Intermission

Betsy Joseph

March 30, 2022

As I lie awake in pre-dawn cocoon

I think of it as intermission:

the time between thrumming of tires

along the nearby highway

and the solitude of white noise calm.

During this lull, for a blessed hour or so,

I begin to follow my breath:

inhalation counts from one to six

exhalation counts from six to one.

Body now still, mind becoming serene,

I turn to a different form of counting,

this time a listing of gratitudes

from menial to supreme,

consciously pausing between each one

until yielding at last to sleep once more,

the weightless blanket of peace enfolding me.

Betsy Joseph lives in Dallas and has poems that have appeared in a number of journals and anthologies. Her poetry collection, Only So Many Autumns, was published by Lamar University Literary Press in 2019. Lamar is also publishing her forthcoming book, Relatively Speaking: Poems of Person and Place, a collaborative collection of poetry with her brother and poet Chip Dameron. In addition, she and her husband, photographer Bruce Jordan, have produced two books, Benches and Lighthouses, which pair her haiku with his black and white photography.

First Light

Jesse Doiron

March 13, 2022

Beyond dark leaves 

of backyard trees 

the sun unhides

the sky.

Such blaze, 

was only dust

before —

a dim-lit firmament.

It rages, 

now,

within the space

that has no human time.

My wife, 

awake, 

without her robe, 

pulls back her auburn hair.

I see it

in first light

as if the last—

ineffable.

Her smile 

arises, flies aflame, 

then hides inside

the sun.  

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.

Aubade for a Long Ago January

Robert Allen

March 8, 2022

The blades of grass between her place and my car

might have been frosted with dew the way they shone

in the early morning’s two or three streetlights.

I may have turned to see the tracks of my shoes.

Maybe I looked only for my white Maverick.

The highway to home was empty but the words

she whispered in my ear filled the night with dreams,

a kind of hushed excitement for a secret

I found hard to keep. When I got to my bed

there would be no more than an hour or two left

before I had to rise for church and meet with

a friendship class we called the Swinging Singles.

Divorced, two kids, at worst a cradle-robber,

she believed I was the answer to her prayers.

Remembering her words still makes my head spin.

What I recall with certainty is backing

out of the garage on the morning after,

swinging around blind with sleep and forgetting

where my brother’s big Suburban had been parked,

then the sound as my rear bumper smashed the red

plastic of his taillight, that fearful moment

of my future unraveling, and those ruby

shards blazing from the ground as I sped away

to a daylight when sweet words couldn’t fool me.

Robert Allen is retired and lives in San Antonio with his wife, two children, five antique clocks, and five cats. He has poems in Voices de la Luna, the Texas Poetry Calendar, Writers Take a Walk, and Poetry on the Move. He co-facilitates Gemini Ink's Open Writer's Lab.

Mrs. Fields® Forever

Melanie Alberts

March 1, 2022

"Look, if we can understand a fucking cowboy talking Texan, they can understand us talking Liverpool." —Paul McCartney, on A Hard Day’s Night being dubbed for American audiences. 

Our night job was baking cookies together, me a poetry major 

and you a bloke from an English town where everyone spoke

a lingo unintelligible to the village ten miles to the north.

I wanted to decipher you, too cute and cocky and of course

every girl in Boston would drop her knickers for, um, what?

What you said and what I grasped mixed like brownie dough

with beef chunks tossed in. Your banter exasperated my ear

dulling whatever love interest was whipped up during our shifts.

We worked well silently together, forming dozens of delicious 

circles because words are overbaked and underproved, crumble

into something you regret sharing as morning coats your tongue.

Writer and psychic artist Melanie Alberts works at the University of Texas at Austin. Her writing and artwork have or will appear in Drifting Sands, Sleet Magazine, Cold Moon Journal, Failed Haiku, Texas Poetry Assignment, Ransom Center Magazine, Just This, The Austin Chronicle, Borderlands, bottle rockets, and others. Follow Melanie on Instagram @clair.circles.spirit.art.

Aubade at the Dawn of War

Kathryn Jones

February 27, 2022

Armies swarm at the border,

tanks crawl down empty streets,

soldiers crouch in moonlight,

ready to pounce like a fox on a rabbit.

More than six thousand miles away,

I wake before dawn safe in my bed, 

thinking of someone like me also lying awake,

not safe, pondering death. Will it come 

in a deafening flash when the tank gun fires or

in silence when the beast devours its prey? 

