Texas Elders
Stories in the Wind
Roberta Shellum Dohse
March 3, 2024
We cannot dig into rich loamy soil
Ancient civilizations just beneath our feet,
No Romans mosaics or Saxon hoards
Viking swords or iron-age forts,
But there are stories in the dinosaur bones,
Carvings in rock, buffalo wallows,
Cliff dwellings and abandoned mines
And wagon ruts cut deep into stone,
And always the ever-present wind
Sweeping across the wide vast plains,
Sculpting the land and all that remains
Along with the rivers, the tides of time.
The wind uncovers long lost footprints,
Then rises again to erase their path –
Hurry, be quick, ‘ere those fragile shadows
Are lost again in the dusts of time.
Unless we look
To the people that remain
The traditions they carry,
the stories they tell.
Roberta Shellum Dohse hails primarily from California. After living on a farm in northern Minnesota and in Oregon, she moved to Texas in 1980, attended law school, and has practiced law in Corpus Christi since 1997. Formerly a flight instructor and a college professor, she has always loved to write.
Ripples
Roberta Shellum Dohse
February 25, 2024
Green lichen, silvery rocks, dark shadows,
Waver in soft ripples that mimic my face,
Then shatter, sprinkling the woods in crystalline
Light as the frog lunges into the pond.
Slowly I see myself re-emerge from this chrysalis
And I wonder at this changeling who has taken my place,
A face so different from the one I remember,
From the person I know myself to be.
Looking back at me I see my mother
The hair no longer bearing a golden sheen,
Now wispier than an angel’s breath, soft
Lines clustered ‘round my mouth, my eyes.
Disturbing, this absence of color, this faded
Being a mere shadow of before. But my heart
Still beats, music still tumbles, poems and pictures
Still wait to be drawn to the light.
Though I can no longer scramble over the rocks
Or bound up four flights of stairs of my youth
Am I now become invisible? Not here in this pool,
Deep in the forest, where nymphs gather round
And vibrate the air with memories and magic
Trigger ripples in the pond bending the light
And ripples in time as I stand on the precipice
Of unknown adventures, just waiting for me.
Roberta Shellum Dohse hails primarily from California. After living on a farm in northern Minnesota and in Oregon, she moved to Texas in 1980, attended law school, and has practiced law in Corpus Christi since 1997. Formerly a flight instructor and a college professor, she has always loved to write.
Metamorphosis
Kathryn Jones
November 19, 2023
Sometimes I wished you dead and myself, too,
Than be locked in this purgatory.
I have watched your metamorphosis
From twenties to middle age to the edge,
Hoping to see butterfly wings emerge
But I see only the cocoon of our linked being.
Sometimes I want to break it open,
Reveal what is to come next even if I am afraid,
Because the waiting, the waiting, the waiting
Is like withering from within, wondering
What might have been if we had wings
And could flutter away on a warm summer wind.
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 an upcoming chapbook, An Orchid’s Guide to Life, to be 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.
Estate Sale, West Texas
Vincent Hostak
August 27, 2023
I’ve had enough and yet I
haven’t even started
A coarse, judgmental voice
squeals from attic stairs
Half of all my weight
suspended in the air
The other squeezing out
these sharp short-lived commands
“It must all be gleaned and stacked,”
a song that urges on
Here’s a low buzz, beat of wings
the carpenter bees
arrived through covert holes
pierced by probing tree limbs
unveiling a Museum
of Delicate Destruction
Gather now all things that
“won’t do it on their own”
A ferment trapped in boxes
glazed by covert drips
Sort the unstained books,
shake out the hidden nits
While the well-dressed bees strain
on, more rafters yet to drill
Mid-life to its very end
Chicago…El Paso
From basements to a crawlspace,
a cargo to please few
The furniture’s now gone, for
sale in other lands
Remnants are our own:
pots pinched by tiny hands,
A letter worth the frame,
scents of dogwood, cigarettes
These badlands have no sea-god
to lift from ranch home wrecks
Just the agent folded with
his notes beside the poplars
He perks up, makes a signal
registers my haul
No re-entries now
this line’s where I’ll stall
In cool unreckoned rain
as sweet as cactus honey
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.
