Looking Back

Alan Berecka

March 1, 2026

I, who am the grandson of four immigrants—

two from Poland, two from Lithuania,

once sent a vial of spit and a hard-earned 

Benjamin to Ancestry.com to find out

that I am over 99% Polish and Lithuanian.

It seems before my grandparents

hightailed it to the States to escape

this or that, my people stayed put

since the day some ancestral fish

had climbed out of the Baltic Sea.

I pointed to these results as proof

that my grandparents had erred

in dooming subsequent generations

to an exile from belonging, that feeling

I had in a junior high class that American

History had nothing to do with me

until we got to World War II in which

my male kin had fought and bled in.

I asked my friend in Tartu, Tõnis Vilu, 

a talented poet and proud Estonian

whose people have stayed put for eons

what it felt like to know that he belongs.

He answered, “To be perfectly honest

I have never felt like I fit in.”

That’s when the scales fell for me, and I saw

that this longing to belong has nothing

to do with borders, but will always be about

being human, unless perhaps someday 

we regrow our gills and swim back home.

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.

Avian Immigration

Jan Seale

February 1, 2026

Other birds flit above us by twos and threes.

They are happy, heading for a local park or lake.

The red-crowned parrots notify us ahead of time.

They have a mission, as well as a tight schedule.

All day they will eat berries from an anaqua tree

in a Valley yard. They will spend the night in the USA.

Come dawn, they have their instructions:

Blitz through the border station.  Head south.

Do not ask permission. No papers or luggage.

Wear only your red crown, your brilliant green feathers.

Traveling in dozens, preferably in V’s, gossip all the way.

Remember to squawk:       “Keek     bereck      keek      keek.”

Jan Seale lives in deep South Texas.  She has authored nine poetry volumes as well as books in fiction, nonfiction, and children's literature.  She is the 2012 Texas Poet Laureate.

We Drive Past The Madisonville Buc-ee’s On Our Way To Denton

Justin Carter

February 1, 2026

We eschew the bright lights for something more primal—

an Exxon near Buffalo, the same one

that the Greyhound stopped that first winter

I was away: temporary migration

from the flatness of Ohio back

to the flatness of the coast—

two versions of the same thing,

two imperfect homes.

I used to sit on my grandmother’s back step

& watch a flock of birds

land amidst the cattle & fallen trees:

dark mass descending through the air.

If I believed in omens—

well, I tend to avoid speculation.

Now we hurtle back north in winter—

reverse trek to a college town

where we felt more right than anywhere else,

the beauty of being—for a while,

at least—a fixture in a revolving world,

old faces, new faces, new faces, new faces.

Justin Carter is the author of Brazos (Belle Point Press, 2024). He holds degrees from the University of Houston, Bowling Green State University, and the University of North Texas. Originally from the Texas Gulf Coast, Justin currently lives in Iowa and works as a sports writer and editor.

Patriotism: An Acrostic

Steve Wilson

February 1, 2026

Driving one last time this wasting, now-emotionless landscape

in West Texas. Even the miles of prickly pear cactus browned, wearied –

cowboys cursing the heat, the white-fire sun blinding them

to their leader’s daily cruelties, duplicities, complicities.

Arroyos parched to sand and ash by another long drought.

These many months with no rain, no escape from what’s ahead:

one angry advance into canyons framed fierce with chiseled 

rock – his trudge toward retribution. Come then, burn what will burn.

Steve Wilson's poetry has appeared in journals and anthologies nationwide, as well as in six collections, the most recent entitled Complicity (2023). His work has also appeared in a few Texas Poetry Assignments. He lives in San Marcos.