Dirty Sixth

Melanie Alberts

September 22, 2021

Austin’s Dirty Sixth

street drowns in deep blues—

blocks away, on the lake

fireflies light up

blink—wait—blink

Bullfrogs gossip

deeply bellowing—they carry

a tune only for her

in a bed of mud, spent

latex and cigarette butts

Her legs delicious

with rain—glistening

a sudden downfall

of delight

accepting everything

She tells herself

silent love stories

falls asleep to a single 

light burning

blink—wait—blink

NOPE 

shines in neon over

a Dirty Sixth door—still, he pulls—

every door all his life opens 

like a fist letting go

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, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Wisteria: A Journal of Haiku, Senryu, and Tanka, and other journals.

Loco Motives

Thomas Quitzau

September 15, 2021

What was once graffiti is now street art. 

Locomotives break their silence sharply 

Thinking they scared us, trying to warn us 

There’s erl in dem där hills waiting to ship...

B E   S O M E O N E

Shiny black pill-shaped cars match their contents.

We played with them empty, clean, perfectly 

Connected rattling thoughts in our oily

Heads we had no idea they’d be filled with...

B E   S O M E O N E

Serving us, serving as black canvases,

Multi-colored loopy repetitive 

Spray paint punctuates a single unit 

Of the run-on sentence proposition:

B E   S O M E O N E 

Now there’s a new president/precedent:

Stop the fracking, stop the drilling, kill jobs.

So the trains don’t run as frequently now.

Oil prices have risen, jobs are frozen…

B E   S O M E O N E?

Now, the iconic Houston overpass

Over which thousands of rail cars clattered

And billions of gallons of crude have passed

Has been painted over and now reads:

K N O W   G O O D.

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 Snow Is Hard in Pampa, Texas

Jesse Doiron

September 8, 2021

When they were done with me,

they rolled me over to a roadside ditch

and left me in the snow to die, and so I did, 

alone and cold and slow enough to have  

some time to think about what happened 

when I told you I’d be back 

as soon as I was done, and rolled a cigarette, 

tight and long, and left you in the bar to make

your way back home that night all by yourself, 

where you stayed up, wondering why I left

when you weren’t even through,

still in your heels and thong, rock’n and roll’n 

and looking lonely as hell on the long wet bar,

where all the empty glasses made it hard 

to dance your last time up without a top on,

when drunks were done with tips,

and all the high-roll businessmen were gone,

and the only other girl was in the corner

grinding long and hard on some old guy who 

felt lucky as hell to be under her, getting off

when the bar was closing down – 

after hours – I left, before your last time up, 

to get the stuff, and they did it hard on me, 

rolled me to a ditch, left me there to die –

alone – in the snow outside of Pampa.

Texas to Me

Christian Garduno

September 1, 2021

Sweet young children

running thru a field

that’s Texas

Texas to me

Texas to me

Jump out of the ocean

& I’m warmed by the sun

that’s Texas

Texas to me

Texas to me

Tan-skinned girl

with the blondest eyes

& she’s looking at me

two lone stars 

can make a galaxy shine

Pull up your boots

throw down some roots

plenty of sky to share

down in Texas

with me

Pawned my blues

for a ticket back home

I’ve got to go

& bring Texas to me

Texas to me

Christian Garduno's work can be read in over 75 literary magazines. He is the recipient of the 2019 national Willie Morris Award for Southern Poetry. Garduno is a Finalist in the 2020-2021 Tennessee Williams & New Orleans Writing Contest. He lives and writes along the South Texas coast with his wonderful wife Nahemie and young son Dylan.