Welcome to Texas

Laurence Musgrove 8/21/22 Laurence Musgrove 8/21/22

Haikus of Texas

Kathryn Jones

August 21, 2022

White bones lie gleaming

On red rock carved by dry wind

Skeletons of time.

River of gray stones

Silent in summer’s embrace

Yet screaming for rain.

Ivory moon hung

On an ebony tree branch

Clouds caught on the thorns.

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. Her poetry has been published on tejacovido.com, in the Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas, and Odes and Elegies: Eco-Poetry from the Texas Gulf Coast. She was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters in 2016.

Laurence Musgrove 7/20/22 Laurence Musgrove 7/20/22

Texas Summers

Paola Brinkley

July 20, 2022

The humid evening air clings

to our sweaty legs and arms

sticky with mosquito spray

and Banana Boat sunscreen,

while we sit on the porch,

in white dirty lawn chairs

sucking on Blue Bell fudge popsicles.

Dad just mowed the lawn.

The smell of freshly cut grass

wafts as a small, coveted breeze

blows past our sweaty necks.

The magenta pink crape myrtles stand proud,

after a harsh winter and a hesitant spring,

Fuchsia knockout roses have a few dried-out petals,

but nonetheless surviving

in peak 100-degree weather,

like the Azteca grass, purple shrubs, and

small little orange mums,

perfectly manicured by my father’s green thumb.

The grass is so green, it almost looks neon,

but I often don’t notice its intensity

until I look back on pictures

of old fourth of July barbecues

and summer birthday parties.

The neighbor just finished

baling the last mound of hay.

The smell of sweet hay mixes

with the rich concoction of summer smells.

I imagine myself on a plane looking below,

and how the bales of hay might look like

fluffy yellow cotton balls on a manicured lawn,

and how rural Texas might have

a piece of wonder that I have never noticed before.

Golden yellow, navel orange, and a salmon-colored pink

color the sky, fading into a navy blue.

The sun slowly disappears behind the green oak trees,

a signal that the day is near end.

We lazily suck on the remnants

of the creamy fudge on our popsicle sticks,

hesitant to get up and head back into the house.

I close my eyes to bask

in the noises of chirping birds,

singing crickets, barking dogs, and croaking frogs.

Children whir past on their bikes, the clicking of fast

pedaling follows behind them, and my mom hums

a song that she heard on the radio.

I hear the ensemble of car doors slamming.

The neighbor and his recruits are done for the day.

The red tractor is abandoned on the lawn,

to be picked up tomorrow.

The warm air bounces like molecules on my skin.

I feel the prickle of the lavender plants

brush up against up my leg,

and the occasional fly that wonders in my space.

I feel the pieces of a puzzle fit together,

And I can sense my place

in this sticky, humid, hot, smelly,

yet beautiful world.

For a moment,

when I sit still enough to observe nature at work,

when the tenacious drone of the modern world

quiets enough to hear the echoes of the earth,

I am reminded that everything will be alright,

that my worries and problems

melt in Texas Summers.

Paola Brinkley is a graduate assistant at Lamar University. She teaches introductory freshman courses and tutors at the Writing Center. Her free time consists of writing poetry and reading from the large stack of impulsive purchases from the bookstore. Paola will graduate in December 2022 with her M.A in English.

Laurence Musgrove 7/17/22 Laurence Musgrove 7/17/22

State Lines

Chris Ellery

July 17, 2022

The U.S. post office in my hometown straddles the state

line, half in Arkansas and half in Texas.

In front of the building, where my father worked,

you can stand with one foot in

each state, as I did many times.

This was the first I knew of borders.

On the ground between my legs

the line I saw on the map was a lie.

Once when my mother was early to pick Dad up

from the graveyard shift, me and my brother killed

the time walking laps around the Texarkana Post

Office for half an hour.

We visited each state at least a dozen times, never, as far

as I know, unwelcome in either.

