The Things I Don't Know About Nebraska
The things I don't know about the state of Nebraska are deep enough to fill a box with pages of discarded poems, meandering and more winding than the Platte River running through the Plains
but when wandering the maps, running fingers over the flat lands of corn country, what I wonder most: who carved out the corner and gave the empty container to Colorado, and why?
In my mind, I imagine scenes of resistance, the fight of it, the proud Nebraskans waving pitchforks and rifles at these greedy neighbors, the grabby ones who carved up the land in spite of it
or I see incompetent bureaucrats, unable to discern lines through wind and water, and calling it a day before the day could even begin, checkmarks in the box, filed away with right, angles, wrong
and it's been said, so I've read, how some of those who live in the northern panhandle today like to dip toes on the border lines one way, to call it the West, and others, the other way, to call it Midwest,
while the most Nebraskans of all just carry on, finding strength in the solitude and in silence of their beloved land, bordered only by its beauty, calling it ... home