God, Trucks, and Cars

Jeanie Sanders

July 7, 2024

The sign said, God, Trucks, and Cars.

I visualize God hiking up his long white robes

and taking a test drive down Military Highway.

Can he be trusted with the keys I wonder?

Will he bring the truck back without a dint

or scratch.  Earth speed must mean nothing

to a God that can call the Universe to order

every day as he checks on his creations.

Cruising down the crowded highway God goes.

People taking him for just another old gray-haired

guy in his truck.  Nothing special really.

But, to God the feel of the wheel is enticing.

The power to quickly move left and right.

The freedom to just be yourself for a while.

The Milky Way has nothing on this God thinks

as he drag races into the night.

Jeanie Sanders is a poet and collage artist. She lives in Lytle, Texas. Her poems have been published in The Texas Observer, San Antonio Express-News, Texas Poetry Calendar, Passager, La Voz de Esperanza, and several anthologies. She has two books of poetry, “The Book of the Dead” Poems and Photographs and “The Dispossessed.”

Unlikely Encounter between a Him and a Her

Irene Keller

June 30, 2024

Through oversized dark glasses, she spied

the pristine, metallic sublime green Chevy

atop spinning extra wide, bold wheels

reflecting the noonday sun.

Her usual speed for safe traveling,

always one notch below the limit,

was replaced with a need to gaze

at the exotic coupe    

moving with sheen and speed

from one lane to another

and then to another.

The silver grays, she and her Focus,

gained on their moving pursuit,

front bumpers and windows aligned,  

with the feminist grandma

honking at the carefree young man 

driving his sun-blessed car while 

jamming to blaring Latin rap.

Feminist? Machismo? Age? No matter

for she just had to holler, “Love the car!” 

The rapping driver side-glanced her way, 

then quickly looked again in disbelief 

to hear her yell one more time, 

“Love the car!” Hearing her truth,

he grinned like a star on wheels. 

He drove west, as all Huck Finns do,

she headed south, like a good snowbird, 

appreciating his back window sticker

                —Tejas man— 

Irene Keller, Ph.D., is a retired Texas public school educator who lives in New Braunfels, Texas. Reading contemporary poetry is part of her daily living.  See her other poems in Texas Poetry Assignment.

Gangster Runningboards

Clarence Wolfshohl

June 30, 2024

It was a ’35 Ford 4-door sedan, 

my first car.  Headlights perched 

on the fenders like crows on a branch.  

No trunk, spare in a continental kit 

on the turtle back, jack and tire tools 

gotten by folding out the rear seat. 

I bought it from Uncle Al for $35.  

His chow dog had somehow gotten shut 

inside and ripped the upholstery.  

I covered the seats with burlap bags.

It was our gang who rode in it. 

Darrell, later to be my best man, 

and he was.  Charles Mercy, 

who all called just Mercy 

because we four compadres needed some.  

Rodney Brown, who fifty years later 

at a class reunion, asked if I 

still had the old beast.

It was gray, faded, powdery.  

My father’s cousin—I guess mine, too—

Frank, who drove his ’29 Model-A 

he had bought new to Indianapolis 

from San Antonio every May to watch 

the races in person, and this was the late 50s,

he and I replaced nearly all the wiring 

in it over the couple years I had it.  

And he told me to scrub the car 

with Ajax to take off the powder 

and make the car shine.  

It worked.

It was the same model we saw 

in some forgotten gangster movie:  

Edward G. Robinson or George Raft 

shooting down rival punks in a blaze 

of Tommy guns.  The shooters stood 

on that black sedan’s runningboards 

as they raced past their foes 

and ratty-tat-tated them

in a crescendo of background music. 

We had gangster runningboards.

And it was Rodney Brown—

the other two already dead by that class reunion.  

Mercy killed in Vietnam in his twenties.  

Darrell, who broke up my wedding 

with a shit-eating grin, dead of a heart attack

in his fifties.  So only Rodney and I 

were left of the gangster runningboard gang, 

and he asked if I still had the car.

Native of San Antonio, Clarence Wolfshohl has been active in the small press as writer and publisher for sixty years.  More recently he has published in Southwest American Literature, The Mailer Review, New Texas, New Letters, and Texas Poetry Assignment.

Soul

John Rutherford

June 30, 2024

I've never owned anything

I didn't pay for in cash, 

a few thousand dollars 

in the form of a cashier's check:

my ticket to the open road. 

I'd had the red Kia Soul

(yes, the hamster car) 

for two months before the flood, 

a five-hundred year event, 

the second in two years. 

It survived when my Subaru did not, 

water over the gearshift, floating

soda-bottles drifting from under the seat

like icebergs, clear and clean

falling onto the silt left behind.

