Lay More Sod

Reilly Smith

November 10, 2022

Texans live the good life

All new houses look the same

Rent a starter one today

That's how Texas rolls

All new houses look the same

Oh look, another development

That's how Texas rolls

Bulldoze trees to lay more sod

Oh look, another development

A cul-de-sac for kids

Bulldoze trees to lay more sod

Corporations own the homes

A cul-de-sac for kids

Texans live the good life

Corporations own the homes

Rent a starter one today

Reilly Smith is a novice poet, a mother, and a graduate student of English at Lamar University.

A Syzygy of Neighborhood Cats

Jesse Doiron

November 7, 2022

Across the lawns, three cats sit still –

a garden gnome

a plasticized flamingo

a jockey in his colored silks

– cats mark their properties.

They wait for what cats wait for here –

a twitch of ear

a disruption in the spine

a limply raised or lowered limb

– time means nothing to them.

Then, of a sudden, they align –

eyes un-thin   

whiskered muzzles open wide 

trembling throats grumble loud

– no longer, cats sit still.

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 in Texas, 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.

Neighborly

Elisa A. Garza

November 6, 2022

Birds are the neighbors I know best.

I walk the neighborhood each morning, 

head tilted to canopy, hoping to spy 

drumming woodpeckers or tittering Blue Jays.

In the high dead branches of the Chinese Tallows

that I call the dovecote, the White Wings perch

by the dozens, as if surveying our street.

Or, on the tallest branch, a lone Mockingbird will sing,

jumping up, wings spread like arms in greeting.

When I walk with my camera to a new street,

long lens seeking songsmiths on lower branches,

a woman drives up asking pointed questions, 

another makes accusations through her doorbell camera,

and I trek back toward home, to my own yard.

My footfalls have startled birds to move, 

pine to pine ahead, my personal avian scouts.  

Once, I watched a hawk hunting in pathway trees.  

Each time it swooped in, another bird flew out at an angle.

They are sharper than most believe, these neighbors,

to match my steps, but not the hawk’s route,

to understand the habits of both the friend, and the foe.

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.

Forestry Today

John Rutherford

October 20, 2022

When the concrete spreads and the town conquers

The country’s heart; — C.S. Lewis

They cut the pasture next to me,

shaved Mother Nature’s head to the scalp,

dark earth trowel-smooth, the old trees

hauled away for chips at German Pellet.

I could not have named the trees

if my life had depended on it.

What's a sycamore to me?

A water oak? A loblolly pine?

They didn’t teach us in school. 

The next day the lines were in the dirt,

marked out with little bits of string,

the boards laid down, concrete to pour

for, the advertisements said, a gas station

and a liquor store and a laundromat

to open Spring of 2023, to be open 24

hours every day on my unlit, quiet

country lane, wood-romance ended,

another outpost of town’s conquest,

an army in hi-viz jackets and hardhats.

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

Air Show Insectarium

Thomas Quitzau

October 7, 2022

Manifold movements within confined space: 

Thick dead air provides mud daubers fluid, 

Hornets galore curve in acrobatic

Arcs and circles envied by Top Guns in

Their clunky light metallic shells, bug-eyed, 

Trained so well, screaming through thinner, colder 

Stratospheric superiority.

These planes—congruent parallel fence boards 

Separate bad neighbors rarely seen in 

Imprisoned impressionistic shade, dark

And light green yards—forests of wild uncut 

Trees jut right out of Earth— flora-stubble:

Her perpetual five o’clock shadow 

Covering this class of active aces.

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.

The Neighborhood in Two Poems

Vincent Hostak

October 5, 2022

I.  Monsoon Days

In the land of the living

nothing is dead which may nourish another.

The magpie clutches this knowledge

shards of oyster shells and broken bracelets

trafficked from backyard museums

poured to the altar in a mate’s eyes.

Today he stops to feed in the place 

where a squirrel took its last breath.

