Rhapsody in Bluebonnets

Kathryn Jones

January 31, 2022

Pebbly seeds tossed on barren ground

in the fall, trusting rain and sun to hatch

star-shaped leaves arranged in rosettes,

lying in wait all winter, cloaked in frost,

stirring with spring’s awakening, 

stretching for Gershwin’s glissando notes,

becoming the state flower, Lupinus texensis, 

cobalt blue rhapsody under cerulean sky,

florets like the miniature sunbonnets 

pioneer women wore on the way West, 

standing as high as a horse’s knees, 

waving flags of peace and serenity

in a world gone angry and red.

Kathryn Jones is a journalist, essayist, author, and poet. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Texas Monthly, and in the anthologies A Uniquely American Epic: Intimacy and Action, Tenderness and Action in Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (University Press of Kentucky, 2019) and Pickers and Poets: The Ruthlessly Poetic Singer-Songwriters of Texas (Texas A&M University Press, 2016). Her poetry has been published on tejacovido.com, in the Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas, and in the upcoming Odes and Elegies: Eco-Poetry from the Texas Gulf Coast (Lamar University Press). She is finishing a biography of Ben Johnson, the Academy Award-winning actor and world champion rodeo cowboy, to be published by the University Press of Mississippi. She was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters in 2016.

Nuptials

Jesse Doiron

December 20, 2021

Standing in my bedroom

with her blouse undone,

she smiled beside the couch

and said, “So nice to finally 

see the place after all

I’ve heard about your wife

and children and the cat,”

that bowed and purred, 

aroused, now, suddenly,

by the unfamiliar smell 

it almost touched, 

when deep in dark

she turned around

to drop her ring near mine 

on the dim-lit nightstand.

Jesse Doiron spent 13 years overseas in countries where he often felt as if he were a “thing” that had human qualities but couldn’t communicate them. He teaches college, now, to people a third his age. He still feels, often, as if he is a “thing” that has human qualities but can’t communicate them.

Gold Dust

Loretta Diane Walker

December 13, 2021

An entourage of cycles

park beneath an umbrella of golden leaves—

soft yellow dust wafts across the seats,

their owners clueless

the Leprechaun of Light rubbed the rib of their tires

with his magical hands.

Loretta Diane Walker, an award-winning poet, multiple Pushcart Nominee, and Best of the Net Nominee, won the 2016 Phyllis Wheatley Book Award for poetry, for her collection, In This House (Blue Light Press). Loretta is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters. Her work has appeared in various literary journals, magazines, and anthologies throughout the United States, Canada, India, Ireland, and the UK. She has published five collections of poetry. Her manuscript Word Ghetto won the 2011 Bluelight Press Book Award. Loretta received a BME from Texas Tech University and earned a MA from The University of Texas of the Permian Basin. She teaches elementary music at Reagan Magnet School, Odessa, Texas. Her latest collection from Blue Light Press is Day Begins When Darkness is in Full Bloom.

Robins After Ida

Thomas Quitzau

December 6, 2021

Stony Brook, New York

I know it’s kind o’ cliché to say,

but they literally came in droves,

like, I mean there was a ginormous

number of robins pecking away

at something in the dirt in the ditch,

and it was no coinkidink since the sand,

which had run down the paths and 

settled all in the same spot, the low point,

created perfect conditions after Hurricane Ida

(I’d have thought I’d escaped these dad-burned 

storms that nearly engulfed me in Texas, but 

they’re following me up here) which forced us

to have to muck out our basement, picking 

at bugs in dirt and all kinds of goodies,

just like robins do.

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.

Her Dress the Color of Clouds

Robert Allen

November 29, 2021

Brother, it was Monday and I was on an errand to the store,

another second-in-the-same-day trip to the local grocer’s,

the November sun unseasonably warm but delightfully so

to me in my shorts-and-T-shirt workout garb, when I catch

a glimpse of this woman, running across the street, the wide

West Avenue street, from one strip center to the next, her

legs kicking up the skirt of her dress and her dress the color

of clouds in an approaching storm, like the paintings of

Narragansett Bay by Martin Johnson Heade which you saw

decades ago in that exhibit at the Amon Carter Museum

during those years when you were single again, ominously

dark with seething blue-greens, and lightning flashing like

the knees of the woman scampering before the oncoming

cars, and I remember not the alligator pear I bought nor the

two crowns of broccoli nor the round white container of

sour cream but the fleet image of that woman running, and

after bringing home the groceries I promptly put away and

forget them, but the woman’s image I keep alive because

you and I still look each time a skirt creates a thunderstorm.

