Sophie Klahr
from LIKE NEBRASKA
She listens like a horse
Patiently broken in
By the Good Lord himself.
There is no softer way.
In each scar, a story—
Pale comma of a slipped saw,
A welding spark.
In fields never razed for crops,
Bright insects part like waters
Where anyone walks.
Easy talk among the workers:
Irrigation bled into a wet spring,
Low ground now a stream
Ripe with frog-song.
The farmer is mowing a path
In what has gone
To seed. A body seen
Hovering among the goldenrod.
SOPHIE KLAHR has had poetry appear in AGNI, American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, and Ploughshares. She is the author of the full-length collection Meet Me Here At Dawn (YesYes Books) and the chapbook Versus Recovery (Pilot Books). She lives sometimes in California and sometimes in Nebraska.
ISSUE FIVE features fiction by Olivia Clare, Aaron Hamburger, Maria Kuznetsova, Dan Pope, Stephanie Reents, and Terese Svoboda; creative nonfiction by Lesley Jenike, Philip Metres, and JoAnna Novak; film writing by Adam Golaski; poetry by Cynthia Arrieu-King, Catherine Barnett, Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, Malachi Black, Miranda Field, Janice N. Harrington, Sophie Klahr, JoAnna Klink, Elizabeth Robinson, Maggie Smith, Rebecca Wolff, and Robert Wrigley; and an interview with Olivia Clare.