Stories in the Wind

Roberta Shellum Dohse

March 3, 2024

We cannot dig into rich loamy soil

Ancient civilizations just beneath our feet,

No Romans mosaics or Saxon hoards

Viking swords or iron-age forts,

But there are stories in the dinosaur bones, 

Carvings in rock, buffalo wallows, 

Cliff dwellings and abandoned mines 

And wagon ruts cut deep into stone, 

And always the ever-present wind 

Sweeping across the wide vast plains,

Sculpting the land and all that remains 

Along with the rivers, the tides of time.

The wind uncovers long lost footprints,

Then rises again to erase their path – 

Hurry, be quick, ‘ere those fragile shadows 

Are lost again in the dusts of time.

Unless we look 

To the people that remain

The traditions they carry, 

the stories they tell.

Roberta Shellum Dohse hails primarily from California. After living on a farm in northern Minnesota and in Oregon, she moved to Texas in 1980, attended law school, and has practiced law in Corpus Christi since 1997. Formerly a flight instructor and a college professor, she has always loved to write.

Ripples

Roberta Shellum Dohse

February 25, 2024

Green lichen, silvery rocks, dark shadows, 

Waver in soft ripples that mimic my face, 

Then shatter, sprinkling the woods in crystalline 

Light as the frog lunges into the pond.

Slowly I see myself re-emerge from this chrysalis

And I wonder at this changeling who has taken my place, 

A face so different from the one I remember, 

From the person I know myself to be.

Looking back at me I see my mother

The hair no longer bearing a golden sheen, 

Now wispier than an angel’s breath, soft 

Lines clustered ‘round my mouth, my eyes. 

Disturbing, this absence of color, this faded 

Being a mere shadow of before. But my heart 

Still beats, music still tumbles, poems and pictures 

Still wait to be drawn to the light.

Though I can no longer scramble over the rocks

Or bound up four flights of stairs of my youth

Am I now become invisible? Not here in this pool, 

Deep in the forest, where nymphs gather round 

And vibrate the air with memories and magic 

Trigger ripples in the pond bending the light 

And ripples in time as I stand on the precipice

Of unknown adventures, just waiting for me.

Roberta Shellum Dohse hails primarily from California. After living on a farm in northern Minnesota and in Oregon, she moved to Texas in 1980, attended law school, and has practiced law in Corpus Christi since 1997. Formerly a flight instructor and a college professor, she has always loved to write.

Metamorphosis

Kathryn Jones

November 19, 2023

Sometimes I wished you dead and myself, too,

Than be locked in this purgatory.

I have watched your metamorphosis

From twenties to middle age to the edge,

Hoping to see butterfly wings emerge

But I see only the cocoon of our linked being.

Sometimes I want to break it open,

Reveal what is to come next even if I am afraid,

Because the waiting, the waiting, the waiting

Is like withering from within, wondering 

What might have been if we had wings

And could flutter away on a warm summer wind.

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), and in an upcoming chapbook, An Orchid’s Guide to Life, to be published by Finishing Line Press. She was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters in 2016 and lives on a ranch near Glen Rose, Texas.

Estate Sale, West Texas

Vincent Hostak

August 27, 2023

I’ve had enough and yet I

haven’t even started

A coarse, judgmental voice 

squeals from attic stairs 

Half of all my weight 

suspended in the air 

The other squeezing out 

these sharp short-lived commands

“It must all be gleaned and stacked,”

a song that urges on

Here’s a low buzz, beat of wings 

the carpenter bees 

arrived through covert holes

pierced by probing tree limbs

unveiling a Museum

of Delicate Destruction

Gather now all things that

“won’t do it on their own”

A ferment trapped in boxes

glazed by covert drips

Sort the unstained books,

shake out the hidden nits

While the well-dressed bees strain

on, more rafters yet to drill  

Mid-life to its very end

Chicago…El Paso

From basements to a crawlspace,

a cargo to please few

The furniture’s now gone, for

sale in other lands

Remnants are our own:

pots pinched by tiny hands,

A letter worth the frame,

scents of dogwood, cigarettes

These badlands have no sea-god

to lift from ranch home wrecks 

Just the agent folded with

his notes beside the poplars

He perks up, makes a signal 

registers my haul

No re-entries now

this line’s where I’ll stall

In cool unreckoned rain

as sweet as cactus honey

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.

