Discovery

Jan Seale

June 19, 2022

I love finding a poem I’ve written, then 

committed to short-term memory loss,

thanks to the medial temporal lobe.

It’s there like a single earring, the mate 

saved on the promise that someday

a glint will show up at rug’s edge

and the two be reunited. Or like 

finding a friend’s letter dropped down 

under the mailbox, caught among 

little flowers, still with juicy details 

though the past is indeed over.

Be careful when finding a poem:

Avoid disgust, scowling, tut-tuts, blaming  

certain words, which of course can later 

be deftly exchanged for others. No hasty 

discard of an idea feared masquerading 

as original thought, which of course 

can later find its way home to its creator.

The subject itself: an amaryllis?

a neighbor’s dog? love unrequited? 

the violence of red? sunlight? 

blunder of the entire wide world?

Think how the poem desires to rise up,

to greet your editing pen. 

Receive it as a newborn baby, kissing

it all over, baptizing it, beginning

with only thanks for serendipity 

or happenstance, or both.

Jan Seale is a lifelong Texan. She is the Poet Laureate of Texas for 2012. She belongs to the Texas Folklore Society, the Poetry Society of Texas, the Texas Association of Creative Writing Teachers, and the Texas Institute of Letters.

Flying On Instruments

Walter Bargen

May 25, 2022

In the flashlight’s beam, he follows the frantic

Flutter of a dusty brown bird up and down

The shed’s cobwebbed window, leaving dusk

Streaked with dust and stars. This bird, perhaps

A phoebe, tries desperately to fly deeper into

Night’s glittering glass as he approaches and fails

At rescue before grabbing it with one hand

Rather than scooping with two.  He is surprised

By its weight, or lack of weight, and feels

Uncertain how light to hold a handful of air.

He steps from the door into the dark

And he almost doesn’t notice his empty hands.

Walter Bargen has published 25 books of poetry, including My Other Mother’s Red Mercedes (Lamar University Press, 2018), Until Next Time (Singing Bone Press, 2019), Pole Dancing in the Night Club of God (Red Mountain Press, 2020), and You Wounded Miracle, (Liliom Verlag, 2021). He was appointed the first poet laureate of Missouri (2008-2009).  

At the Poem’s Insistence

Milton Jordan

May 17, 2022

Are you going to claim I am your poem,

your words scattered and sown with meaning

but little else until I plowed your line,

reset the fence posts of your margin 

and the standard to fly your flag ?

Did you imagine the color, rust reds

among the dusted bronze on autumn’s trees

along the near dry riverbed and distant

sounds of oversized truck tires on asphalt?

Are these your young boys on bicycles

followed by three rangy liver and white hounds

down the grit and gravel road celebrating

another afternoon free of their schoolroom?

Who are you to claim I am your poem?

Milton Jordan lives in Georgetown with the musician Anne Elton Jordan. His most recent poetry collection is What the Rivers Gather, SFASU Press, 2020. Milton edited the anthology, No Season for Silence: Texas Poets and Pandemic, Kallisto Gaia Press, 2020.

Bird on the Fence

Suzanne Morris

March 27, 2022

This is no ordinary bird–  

like a bright red cardinal

beaming down from the sky

or a great winged titan

wheeling on high– 

the bird that lands on the fence

next to the parking lot

where I’m waiting in the car

for a takeout lunch after

reading a poem I wrote

at a funeral.

The bird’s feathers are

dun-colored

slightly darker on the

head and tail,

dingy and matted as if it hasn’t

taken a dip in a birdbath lately.

An outcast of the bird family,

no doubt, a mongrel 

abandoned to

fend for itself.

The bird is infested with

lice, or mites, maybe,

that it pecks at furiously,

under its wings, under its tail,

all over its body

shaking its head and

stamping its feet in consternation.

Poor little rascal,

I think,

and I am inspired to

write a poem about

this ugly bird making an

exhibit of itself

in front of a lady waiting

for her takeout lunch in the car.

Perhaps the bird is acting out

the story of its hard life,

at the conclusion of which

it will grow very still, then

lift its rumpled breast

and burst into a

lyrical, heart-rending aria

after which I will cheer and

toss it a coin.

