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.