Texas Museums
Sandy in Defined Space
Jesse Doiron
July 9, 2023
on the bronze sculpture by Richard McDermott on the campus of the University of Houston
There she stays in an angled memory,
a place that cannot be again in time
yet will not pass away from mind.
First kiss was in the corner in the dark
and neither one of us could see
from there how we would draw the lines
that could not meet again, each way
must end, each touch of skin, each place,
each time still deeper in to mark forever
where she stays – a space she has defined.
Photo Credit
https://www.houstoniamag.com/arts-and-culture/2019/08/uh-public-art-collection-celebrates-50-years
Sandy in Defined Space, Richard McDermott Miller, 1972
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 in Texas, 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.
In the Rothko Chapel, Houston
Vincent Hostak
May 7, 2023
Silence is so accurate…, Mark Rothko
When you fall inside
it is the quietude that arrests, then rests
in all the angles where your bones meet
when you kneel.
Though it’s only held a pose for fifty years,
this place is like the ornament Keats observed:
“foster-child of silence and slow time.”
For all its soundlessness
there is an ecstatic pulse
still trapped in the center of its octagon,
heirloom energy of dervishes whirled,
knees and shoulders pressed Qibla
toward far off Makkah.
It was silence which cracked the obelisk in the pool.
A friend told me that over time
the canvases lost their glow
so they had to be exquisitely cleaned.
“Glow?” I thought. “His oils are the color of ash.”
Then from my own face
I brushed away all aggregations:
concretions of accumulated dust,
imprints from a pillow shared,
fragments of another’s skin,
consequences of imbroglios,
gravity and those years I smoked.
There it was: dancers’ gowns alight, felt caps rustling,
songs of justice spinning. When noise is erased
it leaves slate-colored canals with a glow
pushing outward in all directions.
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.
Rothko Chapel Interior. Photograph: Alan Islas
License: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
Broken Obelisk by Barnett Newman in front of Rothko Chapel: Photograph: Jim Evans
License: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
Joie de Vivre
Suzanne Morris
April 30, 2023
Willem de Kooning made me feel
as if
in a fit of fury he had sloshed paint
one bucket after another
at the unsuspecting canvas
then applied broad brush strokes
and squiggly lines,
calling the chaotic result his Art;
made me feel he was sloshing the paint
at me
as I stood uncomprehending
in a museum gallery, high-walled and
reverent.
Then I read in her obituary how this
much younger woman
changed de Kooning’s painting once
she became his muse
her joie de vivre infecting him,
making him love painting
as he had not done in years.
Chatting companionably out on
a big porch
in matching rocking chairs of
outsized, spindled wood frames,
the couple seem less like a
wealthy, influential arts patron
and a painter of international
renown,
than a pair of frisky pre-teens, fresh from
Friday’s school dismissal bell:
Mimi’s dark hair and
pixie smile
above a black turtleneck
and bare feet,
floppy-haired Willem in
horn-rimmed glasses,
wrinkled cargo pants and
moccasins, unlaced.
Could it be, under the
influence of Mimi,
Willem’s frog became
a prince?
Open to a change of heart, I return for
another look at
the pivotal painting she inspired, of the
place where first they met.
Promising myself I will not be intimidated
I inhale deeply and imagine
diving head-first into the painting’s
ocean blue
sun-spattered swirling
waves of
staggeringly bright
reds, yellows and greens
engulfing me, drenching me in their
energy and their light.
Emerging, then, I ride high above
on the wings of a great seabird
peering down at a
riotous topography of
garden paths meandering through
towering gladiolus, tulips, daffodils
and fringes of wispy sea grass,
neon green;
see a woman in sun hat and
off-the-shoulder dress
her forearm reaching from a
shimmery blue sleeve
toward a man’s outstretched hand,
her lips forming the words,
Am I ever going to see you again?
–After the obituary for Houston native Emilie “Mimi” Kilgore, December 25th, 2022, New York Times. Ms. Kilgore had served on the boards of Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts and the Contemporary Arts Museum.
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.
Along the River Red I Found an Arrowhead
Seth Wieck
April 23, 2023
As a boy, maybe ten, I found an arrowhead
along the River Red, set on the sand like a gift,
so it seemed. Alone I came upon the striped flint.
