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Kevin Grauke
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the poet
With work in The Threepenny Review, The Southern Review, StoryQuarterly, Fiction, and Quarterly West, Kevin Grauke is the author of short story collection Shadows of Men. He's also the winner of the Steven Turner Award from the Texas Institute of Letters. Kevin teaches at La Salle University, and lives in Philadelphia. His next collection, Bullies & Cowards, arrives in 2026 from Cornerstone Press.
the poems
The Secret of Tornadoes
Tornadoes, I knew at age four, were dragons
spun to furious life from sickly spring skies.
Watch meant be careful. Warning meant hide.
Born in the Alley’s south, I learned this quick.
Let’s make a fort in the tub! Mommy once shouted
much too loudly, wrestling a mattress past the toilet.
Houses could become like weeds pulled up and flung.
Cradles landed in trees, sometimes still with babies.
But then an older girl, already in school, told me
the secret: Touch the sidewalk, honey. If it’s warm,
one’s coming. A whisper—wisdom meant only for me.
Honored, I stayed quiet. Pretending to tie a shoe I couldn’t
yet knot, I pressed my palms to the sun-shot sidewalk,
dirtying them in the unicorn dust of her hopscotch chalk.
Frightened but grateful, I flew home fast to warn Mommy,
my pink hands aflame with a May day’s false prophecy.
Ant
I hope to capture this moment exactly, how
the late afternoon sun on this sixth day of May
is shining now on this journal page so perfectly,
casting a shadow of my pen that looks like nothing
if not a hummingbird darting its bill into and out of
the flower of yet another attempt at something good.
Soon, the sun’s gold will sink below the trees,
but for now it holds steady, content to give me
a little more time to try to capture its likeness.
Onto the glare of this still empty page an ant wanders.
Nothing more than a dark speck, it meanders about,
a mobile period in search of a true sentence to end.
I watch it move from here to there and there to there
until it finally disappears over the edge, headed elsewhere,
but not before leaving me a path to follow with the words
of this very poem, now finished and named in its honor.
First Lesson
Two houses down, a young man, a little girl, and a bicycle.
Behind them, in the grass, training wheels tossed aside.
Way down and far back, I feel both dad’s stooped patience
and the mettle of his daughter’s courage. But what I feel most:
the unspoken swirl of their fears—of spills and scrapes,
of tears and pain. And it’s almost a more aching beauty,
even as clumsy and raw as it is, than I, remembering
my own once-tiny girl now grown, can bear on my own.
I watch him, the father, so proud, how he claps and shouts
while jogging alongside as close as he can manage
without jostling an arm or handlebar. He sends out
so much encouragement: Go! You’re doing it! Keep pedalling!
When the inevitable comes, it’s no surprise. It is, after all,
inevitable. The front wheel wobbles, turns too much
to the left, to the right, to the left again. The end then happens
so slowly—the flailing, the toppling, the falling over—
almost if it were taking place in a series of stages
(Duchamp’s bicycle descending the stairs) as she moves
from upright to tilted to tilted still more to crashed to now
splayed on the sidewalk like the insides of a dropped egg.
Not unlike a hand-cranked siren from days even before my own,
the two wheels spin two cries into the neighborhood silence:
one the girl’s, one the father’s. Together, they braid a thin rope
that each hopes the other will snatch to save the day’s grace.
It swings between them, back and forth, then stops. Each is so certain
they’ve let the other down. Except for the crickets, it’s silent now.
She’ll learn, of course, and he will have taught her. Of this I’m sure.
For now, though, failure. But in memory this will glow like treasure.
Publishing credits
The Secret of Tornadoes: The Minnesota Review (Issue 101)
Ant: Alabama Literary Review (Vol. 32)
First Lesson: Poet Lore (Vol. 118)