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.