Land-Escape

Sumera Saleem

September 25, 2022

Trees in my garden are imagination

And flood in the city is real

And both make no parallel of what happiness is.

A moment passes and all a wreck.

I pick up my pen to plant another garden,

Free from the fear of being uprooted

And washed away under weary clouds.

Moments stretch into seasons

And seasons move in a perfect cycle.

Cyclically speaking, will there be another flood in the city?

Should I continue holding my pen to plant another garden?

When trees in my garden are real

And flood in the city is not imaginative

I do not know the soil I may ground myself in.

Sumera Saleem is a lecturer in the Department of English Language and Literature, the University of Sargodha, Sargodha and Gold medalist in English literature from the University of the Punjab for the session 2013-15. Her poems have appeared in Tejascovido, Langdon Review published by Tarleton State University, USA, Blue Minaret, Lit Sphere, Surrey Library UK, The Text Journal, The Ghazal Page, Pakistani Literature published by Pakistan Academy of Letters, Word Magazine. A few more are forthcoming in international and national anthologies.

Stony Path

Kathryn Jones

September 4, 2022

I could have trod up the gravel road

after feeding the horses this morning; 

instead, I took the stony path up the hill

to admire lichen-clad rocks and long morning shadows,

to hear dried grass whisper to the wind,

to feel feathery seedheads tickle my legs,

to look up and see wispy white fingers caress cerulean sky,

to see white-tailed deer, so reddish in summer, turning gray, 

to sense that autumn is coming, finally –

and I am part of it all, 

a sojourner in this wild perfection

gathering moments of peace. 

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. Her poetry has been published on tejacovido.com, in the Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas, and Odes and Elegies: Eco-Poetry from the Texas Gulf Coast. She was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters in 2016.

On Kalaloch Beach in Washington

Robert Allen

September 3, 2022

No one would know this man

has progeny, the way he stands apart

in solitude, shoulders hunched

over, contemplating a charcoal-blue

wave-rounded stone he found

upon the sand. His children stand beyond

the frame, or behind the camera. The son

peers from the dark beneath a wind-whorled evergreen

known as the Tree of Life, which grows despite

the earthless air around its roots, which fan

out with fingers gnarled and black, never reaching the heart

of watery depths. The daughter, who punched

the button on her cell phone for its view

of Daddy’s eccentricity, now scans the ground

for the enormous name someone has etched there with a wand

of driftwood. The father, never done

with being vigilant or being lost, has seen

a second stone to match the first, to his delight,

for in his mind these polished stones can

talk; they’re magical. They start

to dialogue, smooth out his mental traffic snarls while bunched

inside his pocket. His family are too

enveloped in their own pursuits to hear the sound

of two stones talking, while sea and sky abscond

in a conspiracy of steel-gray tones, run

together this midsummer’s day by increasing marine

breezes, guided by a sunset’s eye of insight.

Robert Allen is retired and lives in San Antonio with his wife, two children, five antique clocks, and four cats. He has poems in Voices de la Luna, the Texas Poetry Calendar, and Texas Poetry Assignment. He loves cardio-boxing workouts, hates being on time, and facilitates Gemini Ink's in-person Open Writer's Lab.

That Day With Me

Donna Freeman

September 2, 2022

You take me fishing

Just you and me

And in the quiet waters

I find a tranquility

I never have with you at home.

Mom says it is good to be like this.

I watch your fingers

clench the rod

pull the line

toss it out

spin the reel again.

I try the same

but would be content

to let my small hands be still

and only my eyes follow you.

You are kind now,

take me into your world

help steady me

when the wood boat sways.

But the fish aren’t biting.

You say you’ve had enough.

Time to go.

Suddenly you stop the car.

A man with a badge stands in front

says you drove too fast. 

You make that face you do.

I watch your hand reach 

into your pocket

fumble for a ten-dollar bill,

drop it out the window.

It falls next to the man.

You leave it there.

You smile.

The lake is rough now.

Your hand stays tight on the steering wheel.

My stomach suddenly hurts.

I want to go.

The road home will be bumpy.

and home seems far away.

I never look into your eyes again.

