Ode to a Sunflower

Kathryn Jones

March 27, 2022

This is how you began – 

stardust fallen to Earth

becomes black seeds buried,

waiting for rain, warmth, rebirth;

prickly stalk reaching skyward, 

unbending; flower a tiny sun 

awakening, following her mother 

as she journeys from east to west, 

vanishing below the horizon.

You are the daughter of stars,

brown-eyed, yellow-haired goddess, 

eye-dazzling against blue sky;

Helios Anthos, symbol of loyalty,

longevity, adoration. You endure

heat and drought but open yourself

to beauty. Even as invaders attack, 

trying to pry you from the land,  

you stand tall, roots clinging to soil.

Light reveals you are not one flower

but many, tiny florets surrounded

by golden petals like sun rays, 

seeds arranged in Fibonacci spirals, 

portrait of nature’s perfection. 

You defeat invaders by never dying,

your seed carried by birds or wind, 

gilding fields, meadows, hillsides, 

beginning anew, following the sun.

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 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

Jack

Jesse Doiron

March 26, 2022

Gentle Jack, who shoots

real guns at rabbits from afar,

at twelve, still likes to play 

at being wounded in a war.

Down a deep-declining ditch

that’s richly overgrown

in weeds, where hares dwell

whimsically in peace, as if alone,

the boy rolls well in throes

of well-imagined agony.

Great gouts of blood pretend

upon the battle, gamily,

until he falls against a nest

of leverets, near death,

unhappy in their wandering

about for mother’s breath.

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.

There but for Fortune

Robert Allen

March 26, 2022

The problem was the boots, my brother says. As the class A

officer for the base at Phan Rang, he was one of six men

who had flown out to Cam Ranh in a UH1C so he could pick

up a satchel of scrip. On the way back, this high-hours

bucket of bolts, as Roger calls it, experienced hydraulic

failure and the pilot began an autorotation maneuver to try

to land the Huey safely in Cam Ranh Bay. Before the Slick

hit the water, Roger was pushed out and landed in water

over six feet deep. Fortunately, he managed to flip in the air

so he went in feet first and at an angle, avoiding injury by

skidding through the mud on the bottom until he slowed to

a stop. He found a floating cushion, and he was able to get

his boots off, tie them together, and throw them over his

shoulder. Thus free of their drag he could swim the weary

mile in to shore. Then he had to put his wet boots back on

so he could walk the rugged jungle terrain back to the base

to report the incident and get help. The satchel was never

found. Roger was almost court-martialed for losing Army

payroll, but ultimately it was written off as a combat loss.

You have no idea, Roger says, how much trouble it causes

when military scrip goes missing. The man who pushed

Roger out, a corporal with an easy smile, died in the crash.

ROBERT ALLEN is retired and lives in San Antonio with his wife, two children, five antique clocks, and four cats. He has poems in Voices de la Luna, the Texas Poetry Calendar, Writers Take a Walk, and Poetry on the Move. He co-facilitates Gemini Ink's Open Writer's Lab.

The Voices of War

Jesse Doiron

March 24, 2022

Listen for them.

These are the voices it will use.

At first, the murmuring of discontent.

The innuendo and the sneer. The snide and subtle insult.

A shout from an unseen basement, from a stoop, some balcony, a roof.

The rush of judgments falling out of place in conversations all around, and then the thumping in the auditoriums. 

Soon afterward, other voices come.

Grinding, groaning, clanking, rumbling, heavy sounds –  machines.

Each day they moan in pain to gain another day and though they stop, they will begin again.

Though they rest the night, they will return to break the morning quiet.

Once awake, they move from far to near to closer here another day to say that they will sleep with you tonight.

But you will not sleep.  

Oher voices stay awake. High-pitched. Whirring. Hissing.  

Deafening, they swell outside of you, inside of you. And in you, huge.

Until their sound becomes no sound at all, becomes a ringing nothingness. 

And from the empty void, new voices then arise to fill the empty air with hopelessness, the noise of despair    

Screaming. Crying. Calling. Coughing.

Unguarded speech. Offensive epithets. Cursing. Damning.

Retching, sweating, wheezing, spitting, weeping, bleeding.

Naming body parts. Naming parts of hell and heaven. Naming names naming names. 

While someone you do not know pushes and pulls a piece of you that once was part of you but now is not, now gone.

Listen. Listen, now. Listen for the last voice of the war.

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.