Mama in Real Time

Elizabeth N. Flores 

July 30, 2023

I unfold the paper and hand it to 

the ER doctor at Memorial Hospital.

Here is the list of my mother’s medicines.

Wait, Doctor, my brother says,

look at these pictures of our mother on my phone. 

The doctor is perplexed. I am embarrassed.

Who has time to look at my brother’s photo gallery?

Stop it, I tell my brother. 

I will not, he replies, pointing his finger at me. 

Doctor, my brother continues, now pointing his finger at Mama. 

You see a woman in her 90s, frail and scared, in pain from the stroke 

she had while drinking her coffee and reading the 

Caller-Times this morning. 

I want you to look at her three days ago, 

in her wheelchair, beaming, 

after getting her hair done,

as my niece paints her nails. 

This is Mama, my brother says, 

positioning his phone in front of the doctor’s face. 

As you examine her, please don’t forget that.

Elizabeth N. Flores, Professor Emeritus of Political Science, taught for 46 years at Del Mar College and was the college’s first Mexican American Studies Program Coordinator. Her poems have appeared in the Texas Poetry Assignment, Corpus Christi Writers 2022, an anthology edited by William Mays, and the Mays Publishing Literary Magazine. 

Dental Histories

Walter Bargen

July 23, 2023

For Dr. Rick Omohundro

Tell me before you stick your hands in my mouth

Which photograph is it on the table just inside

The front door of your office in Fulton, Missouri.

It’s not the one with PROOF stamped

Across your portrait more than half-a-life ago,

Where there is enough hair falling over your forehead

To almost conceal your identity, not knowing yet

If you needed to conceal the fact of another life

Gone awry or a celebration of all you yet might become.

A mustache riding your lip down, suggesting

Some notoriety, rock band drummer,

Or revolutionary, and the saucer-plate-size lenses

Of your glasses taking up so much of your face,

Clearly dating your long journey to this moment,

All the proof that any of your patients need before

Reclining in the chair to breathe in the sweet gas.

Please remove your fingers palpating my gums

And tell me is it the black & white photograph

Of three men and one woman standing beside each other

Dressed in leather fringed and beaded buckskin shirts,

Moccasins and leggings, facing the tripod that supported

The heavy box camera where a second glass negative waited

To be exposed. It’s your cousin on the far right,

Who traveled maybe all the way from Polynesia or India or Italy,

But most certainly from Virginia, many times removed

From you now that more than a century-and-a-half

Has derailed somewhere, waiting to be rescued.

Still he stands beside the woman, a former ballerina,

Giuseppina Morlacchi, his wife, their romance forged

in the West of pulp fiction, but she died in the real West,

Leadville, Colorado, 1880, pneumonia, age 33. She still

stands between her husband and Buffalo Bill Cody.

The picture exposed between one of the traveling

Wild West Circus acts, as they waited to whoop it up,

fire an abundance of blanks from repeating rifles

in front of the sold-out adoring crowds. They galloped

around the arena, as the West was

being won and lost twice on the same day.

Your patients open wide for a clearer look

before swallowing their own crumbling enameled histories.

From John Omohundro to his stage name,

Texas Jack, immortalized in the song, Texas Morning,

By Michael Murphy: Texas Jack says drink

Your coffee black/It’s your lucky day/5 o’clock

In the Texas morning. Anthem of the Texas Jack

Society that meets yearly. Now you can get on

with it, stick your hands in my mouth so I can

sing the word Texas in the middle of Missouri.

More on Texas Jack.

