Here and Nowhere

Sumera Saleem

February 20, 2022

Who has ever come to the edge?

Is it I, we, time or none?

Some say it is ‘I’ and ‘I’ is nothing.

Nothing will stay forever and perhaps for no reason.

Some say it is ‘we’ and ‘we’ is a product of dreams,

Always unfulfilled till ‘I’ becomes ‘we’.

Some say it is time which is already over and

What we see is a slow end rolling towards eternity.

What answers do I have other than these? None.

Or perhaps only this, some is the sum that takes us all in

In the hope of being together 

For whatever stays for us beyond the edge.

Sumera Saleem is a lecturer in the department of English language and literature, Sargodha University, 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.

Waiting for the News

Jesse Doiron

February 19, 2022

At five a. m.,

I stand beneath two level trees

of different species, 

waiting for the newspaper.

For years, the oak and pine

have shared 

the birds and squirrels,

arched above my driveway.

That I have seen these trees

grow tall together

is, suddenly,

remarkable to me.

For, when I was a boy,

trees seemed to simply be

and seemed always 

they simply would.

Now, anew, I stand upon an

unfamiliar edge of morning

and appreciate

their dim-lit leaves.

I sympathize

the sleepy sap of limbs

that must be tired 

of all that reaching up.

Some have fallen down;

more with winter will.

I know the oak

will lose his leaves.

His handmaid pine

will brown a bit

yet cling to green,

no matter if it frosts for days.

The warm September dawn

is slow and knows not

to be concerned

about the lack of light.

Wood roaches rattle mad

across the cracked cement;

their cousin crickets count 

in Fahrenheit.

The Wellborns’ cat

stares out, eyes only,

from the moon-shade-cover

of her ill-kempt garden.

Orion is still hunting

night things through the trees

as I wait in the driveway

for the far-flung news.

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.

Covid Ward Sentinel

Jim Benton

February 18, 2022

Covid-19 Visitor Guidelines:

One visitor once per day, up to 2 hours during normal visiting hours. If physician determines it unsafe for a patient to have visitors, we will provide virtual tools for visitation.

I am the gatekeeper

the one outside the door

setting the edge between you

and your own — dying.

On the other side

your life fades gasping away

edging further away from you

with every ventilating pulse.

You would give your life

to hold the hand of your life

who lies beyond the gate,

but I must keep you away.

I must keep you safe

from life’s contagious breath,

robber of breath, inhaling

and exhaling death.

I must explain the inexplicable,

inflate the horror of dying

to the terror of dying alone

at both edges of the gate I tend.

The final isolation is stayed

by the choking isolations of mask

and distance and fear

and yearlong months alone

outside the gate

standing helpless at the edge.

I am the gatekeeper

the separation, the life preserver.

Saving you from what?

Your life is already leaking away,

and death is the only thing

that passes through the gate.

Jim Benton is a retired high school teacher whose best career moments were teaching students to see and write poetry. In retirement, he has given more time to his own writing and has published twenty-odd poems over the last decade or so. He lives in Denton, TX.

Brunch, 2021

Katherine Hoerth

February 17, 2022

This lazy summer afternoon, we brunch

at some bougie restaurant downtown, 

something we haven’t done for far too long. 

We sit on the patio. I sip

a kale and apple tonic with some lemon

and lots of ice to quench that waking thirst

as the smell of fresh espresso wafts

out from the open door. The waitress hustles—

a full tray always in her hand, a smile

etched into her face. We ponder over

what to order, what to satisfy

a hunger that’s been quarantined for months,

a year, a day, a lifetime now it seems—

hand-braided challah toast with maple syrup,

barbacoa tacos with tortillas

made from corn that’s grown mere miles away,

steel-cut oats with marinated berries?

A cappuccino is a must, of course,

with frothy almond milk and local honey,

maybe a rose mimosa, too. 

Wrapped in June’s embrace, I could forget

how we teeter on the edge of peace—

until the waitress interrupts, her smile

shattering as she sets my platter down:

organic avocado toast on multigrain,

topped with siracha and a cage-free egg

that bursts and drowns the plate in golden yolk.

Katherine Hoerth is the author of four poetry collections, including Goddess Wears Cowboy Boots, which won the Helen C. Smith Prize from the Texas Institute of Letters in 2015. She is an Assistant Professor of English at Lamar University and Editor-in-Chief of Lamar University Literary Press. Her next poetry collection, Borderland Mujeres, will be released by SFAU Press.

For What It’s Worth: A Brief Discourse on Edge

Betsy Joseph

February 16, 2022

My earliest acquaintance with the concept of edge

centered on visuals of tables and corners,

of erasers and rulers.

