Extinctual Thinking
Like Science
Darby Riley
July 7, 2022
Global warming is like nuclear weapons –
both threaten all life but we ignore them.
Meanwhile, we watch Wimbledon.
Humans are like tyrannosaurus rex –
masterful, dominating predators
till our homemade asteroid strikes.
Earth is like other planets around our sun
except here water begets biosphere,
beauty begets consciousness.
Tomorrow can’t be like yesterday
nor like now. We must open our eyes
to save our home. When, and how?
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.
I’m Rooting for the Coyotes
M. Miranda Maloney
June 2, 2022
We spent winter turning over mottled leaves, twigs
and branches, limbs of Itztlacoliuhqui, the Aztec god
of damp and dark, asleep or in decay. We unfolded chairs
on warm days beneath trees, our mutt ran creeks amok
with the chaff of plastic bits and bottle caps. I planned
to return to this place in summer. Humidity, rain, or sweat
weaving low to the bow of my back. But I don’t. Instead,
I visited the Gulf, its beach bedecked with waving shades
where children played. There was still a pandemic.
Except the ocean carried none of it but for sticky waves.
I may go to the desert. There, neighbors are losing pets
to coyotes jumping over rock walls to devour their flesh,
drink marrow like water. My heart breaks over their hunger,
and thirst. I can’t help it. I’m rooting for the coyotes. I keep
thinking if only the razing stopped, if only the scaling stopped
for one more strip mall, to squeeze in one more house. If only
I’d quit my want. But there are many like me. Searching
the horizon, my eyes seek the slender shapes of creatures stirring
farther where I cannot touch them, where I cannot hurt them,
where their string of sound is lost at last. All I say, I’m sorry.
M. Miranda Maloney is the author of The Lost Letters of Mileva (Yuguri editorial, Uruguay, 2019), and Cracked Spaces (Pandora Lobo Press, Chicago), forthcoming in August 2021. She is the founder of Mouthfeel Press. She lives in Huntsville, Texas, with her husband, Dan, dog Caspian, and two cats, Edison and Oni. She has three children in college, attending Texas universities.
On Finding Four Fish in My Grass
Elisa A. Garza
June 2, 2022
A pandemic is a sign
of apocalypse, a plague
that won’t end. But I worry
more today about the fish I found
this morning in the grass,
laid elegantly on their sides,
each eye glaring at the sky
like a burned-out beacon.
Only one is damaged, a few
missing scales tempting
green-black flies to feast
and leave eggs that will soon ripen
into greedy maggots that will eat
the flesh away. The other three fish
flex their tails in a soft curve
as if they are swimming,
moving smoothly through the grass,
seeking open water, as we
seek a life beyond illness,
beyond fear of infection,
seek freedom from plague,
from pestilence,
freedom from fearing,
from our own end,
an end we know is near,
an apocalypse nigh,
a plague of fish
just one of many signs.
Elisa A. Garza, a native Houstonian, has published two chapbooks, Entre la Claridad (Mouthfeel Press, soon to appear in a second edition) and Familia (The Portlandia Group). She has taught students from elementary through senior citizens in public schools, universities, and community programs. Currently, she works as a freelance editor.
Cento-taph
Jeffrey L. Taylor
May 29, 2022
We will all go together when we go,
Every Hottentot and every Eskimo,
Not with a bang, but a whimper.
This is the way the world ends.
Apollo Lunar Module — Moon
Voyager 1 & 2 — Interstellar space
Curiosity Rover — Mars
Psyche — orbiting Psyche, its namesake
Look!
See!
We made it this far.
Cento (Latin, “patchwork”): poem made of lines from other poems.
First two lines from “We Will All Go Together” by Tom Lehrer.
Second two lines from “The Hollow Men” by T.S. Eliot with order reversed.
Cenotaph (Latin, “empty tomb”): monument to people buried elsewhere.
Jeffrey L. Taylor retired in 2001 after 40 years as a Software Engineer. Around 1990, poems started holding his sleep hostage. Unexpected for someone who did poorly in English classes. He has been published in di-vêrsé-city, Texas Poetry Calendar, Tejascovido, and The Langdon Review.
The Green-Blue Sea
Dario Beniquez
May 28, 2022
They will go first
before we do
the roaches, rats, sparrows,
or the possum with the glass eye that waits
every day by the stairs
for the leftovers
that no one will bring
because we may not be here unless
we change our not natural point of view.
We may perish, no doubt about it,
no land to spare, no water in the pale-blue tank
glistening,
“Holly Oaks Township, Welcomes You, Drive Safely!”
We’ll have no place to play.
We still have time; we can survive,
with or without science. We’re sentient
beings, no doubt about it.
