Poems for the 2025 Kansas State Fair

Luminary

By Traci Brimhall

Art is as urgent as spring grass,

inevitable as the kiss and its sweet

sequel. Art is a memory wrapped

in a silver shroud, an ecstatic dance

with ghosts through the attic. It is

the image ambushing our loneliness,

a melody trespassing the quiet. It is

the commitment to mistakes, but

its joys are unmistakable. Art is

a stage made of night, each small

star in a constellation burning

like a story. Art is where the light goes when it leaves our hands.

[image credit: Fiona Campbell-Howes – Attribution 2.0 Generic CC BY 2.0 – cropped]

Saturated

By Elizabeth Dodd

Bacon from the farmer whose daughter wrote spare poems in my class; onions from a friend’s small garden plot. These items have intention, laid out like a still-life in the kitchen. I pictured beans a-soak in a big ceramic bowl, late-autumn sunlight slanting in the window, sliced onions luminous as an allusive curl of lemon peel. Baked beans, a recipe I’d never tried. But in the bright chill of the market, a snap decision. I came home with a frozen mass of pig fat, too, looped and tangled like pale, headless eels or a wad of catfish slashed open with a knife. Only as the planks of fat relaxed and softened could you see: no flaky fish-flesh here, no remaining lattice-step of bone… It’s history I’m rendering down.

[image credit: Jeremy Keith – Attribution 2.0 – Generic CC BY 2.0 – cropped]

Aunt Jane’s Tomatoes

By Olive L. Sullivan

They’s nothing’ better than this,
she says, her big raw-boned hands
cupping the reddest tomato on the vine,
her other hand reaching for mine.
We press our backs into the good rich dirt,
tomato plants a colonnade above us,
a dappled arched ceiling like a cathedral,
incense of pungent dust and spicy greenness.

In the kitchen, every bowl and crock
overflows with every kind of tomato.
She slides a pan of oil-drizzled cherry tomatoes
into the oven, wipes her hands on her worn jeans,
Says, but you gotta remember, boo, the only recipe you really need—
one for a happy life, one for satisfaction.

[image credit: Michal Klajban – Attribution ShareAlike 4.0 International – CC BY-SA 4.0 – cropped]

That One Summer

By Luisa Muradyan

There was that one summer
when we decided we were garden people
and we went to the store where garden people go
and wandered around the way garden people do
and came home with tomato seeds and fertilizer.
We shoveled and seeded the plot of dirt behind our house
and knew that something beautiful would grow.
When it didn’t, we tried to retrace our steps
and worked to understand what went wrong.
We read manuals and watched videos
brought in new soil and more seeds
we even joined a gardening grief group
where we sat in circles and talked
about the rain. We aren’t garden people,
you sighed, and as I held you

[image credit: Chad Miller – CC BY-SA 2.0 – cropped]

Avocado

By Wyatt Townley

Better than a baseball
how it fits
in the mitt of the palm

emits its golden glow
from the center where
its pit goes back to earth

to rise again a second birth
returning to the hand
that pitched it

the gold inside the green
offers up its light
and so we down its wisdom

with every blessed bite

[image credit: Ryan Ruppe – Attribution 2.0 Generic- CC BY 2.0 – cropped]

Kirby House Waldorf Slaw

By Eric McHenry

It’s been a rough couple
of decades for us mayonnaise people.
Between its abundances of this and that
—calories, salt, eggy and oily fat—
and its essential off-whiteness it has come to stand,
somehow, for the insidiously bland.

There are needs that no nutrition board can measure.
What’s the recommended daily allowance for pleasure
taken in the familiar? We crave the classic
not because we love its mildly acidic, vaguely basic
flavor-détente but because we remember it so well,
served on our chipware and named for the grand hotel.

[image credit: Nillerdk

Attribution 3.0 Unported – CC BY 3.0 – cropped, changes to contrast/brightness]

The Gods Created Humans from Maize and Other Things I Know About Corn

by Miguel M. Morales

I know the masa of mama’s tamales,
hominy in menudo, and tortillas de maiz.
Corn domesticated us, taught us how to
bend, like its stalk, without breaking, root
ourselves for stability, reach and search for
nurturing light, and use our canopy for shelter.
Crops, like corn, gifted our ancestors with the
ability to nurture families, form community,
develop art and language, and share meals
and story, because they also feed us.

This is what I know about corn.

[image credit: John Doebley – Attribution 2.5 Generic – CC BY 2.5]

Devotional

By Traci Brimhall

I come looking for many of the miracles

I find—the first yellow of April, a redbud

pinking with spring, lichen silvering the

conifer branches. Other graces find me too—

the wind carving its way along the ridge,

stumps of trees licked black by lightning,

even the music of light hail on last year’s

leaves and the hymn of acorn cupules

crunching underfoot. Even before blackbird

nests clutch eggs or bison calve, everything

radiates with life. The indigo only welcomes me

if I hold myself as quiet as a prayer, still as

a heron, let the seeds be touched awake by rain tithing itself to the dirty heaven at my feet.