No tracks but mine. The arrow’s shaft: gone to time.
Only me and the stone and the river
and ripples in the sand like the crease between fingers.
The stone’s still-sharp edge could slice my fingers,
despite time and weather. The arrowhead’s
maker formed a thing that will outlast the river.
A striker of stones showered sparks from this gift,
passing hand-to-hand-then-piercing-hearts. Time-
and-time again man has given man this flint.
But like wind without origin, from whence comes this flint?
As a boy, maybe ten, with my childish fingers
grasping the sharp flint, I couldn’t conceive the time
contained in the pink, white, and purple-striped arrowhead.
The mere hundred years since an unknown warrior laid this gift
on the wide, sandy banks of the Red River
might register as one grain of sand in the river’s
long history. This particular flint
comes from another river whose waters are a gift—
west to east—across the Panhandle desert. Fingers
of the Canadian knapped the earth like an arrowhead,
flaking each layer of geologic time
‘til a valley lay in the Panhandle’s palm. How much time
did it take the Canadian River
to scrape down two hundred feet to Permian mud? Spearhead
makers discovered this layer of flint.
Then with river stones and stone-blistered fingers
they quarried out slabs of this Alibates gift.
But still, in my search, for the giving of gifts,
I’ve found no beginning, simply an unending giving of time.
Before God said, “Let us touch fingers
with Adam,” there was this river; before this river,
an inland sea, silting quartz crystals, forming this flint.
What work has been done, so I could say the word arrowhead?
Now, at forty, with this gift from the river,
each instant this flint has witnessed the persistence of time,
and I can pinch it between fingers, formed as an arrowhead.
This poem was composed for the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum in Canyon and read at the museum's unveiling of Jon Revett's mural. https://www.wtamu.edu/news/2021/06/jon-mark-beilue-public-art-is-for-everybody.html
Seth Wieck's writing has appeared in Narrative Magazine, Grand Little Things, and Front Porch Republic. He is a candidate for an MFA at the University of St. Thomas in Houston and lives in Amarillo with his wife and three children.
Cradleboard
Chris Ellery
April 16, 2023
Almost twelve, fostered from age four.
Everyone knows she’s not right.
Her nights have eyes.
She screams. She runs away.
She wears only black, not knowing it
the color of change.
Today with Mrs. Berry’s class
she attends the past,
the Mayer Museum at Angelo State.
T-Rex, trilobites, raptor eggs, mammoth bones,
the wide-open jaws of megalodon
swallowing classmates six at a time.
Through ice, volcanoes, meteorites,
through epochs and eons,
she passes
with etherized indifference.
She sleepwalks into a room of color—
flocks of waterfowl dead and mounted,
crystal, silverware, amethyst vases,
walls and walls of paintings,
yet though she is fond of art
(her macabre ink drawings worry her therapist),
no vision in that whole bright hall
can enter her eyes.
Like a mouse in a maze,
she heads upstairs. Frontier days
are on display. Tack and saddles.
Wooden teeth. A chamber pot.
Medical tools—bone saw, scalpel, forceps.
A basin used by a prostitute.
Suddenly something calls to her—
an infant’s cry,
which she alone can hear.
She stops, turns,
stands fossilized, staring down
at a Native American cradleboard.
Little more than a weathered plank
with rawhide bands
to hold the swaddled papoose.
Though frayed and soiled, the straps
that held it to a woman’s back
still show a loving skill with beads.
The girl, transfixed, stares and stares,
gazes at that cedar board until she becomes
the baby there, searching
with her newborn eyes
a hundred years for Mother,
her mother
beaten, raped, forsaken, lost—
lost to war, to meth, to choices made—
woman’s terror and woman’s pain
living in her, bearing her
toward the blood
of motherhood.
The bus is loading.
Mrs. Berry seeks and finds
the girl still there, silent,
stoic as wood, apparently emotionless,
except for tears
streaking her stony face.
Chris Ellery is a translator, essayist, and poet whose books include The Big Mosque of Mercy and Canticles of the Body. 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, the Betsy Colquitt Award, and the Texas Poetry Award. Contact him at ellerychris10@gmail.com.
