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.