Movies and More Movies

Milton Jordan

August 13, 2023

That summer, we left our small East Texas town,

a few retail stores strung out along State Street,

our one movie house bearing that street’s name 

anchoring its west end, showing second run 

features and standard Saturday B westerns 

with an ongoing cliff-hanger serial

demanding our weekly return,

and moved to the refinery studded 

suburban sprawl of the Gulf Coast with the Bay

and Palace theaters on Texas Avenue 

featuring first-run films, leaving reruns

westerns and those weekly cliff-hangers

to the Texan, where I spent most Saturdays 

if not at the Arcadia across town.

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