But when I glance at my watch

and look back again,

it is gone.

A novelist with eight published works spanning forty years, Suzanne Morris now focuses largely on writing poems. Her poetry is included in the anthology, No Season for Silence - Texas Poets and Pandemic (Kallisto GAIA Press, 2020). Examples have also appeared in The Texas Poetry Assignment and The New Verse News.                                                

Poems

Darby Riley

February 22, 2022

The poetry group

meets once a month

to unburden itself

of its latest attempts

at transcendence.

Not easy

but fun

straining at meaning

and beauty, rhythm

and harmony,

capturing 

fleeting insights

that vanish

like the last minute,

the last fifteen

billion years.

The truth,

justice,

compassion,

serenity,

the unity of all things,

the hills in the distance,

the bees alive

in sweet spring fragrance.

Darby Riley, a native San Antonian, has been married to Chris Riley since 1971 and they have three grown children and a granddaughter, age 6. He has hosted a monthly poetry writing workshop for over 25 years. He practices law with his son Charles and is active in the local Sierra Club.

Ars Poetica

Matthew Sisson

January 30, 2022

I squeegee the inside of my shower door 

before getting out to towel off. At first 

I produced the usual squeaks and squealings, 

the squeegeeweegings everyone knows. Now 

the door is my violin, the squeegee my violin 

bow. With short strokes, the chirp of cicadas, 

and the cawing of crows. Locked up brakes 

and tires on gridlocked urban roads. Clockwise 

I play the Gregorian chant of cloistered Gregorian 

monks. With counter—the soulful sounds of 60’s 

Motown Funk. I have mastered my art—paid my 

dues. After years of standing naked and sneezing. 

Years of my life, naked and freezing.

Matthew Sisson’s poetry has appeared in journals ranging from the “Harvard Review Online,” to “JAMA The Journal of the American Medical Association.” He has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and read his work on NPR’s “On Point.” His first book, “Please, Call Me Moby,” was published by the Pecan Grove Press, St. Mary’s University, San Antonio, Texas.

pursue pursuing: how “to use the word you are chasing”

Sister Lou Ella Hickman

January 27, 2022

from studies in words by c. s. lewis  

chase it  

until you let it capture 

your thought 

your heart 

then let it settle . . . 

slowly be held 

then 

behold 

the word becomes you 

with its embrace 

Sister Lou Ella has a master’s in theology from St. Mary’s University in San Antonio and is a former teacher and librarian. She is a certified spiritual director as well as a poet and writer.  Her poems have appeared in numerous magazines and four anthologies.  She was a Pushcart nominee in 2017 and 2020. Press 53 published her first book of poetry entitled she: robed and wordless in 2015 

Beyond

Kathryn Jones

December 25, 2021

Poetry is

a journey 

beyond place

a flight

of the mind

weightless 

a transcendence

beyond form

a metamorphosis

of the spirit

bodiless

a tunnel

beyond time 

a passage 

of the heart 

endless 

Kathryn Jones is a journalist, essayist, author, and poet. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Texas Monthly, and in the anthologies A Uniquely American Epic: Intimacy and Action, Tenderness and Action in Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (University Press of Kentucky, 2019) and Pickers and Poets: The Ruthlessly Poetic Singer-Songwriters of Texas (Texas A&M University Press, 2016). Her poetry has been published on tejacovido.com, in the Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas, and in the upcoming Odes and Elegies: Eco-Poetry from the Texas Gulf Coast (Lamar University Press). She is finishing a biography of Ben Johnson, the Academy Award-winning actor and world champion rodeo cowboy, to be published by the University Press of Mississippi. She was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters in 2016.

Enterpe: Zophar

Chris Ellery

August 23, 2021

Et unus est magister vester. Christus. 

Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation

In no particular order, my five best ways

to cure the blues: hold a baby, pray, 

make love. That’s three. The fourth is tear your clothes

then sit on the ground with a few of your friends and indulge

in a little rhetoric. But let the rhetorician

understand the risk of speech; blasphemies 

ooze from the forked tongue of good intentions. 