[image credit: Bureau of Land Management California – Public Domain Mark 1.0 Universal PDM 1.0 – cropped]

Sage

By Dennis Etzel Jr.

This taste of my mother’s worry that
her Thanksgiving stuffing was too savory
when we loved sinking into
the moist breading. In the cupboard
she saved for the holidays
vials of dried blessings while
I still learn from my Master Gardener
spouse the difference between basil’s

sharpness and the comfort of thyme.
I’m that believer from the monastery
of my spouse’s preaching for whole
foods, how bitter notes complement
joy as I pick each leaf’s sacrifice
which survived, like me, November nights.

[image credit: Pussreboots – Attribution 2.0 Generic – CC BY 2.0 – cropped, changes to contrast/brightness]

The Road to Quivira

By Traci Brimhall

Do not fall for it, dear heart. The glimmer

of the horizon is an ending, not a promise

of gilt bells hanging from trees. Do not fall

for the morbid gold of tombs. Do not buy

the myth and wander into the gilded fields

hunting for a lost city. Don’t become the next

Coronado. The road to Quivira is a road made

of bones. Dear heart, you’re a cathedral with a horse

inside it. You are as loyal as any good star. Stop

ignoring the coronas of daisies. The dream

is in front of you. Let yellow tantalize,

but let it be here, where that dream-sick

conquistador found the riches of black earth,

springs as abundant as hope, and plums

that fill your palm sweeter than any bell.

[image credit: Kitty Terwolbeck – Attribution 2.0 Generic CC BY 2.0 – cropped]

Three Meats, One Bowl

By Wanderer

In the pot, they meet—onion, celery, carrot—
a trinity of roots, diced fine,
softening in butter and oil’s quiet warmth,
sweating truth into the stew.
It’s something I always do, the trinity of roots… and truth.
The meats arrive—beef, pork, bison—
each carrying its story, its weight.
One leans heavy with history,
another, wild with untamed roots,
and the third, the bridge, blending borders.
Together, they brown and bloom,
the past made tender over flame.
Cooking, like love, sets your senses ablaze.

[image credit: Jun Seita – Attribution 2.0 Generic – CC BY 2.0 – cropped, changes to contrast/brightness]

When Asked to Write This Poem for a Cookbook

By Melissa Fite Johnson

I chose the hardest dish because I didn’t have to cook it,
only write it. Beef bourguignon, Julia Child’s most famous.
My mother loved Little Golden Books, mommy and daughter
bake a pie for daddy. She wanted us to live this illustration.
When I resisted the kitchen, she said no one would marry me
if I couldn’t cook. I didn’t know how to be myself
and learn this skill, so I didn’t. I imagine Julia Child
beside my computer, complimenting my first draft,
marveling at how poems spring from simple words
the way meals start as ingredients. Julia Child longed for
a child. I wanted a mother who might love me exactly as I am.
Neither of us got our wish, but we both learned the recipe
for a happy life is forgiving. Substitute a child,
substitute a mother, for a passion, for a wonderful marriage.
My husband cooks. I wash the dishes. He fills the house
with the smell of simmering wine. After, I fill it with lavender.

[image credit: Stu Spivack – Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic – CC BY-SA 2.0 – cropped, changes to contrast/brightness]

Bierocks

By Kevin Rabas

When my father had fallen down, not
his body, but his mind, and stayed home
months in his chair and in his bed,
my mother made him bierocks.

The bierocks mom made where like the ones
father ate as a kid, his mother: German,
who could speak it and only made it past
third grade, lived in Luray on the farm.

The bierocks were part cabbage, part meat:
beef, and they were wrapped with the kind
of love someone knows like leavening, like the small
particles that waft in light, like moths,
like angels, like touch. Like love.

[image credit: Nicknbecka – Attribution 2.0 Generic – CC BY 2.0 – cropped, changes to contrast/brightness]

Prairie Ecology

By Traci Brimhall

First, the pink flash of grasshopper wings

makes me think solitude and a prickly pear

in the path guards itself alone, a kaleidoscope

of butterflies puddling on cow pies gives me pause.

I am trying to listen with care, to trust last year’s

hedge apples that seem to say abundance. By the pond

you say, Listen—and I do, as spring peepers plop

into the safety of deeper water. I admire the raw

orange of a lone exposed root in the mud, before

three horses appear sudden as evening shadows

behind us, hooves tamping damp earth. My body

says Be careful, but the tickle I feel is only you reaching

for me so we can both take custody of this memory–

how love is an ecology of awe that takes turns blooming

and feasting and breathless when you touch me.

