Time
In The Dream...
Suzanne Morris
December 3, 2021
...Daddy outlives Mama–
the opposite of how it really happened.
He wanders away from home some nights,
an aging man in his hat and overcoat,
and can’t be found. I phone, but no answer.
I worry until one day he reappears
still in his hat and coat,
on his way to someplace he never says.
In the end, we offer him space
in our building. He accepts, but
there are so many people in the way,
it’s hard for him to get past them
to unlock his door. Then there is a problem
with the key; it has broken in half.
Daddy has been dead for
more than thirty years, yet
I awake feeling stricken
as if I had just hung up from the call,
and wondering if I could have
done more to keep him here.
Suzanne Morris is a novelist with eight published works, most recently, Aftermath (SFA University Press, 2016). Until recently, her poetry appeared only in her fiction. However, last year she was invited to contribute seven poems to an anthology entitled No Season for Silence - Texas Poets and Pandemic, (Kallisto Gaia Press).
Time Zones
Sandi Stromberg
November 26, 2021
1.
Goodbye time watching.
The kind the Greeks
call chronos.
Think chronic,
chronicle, chronology.
Day after day time.
Eight to five,
one-hour lunch,
continuous, unstoppable,
deadline time. The kind we
quantify for birthdays,
anniversaries, the years
between the dashes.
Birth—death.
How we count
the minutes, hours, days,
that pass with no word
from a lover, a child,
a parent, a friend.
2.
I’m learning to live in kairos.
So un-American, this other Greek word
for uncountable time
without English derivations.
No defining word to capture the ineffable
intervals when one side-steps
the frenetic pace to enter
a beckoning flow, lose
oneself in a poem, drift
in a Chopin nocturne,
or merely
contemplate
silence.
Sandi Stromberg has been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize and twice for Best of the Net (2020, 2021). Her poetry is forthcoming or has appeared recently in MockingHeart Review, The Ocotillo Review, San Pedro River Review, Purifying Wind, The Ekphrastic Review, Texas Poetry Calendars, Snapdragon, Enchantment of the Ordinary, and translated into Dutch for Brabant Cultureel and Dichtersbankje (Poet's Bench) in the Netherlands.
Time Lapse
Sarah Webb
November 19, 2021
Clouds slide above the lake, flat-bottomed cumulus
that puff custard at the top and presage storm. They shadow
the white-capped water; they lift past the hills and travel on.
If we were to set a camera to catch them for the day,
we'd see them speed past, dissipate, then edge back in,
lines of white following the currents of the sky,
and if we kept on filming, a week, a month, a year,
the air would flicker—white gray blue, rain sun fog—
clouds blinking into being and passing on.
Decades would show us winter, dim, wind from the north,
summer glare slapping from waves—a perpetual pattern,
days lengthening and shortening in their season.
A hundred years might pass, morse code of light and dark,
and then more, a blur like a stream photographed at twilight,
whose current turns to mist flowing between forest stones.
Beneath the ever-changing torrent of the sky, windows
glisten on the far shore. Their lamps pulse the dark,
flashes and shadows on a quiver of water.
In centuries, lights outline the growing sand, then cluster high
and haze the night. They fade, give way to a necklace of light
faint through heavy trees along a twist of canyon.
Now, gaps in the string, and now a single gleam under the stars.
A firefly on a river bank, dark and bright, dark and light,
it lasts its moment, before the trees close round it, black.
Night comes and then day, storm and then sun, the years stream,
and all the long passing, the clouds sweep over.
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. She posts at bluebirdsw.blogspot.com
John the Grammarian, When Religion Was Magic
Dan Williams
November 12, 2021
Not to be confused with two other
Johns, also Grammarians, men known
for their learning, erudite scholars
of enigmatic knowledge, John VII
was Patriarch of Constantinople
for half a dozen years in the ninth
century, a time when religion was
magic, and early Christians fervently
believed in the potency of icons,
relics, rituals, amulets, saints, spells,
prayers, potions, and healing stones
to perform miracles, onyx, for example,
prevented miscarriages and cleansed
the female body of corruption, this
otherworldly world, where natural
merged with preternatural, where evil
spirits bedeviled all, where people deathly
ill, hopelessly hoping, chained themselves
to churches, where pagan statues were
alive with the power to kill or cure,
where ripples of water in delicate bowls,
lecanomancy, foretold future events,
and astrology, the reading of stars, was
the Word of God, an iconoclast, John
could have been known as The Hammer,
The Cleaner, the Destroyer of Statues,
though the inaccuracies of sources
precludes exact knowing, he smashed
statues, cleaned the clutter, the idolatry,
railed against stoicheiosis, statue magic,
and apotropaic, counter magic, and led
the second wave of Byzantine iconoclasm,
until a relative, wife of his patron, loving
idols more than family, deposed him, then
two centuries later another scholar, John
Skylitzes, attacked the toppled Patriarch,
accusing him of evil sorcery, of conjuring
power from the statues he destroyed, once
powerful, a sage of God’s holy fire, surrounded
by gold mosaics and radiant designs thought
eternal, mere moments of magnificence,
Byzantium was no country for old men.
