Plato’s Phido

Jesse Doiron

January 31, 2022

Paws. Paws.

Wag and lick.

Roll over!

Stay! Beg! Sit!

Paws. Paws.

Out, boy! Out!

Tail. Tongue.

Here, boy! Here!

Paws. Paws.

Heel! Sic!

Shake hands! Fetch!

Play dead! Speak!

Paws. Paws.

Good boy!

Here you go.

Good boy! Good.

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.

Northbounder

Vincent Hostak

January 12, 2022

I could instead have called you “Magnet”

the way you pull northward on the leash

drawn like a lodestone to mineral hills. 

Aside your soggy siblings in a womb

rolling in a van heaving hillward,

Bounders traveling in September’s steam

on Gulf coast roads strung across bayous,

the pine-tacked pass above dry Raton,

‘til your paws scrape these landlocked headlands

rushing upward like the Iron Springs.

Your frame held up by stiff hind legs,

you portray a loiterer’s pose

before coaxing the hinges to fall 

a force to which you are dutifully tuned

much more to you than the leash provokes.

In the air a whirring, currents crackling

where you rest beneath the power lines

and steady your busy eyes to snare

the distant drifting of two-legged ones 

discharging southward from their homes.

They’re dragged up around you in the tow,

a schoolhouse pull they’d sooner ignore.

Sleepy things, they stumble up the grade,

ranks funneling toward hissing buses

as each abandons the frosty air.

Grinding, flowing, wheeling, sometimes even sitting still

or anchored to the wintering grass upon a buzzing hill,

all recall a motor-driven nature installed years ago.

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.

At His Master’s Feet

Antoinette F. Winstead

January 5, 2022

He knew his master’s killers, 

that’s what family say,

had to have known the men 

who tied his master to the chair,

otherwise he’d have defended him, attacked; 

instead, he kept watch all night, 

until discovered, whimpering in distress 

at the feet of his master’s charred body.

If he had voice, 

he’d have confessed his regret, 

having watched his master’s murder.

But how could he have known 

what they planned to do,

these men he knew, 

who scratched his ears and fed him bones?

After all, how many times

had they shouted at his master

laughed, and called him names, 

why would this time be different?

So, he let them tie his master to a chair,

thinking his struggles a game,

even as the men showered him in gas, 

struck a match, dropped it in his lap, 

engulfing him in flames. 

Confused by the comingling 

of the men’s laughter and 

his master’s anguished screams, 

he watched bewildered 

as the flames consumed his master, 

while the men jeered and taunted.

And when the men finally left, 

leaving the smoldering remains,

he curled up at his master’s feet, 

expecting him to rise again,

the loyal dog who mistook his master’s lynching

as just another night with friends.

Antoinette F. Winstead, a poet, playwright, director, and actor, teaches film and theater courses at Our Lady of the Lake University where she serves as the Program Head for the Mass Communication and Drama programs. Her poetry has been published in The Ekphrastic Review, Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas, Voice de la Luna, and the 2022 Texas Poetry Calendar . For her poem “Life Is” she has been nominated for a 2022 Pushcart Prize by the editor of Jerry Jazz Musician.

Rex, Dancing

Sarah Webb

December 29, 2021

He watched the deer step like a breath 

out of the aspen into our dawn camp

and did not bark, his body tense under my hand,

as we stood caught by the quiet of the deer,

the scent of hoof and pelt on the fog.

Other times he could not contain his joy.

He splashed down the shore of the lake

and bucked in alarm when he stepped on a carp in the shallows,

galloped the path left by the water's subsidence

and flung himself, heedless, into me.

Once he knocked me down, hard shoulder into legs

and when I got to my knees, swerved back to butt me head to head.

I have a tee-shirt of coyotes dancing to the moon

and he was like that—wild and yodeling.

I remember him racing off through sageland,

free of our van and leashes and being good.

He'd skid back under the fence to leap close, then out of reach.

Laughing dog, loose on the clouds now,

won't you swerve back this way?

Sarah Webb divides her time between Corpus Christi and a lake in the Hill Country when she is not on the road. She misses her long traveling companion Rex, the most ill-behaved dog in the West.

Basset Cross Blues

Darby Riley

December 22, 2021

Dog Joe whines

at the door

What do you want, Joe?

If not out, then in.

Food, water, a walk,

a pat on the head,

a pee on area flora,

a blanket to lie on,

a bus to bark away,

a weed to sniff and slobber on,

intoxicating!

