Texas Friends
Basement Tapes
Robert Allen
July 23, 2023
Like Tom Hanks, I became a movie nerd
in the seventies, when many old-fashioned
single-screen theaters had gone repertory.
In my hometown, for a dollar a ticket,
you saw two different features every night
at the Olmos, which is where my wife says
we went on our first date. I still have one
of their old schedules somewhere on my desk,
but now it makes me think of my best friend
from grade school days: His name was Robert, too.
For a brief while, the Olmos Theatre
was where we learned our film vocabulary.
I will say Robert was perhaps the smartest
and certainly the most creative person
I have ever known. His weird cartoons filled
the school newspaper. His writing inspired me
to try it myself. Once, he led me down
into the basement of his modest home
where he had guitars, a bass, a drum set,
and this four-track reel-to-reel tape recorder.
He let me play the drums and sing, if you
can believe that, while he played a guitar
and his younger brother Russell played bass.
All afternoon we made music together,
planning ahead of time which instruments
to play in which order, so the machine
would record each track on the preferred side
and the finished songs would sound stereophonic,
like our favorite albums. A glorious time
this was, exploring what talents we had
so we could feel like artists. It was homemade
nirvana. Somehow I never went back.
Maybe after graduation life sent him
on some strange new path. Last I heard, my friend
was staying in a hotel on Times Square,
no doubt to work in Broadway’s theater district,
marching his own way to a different drummer.
But in the seventies, Broadway was not
the mecca it is today. Crime rates soared,
new shows were few, some theaters closed or turned
burlesque. Did some mishap befall my friend?
He has not come to any class reunion,
and when I see a certain kind of movie
where nerdish boy makes good and gets the girl,
I always wonder what became of him—
Robert, Cindy, Dennis, Yvonne, and all
those people I loved once, yet not enough.
Robert Allen is retired and lives in San Antonio with his wife, two children, five antique clocks, and three cats. He has poems in Voices de la Luna, 2023 Texas Poetry Calendar, and TPA. He loves going on long walks to new places, hates to throw things away, and facilitates Gemini Ink's in-person Open Writer's Lab.
Saltwater Sting
Katherine Hoerth
September 30, 2022
It’s a dogged summer day.
We’re at the beach, North Padre Island.
I’m thirteen. We’re celebrating
your birthday as you join me in
the strange new world of teenagers.
The night before, we shaved our legs
for the first time, relished in
the silk and satin of our skin
touching. I smell of pomegranates.
You smell of coconuts. We run
the shoreline, giggling, then jump
into the waves’ embrace of bubbles.
You grab my hand. I hang on tight.
We clench our teeth. You yell out SHARK
then laugh and the absurdity
of life, horizon filled with danger,
jellyfish lurking in the seaweed,
how we make the whole world froth
at the mouth, how everything
nibbles, pricks, devours. We dig
our toes into the sand to keep
the undertow from pulling us
into its underworld of blue.
On the shore, the music blasts,
Selena’s “Bidi Bidi Bomba”
beckoning us back. The palms
dance, their bodies lithe like ours,
bending in the gulf stream wind
but never breaking, like we would—
two girls swimming in an ocean
on a sinking island, linking
arms. We’re in this mess together.
We scream into the darkening
vista, savoring the sting
of saltwater on tender skin.
Katherine Hoerth is author of five poetry collections, including Flare Stacks in Full Bloom (Texas Review Press, 2022). Her work has been published in Literary Imagination (Oxford University Press), Valparaiso Review, and Southwestern American Literature. She is an assistant professor at Lamar University and editor of Lamar University Literary Press.
A Prayer as Dorothy Goes Marching Out
Alan Berecka
September 28, 2022
for Dorothy Alexander
Little sister there are no more
storms to chase, no more
cases to try, no more
rulings to rule,
no more poems to pen,
the good fight in a red hat
has been fought past the bell
nothing to do now but return
to the corner, let us bind
your wounds, untie your gloves
unwrap your fists. Relax
little sister and slip
between the ropes
into nothingness.
Yet, should you continue
beyond the page, please,
find a loophole and pull us through.
Alan Berecka earns a living as a reference librarian at Del Mar College in Corpus Christi. His poetry has appeared in many journals including The Concho River Review, The Windward Review, Ruminate, and The Christian Century. In 2017 he was named the first Poet Laureate of Corpus Christi.