I’ve crossed other borders since then where

the line on the map was worse than a lie,

a bloody lie. Walls, barbed wire, barricades.

And well-armed men on either side

who search your bags,

who never seem to smile,

who never say,

“You are welcome.”

Chris Ellery, now living in San Angelo, was born and raised in the "Twice as Nice" Twin Cities of Texarkana, Arkansas-Texarkana, Texas. He is the author of The Big Mosque of Mercy, a collection of poems based on his residence in Syria and travels in the Middle East.

Laurence Musgrove 7/10/22 Laurence Musgrove 7/10/22

Square Corner

Suzanne Morris

July 10, 2022

The quaint old shop front

with red- and green-striped awnings

looks out on the Cherokee County

courthouse square

the entrance facing crosswise

as if it were a

photograph on a turn-of-the-century

postcard

each corner a neat diagonal

where it slipped into four

gold foil triangles in one of those

old-fashioned albums

rarely found anymore except in

attics or estate sales.

Though it has been unoccupied

for so long that

its snappy awnings are

tattered and faded

and various rumors circulate

about the reason

its tall show windows disclose

in semi-dark recess

an array of boxes and baskets, and

even a long counter like you’d see

in a drugstore or ice cream parlor

of days gone by,

apparently no one is about to move in and

lay down the welcome mat

or pack up the contents

and move out.

And in that respect the building

is like the small East Texas town itself:

something always seems

about to change there, but

nothing ever really does.

For forty years, Suzanne Morris was a novelist, with eight published works beginning with Galveston (Doubleday, 1976) and most recently Aftermath - a novel of the New London school tragedy, 1937 (SFASU Press, 2016). Often her poetry was attributed to characters in her fiction. Nowadays she devotes all her creative energies to writing poems. Her work is included in the anthologies, No Season for Silence - Texas Poets and Pandemic (Kallisto GAIA Press, 2020), and the upcoming, Gone, but Not Forgotten, from Stone Poetry Journal. Her poems have also appeared in The New Verse News.

Laurence Musgrove 7/4/22 Laurence Musgrove 7/4/22

A History of Welcoming to Galveston in Three Parts

Jesse Doiron

July 4, 2022

Part I

Welcome to Galveston, Estevanico (1529)

Today, we found a tribe of men

who came out of the sea.

A storm had killed their village,

floating on an island they had made

from clouds and trees.

All was shattered in the shallows,

while the remnants of their tents

sank far into the waves.

We gave them sweet water

from the rain wells

to quench their thirst

and soothe their blistered faces.

One of them seemed near to death;

his skin had turned to black.

He spoke many languages,

but none were comprehensible.

Mustafa Azemmouri (known as Estevanico) was part of an expedition of discovery in the 16th century led by Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca. He was the first African to set foot on the shores of North America after surviving a shipwreck off Galveston Island. Enslaved as a child by the Portuguese, who sold him to the Spanish, he was eventually put into servitude by a number of coastal tribes including the Karankawa and the Coahuiltecan. Azemmouri escaped the Coahuiltecan with Cabeza de Vaca and two other members of his ill-fated Spanish expedition. They travelled a thousand miles into New Spain (Mexico) where Azemmouri became a guide for the royal viceroy there, who charged him with the task of helping the conquistadors locate the Seven Cities of Gold.

Part II

Welcome to Galveston, Major General Granger (1865)

When Major General Granger came to town,

we knew he was a son-of-a-bitch,

who couldn’t even cotton up to Grant.

But here he was,

indisputably in charge,

and what were we to do?

We gave him a dandy “Welcome in”

and a right nice “Howdy,” too;

even though he had them colored soldiers

all gussied up in uniforms

to make him feel the part—

Major General!

What kind of thinking was he thinking then?

How the hell can any army run like that?

Well, “how the hell” was all we thought about that day,

and next, and more that passed on by – slow and hot.

We’d been mulling in regret the whole of what

had happened to us when Granger came to town—

Goddamn Yankee,

with his black boys all in blue, running up

and down the town with news that every slave

was master of hisself—

For-ev-er-more.

