#it's a poem about living in kansas and missing the ocean

[ruffboijuliaburnsides]

love letter from lebanon

i've been searching for a reason to decry this landlocked mountainless place that has not seen the sea since the Cretaceous

I opened a door in El Dorado out back the oil museum looking for a gold that doesn't poison there was nothing but weathered buildings and wind in the trees a never-lived-in boom town as halcyon history

the Arkansas rushes past my feet down south in the places we took from the raccoon-eyed people and named after them as if that was suitable repayment this is not a place of honor no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here

i think walking through potato fields in the morning fog that this is a place of misunderstanding of misappropriating of mispronouncing and i feel justified in my targeted misanthropy but then i think it's not that simple it never is

i've found no golden cities my eyes were never masked i've harvested no crops i sit in a chapel marked by gods i don't believe in, and i am as far from the ocean that roars in my veins as it is possible to be

but the injustice did not start here or end nothing of the dishonor is unique to this place i am not better for being born of the sand and the sea i would not be worse if i'd been born of the prairie

i still haven't found a reason when the wind rides the prairie grasses the ocean finds me even here