How High’s the Sky at Night in Beaumont, Texas

Jesse Doiron

October 15, 2023

Daddy told me that the sky at night –  

in Texas – is higher than the sun. 

He says it gets to be as far away as  

Lost Causes, and that’s about as far  

away as you can get from Beaumont  

‘cause it ain’t even really in the state. 

He says it gets to be so high up there 

you can’t even see it from down here, 

not even from that big ol’ red hotel  

downtown that no one ever lives in. 

He says the world’s got to go ‘round 

and around and around and ‘round 

and count to a hundred before the sky  

comes back down to ground, and only 

then can the sun crawl on top again  

and start to shine like new, like now. 

He says the whole dang thing gets all  

swallowed up in God’s good gullet, and he  

won’t let it out until the morning when he  

gets up and has to go do holy number two. 

He says if you was to try and follow up 

behind the sky all the way it goes ever’  

night, you’d meet your own behind  

and you could kiss that thing goodbye  

‘cause you’d be good and dead and gone 

for good just like poor ol’ Uncle Son. 

And.  

So there you go. 

That’s how high the sky is – at night  

– in Beaumont, Texas. 

Jesse Doiron has worked in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia as an educator and consultant. His teaching experience ranges from English for international business at the UC – Berkeley Extension in San Francisco to creative writing at the Mark Stiles Maximum Security Prison for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.

East Texas Serenade

Thomas Hemminger

October 8, 2023

We have a nighttime choir 

that sings for us down on the farm. 

On a clear night, they’ll start up 

just after dark. 

When we’ve had our supper, we’ll 

take a seat in a front porch rocker, 

as they’re probably just warming up. 

We settle in, and 

chat about the day. 

A prelude of evening bats

squeak around the sky,

swooping and snatching. 

Then, the main performance begins. 

It starts with a solo, then a duet. 

Soon, a chorus of coyotes are 

shouting in the lunar spotlight. 

We speculate about their subject matter. 

A fine hunt. A stranger in the air. 

Who really knows? 

Deep down, I think 

they’re just happy.

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.

I Dream of All Their Tender News (A Nocturne)

Vincent Hostak

September 10, 2023

Just before day and dusk align

Southern cicadas grow rhapsodic

I curl up beneath the chorus center,

sleep lightly in taut tall grass

Among the earth-forged pickets

which won’t surrender to the heat

I dream of all their tender news:

Coming light from north of west,

Scuttling nearness of the fox,

Savory sips from a greening pond,

Petrichor from dry-baked soil

When I awake the sun is always down

and the news is only about love.

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.

writing the stars

Lou Ella Hickman

September 3, 2023

night       no moon

  in an unknown season  

why i was in our pasture

no clue

but i was there

a child

with such mystery of memory

        above me

an infinity of black silk and stars

       the beginning 

my first poem

                       with the unfolding of hunger

                      for night and stars

Sister Lou Ella Hickman, I.W.B.S. is a former teacher and librarian whose writings have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies. Press 53 published her first book of poetry in 2015 entitled she: robed and wordless. She was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2017 and in 2020.  

That Night in the Davis Mountains

Kathryn Jones

August 27, 2023

Do you remember that long road trip we made 

to the Davis Mountains the year Hale-Bopp 

streaked close to Earth and across the Texas sky? 

The comet would not come this close again

for two thousand years. It was once in a lifetime.

Back then we’d never heard of Alzheimer’s; 

all of our memories lay ahead of us

like the craggy blue mountains on the horizon. 

We drove for ten hours, pulled into the state park

north of Fort Davis, got our permit from the ranger,

pitched our little dome tent by a dry creek. 

At dusk collared peccaries roamed the campground, 

rustling dry grass with their hooves, 

searching for food with their small tusks. 

After setting our watches for 4:30 a.m.,

we crawled into the tent, anxious, waiting.  

At the beep-beep-beep, we unzipped the tent, 

bolted out, aimed our binoculars up at the heavens.

There it was, a fuzzy silver head with twin tails,

one blue, one white, visible with the naked eye

even in the moonlight. When I looked down, 

I saw an even more astounding sight –

a herd of deer sleeping around our tent. 

They looked up at us with wonder in their eyes. 

Many years later, I am the keeper of memory. 

Soon you will forget even that night in the Davis Mountains;

It will fade like an old photograph in an album.

But the images stay fixed in my mind – the blue-silver comet, 

the glittering Texas sky, the deer sleeping next to us, 

protected in the park, content in the peace of simply being, 

not fearing the unknown, not afraid of forgetting 

what it was like to remember.

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.

Woman in the Dark and Light

Suzanne Morris

August 20, 2023

–after Edward Hopper’s 1927 painting, “Automat”

Mama was an Edward Hopper painting.

I know the artist was thinking of her

in that time of long ago

when women were

new in the workforce

and starting to go out alone

at night, too,

the woman all to herself

in the automat

late at night, having a cup of coffee,

wearing hat, coat and gloves, and

a closed look

that would ward off any threat

of intrusion

the bright discs of overhead lights

reflecting off the big plate glass window

looking out on the deserted street

behind her.

