Holey Stones in Kerrville, Texas

Sabra Woodward

October 5, 2025

Bind me to my native soil, 

loop my fingers through its limestone holes.

Though pain has flowed through its tributaries, 

and blood fills the valleys that raised me.

Yet the cicada’s soft chant spreads over its hills, 

and the mourning dove’s cry always finds a willing listener. 

Sabra Woodward lives in Corpus Christi, Texas, where she works in the Del Mar College Library. Raised in Kerrville, she often writes about memory, landscape, and the intersections of faith, doubt, and daily life. Her current project is a chapbook exploring family and place.

Lost to a River Swollen

Betsy Joseph

October 5, 2025

Rivers can connect us,

yet when a river becomes engorged,

enraged and can carry and hold no more,

it spews its excess wherever it can:

on land and trees, on campgrounds and roads,

enfolding all in its path, ferrying 

its cargo and deadly debris

to places where they do not belong

and—in the process—uprooting lives.

As the strong current rolls on,

the news stories roll out

of bodies found and still others lost

to a river still swollen and caught by surprise.

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 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.

Lowlanders under High Waters

Sumera Saleem

October 5, 2025

The sky above us rains as if

there is a demon from the mythological cosmos

called flood, which is let loose 

upon the lowlanders.

Flood does not care like the ghost of time

when it chokes you under its watery weight.

The first subject of all disasters is always lowlanders,

who ambitiously survive and hopelessly die by precarity of all forms;

in other words, it is almost an ambition for them to dare to live,

their lives uprooted by borders, waters, orders, disorders.

The lowlanders have historically been staying for long in precarious depths,

invisible, beyond horizon, for centuries,

and highlanders on the surface, 

visible, across the whole spectrum from moment to moment.

Though both meet the same ends, wet ends.

It is just the question of which type of water they end in.

Do we end in floods, drowning, or tears, either shed or unshed or both?

Sumera Saleem is a PhD student in Blue Humanities at the Australian Catholic University (Melbourne campus), lecturer in the department of English language and literature, Sargodha University, Sargodha, and gold medalist in English literature from the University of the Punjab for the session 2013-15. Her poems have appeared in Tejascovido, Langdon Review published by Tarleton State University, USA, Blue Minaret, Lit Sphere, Surrey Library UK, The Text Journal, The Ghazal Page, Pakistani Literature published by Pakistan Academy of Letters, and Word Magazine. A few more are forthcoming in international and national anthologies.

To the Soft and Armorless

Vincent Hostak

September 7, 2025

after the Guadalupe River Flood, Central Texas July 2025

In a flood, everything loses the knowledge of the self 

and imaginings that the grip holds fast and firm.

The waters, no longer river nor rain,

grow thick and formless,

climb above their limestone banks,

pour over pebble toughened paths

to surge through nets of sleepy campgrounds and cypress trees.

When no design remains to deliver it to its intended bay,

its range leans every direction at once

its faith, a compass spinning wildly,

while blind current draws it southward.

Fish who’ve rarely met a dryland soul,

knowing nothing of their agonies and joys,

are caused to wonder:

What is this, soft and armorless, my fins caress?

Then in a pale flickering come the accounts:

ruined machines, mud and timber, porches coursing downstream.

What we are permitted to see and hear never held a heartbeat.

But where are they, the soft and armorless?

The counting exacts an awful balance:

add to one list, subtract from another,

using numerators abstracting souls.

The river will regain its singularity,

find the self we thought it once contained.

The fish will be content to know only

the ankles and toes cooling there

during another stubborn heatwave.

The soft break of swells against river rock

might tone to sooth us, or not, asking:

“What should you fear more- What you can now imagine

or that, as of yet, you cannot?”

Nature’s Independence

Irene Keller

September 7, 2025

         Rampant torrents

         Arrive with arrogance

         Invade innocent spaces

         Nothing but raging horror

Irene Keller, a Texas poet, was emotionally overwhelmed with no ability to make sense of the endless deaths, the devastating destruction caused by the July 4, 2025, flood in the Kerrville, Texas area. As she watched the news, she could not blame the unexpected deaths on anyone, but rather reacted with an acrostic poem about what she witnessed.

Where Once the Bridge

Milton Jordan

September 7, 2025

We sat on that familiar trailside bench

beyond the low stone bridge over

the slow river’s now and then gurgle

and you remarked as you had before,

Your cane sounds like some scout just learning

to tap out a telegraph warning 

and I offered my repeated reply,

I’m just learning to use this cane.  