Rough Sea at a Jetty, 1650s - Jacob van Ruisdael, Dutch
Herman Sutter
April 9, 2023
What is it the painter discovers
when dabs of white
brushed over strokes of gray become
bursting spray —swelling waves?
When whirls of blue gather
the grays, becoming
not oil and pigment dried stiff
not imaginings
but actualities;
storm dark clouds
descending
to the white-tipped sea?
Is it a kind of truth shaped
by color, craft and accident?
Or just a lie the eye believes
because it seems to be?
Who was it first discovered
how to tell such lies?
How did it come to be
that to say a thing in such a way
would make it true?
Herman Sutter (award-winning poet/essayist) is the author of Stations (Wiseblood Books), and The World Before Grace (Wings Press), and “The Sorrowful Mystery of Racism,” St. Anthony Messenger. His writing has appeared in: The Perch (Yale University), The Langdon Review, Cider Press Review, Iris, The Ekphrastic Review, Benedict XVI Institute, as well as the anthologies: Texas Poetry Calendar (2021) & By the Light of a Neon Moon (Madville Press, 2019). Recipient of the 2021 Best Essay award from the Catholic Media Association, the Innisfree Prize for poetry, Sutter has also been honored by the Texas Playwrights Festival for his poem for voices: The World Before Grace. His recent manuscript A Theology of Need was long-listed for the Sexton prize.
Clay Swans
John Rutherford
April 2, 2023
Long necks, bent to the breast,
resting while waiting for the cracks
to form signs of life, a cygnet hatching
yolk to grey-brown down
on a muddy riverbank.
The reeds piled, woven
with inexplicable deftness,
something ancient and new,
to be washed away in the summer rains
and rebuilt next season.
How far have they flown?
Separate all year, til the season
of love, returning to the same river,
to build the nest again,
their tenancy resumed.
Every year, an anniversary birth,
this time marred, a bruise
blue-speckled on the crown,
evidence, witness of an assault,
waiting for the cracks to form.
John Rutherford is a poet writing in Beaumont, Texas. Since 2018, he has been an employee in the Department of English at Lamar University.
“Waiting Posture” by James C. Watkins in an exhibition called Reflections Made of Memories at the Art Museum of Southeast Texas.
Pink and Champagne
Suzanne Morris
March 26, 2023
–for Cova and Lyn
We are five old friends–
two married couples and me–
walking to the Houston Museum of Fine Arts
on a balmy Saturday afternoon
where Van Gogh’s
soul-baring self-portrait
will pierce me through
with sorrow and
wet my cheeks with tears.
There is barely room for two
on the sidewalk which is
heaved up in places from the
knobby roots of old, thick-trunked oaks,
and I am content to stay
a few paces behind
attuned to the back-and-forth
rhythm of your voices
the sun winking between
shaggy treetops as we pass.
How young we all feel, far
younger than our years.
One of you is dressed in beige slacks
and a champagne chiffon top,
the other in pink print cropped pants
and a pink summer sweater.
Later, while luxuriating in
glasses of chilled wine
the five of us will talk about the
paintings we found most arresting
and the catch in my voice
will show
I am still held in the
grip of Van Gogh.
As darkness falls,
we’ll order dinner from cloth-bound menus
that–we’ll admit with a laugh–
are hard to read by
candle flame.
For now, we advance,
the men walking behind,
shirts open at the neck,
light jackets and comfortable slacks,
a good-natured chuckle
erupting now and then.
We have been doing this
for over a decade
and though I know that
nothing lasts forever, still
I will not be prepared
for the first death among us–
eight years have now passed
since we lost him–
nor for the man beside him to
lose his reason so that
eventually the couple will
cease going out.
Now there are only two of us.
As though it were yesterday,
I can see you in your
pink cropped pants
and you wearing beige
and champagne,
leading us on a sunny day
to a place that
none of us could have
known was there
but was, perhaps, foretold
in the portrait that
haunts me still.
Vincent van Gogh, Self-Portrait, 1887, oil on cardboard, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation).