Charley
Donna Freeman
September 7, 2022
“I call him Charley, she said, squirming in the seat next to me.
He’s my brain that doesn’t want me to read.
He dances, he’s never still, he somersaults and talks out loud.
Sometimes I tell him to be quiet
…but he never is
unless he’s napping.
Then I feel like clapping…. just to be a bother.
My toes join with him, squiggle along
unless they are in flip flops
which they love
… and I do too!
Then they slide and glide
front and back. Just like that!”
She shared a grin, rolled her eyes,
sprung up and skipped through the room.
“That’s why I don’t read,” she confessed,
“and get mad at Charlie so much
because I really want to.
If only he was quiet
I’d be patient and
he would leave me alone,
see that book’s page open.
all those children in the picture,
they’d smile at me
and my teacher, she’d smile too,
say, Look at you, Suzy Boo,
You can read!
You! Yes you!
But Charlie’s up he’d shout
No mam, she’s not reading no book.
She’s doing a daydream. Just look!
Then my teacher, she’ll frown
see Charlie there
and stare me down.
I know it!”
Suzy wiggles close to me.
Now she smiles, shrugs her shoulders,
“That’s my brain, my only one,
“What do they want from me? I can’t help it.
That’s him again.
That’s not me.
That’s silly Charlie!”
Donna Freeman’s poetry has appeared in Wilderness House Literary Review, Blue Lake Review, and appears in Ocean State Poets Anthology: Giving Voice. In 2020 a poem of Donna's was selected for RI Public's Radio "Virtual Gallery.” She enjoys writing on both personal and political matters.
Just Calling You Bill
Donna Freeman
August 31, 2022
This one is for you, Bill.
You didn’t know I would write.
You only knew I was the one who
saw you on a bench
feeding a duck near the river.
You called him “Friend.”
You didn’t have an open gin bottle in your hand.
You weren’t glazed over from drugs.
Your eyes showed clear blue.
But you seemed gone.
So I sat with you.
“Don’t!”
Your first words to me.
“Don’t tell!”
“Don’t report me, please!!”
Your left hand trembled.
A sign stood above the bench:
Please Don’t Feed The Waterfowl.
Friend waddled close to you.
You reached into your pocket
finding two crackers.
But then Friend turned to the river.
The river flowed with iridescent forms.
Mallards swam close to shore
eager to greet their brother.
Ducks are never lonely for long.
I stayed close to you
for a few minutes more
then I was gone.
Donna Freeman’s poetry has appeared in Wilderness House Literary Review, Blue Lake Review, and appears in Ocean State Poets Anthology: Giving Voice. In 2020 a poem of Donna's was selected for RI Public's Radio "Virtual Gallery.” She enjoys writing on both personal and political matters.
Friendship
Shelley Armitage
June 14, 2022
We shared a couple of red-necked boys
who stomped their boots to a western two-step
near a wind-gutted arroyo on the Canadian River
tent top dance, hot summer night, sticky
armpits the color of the fading day.
We were on college break, no real boyfriends.
These two would have to do.
You’d left this little hometown of yours
famous for its sandy soil peaches,
the year you went off to college leaving
your high school boyfriend with dull ambitions behind.
He scrambled the letters on the local movie marquee
to read: Jamie s__ks. Pretty embarrassing
for this little West Texas bible-toting town.
You told these stories at college. We giggled
and told ours. So when you broke your leg
playing pick-up basketball, we were all speechless
your paling expression we’d never seen.
I shouldered you to my Beetle--
another dance—and said, Jamie
don't worry, I am here for you.
But at the doctor’s office when he jerked
that baby into place, I fainted dead away,
making my way into another of your stories.
Shelley Armitage is a professor emerita at University of Texas at El Paso, former Roderick Chair, and Fulbrighter as well as a recipient of NEA, NEH, and Rockefeller grants. I've published over fifty refereed articles and eight books, the most recent, Walking the Llano, a memoir inspired by the family farm and grasslands.