Mama in Real Time
Elizabeth N. Flores
July 30, 2023
I unfold the paper and hand it to
the ER doctor at Memorial Hospital.
Here is the list of my mother’s medicines.
Wait, Doctor, my brother says,
look at these pictures of our mother on my phone.
The doctor is perplexed. I am embarrassed.
Who has time to look at my brother’s photo gallery?
Stop it, I tell my brother.
I will not, he replies, pointing his finger at me.
Doctor, my brother continues, now pointing his finger at Mama.
You see a woman in her 90s, frail and scared, in pain from the stroke
she had while drinking her coffee and reading the
Caller-Times this morning.
I want you to look at her three days ago,
in her wheelchair, beaming,
after getting her hair done,
as my niece paints her nails.
This is Mama, my brother says,
positioning his phone in front of the doctor’s face.
As you examine her, please don’t forget that.
Elizabeth N. Flores, Professor Emeritus of Political Science, taught for 46 years at Del Mar College and was the college’s first Mexican American Studies Program Coordinator. Her poems have appeared in the Texas Poetry Assignment, Corpus Christi Writers 2022, an anthology edited by William Mays, and the Mays Publishing Literary Magazine.
Dental Histories
Walter Bargen
July 23, 2023
For Dr. Rick Omohundro
Tell me before you stick your hands in my mouth
Which photograph is it on the table just inside
The front door of your office in Fulton, Missouri.
It’s not the one with PROOF stamped
Across your portrait more than half-a-life ago,
Where there is enough hair falling over your forehead
To almost conceal your identity, not knowing yet
If you needed to conceal the fact of another life
Gone awry or a celebration of all you yet might become.
A mustache riding your lip down, suggesting
Some notoriety, rock band drummer,
Or revolutionary, and the saucer-plate-size lenses
Of your glasses taking up so much of your face,
Clearly dating your long journey to this moment,
All the proof that any of your patients need before
Reclining in the chair to breathe in the sweet gas.
Please remove your fingers palpating my gums
And tell me is it the black & white photograph
Of three men and one woman standing beside each other
Dressed in leather fringed and beaded buckskin shirts,
Moccasins and leggings, facing the tripod that supported
The heavy box camera where a second glass negative waited
To be exposed. It’s your cousin on the far right,
Who traveled maybe all the way from Polynesia or India or Italy,
But most certainly from Virginia, many times removed
From you now that more than a century-and-a-half
Has derailed somewhere, waiting to be rescued.
Still he stands beside the woman, a former ballerina,
Giuseppina Morlacchi, his wife, their romance forged
in the West of pulp fiction, but she died in the real West,
Leadville, Colorado, 1880, pneumonia, age 33. She still
stands between her husband and Buffalo Bill Cody.
The picture exposed between one of the traveling
Wild West Circus acts, as they waited to whoop it up,
fire an abundance of blanks from repeating rifles
in front of the sold-out adoring crowds. They galloped
around the arena, as the West was
being won and lost twice on the same day.
Your patients open wide for a clearer look
before swallowing their own crumbling enameled histories.
From John Omohundro to his stage name,
Texas Jack, immortalized in the song, Texas Morning,
By Michael Murphy: Texas Jack says drink
Your coffee black/It’s your lucky day/5 o’clock
In the Texas morning. Anthem of the Texas Jack
Society that meets yearly. Now you can get on
with it, stick your hands in my mouth so I can
sing the word Texas in the middle of Missouri.
Winter Texans
Jan Seale
July 16, 2023
Snowbirds they have always been called
but lately a new moniker: Q-tips,
that is, snow-white hair on head,
white tennies on feet. Call them either,
face to face, they will laugh agreement.
Nothing bothers these folks in annual migration.