The Unknown Mother

Melanie Alberts

March 23, 2022

She is carried from the bombed-out maternity ward on a watermelon colored blanket her hip dislocated and her pelvis broken her belly slit open she knows her infant is lost she cries out kill me now the doctors must deliver her body unborn baby to her family where why how will they bury her broken in two?

unwinnable

the black seeds we spit

at each other

Writer and psychic artist Melanie Alberts works at the University of Texas at Austin. Her work has appeared/is forthcoming in Prune Juice Journal, Sleet Magazine, Failed Haiku, Drifting Sands, Texas Poetry Assignment, Ransom Center Magazine, Borderlands, bottle rockets, and others. Follow M. on Instagram @clair.circles.spirit.art

the mystery of resilience

Sister Lou Ella Hickman

March 22, 2022

in honor of the faith of the ukrainian people

tonight’s news—

another agonizing war story

with commentary about resilience of the spirit 

some would label it endurance, persistence, or tenacity

even so it remains a mystery 

and might this mystery be added to the sorrowful ones

or at least a codicil to the luminous

for resilience is the great unknown 

rare like the perfect pearl

yet ordinary as dust . . .

then

when it is shaped and layered by adversity 

grace calls forth

a face

a name

a life

the kiss of hope’s breath made visible

Sister Lou Ella is a former teacher and librarian who now ministers as a spiritual director; her poems have appeared in numerous magazines and four anthologies. She was a Pushcart nominee in 2017 and 2020. Press 53 published her first book of poetry she: robed and wordless in 2015. 

War Is Raw

Betsy Joseph

March 21, 2022

War is raw, he told me,

especially in beautiful places—

during the mist of early sunrise,

during a sweet burst of birdsong

which can take one’s breath away

just as suddenly as mortar shells

can still that same breath.

War is raw, he confessed,

when you have to bend low

as a Huey dips and hovers

to retrieve the injured bodies

you had just worked on,

and you remain to work on others

when you’d rather climb aboard

with your deep psychic wounds.

War is raw, he confided,

when you learn that those fine droplets

from that “helpful defoliant” 

are a chemical, a different enemy 

arriving sometime later and unexpectedly

to soldiers, villagers, and future children alike.

War is raw, he concluded.

The gentle artist he once had been

before the draft claimed him in ’72 

returned him to the US, depleted, in ’73.

Bold colors and broad angry strokes

soon replaced the soft charcoal study

of his girlfriend’s graceful hands.

Betsy Joseph, a retired English professor, lives in Dallas and has poems that 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. Lamar is also publishing her forthcoming book, Relatively Speaking: Poems of Person and Place, a collaborative collection of poetry with her brother and poet Chip Dameron. In addition, she and her husband, photographer Bruce Jordan, have produced two books, Benches and Lighthouses, which pair her haiku with his black and white photography.

Black Ice

Katherine Hoerth

March 20, 2022

February 24, 2022

How easily we slip into despair

on the black ice of the heart. This highway,

with its glazed turns, stretches 

through the endless plains of Oklahoma.

I’m heading south. I’m driving home. I listen

to the radio—a world away, 

a war is born in Ukraine. Tanks plow over 

frozen roads. I fix my eyes ahead:

there’s miles and miles and miles and miles of wreckage—

the sun is up and glimmering, unveiling 

last night’s tragedies of mangled steel 

and shattered glass. The morning sky is now

the color of the aftermath of bombs. 

Ahead of me, an ambulance drives slowly.

We’re all inching forward now. My foot

hovers above the brakes, although it’s futile. 

The car still slips and slides. The ambulance

slips too. I wonder who’s inside, who’s brave 

enough to rescue one of countless victims 

of this ice storm. Every mile or two,

I see another toppled car, a jackknifed truck. 

At first, I count each one, and then I stop—

too many for the weary mind to fathom. 

That could be me: the ditch, the ice, the crossfire.

The news says that the Russians kept on shelling

Kyiv into the early morning hours.

There’s nothing I can do to stop it, no. 

A windmill’s turbines wave. I feel a gust

shove my car. I wince. My knuckles turn

the hue of snow. Ahead, the ambulance

begins its slow careen. It’s happening—

the horrifying choreography 

of calamity. It lurches left,

then swings back to the right. It turns and turns

like the earth, my stomach, and the tires

with nothing left to grip but gloss. It slips 

onto the shoulder then the median. 

