Today I received my contributor’s copy of the September 2023 I-70 Review. This Kansas City based journal, edited by Greg Field, Gary Lechliter, and my friend Maryfrances Wagner, is a handsome thick tome with a plum cover featuring Dixie Salazar’s mixed media extrapolation on Van Gogh’s “Starry Night.” Inside is a wide selection of poems including those from many folks I know, such as Walter Bargen, Mary Gilliland, Ken Hada, Ted Kooser, Denise Low, Al Ortolani, and Tyler Sheldon. I’m honored to have therein a partly true poem about my birth in a hospital overlooking the Kansas City train yards and my father’s paper route and wild marijuana growing on the banks of the Kansas River, and of course I had to work in Charlie Parker busting the charts on “Salt Peanuts” and “Hot House.”