The Obvious

Darby Riley

December 14, 2022

When you come, as you soon must, to the streets of our city,

Mad-eyed from stating the obvious, …

from Advice to a Prophet, by Richard Wilbur (1961)

What is it that keeps us 

from seeing the obvious?

We can’t afford to flirt

with nuclear war. Stop 

burning coal, oil, methane.

Lying kills community.

Earth’s bounty is finite.

All of life is a web.

Truth comes from evidence.

The village is on fire.

We are failing to act.

We party in despair

still hoping to be saved.

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.

You Are Gone

Thomas Hemminger

November 27, 2022

Seducer, healer, deity or thief,

I will see you soon enough—

in the shadow of the rainfall,

in the brief violet darkening a sunset—

but until then I pray watch over him

as a mountain guards its covert ore

and the harsh falcon its flightless young.

from “Prayer,” Dana Gioia

You left a silence, 

An empty place in the house.

Rooms bereft of old stories.

The familiar places,

As if a page has turned,

Are changed from golden-yellow memories

To blue-filtered realism.

The fish aren’t biting today.

The ground is wet and cold. 

The sky is gray and full of rain. 

I’ll wait for the season to change. 

Time can play the physician. 

The sun cycles the dosage.

The moon cycles the council. 

I will miss you.

Life will renew itself. 

Joy will come again. 

I’ll make new stories,

And share them around.

Thomas Hemminger is an elementary music teacher living in Dallas, Texas. His personal hero is Fred Rogers, the creator of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. It was through America’s favorite “neighbor” that Thomas learned of the importance of loving others, and of giving them their own space and grace to grow.

Sunday Shame

Reilly Smith

November 20, 2022

It doesn’t know to feel ashamed

that its name means lazy and sinful.

Like my little sister

after her abortion, when our father

changed her name from Molly to Molly.

Marianne Kunkel, “A Sloth First Hears Its Name”

We sit at the dinner table—round, handed-down

From grandma to mom and then someday to me.

Out of four chairs, we fill three. A memory sits

empty between me and dad. Molly

doesn’t come to dinner anymore. We pass

peas and pleasantries over the empty plate,

and Mom and I avoid eye contact. Dad 

tells the table about his week between smacks.

Maybe we all know

Sunday dinners are as dead as Molly’s baby,

but Dad won’t let us move on. He knows

Mom and I drove her to the clinic. We are not

forgiven.

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

Duet with Fragments (after Sappho)

Vincent Hostak

October 21, 2022

To me he seems like a god

as he sits facing you and

hears you near as you speak

softly and laugh - Fragment 31, Sappho

I listen  

to your sweet and

smiling speech as he sits facing you and

hears you near as you speak

softly and laugh

I’ll soon

let slip the aim

of every word They could not forget you

Poised beyond their reach

They are leaves

with precise and 

tender markings, 

each with meaning

but,

It is their greenness,

each fragment 

almond-shaped or 

in parcels warmly clustered 

I hear a sweet echo that jolts

the heart in my ribs

It is the flush

complexion of

the moon

I hear blushing sweet on a high branch

At the tip of the tallest tree

I can add

nothing, so

I listen I look at you

my voice is empty

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.

---

SOURCES:

Fragment 31, tr Willis Barnstone

To me he seems like a god

as he sits facing you and

hears you near as you speak

softly and laugh....

a sweet echo that jolts

the heart in my ribs...

I look at you

my voice is empty

 Fragment 105(a), tr Anita George

They could not forget you

Poised beyond their reach...

blushing sweet on a high branch

At the tip of the tallest tree

After Grief

Donna Freeman

October 20, 2022

Every year

everything

I have ever learned

in my lifetime

leads back to this: the fires

and the black river of loss

whose other side

is salvation,

whose meaning

none of us will ever know.

“In Blackwater Woods,” Mary Oliver

Grief grows like some wild weed,

overtakes the promise of spring crocus.

Even the smiling sunflowers

that dared to hope

now lie flat

letting ivy creep its way

inside every thin crack. 

A wooden floorboard

thought so stable

scrapes now hollow.

Someone in this small room

dares a breath,

a molecule of air,

invisible it disappears.

So rare, scientists

name it Caring. 

You left me.

I don’t know where you’ve gone,

have no map,

nor faith I’ll find one.

I see you,

your green eyes,

pupils so big

they must have known,

but you didn’t tell 

what was to come. 

Somehow, I remember life,

the feel of you pressed to me.

It was a summer day.

I don’t remember when.

Donna Freeman started writing poetry at age twelve. Her poetry appears in Wilderness House Literary Review, Blue Lake Review and Ocean State Poets Anthology: Giving Voice. Donna's poems were selected for RI Public's Radio "Virtual Gallery" and for ekphrastic shows at Imago Gallery and Wickford Gallery. Poetry is her passion.

