Texas Landscapes
Armadillo Road Trip
Jesse Doiron
June 4, 2023
“What’s it look like?”
“Road,” I answered.
“What kind of road?”
“Slow.”
“Ain’t highway?”
“No. Slow road is all.”
“Can we cross it safe?”
“I can.”
“Well, how about me?”
“Your leg?”
“Well, yeh.”
“Well, yeh, I guess.”
“Well you go first.”
So I started out
through dew-wet
weeds to the
blacktop, still
steaming under
low-slung sun,
when a pickup
truck hummed
suddenly up
from the dusk
with a clumsy
gooseneck trailer
rumbling along.
Jesse Doiron has worked in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia as an educator and consultant. His teaching experience ranges from English for international business at the UC – Berkeley Extension in San Francisco to creative writing at the Mark Stiles Maximum Security Prison for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.
Shelter
Benjamin Nash
February 5, 2023
Black is the limestone above and behind
him from past cooking
fires in the rock shelter,
it is cold and he is
wet from the rain,
he has walked all day,
he is tired and he
pulls out a few pieces of
pine that he always carries with him,
it takes a while for the wood
to finally start to burn,
he can’t see the green water
of the creek below him
or the frog that he
is listening to in the night,
he eats a piece of dried
meat and a few pecans
in the yellow light
of the fire before
he sleeps on the hard ground,
he does not know anything about
us waiting for the clouds
to clear to see a few stars above
the tall buildings in the city,
or the yellow lights of a plane
coming down over the
rock shelter hundreds of years later to land on a runway.
Benjamin Nash has Sun listed now with Finishing Line Press. He has had poems published in Concho River Review, Louisiana Literature, Texas Observer, Southern Poetry Review, 2River, and other publications.
At Elephant Tusk
Kathryn Jones
January 8, 2023
A memory: four friends, topographical map in hand,
compass, provisions stuffed in our backpacks,
disappearing into the desert out in Big Bend,
hiking single file on a faint trail through
sparse lechugilla and creosote, guided by cairns,
walking through dust and time, trying not to lose our way.
Back at crowded Panther Junction, the ranger asked
where we wanted to go. Wherever no one else is going,
we told him. Two hours later, after bumping over dirt roads,
we arrived at the trailhead pointing us to Elephant Tusk,
volcanic pinnacle thirty million years old, jutting
above the desert floor, remote and primitive.
No trees or shade, no toilets, no “amenities” except
solitude and sky. Nothing and everything we needed.
We pitched our dome tents on a rocky point so high
we could almost lasso the half moon rising that night
above the ivory black outline of Elephant Tusk,
mammoth pedestal holding up the fire-ice firmament.
We, such tiny figures in a boundless landscape,
felt our human insignificance and reveled in it.
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.
Bayou Landscape Detail
Elisa A. Garza
December 28, 2022
Elisa A. Garza, a native Houstonian, has published two chapbooks, Entre la Claridad (Mouthfeel Press, soon to appear in a second edition) and Familia (The Portlandia Group). She has taught students from elementary through senior citizens in public schools, universities, and community programs. Currently, she works as a freelance editor.
Lament from a Corner Booth at El Chepo’s
Steve Wilson
December 26, 2022
The developers are closing in. Mile after mile they’re downing trees
and plotting. Seems everyone wants a piece of the Hill Country. Here
at the thinning edge of town, road crews widen neighborhood streets.
Overnight, acres of scrubland have been tamed by new two-stories.
Most mornings, hiding away again, I stop by El Chepo’s for chilaquiles
and the small-town chatter from high-school coaches, a rancher
whose cattle dog lies patiently atop his mud-covered pickup, retired couples
catching up over coffee. It’s all as familiar as their green salsa, fiery
enough to coax open memory like landscapes from a fading past.
Steve Wilson's poetry has appeared in journals and anthologies nationwide; as well as in five collections, the most recent entitled The Reaches. His new book, Complicity, will be published in early 2023. He lives in San Marcos.
Autumn Rapture
Suzanne Morris
December 24, 2022
I.
It is late in the afternoon on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. As I drive home alone from the hospital, life seems as surreal as the autumnal landscape on view through the car windows. It feels as if I am inhabiting someone else’s body, that it was some other wife who stood by as they said to her husband, While we won’t know anything for sure until we get the final test results… Highway 69 climbs then plunges through a vast panorama of bright red and golden and orange treetops that everyone is talking about; never mind that this East Texas miracle can be attributed to scientific fact. Never mind the heaps of leaves already fallen; day after day after day the oaks and sweet gums and maples seem more and more inebriated with color. Today the skies are clearing after several days of unremitting rain, but my spirits are cast down among the wet leaves clinging to the ground. Again and again, I blink and then look again, spellbound by the vibrancy of color after the dull, monochromatic hospital walls.
II.
