Crossing the Stateline, 1991, 2021

Katherine Hoerth

March 2, 2025

And as I cross the state line I remember

that heavy feeling in my stomach’s pit

when my father told me that we had

a whole day’s journey yet ahead of us.

And I remember all the sunflowers 

in bloom along the highway, how the August

sunshine coaxed a bead of sweat to trickle down

my scrawny body like the scrawny river

that we crossed, and how it felt to finally

leave Oklahoma in our ruddy dust. 

My father pulled into the Welcome Center,

told me to stand next to the granite likeness

of Texas, snapped a picture of me with his dog,

Danny, who’s been dead for decades now. 

The stone felt sweltering against my skin

as Texas glimmered in the slants of sunlight.

How could a girl like me not lose herself

in something so colossal and engulfing,

the gold of it, the fields of fading grass,

the sun’s embrace so heavy on her shoulders,

the sky so big. But that was years ago.

And now, I’m back here at this same state line,

standing at the same old hunk of granite.

It doesn’t dwarf me anymore. Even

I-35, that long and weary highway

has a terminus that I can reach

by midnight in Laredo if I speed. 

This state and I, we’ve been through Hell together:

droughts and hurricanes, the rising sea,

ice storms and the unrelating heat,

the booms and then the busts, oh God, the busts. 

This place reveals itself to me in layers,

through the years: its secrets in its thickets,

its rage that bottles in the gulf and bubbles

to the surface almost every summer,

the silence that it keeps tucked in the desert 

of its throat, the bustling cities teeming

with urban life and all its cruelties.

I’ve felt the quaking as its fault lines deepen

like wrinkles in its brow as Texas fracks

itself to death. I know the desperation 

as it drowns in whiskey-colored ocean.

I’ve inhaled its puffs of smoke from flare stacks

as cancer eats away some parts while others

miraculously come to life again—

a picker strums away in Luckenbach. 

It’s complicated but I miss it so.

Everything comes swirling to the surface 

of my psyche as I snap a selfie

at this ageless monument in granite

against a backdrop filled with sunflowers 

and endless sky. I’ll text this to my father

who will reminisce about the day

he brought me to this godforsaken state—

a place that’s always held me in its arms. 

civil war

Suzanne Morris

January 5, 2025

Civil discourse doesn’t require you to abandon your deeply held principles.  It’s a way of discussing that recognizes the dignity of the other.  –John Rose, one of the founders of the Civil Discourse Project at Duke University

we dare not speak the words

that are

dividing families into

hostile camps

we dare not speak the words

that can 

set us apart

from friends and neighbors

each side certain the other’s

truth is some distorted

version of the world

we live in

fence lines fraught

as the line between

North and South

at Richmond

we dare not speak the words

for we could not

raise them civilly, the art of

civil discourse

struck silent by

our fear that

what’s left unsaid is

all that’s saving us

from taking up the

welcome mat and

turning out the light

no we dare not

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. 

The one who loves, loses

Sumera Saleem

January 5, 2025

“Have you ever seen a moment like this

When no matter what you do for justice, you lose?”

Even if you stay silent and look outward as if

you are frozen in time, whereas the world passes by,

you lose.

Even if you voice your mind on what you mapped with your body, 

and what you all hear is dissonance on who you are,

you lose.

Even if you win your way towards truth, and as soon as

you see the other half, defeated, that you once imagined to be,

you lose.

“Your silence hollows you inside.”

“Your voice shapes who you are.”

“Truth relieves you from imitation.”

In the way of justice, there is no win-win situation. 

The only thing that naturally happens is loss.

The one who loves, loses.

And the one who doesn’t, risks nothing.

Sumera Saleem is currently pursuing her PhD in environmental humanities at the Australian Catholic University, Melbourne, Australia. To her, reading poetry is as important as breathing. Her poems have appeared in Tejascovido, Langdon Review published by Tarleton State University, USA, Blue Minaret, Lit Sphere, Surrey Library UK, The Text Journal, The Ghazal Page, Pakistani Literature published by Pakistan Academy of Letters, Word Magazine. A few more are forthcoming in international and national anthologies.

Collateral Damage

Chris Ellery

January 5, 2025

We argued today 

about Israel and Gaza,

about security and justification,

about occupation

and the web of history

and the long burden 

of ethnic identity

and what it means to say

a nation has a right

to exist,

about the strain and necessity 

of moral choice

in this moment and every moment

and what moral choice signifies

to men and women and kids 

on the ground

and to the soldiers and gravediggers

doing the dirty work 

and to the doctors with not enough

bandages, medicines, or sleep

and to the dying, the doomed, 

and the already dead.

Our argument solved nothing, 

eased no one’s pain, 

and we left each other feeling like

the two hot ends of a cut electric

wire or ruptured tendon

or broken bone, jagged, 

disconnected, incomplete, inflamed,

wondering will the pain ever end, 

will we ever really mend, 

will we walk without a limp,

will that old current 

that flowed between us

ever light the world

again?

Chris Ellery is the author of The Big Mosque of Mercy, a collection of poems based on his residence in Syria and extensive travels in the Middle East. His most recent book of poems is One Like Silence.

Pantoum to Disembowel the Texas Sandburs

Robin Carstensen

January 5, 2025

Even the cacti burn and the turtles take cover. 

We throw a lot of shade just to cool down.

