Luling Oil

Jeffrey L. Taylor

July 6, 2025

Oil wells in Luling—
small but mighty,
bucking broncos,
rocking grasshoppers—
smell of oil
in the rearview mirror
before the animated
oil wells register.

Jeffrey L. Taylor is a retired Software Engineer.  Around 1990, poems started holding his sleep hostage.  He has been published in The Perch, California  Quarterly, Texas Poetry Calendar, and Texas Poetry Assignment.

Boom Times

Milton Jordan

July 6, 2025

Oil, boy, oil picked us up like a river 

at flood stage and we surged along

the current of it and rode the crest

of that river at high tide spitting

hands full of money with a common

disdain for every repeated warning.

We rode that surge into town and out

again to derricks in new fields

until the flow slid back to eddies

stagnant in backwater pools, boy, 

and we were factored out when

the bottom line was drawn above us.

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

On the Edge of the East Texas Field

Milton Jordan

July 6, 2025

We worked shares at the time, Daddy and my 

uncles, living along a graveled road,

two houses and two rooms attached to our 

one garage for uncle Clarence, now alone.

Evenings in uncle Doc’s larger kitchen

depending on two coal oil lamps the adults

spoke in muted voices of derricks rising

into view above the ridge to our east,

and if we might be due shares of a gusher

on the acres they’d farmed for fifteen years.

But bankers controlled that land west

of the ridge, held paper on everything

Daddy and Doc owned, and limited shares

to returns from cotton and corn.

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

Crude Revisions

Chris Ellery

July 6, 2025

Homer, sing your Siren as the humming power

of a guzzling engine, Charybdis as a deepwater rig 

spewing crude into the sea like Polyphemus 

vomiting wine and bits of men.

Dante, pilgrim, how in your darkest dreams

could you ever conceive for a circle of Hell

the flame-tipped towers, cauldrons, 

and serpentine pipes of Jamnagar and Houston? 

Won’t you come again on your bony horse, 

knight of la Mancha, and joust this time 

with dragon pumps and demon derricks to save 

the air and earth from the sorcery of Petromagus?

Dear William Blake, beloved master, may 

your dawn-eager angels come today, not for 

the sooty sweeps of industrial London, but for 

the ginzels and worms of the oil patch. 

Heȟáka Sápa, what did you see among the ones 

they slaughtered at Wounded Knee if not black rain 

falling on the graves of your grandfathers 

in a future of diesel and plastic?

Chris Ellery taught world literature at Angelo State University for 31 years before his retirement in 2021. Two of his maternal uncles were killed in separate oil field accidents. His most recent collection of poems is One Like Silence.