City Summers

Sumera Saleem 

September 1, 2021

When you see the present summers hissing at the loneliness

Shambling in the pitiless metropolitan 

Across which lies the bare bodies of civil and uncivil zones

Half drunk on progress and regress,

I see long shadows on snaky roads 

Stretched always on work-dial 

Like the pendulum moving between duty and love 

In a desperately lazy struggle to fix a balance,

And a whiff of rude silence dares call a rain from my dried eyes. 

In a quiet corner of my mud house, I used to hear 

A sudden call of my mother to be inside 

As the sun lashes at our bodies

For trespassing mindless sanctions 

And may hit them hard 

For thirsty thoughts is everyone’s business.

Though my head hums in heat, 

I let my tongue shelter in the trees 

As if my heart harbors an oasis for the future.

When the evening cools like the shade of neem,

I feel how sleepy souls recuperate to wokenness.

I dream of summer evenings bubbling of

Soapy scented wishes, shining and drifting like time.

Sumera Saleem is a lecturer in the Department of English Language and Literature, the University of Sargodha, Sargodha and Gold medalist in English literature from the University of the Punjab for the session 2013-15. 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.

When a River Dies of Thirst (Dallas in August)

Vincent Hostak

August 31, 2021

The run of Summer is a slow, soggy shuffle down Elm Street.

The name’s a cruel wisecrack, as there’s none planted here.

Just like there are no slopes on Hillcrest.

But there is a dog sauntering to a sparse belt of shade.

Both the hound and the shade line are thin

like this town’s single river, the Trinity.

The run of Summer is a river exhausted from rushing.

From west and north, two forks must meet

so, a third somehow weakened cord can slink

through stubborn grassland at a late-Summer pace.

This is where a river grows quiet and when, 

in August, it might die of thirst.

Steaming beneath viaducts with plumes of mosquitos,

you’d think it a miracle it reaches the bay at all, 

that it doesn’t just die here as swamp.

I know there are places where it is loose and wild -

in northern headwaters, where a river doesn’t long to just be.

In deltas and spillways, it hurries again to meet its kin.

Before the Gulf, a river’s promised land, there are 

even-shaded channels growing secret cypress forests

hatching long-legged birds that peck at the crawfish.

But, in this last run of Summer, in uncanopied plains, 

a Dallas dog and a trickle of rivers can only take so much-

the burn on the paw paddles, the haze making sunlight- 

before curling under awnings or dissolving into mud sloughs.

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.

Sub Herbia

Thomas Quitzau

July 17, 2021

In search of crotchety studies 

Longing for more heavy talk 

Striding by a summer sidewalk 

We lie in lieu of pell-mell buddies.

Forks for the new tilled grass

Of suburbia, sprinkle cleaned

Rolled like pot smokers never weaned 

Electronically stabled en masse.

Unheard unseen as we walk about 

Ghost towns left in silence for owls 

Factions frayed dusted in drought

In Anotherville, in Anothercourt, scowls.

Forays frown on Fortune’s diet

Clowns accuse news of feisty rumors

June bugs, bats, and streetlights riot

Chemo spells in waiting rooms fighting tumors.

In the midst of all these First-World mirages 

As we feel the heat from grills and garages 

Sprawl me to the pinnacle, salt me pessimistic 

Pepper me cynical, or at least antagonistic.

Thomas Quitzau is a poet and teacher who grew up in the Gulf Coast region and who worked for over 30 years in Houston, Texas. A survivor of Hurricane Harvey, he recently wrote a book entitled Reality Showers, and currently teaches and lives on Long Island, New York with his wife and children.

The Texas Star

Sister Lou Ella Hickman

July 10, 2021

cooperia pedunculata 

(also known as the hill country rain lily)

i 

after  

spring/early summer rain 

it  

rises    blooms  

small   moon white  

on a slender green stalk 

along the highway  

a star 

ii 

a barbed wire fence 

protects a field 

where a sky of stars 

fell the night before 

and stayed 

Sister Lou Ella Hickman’s poems and articles have appeared in numerous magazines and journals as well as four anthologies. She was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2017 and in 2020. Her first book of poetry entitled she: robed and wordless was published in 2015 by Press 53.

The Summer I Didn’t – Again

Jesse Doiron

July 3, 2021

Show me the summer you tucked away 

beneath your dress, when we undressed 

in the back of my car and you said you loved me,

before I did, and then, because you did – I didn’t.

We talked inside each other, with open mouths, 

and touched our tongues together, wet together, 

with words that really were not words but sounds 

that meant about as much as mouths could say.

And you said you loved me – again and again and

again – when I was trying to say the same thing –

again and again and again – but never did because 

you did, with lipstick-covered lips that covered 

every word I almost said but stopped just short of. 

Then we did it in the back of my car, completely

naked, again and again, on the back seat, in the dark.

The windows rolled up and the night rolled down.

And your dress tucked away somewhere beneath

the dark-hot summer sky. I remember now –

againandagainandagain – when I didn’t.

Jesse Doiron teaches in a Texas state prison. Maximum security. Beaumont. Summer. Enough said.

