The cat knows—
has staked out 
all the best hot-
air vents, lies 
in his own dry sauna, 
dreams that he 
traverses warm 
Mediterranean 
shores, basks in 
his own leveche, 
his own sirocco, 
his own xaloc, 
the furnace-wind ruffling 
his long stomach hair 
like a Berber’s tunic, 
that he smells savory 
ahriche of sheep, crusty 
pastilla of squab. His 
stomach rumbles. 
Winter drifts on, 
outside his notice.

Roy Beckemeyer’s

latest poetry collection is Mouth Brimming Over (Blue Cedar Press, 2019). Stage Whispers (Meadowlark Books, 2018) won the 2019 Nelson Poetry Book Award. Amanuensis Angel (Spartan Press, 2018) comprises ekphrastic poems inspired by modern artists’ depictions of angels. His first book, Music I Once Could Dance To (Coal City Press, 2014), was a 2015 Kansas Notable Book. He recently co-edited (with Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg) Kansas Time+Place: An Anthology of Heartland Poetry (Little Balkans Press, 2017). His poetry has been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net awards, and was selected for The Best Small Fictions 2019.

Beckemeyer serves on the editorial boards of Konza Journal and River City Poetry. A retired engineer and scientific journal editor, he is also a nature photographer who, in his spare time, researches the mechanics of insect flight and the Paleozoic insect fauna of Kansas, Oklahoma, and Alabama. He lives in Wichita, Kansas, where he and his wife celebrated their 58th anniversary last year.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Featured Artist in KYSO Flash (Issue 12, Summer 2019); featuring Beckemeyer’s poetry, prose poetry, and insect photography

⚡ Legacy’s Sunset, a climate-crisis photo-poem in KYSO Flash (Issue 12, Summer 2019)

⚡ Words for Snow, a prose poem in KYSO Flash (Issue 9, Spring 2018), and selected for reprinting in The Best Small Fictions 2019