october country

Sister Lou Ella Hickman

December 1, 2024

                  it is october

                  today the air is empty of humidity

                  the sky is a quiet blue clear

                  as if january had already settled in

                  it is october

                  when leaves begin their journey

                  and birds remind everyone of the mystery

                        we all need to return to

                        it is october

                        a place only the heart knows

                        and remembers

Sister Lou Ella Hickman, OVISS is a former teacher and librarian whose writings have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies. Press 53 published her first book of poetry in 2015 entitled she: robed and wordless. She was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2017 and in 2020.

The Shrinking Season

Elisa A. Garza

September 22, 2024

The bayou reduces itself,

a bare slick line. The sky

will not rain.

Whose grunt will greet us

when marshes diminish

and do not tempt

the nesting minds

of herons?

The sea

only whispers.

Elisa A. Garza is a poet, editor, and former writing and literature teacher.  Her full-length collection, Regalos (Lamar University Literary Press), was a finalist for the National Poetry Series.  Her chapbooks include Between the Light / entre la claridad and out in 2025 The Body, Cancerous (both from Mouthfeel Press). 

The Water Oak

Jesse Doiron

September 8, 2024

Spring

A great load of green

growing over the garden

over the grass

unhidden and bidden

burgeoning forth

breaking through 

the blue of an 

unburdened sky.

Summer

The shade. The shade. The shade.

It seems ice cold – the shade.

The lizards and the cat 

doze deeply in the shade.

Ivy crochets lazily.

The birds, bewildering

to rest, hide in the shade.

They leave the bugs alone.

The cat leaves them alone.

The ivy knits along

the longest lines of shade,

where beetles drowse away,

and I sit idly by

beneath the shade, the shade. 

Autumn

Rouged and bejeweled, she lets her auburn 

hair fall lightly down in a yellow light.

She is alluringly demure, as if 

embarrassed to remove her clothes, as if 

unsure of what her nakedness might mean.

She twirls her skirt this way and that as she 

unbuttons, knowing I will look for more.

She loosens more, unbelts her garters, and

unties, undoes,  unblouses, then, slightly 

bends to let what’s left slip down her spine.

She shyly shows her limbs, her trunk, her smile 

as I admire her all the while – and 

gather up what she has scattered on the floor.

Winter

Last winter hurt the tree.

I saw it shivering

the week it rained and rained,

until the ice pulled down

a dozen leafless limbs –

big ones – with jagged ends

that left her trunk in thorns.

She shed half of her weight

back then, and all around 

her roots were broken dreams.

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.

Rain (San Marcos)

Steve Wilson

August 25, 2024

Summer

The turning toward 

summer: after rain, discover 

a long trail of fire ants 

below the torporous clouds.

****

Rain upcountry.  

The river cascades seaward.

Autumn

For hours, a steady rain.  

   The taillights of cars glister, diffuse 

along the flooded streets.

****

Rain rouses silence.  Silence, beauty.  

Beauty, longing.  

On side streets: 

people wrapped in raincoats, 

water fracturing like glass.

Winter

Wet with rain, the wood pile – 

****

Child catches reflections

in pools of rain-

water – blue musings.

Spring

An awakening toward, into – 

susurrus 

of rain, then rain.

****

Sheets of rain, silver-gilt 

within the diminishing light,

veil the far woods.

Steve Wilson's poetry has appeared in journals and anthologies nationwide; as well as in six collections, the most recent entitled Complicity (2023). He lives in San Marcos.

A WINTER JOG THROUGH SNOW WITH THE FRIEND FROM TAIWAN

Stefan Sencerz

July 14, 2024

So vast

white winter twilight

Fresh snow arrives

with you asking the question:

“Why Bodhidharma crossed the high seas?

What is the meaning of life?”

I wish I had the turning word

“Sky is blue? Snow is white?”

I know

I read it somewhere

“Lightly lay your feet on the ground”

is all I manage to say

We jog through the snow path flows

the river’s frozen

soft snowflakes settle on barren trees

You stop in half step 

in the midst of vast field 

“Master! Master!

This is better than getting laid!”

You yell throwing arms to the sky

I laugh, “Move on! Don’t lose your mind!

Lay your feet on the ground gently!”

We jog through the snow

step by step

I learn Plato and Aristotle from you

you Buddha and Lao-tze

sometimes you can learn something 

even from me

Calmly path melts

into the boundless morning

hoping one day

we’ll both forget

names for all colors and shapes

Stefan Sencerz, born in in Warsaw, Poland, came to the United States to study philosophy and Zen Buddhism. He teaches philosophy, Western and Eastern, at Texas A&M University, Corpus Christi. His essays appeared in professional philosophy journals (mostly in the areas of animal ethics and metaethics) and his poems and short stories appeared in literary journals. Stefan has been active on the spoken-word scene winning the slam-masters poetry slam in conjunction with the National Poetry Slam in Madison Wisconsin, in 2008, as well as several poetry slams in San Antonio, Austin, Houston, and Chicago.