I watch it through my window as it topples,

rolls like a snowball, like an avalanche,

a war out of control, until it stops,

as still as death. An eerie silence fills 

the frozen psyche and the morning air. 

Suddenly it’s in my rearview mirror.

What else can I do but keep on going?

If I hit the brakes and stop, the ice

will take me, too—and so I watch it grow

smaller in the distance, praying someone

else will interfere, that good will triumph 

like it always has, or so I let 

myself believe. I’m praying for the driver,

for the passenger, and for Ukraine,

for light, for this freak storm to end, for peace.

Deep inside, I shatter like the windshield.

Katherine Hoerth is the author of five poetry collections, including Flare Stacks in Full Bloom (Texas Review Press, 2022). In 2015, she won the Helen C. Smith Award for the best book of poetry. She is an assistant professor at Lamar University and editor of Lamar University Literary Press.

Aggressor’s Stance

Suzanne “Zan” Green

March 18, 2022

What glory or virtue 

is found in destroying 

the lives of others

& there lies the evidence

the shelled apartments

transformed into rubble

& what’s still standing

those buildings have faces

scorched & wailing, the

interiors still showing signs

of what once was living

the rips of patterned paper 

a town’s hospital’s bombed

& a mother dies in labor

Everything left abandoned

& immobile—where once

was warmth & movement

All at once—our efforts seem 

strangely futile—our living

so precious yet precarious

& what’s left for us is loving

In our loving—comes equal

parts losing—& we wonder

how an aggressor becomes

so afraid of their own heart

Suzanne “Zan” Green grew up in the South of England and moved to Texas in 1992. On the outside, Zan is a mother, and a geoscientist—on the inside, a dreamer for the Earth. Their poems are the tender work of healing. Zan has self-published a trilogy titled All Things Holy, and recently, a tribute to their sister Jay, called Wonderings.

Etchings in Stone

Roberta S. Dohse

March 16, 2022

They used to tell something

Of the ones lying there,

Not just dates, not just mother or father.

Rather,

Taken in the glory of his youth by a fever

Founder of the mill

A teller of stories

Philanthropist, healer

Banker, pastor, priest.

But look at the long lines, the white crosses

Running with the undulating hills, 

stretching out of sight.

So many lost in far places,

Lost in their final fight.

So much grief at their memory

No matter whether friend or foe

Maybe a tree or rose to mark their spot

So they are not lost again in this sea of souls.

We try to move on, but I wonder if time 

Really is a wheel turning in on itself,

Inexorably swinging back to erase

All the steps forward, the hopes in the stars,

All the illusions of comfort and peace.

Now the fear and the terror return 

And more hills wait 

For long lines of white crosses,

Too many to see through the tears in my eyes.

Roberta Shellum Dohse hails primarily from California. She is a graduate of the University of California Berkeley. After a stint on a farm in northern Minnesota and time in Oregon, she moved to Texas in 1980. She attended law school at the University of Houston and has practiced law in Corpus Christi, Texas since 1997. A former flight instructor and college professor, Roberta has been published in Corpus Christi Writers Anthology series (2018-2021), Lamar University’s Odes and Elegies, Eco-Poetry from the Texas Gulf Coast (November 2020), Voices de la Luna, Austin International Poetry Festival Anthology, and Poetry at Round Top.

Standing Frozen Between Inaction and Chaos

Janelle Curlin-Taylor

March 14, 2022

This is how I feel about Ukraine

Shut down between Putin's vicious rage and

His willful determination to rewrite history

To benefit his maniacal drive to power

All history is complex

History of the oppressed most of all

So many failed attempts to find allies

In 1917 would the Communists help

In the 1940s would the Germans help

Baba Yar – the mass slaying of Ukrainian Jews

The Nazi's Ukraine Holocaust

Stalin's slow, tortuous, grueling gulag

Chernobyl built on a site nearby

Not Communists

Not Nazis

Not nuclear power

In the illusive search for freedom

Bigger is not always better

Today, over $1 million has been raised

For Ukrainian people on Airbnb

Miracle of resistance via Internet

"Use this for someone who needs a room"

Empire vs Beloved Community

This is Lent

How could I forget

Where I stand

Janelle CurlinTaylor’s poetry has appeared in the di-verse-City Anthology, Blue Hole, Best Austin Poetry 2018-2019, Waco Wordfest Anthology 2020 and 2021, Texas Poetry Calendar 2020, Tejascovido, Texas Poetry Assignment. She is married to California poet Jeffrey Taylor.