Dan Williams is the Director of TCU Press and the TCU Honors Professor of Humanities. His second collection of poems, At the Gate, A Refuge of Sunflowers and Milkweed, is forthcoming from Lamar University Literary Press.
Puzzled: Middle Passage
Thomas Quitzau
November 5, 2021
It was the manner in which you were transported
like cargo, like sardines, with attitude
It was the manner in which you were treated
once here, like animals, with fortitude
Brought to Brazil mostly, the puzzle piece needed
sharing rocks with the Ivory Coast latitude
Holding clay bowls from nations greeted
with enslaved retrograde notions’ lassitude
of tectonic motions
of temporal commotions
of Creole Haitian potions
of burials in gigantic oceans:
missing “pieces” of this corpulent
flattened and expedient
molten and turbulent
moving and fraudulent
unfathomable puzzlement.
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.
All Fall Down
Jesse Doiron
November 5, 2021
No hero holds us all
in thrall forever,
for never can he be the same –
always.
His name will change,
as will
our willingness
to praise.
It fades in days,
though they be counted by in years,
and years be counted by in decades
– more, in centenaries.
Days will be counted by and by,
and, then, someday,
they will pass by – away.
They will – away.
By then, they will be past.
A hero cannot last in stone.
His monument
is only for the moment.
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.
From My Father’s Voice: The Aromatic Memories
Betsy Joseph
October 29, 2021
Toward the close of my long life
I found memory to be both selective and unpredictable,
to be both elusive and ineluctable.
There were moments of memory strangled
when I could not recall my own father’s middle name.
Yet there were also fragments of another kind
which would arrive, most welcome, often at early dawn:
memories of aromas both subtle and robust
floating from the oven or stovetop
throughout the rooms of our house,
always accompanied by a wife’s deep love for cooking.
For fifty-plus years my wife’s kitchen
produced standard pleasures of meatloaf and pot roast
as well as dishes with a charming lilt like Coq au Vin
and those with hard consonants like Hungarian Goulash,
strong on paprika— and all of them delicious.
As my memory continued to dim
(imagine a backyard in deepening twilight),
I still savored those aromatic memories—
yes, growing more rare, though certainly no less sweet
when they did appear.
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 Backward Running Timepiece
Antoinette F. Winstead
October 22, 2021
The old man lived from right to left.
Born withered and worn, seasoned and wise, cane in gnarled, arthritic hand, he progressed.
The watch on his shriveled, liver-spotted wrist, ticking down time -- tock-tick -- in reverse.
The milky film concealing his cynical brown eyes, clearing with each tock-tick of passing time.
The hunched curve of his shoulder and back, straightening,
gaining him feet, not mere inches.
The naked pitted gums of his pinched mouth, giving way to perfectly aligned white choppers.
The roadmap of embedded lines crisis-crossing his weathered features, smoothing and softening.
The broken red veins covering the bulbous tip of his nose and apple cheeks, disappearing.
The thin, white hair of his sun abused pate, growing darker, thicker and lusher.
His weak, thin frame strengthening with muscle,
rippling like powerful waves beneath taunt, glowing skin, tanned to perfection.
Cane no longer needed, he strolled with a young man’s confidence,
long strides, heavy-footed, and purposeful,
mischievous brown eyes focused on a dream-filled, lofty future, imbued with youthful arrogance.
Growing younger and un-wiser with each tock-tick of his backward running timepiece,
he demanded his due, loud and obnoxious;
pouted, stomped, and fitted when no attention was given.