Past Too Late

Betsy Joseph

October 11, 2022

      The breaking of so great a thing

      should make a greater crack.                      

                         William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra

Twelve years past too late

the holding pattern wearies, wobbling

from the inertia of postponement.

Not now, they would think.

With two holidays soon approaching,

easier just to go through the motions.

Two months later, they acknowledge

certainly not now, for it would cast

a definite pall on a family member’s birthday.

Surely better timing ahead.

Twelve years past too late

and another anniversary looms ahead.

Not now, they would tiredly agree,

musing on the obvious awkwardness 

it would impose upon themselves—

not to mention an announcement 

that would bear sadness all around.

But when then?

they would whisper deep into the night,

both feeling the toll exerted on each of them,

feeling almost guilty, thinking surely

they should feel a crack greater than exhaustion

as twelve years past too late

now slips too easily into thirteen,

and one automatically asks the other

what they should have for breakfast

as dawn finally arrives in a stupor of indifference.

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.

The Simplest Things

Milton Jordan

October 10, 2022

I have had to learn the simplest things

last, which has made for difficulties.

Maximus to Himself , Charles Olson

Question marks create more conversation

than exclamation points, and silence

sustains more dialogue than the best advice.

Yesterday’s answers open tomorrow’s 

confusion and certainties dissolve

in the familiar fog that marks my mornings.

Neither carefully constructed rhythm 

and rhyme nor well-paced narrative action

will veil my failure to engage strangers 

or friends who page through these poems, and obscure

language or literary references

invite few listeners into your story.

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

Involuntary Muscle

Thomas Quitzau

October 9, 2022

         Out of the air a voice without a face

          Proved by statistics that some cause was just

                    The Shield of Achilles, W. H. Auden

Wake up! And move through the doorsill standing

Peer into this air, so rare and common

Don’t board rockets, intentions demanding

Listen! Harken back and boldly summon

For this era, knowledgeably prepared

Shares the winds that have screamed like old sages

Horrors, repeated mistakes they’ve declared

Hover, shock-waving commanders’ rages

Still go out, still breathe, still measure wisely

Spherically fracturing resounding

Irrelevant Time gapes imprecisely

Now out! And hold up His warm heart pounding

Thomas Quitzau grew up in the Gulf Coast region and worked for over 30 years in Houston, Texas. A self-ascribed member of the ZenJourno School of poetry, Tom recently relocated with his family to Long Island, New York where he teaches and writes.

The Woman

Chris Ellery

October 8, 2022

Maybe God didn’t like

The look of my face when He made it.

Rainer Maria Rilke, “Song of the Little Cripple at the Street Corner”

For a year she was there in the weightroom, 

overweight with a face to make a toad retch

and the vilest of God’s creatures take a back seat.

The fit coeds and gym rats with their biceps, pecs,

and tatts would give her space as if her looks

were some infectious, terminal disease.

She did her best, and gained and gained, 

and beauty glowed from her I couldn’t miss.

When she and I would chat, I felt a strange

attraction, flesh and soul, allure of sure

serenity that made her scars and warts and moles

not invisible, but adornments of her loveliness.

Who gets to say what beauty is, and why?

And who will dare to doubt or mock that I,

since she stopped coming to the gym, can feel 

both tenderly bereft and perfectly fulfilled?

Chris Ellery is a frequent contributor and ardent reader of TPA. His two most recent poetry collections are Elder Tree and Canticles of the Body. Contact him at ellerychris10@gmail.com.

Frostbite

Suzanne Morris

October 7, 2022

My sarcasm wounded a student today.

Afterward I heard him running down the stairs.

                  – from Frost Flowers, by Jane Kenyon

She has sometimes heard others

call them frost flowers,

the wild asters sprouting scattershot

in a field where the poet is

walking alone at dusk

...tired from teaching and a little drunk...

from words flung scattershot at a 

pupil who disappointed today and

who seemed deserving of

a lashing with her caustic tongue.

On the first day of class

my high school English teacher

raged at me for a question I asked

and maybe I deserved my

flaming cheeks, my pounding heart,

the hot tears bitten back till

afterward in the restroom.

And maybe the poet is as

wounded as her pupil as she

walks alone, up on the hill

above her home, amid the frost flowers

...looking at the dark windows below.

Let them be dark... she laments

as she hears

a large bird’s distressing cry

down-mountain:

I was cruel to him: it is a bitter thing....

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.

Why I Write

Anonymous Inmate and Donna Freeman

October 5, 2022

          Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.

Plato

Poem by Inmate

Unfriended by society,

My voice has become nothing

More than twitters echoing

 off these bare walls,

only to disappear mid-echo.

I think I continue to write

in order to be known,

as if my existence

depended on it,

even when it’s never read

or better left

unsaid.

Response by Donna Freeman 

To prove we can travel

beyond our internal prisons

our insecurities

locked cells of inadequacies.

