Advice to a College-Bound Daughter

Betsy Joseph

November 2, 2025

My father, generally a man of many words,

stayed mostly silent while driving north on the interstate

to settle both my belongings and me in my college dorm.

Perhaps his thoughts lingered on his own college migration

over thirty years earlier from a cultural and physical landscape

that no longer served him.

I used the quiet to contemplate my own imagined impressions

of the place I would spend the next four years.

The radio turned low, we bumped our way

through several miles of road work, detours,

listening to the tires spinning down the highway,

getting us closer to our destination.

At last my father broke his silence by clearing his throat.

He glanced sideways at me, then turned his eyes

back to the traffic just ahead.

I angled my face and looked at his profile,

struck by a nervousness that squared his jaw

and tensed his hands at the wheel.

I heard a deep inhalation first,

followed by a tumble of words in the exhalation,

an almost strangled “Honey, I want you to know . . .”

“Know what?”  

I wanted to help him, or I thought I did.

“Well, please hear me out.  This isn’t easy to say.”

“Ok.”  I stared ahead and waited for him to find his words.

“Honey,” clearing his voice again,

“Honey, there are two kinds of girls.”

Then his voice trailed.

“Two kinds of girls . . .” I prompted.

“There are the girls that guys want to get experience with

and there are the girls guys want to respect.”

“And the point of this conversation?” I countered,

no doubt a bit sharply.

“The point,” he continued, “is this”:

“Which kind of girl do you want to be?”

I don’t know if I hated him at that moment

or whether I admired him.

I felt the blood rushing to my face,

hot and embarrassing.

I also considered the courage he had summoned

from within to broach this sensitive topic

with his eighteen-year-old daughter.

I realized fairly quickly that he didn’t expect an answer,

nor did I offer one.

He wanted me to ponder his words,

to put weight into a father’s caution,

a father’s notion of reputation.

Which led me to wonder if his words sprang

from parental responsibility or from territorial concern

for his youngest child and only daughter.

An awkwardness prevailed until we parked

and unloaded all my gear.

Carrying the loads up three flights of stairs

winded us both and left little air for talk.

He noticed various girls in the hallways

dressed less modestly than I

and simply shook his head as only

a befuddled father can, and for the first time

I saw my dad in a different light.

Whereas I had always perceived his confidence,

his signs and show of strength,

I now saw the slackness of vulnerability 

in his posture and in his dark brown eyes.

I think he saw time, distance encroaching

and didn’t feel prepared to let go quite yet.

Betsy Joseph lives in Dallas and has poems that have appeared in a number of journals and anthologies. She is the author of two poetry books published by Lamar University Literary Press: Only So Many Autumns (2019) and, most recently, Relatively Speaking (2022), a collaborative collection with her brother, poet Chip Dameron.

She was only six when she learned to fly

Herman Sutter

November 2, 2025

“Daddy look at this,”

            she said and ran

                        straight at the tree

as if she would slam

            against it

                        and I screamed

stop

            but she was laughing

and so fast

I could barely think

            before

                        suddenly she is

off the ground

arms outstretched

                        as if to catch

the air itself

            or set it free

                        when the slap

of landing

            startles me

and for an instant

her embrace

            of the trunk

                        is all I see; then

arms and feet scurrying

upward into the green

                        thick leaves, bending

branches shivering at her touch,

            she glides unbearably

high

into the old magnolia

where the sun

gathers gently

glittering with laughter

and her father

            stands watching below

knees knocking

and always afraid

of falling

stares astonished

            at the wonder

                        of a daughter

and all the things

he’ll never know.

Herman Sutter (award-winning poet/playwright/essayist) is the author of two chapbooks: Stations (Wiseblood Books), and The World Before Grace (Wings Press), as well as “The Sorrowful Mystery of Racism,” St. Anthony Messenger. His work appears in: The Perch, The Ekphrastic Review, The Langdon Review, Touchstone, The Merton Journal, as well as: Texas Poetry Calendar (2021) & By the Light of a Neon Moon (Madville Press, 2019). His recent manuscript A Theology of Need was long listed for the Sexton prize.

Third Daughter

Milton Jordan

November 2, 2025

Marie Anne set about to round us up

that October she reached sixty, a boomer

born along a river not the Neches;

younger by years than we, born beside

that reluctant red-dirt current, replaced 

now by the swift gurgles of the Sabinal

running clear, across a rocky bed,

audible from the west bank back porch

of her birthplace, where we’d moved the summer

after the war began, and she’d married,

birthed our three nieces and now gathered 

a widely dispersed crowd of siblings

and significant others to celebrate 

the birthday she shared with her youngest.

Milton Jordan lives with Anne in Georgetown, Texas. He co-edited the first Texas Poetry Assignment anthology, Lone Star Poetry, Kallisto Gaia Press, 2022.

Dawdling Toward Eventually

Vincent Hostak

November 2, 2025

for my daughters

She in August, her in June,

they fell into place — late:

the first and last stanzas of Summer.

They were also the hardest to write.

For energies yearning to be born, 

they took their own sweet time.

Despite their mother’s urging,

chocolates and late-Spring walks 

around a dreary mall’s perimeter

tremors were slow to become earthquakes.

August and June mapped lazy boulevards 

dawdling toward Eventually.

When August greets the soccer field, she

persuades a tiny guard to eat clover leaves

and dance with her beside an empty net.

June coddles skeins of handspun wool

steeping in a bath of indigo.

She hangs wet cords to dry, spools more.

They tend gardens of peppers and peonies, 

things obeying slower rules of time

as they bend light from green to red.

I have just one lens with which to view them both.

It corrects nothing that I see. 

This is as it should be.

I’ve one timepiece to measure their movements.

It runs slow to swift, like them.

They are never late.

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 and produces the podcast: Crossings: the Refugee Experience in America.

Whirligig

Clarence Wolfshohl

November 2, 2025

At five she and I made a paper whirligig

Pinned to a mesquite twig.

It caught the wind

Blown past her as she ran

Down the rockside hill

When I’d come in after work.

I’d catch her wild hugs

Around my neck,

The whirligig propelling in my ear.

She was what we had

Plus the rockside hill.

They moved to another hill

After the wedding,

Fought the droughts,

The windmill turned empty-handed.

But she comes home

Windy days;

Lately brings

Her own with whirligigs.

I can’t catch them up

As strongly.

Weeds too high on the hillside anyway

For those wild hug flights.

The mesquites are larger or rotted dead.

I sit here recollecting budding twigs.

Clarence Wolfshohl has been active in the small press as writer and publisher for over fifty years, publishing poetry and non-fiction in many journals, both print and online, including New Texas, San Pedro River Review, Agave, Cape Rock,  New Letters, and Texas Poetry Assignment.  In 2025, he has published Play-Like (Alien Buddha Press) and the chapbook Scattering Ashes (El Grito del Lobo Press). Wolfshohl lives in the suburbs of Toledo, Missouri, with his cats.