Another leashed and neutered

brother to nose,

a sidewalk sister to kiss,

a siren to answer

joyfully, mournfully,

remembering distant freedom.

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.

Ten Years Gone

Loretta Diane Walker

December 15, 2021

For Arthur March 14, 1998--May 9, 2011

I covet the music of his sleep.

The rising and falling of his breath.

The syncopation of his snoring.

I long for the cadence of his yelps.

The rhythmic lapping of his tongue.

The bebop of his bouncing body.

I miss his eyes singing happiness.

The admiration in every lash

when I stroke his onion-colored head.

His white clay bowl looks like a candle

in the dim corner of the kitchen.

The memory of him a golden flame.

Loretta Diane Walker, an award-winning poet, multiple Pushcart Nominee, and Best of the Net Nominee, won the 2016 Phyllis Wheatley Book Award for poetry, for her collection, In This House (Bluelight Press). Loretta is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters. Her work has appeared in various literary journals, magazines, and anthologies throughout the United States, Canada, India, Ireland, and the UK. She has published five collections of poetry. Her manuscript Word Ghetto won the 2011 Bluelight Press Book Award. Loretta received a BME from Texas Tech University and earned a MA from The University of Texas of the Permian Basin. She teaches elementary music at Reagan Magnet School, Odessa, Texas.

Lucky Penny - a haibun

Melanie Alberts

December 8, 2021

It was a late afternoon in June when our hound Penny went missing. She wasn’t missing for long—shortly after I heard mockingbirds making calls of pain over her favorite resting place on our porch, I found her around the corner by the side of the road. Someone had draped a sheet over her body. Her head was lolled back, her leg bone exposed, and I couldn’t keep my composure. As I sobbed, two women stopped their cars to help me, one even sent her husband to load the body in his truck and take it back to our house. 

lost dog—

a low whining

inside me

I had to pick up our son at the karate dojo and phoned my husband on the way there as he was out of town, but there was no answer. Crying, somehow I made it to the dojo. It had been a blustery day; the wind blew down the gate we used to secure Penny on our porch and that is how she got loose. As I opened the car door, a gust carried a document out of the door pocket and I lunged to get it. Seeing me reaching for the ground, one of the other karate kid’s moms called out, “Find a lucky penny?” Crying harder, I explained how our Penny just died. Oh no, she said. I saw her lying there as I drove home earlier. I’m sorry.

a fever passes

unexpectedly

between us

When I reached my husband, he insisted that Penny had been lucky. She was a rescue pup, a shepherd-hound mix, and lived the first few months of her life wild before coming to us, adorable but worm-ridden. She was jittery during thunderstorms and cowered around men for certain secret reasons. Penny spoke with us constantly with her powerfully wagging tail and growly vocalizations, her expressive face and curious energy. We called her Penny because of the large, copper circles on her hide, and over the four years she lived with us, we often commented on how strong she was, how fast, how healthy, how exuberant. We were the lucky ones to know and love such an animal, full of wonder and poised to chase after anything that caught her eye, carried off by a sudden breeze.

under the sheet

her unbuckled collar—

the longest day

Writer and psychic artist Melanie Alberts works at the University of Texas at Austin. Her non-fiction and poetry have appeared in the Ransom Center Magazine, Just This, The Austin Chronicle, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Wisteria: A Journal of Haiku, Senryu, and Tanka, and other journals.

The Dog House

Suzanne Morris

December 1, 2021

-for Boots

Today I thought of you as your dog house,
collapsed into separate pieces,

rode away in the buggy:
sturdy redwood, to be repurposed

as your body has been,
the primary element of Creation.

Well made, the dog house, by a
German company

even the instructions were correct
your Master noted

as he assembled it in hopes
you would use it

which you did, after a fashion,
making the roof your sleeping porch,

preferring the freedom of outdoors.

You wiled away long moonlit nights
nibbling at the corners

and it was those nibbled edges on the wood
gave me pause today when

the whole thing was loaded up
having survived you

on that misbegotten night when

your love of freedom
wound up costing your life,

collapsing our hearts into pieces.

Suzanne Morris is a novelist with eight published works, most recently, AFTERMATH (SFA University Press, 2016), a survivor's tale from the New London school tragedy of 1937. Until last year, her poetry appeared only in her fiction. Then, she was invited to contribute seven poems to an anthology entitled, "No Season for Silence - Texas Poets and Pandemic" (Kallisto Gaia Press, 2020).