Kathryn Kysar is the author of two books of poetry, Dark Lake and Pretend the World, and she edited the anthology Riding Shotgun: Women Write About Their Mothers. Her flash creative nonfiction has recently been published in The Mollyhouse, Slag Glass City, and Sleet. She performs with the Sonoglyph Collective, an improvisational poetry/jazz group, and can be found on Twitter @darklake.
When my mother was a girl during the Depression, the circus rolled into her prairie town on slow trains, then set up on the fairgrounds at the edge of town. She loved the big tent, the smell of sawdust. My circus? At the cement civic center downtown. I was not captivated by the clown cars, the balloons, the woman riding… Read more →