Winter Texans

Jan Seale

July 16, 2023

Snowbirds they have always been called

but lately a new moniker: Q-tips,

that is, snow-white hair on head,

white tennies on feet.  Call them either,

face to face, they will laugh agreement.

Nothing bothers these folks in annual migration.

Taking the great southern route each autumn,

like birds migrating to warmer climes,

they command Winnebagos and Airstreams, 

or, waiting for them in countless parks,

air out their ‘park model’ homes.

They’re planning reunions, square dancing,

card games, shuffleboard, ping pong.

Calloused hands from fifty years of farming,

making biscuits, feeding chickens, or

curved backs from sitting at a desk all day,

eyes dimmed with necessary reading of

reports and student papers, they’ve come

to escape five months of shoveling snow.

But old habits die hard and they’ll end up

tutoring children in the Valley’s schools,

renovating houses for the poor, 

crocheting caps for windy blasts,

sewing quilts for the over-traveled.

Some will ladle out kettles of hot soup

for the hopers and wishers.

They’ve put in storage or given away

their life clutter, are learning Spanish,

picking oranges, holding Saturday sales,

wading in the Gulf surf, driving to Mexico 

for medicine, curios, haircuts, cervezas.

They’ll do crosswords, bridge, movies until 

Wednesday night, when they’ll gather 

in the clubhouse for jams, with guitars, fiddles,

banjos, accordions. But first they’ll eat King Ranch

casserole, Spanish rice, tacos, enchiladas,

top these off with rhubarb pie and pound cake.

In their spare time, they’re writing their life stories,

reading crime novels, Westerns, recipe books, 

knitting grandbaby sweaters, woodcarving,

painting scenes of palm trees, resacas.

They’re filling the parks with bike rides, 

the flea markets with curiosity and joke-making.

They’re claiming pleasure while they can.

Snowbirds of a feather flock to Texas together,

while Q-tips, their spines toward Texas incline. 

Jan Seale, the 2012 Texas Poet Laureate, taught Winter Texans for 22 years at the Museum of South Texas History to write their life stories.  They wrote about things like raising eight children, flying for the Luftwaffe, being torpedoed in a submarine, and being attacked by a tiger riding an elephant in India. They also kindly bought her books and came to her poetry readings.

Daughter Heaven Mountain

Chris Ellery

July 9, 2023

To begin her yearly wellness exam, 

Dolores is given three words 

to remember, a test for dementia.

“Daughter.” “Heaven.” “Mountain.”

Pulse oximeter. Blood pressure cuff. 

Stethoscope sounding her torso 

for the beat of her heart, the flow 

of breath. “Have you recently fallen?” 

Dr. Darby asks. “Do you have trouble 

getting out of a chair? Trouble 

with drooling? With swallowing?

Incontinence? Vision? Memory?”

Meanwhile, ageless Ni Zan, 

the Yuan master, paints a perfect world

in her brain. In his signature way, 

he uses only black ink and leaves 

large swaths of the paper 

untouched by the brush, suggesting 

sky or mist or water.

From nothing 

there emerges a bamboo grove 

on a riverbank, plums and orchids

and gangly pines, a hermit’s hut 

tucked away in the cleft of a distant range 

to prove the existence of humans.

Dolores learned long ago 

how Ni Zan, in his last years, 

gave away all that he owned 

to take up the life of a Daoist wanderer 

in the Lake Tai region of his youth. 

Now she is straightening her blouse 

as her doctor explains 

the alarming numbers in her blood, 

her prognosis and options. 

To the doctor her smile as she listens 

is disconcerting. Yet she hears 

and understands, clearly, even 

as she follows the wanderer, 

the strokes of his brush.

Ni Zan leads her across 

a rugged stream, under gaunt trees 

with an owl perched on one high limb, 

past a grassy swell where a doe 

and fawn are browsing, into 

a vast blank space, 

where his brush pauses.

She knows she must travel through

on her way 

to the far mountains drifting 

in nothingness

below the untouched sky, 

a tall mother mountain maternally rising 

above her brood of little mountains.

“And now for the test,” Dr. Darby says, 

noticing her far-away look.