Sailing Over the Moon in Texas
Jan Seale
June 12, 2022
for Charles
How you called from Dallas to see if
I was still coming to the Texas State Fair,
how I said I’d lost the will, then you told me
about your tests for vertigo, and at the end
of possible diagnoses we wondered silently
if this was not the beginning of ailments
finally halting the merriment of friendship;
How I suddenly remembered the lunar eclipse
beginning at 9:11 (why, oh why that time?)
and, not wanting our connection broken,
how we hurried out to our respective lawns,
phones pressed to our heads, looking east,
you dodging fir and elm, I palm and mesquite,
and began to co-narrate the celestial event;
How it was a luminous fingernail at first,
yet I observed the other side faintly glowing.
(You could not see the other side prompting you
to say you had not had your glasses changed
in several years. Well, then no wonder, I said,
but it’s just a fingernail, though I willed you
to see the umbra and after a while, you did;)
How the fingernail was trimmed by the earth,
bursting in with the astronomy scissors,
while we asked, Is it smaller where you are?
Laughing, as if we could know…then Nah,
the distance between us is nothing at all
compared to the earth from the moon tonight,
hugging as it is, the short side of its ellipsis;
And though we didn’t make Guinness,
I awoke next morning to think of the numbers:
60 years between us since high school,
500 miles the road between us, 220,000 miles
the moon’s wink, we in a giant triangulation
with it from our respective driveways,
leaning, pointing, straining, blinking,
What with your vertigo, my bad ear, your
heart valve, my heartache, thinking how possibly
this might be our only time to share a celestial event;
still, how maybe next year we could try to close in
on the state fair, say howdy to Big Tex,
see the sheep exhibit, eat deep-fried anything,
and ride the round moon of the ferris wheel together.
Jan Seale is a lifelong Texan. She is the Poet Laureate of Texas for 2012. She belongs to the Texas Folklore Society, the Poetry Society of Texas, the Texas Association of Creative Writing Teachers, and the Texas Institute of Letters.
Text Messages from the Dead
Betsy Joseph
June 5, 2022
Your words registered first
followed by your unmistakable voice in my head,
silenced now these almost seven years.
I had not realized our text relay remained unerased,
unglimpsed, yet still alive all this time.
Momentarily time stood still
as I read the back and forth responses:
your desire to train for another triathlon,
then recent news on a clinical trial
your doctor was strongly advocating;
my return replies supporting your determined wishes,
striving to sound casual, cautiously optimistic.
Still you passed away,
your renewals of hope unflagging
while the cancer in your brain kept growing,
placing a choke hold on your life
until it ebbed and no longer flowed.
The text messages remain, though you are gone,
and they pulse with determination,
with your courage and daring
in the emptiness of space.
They are a reminder that I continued to live,
that I was able to choose the time of my retirement
while you had to depart from teaching
long before you were ready.
So certain, so hopeful for another remission,
you had the dean promise to schedule
classes for you in the spring.
Though your will was mighty,
the tumor was stronger.
You drifted away in the shank
of a warm August evening,
and many mourned you on your way.
Time does not stand still, though,
and your voice reminds me to rejoice
that I remain among the living
and do not need conversations from the past
that are no longer relevant.
You were always mostly right, especially this time.
Just now, with two soft finger touches, our words disappear.
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.
Resilience as Weapon
Janelle Curlin-Taylor
November 30, 2021
For Loretta Diane Walker
whose resilience gives me courage
Resilience:
#1 - The capability of a strained body to recover its size and shape after deformation caused especially by compression stress.
#2 - An ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change.
Weapon:
#1 - Something (as a club, knife, or gun) used to injure, defeat, or destroy.
#2 - A means of contending against another.
If a weapon is something used to injure, defeat or destroy
Then resilience may not qualify.
If a weapon is a means of contending with another
Resilience may be the best.
To contend with is not necessarily
To destroy, defeat, or injure.
To contend with may be to
Maintain or assert.
To contend with may be to strive
against difficulties.
Is resilience a weapon?
Against disease, or poverty, or prejudice
Or harsh environments, or political turmoil?
The ability to recover or adjust.
The 11th Edition of the Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary
Inserts the adverb "easily" as to recover or adjust easily.
I protest.
Recovery is rarely easy.
Who would say they find it easy to adjust to CANCER
When the very cells of our bodies
Become the enemy.
As COVID variants continue to
Wreck havoc with human life, relationships, culture.
Adjusting easily? Recovering easily? Makes no sense.
Long COVID-19 - a strange malady poorly understood
And, as yet, lacking a cure
May, all the same, be overcome, eventually.