“I want! I want!” his mantra chimed, relieved occasionally by the refrain, “Mine, mine, mine!”
He toddled and stumbled on chubby unsteady limbs, reliant totally on another’s hands.
Bottle to lips, he cooed and delighted, his large innocent brown eyes, dimmed and unfocused.
Smaller and smaller he diminished,
‘til nothing was left,
but the steady tock-tick of the backward running timepiece.
Antoinette F. Winstead, a poet, playwright, director, and actor, teaches film and theater courses at Our Lady of the Lake University where she serves as the Program Head for the Mass Communication and Drama programs. Her poetry has been published in The Ekphrastic Review, Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas, Voice de la Luna, Jerry Jazz Musician, and The Woman Inc.
A Little Death
Seth Wieck
October 15, 2021
Tears coined
in the crows’ feet
of her eye clench
Her sigh
wet in his ear
She quaked
belly and thigh
against him
It doesn’t last long
enough, she said
raptly and rapped
his bald shoulders with balled fists
viced his
to-the-hilt-hips to twist
another inch
that doesn’t exist
Time stirred
against the pale
thigh of eternity
like the first
time he held
her hand
Seth Wieck's writing has appeared in Narrative Magazine, the Langdon Review of the Arts, Tejascovido, and the Broad River Review where he won the Ron Rash Award in Fiction. He lives in Amarillo with his wife and three children and appraises real estate.
Family Portrait
Jan Seale
October 8, 2021
Certainly the white-haired grandparents
with their naturally rounded bellies
will have dropped out of the picture
but what of the father on the left
who sired the four almost-tall teenagers?
He is absent by way of a troubled heart
and his daughter in short-shorts
as befitting the summer day this picture
was taken now gone to some heaven
the rest of us are not. Another father
far right, contributing the three sprouting lads?
A ghost, only his music remaining.
Two sisters, who started it all, smile giddy,
hold hands in the success of the outing.
The six who are left have long been stretched out
of their teenage skins, stretched to a day’s work
and incurable conditions, to poor plumbing
and trips to the vet and the hardware store,
to the band hall and the football game. But
look at them here in their matching striped shirts,
one boy on his knees (so as to get everyone
in the picture) who doesn’t know that he’s kneeling
in prayer for the falling away of the principals
and for his car-wrecked big sister, for the
eventual falling away of everyone here to make room
on the photographic paper for the next batch
to come cheerfully, innocently, to occupy
the frame, which is in fine condition even
after so many years and can be refilled again
and again on this pale blue dot sailing the sky.
Jan Seale, the 2012 Texas Poet Laureate, lives in Texas on the U.S.-Mexican border. She has held a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in poetry and has served as a Humanities Scholar for Humanities Texas. Her latest book of poetry is PARTICULARS: poems of smallness, published by Lamar University Literary Press.
Freezing of Time
Jeffrey L. Taylor
October 1, 2021
Branches sagged under their load of ice.
The willow bent low, disappeared
from the second-story window. Snow
covered streets, trees, and the sound
of non-existent traffic. Power lines broke,
taking heat, lights, clocks. There is not
a wind-up clock in the house. The sundial
on the patio is more decoration
than timepiece and not much use
under snow-colored skies.
Only Earth’s power lines remain.
Ley lines, Dragon lines, Spirit lines.
What they connect has been lost
to our sensibilities. Too many generations
have passed without passing along their lore.
The camp stove, once recreational equipment,
is now survival equipment. It was donated
to Parks & Rec. years ago. Though out of practice,
I remember how to cook and wash dishes
with unsafe water.
The down sleeping bags are also gone. We have blankets,
a heavy comforter, and warm clothes from the climate
that just visited us. The shovel in storage
is miles away.
Driving? No tire chains. No snow tires.
No studded tires. No one
with a snowplow hitch on their pickup.
The street will not be plowed.
The city has only a few sand spreaders.
All is frozen, including time. For nine days,
our cars will not move. Meals will grow
increasingly odd as supplies dwindle.
We keep the cell phones fully charged,
every available jug filled with water.
Reserve capacity—a new consideration.
Jeffrey L. Taylor retired in 2001 after 40 years as a Software Engineer. Around 1990, poems started holding his sleep hostage. Unexpected for someone who did poorly in English classes. He has been published in di-vêrsé-city, Texas Poetry Calendar, Tejascovido, and The Langdon Review.