Warflowers

Jeffrey L. Taylor

March 13, 2022

They were told
they would be greeted
with flowers
and welcoming arms.

Some are already adorned,
chests poppy red,
greeted with arms,
welcomed from the West.

Snowflowers bloom
on smoking tanks,
on soldiers lying cold,
on buildings scorched
by missiles possibly meant
for somewhere else.

Snowflowers cover
what we cannot unsee.

What language has a word,
akin to widow, for a mother
whose son will not be coming home?

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.

Stomach Pain

John Rutherford

March 11, 2022

I come to work late,

do the best to ignore the news

and answer questions from my friend

“Who’s winning over there?”

Give the best answers that I can,

Russia’s winning, as expected

but nobody wins when you’re fighting

memory, the truth, and civvies

with yellow armbands.

What use are NLAWS and BMPs

against memory?

A Molotov cocktail,

gasoline and a rag in a vodka bottle,

chucked against the side of a tank.

What use are machine guns,

Polish MiG-29s, against truth?

GRAD rockets across the Dnieper,

a fleet full of water in the Black Sea.

What use are soldiers

against civilians armed by the state?

Mortars hidden in apartment blocks,

censorship in big tech.

I grunt through a wave of nausea,

my stomach a clenched fist,

at least it’s Friday.

John Rutherford is a poet writing in Beaumont, Texas. Since 2018 he has been an employee in the Department of English at Lamar University. Since 2014, he has followed the events in Ukraine.

Again

Benjamin Nash

March 11, 2022

The Night of the Hunter was 

on the television 

and two police cars with

their sirens on were

rushing to help someone,

Russia went into Ukraine

with their tanks 

to protect their sphere 

of influence and 

their missiles were 

killing women and 

children in the big cities,

once the military chaplain

told us in our 

confirmation class 

when I was a child that 

love was the most 

important law of all of them,

in a different war

our citizen soldiers went

to Europe to deal

with a preponderant power,

this time we worry 

about a nuclear war 

and use sanctions instead,

on the border with Poland

two refugee children

are given an orange

and a green lollipop,

the family probably left

everything they had 

except what was in 

the sugar bowl or a jar

and the bags that they could carry.

Benjamin Nash has had poems published in Concho River Review, Louisiana Literature, Texas Observer, 2River, Pembroke Magazine, and other publications.

White Stork Requiem

Vincent Hostak

March 9, 2022

Solomenka is a multi-residential district on the subway line in Kyiv  

The White Stork, the Ukraine national bird, can be found in the city

Sometimes on nesting platforms.

Solomenka at daybreak

wind in the narrows

grazes ledges and windowpanes,

sounding choirs of spirit-flutes

through the tenements

Should we heave through the tunnels,

climb from the Metro,

greet daylight’s breach through the dust motes?

Do forces shoot at running game?

Are there rules at all?

The spoils? Minerals lying

beneath these tube lines,

charms dangling in silver-white veins

they’ll crush in the mills

World without brush, moss or us

Is this what you scheme?

Nothing for the nesting White Stork

to fuse into wreaths

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.

Song for America XXI (Memorial Day memory)

