Bandera Road Fantasy

Carol Coffee Reposa

September 26, 2021

“DIRT WORKS,”

The highway sign proclaimed

In big block letters,

And I started to imagine

Dusty legions

Toiling tirelessly in someone’s house

Like ants in their orderly colonies,

Millions of motes

Laboring over a carpet

Or table,

Dun-colored armies

Rank and file

Making inroads in upholstery

Deploying in drapes,

Patiently infiltrating

Cabinets and closets,

Drilling on window sills,

No quarter sought or given until

An equally enterprising mop

Or broom or sponge

Halts their maneuvers,

Briefly.

Author of five books of poetry, Carol Coffee Reposa has received five Pushcart Prize nominations, along with three Fulbright/Hays Fellowships for study in Russia, Peru, and Ecuador and Mexico. A member of the Texas Institute of Letters and of the Voices de la Luna editorial staff, she is the 2018 Texas Poet Laureate.

Highway Signs

Jeffrey L. Taylor

September 19, 2021

Just beyond Sonora
highway signs promise:
74 miles to Kent, TX.
Then 50.  Then 30.
Ft. Stockton lies beyond.
Out here towns are few
and far between.

Between signs in 80 weather,
snow and hail fall
from a glacial blue cloud,
a mile wide, spanning the sky.
No overpass in sight.

We all wait it out on the shoulder,
not willing to brave inches of icy slush.
The semi eases back onto the road
blazing a trail.
We follow in its wake,
caravan behind the ice breaker.

At the Kent exit, rest
is all that is available.
No coffee.  No café.  No gas, only
a closed post office
and empty buildings
easing themselves
onto the ground.

Out here towns
are fewer
than they appear.

Jeffrey L. Taylor's first submitted poems won Riff Magazine's Jazz and Blues Poetry Contest.  He has been published in di-vêrsé-city, The Perch, Red River Review, Texas Poetry Calendar, and Langdon Review.  Serving as sensei (instructor) to small children and professor to graduate students has taught him humility.

Regressive Thoughts on Infinity

Alan Berecka

September 12, 2021

Alan Berecka, a librarian in Corpus Christi, is a transplanted Texan who grew up in rural upstate New York. Over the years, on several cross country drives back from his boyhood home, he has been confronted by milage marker at the Texas-Louisiana border on I 10: El Paso 857 miles. Although he has never been to El Paso, the sign always garnered a reaction: amusement, fatigue, and marvel to name a few.

Night Sky North of San Antonio

Robert Allen

September 5, 2021

Lee wants to see the Lyrids, so at half

past midnight, after quickly packing two

camp chairs, a lawn chair, blankets, and a small

black flashlight, we drive out 281

beyond the county line, make a hard right

on Farm-to-Market 1863,

and end up, once we follow Stahl Lane left

through two sudden hairpin turns of its own,

in the parking lot of a Latter-day

Saints church where we unload, get Lee positioned

in her wheelchair, unfold our chairs, and sit.

On the horizon behind us, the glowing

white haze competes with the cobalt above,

but the Big Dipper stands out easily

and our son points to Vega, which is where

the meteors are supposed to come from.

A whippoorwill calls from a nearby tree,

dogs bark through a distant fence, and Lee starts

to talk about her childhood while our two

grown children settle into their own worlds,

Robyn in a chair, Richard lying down

on the ground on a blanket. The dense sounds

of nature’s chorus grab my full attention

and I begin to think of human song,

an old pop tune by Presley or Hank Williams,

googling to find one on my phone and send

its lonesome notes into the air, which soon

earns Richard’s disapproval. Lee keeps talking

and says she remembers the many times

she rode with her dad in his red sedan

from Texas to Washington state and back,

and she would stargaze while looking out through

the car’s rear window, Pop being the type

of driver who would never stop to rest

but might need someone to talk to, and she

the one whose voice would help him stay awake.

The few times he did stop—middle of nowhere,

desolate country, not even a billboard

to prop against the emptiness and break

the boredom—the night sky was glorious,

a giant twinkling flower above their heads

with jeweled petals to drop on spellbound hands.

Anyone seen a falling star? I ask

when almost half an hour has ticked by.

Robyn says she thinks she saw one, how it’s

the kind of thing you cannot see directly

but only at the corners of your sight,

and in view of the chill we all agree

to pack it in. Two evenings late, one blanket

short, more eye-squinting glances here are futile.

Drive further west next time, escape the lights,

go past Fort Stockton and on toward Marfa.