A Catalpa Tree in Munger Place

Vincent Hostak

July 14, 2024

Arborists hate the smell of its fresh cut limbs

but the shade from its broad leaves 

have no peer on August afternoons. 

Memory clouds how much of this is reason, 

and how much is sorcery or miracle, when

the shape of the absent limbs is greater than if all were gone.

There was nothing greener on a Summer’s night.

Its seed pods dangled like sad cigars or

wiry fingers stretching to touch their shadows.

Its dark grey twin looks back, admires

all the fine detail shared in amber streetlight.

We prayed for sheets of rain. Yearned for ruckus, caught merely a whisper.

From April to May, it sported elephant ears

ringed with paper thin garlands,

tiny, white and scarcely speckled orchids.

In June they fell on crabgrass, painted the curb,

circled the storm drains, insinuated snowfall.

We put them in a bowl of water, made a stylish floating world.

We strolled on nights soulless and silent

but for engines growling on Greenville.

Autumn took every shortcut across our big state.

The catalpa’s leaves were gone in hours.

When the old scents returned, you said

you could smell a norther circling Oklahoma.

After the storm, bone collectors lined the street.

They came with ropes and rented wagons,

they left with their ladders and half our tree.

They sped away with fenders sagging,

drew sparks on frosted asphalt,

fishtailed their way to another scheduled surgery.

That Winter the space heater failed, 

the toilet and the fishbowl froze.

Our Goldie, later Lazarus, circled for hours

inside an air-pocket under surface ice,

bobbing about, popping its wee fish mouth,

inhaling the last food flakes to January’s howling saws.

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.

Summer Suite

Chris Ellery

June 23, 2024

Green was the silence, wet was the light,

the month of June trembled like a butterfly.

Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets

1. League

She said she loved

how I printed my name

on my glove.

Simple lines without flourish.

Elegant. So unlike

how I moved

to scoop up grounders

in the infield,

all bowed legs and windmill arms

and elbows, 

scribbling chaos

along the baseline

like an indecipherable

calligraphy

adapted from some dead

Semitic language.

In baseball you have to learn

the shortest distance

between two places, 

like where you stand

between first and second

and where you can catch

the hard-hit liner. 

Somehow I could never get 

to the point

directly.

A league is how far 

a horse can walk 

in an hour, 

a crow leaves no tracks

on the sky

for the horse to follow. 

I loved how she said she loved

how I drew wild, 

superfluous

doodles on the diamond,

winding and weaving my way

20,000 leagues

under a pop up to catch

the falling white orb

of a fleeting

summer.

2. Ripening

One rootbound summer of my adolescence 

I spent in the orchard picking peaches, every tree 

a galaxy of ripening suns.

Morning and afternoon I could feel my own body 

ripening. Day by day I could feel my hands 

being molded to the shape of a succulent harvest.

Every day as the shadows grew long in the Hill Country 

I savored one perfect, tree-ripe sample of the season—

a dense little globe of rainfall, earth, and light.

How juicy and sweet the fruit, still warm from the sun!

How tender the flesh, how eager to pull away 

from the stone!

3. Narrow

The way Rousseau threw rocks at trees I play a little game with myself.

If the lawn mower starts by the third pull I’m saved forever—

or at least all day.

Something about the promise of the manicured lawn makes me believe 

that I have heaven 

tethered at the end of the chord. 

It must be 

all that green appearing at my feet 

like a country club fairway in the wake of the whirling blade. 

It must be

those narrow lines my mower traces on the grass, 

sunshine crisscrossing in the perfect mandala of perpendiculars and curves.

To the rhythm of the rpms I plan my memoir—How It Should Have Been, 

and Is, my working title—as the lawn recalls the wilderness 

it once was. 

It’s always always always Saturday afternoon. 

Catching all the clippings in a bag like imperfections, 

my mower revises every tale by Updike, Irving, Fitzgerald. 

No conflict. No catharsis. No tears. No accusations. No divorce.

Just bliss bliss bliss in the suburbs. 

When my friends and I play catch, the hard ball always hits the sweet spot of the mitt.

The pigskin arcs across the sky with a tight spiral.

Lawn darts, croquet, and bocce ball while the smoker billows with no tincture of Gehenna.  

To offer a sweet libation of her own making, my own Thérèse, my dear Madame de Warens 

crosses the fresh-cut grass, 

appearing like a firefly on a summer evening.  

I bloom like a yellow iris of April.

4. Heart

This knife slices open a memory.

My father spreads the table with newspapers

and plops down a watermelon

fat as Falstaff’s thirst.

Three decades later, 

with all my children watching,

I take up the knife and slide the blade 

again and again along the rod

in the ritual of sharpening.

We hear the rind splitting

as the keen edge glides through ripeness,

then all seize a slice, eager

to sheathe our faces in sweetness. 

Out under the live oaks, 

savoring sunshine with the lips of summer,

we spit the black seeds on the grass.