At first light a silver dome spreads, 

not fog but smoke on the horizon.

She sits by the window, cello between her legs,

drawing the bow across strings: 

“Ode to Joy,” Schiller’s poem of peace, last

movement in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

The armies do not hear, marching into morning;

she plays on, praying not with words but notes,

playing for joy and against rockets falling, 

against jaws opening, against the devouring. 

The same sun obscured by smoke over there

streams into my bedroom here. I arise

to brew a pot of tea, glimpse out the window

daffodils pushing through frozen ground, 

defiant, taunting winter. News flashes 

on the TV screen: “War begins,” but 

tell the truth – war never ended. 

Six thousand miles away, someone like me

still plays a cello. I hear each precious note

as sure as I hear my own voice, singing with her, 

“Joyful, like a hero to victory.”

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.

The Tender Things

Suzanne Morris

February 22, 2022

are what you dread
to think of

when he hasn’t
come home

fight fiercely to

drive from the
threshold of your mind

and shut the door;

otherwise you won’t
survive

this thing that
couldn’t happen

but did. Or might have.
It’s the not knowing

keeps you awake
all night

when it’s too dark
to search anymore

through the
deep woods

into which he wandered–
too far to hear your calls?–

Or hearing them,
unable to respond?

You can only imagine
the worst

though you leave his bed
at the foot of yours

just in case

then doze fitfully between
intense spells of anxiety.

By morning, though
he is

desperate to be found,

caught by the loop
of his leash

on a stump and
wound round and round

powerless to escape

his bark would wake
the dead

and is the sweetest
sound you have

ever heard.

When he’s safe
at home again

snoozing off the
scary night

you luxuriate in
thoughts of him

pausing inside the door
to stand perfectly still

as you wipe his feet
on the towel you’ve placed there

on mornings he goes out
to pee on the wet grass

inside the
back yard fence.

How dutiful he
has always been

to remember to
stand there so still

and lick your face
as you bend.

Now that he is home,
it’s safe to think of

such tender things
between you

that have been, knowing
they will be again.

Suzanne Morris is a novelist with eight published works, most recently, Aftermath (SFA University Press, 2016). Until recently, her poetry appeared only in her fiction. However, last year she was invited to contribute seven poems to an anthology entitled No Season for Silence - Texas Poets and Pandemic, (Kallisto Gaia Press).

it is the lark

Sister Lou Ella Hickman

February 15, 2022

it is the lark, the herald of the morn . . . 

romeo and juliet  act III, scene 5 

juliet speaks 

o stay, dear husband stay 

and let us continue 

the song of our bodies    

our flesh 

the ghostly father made one 

both nightingale and lark 

only echo the blitheness of our joy . . .   

the sun rises   alas 

how sad its morning’s light  

for you must depart 

and as you leave 

let my little death fragrance your going 

then return  

so we may worship night again 

as pious pilgrims do 

Sister Lou Ella has a master’s in theology from St. Mary’s University in San Antonio and is a former teacher and librarian. Her poems have appeared in numerous magazines and four anthologies.  Her first book of poetry entitled she: robed and wordless was published by Press 53 in 2015. 

In Season and Out

Milton Jordan

February 8, 2022

for Anne

This year, for once, our Christmas Cactus chose

to fulfill its official task and bloom

at the onset of Advent, white buds

appearing at the ends of jagged stems.

You saw those and swapped your Chinese Dollar 

from the back corner of our table

for that seasonally specific cactus

in its red clay pot rimmed by a broad band

glazed green dark enough to appear black

over a Caddo incised pattern.

Breakfast’s morning sun lights the new blossoms

near the tips of those saw blade edged leaves

reflecting, you remark, Christmas green highlights 

off the rim’s irregularly notched design.

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.

Snowy Aubade

Thomas Quitzau

February 1, 2022

Stony Brook, New York

The sky has wedded Earth before dawning.

Or could it be someone’s flipped the awning?

Either way, this bridal dress consummates

Union states once thought virginal, wedlocked

Land, indigene island, no one’s bedrock.

Run to the window if you even care,

In your oil-heated home (dare not to stare!);

Sweet lighting glows, but the veil obfuscates

The view—see who’s most eager to scamper?

My huskie: debonaire happy camper!  

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.

Photo above by Thomas Quitzau