Sophie Klahr is a poet, teacher, and editor. Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Poetry London, and elsewhere. Her poetry collection Two Open Doors in a Field was published by the Backwaters Press in March of 2023.

Today is Poetry at Work Day. Take the extra time today to admire the poetic in the mundanity and carve out space for creativity. On Sophie Klahr’s various looped road trips from Nebraska to California she did just that with her collection Two Open Doors in a Field.  

With these two poems as your map, join Klahr on a road trip bound by the radio and the soul as she reflects on driving thousands of miles alone, letting the landscape and music transform each other into a love letter for home.

---

Driving Through Nebraska, Listening to the Radio

Dawn on 101.5, The Fever:
Sometimes you’re gonna have to lose, it sings.
Mice behind the lath, swallows in the eaves;
a rush of bergamot, wild sage drying
on the sill, boots already wet from dew.
The branches of a huge burn pile lift like
still-submerged coral. That old dream again:
the dream again  of the house that isn’t.
Why don’t you admit, you said, that all roads
  lead to Nebraska. In the time we spent
together, somewhere, a few languages
died. When you said  It will always be un-
  even between us, I heard a new word
for a field  impossible to measure

---

Parked, Nebraska

---

For more award-winning poetry, check out other titles from the Backwaters Press.