Like my father before me

I hold a wedge in both my hands

and eat from the ends, saving the heart for last.

5. A Dying Oak

yellowjackets 

cloud

around a hollow limb

termites

channel through rings

of a hundred summers

a woodpecker 

lights

with its noisy drill

may I also

as long as I am

be cheerful and giving

6. Lake

My wife and our children and their children 

are playing on the beach. Their voices join 

with the voice of Conifer Lake, their breath 

with pine trees breathing the summer air. 

When last I was here, the inlet where we swim 

today was frozen. The waves were broken

into shards of ice. Even then it seemed a miracle

to walk across. The lake was groaning. 

I thought of fish looking up from under the ice. 

Fish, I am told, are forgetful. They wouldn’t recall 

my steps overhead if I’d ambled above on a stormy 

summer day plucking men from the waves.  

If fish are the unconscious of a lake, I can’t 

expect this lake to remember if it was afraid 

that day that it couldn’t bear my weight. Well, 

I was afraid. Nevertheless, I say to the lake: 

One winter day I chose to cross on ice. 

You held me up and delivered me 

to a sunny evergreen shore 

which I could never have reached by any other way. 

7. Moon and Month of Oak

June, the month that welcomes the oak moon,

brings triple digit days to the Concho Valley,

the end of my seventh decade on the planet.

Days before the blistering solstice

I mow the grass under a shady sombrero.

Claws of sunlight, filtered through oak leaves,

scratch at my bare white legs, basted in sunscreen.

Scared from the compost pile when I turn it, 

a prairie lizard scampers up a nearby live oak

to watch me put away the mower

and turn on the hose to dampen the fresh clippings.

He doesn’t seem too worried

about carbon emissions and global warming,

but who knows?

Showered and changed, I dare to eat 

a Fredericksburg peach 

for lunch outside beside a bed of succulents. 

This is my way of welcoming summer, 

welcoming once again the month and moon of oak,

reaching out to my eighth decade on the planet

like the red yucca stretching their slender stems 

to the brightest rays.

Chris Ellery is a member of the Texas Association of Creative Writers, the Fulbright Association, and the Texas Institute of Letters. His poetry collections include The Big Mosque of Mercy, Elder Tree, and the forthcoming One Like Silence. The later poetry of Pablo Neruda has been a major influence on his recent work, including "Summer Suite."

These Many Seasons

Betsy Joseph

June 2, 2024

In autumn

our towering fruitless mulberry stands

unleafing in the dark as if modestly 

bathing and releasing itself from the bondage

of weight that accompanies being the largest tree in the yard,

the expectations of providing shelter and shade

for its humans and a climbing dome

for the young boys and their friends,

and for supplying nesting crooks for squirrels.

In the winter

of our lives now, the mulberry and I

are still standing in spite of

an early summer house fire more than a decade past

that left us both feeling singed,

and in spite of tornadic storms that swiftly swirled,

kicking up limbs in a dizzying dance a few springs ago.

Among other companions,

it has taken a steady tree with a thick gnarled trunk

to ride out four decades, these many seasons with me

as we continue to age in place.

Betsy Joseph lives in Dallas and has poems which 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.

A Music Teacher’s Seasons

Thomas Hemminger

May 5, 2024

Music teachers start their year in autumn. 

Folk melodies and harvest colors float around

fresh faces in new clothes singing of 

Simple Gifts and being Homeward Bound. 

As the weeks goes by, 

xylophones become dancing bones, 

and bouncing balls are Great Pumpkins 

keeping beat with tempo games. 

Magically, music morphs from

Halloween to Herald Angels

and snowmen Walking on the Air. 

Holiday carols and peppermint sticks 

decorate our time sliding in to 

the Season of Light and Silent Nights.

We take a break, 

for a short winter’s nap, 

and before we can blink

it’s time to come back.

Raspy recorders remind us that 

Birdsongs are beautiful, like flutes fluttering

between the tree branches overhead. 

Songs about growing recall

the meaning in “Kindergarten”,

each child, like a flower, is

beautiful and unique in their own way

as they reach for the sky 

when spring speeds in to the Month of May. 

Finally, the year ends in Summertime, 

a surprisingly quiet season for music teachers, 

though just as important in the cycle.

We have to remember that songs are 

both sound and silence, and that

“Music is in the space between the notes.” 

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. The last line of the poem above is based on a quote attributed to the beloved Impressionist composer Claude Debussy. 

A Year on the Brazos

Milton Jordan

May 5, 2024

Yesterday when today was tomorrow

the river rushed past town in spring surge

mud-red and roiling, excited by April, 

and unwilling to abide in its banks.

Today was tomorrow yesterday

and the town settled into summer,

the river’s slow flow within its banks,

muddy but well below roiling.

Tomorrow’s today now far behind yesterday,

the hot dry summer stretched into autumn,

streams trickling around muddy islands 

toward the dwindling current’s winter bed. 

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