Resilience: yes. Easily: no.
A powerful disease indeed to make even
Merriam Webster blush. Imagine!
Even our language must change.
Given these challenges
Resilience as practice seems the only weapon that may prevail.
Janelle Curlin-Taylor is descended from several generations of Texas poets, Janelle has turned her poetry into sermons for 30 years. Her poetry has appeared in The di-verse-City Anthology, Blue Hole, Best Austin Poetry 2018-2019, Waco Wordfest Anthology 2020 and 2021, Texas Poetry Calendar 2020, Tejascovido, and Texas Poetry Assignments. She is married to California poet Jeffrey Taylor.
The Loom
Vincent Hostak
November 17, 2021
In the Mission City,
beneath a bridge at Camden Street
bats before dusk make a close-knit coat.
Gauzy fiber, twisted lips on tiny heads
drape across the bridge’s belly
above a pulsing river.
The hour the first thread is pulled
the framework is abruptly lost
and fast unraveling strings
pull tiny tatters from the whole.
In chartless flight to north and south
inferring not a single path, but
breaking wide into the hunt, the dark.
As if they never knew each other,
decamping from familiar friends,
forgetful of the mouse-ear fur
that warmed them each
when all were clenched upon the beams.
Or, how they trembled here
even in sleep that Worst of Winters.
That Worst of Winters: cousins froze,
shapes fell like sumac fronds
to join the river or veil the walks.
But all of that was spells ago.
Spring’s thaw bent to Summer’s lure,
“one trance traded for another
is how we tell our histories here,”
as each is drawn to the loom again
charmed by chattering and heartbeat chants.
Vincent Hostak is a poet, essayist, and advocate. Long a resident of Texas, he resides in the intersection of city and wilderness near Denver. His poetry is published in Sonder Midwest (#5), Tejascovido.com, the Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas, and Wild, Abandoned (the blog). His podcast on refugee resettlement & culture: https://anchor.fm/crossingsrefugees.
Refracted Light
Roberta Shellum Dohse
October 24, 2021
The grasses grow tall
in the low-lying ditches
near the edge of the road where
they wave in the breeze.
Their fluffy heads, full of seed, glisten
purple and silver in the bright sun slanting,
glancing through the trees:
tall as they edge down the hill
and glint bright yellow in late rays of the day,
as the sun smiles down from a bright blue sky,
only beginning to darken toward eventide.
The water pooled by the road deep
in the ditches begins to blacken now
under shadows that stretch low towards the road.
It reminds me of you,
all the secrets you hold
so very close to your heart.
And though we drink tea in the warm afternoons
and I hug you tightly as my dearest friend,
a wall seems to close
when I come too close.
Then you laugh, back up, and off we go
on different trails of confidence.
Joy holds the days, although always a space
a holding back
like the still dark pools
at the side of the road
quiet beneath the lowering sun,
keeping their secrets deep.
But even then they reflect the light,
holding on to the light as long as they can.
And you, my friend, you do the same,
and in the glint of that light, never mind the space,
my arms are long enough.
Roberta Shellum Dohse hails primarily from California. She is a graduate of the University of California Berkeley. After a stint on a farm in northern Minnesota and time in Oregon, she moved to Texas in 1980. She attended law school at the University of Houston and has practiced law in Corpus Christi, Texas since 1997. A former flight instructor and college professor, Roberta has been published in Corpus Christi Writers Anthology series (2018-2021), Lamar University’s Odes and Elegies, Eco-Poetry from the Texas Gulf Coast (November 2020), Voices de la Luna, Austin International Poetry Festival Anthology, and Poetry at Round Top.
The Failure
Robert Allen
October 23, 2021
Dennis Wheeler was my friend in third grade.
I’d walk from my house to the trailer park
where he lived. Adorning his bedroom walls
on narrow shelves sat the cool model airplanes
he had built and painted. They looked amazing.
“Hide the plastic,” he’d say, “or pretense falls.”
Besides fighters, bombers, and modern jets
was one special plane, bigger than the rest:
a balsa-wood biplane, flames on the cowl,
long yellow wings, motorized, hand-controlled.
Given space, it could loop or spin or roll.
“In the wrist,” he’d smile, with the engine loud.
I treated him miserably back then.
