The Missouri Exile
by Matthew Brent Jackson
The original Kansas City was both in Kansas and Missouri as French trappers brought their Blackfeet wives to settle on the bottomland of the Kaw River. Apparently they fished, hunted, trapped, farmed, drank whiskey and played the fiddle, populating the edges of the Kaw with their French/Blackfeet children. They apparently felt good about it all until the Kaw flooded, as it has a tendency to do, washing away their farms. Later Anglo settlers did their best to expunge the memory of the freewheeling French who had preceded them. Yet the laissez-faire quality has never entirely left.
Topeka People Memorial Gardens
by Craig Davis
Ray, weathered and asiatic, like a guide come down from the high desert to lead them back from the deep night. Back to where the sun rose close. Where it burnt the flesh so slowly and for so long. Where no camera could profane his image with its nauseous yearning for youth.
Coney Island Wintertide
by Lucas Wetzel
“If Paris is France, then Coney Island, between June and September, is the world,” said George Cornelius Tilyou in 1886.
So what is Coney Island on a rainy December weekday 125 years later?
The Forgotten Actress Dressed as Catwoman Alone in Her Room
by Bridget Lowe
There were so many nights of loneliness, the word
prowl comes to mind, the needle and thread
were as bored as I.
My mind was elsewhere.
The Forgotten Actress as Contestant on Dancing with the Stars
by Bridget Lowe
You were a liberty horse, parading around
the ring without a rider. You needed no one
to direct you, to tell you where to turn.
Kawsmouth 