Special feature:
Two Poems from Missouri's First Poet Laureate,
Walter Bargen
Beauty’s Sirens
She mentions the butterfly weed
blooming along the driveway
beside the pasture fence,
between a cedar with barbed wire
grown deep into its trunk,
and a persimmon tree
suffering the same fate,
both have grown taller than the usual
thicket in which they huddle.
She says to look for magenta blooms,
maybe a bleeding lavender,
only clouted at the ends
of lanky stems near the poison ivy: two umbels already
an opening ballet troupe with their tightly petaled
tutus, and two stems still budding
onion domes, waiting to be called
to dance a purple prayer.
Unlike the butterfly weed that grows
every year by the hydrant near the house
that blooms a popsicle orange,
startling as the warning vests of a road
construction crew, and this day
could be candy sweet,
but he misses the flowers
along the rutted drive, too busy,
worried that he might
run down a turtle
on his way to work.
Columbus Day
He decided not to go to the Flag Day luncheon.
He grew up with flags. Always out of reach,
the cable’s beat a martial tune on windy days.
He played with toy soldiers daily.
Their conversations, always the same─
more guns, more ammunition─
finally boring, but then he knew boys
who never grew tired of the shouts and explosions.
He watched flags burn and men be kicked
for burning regrets. Flag bras, flag bikinis,
kept his attention focused. He almost enlisted.
But then he’d already sat through an all-staff meeting
and the cheers of approval that followed
the announcement, a collection box
to be placed in the office kitchen
to support men and women forced to kill─
at least most of them. He didn’t want to sit
through that again, half-wanting to say something
that could be, would be misconstrued.
Then he heard that Indian headbands
were being handed out and one menu item
was Navaho fried bread.
Now for sure he wasn’t going to sit down
to a potluck of Manifest Destiny
though the canvas stretched over
the metal ribs of his Conestoga wagon
in the parking lot is red, white, and blue.
Walter Bargen has published eleven books and two chapbooks of poetry. His three most recent books are, The Feast, from BkMk Press-UMKC (2004), which was awarded the 2005 William Rockhill Nelson Award, Remedies for Vertigo from WordTech Communications (2006), and West of West from Timberline Press (2007). In 2008, his twelfth book, Theban Traffic, is scheduled to be published. His poems have appeared recently in the Beloit Poetry Journal, Poetry East, Seattle Review, and New Letters. He was the winner of the Chester H. Jones Foundation prize in 1997 and a National Endowment for the Art Fellowship in 1991. In 2008, he was appointed the first poet laureate of Missouri.