Scallops, crawdaddies,
even a chicken or two, field-fed
heifers,
add a plot of land to the ranch:
we can survive. The earth
taketh away; the earth giveth.
Listen to the ants,
follow the pelicans,
out toward the green-blue sea.
Dario Beniquez grew up in Far Rockaway, NY. He is a poet and engineer. He lives in San Antonio, Texas. He facilitates the Gemini Ink Open Writers’ Workshop. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Pacific University, OR. He is the author of the poetry collection, Zone of Silence, published by https://www.flowersongpress.com/
A Certain Natural Life
Milton Jordan
May 27, 2022
In a stone scattered field on the dry side
of a bare ridge, one twisted Juniper
grown slightly taller than a bush still stands
as near green as any Juniper
after another drought dry year.
Pushed through the rocky cover into soil,
the Juniper’s roots stretch out toward water
and mycelia to reach distant
nutrient sources sustaining
its stunted, defiant life.
Milton Jordan lives with Anne in Georgetown. He is coediting an anthology of Texas Poetry Assignment from 2021.
Stony Brook*
Thomas Quitzau
May 25, 2022
(after Eliot’s Four Quartets)
Stand tall, oh allegiant ones
Are you saluting this half-empty moon?
Stand at attention, young’uns!
Like your elders, stop swaying!
Are you praising the fiery orange sunne*
Sinking near your cousins’ green ankles?
Winter has shown you off, you and all
Your capillaries against the periwinkle dusk
What staunch perches you present!
What countenance you inspirit!
The countless houses your kin have shapen
The boats they’ve boldly buoyed
How many migrants have you timely
Harbored, clutching creatures in darkness?
Soon, you’ll hardly be noticed, gigantesque
Each of you, home to a billion lichens
*Stony Brook, NY, a hamlet on the north shore of Long Island
*Old English word for sun
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.
To Keep Going
Walter Bargen
May 22, 2022
From far up the valley,
from deep in the willow thickets
along the creek, a birdcall
comes I don’t recognize.
Juan Ramón Jiménez wrote
that he would go away.
And the birds will still be
there singing. He was right,
he went away, and some of us
still hear him singing, in
the branches beside our houses
and far up cold creeks.
But there are those birds
that have left too. The last
dusky seaside sparrow died
in a cage behind beach dunes
in Florida, unable to call in a mate.
The shrike, the butcher-bird, Jackie
hangman, the strangler, all our names
for feathers on the same bird,
a songbird that goes against the grain
and with hooked beak breaks necks
of mice and other birds and sometimes
hangs their limp bodies on strands
of barbed wire where they dangle
like half-eaten laundry–their song
is disappearing too–along with
the meadowlark that has perched on
a fencepost in my garden and tilted its
head back, stretching its neck and exposing
a black feathered necklace as it points
its bill skyward, clearly announcing
spring, a yellow-breasted soloist
fronting an orchestra of greening
grass, it too is going away, and for
no good reason that we can understand,
and so there are fewer notes
to remind us of his going,
to keep us listening, to keep
us going.
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).
Buffalo May 14, 2022
Vincent Hostak
May 21, 2022
In September the pink-striped steelhead will run
but we’re already in waders in our dreams
the weary Niagara retreats to the north
away from the shoals and their stiff threads of grief
all of what we lost today with no trail back
church lunches with passion-fruit cake
the excitement for a trip to Devil’s Hole
the sight of cormorants clouding the shore
and no matter how hard it may have been
to breathe another day in this world, we lost
the fragrant balm from witch-hazel shrubs
that you once mistook for lemon.
Vincent Hostak is a writer and media producer from Texas now living near the Front Range of Colorado south of Denver. His recently published poems are found in the journals Sonder Midwest and the Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas and as a contributor to the TPA. He writes & produces the podcast: Crossings-the Refugee Experience in America.
Aphasia
Suzanne Morris
May 18, 2022
–for Patricia and in memory of Jim
Beautiful word, like a
term for a symphony movement
or a ballet score
say it aloud, the
stress a gentle arc floating
above the center
and you’d hardly know
you were instead
describing the man’s
tortured effort
to seize the word
to advance his story–
what his life had been like,
how he came to be sitting here–
as we talked for a while
after worship last Sunday;
his crisp enunciation
of connecting words,
the earnest gestures of his hands
as he worked up to a
chapter’s end, but then–
Silence. Hands lifting up,
then dropping to his lap.
The man would shake his head,
half smile in apology,
start over,
only to be blocked
just short of destination,
his mind pawing blindly at the air,
then shaking its fist as
the all important word
escaped him yet again.
He was aging in a handsome way,
dark hair parted up the side, deep
inroads of distinguished gray
eyes aglow with hope like
altar candles lighted
for communion
but then– Darkness.