Later I would consider the notion differently:

the edge of a jawline tightening in anger,

the nuance of a voice edgy and brittle with scorn.

It was then I would long for the simplicity

of the folded edge of manila paper.

So many in these times continue to be on edge,

perched rather than poised on their ledges

of sanctimony and self-delusion.

They are not the first in our history

nor, sadly, will they be the last.

The present, though, being the only certainty

we can cup in our palm, makes the time ahead

look to be ever bumpy and more unkind.

How and when, I wonder, did current malcontents,

once so preoccupied with their rulers and paper,

now aligning the edges to suit their vision,

lose sight of The Golden Rule?

Betsy Joseph (Dallas, TX) has poems that have appeared in various journals and anthologies. Her poetry collection, Only So Many Autumns, was published by LULP in 2019. Lamar is also publishing her forthcoming book, Relatively Speaking: Poems of Person and Place, a collaborative collection with her brother, poet Chip Dameron.

The Wreck of Our Life Together

Jerry Bradley

February 14, 2022

“I drink to the wreck of our life together.” Anna Akhmatova, “Last Toast”

he orbited the Dairy Queen several times 

before he caught her eye

the signals he got in that first kiss 

were stronger than late-night radio

one usually forms good habits

and falls into bad ones

so they waited as fast as they could

and two years later wed

he told friends later he’d married her for her looks

but not the ones she’d begun to give him

a lot of history is not fit to repeat

but he never got lost in his own tears

now he notices the run in the night’s stocking

how the wind sings at every crossroad

and whatever edge he crosses

it’s a place where he never has the right of way

Jerry Bradley is poetry editor of Concho River Review and a member of the Texas Institute of Letters. His latest book is Rapunzel's Parrot.

HOLD FAST #2

Janelle Curlin-Taylor

February 14, 2022

Conversation with The Thread

William Stafford

There is a text:

"Feed the hungry, welcome the stranger

House the homeless, care for the sick"

This is my thread.

Will the thread keep me from the edge or

Will the thread lead me to the edge?

When I was young I hoped

The thread would lead me to the edge

Later in life I held on tight

Hoping the thread would keep me

from the edge.

I remind myself 

"while I hold the thread

I can't get lost"

Even though it goes

Among things that change.

This thread goes missing

When I am not mindful.

I always find it

At the edge.

In times of loss and fear

In days of chaos and despair

"Hold fast to your thread" I tell myself

Never grow weary of where the thread takes you.

As long as you live hold fast to your thread.

Odd Monday, 12/10/2021

Janelle CurlinTaylor’s poetry has appeared in the di-verse-City Anthology, Blue Hole, Best Austin Poetry 2018-2019, Waco Wordfest Anthology 2020 and 2021, Texas Poetry Calendar 2020, Tejascovido, Texas Poetry Assignment. She is married to California poet Jeffrey Taylor.

Many on Edge as the Virus Rages

Nate Wilbert

February 12, 2022

Stand on the bank of the Rubicon river,

Place yourself in view of Caesar and his legion,

Watch as they cross not one but two lines.

Dance in the fire of our falling empire,

Lay down in the light of stars, not your star,

Breathe in deep the air of the morning after.

Drop between the womb and our relentless 

World, where the lilies of the mountain die

So busy city streets get their palm trees,

Where gold leaf halos are found, out of reach,

Where stories fall at graveside, ceremonies

Holding the candles of life so tightly.

Stretch your soul like all of humanity

Beyond your conception of God, further,

Beyond even Rumi’s field, where we meet

And beyond, of course, the certainty of

Our Rubicon, rim of reality, 

Crossing the edge, ascending, descending.

Grab Jacob’s ladder, while Jacob watches

Us climb between this pandemic and its 

Endemic. There’s an edge to everything.

Nate Wilbert, a Texan for 25 years, now lives on the edge of the Adirondacks of New York, with his wife and their dog, reading and writing poetry, working remotely for an airport in Texas.

Lingering Effects

Suzanne Morris

February 10, 2022

The new black cloth mask felt
heavy on my face–

supposedly more effective
than the thinner ones

hastily procured in the
early stage of the long pandemic–

its small slit for breathing
barely a reprieve

and I couldn’t get the
words out

though they seemed
right on the edge

how I felt sitting in
the big theatre auditorium

that Sunday afternoon when
live plays had resumed after

a year and a half of
delays and false starts

attended by dashed hopes and
another round of layoffs

then finally–.

