Trout fishing for democracy

Herman Sutter

November 8, 2024

I cast my vote—like I would a lure

tossed into a lake

in search of something 

or someone

curious enough to ask:

What is this?

My vote is a question asked

in the privacy of hope

and sent with a flick of a wrist

gliding into the mist 

where it drops with a soft

slurp into the cold 

dark of distance

as I shiver near the shore

and wait to see

will any ripples form

and if they do

will they even notice me?

Herman Sutter (award-winning poet/playwright/essayist) is the author of Stations (Wiseblood Books), The World Before Grace (Wings Press), and “The Sorrowful Mystery of Racism,” St. Anthony Messenger. His work appears in The Perch (Yale University), The Ekphrastic Review, The Langdon Review, Touchstone, i.e., The Merton Journal, as well as: Texas Poetry Calendar (2021) & By the Light of a Neon Moon (Madville Press, 2019). His recent manuscript A Theology of Need was long-listed for the Sexton Prize.

Rise Up Rap No. 1

Darby Riley

November 5, 2024

All you have to do

is, first you have to care

then you have to wake up

see what’s happening, see why

see how to change it

work with others, make a plan

make it spread, make it fun

joyful, hopeful, all the rage,

a way out of world’s end –

you have to be so many

that you run the city, then the state

the whole country – all the skills

of everyone in charge working

to stop the madness, no more

killing nature or each other

the end of everything for sale

the end of me, the start of us

the end of nations, the start of world

to keep everything alive

to make soil, rivers

forests and seas like new again

to make love of the earth

the end of money as god 

Darby Riley is a lawyer and Sierra Club volunteer in San Antonio. He has hosted a monthly
poetry writing workshop since 1992. His poems have been published in several anthologies,
including Lone Star Poetry, and several local publications, including the San Antonio Express-
News.

A RECURRING NIGHTMARE ABOUT VOTING

E. D. Watson

November 3, 2024

Inside the booth I panic: I cannot find

my party on the ballot, the people’s party

party of the whale people wolf people bird people 

bear people frog people cricket people human people 

I can twist the dial on the voting machine, 

but it does not call my country into being, 

that lost land built from poems and dreams, songs

I learned as a child, stories that made our story clean 

oh my country, my people, I want to vote for who we

could be, where is it on the ballot? Beyond the booth’s 

flimsy curtain the world screams: Lesser of two evils! 

The Devil! Apocalypse! The burning end! Machine voices.

I remember to breathe and recite my mantra:

This land is older than we are and it will survive us. 

Meanwhile the names on the screen are shaped like bombs 

and I don’t know how to say them but I know 

they can make me. The machine voices are loud 

and convincing. And then: behind me, beside me

beneath me a rumble: tectonic plates and dancing feet

voices rising like the wind that pushes seas, razing towers

clearing the skies for birds to wing, clearing the coasts 

for the mangroves’ return, seven generations

of whale people wolf people bird people bear people 

frog people cricket people human people singing together; 

the power of the song splits the screen, 

a rainbow pours out, I climb up and away 

and this is not a nightmare after all, but a dream;

the nightmare comes upon waking. 

E. D. Watson is an award-winning poet, yoga teacher, and certified Practitioner of Poetic Medicine in Central Texas. She is the author of one full-length poetry collection, Honey in the Vein, and two chapbooks: Anorexorcism and Via Dolorosa & Advent Wreath, winner of the 2023 Cow Creek Chapbook Prize. Individual poems and stories can be found online at Rattle, Ms., and other journals.

Meditations on the Ballot

Suzanne Morris

October 27, 2024

From the safe harbor of my TV room

many miles away

I witness the domed roof of the famed

Tropicana Field Stadium

being torn to shreds by the howling winds 

of hurricane Milton

as the storm engulfs

Florida’s coastal communities

and massive tornados churn

even before

piles of potentially deadly debris 

can be cleared from

hurricane Helene that struck

just two weeks earlier

raging all the way from there

to the Appalachians,

those who survived in its wake

grieving for all who were lost and

looking out in shock on the bleak scene

of their houses and roads 

swallowed up by mountainous

flood waters

clothing, keepsakes, beds and dressers

tax returns, books, certificates of record– 

possessions once safe

within home walls

suddenly washed away.

How could we ask any voter who endured

one of these deadly storms– 

let alone, both– 

to wade through the wreckage

of their lives

and cast a ballot in the

Presidential election of 2024,

though we’ve been warned that

every single vote will count,

the survival of our democracy

hanging in the balance.

And I think how 

impregnable our democracy

has always seemed, yet, 

how fragile it really is

just one ballot after another, over

the life of our republic

sum total of the great overarching dome

that unites us.

