homeless printers & magicians. Inmates held it in their hearts during their long ordeal of crime & time & parents passed it without thinking to their children.
One night the man dreamed the most incredible & extravagant of dreams: His face came back to him. He could feel it & see it in the mirror. When he woke, the rest of the world could not see him at all. He had completely ceased to exist among them.
About the Author:
Clif Mason lives in Bellevue, Nebraska, with his wife, a visual artist. He is the author of one collection, Knocking the Stars Senseless (Stephen F. Austin State University Press), and three chapbooks: The Book of Night & Waking (won the Cathexis Northwest Press Chapbook Prize), Self-portraits in Which I Do Not Appear (Finishing Line Press), and From the Dead Before (Lone Willow Press). His work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and he has been the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship to Rwanda, Africa. He also writes magical realist and fantasy fiction. Twitter: @mason_clif
That last day before moving on I fish the shallows of the lake. I stand regally, stretch my long neck. I see myself, a sculpted ice fountain reflected in the surface, sleek feathers more blue than the lake, stiletto beak more gold than the rushes.
In the soft smell of recent rain ducks kiss fertile lake beds. I spot an underwater flash of light and strike, shattering my reflection. I pull out a silvery minnow, marveling at my fishing prowess and savor spring’s bounty.
A cacophony of nasal quacks warns me! I hunker down, leap, open azure wings, grab air in plumes, rise with warm currents, but then remember the minnow-rich slate pool the whisper of rippling water. I circle, splash home on feather parachutes.
This shallow fertile lake is my sojourn. Tomorrow will be time to move on.
About the Author:
Kim McNealy Sosin is an Emerita Professor of Economics at the University of Nebraska Omaha. Her post-retirement interests include writing and photography. Her poems and photographs have appeared in Fine Lines, Failed Haiku, Daily Haiga, Voices from the Plains, Landscape Magazine, The Heron’s Nest, Wanderlust Journal, Raw Art Review, and Sandcutters.
Warren Buffett eats peanut brittle live on stage in front of forty thousand faces, he makes it look easy, picks up a golden chip, mid-sentence, uses that same hand to gesture a point to life, punctuates with a crunch.
You crane your neck for the video screen, hoping to see the slo-mo replay, but, no,
it’s just some monologue about picking stocks, making money.
Flash | By Matt Mason
—from an inch-long news story in the Omaha World-Herald
3am, naked man in Nebraska drives his truck through a church, sideswipes a school, ends up spinning on the State Capitol’s lawn;
he’s wearing nothing but rain and spotlights, his skin a living glitter ball across the grass, stepped out a superstar, blue-red paparazzi pulses flashing breakneck beats around the streetlight city.
You can’t publicize a show like this.
Too much is the surprise of it, that, otherwise, would keep you brewing coffee after bedtime so you could sneak to the church halfway to dawn, sit with the whole neighborhood; everybody here, the Presbyterians the Baptists from the red house, everybody squeezed in the balcony
meditating on the pair of candles far away as stars before the scene ignites, before a choir of rubber and internal combustion blazes up the aisle, slows like genuflection, screeches left at the altar, tips the holy birdbath, and parts the side doors like a sea.
Mary just smiles. Jesus doesn’t even turn his head.
Not a soul notices how beautiful the Capitol building looks in this rain, confetti of light beams, orange pickup spinning on the green, tires spraying mud across the cosmos.
In such a Funkytown spectacle, you’d think the officers would move more like the YMCA dancers, leap like antelope, prowl like panthers instead of such clumsy choreography where they fall on this slickfish naked highlight and beat his chin into the muck; they lie to the rain, saying: that’s it for the show, nothing to see here, get yourselves home.
About the Author:
Matt Mason is the Nebraska State Poet and Executive Director of the Nebraska Writers Collective. He has run poetry programs for the State Department in Nepal, Romania, Botswana and Belarus. Mason is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and his work can be found in magazines and anthologies including Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry. Mason’s 3rd book, I Have a Poem the Size of the Moon, is due out from Stephen F. Austin University Press in late 2020. Matt is based out of Omaha with his wife, the poet Sarah McKinstry-Brown, and daughters Sophia and Lucia.
There is always risk when uprooting a tree. Generation after generation, we yank roots from the earth, and no one can recall the first seed, the place a root splits. My tongue names a new species that my sons can never understand. I kiss their foreheads at night and they grow into strangers, laughing in their sleep.
I remember the lanky boy in Kove Guberdnia who ate copper coins from his parents’ wallet rather than be forced on a ship to America. He ate half of their fortune. His fingers were orange, smelled like dirt. He swung from trees, a monkey-snake, rushed to me one day across the road where I often dug, pat soil, grabbed weeds, planted flowers. He shoved his splintered hand in my face. I already sensed I would be a mother to sons. I tweezed out the tiny wood with my black nails, licked his red wound slow and hot, prophesied he would remain a boy forever running from himself without guilt in his chest, without pages between his lips, without an ocean to hold him steady.
– Mena “Minnie” Pretcovitz, 1905
About the Author:
Jamie Wendt is the author of the poetry collection Fruit of the Earth (2018) and winner of the 2019 National Federation of Press Women Book Award. Her poetry, essays, and book reviews have been published in various literary journals and anthologies, including Feminine Rising: Voices of Power and Invisibility, Lilith, Literary Mama, The Forward, Third Wednesday, and Saranac Review. She holds an MFA from the University of Nebraska at Omaha. She teaches high school English and lives in Chicago with her husband and two children.