Hide and Go Seek

Sarah Webb

June 26, 2021 

In the crouch of summer night

I scowled in a dark hedge.

A branch stabbed my shoulder.

I held still

but raged inwardly,

choked on tears.

They hadn’t touched me

not in time—

they hadn’t!

A firefly flared to my arm,

its feet too soft to feel.

Its glow pulsed the night.

Sarah Webb co-edits the Zen magazine Just This. Her collection Black (Virtual Artists Collective, 2013) was named a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award and for the Writers' League of Texas Book Award. Her Red Riding Hood's Sister (Purple Flag, 2018) was also short-listed for the Oklahoma Book Award.

Driving West

Milton Jordan

June 19, 2021 

In Lampasas the Wagon Wheel Motel

used half hubs with seven spokes reaching

half rims for head and footboards on beds

spread with bright western design blankets.

Amberman scheduled early arrival

so we could swim in the spring water pool

next door before eating our supper.  

The Wagon Wheel was our midway stop

when we drove to visit his brother

on chalk dry land near Ozona.

Uncle Doc, he said, had blown two fortunes

before he found those eighty acres 

about as far from deep green forest

and disapproving family as he could move.

Milton Jordan lives in Georgetown with the musician Anne Elton Jordan. His most recent poetry collection is What the Rivers Gather, SFASU Press, 2020. Milton edited the anthology, No Season for Silence: Texas Poets and Pandemic, Kallisto Gaia Press, 2020.

Stung on the Eye

Robert Allen

June 15, 2021 

                       Why I thought not a one

of those buzzing brown-and-yellow-striped pests

clustered on a low branch of our magnolia

would swoop down to land its stinger on me

I do not know, but my eight-year-old head

had decided this nest must be destroyed—

perhaps it spoiled my favorite climbing tree,

maybe I could not stand to hear the buzz,

or August heat gave me a love of shadows,

clearly my young ego was in control—

and with my Louisville Slugger in hand

I marched up to that tree and took a whack.

Oh not just any whack. I swung the barrel

of my bat right through the meat of that nest,

whose startled guests became an angry cloud.

I turned but warm air held me like a blanket,

arms up, legs sluggish, and on my left eyelid

a pin pricked. In fear I began to run

a doomed mad dash across our wide backyard.

Then pain, tears, growing fire below my brow

forced me to my knees, where with skyward looks

I found the house and wailed for help. My mother,

rudely taken from her afternoon nap,

was knowing and efficient. She prepared

a bandage of baking soda and ice

to bring down the swelling, she hugged me close,

and not once did she scold or chasten me

for such a foolish stunt. Now I can wonder,

nearly fifty-eight years after the fact,

about the psychological effect

of the lesson learned, how it hurt so much

to see the orange glow of my bedroom walls

that day, but what still takes me by surprise

is the dead weight of that hot summer air,

bouncing off thick green grass, and how I thought

by running through it I could get away

from anything.

Robert Allen is retired and lives with his wife, two children, five antique clocks, and six cats. He has poems in di-vêrsé-city, Voices de la Luna, the Texas Poetry Calendar, the San Antonio Express-News, The Ocotillo Review, and Poetry on the Move. He now co-facilitates Gemini Ink’s Open Writer’s Lab.

Summers of Lightning Bugs

Katherine Hoerth

June 8, 2021

Once, I loved you like a firefly—

remember how they used to make the fields

effulgent like the midnight sky once was?

When this was open fields and the heart

grew wild like the prairie? Do you remember

how each year those lightning bugs returned?

Like spring, the cricket’s song, and wild pigeons.

How their lightshow made of everything

that moves our bodies lit this backyard up?

And one by one, some darkness snuffed the fire—

little mistakes like leaving porchlights on,

the city’s growing glow, the giant flares,

those blazing elephants we can’t ignore

in the onyx skies that are our lives. 

Now, it’s night again. It’s summer, too.

Now I’m sipping bourbon on the porch

gazing into fields of emptiness,

wondering what mountains I must move

to make those lightning bugs return to us.

Katherine Hoerth is the author of four poetry collections, including Goddess Wears Cowboy Boots, which won the Helen C. Smith Prize from the Texas Institute of Letters in 2015. She is an Assistant Professor of English at Lamar University and Editor-in-Chief of Lamar University Literary Press. Her next poetry collection, Borderland Mujeres, will be released by SFAU Press in 2021.

Hot Dry Summer

Milton Jordan

June 1, 2021

In August in this place we often resort

to naming sparse particles of mist, rain

when the city forester comes round,

as if this were a city with a forest,

reminding us watering is restricted

to two days a week before 9 a.m.

The Thursday he brought his college student

intern she politely rejected my

claims of weekend visits with distant family,

and barely damp air was inadequate 

excuse for my late afternoon schedule.

Scratching “Warning” on the face of her

citation, she delivered it with a

friendly “Y’all have a good visit, sir.” 

Milton Jordan lives in Georgetown with the musician Anne Elton Jordan. His most recent poetry collection is What the Rivers Gather, SFASU Press, 2020. Milton edited the anthology, No Season for Silence: Texas Poets and Pandemic, Kallisto Gaia Press, 2020.