Robert Allen is retired and lives with his wife, two children, five antique clocks, and five 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.

Brown Recluse

Melanie Alberts

November 22, 2021

Please don’t hate me,

a spiderling born suddenly

homeless during a summer of rain,

poured out of silk with fifty

sisters, fighting for space on a branch

as your hand hit me—yes, I fanged 

your flesh not because I hate you—

(I have nothing but this precious

salve to slow down a clumsy great 

body like yours, cutting through everything, 

crushing life in a single step) simply put, fear

is born into us, how we turn aside, 

how we must hide—I must leave

this restless weed, born

essentially alone as I was, hatched

during a season of prayed-for rain,

between a hill country highway 

and a service road lined with tents, luscious

cardboard hiding places, breathtaking beauty!

Writer and psychic artist Melanie Alberts works at the University of Texas at Austin. Her non-fiction and poetry have appeared in the Ransom Center Magazine, Just This, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Wisteria: A Journal of Haiku, Senryu, and Tanka, and other journals. Follow Melanie on Instagram @clair.circles.spirit.art.

The Bends

 Jim LaVilla-Havelin

November 8, 2021

It seems to me, the way out to Big Bend,

which friends we’ve sent out thataway have found

absolutely empty, free of anything to see,

is much fuller than that, if you consider it

and remember things like the stop at Langtry, 

the dusty last gas, last gasp, in Sanderson,

that spot on the highway where we were

greeted by a large antlered animal in the center

of the road which I identified as your father,

and

the way the peaks begin to serrate

the horizon

the closer you get –

until unprepossessing Marathon,

which boasts

The Gage, the railroad you can hear at night rumbling by,

and the hotel’s restaurant which has at times been very

very good, and not much else, though assessments

of this sort depend so much on who is looking, and

what they hope to see.

Jim LaVilla-Havelin is the author of five books of poetry. He is a poet, editor, and community arts activist - the Poetry Editor for the San Antonio Express-News/Houston Chronicle, the San Antonio Coordinator for National Poetry Month, and the 2019 City of San Antonio's awardee for Distinction in the Arts - Literary. He teaches senior citizens, incarcerated youth, the Young Women's Leadership Academy's Young Poets Society, and workshops in museums and libraries.

The Long Tundra Crawl

Betsy Joseph

November 8, 2021

The ice storm that brought power lines to their knees in North Texas 

early January of 1979 also pounded the Panhandle, paralyzing I-40; 

I recall my return trip from Dallas to Albuquerque, stopping in Childress

to refuel the car and my body, thankful for the truck stop that remained open,

allowing me to seek brief refuge before continuing 

the cold-numbing/mind-numbing journey suddenly made more complicated

by the realization that my cat, left sleeping in her thick blanket

in the back seat of my Volvo which I had responsibly locked,

lacked the dexterity to unlock the door—locks now frozen on the outside—

and appeared unworried that she could not do so but I,

supplied with a handful of matchbooks lying on the diner’s counter,

worked feverishly in Jack London-fashion to thaw the driver’s side lock—

successfully, I might add—my awakened cat raising her head curiously, 

my heart pounding gratefully, and we continued the long tundra crawl to Albuquerque.

Poems by Betsy Joseph (Dallas, TX) have appeared in a number of journals and anthologies. Her poetry collection, Only So Many Autumns, was published by Lamar University Literary Press in 2019. Recently she and her husband, photographer Bruce Jordan, published their book Benches, which pairs her haiku with his black and white photography.

The Commissioners’ Friends

Milton Jordan

November 1, 2021

Upstream from two interstate bridges

the San Gabriel in spring surge slaps

its current against the rocky south bank

before running more smoothly through concrete

pilings into a pool no longer

a favored picnic and swimming spot,

edges now skimmed with off-colored algae,

but deep-pocket developers still deflect

every challenge from our loose coalition

we named Valley River Advocates

to mock their planned Valley River Estates

clearing another eighty-eight acres

along the river’s more rolling north bank

where the county scrapped the plan to create

hiking trails and a nature preserve.

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.