We all yearn to break

 self-made barriers

our brains have created 

imprisoning our souls.

Form gives us freedom 

 hope for a future.

Words are the key

to unlock our prison’s door.

Note by Donna Freeman: A poetry group I belong to ran a voluntary workshop for prison inmates. Its purpose was to give them a chance to learn about poetry as well as to learn how poetry can be used as a powerful expression of their own feelings and thoughts.

As part of that experience, prisoners were asked to write a poem in response to the quote from Plato above and to explain why they write. Then members of my poetry group, myself included, were each given one prisoner’s poem to which to respond to the same question," Why I Write.”

Above is the prisoner’s poem I was given followed by my response.

Donna Freeman started writing poetry at age twelve. Her poetry appears in Wilderness House Literary Review, Blue Lake Review, and Ocean State Poets Anthology: Giving Voice. Donna's poems were selected for RI Public's Radio "Virtual Gallery" as well as ekphrastic shows at Imago and Wickford Art Galleries. 

the house that elizabeth bishop built

Sister Lou Ella Hickman

October 4, 2022

There’s nothing at all complicated, she explained, it’s like making a map. 

e. b. commenting on how she writes poetry 

i 

this was the house that elizabeth built 

who drew the maps to find the bricks 

who used the bricks to write her poems 

ii 

this was the house that elizabeth built

where walls and floors and rooms were shadows 

and was never a home 

this was the house that elizabeth built 

who closed the curtains 

but not quite the door 

iii 

this was the house that elizabeth built 

the books she read, the music she played, the food she cooked 

that was never a home 

hers were the stories that became the house 

that stood on the street etched on the map 

she drew for her travels 

iv 

this was the house where she loved her loves 

how she chose to live where she wrote her life 

this was the house that elizabeth built 

that was never a home 

Sister Lou Ella Hickman, I.W.B.S. is a former teacher and librarian whose writings have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies; Press 53 published her first book of poetry in 2015 entitled she: robed and wordless. She was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2017 and in 2020.       

Homage to My Breasts

Shelley Armitage

October 3, 2022

           these hips are big hips

Lucille Clifton, “homage to my hips”

Ok.  So Nora Ephron had a few things

to say about breasts—

but these are to be lifted up.

Gone are the rocks of ages—

Aphrodite, Marilyn, those buxom

girls on Alyki Beach.

Gone the silicon, away with

size B becoming D.

My breasts could get lost in a sports bra

and not find their way to the finish line.

Yes, Columbus.  The worId is round,

not flat, flat, flat.

But think about these pert

nipples

now spurred from their repose.

Roused really.

Such a godsend

for the purest 

drive in golf—

No worthy booby trap.

Dr. Shelley Armitage is professor emerita and former Roderick Professor at the University of Texas at El Paso. Holder of several Fulbright professorships in American Literature, she has been awarded three NEH grants, an NEA, and a Rockefeller grant. She has published over fifty refereed articles on subjects such as photographic criticism, the arts, popular culture, multicultural literature, and gender studies, along with eight award-winning books, the most recent, a memoir, Walking the Llano: A Texas Memoir of Place. She is a 2022 inductee into the Texas Institute of Letters. She lives in Las Cruces, New Mexico and continues to manage the family farm in Texas and its native grasslands, places that inspire her writing.

Through the Needle’s Eye

Milton Jordan

October 2, 2022

When they say they’re praying about their decision

They’ve already decided.

               Mark Jarman, “Don’t Get Your Hopes Up”

Not that my camel could not thread the needle’s eye

but every needle within my reach is eyeless.

No matter the sharpest point, every project

I imagined aborted before it began.

Cloth, plain or patterned, in my hands, showed no stitch,

no mending nor decorative borders,

and leaders I petitioned for useful tools

answered with prayerful words but empty hands,

narrowed eyes watching from inside the city’s gate.

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

Snakes in the Pine Straw

Jerry Bradley

October 1, 2022

The greatest poverty is not to live in a physical world.

Wallace Stevens, “Esthétique du Mal”

In summer, cooled by earth, water, or shading clouds,

creatures frequently sink to their lowest level,

each a good day to be alive and wanting no more

than to be left alone with food and drink nearby.

I know that desire -- to be as invisible as a neutron star,

the taste of a ripe melon -- and I too resist

when prodded from my bed or cushy mud

by the thrutch and squeeze of too much life.

Even when you start with nothing, it’s hard to keep it,

almost impossible to stay comfortably warmed

and braddled just out of sight.  Some stumbling fool

always seems to come along.  But we should be forgiven

for imagining more than we have, by the choice

of words that shaped our choice of worlds.

Jerry Bradley is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters and the author of 6 full-length poetry collections. He is the poetry editor of Concho River Review and a past president of the Texas Association of Creative Writing Teachers.