We could be walking at school during recess
when suddenly, for no reason, I’d hike
my leg and kick him in the guts, as if
I had the right. What an asshole I was.
He’d laugh it off. “Price of friendship,” he’d joke.
I think we played together every day.
It was a thrill to know I had a friend,
someone as constant as the ocean tide.
When Dennis had to move to California,
he did his best to find me a replacement:
another wingman along for the ride.
His last day, while he stood in front of class,
when each of us got up to say goodbye,
you’d think I might have known how dire, how bleak
the situation was, what words to say,
how much I’d miss the guy, his model planes,
his earnest ways. Instead, I could not speak.
I neither saw nor heard from him again.
I bet he works in the theater biz now,
designing sets. His girlfriend, jet black curls,
temps for Merrill Lynch when she’s not employed
as a prop girl. They own a gorgeous house
and a dog, and weekends, they watch for whales.
What could I say to him now we are grown?
That his patience, grit, and love of detail
inspire my days? That when my kind of art
should fail to fly or roar or color true,
I remember my friend Dennis, and still
can find no words to fuel this empty heart?
Robert Allen is retired and lives in San Antonio with his wife, two children, five antique clocks, and five cats. He has poems in Voices de la Luna, the Texas Poetry Calendar, Writers Take a Walk, and Poetry on the Move. He co-facilitates Gemini Ink's Open Writer's Lab.
Postcard from a Friend
Sarah Webb
October 22, 2021
Once, I got a postcard from my friend Sheila.
It was a London scene—the Tower,
a place with a history: hidden rooms, forgotten
oubliettes, the princes who disappeared there,
Henry the Eighth's young wife embroidering
on the eve of her beheading. On the battlements,
ravens nest, blood-minded birds.
Sheila is not blood-minded. She lives a quiet life
with her husband, and when I ask her, what's been happening,
she says, Not much. Been doing a bit of writing.
Tranquil, I could say, but I would be wrong about that—
ten murder mysteries she's written, with victims
falling off bridges into the Columbia or off
balconies onto rocks. Bodies crumpled in pools of scarlet,
snared in blackberry bushes, buried under mudflows.
And what was she doing in London?
Teaching Shakespeare: the blood-stained
hands of Macbeth, poison in the ear
of Hamlet's father, ghosts who walk.
When I visit, we walk beside the Columbia.
I entertain her with stories from my life—camping
on the desert, finding an enormous snakeskin on my doorstep,
shots fired by a barricaded husband and the neighborhood lockdown.
Beside us, the water flows calmly. Sheila smiles calmly.
She is probably plotting an overturned sailboat
and an encounter with a giant sturgeon in the murky depths.
Sarah Webb divides her time between Corpus Christi and a lake in the Hill Country. Former Poetry Editor for the journal Crosstimbers, she co-edits the Zen magazine Just This in Austin. Her collections Black (Virtual Artists Collective, 2013) and Red Riding Hood's Sister (Purple Flag, 2018) and many of her poems wander the line between the everyday and the fantastic.
Tabernacle Sunday
Milton Jordan
October 20, 2021
In memory of Milton S. Jordan
Did you show up on May’s last Sunday
and arrive in time to hear the service
close with singing and the ritual
benediction you always pronounced?
Maybe you wait now with other men
bringing ice chests and wicker baskets
to the outdoor tabernacle tables
where women will spread cloth and set bowls
and platters filled with food for three such crowds.
Do you still walk, afternoon, among old graves,
and reset stone slabs and toppled monuments?
Do you clear cans and scattered trash Stella’s
grandson left behind his mower Saturday?
Are the inscriptions all familiar
in that yard where space has long been filled?
Who rings the bell now to call you all
back to tabernacle tables reset
for leftovers and lemonade?
Milton Jordan lives in Georgetown with the musician Anne Elton Jordan. His most recent poetry collection is What the Rivers Gather, SFASU Press, 2020. Milton edited the anthology, No Season for Silence: Texas Poets and Pandemic, Kallisto Gaia Press, 2020.