But that morning the stream’s roaring surge 

left an empty gaping space where once the bridge 

crossed and our familiar bench tangled in

a stand of trees at the downstream elbow,

as we watched, silently, with others 

from the road above the higher east bank.

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

seven solemn epiphanies: for the flood

Herman Sutter

September 7, 2025

What has the rain wrought

with all its wealth

melting like wings in the sun

the rain is endless

let it come

a shadow shifts beneath the water’s drift, 

clings to a branch--lets go

edgeless –the water becomes all shadow

the rain is endless

let it come

impenitent as silver 

and silent as light 

the surface recalls the clouds one by one

the rain is endless

let it come

the wetness washes over all

the grass the earth the ants 

gathering in clusters of shimmering earth

the rain is endless 

let it come

floating upon a fallen leaf

a beetle glistening --wings melting

like wax in the sun

the rain is endless

let it come

to the cat clinging

to the tree and the cat

below twisting helplessly 

the rain is endless

let it come

the old man strikes a match

and lifts the darkness to the night

fading like the sun

the rain is endless

let it come

Herman Sutter is the author of Stations (Wiseblood Books), and The World Before Grace (Wings Press), and “The Sorrowful Mystery of Racism,” St. Anthony Messenger. His work appears in: The Perch (Yale University), The Langdon Review, Benedict XVI Institute, Touchstone, i.e., The Merton Journal, as well as: Texas Poetry Calendar (2021) & By the Light of a Neon Moon (Madville Press, 2019). He received the 2021 Best Essay award from the CMA. His recent manuscript A Theology of Need was long listed for the Sexton prize.

The Ways of God: Lamentations

Alan Berecka

August 3, 2025

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Alan Berecka resides with his wife Alice and an ornery rescue dog named Ophelia in Sinton, Texas  He retired in January from being a librarian at Del Mar College in Corpus Christi and is settling into a whole new level of contentment. His poetry has appeared in such places as the American Literary Review, Texas Review, and The San Antonio Express. He has authored three chapbooks, and six full collections, the latest of which is Atlas Sighs from Turning Plow Press, 2024. A Living is not a Life: A Working Title (Black Spruce Press, Brooklyn, 2021) was a finalist in the Hoffer Awards. From 2017 to 2019 he served as the first poet laureate of Corpus Christi.

Summertime

Shelley Armitage

August 3, 2025

after the song

We had only summers past for reference:

Mama Dunn’s June backyard, plastic tablecloth

catching the breeze, watermelon seeds

a gestalt among sandwiches.  

The lake on a still day, Dad dragging

water skiers behind his fishing boat,

underpowered prop making a pitiful wake.

A lover sharing prickly grass and not minding it.

A summer romance at band camp, gardenia corsage

suffocating the night air.

Each an ordinary grace.

But Camp Mystic, who knew what to expect

with a name like that

fireflies more magic than cell phones

--night necessary for light--

without it they were only bugs in a bottle.

An all-girl Christian camp, no boys,

no cell phones, cabins along the Guadalupe River

where you could scratch your name on the same ceiling 

 your great grandmother signed in 1927.

Oh, the traditions!

Charm bracelets bear witness years later.

The second graders were lodged near the river

Safe, FEMA declared this old flood plain.

A nest of new friends, joined in Christian love,

with goals to be a better person through

spiritual growth among the mighty cypress,

the oak, and grounding sumac.

Who named this recreating river? Some mystic ties here too:

Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe, our mother of miracles

Spaniard explorer Alfonso de Leon named the river in 1689.     

But the rogue river tells another story:

Locals call these environs flash flood alley

No lessons in canoeing nor chapel prayers

can stop a high rise

Especially one that comes after midnight

It would be easy to blame the river

masquerading as a friendly old gal

pooling green waters filled with catfish,

buoyed inner tubes, agile kayaks

in a summer rite of passage.

No, no one could teach

how to swim upstream,

against the raging river

How to cling to a tree

How to take to the sky

away from snakes and debris

as another soul is washed 

in the ineffable waters

Or how to say the Lord’s prayer

with frothing foam churning

in the mouth.

Be a light for all to see

in this pitch-black wall of death.

Shelley Armitage is an emerita professor at the University of Texas at El Paso.  She is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters, and her most recent book is A Habit of Landscape (Finishing Line Press).  She also has new poems in the forthcoming collection, Unknotting the Line (Dos Gatos Press). Her award-winning memoir, Walking the Llano: A Texas Memoir of Place, was a Kirkus Review starred book and featured at the Tucson Book Festival.