Donna Freeman’s poems have appeared in Wilderness House Literary Review, Blue Lake Review, Ocean State Poets Anthology, RI Public's Radio “Virtual Gallery,” and Imago gallery. Wickford Art Gallery will display another poem of Donna’s and publish it in a book in September for their themed show “Hope.”

Newly Unique

Darby Riley

August 31, 2022

Every snowflake which ever fell

is different from all the others.

Every mountain laurel leaf, each

drop of water, molecule, ant,

cloud, asteroid, or horseshoe crab

is slightly unlike all beings

that ever were or will become.

And on top of that, reflect how

everything changes each instant

so nothing is just like it just was.

In each of our fleeting moments

all of us are newly unique.

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.

Prayer Signs

Kevin Garrison 

August 28, 2022

The church is never silent. 

Look. Over in that corner,  

A spider spins its webs in octaves  

Undetected, spinning an antenna  

To amplify the electric crackle  

And flapping wings of the luciferin-filled  

Firefly hoping to escape the room. 

Listen. Even higher,  

The long-dead wood in the rafters  

Still speaks in creaks and pops,  

The roof molded by the doxological  

Calls of thousands of voices  

Who no longer sing and carpenters  

Who no longer build. 

Close your eyes and ears, now.  

Next to you, during this dark moment  

Of silence, a baby cries to mother for milk,  

The most beautiful of all prayers.  

The child behind you scratches  

An itch and rustles his Sunday best.  

You can feel the air move as the parents  

Place their hands on their children's bodies, 

Signing “Be still, child.” 

Forgive me these digressions.  

I keep replaying a scene from a funeral 

Last month: the microphone slowly  

Dropping from the grieving daughter's mouth,  

The weight of the microphone pulling  

Against an improperly tightened nut.  

No one could hear the eulogy,  

The mother living in the daughter's body and words.  

Only the Deaf could see the raw lips 

While the rest of the room pretended to hear. 

Do me the smallest of favors, reader.  

Be better than us. At the next funeral,  

I dream that one of you stands up,  

Pauses the tears, and says "I can't hear." 

We are all deaf. 

A body lays in linen, hands folded 

Over a chest in the sign for "love,"  

Smiling up at the casket roof forever. 

Kevin Garrison is a deaf professor of English at Angelo State University. He resides in the central spaces between Deaf World and Hearing World, and his poetry grapples with the daily challenges of being oral deaf, often with hints of religious symbolism.

One Sunday Morning

Jan Seale

August 20, 2022

I.

When my son and I head west upriver early on a Sunday in spring we come upon a story: fifty humans walking the east-bound lane in silence, families in front—mothers holding swaddled babies, fathers with toddlers beside—youths to the rear with backpacks, their shoes aflop with no laces. Slow trucks of the border patrol, one leading, another following, shepherd the line. These humans have crossed nation to nation in the night and come up from the Rio at daybreak, cheered on by mesquite, huisache, ebony.

II.

An hour passes and we arrive at our own destination on the Rio Grande. We finish our official business but hesitant to leave, walk a block in this post-colonial town, eye a caliche path that spans the embankment. Holding on to each other, we inch our way down, feeling ourselves being studied on a distant screen. Still, no uniforms or flashing lights, no gates, walls, or demands of credentials. We find ourselves under the bridge, an oasis between nations, a few permitted cars clunking overhead—perhaps to deliver bread, the Mass, or visiting abuelas. Across, in the determined Mexican town, church bells start up, activate baying dogs. The morning breeze from the Gulf reaches miles upriver to skim cool over the water. Two Mexican children swish-dance around the bridge pillars. Dare we a moment of grace? There’s more.

III.

We turn our gaze upward, where a thousand mud bowls surprise us, a tightly woven mural on the bridge underbelly. Swallows have sought out this manmade contraption, glued their ceramic nests, obscuring the girders, the concrete, the stays. Now birds dart, soar, descend, happy with the morning’s feed, returning to their chicks through the mouths of their grinning mud gourds, each choosing its own.

IV.