You Know Who You Are
Marilyn Robitaille
October 19, 2021
You know who you are
The one who listened when you didn’t have to
Told me things would be all right even when they weren’t
Especially then, when blood dripped from my pores
When no turning of the screw could fix my hurt
The taste of metal on my tongue, the smell of hair on fire
Remember when a plane fell from the sky
Or at least we thought it did
You held my hand and then my head and made me breathe again
You’ve filled the gaps, sewed the tears, mended holes
In head and heart, carried burdens of your own
Too many that I never knew their cost and weight
Awake at night in solitude, remembering green Vermont
Picnic at Frost’s farm, mint-juleps on the porch, poetry in the very air
All those books and late-night desperation singing
Medieval madrigals in cadence varying the music
A hunt for Christmas trees, a day so cold that birds froze
A rocket ship to Florida and sand fleas, sipping whiskey by a fire
Beached whales together, pregnant in a summer pool
Calling all New Yorkers, communing with your soul
You deserve the accolades, Valrhona chocolate, the best champagne
I can never say it loud enough for the universe to hear
I love you
Marilyn Robitaille teaches English at Tarleton State University, a Member of the Texas A & M System. As founder of Romar Press, an independent press, she facilitates and promotes the publication of good books on a wide variety of subjects. She co-edits Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas and co-hosts the annual Langdon Review Weekend, a Texas arts and letters festival in Granbury, Texas. In addition to research on eighteenth-century women dramatists, her current interests include writing poetry; contributing a weekly travel column to Stephenville's Beneath the Surface News; and planning a Romar Press "Finding Your Muse" Writing Retreat 2022 in Santorini, Greece.
The Boy-Worn Path
Jesse Doiron
October 18, 2021
Over a field of green,
the boy-worn path extends
from me to you,
then back again.
And where it starts
it also ends.
No need to look,
bare feet can feel the way.
They often do each day,
when arm in arm,
we walked as one,
as if we had no place to go
but where we were,
and back again.
No need to run apace,
our way can wait.
It always did.
And we can never separate,
for we are friends,
both then, and now,
somehow, at both our ends,
where over the field between,
a boy-worn path extends
from you to me, always,
and always back, again.
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.
The Friendship Song
Loretta Diane Walker
October 17, 2021
I am ten, you, eleven—neither understands forever,
or how we cook memories in summer’s oven-hot nights.
They are too short for us
to fill the air with our secret language,
eat Popsicles, and giggle
about what adolescent girls giggle about.
We are not concerned with becoming
more than what we are in this moment,
only with being together.
We sing make new friends but keep the old,
one is silver and the other gold.
Such emptiness in those words for us.
We want only the gold of our friendship,
lock our hearts with a pinkie swear—
“We will always be each other’s best friend.”
Aging is betrayal’s agent.
I am twelve, you, thirteen—neither understands vows
break because hearts expand beyond childish boundaries.
I am contradiction/cliché—band nerd, bookworm, track jock,
quiet.
You a middle school dream—social butterfly, cool kid,
pretty girl.
We are not concerned with becoming women,
only with being accepted.
We sing make new friends but keep the old,
one is silver and the other gold.
We share ourselves with other new gold friends.
Our friendship, silver. Our secret language, silent.
A rowdy wind yanks time, a flimsy kite, from our hands.
Years drift. Age thirty, my gold friend ascends. Pneumonia.
Her last words to me, “I love you.”
You see my broken heart, tell me “I’m sorry.”
Age sixty-five, your sister ascends. COVID.
I see your broken heart, tell you, “I’m sorry.”
Your words to me, “I know you are. I love you.”
Curious how loss, that container of sorrow,
holds the same words as restoration.
We sing make new friends but keep the old,
one is silver and the other gold.
But friendship is a wild animal
with flapping wide arms.
Love, the stronger beast,
circles its unassuming body,
waiting to tame it.
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.
Second Self
Chris Ellery
October 16, 2021
The summary of the advice of the prophets is this: Find yourself a mirror. Shams-i Tabriz
An old Greek proverb declares, “A friend
is a second self.” Achilles and Patroclus—
is that what they felt? Odysseus and Eumaeus—
this is no longer a story of master and slave.
A friend gives life for a friend and finds it.
In his friend Shams-i Tabriz, mystic Rumi
saw the center of all. Moses, Jesus, Muhammad.
No more need to search for prophets.
Yahweh, Allah, Brahma, the Tao—the mystery
lies deep in the love you see there.
With my friend, I feel my virtues multiply,
noble sisters and brothers always eager for right action.