Suzanne Morris is a novelist and poet. Her poems have been published in anthologies, and in online poetry journals including The Texas Poetry Assignment, Emblazoned Soul Review, The New Verse News, The Pinecone Review, and Stone Poetry Quarterly.
At the Museum of South Texas History
Jan Seale
March 19, 2023
Step into the main gallery, second floor:
a mammoth from the Pliocene epoch
trumpets silent welcome, and overhead
an ichthyosaurus churns the Paleo-Gulf.
Move to the diorama: smooth Coahuiltecans
bring a wild turkey back to camp
while cicadas chirp and a cougar growls.
These humans are carefully not leaving
a written record, only shell fragments,
chipped stone flakes, campfire hearths.
Next, Spaniards in helmets and chain mail
lead horses through the thorn scrub forest,
trample the prickly pear cactus.
Now civilization commences near fresh water,
with colonists hanging church bells,
electing alcaldes, plowing the fields.
In a narrow jacal, an Aztec descendant
sings quietly, tells a mythical tale of a lover.
A rattlesnake menaces, a cook brews
coffee from mesquite beans. Across,
an entrepreneur checks his steamboat
for passage on the Rio Grande.
Meanwhile, downstairs the greeter
readies the computer, the cash box,
the visitor bracelets. The building
supervisor flings open oak doors,
lets in sunlight for a brief air-out.
The gift store lights flash on.
A bobcat strolls in.
(This museum is not in the suburbs.
This museum is no kitschy tourist attraction.
MOSTH boasts a board, a website,
an archive, national listing; has won prizes,
is solvent, imposing, sits on the square
opposite the county courthouse.)
The bobcat steps lively, bringing
a lovely buff color, with spots,
long legs, fuzzed feet, facial ruffs, ear tufts,
gleaming eyes, porcelain pink nose,
and, topping it off, a short curled-up tail—
all these declare it is not Tabby Americana.
The bobcat looks about, startled at shrieks
and running feet. Perhaps it is wondering
where water is, where chipmunks, where snakes.
It turns, and on retractable claws moves quietly
from the stone tiles of the entry foyer to
the gift store.
Full of purpose, it heads straight
for the book display, (ahh, our kind of cat!)
climbing shelf by shelf to the top, turning,
checking its vantage, settling in a corner.
Was it once an Egyptian cat on a tomb?
Exhibit A licks its paws, takes a spit bath
after the long journey to town. Then settles.
Here we see a learned cat, a scholarly feline,
an educated carnivorous mammal,
a book lover cat having chosen to preside over
The Amazing Life of a South Texas Cowboy,
The Rio Grande Delta and I’d Rather Sleep in Texas.
In true reverence to the region’s biome,
the police are not called, only Animal Control.
These folks, delighted, relieved of boring stray dogs,
do a careful takedown, feline to opossum cage.
Upcountry, “Hello,” yells the rancher into his phone,
“A WHAT you say?” He knows all about MOSTH,
believes in heritage, history, this peculiar land.
So he gets in his pickup, drives an hour into town,
stomps into the museum, kneels and looks
into shining yellow eyes.
“Well hello hello, Betty Bobcat,” he croons.
With a name, she’s taken up, walked to the door.
She’s over the side of his pickup;
she’s off to home on his range.
So much for show-and-tell, for a live demonstration.
So much for not-musty, not-dead museum displays.
Here’s to living history. Yowl! Pssttt!
credit to Museum of South Texas History
Jan Seale is the 2012 Texas Poet Laureate. She lives in South Texas, on the U.S.-Mexican border. Her garden is full of succulents which grow rich and beautiful with hardly any tender loving care.
Images of Love
Chip Dameron
March 12, 2023
Based on Jim Love’s Area Code, a welded steel sculpture at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
A bunch of boxes tells how parts
of Texas make a crazy metal quilt
of culture: Indian arrow to lug nut
wrench, javelina to stylized rattler,
two longhorns to a U-turn.
Ma and Pa, galvanized fixtures
in a sly Texas Gothic, anchor
the squared middle, while pedestaled
on either side are a ten-gallon hat
and an oil well pump jack, silhouettes
of what people here still worship.
There’s a big bullet hole in one corner
and an American flag in rigid glory,
its stars stranded in barbed wire –
don’t go tangling with Texans.