[image credit: Rawpixel – Attribution 2.0 Generic CC BY 2.0 – cropped]

The Little Chef

By Brian Daldorph

Home alone in his parents’ cold house,
he makes Magic Meatloaf
from a recipe in his Irish grandmother’s
handwritten cookbook of spells,
finding all the ingredients—
garlic, breadcrumbs, spices, salt, ketchup,
ground beef, spuds and sausage–
in his mother’s kitchen.
He cooks for his family so supper will be ready
when they get home to that savory aroma
that will dispel their misery
as they sit together to fill themselves with
the warm goodness of magic meatloaf.
“Eat up,” he’ll say. “Eat up!”
All of them stuffed with meatloaf and love
so they’ll never be hungry again.

[image credit: Fourbyfourblazer – Attribution 2.0 Generic – CC BY 2.0 – cropped]

Smoke Carries the Wish to the Heavens

By Traci Brimhall

Once my mother baked with patience
and a glossary of her sorrows. The frosting
embroidered her wish for a steadier happiness,
the knife alert in her hand, ready to serve
her love on paper plates. My hunger stirs
a dream of cream and flour, delicious as any
of rain’s brief kisses on the garden. Years ago,
I sucked frosting from birthday candles,
their small fires quieting in me. Today, I lick
whipped cream from the beaters, and the sad
songs turn sweet, my body less lonely in
the company of sugar and heat. Sun brightens
the knife as it slides into the cake. My fingers
make the shadows of candles. I close my eyes.
The memory is already my wish.

[image credit: Scott Schiller – Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic – CC BY-SA 2.0 – cropped]

Sweet Things

By Huascar Medina

Every café has a pastry display case diva—a slice of sweet. The star of the show, ogled by a line of patrons, humming a sweet tooth love song. That was us, patiently waiting our turn, sharing timelines of happiness before the daily grind turned us into drive-thru service windows with no bakery views.
Maybe we should slow down, my love? Take a drive to Kechi. Turn off the radio and talk like we’re waiting in a long line and no one’s paying attention. Let’s stop at Elderslie Farm, harvest our fruit, practice intentionality, put in more effort, and make better choices.
Once home, let’s bake together. Play some Chaka Khan or Cleo Sol. Read our recipes out loud. Use words we don’t say enough to each other, like sugar, slowly, generous, gently, careful, and just right.

[image credit: Calmuziclover – Attribution 2.0 Generic – CC BY 2.0 – cropped]

Ad Astra

By Traci Brimhall

The story we tell the future will have windmills
and the quiet clap of cottonwood leaves, annual

festivals and old streams elbowing their way into
fields that many histories ago were shallow seas.

The story will be what we make of it, with our corn
mazes and street corners, dirt roads and art districts,

block parties and community gardens. Our chapters
will be like our seasons­ — reliable in their surprises.

The story we are writing to the future has facts, like how
a sunflower’s face is a union of individual seeds all

leaning towards the sun together. This story grows.
It changes with each day. It’s full of possibilities,

like how, before dawn ripens the horizon, the night
sky dreams one more story for the library of stars.

[image credit: Curtis Palmer – Attribution 2.0 Generic CC BY 2.0 – cropped]

For the Love of Plums

By Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg

The first fruit I loved beyond nourishment
fit my child-sized palm perfectly.
I would seek them out all my life
in the grocery aisle, at the farmer’s market,
from the rare tree where they grow recklessly,
as if they were infinite as stars beyond stars,
in the largely-ignored backyard of a stranger.
Then I’d haul them home or pocket all I could
over both my happy hips, setting them
on the counter to perfect themselves
until it was time to bite into an exact plum,
the first beloved manna from a tree,
what I hope is the last juice on my lips
on the cusp of death. After all,
plums know things beyond what
we could ever taste of this world.

[image credit: elPadawan – Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic – CC BY-SA 2.0 – cropped, changes to contrast/brightness] ]

Dear Tomorrow

By Traci Brimhall

When you come to me, as you always do,

as an anxious loop turning my mind like

a tornado’s hook echo, I take your what if’s

to the prairie. Sometimes I don’t know

if the wings flicking past my knees are

butterflies or grasshoppers. I don’t know

if the almanac calls for good rain and calm

winds for my fluttering heart. And I don’t

know when the vulture, that prairie phoenix,

will resurrect what’s left of the rabbit. But

I know the paths. I know the seasons.

I know you’re coming for me, but now

I’m steady as I walk my circle, singing

to every bird I startle from the grass.

[image credit: James Watkins – Attribution 2.0 Generic CC BY 2.0 – cropped]