Rush Home – Devon Neal
Us Girls – Hannah Nathanson
Cabbage Dances and Other Prizes – Martin Fisher
What They Tell Me – Bart Edelman
Not Bukowski – Alex Stolis
Something Fine – Don Narkevic
Letter from the Editor
Dear Readers,
It feels good to open Prairie Home up again. After nearly a year and a half of our online magazine not publishing anything new, I wasn’t sure when, or whether, this moment would come. Much of that time went to starting a new job and trying to figure out a unifying theory of Long COVID, a disease which appears to resemble an autoimmune disorder. It affects the nervous system in ways not unlike lupus, and it has a way of turning the simplest parts of a day, like standing, sleeping, or walking to the mailbox, into small negotiations. Lots of rest has been necessary, but through all of it, I missed reading your writing, and the work of reading and choosing poems… keeping poetry alive. I’ve realized with as much uncertainty as there is about the world currently, poetry is still as alive as it ever has been.
When we reopened for submissions, you reminded me that it never needed my help. Poems arrived from Kentucky and California, New York and West Virginia, and across the ocean from the UK, India, China, and Australia, and I’m grateful to every writer who trusted us with their work while we found our footing again.
As always, no theme was set for this issue, and as always, one found us anyway. These poems keep circling home: how we get back to it, what we lose along the way, and what we notice once we’re there. In Devon Neal’s “Rush Home,” a couple races a storm toward lamplight and bathwater and one shared blanket, and the house becomes a shelter made of small comforts. Don Narkevic’s “Something Fine” walks a grandfather and his grandchildren down a hometown street of empty storefronts, where a vanished bakery comes back to life through memory, with its breads, its sugared pastries, and its checkerboard floor, before he admits that the finest things, like the first snowfall, never last long. Bart Edelman’s “What They Tell Me” is home seen from the other side: a working life of routine and quiet resignation, a promised vacation with nowhere to go, rendered with a dry wit that makes the ache land harder.
Other poems find their footing in stranger territory. Hannah Nathanson’s “Us Girls” turns a tarot reading for a park goose into a funny, uncanny meditation on friendship, city grime, and the souls hiding in unlikely places. Martin Fisher’s “Cabbage Dances and Other Prizes” drifts through a dreamlike dinner party of dancing vegetables and royal onlookers, only to arrive at the very human wish to disappear from oneself. And Alex Stolis’ “Not Bukowski” spoke to me most personally this time. It’s a poem of a sleepless night, of screeches and sirens and the unease of not knowing what’s out there in the dark, and it ends with a plain, hard-won declaration of being sober and being alive. After a year and a half of too many restless nights of my own, I read that ending more than once.
I hope you find something in these pages to carry with you. Thank you for waiting for this issue, for writing, and for reading. It is good to be able to open Prairie Home again for this new issue.
Warmest regards and clearest of skies,
Chris Stubenrauch
Editor-in-Chief, Prairie Home Magazine