Robert Daseler’s full-length plays Dragon Lady and Alekhine’s Defense have been staged by South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, California. The University of Evansville published a collection of his sonnets, Levering Avenue, and his essays, short stories, and poems have appeared in numerous journals. (“A Crop Duster” first appeared in Poem.) Daseler writes: "I wrote ‘A Crop Duster’ prior to 2009, when I moved to Paris for a year. Before that I had been working at the state library in Sacramento and commuting back and forth from Davis, which is about fifteen miles west of the state capital. The highway between Davis and Sacramento runs over a causeway that crosses a large flood plain, which is mostly farmland, and it is possible most months of the year to see crop dusters swinging back and forth over the fields of grain. It's actually a lovely sight ... The crop dusters were almost all bi-planes, not so much different from those that flew over France during the Great War. I suppose bi-planes are easier to handle at comparatively show speeds, and they are probably more maneuverable, too. Once, while driving with my sons in the vicinity of Gilroy--this would have been circa 1999—we stopped, when, out of the west came a propellor-driven airplane that, as we watched, began to climb precipitately, straight up. At the peak of its climb, it suddenly stopped, and then it fell, rolling wing over wing. We thought that it would crash nearby, but, seemingly just a few feet from the ground, it pulled out of its hapless fall and climbed again. It did this two or three times, much to our amazement, and then it flew back to San Jose, or wherever it had come from."

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