I haven’t developed Covid–
thank God– but maybe

something in my spirit
couldn’t breathe freely for too long

and was left with certain
lingering effects

how being in my
assigned seat seemed

the same as before,
but then again

not the same at all,

the old tingling rush of
anticipation at the curtain’s rise

all but smothered under
some undefined weight

and the words to
describe how I felt

trapped behind
the mask

now required
at all performances.

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).

The Wounded Poet

Jim Benton

February 3, 2022

for Naomi Shihab Nye

Beside the ancient city gate

back against its adobe wall, the poet

regards sore-footed travelers passing

in caravan and convoy and cavalcade.

Wrapped in hand-woven clothes, she watches

and weaves from threads of sorrow and loss,

from unraveled remnants of lives asunder

and wounded strands of common paths,

her garments edged with compassion.

She is at home in the dusty darkness

of refugees, migrants lost and wandering,

shuffling men and overlooked women,

and children with sticky hands spilling outside the edges

of maps and nations and borders and walls.

The garments she weaves are the songs of their lives;

their broken melodies are hers as well.

For who can hear the sufferer’s song

and not have wounds of her own?

She sings with the power of days and wraps them

one by one in serapes and shawls,

burqas and bandages, caftans, cloaks,

and sheltering woolen blankets.

She sings of pulleys and buttonholes,

and weeds that spring from sidewalk cracks.

Her children notice and reshape their world: 

shoelaces, snow bullets, socks turned inside out.

And never forget their own power.

One by one, she weaves her garments,

sometimes unraveling, starting again.

Day by day, she gives them away

as freely as she returns a smile,

clasps a hand, or sees what others do not.

By moonlight, she gathers fallen strands,

discarded tales, forgotten dreams,

from the hard-packed trails,

fills her jug with water from the roadside

well, and sometimes wrestles

angels for a blessing or a song.

At times she sings far away from home,

an ember all wrapped in adobe and warming

all who gather near. She sings

with the power of children and days,

wearing a garment woven of life,

and beckons us all to weave together

a song of love for all the earth.

Jim Benton is a retired high school teacher whose best career moments were teaching students to see and write poetry. In retirement, he has given more time to his own writing and has published twenty-odd poems over the last decade or so. He lives in Denton, TX.

Dreaming in Noir

Fernando Esteban Flores

January 27, 2022

Chapter One hundred seventy-eight

(for Suzanne Green)

Cruelty bashes you like a mace

Not a place that’s kind

Easier to fall in with thieves

Murderers terrorists the unkind

To be waylaid 

A long way from grace

Harder to find 

Ballast tottering 

On the edge

Of such a tenuous space

My friend Suzanne

Says there are still

Little crevices of magic

To be found in the world

I hold that thought

—a better lantern

Than light—

Like Diogenes

Searching for 

An honest human

I’m told he

Didn’t much care

For popular opinion

Or wealth

Thó I’m not from the school of cynics

I don’t trust Pandora’s Box

Somewhere a man is drowning

Let’s not wish him well

But get him the

Hell out of there

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.

Wind Pipe

Jim LaVilla-Havelin

January 20, 2022

---

Wind 

Pipe

with words

tightening

in his throat

clutching at

the air, he 

composes

the great 

loss of breath

poem

a poem so

constricted

so dense

and closed

to wordy

happen

stance

that it 

becomes

almost imp-

ossible to

to get a

word in

edge wise

Jim LaVilla-Havelin is the author of five books of poetry. His new chapbook, TALES FROM THE BREAKAWAY REPUBLIC, will be published by Moonstone Press in Philadelphia in 2022. He is the Poetry Editor for the San Antonio Express-News and the Coordinator for National Poetry Month in San Antonio.

Josephine

Melanie Alberts

January 13, 2022

There was only so much I wanted to experience

through my grandmother, with her old lady smells

of ammonia, b.o., and bacon fat, her ignoble housedress

and sagging bosom, all topped off with a job as a janitress

at my once-favorite New Haven skyscraper. She survived

the scourge of her time, in my time just a history lesson

named after a country I wanted to visit until lockdown

congratulated the unreachable distances between us. 

She did teach me how to make pierogies but forgot

to mention an ingredient (friends’ faces dropped

as they ate them, those flattened pillows dolled

up in butter). She told my fortune and described

her mother’s ghost, handing to me centuries of Polish

superstition and sentimentality in an afternoon.

Through her, I saw the truth in the National Enquirer,

listened with half an ear to her rants against The Jews,

The Blacks and The Protestants and all my friends

who were not saintly offshoots of Eastern European virgins.