At length, I bid him farewell and
rose to be on my way:
his torture had become my own.
Now I shape this poem
from my
repertoire of
words
to tell of someone
robbed of them.
So many dancing
on the tip of my pen,
each haunted by the man
who prayed in vain for
one.
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.
THE BOMB
E. D. Watson
May 16, 2022
when i try to think about the bomb
i can’t—
thoughts rise and scatter like flakes
of burned pages
when I try to talk about the bomb
the words just fry
not even steam just gone—
my mouth stills
not the stillness of sleep
but the stillness of not
wherein no one speaks chatter dispersed
falling soft as ash, as snow—how
can a mouth say such a thing
without a jaw—
could the wind could a stone?
ask the dinosaurs if they mattered
ask mars if it misses its clouds
ask me to write a poem about the bomb
you’ll get a silent world in silvertone
you’ll get whatever comes: geologic time,
oblivion
E. D. Watson (she/they) is a poet and certified yoga teacher. Their work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and was named winner of the 2021 Able Muse Prize for Poetry. They completed an MFA in Creative Writing from Texas State University, followed by training from the Institute for Poetic Medicine. Her poetry and yoga workshops are designed to release held language from the body to enhance healing and self-knowledge.
Gone
Jim LaVilla-Havelin
May 15, 2022
“Why did they go away, do you think? If there ever were such things?”
The Last Unicorn, Peter Beagle
lastness
and lasting
elasticity
(of a world which
can accommodate
so much loss
and keep spinning)
and then
without so much
as a word of farewell, not a trace left behind
they’re all
gone
elasticity
(of an empathy and
arms to stretch to
gather them all up)
save what you can
every last one
before
they’re all gone.
Jim LaVilla-Havelin is a co-founder of San Antonio’s Stone in Stream/Roca en el Rio: a collective of writers and artists committed to the environment.
Maybe You’ve Noticed
Zan Green
May 13, 2022
Maybe You’ve Noticed, there’s a quiet that you’ve felt or less
missiles in the hedgerows or in the high blueness—circles above you
Losses are now proven—including 1/2 of my favorite sparrows
so if you’re thinking—but cycles aren’t new—it’s true—
many species fell during the last serious die-off—including all major
dinosaurs—(except feathers)—yet I’m curious if this time’s different
After all—T-Rex’s dominated for over one hundred & sixty
five million—& that’s a whole lot longer than us humans—
So we asked—& Carbon-14 was able to tell us that the giant
Chicxulub crater was about the same age—& leading scientists to
theorize that an asteroid’s big collision caused a series of tidal waves
which leveled the land like a sweeper & the final topple came
as darkness descended Earth—after the sun was eclipsed by ashes
Yet Earth’s die-offs always have survivors—since the Cambrian—
horseshoe crabs have been the Earth’s oldest living fossils
& Gingko Biloba—the Earth’s oldest living trees & pre-Gingko—
the planet was mostly oceans—& before all of them—the blue-
green algae brought us life-giving oxygen—which begs a question—
if the dying birds are the dinosaurs’ last-living relatives
& horseshoe crabs survived all five major die-offs (until now)
Question’s not—what’s behind the headline—but who
Either way—bird losses don’t just happen & neither does the work
yet a first step towards feathers even recovering is seeing them
as family—with empathy for their struggles—learning what ails them
& the rest is common sense—because that’s what family does
Zan Green grew up in the South of England and moved to Texas in 1992. On the outside, Zan is a mother, and a geoscientist—on the inside, a dreamer for the Earth. Their poems are the tender work of healing. Zan has self-published a trilogy titled All Things Holy, and recently, a tribute to their sister Jay, called Wonderings.
Elegy for a Once-Wild Place
Kathryn Jones
May 11, 2022
The inevitable is coming;
we unknowingly brought it with us.
Did we really think we could flee
to this wild place and no one would follow?
We cannot close the gates now.
Bulldozers uproot cedar on hillsides,
chainsaws buzz, trucks rumble
over cattle guards. Old ranch houses
crumble, while skeletons of new homes
sprout from limestone hills.
The little goatherd and windmill
down the road disappeared, replaced
by Black Angus, a metal shed full of hay,
protected by a locked gate and a
“No Trespassing” sign.
They come with satellite dishes,
Internet towers, King Ranch-edition trucks.
More white-tailed deer lie by the highway,
graceful necks broken. One died
by our mailbox and bloated in the sun.
High game fences inch toward us,
tall power poles creep up the highway,
paved roads slice up the landscape.
We are all refugees now, fleeing like deer,
searching for a piece of the last wild place.
