The blue notes spiraling up from the transistor radio
tuned to WNOE, New Orleans, lifted me out of bed
in Seward County, Kansas, where the plains wind riffed
telephone wire in tones less strange than the bird songs
of Charlie Parker.
—B.H. Fairchild, Hearing Parker for the First Time

What a thrill it was to read my first Fairchild poem, Angels.  By the time I got to the second line “hauling a load of Herefords from Hogtown to Guymon” I was hooked.  He knew the world I grew up in, from the maize fields to Highway 54.