I know he followed Mama

into the dark night

when she snuck through her bedroom window

wearing red high heels and a string of pearls

headed for the bright lights of

the nearest East Texas town,

followed her still, when she was a

single working woman

clerking at the W. T. Grant store

in Houston,

saving from her weekly check

to pay on the

newest fashions she’d

put in layaway

dreams enfolded in clouds of

tissue paper;

followed her even to where she

eventually wound up,

a wife and mother of two

loading the wash at the laundromat

nearby on Telephone Road

late at night when

no one else was there,

machines coin-operated like food slots

in the automat where

you had to bring your nickels

to open the little doors

coins jangling in Mama’s pockets

under the bright lights above,

the round glass dryer doors

an audience of eyes

looking out at her

Hopper etching the man in Night Shadows

walking alone

up the middle of the dark

deserted street 

past those big plate glass windows

like the peeping Toms

we always knew were lurking

somewhere out there.

Suzanne Morris is a novelist and poet.  She has contributed to several poetry anthologies, including Lone Star Poetry (Kallisto Gaia Press, 2022).  Her poems have appeared as well in The Texas Poetry Assignment, The New Verse News, Stone Poetry Quarterly, The Pine Cone Review, and Emblazoned Soul Review.  A native Texan, Ms. Morris resides in Cherokee County.

Another Stifling Night

Ulia Trylowsky

August 13, 2023

Past endless dinner conversation that ends abruptly, 

long after her last glass of wine, she opens the door 

to a gust of hot air, smelling of sickly sweet flowers 

in overgrown grass.

Why is it so damned stifling?

He talks of celestial events, wants her to join him, to look 

up at the sky. He thinks it’s romantic. She strains her neck;

sweat runs down her back. Who cares about stars and moons 

and cosmic dust?

Why is it so damned stifling?

In bed, she listens to the rattle of the fan. She thinks, 

“We need more air.” He moves closer, but she retreats 

from the touch. Blame it on the warming of the planet,

but then again – it’s been like this.

Why is it so damned stifling?

Ulia Trylowsky is a transplanted Ukrainian-Canadian who has lived in Southeast Texas for over 25 years.  While she struggled to accustom herself to the unique qualities of the region, she now calls it home and, until the war in Ukraine, found herself to be quite a happy person.

Highway Nights

Milton Jordan

August 6, 2023

Oncoming traffic forced by unexpected 

construction into our lane for two miles

left us waiting past dusk for the pilot car

to lead us slowly through November’s darkness 

and you, nicely, refrained from comment 

on my attraction to old highways.

We saw only isolated farmhouse lights

through thin curtain kitchen windows along 

the narrow Shelby County roadside 

and a limited distance down the road,

but found our favorite City Diner

open late in Center where we ate 

and called Mother to explain our delayed 

arrival well beyond being any help 

preparing tomorrow’s big dinner.

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

Nightsong, September

Amy L. Greenspan

July 30, 2023

Not until midnight does September heat 

yield to the breeze that swings my hammock.

Above me, the rustle of sycamore leaves,

thirsty and dark against moon-washed sky – 

a song of longing, a wishful refrain.

A distant train lends a rhythmic hum

to the music of wind-stirred branches.

A scatter of stars dancing in sync

taps miniscule beats on a cloudless stage. 

In this singing darkness, I start to believe

in sun that’s gentle, in skies that rain,

in summers that end, seasons that finally change.

Amy L. Greenspan spent most of her career in legal publishing. Amy’s poems have appeared in a number of collections, including Weaving the Terrain: 100-Word Southwestern Poems; Lifting the Sky: Southwestern Haiku and Haiga; multiple editions of the Texas Poetry Calendar; Texas Poetry Assignment; di-verse-city; cattails; and Haiku Presence.

Night Travel Through West Texas

Jeanie Sanders

July 23, 2023

You are on a straight West Texas road

going somewhere late at night.

The stars seem so close and bright that 

as you go over the next hill you

think they might be laying on the highway.

Like the Universe fell from the sky

to light your way to some exceptional place.

No jackrabbit dashes into your headlights.

No coyote’s reflective golden eyes shine.

The remoteness of any life makes you

feel solidarity.  Music crackles in and out 

over the radio.  Jumping in static from 

evangelical to Western swing.  Abruptly,

as though he were traveling with you,

a mariachi singer’s soulful song of love

comes over the airwaves.  You don’t need

to know all the words to know his is a sad love

as plaintively and soothingly “mi amore” is sung out

breathlessly circling the stars.

The evangelist fights his way onto the radio again

telling you in a deep drawl by what means

you can be saved.  Proclaiming, even though you

are on a road traveling miles from grace, that

you can still send that love offering and

receive a free vial of water from the River Jordan.

Two very diverse appeals to the heart.

The full moon rises in the middle of the curved road

as alive and round as though it had the capacity to

suddenly bounce down the highway. As under its

reflecting light you move into an early

West Texas morning.

Jeanie Sanders is a poet and collage artist. She lives in Lytle, Texas. Her poems have been published in The Texas Observer, San Antonio Express-News, Texas Poetry Calendar, Passager, La Voz de Esperanza, and several anthologies. She has two books of poetry, The Book of the Dead: Poems and Photographs and The Dispossessed.

Taking Out the Trash

John Rutherford

July 23, 2023

Ninety degrees at eight PM,

and I’m taking out the trash,

the window’s slick with condensation,

the cats are hiding in the bath.

I wear long sleeves year-round,

thought I was used to Texas heat,

but ninety degrees at eight PM

has really got me beat.

I’m thirty-one and can’t remember

a summer hot as this, grass brown

and dead in July, even before the 5th,

ninety degrees at eight PM, what gives?

I lug the bags out to the dumpster,

the moon-glow shining off the creek,

a kingfisher takes his dinner, sweat beads on my cheek,

ninety degrees at eight PM, ain’t this a treat?

John Rutherford works in the English Department at Lamar University. His work can be found in the Concho River Review and The Basilisk Tree.