The curb briefly stained (before the next rain)

Until three o’clock (when the gods are drunk again). 

What rests easy?

Not a yellow bullhead

circling the fogged creek bottom

puffing out a pebble

it mistook for a snail.

Not the water striders

on the taught skin of pond

miming falling rain

before it arrives.

The land of the living 

is a neighborhood of unquenchable beasts 

between foothills and hard acres

and groves of cattails, cleaved, menaced by seeds

where gifts from the impulsive sky

but for distractions each solves to seize.

II.  The Peach Thief

Ambiguity

is the night’s best game.

Walk this neighborhood by daylight

you may never be surprised.

Step into this page, into the nigh black night

you arrive where the street 

relaxes downslope from the park

(there’s a tiny pocket where the air is cooler).

Shadow

a mad architect

swallows all trusted shapes

returning: a space carved by an open door,

porch-lit bodies exquisitely tangled

or curtains hung from the jamb

(lovers saying goodbye, goodbye).

Everywhere, crumbs of consciousness,

rustlings nearly camouflaged

by songs of great bull-crickets,

leaves gossiping within a rare peach tree

(a hermit in this neighborhood that once was an orchard).

A hand conjoined to shadow

struggles through cords of cat’s eye leaves

swipes at the last fruit of summer.

A moonlight borne thief with

traces of windbreaker or vellum thin wings

(it’s the hour, who knows which?)

tunes out my wonder, minces away.

I consider these walk-ons:

a witness, a thief

an occasion after dawn 

(when night selves retire).

What remains turns in a trance

with a different plot

where both scale the hill

search for vanished contours and

find everything less remarkable by daylight.

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.

Neighborly Waltzes

Betsy Joseph

September 28, 2022

ONE, two, three,

STEP-step-close.

To the strains of Johann Strauss

streaming from another room

I found myself at seventeen

teaching a widowed neighbor to waltz

in measured three-quarter time.

A church social in the wings,

along with a lady friend’s invitation,

had this seventy-something neighbor

shyly ringing the doorbell, asking for my assist.

Still at an age where I thought I could do anything,

I promised I would try.

At night I did my research,

neighbor Henry found a record,

and we practiced each afternoon

until he somewhat mastered the rhythm

and he felt almost confident.

The special evening, when it arrived,

went well according to his report 

and Henry continued to dance for some years ahead.

I’ve not waltzed since that age of seventeen.

My spectacled and slender neighbor,

his silver hair always neatly trimmed,

passed away my second year in college.

From memories of old, yet still wondrously fresh,

Henry remains as I once remembered:

undaunted and determined,

forever chuckling at our missteps,

both of us in ages of becoming. 

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.

When You Were There

Suzanne Morris

September 21, 2022

–for Connie

I’ve been thinking of you lately,

and wanted to be in touch– 

Not long ago I went back to Idylwood

and took a stroll.

It hasn’t changed much

over the years from

the way I remembered it. 

Those sturdy brick homes

retreating behind leafy shade trees

on streets sloping down to where

the bayou winds unhurriedly

along its path

still evoked a dreamy, faraway

feeling that made it hard to believe

I was only a few minutes from

downtown Houston.

I started at our house,

across the street from the park

where as a child I would

fly through the air

on a wood plank swing

suspended on bulky iron chains

and plunge, terrified, from the

top of the mountainous sliding board.

Then I found myself

pivoting around and

heading one street over

to the house where you and

your mother lived for a year or so.

I didn’t recall the house number

but I remembered

your attic bedroom with

two dormer windows

overlooking the front walk, and 

that’s how I found it.

First thing I thought of was

that time we stayed up all night

stretched out on the bed

in our shorty pajamas

cramming for finals

on No-Doz!

And after a while you

looked up from your books 

and said to me, with an intensity

I wouldn’t forget,

that you loved it there and wanted

never to leave....

