Extraordinary Sunshine Weaver

I’m grateful to Jason Ryberg, the Editor-In-Chief at Spartan Press, and Editor Sharon SingingMoon for inviting me and other Missouri poets to submit 10 poems each. I’m honored to be included with the other poets in this anthology.

Poets in Rough-Cut Elegies: An Anthology of Missouri Poets

1. Aurora Athelyn
2. T. James Chapman
3. Ben Kuzemka
4. Nancy Jo Allen
5. Walter Bargen
6. Terry Allen
7. Barbara Harris Leonhard
8. Lynne Jensen Lampe
9. Elijah Burrell
10. Anand Prahlad

Click Here to Order the Anthology

Two of My Poems in This Anthology

The Lost Child

I search for my embryonic dream, 
lost too soon. Unable to hold on 
in my misshaped womb.

A wolf leads me into a cave,
where I meet—Mark Twain! 
He’s dressed in white.
Has silver hair, like mine.

He regales me with his tales 
of roughing it on the Big Muddy
as a steamboat pilot.

Though I love my walks and drives
along the Big Muddy, I know nothing
of the adventures and dangers 
of reading rivers for safe voyages.

I stumbled into this cave 
searching for help to find
my lost child.

He shares the loss of a brother, Henry, 
to a steamboat boiler explosion.
He feels guilty about Henry’s death,
failing to heed the warning in a dream.

I too have six siblings, not one gone—
except for the baby Mom lost as a teen. 
A secret pregnancy. A tiny soul 
who could have been an older sister.

Twain mourns his son, Langdon, taken
by diphtheria at 19 months
during a sorrowful and pathetic, 
brief sojourn in Buffalo.

I still miss the little one I lost too soon 
to be named and nurtured. It was
an abrupt ending to a dream. 

He says that I do know the river.
Our lives share snags. We’re strong vessels, 
navigating tough currents, root wads, and rocks 
that can tear our insides out. 

Nothing that grieves us, he says, 
can be called little.


The Found Poems of Amelia Earhart 

Inspired by Traci Brimhall, “On Lost Lyric Poetry of Amelia Earhart: A Missing Pilot 
and Her Poems” (Literary Hub via New England Review, 02/01/2020)

Putnam guarded Amelia’s lines
on death and desire
scribbled on envelopes
hidden in notebooks
No dates or context clues
Private flights of fancy
charred by a house fire
Metaphors jotted on pink notes, tiny sunsets
over a gray sea of scribbled graphite
Lyrics on women and beauty — images
splintered while plummeting
from the clouds, artifacts 
half-buried in sand
somewhere

“The Found Poems of Amelia Earhart”  first appeared in The Gorko Gazette.