Jeff McMillian lives in St. Joseph, MO with his wife and two sons.
Jeff is HR Manager for Northwest Pipe Company in Atchison, KS, with Training & Development responsibilities throughout the U.S. Jeff is also an Adjunct Instructor at Missouri Western State University, where he graduated with a B.A. English Literature. Jeff received his MFA from Bowling Green State University.
 

Young people who would write well should read, read, read. Couple that need to speak with a need to hear what others have said and how they have said it. How they have said it. Love the language, and at least learn from it when it turns into something ungainly. Then lay it out there and write, write, write.

This picture is of Jeff McMillian (background) helping son,
Cole (foreground) with a service project. Cole's hardworking friends are also pictured to the left.
 

    I arrive and wake John nicely, we hug,
    because a ladder bashing
    the bedroom wall is no way
    to meet the day when one
    has retired to a living
    history of writing and talking.

    Talking on the deck before work
    begins brings back the summer
    when Roger and I learned to build
    something beautiful and strong
    from red cedar and personal pain
    which Roger may sometimes swim
    through still.  Unmoving
    now, it holds weight well,
    but John wants me to replace
    a handrail where a knot
    is rotting from within, and
    I power wash moss and faded
    stain.  I’ll have to polish the brass.

    I brag that 13 years hasn’t
    blistered the paint, only sunlight
    and water have faded the hue.
    Maybe I’ve lived up to John’s
    lessons on Zen & motorcycle maintenance.
    And of course on the ladder
    dreaming of poetry I’m on the mast
    but I do not fall.
    We do not fall.
    Or at least the sea becomes the arms
    of loved ones waking us mildly.
    If my job is too much in the mind,
    but yet still shackles the mind
    like a monomaniacal sailor
    signed on for a tedious journey,
    then how is it that painting is free
    of mind and absolutely creative
    as the mast becomes Eden while
    my arm goes up and down gesturing
    to a summer sun that marks us
    for what we are: golden.

    Sitting on the swing with Kelly’s name
    on the brass in the place where I hung it,
    John understands the fundamental laws
    and the secret names of work, and
    therein has power over it (times two in retirement!).
    I doubt the swing can weather another
    decade, but the brass will, and clay
    masks which litter the lawn and living room will,
    and I will mostly, and this place will mostly,
    and John will mostly -- though he’s been
    to Meirhoffer’s to settle his final plans.

    After a funeral on some summer
    afternoon in St. Joseph, hopefully
    a work day, John will be buried
    at a family cemetery in Bumfuck Iowa
    next to Larry where butterfly bushes
    wake no one, but sway like sails.
    And the rest of our friends will survive
    or flourish mostly.  Scott and Hans
    and Kelly and Roger and Dooley and everyone
    whose poems are paint that does not fade.

    Even after falling we do not
    really fall if the words we’ve lived
    by still frame this town we
    call our own, whether in body
    or spirit, even if the Bachelor
    Buttons should not mean, but be.
    13 years after, and 13 years after.
    Not a summer passes without its history
    of talking, but these have been
    our own, and it is not meaningless,
    though minds come to nothing
    dwelling on it: a deck, a mask,
    a house in need of paint.