Ode To My Best Friend (& Clouds)

Thomas Quitzau

October 10, 2021

1.

I don’t have many friends, I realized

Recently. Real ones. Do family count?

Oh I talk with lots of people       and dogs

And God, unsure what friend means anymore.

Last year, during the COVID pandemic

I read so many unimportant posts

I began to believe dull nonsense.

I started to think nothing had meaning.

One article in particular said:

Your wife’s friends are not your friends. Let her have

Her life apart from you. Get your own friends.

I wondered if my wife was my best friend.

2. 

Last week my wife showed me a photo of 

Our grandchildren in Texas, and as much as

I love them, my eyes were drawn to the sky

Behind and above them, to the lighting.

It’s a sky I’ve only ever seen in 

Texas: mesmerizing, azure, behind

Cotton-ball clouds holding tons of water

Sharing the ceiling to eternity.

There’s an indescribable comfort in 

Looking up in Texas, with that special

Lighting at latitude 30, driving

East, I-10, across the widest of states.

3. 

To those poor writers staring at their screens,

Indoors, giving bad advice, who don’t know

What they’re missing, snubbing that faithful sky,

Friend to millions who take the time to look, 

I raise my glass with my best friend, my wife

(There, I said it) to friends we left behind

To serve God and others in New York state,

Latitude 40 degrees, three days drive:

A toast to the Texas sky that presides 

Over some 30 million citizens,

Hard-working, robust, resilient, loving,

Hustling, moving, free, like the clouds above them.

Thomas Quitzau is a poet and teacher who grew up in the Gulf Coast region and who worked for over 30 years in Houston, Texas. A survivor of Hurricane Harvey, he recently wrote a book entitled Reality Showers, and currently teaches and lives on Long Island, New York with his wife and children.

The Words

Suzanne Morris

October 8, 2021

My friend with brain cancer
can’t talk in a straight line

anymore.

It all started when
she fell asleep one afternoon,

and when she got home
from dreamland

she’d left behind the
map to

where her words live.

The last time we talked
on the phone

we joined hands and
walked into her

strange new neighborhood.

Suzanne Morris is a novelist with eight published works, most recently, Aftermath (SFA University Press, 2016). Until recently, her poetry appeared only in her fiction. However, last year she was invited to contribute seven poems to an anthology entitled No Season for Silence - Texas Poets and Pandemic, (Kallisto Gaia Press).