“What are the words

that I gave you to remember?”

Half in a mystic dream she meets his eyes

with her inscrutable smile.

“Daughter. Heaven. Mountain.”

Chris Ellery is an elder living in San Angelo. Among his five books of poetry is Elder Tree, elder being the thirteenth and last tree of the Celtic tree calendar. According to Jane Gifford in The Wisdom of Trees, it is “under the protection of the Old Crone aspect of the Triple Goddess, who guards the door to the Underworld, to death, and to the dark inner mysteries.”

Grandpa and the Elder Tree

Thomas Hemminger

July 2, 2023

Our fishing spot was on the river

right below the oldest Shagbark Hickory 

in the county.

Under that tree, I heard whole stories

about our family heritage. 

You told yarns from five generations 

up our family tree under the wide shade

of that favorite arbor. 

Our first generation met for church 

“on these very grounds.” 

The second took a nearby wagon-rutted road 

into town, but “now it’s all ‘in town’ of course.” 

Great-grandpa proposed 

to Great-gran, “right here,”

and you’d point to the very spot.

You fished here with your daddy 

“just like we were doing,”

and you fell into the water 

when you climbed out too far

“on a branch that’s gone now.”

That tree reminded me a lot of you,

because it looked kind of shaggy

but it felt so strong.

Also, because it seemed like it would

go on living forever.

Both of you were giants to me. 

Always will be, 

I expect.

I miss you both. 

Thomas Hemminger is an elementary music teacher living in Dallas, Texas. His personal hero is Mr. Fred Rogers, the creator of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. It was through America’s favorite “neighbor” that Thomas learned of the importance of loving others, and of giving them their own space and grace to grow.

Learning to Text

Suzanne Morris

June 25, 2023

for my son, Quentin

Iloveyou

I text; there’s no space

between the words

as if I’d said them out loud:

ILOVEYOU

no space between our bodies

when we hugged goodbye

before you went back home

having taught me to text

on my new flip phone

a needed step in this

vast new widowhood

I’ve woken up to.

You text back quickly,

as if you were

awaiting my words

speeding through cyberspace

You too!!!

I hold the phone in one hand

the instruction booklet

open in the other:

which key do I use

for inserting a space

a step I must

learn to take

now that I’m alone?

Suzanne Morris is a novelist and poet.  Her work is included in several poetry anthologies, most recently, Lone Star Poetry (Kallisto Gaia Press, 2022).  Her poems have appeared in The Texas Poetry Assignment, The New Verse News, Stone Poetry Quarterly, The Pine Cone Review, Emblazoned Soul Review, and Creatopia Magazine.  Ms. Morris lives in Cherokee County, Texas.

The Old Man on the Red Porch

Lyman Grant

June 18, 2023

Often, he is sitting up there,

the morning light preying

up the little box table 

beside him erect in his rocker.

He does not wave back.

I don’t even think he nods

at us perambulators, gleeful

in our healthful self-satisfaction.

We are mere moments 

he remains indifferent to,

thoughtless smiles dressed

for each passing season,

arms raised and dancing

like penitents on the back pew,

eager to snare some god’s attention.

Lyman Grant is an expat Texan living in the Shenandoah Valley.  His most recent book of poems is ostraca, from 4doorloungebooks. 

Fingers of Darkness

Betsy Joseph

June 11, 2023

My friend steps cautiously to the edge of darkness,

myopic eyes peering into the unknown.

At eighty-six he is nobody’s fool.

A single step farther and the fingers of dimness

might touch him, might tag him first.

This is no child’s game, though.

Darkness is playing for keeps,

and he knows it as surely as he knows

that once beyond the border he will not return.

He will not be able to run to home base

to the call, “Olly olly in-come-free.”

Not prepared to lose his memory,

much less kick the bucket,

he wishes he could kick the can again

with boyhood chums whose names

are now wispy as his days are a blur.

Dusky shadows lean closer, straining to touch—

perhaps preparing to embrace him—

but he is able to still step back.

