TEJASCOVIDO
THE ARCHIVE
THE INVITATION
Between March 13-June 1, 2020, TEJASCOVIDO invited Texas writers and artists to respond to the effects of the COVID-19 virus pandemic.
In times of crisis, stress, confusion, and an unpredictable future, we are well-acquainted with the power of words and images to help us focus our minds, calm our bodies, and strengthen our hearts for the comfort and benefit of others.
TEJASCOVIDO requested submissions from poets, teachers, artists, photographers, and other writers that demonstrated that power, comfort, and benefit.
CONTRIBUTORS
Robert Allen — Dario R. Beniquez — Alan Birkelbach — Robin Bissett — Jerry Bradley — Jacinto Jesús Cardona — Chantel L. Carlson — Julie Chappell — Kevin Clay — Jessica Neno Cloud — Garrett Cole — Tess Coody-Anders — Jerry Craven — Sherry Craven — Wade Crowder — Colin Cummings — Terry Dalrymple — Jesse Doiron — Richard Dixon — Jason Edwards — Chris Ellery — Charity Embley — Chuck Etheridge — Brian Fehler — Jonathan Fletcher — Fernando Esteban Flores — Michael J. Galko — Alicia Zavala Galván — Jules Gates — Anna B. Gonzalez — Lyman Grant — Lucy Griffith — Jean Hackett — Ken Hada — Al Haley — Michael Helsem — Rodolfo Hernandez Jr. — Mark H. W. Hiebert — Katherine Hoerth — Vincent Hostak — Yazmin Aliyah Jimenez — Vanessa Couto Johnson — Elizabeth D. Jones — Hank Jones — Kathryn Jones — Kenneth Jones — Paul Juhasz — Craig Kinney — Ulf Kirchdorfer — Chad Knesek — Jim LaVilla-Havelin — Sarah K. Lenz — Kendra Preston Leonard— Avery Mann — Richard McAlister — Janet McCann — Bill McCloud — Grace Megnet — Zee Mink-Fuller — Mackenzie Moore — Steven Moore — Susan Signe Morrison — karla k morton — Tom Murphy — Benjamin Nash — Joanna Nellie Navarro — Joe O'Connell — Salena Parker — V. Paige Parker— Andrea Perez — Mary Guerrero Perez — Randy T. Prus — Moumin Quazi — Octavio Quintanilla — Clay Reynolds — Lee Robinson — Marilyn Robitaille — René Saldaña, Jr. — Sumera Saleem — Lisa Toth Salinas — Katharyn Salsman — Jeanie Sanders — Steven P. Schneider — Stephen Schwei — T. Wayne Schwertner — Jan Seale— Linda Simone — Grant Sisk — W. K. Stratton — Karyn Suggs — Herman Sutter — Marcy L. Tanter — Jeffrey L. Taylor — Larry D. Thomas — Loretta Diane Walker — Ron Wallace — E. D. Watson — Marilyn Westfall — Ken Wheatcroft-Pardue — Cullen Whisenhunt — Seth Wieck — Nate Wilbert — Debbie Williams — Sunny Anne Williams — Steve Wilson — Antoinette F. Winstead — Mallory Young
LANGDON REVIEW
This project culminated in the publication of a special edition of Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas in September 2020 which featured 30 selections from this site, plus work from Texas Poet Laureate Emmy Perez, as well as photographs of selected writers and introductory pieces by each on how they were surviving the pandemic. More on this special volume co-edited by Moumin Quazi, Marilyn Robitaille, and Laurence Musgrove here.
Vessel
KATHRYN JONES
May 31, 2020
KATHRYN JONES is a longtime journalist, essayist, author, and teacher. A regular contributor to The New York Times and a contributing editor and former writer-at-large for Texas Monthly magazine, her essays have been published in Texas Monthly and in two 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 ). She currently teaches journalism at Tarleton State University and is finishing a biography of Ben Johnson, the Academy Award-winning actor (The Last Picture Show, The Wild Bunch) 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.
Coronavirus Dream
LEE ROBINSON
May 31, 2020
I hug the guy who delivers the mail,
The old cashier at the grocery store
Whose mask doesn’t hide her smile,
Whose patience purifies the air.
I hug the barber who’s cut my hair
Two hundred times, who’s hanging a sign—
CLOSED—and ask him to share one more
Bad joke before next time, if there is one.
In this dream of course I can fly.
I am out-of-body with my antibody.
I cross oceans, hug my children, my
Grandchildren. “I love you,” I say,
Not “Goodbye.”
LEE ROBINSON’S first poetry collection, HEARSAY, won Poets Out Loud Prize from Fordham University Press and the Violet Crown Award from the Texas Writers' League. Her second collection, CREED, was published by Plainview Press. LEARNING TO LOVE MY ARMADILLO, her third collection, is forthcoming from Groundhog Poetry Press. She lives near Comfort, Texas.
Meanwhile
LUCY GRIFFITH
June 1, 2020
Anthropologists say a mended femur signals
the first evidence of civilization. For
those early humans, a broken leg meant a
lonely, hungry end, unattended.
Now as we isolate,
my cells ache for those alone, fractured,
unprepared. Each breath a skirmish
in an invisible war.
But I remember the smell of lavender
in my daughter’s hair, recall the way
she holds on to a hug with fierce patience,
as if her love demands its own time to travel, skin to skin.
For now, I memorize
the poet who held my face in her hands,
then touched forehead
to forehead, wordless.
I feel the sweet length
of a grandchild, damp with play,
sprawled upon me as we say goodnight
to the moon and stars.
I need to hear the small moans,
breathless gasps
in a room listening carefully
to a poem well told.
Meanwhile, may I do what I can—
as I wait for the world to mend.
Happiest on a tractor named Mabel (a muse of 55 horsepower) LUCY GRIFFITH lives on a ranch beside the Guadalupe River near Comfort, Texas. Her first collection of poems We Make a Tiny Herd was published by Main Street Rag as a finalist in their poetry book contest. Tiny Herd was recently awarded the Wrangler Prize for Poetry by the Western Heritage and Cowboy Hall of Fame. She won the Returning Contributor Scholarship in Poetry for the 2019 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. In addition, she was nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize in 2019.
Where We Planted the New Garden Bed
MARK H. W. HIEBERT
June 1, 2020
Being that the rain came in plentiful
last night and thorough into morning,
I didn’t anticipate how difficult turning
soil would be on a Sunday morning.
It was. The stone-hard dirt thwarting
shovels and the full weight of this heavy
man balancing with some assistance
the standard blade against the earth,
seventeen holes difficultly dug yielded
little openings for the given effort,
what serves as a prayer for new days
taking root (blooming as the hearty
will year to year, growing more lively).
We’ll give them more water tonight,
new plants in old dirt, and let it be
enough, with the care we can still give.
Making his home in San Antonio, MARK H. W. HIEBERT works in multiple mediums to find a few threads of meaning. He took his MFA in creative writing from Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia in 1998. Among other places, he can be found online at hiebertphotography.com and meadowoodisaband.com.