From River and Rust’s Afterword:

Allen County is a drive through area in a flyover state.  Lima, its county seat, is a town with body image issues. It thinks it is bigger than it really is. And despite its small-town size, about 35,000 residents, Lima considers itself a city, with all the benefits and drawbacks that implies. I lived for five years in Van Wert, Ohio (a truly small town with no aspirations to be a city) and I lived in Toledo for about nine years, so I know the difference between a city and a small town. Lima is neither. 

When I walk through the older parts of town, I see echoes of the elegance of the 1880s oil boom that built Lima. I can see the movie palace that is being revived as a theatre, and the new coffeehouses and a couple of upscale-for-Lima restaurants. There’s the Veteran’s Memorial Civic Center, where I’ve seen plays and symphonies, musicians and speakers, and Encore Theatre, where I’ve watched friends and family onstage.  Lima offers a variety of cultural experiences. 

Yet those of us who identify as “creative” often feel a geography-fueled imposter syndrome. Our bar bands aren’t on the verge of headlining a stadium tour; our symphony doesn’t do soundtracks for blockbuster movies. Bob Dylan didn’t leave Hibbing, Minnesota to make it big in Lima, and after spending one night here generations ago, Lenny Bruce used Lima as a punch line. No mountain vistas inspire us; no massive waves crashing on shorelines punctuate the rhythm of our days. We are acutely aware that we are not enveloped in the same petrie dish that spawns “real poets, writers, and artists.”  

We ignore that Ohio has been home to Mary Oliver, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Nikki Giovanni, Toni Morrison, Zane Grey, and James Thurber. We don’t realize that poet Maggie Smith, who is currently on the New York Times bestseller list, can be seen grocery shopping in Columbus—as can guitarist Eric Clapton, at times, since one of his homes is in Columbus. Sci-fi writer John Sclazi lives in Ohio, as did Andre Norton and R.L. Stine. Ohio may be a fly over state, but in terms of the arts, it’s a powerhouse.

But deep down, I still find it a bit amusing, a bit pretentious, that Lima has a poet laureate. Why does Lima think it’s worthy of bestowing such a title on someone?  

Here’s why: creating art matters. Experiencing the joy, horror, uncertainty, sublimeness, grossness of being here, of being alive, is what everyone is doing, regardless of whether we stop at a bodega before we hop on the subway or we wait twenty minutes in our gas-powered car to get a Kewpee hamburger at the drive-thru. We’re just people, and no glossy veneer of culture changes that. As Ram Dass said, we’re walking each other home. Poetry, like all art, is part of that journey, and we’re in this together.

I’m proud of this collection. It’s a cross section of Allen County: These pages represent the paradoxical nature of Lima: college professors, street poets, people who left to build lives in big cities, people who came back after years away. This collection represents people of various races and ages, of different educational and socioeconomic backgrounds. Their link is that at some point in their lives, they called Allen County home.

There’s one fact—one belief—about Lima that probably says more about us than any other. We have a chemical plant, an oil refinery and a tank plant. We have had those since my dad was young. Because of those industries, we’re number three on the list of places to bomb if there’s a nuclear war. That was a universally accepted article of faith in Lima while I was growing up. We used to believe the Russians would attack Lima to bring America to its knees; now it’s Middle Eastern terrorists. On 9/11, while the rubble was still settling at New York and the Pentagon, the schools in Lima went on lock down because the superintendent said that “the authorities” believed Lima could be the next target. Everyone I’ve ever met from outside of Lima is baffled, truly astonished by this belief. And everyone I’ve ever met who was born and raised here takes it as an article of faith equal to anything found in the Bible or the Declaration of Independence.

“I was born in a small town”—that John Cougar Mellencamp song resonates with me. Lima doesn’t know it’s a small town though; any town that ranks as the third target in the US is way too important to be a small town. Even though the logical part of me knows Russia never knew Lima existed, and the Taliban isn’t trying to infiltrate the tank plant, there’s a part of me, the forever-ten-year old voice whispering at three a.m., that believes that during the depths of the Cold War, little boys with names like Vladamir and Leo played war with their three inch high plastic red soldiers, aiming their teeny bombs at Lima, chortling, “Ya, ve vill take over the world vonce ve rid ourselves of Lima!” It wouldn’t surprise me one bit, you know. That’s the type of town Lima is.

Jeannine Jordan

Lima, Ohio

October 2023