My poem “Cornfield, Lighthouse, Man” was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize.  It was originally published in the twelfth issue of Riggwelter.  Here is the full version:

Cornfield, Lighthouse, Man

Somewhere in the soul of Iowa
there is a cornfield that sways
on and on like a slow ocean,
and in the middle of that field,
in the breaths before a storm,
a man who builds a stone lighthouse.

His neighbors the farm over
say he went crazy
the day his wife left him
ten years ago
during a lightning storm.

It matters little now the how
or why it happened.
She could have just as easily
died from a heart attack
coming home from the grocery store.

A man with no purpose,
a man with no spring, no
planting, no water,
no empty autumn husks,
a man adrift without a tether.

He stands out in the freezing mist,
a keeper of corn and rain,
and rock by rock,
he builds a beacon to the sky,
a lantern in the fog for coming back.

The genesis of this poem–driving past a cornfield near Des Moines and imagining a cornfield as an ocean.  Then wondering–how does a person find their way?