So often silence is the wisest mode

of argument, uplifting, healing where

dialectics or polemics wound.

Work hard—that’s fifth. Wash, rake, serve, make something.

A sixth, if there can be that many on 

a list of five, would be to sing. Let’s say

that singing is implied in numbers four

and five. It is no stretch to claim it’s both

a kind of rhetoric and work. To sing? 

Of what? Of babies, God, the young and old 

in love. That is, express the pain and joy

of life and living. Sometimes, as in this song, 

I sing of singing, and I like to say

that every song is metasong.

I cannot claim that any songs of mine 

have forked the lightning, flared from nothingness

to dazzle primal and uncomprehending dark. 

Like everyone down in the dust, stricken by love, 

which costs so much, I grope for syntax

and mangle syllogisms. Bear this in mind, 

whoever reads this book. Verily, 

only One is wise. Therefore, I offer in advance 

my seven rams and seven bulls. Yet even

if every line and rhyme be born of blindness 

down in the deepest pit of my desire, 

I still believe my making holy work. 

It is the darkest night that best reveals 

the lightning and the stars. 

Chris Ellery is author of five poetry collections, most recently Canticles of the Body and Elder Tree. A member of the Texas Institute of Letters, he has received the X.J. Kennedy Award for Creative Nonfiction, the Dora and Alexander Raynes Prize for Poetry, and the Betsy Colquitt Award.

Playing the Flute after Long Absence

Jan Seale

August 8, 2021

The silver is the first to hear the tone

and then the lip decides it too can like

the mellowness that slices like a knife

the silent air on which the note is blown.

The player feels the burden all alone

to shine the tarnished piping back to life.

Strangely, as the notes pile to the light,

the tune, like water, seeks its own.

The fingers gain a temporary cure

from arthritis, dull procrastination;

the embouchure minds its reputation.

Sculptured sound recalls it can be pure.

It cancels out the sin of hesitation,

restores the flutist’s sonorous sensation.

Jan Seale, the 2012 Texas Poet Laureate, lives in Texas on the U.S.-Mexican border. She has held a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in poetry and has served as a Humanities Scholar for Humanities Texas. Her latest book of poetry is PARTICULARS: poems of smallness, published by Lamar University Literary Press.

Thou Art My Verse

Thomas Quitzau

August 1, 2021

Some words, not ours, have been said

to belong to a muse

Some thoughts, at odd hours, have been bred

causing us to lose

Some semblance of time, monsters in our heads

banging the bars in calaboose.

Bon voyage, clairvoyant: time travel

is possible if practiced

Discoveries, sought beyond Earth’s arc,

  need flexible didactics

Pretending is recommended as one

of many old bold tactics.

How could we be mindless and mindful

at the same time?

Out of our minds and in someone else’s

and still able to rhyme?

Or close to it, far from perfect, human,

trusting in the sublime?

Oh verses! Whether free, blank, or ode

sonnets, rondeaux, haikus

Oh lines! Stanzas mazing words

cast into quivery queues

Your nuclear cores blaze celestially

projecting cosmic truths!

Thomas Quitzau is a poet and teacher who grew up in the Gulf Coast region and who worked for over 30 years in Houston, Texas. A survivor of Hurricane Harvey, he recently wrote a book entitled Reality Showers, and currently teaches and lives on Long Island, New York with his wife and children.

Close Reading

Robert Allen

July 25, 2021

The first line is curved like the bow of a ship.

  The second line is severed in two places.

   The third line contains a word you do not know.

    You stop to look it up, believing it critical

     to your understanding of the entire poem.

     The fourth line describes something dangerous

    you did when you were twelve, sending you back

   to a childhood memory, some boys you once knew,

  before you shake yourself and return to the page.

 The fifth line is curved like a woman’s hip.

  The sixth line has some words crossed out,

   making you overestimate the line length.

    The seventh, eighth, and ninth lines are missing

     completely, as if this were an ancient manuscript

     whose pages had begun to decay and disappear.

    The tenth line has an image which makes you gasp.