A strong enough wind

could blow it away.

A native of Houston, Suzanne Morris has made her home in East Texas for nearly two decades.  Her poems have appeared in anthologies as well as online poetry journals, including The Texas Poetry Assignment, The New Verse News, The Pine Cone Review, and Stone Poetry Quarterly. 

Memento

Elizabeth N. Flores 

October 27, 2024

As the family gathered 

two weeks after their 

mother’s funeral

to go through her belongings, 

the eldest son claimed 

only one keepsake, 

her voter registration card 

she let him hand to 

“Miss Dolly,

the precinct lady” 

when he was eight.

Can we recall when we first 

represented our family in 

public, and did it well? 

The eldest son could. 

That October morning

in 1992, accompanying his 

mother to the early voting van 

stationed in the parking lot 

of the nursery and floral shop

a block from their house. 

When Miss Dolly returned the card 

to him to give to his mother, 

it was as if the two ladies 

had come to an unspoken agreement 

that he was worthy of trust, 

a feeling he carried with him

each time he voted 

in all the years that followed.

Elizabeth N. Flores, Professor Emeritus of Political Science, taught for over 40 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 and 2023 editions) anthologies edited by William Mays, the Mays Publishing Literary Magazine, and the Windward Review.

Texans Line Up

Milton Jordan

October 27, 2024 

The Taylor Daily Press dispatched me daily

to report voter turnout at polling 

places countywide based on yesterday’s 

posted numbers and today’s line lengths,

strictly warning me to avoid interviews.       

Limited to Monday’s opening day lines

stretched beyond marked boundaries into a maze

of candidate yard-signs, I rushed to meet 

our afternoon edition deadline,

and wrote only estimates of large numbers.

Surprised, past midweek, by lines still stretching 

into signage and high triple digits

posted on doors, I reported possible

records, but The Press pulled my paragraph

on increasingly aggressive poll watchers.

Milton Jordan lives with Anne in Georgetown, Texas. He co-edited the first Texas Poetry Assignment anthology, Lone Star Poetry, Kallisto Gaia Press, 2022.

It’s Coming

Jeffrey L. Taylor

October 20, 2024

The fuse is lit.
The timer going.
I don’t see when
or what or where
it’s going to explode.

I hear the tick,
the hiss of the fuse.

Is a constitutional monarchy coming?
The newly crowned king declaring
on his first day on the throne
an unconstitutional anarchy.

Or an embattled constitutional,
duly elected by Electoral College,
President of the Republic.

East versus West
Coastal Elite.

Jeffrey L. Taylor is a retired Software Engineer.  Around 1990, poems started holding his sleep hostage.  He has been published in The Perch, California  Quarterly, Texas Poetry Calendar, and Texas Poetry Assignment.

A minor(ity) President

Jeffrey L. Taylor

October 20, 2024

||: He has let us know
there will be violence.
Winning—collection of debt
long imagined.
Losing—creation
of more. :||

Jeffrey L. Taylor is a retired Software Engineer.  Around 1990, poems started holding his sleep hostage.  He has been published in The Perch, California  Quarterly, Texas Poetry Calendar, and Texas Poetry Assignment.

Footnotes

||: and :|| are musical repeat signs.
A Minority President won the Electoral College and lost the popular vote.

Papered

Vincent Hostak

October 13, 2024

We shouldn’t favor the odds.  After all,

paper fails one out of three conflicts.

In all fairness, neither rock nor scissors 

served our transactions any better.

Today we walk freely on the peaceable path 

together resembling two felt-topped Quakers 

clutching our ballots like precious babes

with glue still fresh on our tongues.

In times even stranger than these,

if one had any identity at all,

it was papered, assured by white skin.

If one had a vote, he had land, she: neither.

Yards from the courthouse, we who

were never turned away, passing as privileged,

revisit lesser anxieties: Is the envelope sealed?

Did you remember to sign yours?

Tonight, we’ll probe an inherited symbol,

an ungainly bird splayed on a dollar bill.

Then, resisting its cluster of arrows,

we’ll sit and dine sweetly on its olives.

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.

A Vote. A Voice

Thomas Hemminger

October 13, 2024

A vote. A voice

A note. A choice.

A brushstroke

on a canvas,

each one different

from the next.

Do not tell me what

my place in the picture is.

I will be it on my own.

I will add my color

to the others

and separately,

but together,

We will make the art.

Thomas Hemminger is an elementary music teacher living in Dallas, Texas. His work has been published locally in Dallas, as well as in The Wilda Morris Poetry Challenge, The Texas Poetry Assignment, and The Poetry Catalog. 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.