Distributed for CavanKerry Press
Requiem in Wide-Open Minor
This fresh and plainspoken collection of poetry blends lyric and narrative, dream and memory, while grappling with the loss of people and places.
In Requiem in Wide-Open Minor, Justin Hunt grapples with the death of his adult son and the loss of his Kansas childhood—a rural way of life that vanished long ago but pulses yet in the deepest part of him. These are poems of remembrance and longing, of prairies and grain elevators and souls departed, of dreams about a son now gone, of marriage and of a wife who shares in the poet’s discovery of everyday beauty even as they face their own mortality. Here, then, an elegy for a beloved son, a hymn to the Southern Plains and its people, a testament to resilience.
Table of Contents
I
Driving
Afternoon on Slate Creek
From an Old Sky, Murmurs
Cotton Rats
If I Could Trace Again the Honed, Flat-End Blade
Aurora Borealis
Terry, 1950 – 1970
On the Way Back to Town
The Fire God
Slags of Cloud, a Cold Wind
II
49 Imprint
We Were Seventeen
Night Walk
The Summer We Left
June, 1969
Upon Learning of Your Death, I Peer into the Wrong End of a Telescope
How Time Works on the Southern Plains
Quitting Kansas
Somewhere South of Coldwater
It’s Okay, Dad
III
Armageddon 3 AM: On My Pillow’s Cratered Plain
The Winter of Your Flu
Who Looks for You
Remember
Every Day, I Think of Those Years
Elegy at Ebbtide
Night After Night, the Flicker of TVs from Neighbor’s Windows
If I Get Alzheimer’s: Instructions for My Wife
4 AM, at the Bay Window We Never Had
Today We Hauled Your Toys from the Attic
Walking at Dusk
IV
The Way It Is Here
Red
Waty Watson, Railroad Engineer
While Dreaming of Our Old House, I Speak to My Wife
My Massage Therapist Says She Hears Trains Inside Me
My Mother, My Father
At the Missouri Pacific Depot, Where, in 1931, You Holed Up
for Three Days and Drank
You’ve Turned into My Backyard Table, Daddy
Sometime Before I Wake, Oliver Price Swings By in His Turquoise
and White Pickup
Why I Flinch at the Thought of Daylight Squandered
Of Light and Time
Still Quitting Kansas
Trek
V
The Only Holy
Oblivion
In Vienna’s Stadtpark
When I Noticed, at Last
Sundown at Huntington
On Nights Like This
Prayer from a 1952 Chevy Suburban
Knife and Salt
The Odds Are Against You and Me
A Quarter North
Requiem in Wide-Open Minor
Nocturne
Acknowledgments