Bio of Maureen Tolman Flannery

Maureen Tolman Flannery has grounded her poetics in the various landscapes of her life experience: Wyoming, where she grew up in a sheep-ranching family and has recently returned to rescue and restore two historic log cabins, Mexico, where she became infatuated with the rich complexity of its culture; and Chicago, where she and her husband of 52 years settled to raise their family of three sons and a daughter.

She received a Literary Award from the Illinois Arts Council and was thrice nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Maureen has received multiple awards in Poets and Patrons contests over the years, as well as in the Joanne Hirshfield Memorial Award, WyoPoets and New Millennium Writings contests.

She earned her BA and MA degrees in English Literature from Creighton University, and taught English as a Foreign Language for thirty years. She has been active in end-of-life care and support of home funerals and green burials.

She has published over 500 poems in numerous literary journals and anthologies. Her own volumes of poetry are Following the Cabin Home, Navigating by Expectant Stars, Tunnel Into Morning, Destiny Whispers to the Beloved, Ancestors in the Landscape, Beloved Quietus, Secret of the Rising Up, Remembered into Life, and Snow and Roses, a chapbook about the White Rose resistance in Nazi Germany.

Litany for a Rancher

Bless this man who lies abed
with so much riding on the way he dies,

Bless his riding the range, his bronc riding,
his riding it out, letting it ride,
riding herd on, riding rough-shod over,
and his sometimes riding the fence.

Bless his fence building, fence fixing,
his offense, defense, nonsense and his sensitivity.

Bless his camp tending, crop tending, pretending,
his tenderness tending sick lambs at night,
his tending to park at the Ten Sleep bar,
his being wrong and his being right.

Bless his bull breeding, bull-shitting, bull-dogging,
his shooting the bull and his humble going home.

Bless his fishing, hunting, dogging the timber,
sheep dog training, curses blaring, pups birthing,
nursing into dog days of his doggedly caring for sheep.
Bless his lambing, docking, shearing,

his mouthing out, his dressing out,
and his being out of time.

Bless all that husbanding
and the wife a lifetime at his side.
Bless his siring five to carry on the line.

Bless their dancing at the Wagon Wheel,
his sheep wagon, covered wagon leading the train,

his being on the wagon
and the wagging tails of his well trained dogs.
Bless his logging and cabin building,
the muddy cab of his pickup truck,

his wethers, ewes, his bucks, his cussing and his cussedness,
his luck and his being down on it.

After tending his land and tending to land on his feet,
bless his recent forgetting, falling, recalling,
calling out in the night,
his victories, feats, defeats.

Bless his wink for the nurse’s assistant,
his cursed insistency on peeing in the sink

Bless his branding cattle, branding sheep,
rounding and rounding up,
rough riding, rodeo riding,
riding high, riding west into the sunset.

Bless him.

Bio of Judith Tullis

Judith Tullis is the Treasurer of the Illinois State Poetry Society, Secretary of Poets & Patrons of Chicago, and is active in several other groups of poets and writers. Her many poems can be found online and in print. She lives in a small house with a large garden where poetry often happens.

Mules

Sure-footed Conchita
descends the mountain,
patient under pressure,
her back bowed
by hundred pound bags
of fragrant coffee beans
hand-picked by Juan Valdez.

Dark-eyed Manuela
avoids uniformed men,
boards a plane,
her stomach full
of cocaine condoms.
The job sustains her family,
destroys others.

Females,
placid or desperate,
beasts of burden
for Columbian exports
to satisfy the world’s appetites.

Kabul Dead End

A woman stands alone
covered head turned
to a crumbling wall
shoulders hunched
protecting a secret.
She takes something
from a drab cloth bag
maybe a cell phone
for a forbidden call
or a knife
weapon of honor
in defense or revenge
or, even more dangerous,
a book of poetry.

Soap Opera

Because the god of plumbing
had an argument with the god
of laundry appliances,
I met the morning with a mop
instead of hazelnut espresso.

Because of caffeine deficiency
and a wet floor, I shuffled
out the kitchen door, old clothesline
atop a basket of soggy clothes braced
on my right hip, weighty as the world,
oceans spilling down my leg
filling my shoe.

But isn’t it something to have shoes,
and the clean water is a bonus,
an entitlement taken for granted
in my kitchen where I sip coffee
and watch my boys’ bodiless
baseball uniforms run in the wind
stealing every base to home plate.