Shopping Cart
    items

      August 18, 2017When You Tell Me That You Feel AloneSam Killmeyer

      how am I supposed to feel anything
      but the worn basin ringed with trees sighing
       
      through grey November days stretched out
      like the cat, wet on my front porch,
       
      waking in the morning cold and knowing only
      the urge to be smothered under bed covers.
       
      When you tell me that you feel alone
      I think of standing on the grey prairie
       
      with the sky too big for me, thoughts
      blown out by common milkweed’s face,
       
      body scraped hollow with a wrought-iron ladle
      and flooded with all that was, will be, might become.
       
      When you tell me that you feel alone
      I remember being a struck lightning rod
       
      floating above the earth, charged but nothing
      through which to ground out the flames.

      from #56 - Summer 2017

      Sam Killmeyer

      “I moved to Kansas from Cleveland the summer after graduating college. I was 21 and had never been west of Indiana. That fall the Flint Hills were gold-brown, crisp from drought, and standing under the giant prairie sky I felt my ‘I’ shatter. In some ways, that breakdown made room for the glimpsing of other lives that makes my poetry possible.”