Ride, like wise men, star-blind for Bethlehem.

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.

Texas Tessellation

Thomas Quitzau

August 29, 2021

Look into the kaleidoscope of jazz 

       and you will see America;

Step into the structured rhythms of swing 

       and you will find freedom reigning;

Stand in the middle of an ensemble 

       and solo failure’s optional.

As you rotate within the cylinder, 

       open fields hold life Escher-sketched

Stretched barbed wire, crisscrossed by high voltage lines— 

       lights flicker on the horizon,

Rain is showering us all, equally— 

       now it is pouring: cascading

Blurred dotted lines solid lines dividing— 

       nothing is clear, the sky’s hiding 

Lightning flashes, 18-wheeler sprays us;

       marvelous musics amaze us 

Crowding the rotation awaiting turns;

       cattle statues graze as clouds churn.

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.

Driving to Missoula

Milton Jordan

August 22, 2021

for Anne

The nature of tomorrow seldom

troubles today, but yesterdays hover

over morning’s cloudy dawning, lifting

a bit in the brighter afternoon.

Remember dust rising behind tractors

pulling four-blade plows to turn under

dry stalks of drought-dwarfed corn west of Dalhart?

Once, a Saturday as I recall, 

we drove into Pinedale and you were writing

your Crows Were In An Argument song

so I was reluctant to stop the car.

You finished that tune the next afternoon

when we were closer to Missoula.

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.

A Favorite Highway

Milton Jordan

 August 15, 2021

The road that runs from Clarendon to Claude

comes up from the Intracoastal Canal,

tracks the Neches through forests onto prairie

to reach high mesas and steep-walled canyons,

‘til west of the crest of Togwotee Pass

startling basalt peaks appear the French

once exclaimed beyond that wide depression

until it wanders into its fifth state

and leaves the country near Glacier Park,

but in Clarendon and Claude, it’s a small town 

route with empty storefronts, Dollar Stores,

some service stations and coffee shops

where local retirees gather daily

with little thought for their road’s wanderings. 

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.

On Route 290

M. Miranda Maloney

August 8, 2021

A type of Juniper. Nothing clear and cut. Bikman Organic Farm then Bell Farms. What’s ahead?

Bogs D’Arc Lane. Corn and more shucks of corn, and in between, no shaft for light. In the hurricane sky. A semi-truck t-boned my sister sixty miles away. 

We’re in Klaus Lane now, across seventy-seven belts of acres. We slaughter down this country lane, zoned for BP, KFC, DQ, HEB, and whatever else builds this way. Stop at the Breakfast Basket for biscuits and gravy. She got banged up—an imprint of round cheek and broad nose on the driver’s side windowpane. 

Ahead is Dog Trail, but we must cross Watermelon Fest and Old Potato Road. Here is a trickle of goats. Longhorns and more horns. There’s Friendship Cemetery, with stones and water holes. Said she was on her way to pick a buddy from the airport, flying from Tombstone. 

A row of windmills. The orange glow of corn. Soon to be subdivided. 

In Gilding, close to Whistle Stop next to Magnolia where the trees are wider. This must be God’s country. A sign reads: All trucks enter here. In his defense, the driver who hit her had a history of depression. But he was caked with amphetamines and on parole that day.

We stop at Carmine. Rows of antique shops line the sidewalks. At Round Top, in the center of Main Street, a white cow lingers, then moos its way to Memory Lane. Before she passed out, she called mom. Said she was afraid; could she fly home?

We take a shortcut to Crossover. Hempstead skirts Heartbreak. Turtle Bayou is drowned in Trinity water while the young, humped trees in Winnie clamor under cat calls of cicadas. She remembers nothing while in the hospital, except her bruised knees; she’s happy she made it out.

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.

Past Dalhart

Dan Williams

August 1, 2021

Way out there somewhere, west past

Dalhart, there’s only earth and sky,

the immensity of space, seemingly

limitless this openness, this emptiness

filled with life, and all are dwarfed by 

faraway horizons that stretch beyond, 

beckoning to follow, unbending roads 

disappear in distance, haze the only 

limit, colossal cumulonimbus clouds rise 

twenty, thirty thousand feet into thinnest, 

breathless air, and below grain silos 

the highest human offering.  Out there, 

in endless expanse, there’s healing there.

Dan Williams is the Director of TCU Press and the TCU Honors Professor of Humanities. His second collection of poems, At the Gate, A Refuge of Sunflowers and Milkweed, is forthcoming from Lamar University Literary Press.