In the company of Krishna, no wilderness is too dark.
This is the meaning of the myth of the lonely traveler.
Our friends go with us wherever we go.
The face of your friend is a silver parable.
For Jalal al-Dinn it was Shams. Now go to your own
and gaze until that incarnation becomes a revelation
and you can see your own true self—
the lover complete, the holy fool, the living one.
Chris Ellery is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Canticles of the Body and Elder Tree. A member of the Texas Institute of Letters, he has received the X.J. Kennedy Award for Creative Nonfiction, the Dora and Alexander Raynes Prize for Poetry, and the Betsy Colquitt Award.
If I Leap
Robin Carstensen
October 10, 2021
dear nina
here we are
again
spread across mint green
linen like a bed of moss
my palm on your vibrating spine
again
but you can’t know
again no episodic
frames
or photos of us
in your mind to remember
my laughter or why I laughed
at your crab- like hop
or my astonishment
that time we moved
into our once-upon-a-time house
Jo and I in a kitchen stand-off
shearing the hot air
with our voices faces
swollen in misunderstanding
suddenly you
were standing there
at my left side
on your twiggy hind legs
your amber eyes unfocused
straining toward mine
your soft-padded paw tapping
my balled up hand like a young bird’s
feathers
but your voice it was
your chirping
voice raspy choked
cut and channeled
us
to some core
millennia ago
when the first flower bloomed
then others all over
earth
petal soft
light and billowing
nothing
reckless
as a thought
here we are
now and your velvet
Maine Coone fur rising
and falling beneath my stroke
your cooing current
flowing through
and through
like a bamboo rain
stick
tilting
razor clams spindle shells
chestnut turbans
ivory tusks
white cap limpets
abalone
sharp knobbed
dog whelks
slowly back
and forth
wave
upon wave
upon shore
you sound
like a buffalo drum
beating far away
and in the forever
hums and glottal tongues praising
the exquisite
wordless
as your timpani riff
endlessly rolling
through my hand arms
chest my whole this
glorious now how bliss
and still
for one moment I can barely stop
this aged habit this hobbled
wanting
thinking
my human if
I leap
from this dazzling
soft bed
of earth
before you do will I
leave
such a sacred
warm
impression?
Robin Carstensen’s manuscript In the Temple of Shining Mercy received the annual first-place award by Iron Horse Literary Press in 2017. Recent work has been published by FlowerSong Press, Jacar Press, and Lamar Press. She is co-founding senior editor for the Switchgrass Review, advises the Windward Review, and serves on the People’s Poetry Festival Committee.
As if All Journeys Lead Us Home
Jim LaVilla-Havelin
October 10, 2021
“riding on a train
bound west…”
we were so innocent then
certain the Cuban Missile crisis was
going to be the end of the world –
schooled in this fear from years
of ducking and covering –
the only response we knew, was to cram it all
into one song
“and it’s a hard, it’s a hard
it’s a hard, and it’s a hard,
it’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall”
we didn’t know much about climate change
Hiroshima was a silhouette burned into a wall
and when the hard rain really started falling
after Lee Harvey Oswald, Viet Nam, Kent State
watched Bob in a downpour
at the edge of the Cuyahoga, where it empties
into Lake Erie – the Flats
surrounded by
other
old
wet hippies
we were so innocent then
but you knew Hattie Carroll’s life matters
and Hurricane Carter’s life matters
this was so long before everything else that
you could write
“ I married Isis on the fifth day of…”
and not set off alarms
across the country
“I dreamed a dream that made me sad”
as if sadness, loss, grief, and broken promises
were not a longstanding burden
until we could not stand
Roethke stayed up half the night
“to see the land I love” in his night journey -
the train
but Bob hitched a ride
arrived in New York from way out west in
Minnesota (who could imagine that they would freak out in
Minne….)
freewheelin’ and jaunty
even innocent
rolled out Kerouac’s
sacred scroll
it came to Woody
innocent enough to make me smile and consider
even though many of them are dead now
and we know far too much
“the first few friends I had”
Jim LaVilla-Havelin is the author of five books of poetry. His work has appeared in anthologies about Bob Dylan, Selena, vultures, policing, and others. Sometimes Bob Dylan’s voice (probably the earliest versions) wings its way into his head, and he hums. Sometimes it’s John Coltrane.