Taking the great southern route each autumn,
like birds migrating to warmer climes,
they command Winnebagos and Airstreams,
or, waiting for them in countless parks,
air out their ‘park model’ homes.
They’re planning reunions, square dancing,
card games, shuffleboard, ping pong.
Calloused hands from fifty years of farming,
making biscuits, feeding chickens, or
curved backs from sitting at a desk all day,
eyes dimmed with necessary reading of
reports and student papers, they’ve come
to escape five months of shoveling snow.
But old habits die hard and they’ll end up
tutoring children in the Valley’s schools,
renovating houses for the poor,
crocheting caps for windy blasts,
sewing quilts for the over-traveled.
Some will ladle out kettles of hot soup
for the hopers and wishers.
They’ve put in storage or given away
their life clutter, are learning Spanish,
picking oranges, holding Saturday sales,
wading in the Gulf surf, driving to Mexico
for medicine, curios, haircuts, cervezas.
They’ll do crosswords, bridge, movies until
Wednesday night, when they’ll gather
in the clubhouse for jams, with guitars, fiddles,
banjos, accordions. But first they’ll eat King Ranch
casserole, Spanish rice, tacos, enchiladas,
top these off with rhubarb pie and pound cake.
In their spare time, they’re writing their life stories,
reading crime novels, Westerns, recipe books,
knitting grandbaby sweaters, woodcarving,
painting scenes of palm trees, resacas.
They’re filling the parks with bike rides,
the flea markets with curiosity and joke-making.
They’re claiming pleasure while they can.
Snowbirds of a feather flock to Texas together,
while Q-tips, their spines toward Texas incline.
Jan Seale, the 2012 Texas Poet Laureate, taught Winter Texans for 22 years at the Museum of South Texas History to write their life stories. They wrote about things like raising eight children, flying for the Luftwaffe, being torpedoed in a submarine, and being attacked by a tiger riding an elephant in India. They also kindly bought her books and came to her poetry readings.
Daughter Heaven Mountain
Chris Ellery
July 9, 2023
To begin her yearly wellness exam,
Dolores is given three words
to remember, a test for dementia.
“Daughter.” “Heaven.” “Mountain.”
Pulse oximeter. Blood pressure cuff.
Stethoscope sounding her torso
for the beat of her heart, the flow
of breath. “Have you recently fallen?”
Dr. Darby asks. “Do you have trouble
getting out of a chair? Trouble
with drooling? With swallowing?
Incontinence? Vision? Memory?”
Meanwhile, ageless Ni Zan,
the Yuan master, paints a perfect world
in her brain. In his signature way,
he uses only black ink and leaves
large swaths of the paper
untouched by the brush, suggesting
sky or mist or water.
From nothing
there emerges a bamboo grove
on a riverbank, plums and orchids
and gangly pines, a hermit’s hut
tucked away in the cleft of a distant range
to prove the existence of humans.
Dolores learned long ago
how Ni Zan, in his last years,
gave away all that he owned
to take up the life of a Daoist wanderer
in the Lake Tai region of his youth.
Now she is straightening her blouse
as her doctor explains
the alarming numbers in her blood,
her prognosis and options.
To the doctor her smile as she listens
is disconcerting. Yet she hears
and understands, clearly, even
as she follows the wanderer,
the strokes of his brush.
Ni Zan leads her across
a rugged stream, under gaunt trees
with an owl perched on one high limb,
past a grassy swell where a doe
and fawn are browsing, into
a vast blank space,
where his brush pauses.
She knows she must travel through
on her way
to the far mountains drifting
in nothingness
below the untouched sky,
a tall mother mountain maternally rising
above her brood of little mountains.
“And now for the test,” Dr. Darby says,
noticing her far-away look.
“What are the words
that I gave you to remember?”
Half in a mystic dream she meets his eyes
with her inscrutable smile.
“Daughter. Heaven. Mountain.”