Now the blazing sun is quickly sinking, flickering between the trees off to the west, shining a single spotlight first on this tree then on that one, illuminating each as though it were a glittering, sequined soloist, and an old stagehand, grizzled and gray, hidden in the wings, was flipping those gigantic switches from my days of childhood dance recitals at the Houston Music Hall. Now and then, the sun cuts a wide swath across a pasture, casting a colossal ray that sets the entire landscape alight, the foliage glowing, trembling with incandescence. I blink and blink, trying to imprint this image on the walls of my mind, thinking about how I will describe to you what seems to me indescribable when I return to your bedside in the morning. And that is when I become eerily aware of a sense that I am being cradled and lifted high above. For mile after mile, the highway seems to be unspooling far below me while I remain aloft, eyes brimming, the treetops blurring into a landscape of flaming votive candles.
For forty years, Suzanne Morris was a novelist, with eight published works beginning with Galveston (Doubleday, 1976) and most recently Aftermath - a novel of the New London school tragedy, 1937 (SFASU Press, 2016). Often her poetry was attributed to characters in her fiction. Nowadays she devotes all her creative energies to writing poems. Her work is included in the anthologies, No Season for Silence - Texas Poets and Pandemic (Kallisto GAIA Press, 2020), and the upcoming, Gone, but Not Forgotten, from Stone Poetry Journal. Her poems have also appeared in The New Verse News.
The Staked Plains
Shelley Armitage
December 18, 2022
Shelley Armitage, professor, writer, naturalist, lives in the Chihuahuan desert in Las Cruces, New Mexico. She is author of eight award-winning books, most recently Walking the Llano: A Texas Memoir of Place, a Kirkus-starred book cited as one of the best memoirs of the year, and a finalist for the May Sarton prize, the New Mexico-Arizona Book Award, and the Collins P. Carr award from the Texas Institute of Letters. Armitage is Professor Emerita at the University of Texas at El Paso where she held the Roderick Professorship and is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters. She manages the family grasslands near Vega, Texas—inspiration for how we experience kinship with the places we inhabit.
The Way to Bull Creek
Vincent Hostak
December 17, 2022
The best way to reach the creek
is to follow others
through scrawny mountain juniper
on two wheels ringing
like bell-strung trousers
charm strung skirts
Follow, too, the raspy song
of a thirsty red-eyed vireo
down an unmarked canyon switchback
framed with cold limestone
pitched by the Long Loose Fault
without intention
a hazard on all sides
without intention
warning to you
“sharpen your gaze”
smudged in the tongue of rubber-stained glyphs
by those who fell,
split helmets, maybe more.
They -- already bathing beautiful
skinned knees, naked in the creek,
the early ones
socks and cleats half buried
in muddy shoals.
The best way
empties into live oak groves
fed by a secret aquifer
ruled by a blind salamander
found only here.
The best way
is through a sticky net of cankerworms
and tiny insects for which there may
be no name in any language.
When you arrive, wipe the tangled lacework
from your eyes and cheek
share with these the warm
top water from the creek.
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
Fort Worth Lake, Despite the Din
Dan Williams
December 11, 2022
Despite the din and drone of highway,
and beyond the human sprawl, the clustered
lake houses and docks, there’s persistence
out on the water, a world of reed and mud
bank too shallow for bass boats and jet skis,
where mallards and cormorants gather,
and egrets and cranes hunt, hugging the quiet
shoreline, the edge between lake and city,
to slip into these areas, an infinite spectrum,
color, shade, sunlight, and prospect, humbles
with rare privilege, when watching a kingfisher
fish, hovering, then darting, or a pair of ospreys
circle in the updrafts, and by chance, an eagle
perched high on a branch, watching for the glint
of silver, the Great Blues and most of the Great
Whites remain skittish at human approach, too
great the residual, instinctual memory of shotgun
pellets, but sometimes a slow, silent paddle
allows a closer glimpse, and the fierce eyes
watch, ready to take flight and indignantly
squawk at the disturbance, to know water,
that marginal world, and congregate among
the birds, requires homage, praise, and prayer.
Dan Williams is the Director of TCU Press and the TCU Honors Professor of Humanities. His second collection of poems, At the Gate, A Refuge of Sunflowers and Milkweed, is from Lamar University Literary Press.
South Texas ‘Scapes
Linda Simone
December 11, 2022
Linda Simone’s poetry books include The River Will Save Us and Archeology. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Texas Poetry Calendar and Bearing the Mask: Southwestern Persona Poems (Dos Gatos Press). Born and bred in New York, she now lives in San Antonio.
Lunar Musing
Chip Dameron
December 10, 2022
Chip Dameron’s latest book is Relatively Speaking, a two-poet collection with Betsy Joseph. He lives in Georgetown, Texas.
Cattail Marsh
John Rutherford
December 4, 2022
John Rutherford is a poet writing in Beaumont, Texas. Since 2018, he has been an employee in the Department of English at Lamar University.
Across
Jim LaVilla-Havelin
December 4, 2022
Jim LaVilla-Havelin is the author of six books of poetry. His most recent, Tales from the Breakaway Republic, a chapbook, was published by Moonstone Press, Philadelphia, in May 2022. LaVilla-Havelin is the Coordinator for National Poetry Month in San Antonio.
Wandering the Back Roads
Milton Jordan
December 1, 2022
Milton Jordan lives with Anne in Georgetown, Texas. His most recent poetry collection is A Forest for the Trees from Backroom Window Press, 2022.