For fun, city slickers are offered
a canted bottle with swollen teats,
just ready for milking. Want more?
Then open the door to the safe
and squeeze right on in.
Chip Dameron has published eleven collections of poetry and a travel journal. His poems, as well as his essays on contemporary writers, have appeared in numerous publications in the U.S. and abroad. He is a professor emeritus of English at The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. A member of the Texas Institute of Letters, he’s also been a Dobie Paisano fellow.
Cattle Drive
Dario Beniquez
March 5, 2023
With No Roof but a Resistol by Bruce Green at The Briscoe Western Art Museum
Here they are two vaqueros, with no roof, but the sky, — a grey sky.
Their eyes overlook the western plains, not only to assess the storm clouds
forming, but to oversee the stray cows grazing in the far distance.
One caballero, the weather prognosticator, wears a yellow saddle slicker.
The other, the undecided one, the one in the denim shirt, turns away
from the nearby cattle, looks directly into the pale blue skyscape.
He is thinking about a cattle town miles away, maybe even days away.
Hands on the reins, he thinks, let’s find a campsite to hunker down
before the sun goes down before mañana’s cattle town.
Dario Beniquez grew up in Far Rockaway, NY. He is a poet and engineer. He lives in San Antonio, Texas. He facilitates the Gemini Ink Open Writers’ Workshop. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Pacific University, OR. He is the author of the poetry collection, Zone of Silence, published by https://www.flowersongpress.com/
To an Apache Basket
Fernando Esteban Flores
February 26, 2023
(at the Witte Museum)
Elaborate—no
Nor elaborating
No sweet melodies to contemplate
A more flowery tale could not be told
Unlike Keats’s Grecian urn this simple tendered thing
Unearthed & raised from desert sands yet its own story does hold
What burdens of survival you must have borne
When first birthed into the world & to this day survive to tell
Skilled leathery hands that from the earth drew life from you
Pitched & shaped to give you artful form
How many thirsty souls drank from your lips
What weary calloused hands pressed & passed you forth
Your very presence sings a simple human phrase
A quiet-tempered song of praise
Fernando Esteban Flores is a native son of Tejas, a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin, published three books of poetry: Ragged Borders, Red Accordion Blues, & BloodSongs available through Hijo del Sol Publishing, published in multiple journals, reviews, newspapers, and online sites, selected in 2018-19 by the Department of Arts & Culture of the City of San Antonio, with support from Gemini Ink for his poem “Song for America V (Yo Soy San Antonio)” as one of 30 poems/poets to commemorate the City’s Tricentennial anniversary, and recently became poetry editor of the Catch the Next Journal of Ideas & Pedagogy.
At the Cradle of Texas Liberty
Milton Jordan
February 23, 2023
the caption, elegantly written in script
reminiscent of a 19th-century hand
on paper stressed to appear as parchment
of the period, asked us to believe —
disregarding metallurgists’ reports —
the case displayed a blade Bowie may have used
in valiant defense of the Long Barracks
where, in fact, Bowie lay immobile
in fevered delirium through the battle,
and the leather pouch displayed below
possibly held shot for a long rifle
used by a certain Tennessean.
Milton Jordan lives with Anne in Georgetown, Texas. He co-edited the first Texas Poetry Assignment anthology, Lone Star Poetry, Kallisto Gaia Press, 2022.
Junior Chamber of Commerce Ruins Museum Forever
Chuck Etheridge
February 19, 2023
I. Museums
Despairing at my advancing heathenism
My parents dragged me to museums,
Art, history, nature, culture:
Poor matches with my hyperactivity.
At the El Paso Museum of Art:
“Don’t touch the paintings.”
At the Centennial Museum:
“Don’t touch the Neandertal.”
At the Magoffin Historic Home:
“Don’t touch anything.”
At the Museo de Arte de Ciudad Juárez
“No toques nada.”
They tried to drill culture into my thick,
Red-headed skull impermeable to
Talk of brush stroke techniques
Or thousand-year-old pottery shards.
All I heard was, “History
Blah, Blah, Blah, old things.”
I’d fidget, and wiggle, and beg
To be set free, to be let outside.