We speed through the sundown towns, pretty hill 

country—Marble Falls, Hico, Stephenville’s KKK 

throwing shade on patrol, brewing and stewing

Jim Crow, as if it’s so cool recruiting rock church

mothers of liberty in pretty hill country sundown

towns across stone red Abbott and his Lonestars

rolling over Roe vs. Wade, recruiting rock church

mothers of liberty to ban and bury books, history, 

Frederick B. Douglass under stone red Abbott

and a few lords of SCOTUS. Bedraggled, we hope

for the last gasping book banners to get woke,

save a book, let the patriarch twist into wasp nests 

under the garage door eaves, with some of SCOTUS 

and the rest of the old pale vinyl siding houses cracking 

and molding, twisting into the wasp nests dangling

in the South Texas tundra bloating their last gasps 

from the old pale vinyl siding houses cracking, 

barely hanging on before they drop, disembowel 

in the South Texas coastal tundra bloating their last 

gasps, coagulating from a pool of their perennial 

hanging-on before they drop, disembowel

their sticker burs, dissolve into the bludgeoning heat.

Corpus Christi’s Poet Laureate (2023-24), Robin Carstensen's work is recently published in Equinox, RiverSedge, and Club Plum Lit, where she’s nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Iron Horse Literary Press awarded her chapbook In the Temple of Shining Mercy first place in 2017.  She teaches at Texas A&M University-CC, serving as senior executive editor for The Windward Review and on the People’s Literary Festival.

Eggs and Ammo

Kathryn Jones

January 5, 2025

Saturday morning on the Somervell County

courthouse square. Jars of blackberry jam,

squash pickles, paper bags of pecans, local honey,

and brown, speckled, pale green eggs 

lined up on tables around the market

where farmers have sold their wares for 

a hundred years, first from horse-drawn carts,

now from pickup trucks and flatbed trailers. 

A white Ford-150 pulls up next to the table

selling free-range eggs under a blue tarp. 

Cardboard boxes fill the truck’s long bed. 

The driver hangs a crude sign over the tailgate:

“AMMO” in big black block letters. Cars stop.

People come over to see what kind of ammo

he’s selling – handgun, rifle, shotgun. A customer

wears a T-shirt that reads “Family. Faith. Firearms.”

It’s a seller’s market. People are afraid now

of the different, the alien, the other. 

Fear is good for the ammo business. 

Not so much for the egg business. Stores

have plenty of white eggs a lot cheaper than these

pretty free-range ones. Egg Man packs up his cooler,

folds up his tarp, drives away. Ammo Man 

is too busy taking money to notice.

Kathryn Jones is a poet, journalist, and essayist whose work has been published in The New York Times, Texas Monthly, Texas Highways, and the Texas Observer. Her poetry has appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies, including TexasPoetryAssignment.com, Unknotting the Line: The Poetry in Prose (Dos Gatos Press, 2023), Lone Star Poetry (Kallisto Gaia Press, 2023), and in her chapbook, An Orchid’s Guide to Life, published by Finishing Line Press. She was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters in 2016 and lives on a ranch near Glen Rose, Texas.

Her Beatitudes

Vincent Hostak

January 5, 2025

Oral arguments in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization were held three years ago, in December 2021. Before the 2022 Supreme Court decision, a limited exception statewide ban on abortion care was rendered law in Texas. Maternal mortality rates in the state have increased by 56%, between 2019 and the end of 2021 (over five times greater than the national average).  These numbers are supported by Texas’ own Maternal Mortality and Morbidity Review Committee.  The leadership of the same committee announced it will “skip” an in-depth review of these rates for the years 2022/23.

From here on in the world is dry

reservoirs just wading pools choked with duckweed

abandoned beehives grow dull and papery

their cells lacquered with remains of nectar

Driving on, struggling to stay awake, counting

farm roads she crosses from Amarillo to Colorado,

she sees braided rivers give up their strain 

as they yield to the yellowing soil

She sings to herself, her Beatitudes:

“Blessed is the struggle, this aching dry land crawl,

For I will save my life and more by this test.

Blessed are the doctors who risk redresses of the arrogant,

For they will live in the shrinking province of the Just on Earth,

Blessed are the labors I gave and those I cannot,

For I alone will own my work and my grief.”

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.

Why?

Thomas Hemminger

January 5, 2025

Why do we struggle 

To say a kind word?

To offer a hand up?

To carry someone’s burden? 

Why do we wrestle with 

feeding our neighbor?

Or saying “Yes, I can help.” 

Why do we argue

when it’s time to agree,

confusing debate with accomplishment, 

and winning with progress?

Why are we working hard, 

but not working it out?  

Why? 

Thomas Hemminger is an elementary music teacher living in Dallas, Texas. His work has been published locally in Dallas and in The Wilda Morris Poetry Challenge, The Texas Poetry Assignment, and The Poetry Catalog. His hero is Mr. Fred Rogers, the creator of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. Through America’s favorite “neighbor,” Thomas learned the importance of loving others and giving them their own space and grace to grow.

Stony the Road *

Milton Jordan

December 15, 2024

Most of its population separated 

by the state highway angling southeast

and long decades of Jim Crow redlines,

the town sat midway along the speeding

freeway route from Houston to Dallas.

In their pie-shaped, roadway-divided

neighborhoods, children heard the veiled language

of protest in hymns and old work songs,

the tales of their grandparents’ struggles

and vowed to be the ones who changed things. 

Two truck stops at the interstate exit

and the Trailways Depot served those children,

now at Carver High School, organized to test 

local eateries with actions they’d seen 

in reports from Carolina and Tennessee. 

On the courthouse square, though, and elsewhere

outside their own slice of town, cafes turned

the students away, and soon hired armed,

officially off-duty, deputies to clear 

their peaceful stand-ins from cafe entrances. 

New voices joined old songs of protest, 

new bodies wearing handed-on sweatshirts

replaced classmates now in the county jail 

on those rough courthouse square sidewalks 

their grandparents had walked years before.

* James Weldon Johnson “Lift Every Voice and Sing”

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