What Happened on the Way to Work the Week my Car
Was in the Shop
I heard a moan so like a glacier
giving way or metal twisted
beyond its tolerance
I couldn't be sure
the passenger before me made the sound. I started
up from I, Claudius
to a pair of eyes magnified to eggs
by heavy glasses, and the face
kept right on swinging
another twenty degrees
until the eyes faced out the window.
Her bulging faux-fur coat
was held in check by a lattice
of brown vinyl straps,
something from the Montgomery Ward
Visigoth Collection.
There were a few more moans at irregular
intervals, but her jaw never moved,
not a muscle twitched. The sounds
manifested themselves
in the bus's heated air like the trumpeting
of a moose, an alien racket
seeming at once near
and distant as
in a field of snow.
Nobody's better
at disregarding than bus passengers —
they (including the woman
in the faux-fur coat) acted like nothing
was happening. I got off at my stop
and started up the street
between two graveyards.
There was nobody there
except the headstones,
one of them heart-shaped,
a valentine of death.
When the sun rose,
it turned out
there were three thousand crows
waiting for it,
standing, calm in the cemetery grass.
— Daniel Spees ’96
Spees teaches English at Hutchinson, Kan., Community College. His poems have appeared in many journals, including The Midwest Quarterly, The Mid-America Poetry Review, Mississippi Mud, Thorny Locust and Blueline. A chapbook, Michelangelo's Snowman, was published by Oil Hill Press in 2006. A volume of his poems, Asleep in the Orchard Grass, is forthcoming from Woodley Press.
Hits the Fan Series
mixed media
Diane Lincoln ’77
Artist and educator Diane Lincoln '77 has created a series of mixed media works on folding fans including, from the top, “Freda,” “Child of the Universe” and “Our Lady.”
An assistant professor of art and design at WSU, she has a broad array of artistic endeavors and achievements to her credit —starting with her first work of art at the age of 5, a painting of a dark green jungle with yellow butterflies.
Ron Christ, WSU art professor, has described Lincoln’s adult works of art as successful blends of “the realms of the aesthetic, the physical and the spiritual with a range of topics from the most intimate reflections on the personal self, to individual and universal commentaries on broader cultural and historical events.”
Among the topics Lincoln has explored as both artist and educator are the Holocaust, the breakup of the former Yugoslavia and the withering of Kansas’ spiritual and cultural heritage.
Winter Field
watercolor
Oscar Larmer ’55
Oscar Larmer’s landscape imagery graces many public and private collections. The artworks of this retired Kansas State art professor have been showcased in 41 one-man shows and been accepted in more than 100 national and regional juried or invitational exhibitions over the course of his career.