Fernando Esteban Flores

March 7, 2022

Say adiós so long  

Jesús Rosalio Roberto Leόn

Father tíos friends

Others of our honored dead

Shields of my early life

Buried underneath the vast Texas skies

Each wrapped in the flag of country

Fought for de todo corazón—all heart

Believing it would give you

Some hope a place to start

Living out that scene cited in those

Spartan classrooms of your American youth

Thó not readily received

In the land of your own birth

Of humble second-class worth

By virtue of the palette your skin 

You ground your fingers in &

To the bone to stake your place

Among the jagged stripes & sweeping stars

Looking down the long barrel of 

Battles you gave your innocence for

Green & wet behind the ears

What did you know of world affairs

Behind your brown & scrawny frames

Young boys barely men from small

Pueblitos dusty little South Texas towns

Off you went odds against to test your verve

& back you came shaken yet undeterred

Each one having braved the worst

That men can do to other men in war

The first of families to have

Dared risk the only goods

You had to barter with

& then pull off the improbable

& moved the rest of us a little further

Up to dream bigger than before

I listen for the meaning now

As mournful Taps

Bugles out its measured notes

Of unmeasured pain 

Across the nation’s 

Hallowed grounds

Fort Sam Laredo

San Fernando Arlington

Where you lie in state

This remembered day

Knowing you gave your best

As men can do

I honor you thó long past due

Father uncles dearest friends

May we meet again 

As we were meant

So long I say adios

Fernando Esteban Flores is a native son of Tejas, graduate of the University of Texas at Austin. Published three books of poetry: Ragged Borders, Red Accordion Blues, & BloodSongs available through Hijo del Sol Publishing. Published in multiple journals, reviews, newspapers, and online sites. Selected in 2018-19 by the Department of Arts & Culture of the City of San Antonio, with support from Gemini Ink for his poem Song for America V (Yo Soy San Antonio) as one of 30 poems/poets to commemorate the City’s Tricentennial anniversary. Recently named poetry editor of the Catch the Next Journal of Ideas & Pedagogy.

The Pyre of Hector

Chris Ellery

March 3, 2022

Fire changes flesh

into purity 

beyond corruption, 

beyond the teeth 

of wolves and rodents

and the beaks of birds,

beyond the trowels and brushes

of some distant dig 

in Ilion, 

where future warriors 

of academe (besieged city 

of science, art, and history) 

sift the bones and broken pottery, 

contending for merit 

in the dry remains.

A hero, fallen, should not

become

the feast of worms. 

Ash is meat 

immune

from further decomposing.

Hence, my father, before all gods, 

makes peace 

with my destroyer. 

They too

will know the burning

and relief.

Chris Ellery is author of five poetry collections, most recently Canticles of the Body and Elder Tree. A member of the Texas Institute of Letters, he has received the X.J. Kennedy Award for Creative Nonfiction, the Dora and Alexander Raynes Prize for Poetry, and the Betsy Colquitt Award.

A Cinquain

Michael Helsem

March 2, 2022

pockets
to be filled with
sunflower seeds · that way,
soldier · the spot where you fall gets
a sign

M. H. was born in 1958. Shortly afterward, fish fell from the sky.

Photo of the Great War

Suzanne Morris

March 1, 2022

  – from The American Heritage History of World War I, a century removed

So this is where it ends:

Not with graying dignitaries

in stiff white collars

and frock coats

seated around a table neath

a gilded, frescoed ceiling

one May afternoon,

signing pens in hand;

not with bright medals pinned

upon thrusting generals

who lived to write

memoirs waxing blameless

of their sins.

But here, on an unmarked field

strewn with dead bodies

of prime young men.

How peaceful they seem,

stretched out upon the hay

neath scumbled clouds

too tired even to remove

frayed boots from blistered feet

limbs curled up or flung out

in abandon to

their first decent sleep

since the war began.

Sh...quiet...

softly whispers the wind,

to a column

of tall poplars

standing sentinel,

and haystacks plump

as grandmothers cross-stitching

prayers back home.

Their memoirs?

Penned with

disappearing ink upon

each nation’s soul.

Oh, the kisses and

bouquets tossed

on your parade

brave, hopeful youth 

in sepia tone enshrined

in frames of gold. 

But now within 

this dusty book

we turn a certain page

and there’s the end, 

in center spread:

the sum of  

what you gave.

Sh...quiet...

softly whispers the wind

it’s their first decent sleep

since the war began.                            

A novelist with eight published works spanning forty years, Suzanne Morris now focuses largely on writing poems. Her poetry is included in the anthology, No Season for Silence - Texas Poets and Pandemic (Kallisto GAIA Press, 2020). Examples have also appeared in Texas Poetry Assignment and The New Verse News.

Early On

Milton Jordan

February 27, 2022

He pointed out my nickname written 

on onion skin my brother sent from some

unnamed base in an unmentioned country.

My brother, Daddy claimed, sent the letter 

to me and he read aloud the words I might 

recognize after several such letters.

Most days he read from the Morning News

and I tried to speak the strange names of towns

he would point out with a Chesterfield 

between his fingers. Rob’s base is near there.

He works on motors to keep airplanes flying.

My brother, Robbie, came home from that war,

we thought uninjured, and mustered out

at the Smith County Center where we met him 

to begin the trip back to Teague and a world

that exposed injuries we had not seen.

Milton Jordan lives with Anne in Georgetown, Texas. His chapbook, The Amberman Poems, is out from Kallisto Gaia Press. A collection, A Forest for the Trees, is forthcoming from Backroom Window Press.