This, this, we say, is what it means to take hold of peace: sunrise yellowing the day, water speaking prudence, air breathing kindness, the duet of swallow wings and children’s laughter, all here between nations. We think of the humans back on the road who have crossed this morning filled with fear and hope, and of those who receive them in dutiful patience day in, day out. How the birds give, in their innocent tight formation of nests, the definition of neighbors. How the earth tells us that the way things fit is what we must know. How this moment comes saying connection, connection.

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.

Resurrection

Kathryn Jones

August 18, 2022

Dead, dried snake lies in the dust

on a gravel road outside Santa Fe,

flattened by car wheels, stiff as old leather;

it speaks to me not with a hiss but a whisper.

I came to New Mexico to paint adobe churches,

not a desiccated serpent;

translucent skin and delicate bones curving

in a frozen “S,” the flesh lost forever.

I lay the carcass on a flat rock, take a pencil

from my bag, cover the remains with white paper,

rub soft gray lead back and forth

as I have done on my ancestors’ tombstones.

Spine and scales weave a raised pattern,

a ghost image that crawls across the page,

then drops to the ground and slithers away,

leaving its silver spirit on my hands.

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. Her poetry has been published on tejacovido.com, in the Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas, and Odes and Elegies: Eco-Poetry from the Texas Gulf Coast. She was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters in 2016.

Prayers at the Bench

John Rutherford

August 15, 2022

On the bench, I smoke my cigarette

and see the outline of a fallen leaf,

impressed beyond its time: a threat,

a fossil, memorial to its life, brief.

Seems yesterday I sat out on the bench,

swapping poems with an older man,

pipe fuming, a trail of smoky incense

and prayers in syllabic sleight of hand.

Out here again, ten years to the day,

but now I’m the codger with the limp:

Two heads reading over lines as we pray,

but it’s too hot, and I’ve become a wimp. 

The roles reversed, the faces changed,

but still we smoke our cigs, count meters, feet.

With new poets, we trade in the same exchange,

proofing their lines with sweat from the heat.

John Rutherford is a poet writing in Beaumont, Texas. Since 2018 he has been an employee in the Department of English at Lamar University.

The Judas Tree

Vincent Hostak

August 14, 2022

I cling to the old words I often cannot find

Times were, I raged

paced up and down the stories of this house

tipped my head to hear

mouse-tongued songs murmuring from floorboards

only to race away too soon

through passive vents and the holes I failed to patch

I strain to reach a pitch I cannot hold

Like the songs from tented desert shrines

ancient Mihskin temples with goat hair walls

where verses aligned with sacred smoke

kibbitzed in the plumes and 

were lost to potent crackling limbs

the last of dew choked from the Judas Tree.

I long for names I often cannot call

It is not that these are forbidden

nor even affirm some unnamed gods

nor disclose a secret well

nor map to epic stories of diverging plains

With this same fever, I fell exhausted in the garden bed

the one I forgot to cultivate this year

I dreamed of all the things that perish unnoticed

a bristle-backed drifter that curled beneath my spine

green cowlicks tangled in the maidenhair

a scrap of pelt the splintered border snagged

My loose and dreaming mind

flirted freely with the unsigned world

I babbled out the names I will soon forget

but knew each entity was owed.

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.

Echo Location

Jerry Bradley

August 10, 2022

Rebounding from the other side of the canyon,

my words come back, faint and out of step,

like stragglers returning from a lost campaign.

But it’s not just the words.  Memories come back too,

and there is no escaping their insistent repetition.

What I did once still resonates, and those deeds

intrude like the report of a small weapon

whose ricochet — imperative, resolute, and unrelenting —

is nevertheless as half-hearted as the landscape that surrounds

and the frown of a disappointed lover.

Jerry Bradley is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters and is the author of 11 books. His poems have appeared in New England Review, Modern Poetry Studies, and Southern Humanities Review. He recently retired from Lamar University.

The Wife

Suzanne Morris

August 7, 2022

There's a cancer on the presidency. John Dean

It changed my life, and not for the good. Stephen Ayres

She has stood by him

through it all

and now she sits behind him

in the chamber

as he testifies, under oath,

before the Committee.

And I am reminded of

another wife

some fifty years ago

who stood by her man

in circumstances

different in some ways;

in others, eerily the same.

