The Midwest Quarterly, out of Pittsburgh, Kansas, had rejected 16 batches of my poems going back to 2005. Yesterday, editor Lori Martin accepted two poems, “Storm” (about a shell-shocked Iraq war veteran during a thunderstorm) and “Insomniac’s Lullaby,” a disguised pantoum, for an upcoming issue. Missourians are supposed to be stubborn, but Kansas-born poets also can be hard to discourage.