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 Stand-Up Comic’s Plea for Sympathy
Robert Allen
May 8, 2022
“Granted, the history of comedy
is vast,” my brother says while spotty rain
keeps attempting to fall on both our heads
during our Wednesday morning walk, “but how
many more trains can fit inside Grand Central?”
A question which reminds me of the fact
that in thirty years our world will be covered
in concrete, our glaciers, both poles of ice,
not to mention our polar bears and salmon
will be gone, people far apart will turn
into vegetarians because there simply
will be no space, or grass, on which to graze
our cattle, and we will live underground
in dimly lit enormous rooms with tubes
along the sides where we will feed, and tubes
along the other side where we will—“Hey
didn’t this conversation go south quickly?”
my brother asks as a drop of rain falls
in his eye.
Now we grow weary of walking,
and the walls, which hitherto have kept out
the sea, begin to crack, and the bleak thought,
unspoken between us, that the whole crazy
human race will go extinct in another
seven-hundred-sixty-eight full years, flatly
gives neither one of us much comfort. Then
comes the simultaneous realization
that the comedians of our future planet
will never be at a loss for material.
We stare at each other, eye to wet eye,
buds for all eternity, and the sun
gets off these stinging one-liners, real beauties
they are, while the trains keep coming and going
through Grand Central, never stopping for bears,
lost fish, or lowly cows. At which point nothing
keeps either one of us decrepit, neck-deep
fools from launching into a monologue
no one will be alive to listen to
except, perhaps, the much maligned and surly
cockroach, or the occasionally hapless
spider, neither one of which seems to lend
a leg-hair while we stand next to our cars,
contemplating the climate of our days.
At length, my tired brother can joke no more,
and with cause to cry I’m dying up here
he begins, instead, to describe a world
which is not dying but is constantly
being renewed, where the children of Eve
and Adam learn to live and die together,
the sun’s soft light is filtered by the right
amount of clouds, the rain drops willingly,
and the trains, those filthy trains—here he falters,
wants to say they will be gone, will reduce
their rolling number to allow more space
for living things, but nothing is that simple.
“If only humankind knew how to leave
this stand-up world a better place. Remove
the plastic from the sea, let salmon lose
their Alzheimer’s and gain their memory.
Stop using trains and planes and cars to burn
those fossil fuels, the polar bears can keep
some solid ground. Feel the earth’s pain,” he sighs,
a sigh so dark he smiles, then drives away—
so cold I dream my car goes up in flame.
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.
Free-Composition
Thomas Quitzau
May 6, 2022
When oft-plentiful red bottlebrush spent
Is combed no more by busy visitors,
When you see carcasses’ inquisitors
Desert prospects, none of which prove ardent,
Along come smaller creatures, gnats or flies,
Proportional to the remains unseen
By the first responders, focused and lean,
Least noticed by some carnivorous eyes.
Wasps, most maneuverable, push away
Hummingbirds, grand and green, buzzing in place.
Bones, picked clean, present marrow’s golden tray:
Merged microbiomes must tend idle space.
Earth welcomes home elements aforethought,
Tugging us all at the same ancient rate
That, when absent, cripples the astronaut
Whose land and life sadly do separate.
At times like these when wind settles and fades,
When we no longer seek summer’s short shades,
Soul forces of every living being
Embrace musing’s kingdoms ever freeing.
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.
Alighting
Kathryn Jones
May 4, 2022
My sanctuary is a land of juniper-oak woodlands,
home of cardinals, chickadees, woodpeckers,
titmouse, wrens, crows, juncos. Each morning
they chirp and squawk, beseeching me
to fill feeders with black oil sunflower seeds,
the rock pond with water. Birds flutter down
like angels of a greater god. I feed them and
they feed me. They take refuge, here.
Endangered Golden-cheeked Warblers arrive
each spring, flashing their bright yellow faces.
They fly over mountains, migrate free of borders,
settle in this pocket of Texas, the only place
on Earth where they nest. Tiny beaks weave
strips of cedar bark with spider webs for cradles,
lay three or four eggs, one clutch a season.
Instinct makes a stand against extinction.
This sanctuary was theirs long before I came.
How did we, different species of the same universe,
choose this place to alight? I watch warblers flit
between live oak branches, pecking at insects
hidden in lichens. They dip their beaks in water,
gold cheeks glowing against gray rock, then fly
back into the woods. I cannot touch them, but I feel
their wild hearts beating. I take refuge, there.
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.
Wearying the Creator
Milton Jordan
May 3, 2022
During working hours, three days short
of Sabbath rest but an eternity
removed from chaotic void, God wearies
of careless creatures practices pushing
steadily back toward the dark, obscuring
light and ignoring divine calls to turn
from our God wearying destruction.
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.