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Aug 15, 2026
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It Takes More Than Six Transfers To Reach Guymon, Oklahoma From Breton Woods By Bus
(after Elizabeth Bishop)
A Sunday morning chasing past Guymon,
west, a plume of blue-gray exhaust
follows like a stray dog. The bow
of a ship would plow through the waves,
but the flat nose of the bus has to ride
the swells, up then down.
Out here, there's no white-clad steeple
to disturb the barren landscape.
More nothing arrives as the bus rolls past
flat forests of scrub blackjack oak.
Mesquite trees fill holes between the oaks,
creating a maze of sage and rough dark bark
that's impossible to penetrate unless born
with armadillo blood.
A dust covered old man sits near the front.
A young, dark skinned sleeper in jeans nods
on the middle right. Near the back bench,
a fellow with a yellow shirt and sunglasses
on his head is snapping photos out the window.
There’s a trail no longer a trail that leads
to the horizon and past, and the wisp could be
smoke, and there could be an adobe cabin.
A pioneer woman is rendering fat. She’s thin
but stout, fierce brown hair pinned in a bun.
Her husband is stirring up dust behind a mule
that limps. Two children scrub shirts in a tub
and splash each other with lie soap water.
The air brakes whine. The dusty old man
climbs down and steps into different colored dust,
digs in the beast's belly for his luggage, and sits
on a suitcase tied with cord. The next bus
will be by in 4 hours, then it's 4 more hours
to Taos, situated in the foothills
of the Sangre de Cristo mountains, where it's been
for a thousand years. The bus waits for a lone car
to pass. The picture taker snaps another.
— W. Barrett Munn, Aug 15, 2026
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About This Poem
Style/Type: Free verse
Review Request Intensity: I want the raw truth, feel free to knock me on my back
Editing Stage: Final polish
Critiques
neopoet
21 hours 26 min ago
Neopoet AI [2026-06]
The below is a computer-generated response from Neo, Neopoet’s AI:
The poem's strongest moments come from its grounded, particular observations — the exhaust plume trailing like a stray dog, the old man sitting on a cord-tied suitcase waiting four hours for the next connection, the picture taker who reappears at the close to quietly anchor the ending. The ship-and-swells conceit for the bus riding Oklahoma's flat terrain is genuinely surprising, and "different colored dust" earns its place as a small, exact detail. The phantom pioneer family in the fourth stanza is an interesting tonal gamble, and the spare, matter-of-fact way they're introduced — as if glimpsed through the smoke — partially works. However, the section risks feeling like a separate poem inserted into this one, because the transition in and out of the vision is handled too quickly; a single bridging line, something that ties the wisp of smoke more concretely to the act of looking out the bus window, would help the reader move in and out of the imagined past more smoothly.
The line "a prairie life irretrievable" is the one moment where the poem tells rather than shows what it has otherwise been demonstrating all along, and it slightly deflates the stanza that contains it. The same impulse appears in "It's a lonesome business traveling through country where no one wants to be" — the observation is true to the landscape, but by this point the poem has already made the loneliness felt without naming it. Cutting or softening those two explanatory gestures would let the accumulated imagery carry the weight it has already earned. The closing image of the picture taker snapping another photo lands well as written, and the poem would benefit from trusting that quiet exit to do the thematic work without the preceding editorializing.
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Sid
12 hours 8 min ago
I agree with what neo said…
I agree with what neo said and I felt within me the power you hold in you. It flowed through the strong imagery your words provoked.
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