As a child, I wondered why dad never disclosed the date

of his parents’ marriage and his birth. Passing years soften

the past and as secrets waft through shut bedroom doors

my grandmother Josephine becomes again the “high-stepper”

she was in her youth, close-cropped curls and open smile,

flapper legs luminescent as if coated in the lilac-scented talc

she patted under her arms, on her face, across her breasts,

powder purchased in a dime store with her boyfriends’ money

jingling in a handbag, its frayed edges bursting with purest desire.

Writer and psychic artist Melanie Alberts works at the University of Texas at Austin. Her non-fiction and poetry have appeared in the Cold Moon Journal, Texas Poetry Assignment, Ransom Center Magazine, Just This, The Austin Chronicle, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, and others. Follow Melanie on Instagram @clair.circles.spirit.art.

Feast of the Singed

Vincent Hostak

January 6, 2022

A snow too late to quench the fires

arrived in the new year

brushing across a plain of soot

like the opposite of shadow

chasing a south-breaking crow.

She imagines a place 

where seeds still cling to tallgrass,

where the feast is meager but fair.

Follow the long-told story

of a frozen spillway, a cache  

filled with the eggs of last Summer’s mayflies.

Take hold and rummage while you can,

there’s a dream beyond the fire-break.

The others too, with feathers singed,

will soon be here to split the crust,

cling to the edge and taste the meats

along the ash-filled strand.

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.

Insomnia

Kathryn Jones

December 30, 2021

Be still, my unquiet mind;

do not go down that dark hallway,

doors on each side half open, 

beckoning me to enter

rooms with faces floating in the wallpaper.

Echoes and creaks and a stifled scream –

I have been there too many times.

I close my eyes, pray for sleep.

Outside the moon slides below the clouds,

throws a dagger of light across my face.

My eyes flutter open; I look out the window.

A creature rustles in the garden;

irises sway like violet ghosts.

I toss back the covers. 

It’s coming. 

I get up, go to the kitchen, pour a glass of water. 

An invisible icy hand rests on my shoulder;

I shudder and wrap myself in a robe.

The clock ticks, the pendulum swings,

the kitchen faucet drips and so does my mind,

counting off the things I must do tomorrow

but tomorrow is already today.

I surrender and retreat to bed. 

The moon sets, the rays no longer pierce my pillow.

The garden is still, the wind chimes tinkle. 

The doors close, the faces fade into the wallpaper.

I fall into a deep sleep and dream…

Artists paint naked people in a strange room;

spies chase me with guns; I’m sick in a hospital

with a tube down my throat. I run to the edge

of an abyss and start falling, falling, falling….

I jolt awake, soaked with sweat,

relieved to see sunlight and a brief reprieve.

Then the afternoon shadows lengthen,

the day dwindles again,

the carousel begins spinning in my head,

horses frozen in gallop, nostrils flared,

chasing each other around in circles.

I hold on, eyes shut, but I do not sleep.  

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.

Free to Fly

Thomas Quitzau

December 24, 2021

Why must we choose sides?

Must we pick a face of the COVID-19 Rubik’s cube?

Rushing to judgment’s edge?

Flying from all directions

Blue Jays float to the platform

For peanuts in the shell

Multiple sorties

There must be 19, 20, 21

Swooping blue arcs

They don’t all look alike

They wear no clothes

They’re socially distanced, sort of

They wait their turns

They step aside for one daring woodpecker with the red mask and sharp beak

They own the air

They are Jetsons in the high ivy

Never nudging

Never misjudging

Clutching only peanuts.

Scheduled to arrive tomorrow, my son has tested positive:

He won’t be coming

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.

Beginning Again

Milton Jordan

December 22, 2021

We still struggle to shore up shattered structures

of lives we once thought overly demanding,

too many tasks with excess expectations

from friends and family and colleagues that seemed

too often to fill cherished spaces

we’d planned to keep empty for ourselves.

Empty has become our way of living

after two years on infection’s edge

and we yearn to use again those habits

of cooperation and community

now atrophied where we set them aside

months ago, expecting a brief lockdown.

Perhaps now we’ll welcome expectations,

tackle every task together and find

cherished spaces in those shattered structures. 

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.

We in the World

Jeffrey Taylor

December 21, 2021

are riding this toboggan together,
negotiating twists and turns of the terrain,
avoiding rocks and trees. Now an edge
arrives unexpectedly. Some lean left.
Some lean right. Together,
we go over the edge.

Jeffrey L. Taylor retired in 2001 after 40 years as a Software Engineer. Around 1990, poems started holding his sleep hostage. He now writes in the day. He has been published in di-vêrsé-city, Texas Poetry Calendar, Tejascovido, Failed Haiku, Loud Coffee Press, and California Quarterly.