The oil changes and tire rotations

punctuate my months like birthdays,

anniversaries, inspections like Christmas

and voting: due annually, do if I remember,

and always pay the bill in full.

John Rutherford is a poet living and writing in Beaumont, TX. His work can be found in The Basilisk Tree, The Texas Poetry Assignment, and in his 2023 chapbook Birds in a Storm(Naked Cat Press). He is currently an MFA student at the University of St. Thomas(Houston). 

Red Convertible

Suzanne Morris

June 30, 2024

Two men came to deliver a new

side-by-side washer and dryer set

in high-gloss white

and haul away the high-end

pair in candied-apple red 

that had commanded

our washroom

for nearly two decades.

I remarked to one–a Black man

with a bushy gray beard

and a little space between

his two front teeth– 

how you had joked when we

selected the color,

that we were too old for a

red convertible

so we were buying a red

washer and dryer instead.

The man’s face broke into

a broad boyish grin.

You’re never too old

for a red Corvette, he said.

Funny he would readily

think of

that sexy, low-slung

powerhouse of a car

you had fantasized about owning

from the time you were a teenager

until you were way too old to

ease in behind the wheel.

And as though it were yesterday

I could hear you express the hope

that the pricey washer and dryer

would last the rest of our lives.

In your case, though not by far,

they had.

I watched as the pair

in candied-apple red

were hoisted up, then

bumped and shoved, side by side

till they were swallowed up

in the mouth of the delivery truck,

the accordion door 

rolling down and banging shut

then the truck was

speeding away.

A native of Houston, Suzanne Morris has made her home in East Texas for nearly two decades.  Her poems have appeared in anthologies as well as online poetry journals, including The Texas Poetry Assignment, The New Verse News, The Pine Cone Review, and Stone Poetry Quarterly. 

Ten Cadillacs

Kathryn Jones

June 23, 2024

Every time I drive west of Amarillo

where the Mother Road, Route 66, used to run,

they pull me to exit off the busy interstate,

make the pilgrimage to a dusty patch of land, 

a ranch with no cattle but a herd –

ten painted Cadillacs, halfway in the ground.

They face west in a line, angled so their tail fins

point to the sky, paint peeling in the sun, 

wheels stripped of tires, metal rusting,

decaying but defiant. To some they are junk, 

to others art. To me they are cairns on a trail,

pointing the way so I will not get lost. 

I get back on the road, point my car west, 

Cadillacs fading in my rearview mirror,

their journeys over but mine just beginning, 

heading not toward a destination, 

distracted by roadside attractions, but still 

searching for wonder, a journey with no end.

Kathryn Jones is a poet, journalist, and essayist whose work has been published in The New York Times, Texas Monthly, Texas Highways, and the Texas Observer. Her poetry has appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies, including TexasPoetryAssignment.com, Unknotting the Line: The Poetry in Prose (Dos Gatos Press, 2023), Lone Star Poetry (Kallisto Gaia Press, 2023), and in her chapbook, An Orchid’s Guide to Life, published by Finishing Line Press. She was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters in 2016 and lives on a ranch near Glen Rose, Texas.

Some Years Later

Milton Jordan

June 9, 2024

The two photographs share a synoptic

quality, hung with others along the stairs 

above the first landing, the woman, 

younger then, in the season’s standard 

skirt, letter sweater and saddle oxfords 

at the front fender of an early forties 

black Chevy sedan, luggage ready to load.

In an adjacent frame a full color 

image of a strikingly similar

figure at the open driver’s door

of her deep red ‘64 El Camino,

faded Levis, Tony Lamas and a crisp 

white, button collared shirt, the standard

that season, her luggage already loaded.

Milton Jordan lives with Anne in Georgetown, Texas. He co-edited the first Texas Poetry Assignment anthology, Lone Star Poetry, Kallisto Gaia Press, 2022.

Cruising the Bluebonnets

Gary S. Rosin

June 9, 2024

Out in your red sports car,
you cruise with the top down,
a Chuy's baseball cap
pulled down over your eyes
against the April sun.

You take Farm-to-Market
highways, without shoulders,
across the Hill Country,
try to take each curve at
twice the suggested speed.

Bluebonnets and paintbrush
start to spread across fields,
pose for the annual
bluebonnet photographs—
you and your girl, smiling.

Then it’s on to the next
curve, the wind in her hair,
the sun already low,
as you and Joe Ely
sing “Lord of the Highway.”

Gary S. Rosin’s work has been nominated for Pushcart Prizes and “Best of the Net,” and has appeared, or is forthcoming, in MacQueen’s Quinterly, The Ekphrastic Review, Texas Seniors (Lamar Literary Press), and elsewhere. He has two chapbooks, Standing Inside the Web (Bear House Publishing), and Fire and Shadows (Legal Studies Forum).