   You begin to read quickly to see what happens,

  losing track of the line where you are in the poem.

 The next line is curved like the edge of a violin,

  with so sharp a turn the melody of the poem

   finds an ache in your heart, which slows you down,

    almost compels you to stop, then does not.

     The line after that has another startling phrase,

     which does make you stop and admire the poet’s genius.

    The next line contains the barest hint of a suggestion.

   The line after that is heavy with symbolism.

  The next line hits like rain on a tin roof.

 The line after that is curved like your lover’s lips.

  You begin to harbor secrets: the touch of her skin,

   smell of her hair, sound of her naked voice

    on the phone. You brood on the feel of the poem

     in your mouth, how its words float in the cold, wet air

     and drop down to earth as if after a long voyage.

    The next line, which by a ghost editor’s quick

   and inexplicable count is the sixty-seventh line

  of the poem, is simply radiant, being that point

 in any good poem where a marvelous resolution

  is achieved. You may not understand, yet,

   how that resolution works but you know it is there.

    You begin to look back over the poem,

     rereading some lines and noticing, now, certain

     images and correspondences you missed

    the first time through. You see the relationship

   between a word in the first line and other words

  in the tenth and nineteenth lines. The whole fabric

 of the poem acquires a unity, a harmony of omen.

  You wish you could write a poem like this.

   You wish, at least, that you could be more aware

    of the gifts you have as a poet and be able

     to employ them with skill while composing.

     You wish out of daft artistic desperation

    you could enter into a zone of poem-making,

   the way Magic or Larry or Michael could create

  with a round orange ball, where your words

 would live on the curve of a page and your readership

  could feel an ocean breeze coming off the gulf,

   hear the rattle of leaves in an alder grove

    you walked once in Scotland looking for cairns,

     taste your mother’s warm caramel fudge fresh

     from the stove in her Formica-countered kitchen

    during the middle years of the twentieth century.

   If words do not fail, whether you sit at a desk

  with slim pen in hand or fat fingers to keyboard,

 you wish your snaking curve of images and quips

could flow like a serenade, seduce, and set sail.

Robert Allen is retired and lives with his wife, two children, five antique clocks, and five cats. He has poems in di-vêrsé-city, Voices de la Luna, the Texas Poetry Calendar, the San Antonio Express-News, The Ocotillo Review, and Poetry on the Move. He now co-facilitates Gemini Ink’s Open Writer’s Lab.

A Poem Forming

Sarah Webb

July 11, 2021

The poem rises

from something we have forgotten

and we find it again

in the lines of the poem.

I sit and watch the clouds tonight

and each—elephant

streaming tatters of banner, the fish

transforming into a whale—

whispers the secret

just out of hearing but there

nevertheless

not random molecules of water vapor

but mystery

holding its meaning as rain.

I look at the acorns strewn on the deck,

at the wake of a boat that 

slaps a wave across the rocks,

at the notebook open to a page

in all of it, meaning emerging

whether I will it or not

and below them

below pattern, significance

forgotten and silent

a welling

below names, poems, things

alive, alive

coming to be.

Sarah Webb is a co-editor for Just This, a magazine of the Zen arts associated with the Austin Zen Center and Appamada in Austin. She started Zen fifteen years after beginning to write, so Poetry always had a head start, but the practices are so intertwined now she can scarcely tell them apart.

The Return

Janelle Curlin-Taylor

July 4, 2021

The sense of having walked from

inside yourself out into the revelation.

David Whyte  

How do I return to walk

Far inside myself?

A place of mystery, domain of the Shadow.

No one has ever been there but me.

And me, I left as quickly as I could.

Chasing after the revelation I believed

To be far outside myself.

"Self-absorbed," the religion of Empire said

Of those who spent too much time far inside.

"Parochial," said the academy, "narrow,

Lacking curiosity."

And now I come,

So much of my life spent

In pursuit of the revelation out there.

Wandering, following a curiosity all my own.

To listen to the music of the dark mystery

Far inside myself.

The poems bade me reenter

To seek this dark mystery

Of which they often spoke

In a language I barely understood.

And only now I recognize the rhythm

Is my own.