It was nice to see the family

who live there now

are doing their part to

keep up the neighborhood– 

there are flowers blooming

up and down the front walk.

As I paused in my steps

my gaze swept up to

those two windows,

and I found myself imagining you,

up there in your attic room,

peering down at the sun-speckled

houses and yards below. 

All at once a queer feeling

overtook me, that somehow

I had become enfolded

in that time

when you were there.

I felt almost as if I were in

a state of grace

and perhaps I was, because

after the moment passed

I realized how much I’d

taken for granted

growing up in Idylwood

and understood

for the first time

why you cried so hard

when you and your mother

moved away.             

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.                                        

Allandale, Linked

Amy L. Greenspan

September 14, 2022

We arrived in the 80s when, like our house,

we were barely 30 years old. Avocado 

and gold shag covered the floors. The oven, 

one bathroom were pink. The den’s linoleum 

likely was laced with asbestos.

Inside, all was small. Outside, all was big.

Yards flowed together or wore chain link fences – 

low, so neighbors could chat.

Always a gate so kids could run through

without climbing the gray diamond grids.

And run through they did! Year after year,

kids spilled through backyards

like minnows after a rain, lifting

and dropping each horseshoe-shaped latch

with the loud metal clank of freedom.

Our lot’s chain link remains on two sides

but the back now wears new neighbors’ wood – 

tall, silent slats have replaced the gate,

blocked the spot where a makeshift mailbox

let little girls share their secrets.

We won’t know those neighbors.

They won’t know the joys

of life in a chain link world.

Amy L. Greenspan spent much of her career as Managing Editor for a legal publishing company. Her poems appear in multiple editions of the Texas Poetry Calendar, as well as collections including Weaving the Terrain: 100-Word Southwestern Poems, Lifting the Sky: Southwestern Haiku and Haiga, di-verse-city, cattails, and Haiku Presence.

Canine Eclogue

Kendra Leonard

September 7, 2022

Whose coonhound there is singing,

marking possum and raccoon—

those magicians of night who in slim hours

make the landscape of fences and grills,

cars and patios all their own—

and baying at full throat?

He is not mine; mine is the Pyrenees dog,

turned kangaroo to leap for the possum.

Her barking is not song, but in her pride,

recounting her diligence in guarding

me, her livestock, she will make 

a great roar of self-satisfaction.

Whose dog is it that barks for bedtime:

nine o’clock, he barks, eleven o’clock,

small chihuahua barks,

short blasts of alarm, coming from the safety

of the deck

under which

the possum lurks. 

Not mine either; mine is the long

and lean dog, his edges fringed 

like a Western shirt: he makes noise rarely,

unprovoked but for large strangers.

These hounds a soundscape craft

that I would allow every and all nights

were it not for neighbors with guns, Texas triggered,

for making silent what would naïvely sing,

voicing instinct, excitement, and scent.

Kendra Preston Leonard is a librettist and lyricist inspired by history, language, the environment, social issues, and the mythopoeic. Her first chapbook, Making Mythology, was published in 2020 by Louisiana Literature Press, and her novella in verse, Protectress, was published in 2022 by Unsolicited Press.

Numbering Those Days

Milton Jordan

September 1, 2022

Once in a lifetime that hides in my memory

like a chapter in an unfinished novel

when my hair hung over my shirt collar,

I gave my shaving mug and brush to the kid

across the street two years before he’d need them

and moved into three rooms behind Chandler’s store

on a back street alongside the freight tracks

with another old boy on a different search.

Four blocks over the Always Open Grill

on Fifth sold monthly breakfast tickets for eggs,

bacon, toast and coffee if you ordered by six.

The city still ran Route Seven out Federal

to the mill and Javier would join me

for the last mile to put in our daily 

eight hours on the saws and trimmers.  

Milton Jordan lives with Anne in Georgetown, Texas. "Numbering Those Days” is the opening piece in a cycle of poems on their life together.