Chris Ellery is an elder living in San Angelo. Among his five books of poetry is Elder Tree, elder being the thirteenth and last tree of the Celtic tree calendar. According to Jane Gifford in The Wisdom of Trees, it is “under the protection of the Old Crone aspect of the Triple Goddess, who guards the door to the Underworld, to death, and to the dark inner mysteries.”
Grandpa and the Elder Tree
Thomas Hemminger
July 2, 2023
Our fishing spot was on the river
right below the oldest Shagbark Hickory
in the county.
Under that tree, I heard whole stories
about our family heritage.
You told yarns from five generations
up our family tree under the wide shade
of that favorite arbor.
Our first generation met for church
“on these very grounds.”
The second took a nearby wagon-rutted road
into town, but “now it’s all ‘in town’ of course.”
Great-grandpa proposed
to Great-gran, “right here,”
and you’d point to the very spot.
You fished here with your daddy
“just like we were doing,”
and you fell into the water
when you climbed out too far
“on a branch that’s gone now.”
That tree reminded me a lot of you,
because it looked kind of shaggy
but it felt so strong.
Also, because it seemed like it would
go on living forever.
Both of you were giants to me.
Always will be,
I expect.
I miss you both.
Thomas Hemminger is an elementary music teacher living in Dallas, Texas. His personal hero is Mr. Fred Rogers, the creator of Mr. 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.
Learning to Text
Suzanne Morris
June 25, 2023
for my son, Quentin
Iloveyou
I text; there’s no space
between the words
as if I’d said them out loud:
ILOVEYOU
no space between our bodies
when we hugged goodbye
before you went back home
having taught me to text
on my new flip phone
a needed step in this
vast new widowhood
I’ve woken up to.
You text back quickly,
as if you were
awaiting my words
speeding through cyberspace
You too!!!
I hold the phone in one hand
the instruction booklet
open in the other:
which key do I use
for inserting a space
a step I must
learn to take
now that I’m alone?
Suzanne Morris is a novelist and poet. Her work is included in several poetry anthologies, most recently, Lone Star Poetry (Kallisto Gaia Press, 2022). Her poems have appeared in The Texas Poetry Assignment, The New Verse News, Stone Poetry Quarterly, The Pine Cone Review, Emblazoned Soul Review, and Creatopia Magazine. Ms. Morris lives in Cherokee County, Texas.
The Old Man on the Red Porch
Lyman Grant
June 18, 2023
Often, he is sitting up there,
the morning light preying
up the little box table
beside him erect in his rocker.
He does not wave back.
I don’t even think he nods
at us perambulators, gleeful
in our healthful self-satisfaction.
We are mere moments
he remains indifferent to,
thoughtless smiles dressed
for each passing season,
arms raised and dancing
like penitents on the back pew,
eager to snare some god’s attention.
Lyman Grant is an expat Texan living in the Shenandoah Valley. His most recent book of poems is ostraca, from 4doorloungebooks.
Fingers of Darkness
Betsy Joseph
June 11, 2023
My friend steps cautiously to the edge of darkness,
myopic eyes peering into the unknown.
At eighty-six he is nobody’s fool.
A single step farther and the fingers of dimness
might touch him, might tag him first.
This is no child’s game, though.
Darkness is playing for keeps,
and he knows it as surely as he knows
that once beyond the border he will not return.
He will not be able to run to home base
to the call, “Olly olly in-come-free.”
Not prepared to lose his memory,
much less kick the bucket,
he wishes he could kick the can again
with boyhood chums whose names
are now wispy as his days are a blur.
Dusky shadows lean closer, straining to touch—
perhaps preparing to embrace him—
but he is able to still step back.
Not today.
My friend selfishly wants more time in the light.
Not yet.
He asks the fingers of darkness to tag someone else.
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.
At Schmidt’s
Milton Jordan
June 4, 2023
Bent slightly over the tin topped table
bordered with half-inch quarter round molding
in the drafty back room at Schmidt’s Seed and Supply
Amberman hacked through another spasm
and looked at the seven dominoes he held.
Ten or twelve others sat this November morning
at Forty-two games or Domino tables.