Janelle Curlin-Taylor is descended from several generations of Texas poets. Her poetry has appeared in the di-verse-city Anthology, Blue Hole, Best Austin Poetry 2018-2019, Waco WordFest Anthology 2020, Texas Poetry Calendar 2021, and Texas Poetry Assignment. She is married to California poet Jeffrey Taylor.

Arse Poetica

Jesse Doiron

June 27, 2021

I’ll play the poet’s part,

and stay apart,

away,

in my apartment.

I’ll smile knowingly

and jot down words

which mean

something,

in particular.

I will be seized

with seizures of solemnity,

juxtaposed jocularity.

I will laugh too loudly.

I will drink too much.

I will smoke kinnickinnic

and nicotine, 

till Clarity comes.

And then, 

I’ll dance with her.

I’ll dance near to her,

nearer to her than anyone, 

nearly to dawn,

when,

as vampires do, 

I’ll hide.

Because of this,

snide people, 

who pass by, 

will sneer:

“My, my . . . 

So queer!

You know,

he thinks himself 

a poet”

Jesse Doiron spent 13 years overseas in countries where he often felt as if he were a “thing” that had human qualities but couldn’t communicate them. He teaches college, now, to people a third his age. He still feels, often, as if he is a “thing” that has human qualities but can’t communicate them.

Poetry Is

Loretta Diane Walker

June 13, 2021

Poetry is the soul’s microscope.

That powerful eye that sees beyond

what is beneath the hidden.

It is society’s archivist.

The record keeper of all deeds

gardened beneath the sun.

It is a coin minted in questions and answers,

God’s seventh right hand,

the simplicity and complexity of

what is.

Loretta Diane Walker, an award-winning poet, multiple Pushcart Nominee, and Best of the Net Nominee, won the 2016 Phyllis Wheatley Book Award for poetry, for her collection, In This House (Bluelight Press). Loretta is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters. Her work has appeared in various literary journals, magazines, and anthologies throughout the United States, Canada, India, Ireland, and the UK. She has published five collections of poetry. Her manuscript Word Ghetto won the 2011 Bluelight Press Book Award. Loretta received a BME from Texas Tech University and earned a MA from The University of Texas of the Permian Basin. She teaches elementary music at Reagan Magnet School, Odessa, Texas.

A Doorway into Thanks

Janelle Curlin-Taylor

May 7, 2021

Poetry allows pain

to find relief in rhyme,

in meter, in small

and measured lines,

set out upon the page.

Several poems later

other memories surround the pain,

softening the focus,

expanding the view.

At last, pain,

thus accompanied,

becomes a doorway into thanks.

Filled with gratitude,

pain — no longer alone —

moves into the background

and healing begins.

Janelle Curlin-Taylor is descended from several generations of Texas poets. Janelle has turned her poetry into sermons for 30 years. Her poetry has appeared in the di-verse-city Anthology, Blue Hole, Waco WordFest Anthology 2020, Texas Poetry Calendar 2021. She is married to California poet Jeffrey Taylor.

Why Poetry

Jeffrey Taylor

April 21, 2021

“…poetry is not medicine—it’s an X-Ray” —Dunya Mikhail

“I write to find out what I think.” —Joan Didion

I write, sometimes, to know what I feel,

an X-Ray of sorts.  Of myself.

Sometimes I find something

I need to heal and reach out

for another’s poetry.  Mary Oliver

works.  Her poem, “The Journey,”

shows a place inside which reaches

for words it cannot find

on its own.  The articulation task

falls to another.  If I do not find it

out there, I must go into the caves

with no light beyond what I bring

to find images left by others for reasons

of their own.  I may or may not fathom them.

I may find a meaning that was not

the reason they imprinted the likenesses

of now extinct animals on the walls.

From inside, I hope to emerge

with some revelation.

It will require many trips.

Jeffrey L. Taylor never received anything higher than a C in English throughout school and college. Through articles in recreational computer journals, he learned to write with rhythm and conciseness, often too concise. In poetry, that is not a problem. Around 1990, poems began waking him in the night. He now writes in the day.