Now can you feature that?

They had it all proclaimed in black and white.

Weren’t no white man nothing more than equal to ‘em

in the eyes of God Almighty and what

was passing for the government those days.

Dreadful days. End-times days.

End of everything we knew was right.

So, tell me then, what the hell was we to do

when General Order No. 3

was read out from the balcony

and printed in the papers, pasted on the walls,

and all the slaves was jubilating in the streets

from Ashton down to beach and back again?

Well— howdy’s how we said it then,

but we didn’t mean it well at all.

We was only being nice, being polite.

Down deep inside, we couldn’t exactly come to terms

with what the Major General had to say.

No. No siree. Knew it couldn’t last.

Just a summer thunderstorm.

Major General Gordon Granger was commander of the Headquarters District of Texas and as such delivered the official notice of emancipation to the citizens of Texas. The “news” was more than two years after Lincoln’s proclamation that freed all slaves in the United States of America. It was not well received by the defeated loyalists of the Confederate States of America.

Part III

Welcome to Galveston, Miss Linda (1965)

Miss Linda had never been to Galveston before,

never seen a beach,

never worn a bathing suit,

and never spent the night in a white family’s house.

She was all smiles from the first day of her welcoming,

even after she was sunburned

and stung by a jellyfish

and cut her toe on a broken bottle in the sand.

Momma was so happy Miss Linda came,

and I was, too.

Her visit made me feel good about having friends, holding hands,

and being part of what it was that made Miss Linda smile.

When those boys came up behind us on the seawall,

I didn’t even think to turn around and look

when they followed us

down the concrete steps to the water’s edge.

The brick they threw

fell right beside my foot,

so I yelled out, “Hey, you boys!”

But Miss Linda was already dead.

And no one stopped to help me

pull her from the surf,

that she’d told Momma, at her invitation,

was something she would die for, just to see.

Linda Arceneaux worked as a housekeeper for a prominent Houston family. She was murdered on a beach in Galveston by a group of teenagers who assaulted her with bricks while she was walking with her employer’s daughter one Sunday evening after supper at their vacation cottage.

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 in Texas, 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.

Laurence Musgrove 7/2/22 Laurence Musgrove 7/2/22

Boquillas Canyon Welcome 1978

Vincent Hostak

July 2, 2022

I am the lurker here and she’s no stranger

this landscape reports no borders

I, the morning hiker, she a knowing nomad

for whom nothing around is alien.

She collects her change of clothes

dried overnight upon huisache shrubs

carefully avoiding the cruel hook of its pins.

Her shift dress and socks

weigh little more than dry air

good to fold away in a back-strung pack.

These may be worn the next day

for what sways upon her narrow frame

is worthy of more travel.

She thinks, “I can wait to enjoy

the sweet perfume pressed to these,

long into the sweaty hours.”

All trails here must be called a stretch

or a haul or a draw or a range

but are always nearly endless

like the length of the Rio Grande and

the rise of Sierra del Carmen.

Her family is somewhere on my side of the drink

¡Apúrate! ¡Apúrate! Ya nos tenemos que ir.

These wetlands, deserts, soft rock walls

embody whole a landscape of a state

the long unmapped region ahead

with its skin-deep veins of moisture

you can easily wade across.

The welcome sign is autonomic

presented by the land not its holders.

Decades later, perhaps

free-passage vagaries won’t stand

and roaming here one day bright and early

the uniformed and badged

will collect your grandchildren

like you did your airy frock and anklets.

Tus nietas caught and released to the elsewhere

abandoned like the Grizzly, like the Mexican Wolf.

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.

Laurence Musgrove 6/30/22 Laurence Musgrove 6/30/22

Memorial of the Wind

John Rutherford

June 30, 2022

Breeze along I-10 over the Sabine,

head West, towards the sleep-bound sun

just look down, and you’ll see it,