Twenty years ago these men ran this town
the boards and councils, banks and businesses,
the foundry and sawmill both now shuttered.
Other old men sat at those edged tables
in that store then owned by Schmidt’s two uncles.
Near noon we walked at Amberman’s cane’s pace
toward lunch at Rinehardt’s City Cafe.
You’re older now, boy, than I was when
all this caught up with me in sixty-eight.
He credits twenty-six years of mill dust
for his daily weakening lungs, but quit
a two pack a day habit two years
before leaving that mill foreman’s job.
Dust or smoke makes little difference now;
and we gave neither much thought then, he said,
as I held the same oval glassed, wooden door
and heard the fry cook’s familiar greeting.
Milton Jordan lives with Anne in Georgetown, Texas. He co-edited the first Texas Poetry Assignment anthology, Lone Star Poetry, Kallisto Gaia Press, 2022.
First Contact
John Rutherford
May 28, 2023
The first thing my grandmother asked
was if we had seen my grandfather,
she forgot he died, but ninety-three years
is a very long time to be alive.
We told her that we hadn’t,
throats tight, masks fogging our eyeglasses,
the first visit allowed amidst the lockdowns
in the locked ward at her nursing home.
Silsbee, Texas is only twenty miles
from home, but it felt so much longer
in those early days of the months-long Spring Break,
the furthest I had traveled in weeks.
They checked our temps at the door,
all in the upper 90s but no fevers,
so they gave us heavy masks,
N-95s that protruded like a duck’s bill.
The door to her ward was magnetic,
and she stuck to it, waiting but trapped
by her feeble legs and arms, one escape
too many had lost her the power chair.
We settled into our rhythms,
I told her about being married and work,
and she showed me her arts and crafts,
but she didn’t recognize me once I took off my hat.
She insisted I do so, as a gentleman
“never wears his hat indoors”
but my retreating hairline surprised her,
and I could tell she didn’t know me anymore.
I kissed her cheek when the hour was up,
the coast was clear, and it had been a while,
masked slipped down, first contact,
and she knew me again, for a moment.
John Rutherford is a poet writing in Beaumont, Texas. Since 2018 he has been an employee in the Department of English at Lamar University.
The Passenger
Kathryn Jones
May 21, 2023
He rides, looking out the window
at everything, at nothing.
He rides because he cannot drive and
he hates it, hates me for driving him.
He longs to be in control
of something, anything,
but the world spins on without him,
as if to say, “We can go on without you just fine.”
He cannot remember what happened yesterday
or the day before, but he remembers
what it felt like to put the key in the ignition and
drive, free, toward the horizon.
He is the passenger now, not free,
not looking at the horizon because there is none,
riding into the dark, dark night
even though it’s a brilliant sunny day.
Kathryn Jones is a journalist, essayist, author, and poet. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Texas Monthly, and in the 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. Her poetry has been published on tejacovido.com, in the Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas, and Odes and Elegies: Eco-Poetry from the Texas Gulf Coast. She was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters in 2016.
An Elder Elaborates
Chuck Taylor
May 14, 2023
In Korea strangers offered on buses their seats
When I was 50
I knew I was old
I knew I was not old
I had a daughter three
In Texas I took her
daddy-daughter camping
We threw oranges into
the open mouths
of baby crocodiles
standing on the shore
of a lake in east Texas woods
till they told us not to
Today that daughter's 32
We're in a ryokan in Japan
sleeping on futons on tatami mats by
a raging mountain river
She's with her husband in the other room
Shall I speak of doom?
Bad knees mean it's
Hard to get up off the floor
My CPAP machine made for better sleep through the night
I am old. Still old.
Seems like rooms are always cold
I never wear my trousers rolled
Chuck Taylor's latest novel is "Hamlet Versus Shakespeare." He taught Shakespeare at Angelo State University. The novel turns the tragedy of Hamlet into an adventure and comedy. Taylor is retired from wandering and teaching and spends his time with books, friends, family, manuscripts, a dog, and household repairs.