To No. 149

Kathryn Jones

September 6, 2026

You look at me with big dark eyes, 

lashes like black fringe, 

yellow tag on a pierced ear indicating

you are someone’s property, 

meat on the hoof, a head of cattle. 

I lost my taste for beef

after raising Texas Longhorns—

no one wanted their rangy, lean meat, 

but you are a Black Angus, 

prized for your marbled muscle.

I watch you across the fence

peacefully grazing in a pasture, 

licking the face of another in an act

of trust, standing with the herd 

under a tree on a hot summer day.

I offer you a cube through the barbed wire.

You come and take it with your thick pink tongue,

big eyes wary. You’re don’t know 

you’re a number now, confined and well fed 

because there’s a bounty on your head.

Kathryn Jones is a poet, journalist, and essayist whose work has been published in The New York Times, Texas Monthly, Texas Highways, and the Texas Observer. Her poetry has appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies, including TexasPoetryAssignment.com, Unknotting the Line: The Poetry in Prose (Dos Gatos Press, 2023), Lone Star Poetry (Kallisto Gaia Press, 2023), The Senior Class: 100 Poets on Aging  (Lamar University Literary Press, 2024); and in her chapbook, An Orchid’s Guide to Life (Finishing Line Press, 2024), and the collection The Solace of Wild Places (Lamar University Literary Press, 2025). She was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters in 2016 and lives on a ranch near Glen Rose, Texas.

coming home

Sister Lou Ella Hickman

August 2, 2026

sometimes during sleep

my dreammaker leads me 

back

home  

back to the house

a hundred acres of land . . .

pasture   windmill    barn

yet

there is also absence 

no people   no family

no cows with their cud or calf

no white face bull with his froth of forehead curls

not even willie our black angus

struggling to slip through a neighbor’s barbed wire fence

absence   perhaps that is their unseen question

under this longing called dreams

Sister Lou Ella Hickman, OVISS writings appear in numerous magazines and anthologies. Press 53 published her first book of poetry in 2015, entitled she: robed and wordless, and her second, Writing the Stars, on October 4, 2024. She was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2017 and 2020. and a Best of the New in 2026. 

Froggy’s Café

Ken Davis

August 2, 2026

Vaqueros, cowboys wielding their rust-laden blades

As if they were scalpels carve the cattle

Into entrees for their rich ranchero patrones

While they subsist on the “trash meat” of tongue, guts, and diaphragm

Immersed in a softening broth of plums, cactus, and sage

Gestating over a mesquite fire until they are born

As fajitas.

Speed up to Froggy’s Café in the fifties where my Uncle

Doo-Dad takes the same “trash meat” as the vaqueros,

Rolls it in the thick bready dough

Tosses them into the crackling deep-fry basket

From which they will emerge as “steak fingers.”

Aunt Fronie presides over the sibilant grill

Cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth

Swearing and sweating as she sculpts the hissing patties

And flips them into the waiting nest of bun

Grease oozing and sizzling

I contemplate my youthful dilemma

Of choosing the squish of the burger

Or the crunch of the fingers

As Elvis wails Jail House Rock

From the nickel-a-play juke box.

Ken Davis is a lifelong Texan, born in San Angelo, lived all over Texas, and graduated from Tascosa High in Amarillo, UT Austin, and UT Medical Branch Galveston. He practiced family medicine in Conroe for 40+ years and is now part-time faculty in a medical training program.