II. Trains
“Yes,” they said, despairing.
I darted past the guards,
Flew down two flights of stairs,
Burst through double doors into sunshine.
All I needed to be happy was to run.
I slid down a banister, climbed back up,
Rolled down the hill for good measure,
And then ran around back of the building
And fell in love with the museum.
A full-sized steam locomotive sat,
Begging to be climbed. I rang the bell
On top of the boiler,
Used the cowcatcher as a slide,
Dove into the empty coal cart,
Tried to climb into the locked cabin,
Jumped on top of it bellowing, “CHOO, CHOO.”
Even my well-behaved, rarely-spanked,
Good-grade-getting sister loved the train,
Although Sunday dress wearing modesty
Kept her from joining me atop the boiler.
III. Junior Chamber of Commerce
“The museum with the train,” I would beg,
Baffling my delighted parents,
Although I had to look at the stuffed grizzly (scary)
And a diorama called “The Stone Age” first.
Then I could climb all over my beloved train,
The El Paso and Southwestern Locomotive Number 1,
Pretending to be an engineer,
Navigating my train through the Rockies.
My paradise was lost
Due to the evil machinations
Of the El Paso Junior Chamber of Commerce,
Train hating kids in three-piece bankers’ suits.
Or so I pictured them, Disney villains
Taken straight out of Mary Poppins,
Bleating twin evil mantras: “Civic Duty”
And “Preserving our History.”
They erected a steel and glass building around it,
Shielding the train from the elements, from kids like me.
I would stand, nose pressed to the glass,
Telling Locomotive Number One, “I miss you.”
IV. Do Trains Dream?
Old Number One, now imprisoned
Completely indoors In The Railroad
And Transportation Museum of El Paso,
The main exhibit.
“Fully restored,” museum literature says,
And proclaims Old Number One will
“Never have to move again.”
As if that’s a good thing.
Sitting in a glass case, there to be seen,
Forever locked away from human touch,
Its wheels, never allowed to roll again,
Boiler and coal cart forever empty.
Does Engine Number One
Dream in its glass-entombed slumber?
Does it miss daring itself up mountain passes
Carrying lumber, or ore, or people?
Does it miss being busy, being touched
By engineers, by firemen, by railroad workers?
Does it miss being climbed on by children?
Does it miss me?
A self-proclaimed desert rat, Chuck Etheridge was raised in El Paso, Texas. He is the author of three novels, Border Canto and The Desert after Rain, and Chagford Revisited. His poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction have been published in a variety of reviews and anthologized in a number of books, and he has written two plays that have been produced. His most recent work can be found in the Corpus Christi Writers Anthologies, Trek-a-Tanka, Switchgrass Review, and Level Land: Poems for and About the I 35 Corridor.
Southwest Duet
Robert Allen
February 12, 2023
on Progress II by Luis Jiménez
Blanton Museum of Art
Caught in the moment of their strongest
opposition, held fast by a length
of lariat, that single straight line
creates an illusion of support.
Both figures would collapse but for the
tension in this taut, tightening noose.
The stiff lean of the vaquero’s back
and earthbound track of his horse’s hooves
seem to balance the desperate leap
forward by the longhorn bull, whose twin
horntips whip up and around as if
puncturing the pale brush-country sky.
Below stand the stubborn juniper,
spiny ocotillo, blossoming
prickly pear, centipede, horned toad, rat.
Owl grasps jackrabbit in its talons,
wren stabs lizard, tarantula hawk
waits to sting the doomed tarantula.
Feathered spear lies broken, defeated
near the ghoulish skull a mouse calls home.
Is this progress? The artist says so.
Our future, he says, is big and bold
like legions of gleaming lowriders,
fueled by an Aztec fire from within
where letters grow more than nine feet tall,
words are cast in slick blue fiberglass,
and red neon lights dot every eye.
Robert Allen is retired and lives in San Antonio with his wife, two children, five antique clocks, and four cats. He has poems in Voices de la Luna, the 2023 Texas Poetry Calendar, and TPA. He loves cardio-boxing workouts, hates to throw things away, and facilitates Gemini Ink's in-person Open Writer's Lab.