She lacks the refinement

of that earlier one,

the chic designer garments

and eye-catching jewelry that

riveted the television

audience day after day

but she has, at the same time,

a kind of delicacy about her

in the high cheekbones

and small mouth

the clear, wide-set eyes

and fair complexion.

And there is that same

inscrutable look

and remarkable

composure

that I remember in

the one before,

at least until near the end when

the witness is asked

what his life was like before,

then after, that day

when the lies he had believed in

erupted in chaos and destruction.

He remembers being just a

regular family man,

working at the same place

for twenty years

making his way up to

supervisor;

but after, he was fired and

had to sell their home.

At these words, the wife’s facade

breaks into pieces

like fine porcelain

dropping from a ledge

and I can’t help thinking 

the price she has paid

and will go on paying is

higher than that of the earlier one

given this age of raging

social media, 

of hate mail and death threats.

And I wonder what

she is thinking as

the gentleman from Maryland

thanks the witness for his testimony.

But her face has become

inscrutable again.

For forty years, Suzanne Morris was a novelist, with eight published works beginning with Galveston (Doubleday, 1976) and most recently Aftermath - a novel of the New London school tragedy, 1937 (SFASU Press, 2016). Often her poetry was attributed to characters in her fiction.  Nowadays she devotes all her creative energies to writing poems. Her work is included in the anthologies, No Season for Silence - Texas Poets and Pandemic (Kallisto GAIA Press, 2020), and the upcoming, Gone, but Not Forgotten, from Stone Poetry Journal.  Her poems have also appeared in The New Verse News.

Memory in Water 2

Shelley Armitage

August 5, 2022

It’s what he has:  black bottomed plastic,

algaed corners, slow evaporation of

what is already wastewater.  

Thrawn tumbleweeds accumulate, gnats swarm,

but really there’s nothing to eat.

Workers from the domestic water association

manage the treatment plant. With their

conjunto music, and wind trimmed talk

they float above him, then grind out 

the connecting road in ATV rattles.

Nonplussed, he strokes the water.

It’s been nine weeks now and no flight.

On morning walks, I peer through the chain

linked fence that jails the ponds.  DANGER

Chemicals at this Site.  A hefty chain and lock

discourage trespassers.  What to do but watch

and wait.  When I phone, the company operator

assures they sometimes take him food.

He suns (there’s no shade), paddles, makes

his way in circles, his flock already gone for the

summer.  Might he be like your hawks, Robinson,

hurt and grounded but without the pride that 

earned a leaden end.  

A Ring-Necked duck,  un-

assuming in his indigo necklace, his body a

muddied flash of white against the slime,

and that other white—a tiny bright wrap around

his dark beak.  His breeds’ distinction? The instant

take-off, no labored flapping, no scattering on the 

wet runway.  That’s how strong his wings should be.

This morning he sits along the pitched wall of the pond

at water’s edge.  For some reason he can’t fly

and he can’t walk out.

Perhaps it’s the reflection of sky in the water

that makes him think he’s still flying.

Yesterday I glimpsed a female beside him.

Side by side, they fluffed their feathers.

I watched to see if she would follow him in his 

methodical foray.  She didn’t.  She flew away.

He was left again with occasion visitors—but not

to him, to the water: quail, thrasher, killdeer.

What I know about ducks comes from a feed store,

Easter time, we kids begged for one of the ducklings.

We filled our plastic kids’ pool, put out some grain,

while waiting for next day’s Resurrection.

That morning our duckling lay lifeless, an upside-down

yellow in the blue pool, some miraculous balance

tipping his feet to the sky.  Crying brought no wisdom,

no realization except that of the first raw feeling of being alone.

We’re companioned are we not, you and I,

by my daily visits.  My aloneness meets yours;

yet I am less alone when you are here

and you are less free.

Shelley Armitage is professor emerita at the University of Texas at El Paso. She often writes about place and takes inspiration from everyday encounters and how they challenge an awareness that can make its way into poetry.

here and now

Jim LaVilla-Havelin

August 3, 2022

here and now

are

gloriously

separate from

then and there

and

while I plod

along

and pace

means little

or nothing

it

does make

it

possible to

get to

hither and yon

somewhere

that used to be

for

someone else

here and now

Jim LaVilla-Havelin is the author of six books of poetry. His most recent, Tales from the Breakaway Republic, a chapbook, was published by Moonstone Press, Philadelphia, in May 2022. LaVilla-Havelin is the Coordinator for National Poetry Month in San Antonio.