Not today.

My friend selfishly wants more time in the light.

Not yet. 

He asks the fingers of darkness to tag someone else.

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. 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.

At Schmidt’s

Milton Jordan

June 4, 2023

Bent slightly over the tin topped table

bordered with half-inch quarter round molding

in the drafty back room at Schmidt’s Seed and Supply

Amberman hacked through another spasm

and looked at the seven dominoes he held.

Ten or twelve others sat this November morning

at Forty-two games or Domino tables.

Twenty years ago these men ran this town

the boards and councils, banks and businesses,

the foundry and sawmill both now shuttered.

Other old men sat at those edged tables

in that store then owned by Schmidt’s two uncles.

Near noon we walked at Amberman’s cane’s pace

toward lunch at Rinehardt’s City Cafe.

You’re older now, boy, than I was when

all this caught up with me in sixty-eight.

He credits twenty-six years of mill dust

for his daily weakening lungs, but quit

a two pack a day habit two years

before leaving that mill foreman’s job.

Dust or smoke makes little difference now;

and we gave neither much thought then, he said,

as I held the same oval glassed, wooden door

and heard the fry cook’s familiar greeting.

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

First Contact

John Rutherford

May 28, 2023

The first thing my grandmother asked

was if we had seen my grandfather,

she forgot he died, but ninety-three years

is a very long time to be alive.

We told her that we hadn’t,

throats tight, masks fogging our eyeglasses,

the first visit allowed amidst the lockdowns

in the locked ward at her nursing home.

Silsbee, Texas is only twenty miles

from home, but it felt so much longer

in those early days of the months-long Spring Break,

the furthest I had traveled in weeks. 

They checked our temps at the door,

all in the upper 90s but no fevers,

so they gave us heavy masks,

N-95s that protruded like a duck’s bill.

The door to her ward was magnetic,

and she stuck to it, waiting but trapped

by her feeble legs and arms, one escape

too many had lost her the power chair. 

We settled into our rhythms,

I told her about being married and work,

and she showed me her arts and crafts,

but she didn’t recognize me once I took off my hat.

She insisted I do so, as a gentleman

“never wears his hat indoors”

but my retreating hairline surprised her,

and I could tell she didn’t know me anymore.

I kissed her cheek when the hour was up,

the coast was clear, and it had been a while,

masked slipped down, first contact,

and she knew me again, for a moment.

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

The Passenger

Kathryn Jones

May 21, 2023

He rides, looking out the window

at everything, at nothing. 

He rides because he cannot drive and

he hates it, hates me for driving him.

He longs to be in control 

of something, anything,

but the world spins on without him,

as if to say, “We can go on without you just fine.”

He cannot remember what happened yesterday

or the day before, but he remembers 

what it felt like to put the key in the ignition and 

drive, free, toward the horizon.

He is the passenger now, not free, 

not looking at the horizon because there is none, 

riding into the dark, dark night 

even though it’s a brilliant sunny day.

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.

An Elder Elaborates

Chuck Taylor

May 14, 2023

In Korea strangers offered on buses their seats

When I was 50

I knew I was old

I knew I was not old

I had a daughter three

In Texas I took her

daddy-daughter camping

We threw oranges into

the open mouths

of baby crocodiles

standing on the shore

of a lake in east Texas woods 

till they told us not to

Today that daughter's 32

We're in a ryokan in Japan

sleeping on futons on tatami mats by

a raging mountain river 

She's with her husband in the other room

Shall I speak of doom?

Bad knees mean it's

Hard to get up off the floor

My CPAP machine made for better sleep through the night

I am old. Still old.

Seems like rooms are always cold

I never wear my trousers rolled

Chuck Taylor's latest novel is "Hamlet Versus Shakespeare." He taught Shakespeare at Angelo State University. The novel turns the tragedy of Hamlet into an adventure and comedy. Taylor is retired from wandering and teaching and spends his time with books, friends, family, manuscripts, a dog, and household repairs.