Dreaming in Noir #223

Fernando Esteban Flores

August 1, 2022

A bucket of iced Shiner Blonde 

Among the sparrows wrens & worms

Chilling out the evening frazzle

Michael Frank’s summer-laced lyrics on the turntable

To motivate the sprinkled lawn

Like a samba in the long cool grass

I tend a garden of weeds

Marvel how they know

To grow on all sides of the fence 

Face hostility with a dogged generosity

Abundance without bounds

Wild green love lush liberal

With calculated abandon

Their work done in the open

Al aire libre

Transparent with a certain grace

Even the Texas heat is no match in their wake

They blossom sooner

Spread faster jostling with other roots

For the best available spot

Come drought or deluge

I let them go about their business

Praise their bounty

& think how much we miss

From what grows out back

Fernando Esteban Flores is a native son of Tejas, a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin, published three books of poetry: Ragged Borders, Red Accordion Blues, & BloodSongs available through Hijo del Sol Publishing, published in multiple journals, reviews, newspapers, and online sites, selected in 2018-19 by the Department of Arts & Culture of the City of San Antonio, with support from Gemini Ink for his poem “Song for America V (Yo Soy San Antonio)” as one of 30 poems/poets to commemorate the City’s Tricentennial anniversary, and recently named poetry editor of the Catch the Next Journal of Ideas & Pedagogy.

Geometric

Chris Ellery

July 31, 2022

The center of the Mandala is the Now-moment, where, through the quality of attention, we constantly create ourselves anew.

Padmasambhava

Here 

on my red brick patio

a couple of

yellow and green 

striped lizards are 

playing, 

exploring 

the cracks 

and crevices, 

darting from sun

to shadow, from shadow

to sun, 

diverging, converging, 

scrawling 

invisible lines—

triangles, 

swirls, 

parabolas—

to trace a crazy

mandala.

Now 

I know how it is 

possible

to live 

joyfully in the universe

without rockets

or roads.

Chris Ellery is the author of Elder Tree (Lamar University Literary Press, 2016), a collection of poems inspired by the Celtic tree calendar and immersed in Celtic spirituality.

Drinking from Puddles

Betsy Joseph

July 29, 2022

Shunning the recently replenished water bowl

beneath the kitchen window sill,

our sleek gray feline moves outdoors instead,

seeking an early Texas sun straining and gaining strength

as she drifts toward small sparkling patio pools

to drink from the puddles.

She raises her head slightly to look at me,

water droplets glistening on her white chin,

and lowers for one more drink.

Betsy Joseph lives in Dallas and has poems that have appeared in a number of journals and anthologies. She is the author of two poetry books published by Lamar University Literary Press: Only So Many Autumns (2019) and most recently, Relatively Speaking (2022), a collaborative collection with her brother, 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.

Training Peas

Lyman Grant

July 27, 2022

First I look for the arc 

at the tip of the tendril. 

I have to be patient. 

Not every plant yearns

to grasp and climb. 

One has to be ready, 

eager, even, to commit 

to the journey, 

the ascent into the unknown, 

the blind scramble 

toward self-realization. 

But when I see that crook, 

the bend of desire to clasp 

the twine and rise, oh.

Lyman Grant, once a long-time Texan, now writes in Harrisonburg, Virginia.

Year after Year

Milton Jordan

July 25, 2022

Watching the water

The Great Egret lifts slowly from the shallows;

for a moment, drops dimple the pond’s surface

and dozens of timid minnows venture

back from their hidden depth surrounding

our occasionally operative fountain.

Waiting for Water

Cracks and creases crisscross the dried mudflat

where our pond rippled and the twirling fountain

stands motionless on its exposed base.

Two Great Egrets and a Blue Heron

have harvested the once plentiful minnows.

Milton Jordan lives with Anne in Georgetown, Texas. His most recent poetry collection is A Forest for the Trees from Backroom Window Press, 2022.