
Texas Portrait
A Portrait of the Poet as a Young Pediatrician
Vincent Hostak
July 6, 2025
for William Carlos Williams
You could live a second lifetime
in the Meadowlands
filling your lungs with damp air,
marveling at a glowing bog-bean flower
loitering under the towering reeds
But, only as long as you were unbothered
by the busy details around you:
clouds of gnats, odors rising
from the slow hot simmer of fallen leaves
or the uninvited, open-throated howl
of mowers along the turnpike.
A young doctor
has little time to lose himself in the marsh,
to map the entirety of the small countries
toiling in dust shed by cattails.
Instead, he sees minute hospitals in the shoals
where no birth is accidental
and how a nightcrawlers’ severed parts
might be reunited by tiny surgeons
He sees a bee’s wing in need of repair
His large, soft hands, he knows,
would be far too clumsy for the task.
Hears the crackling call of an ibis
recalling the pediatric ward’s cranky intercom
which dropped consonants from his name
Witnessing spoonbills stiffly roosting
with their beaks, those long forceps
sweeping the shallows, pinching out minnows.
Everywhere in this soup something is hard at work,
an exotic world is close at hand
Everywhere, a detail to be remembered
even after the stroke
When the walks grew few to none,
Flossie read to him for hours
When he struggled to speak,
his tongue drummed words against his teeth
A lotus stranded in a drying pool, still blooms
A cloak of tadpoles quivering on a frog’s back
soon cling to parrot-feathered weeds
waiting until the world needs their voices.
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 and produces the podcast: Crossings: the Refugee Experience in America.
Rita at 60
Darby Riley
July 6, 2025
slim and civilized,
can make even cold lima beans
taste good:
likes to celebrate
decorate
dress up like a witch.
Good friend:
she’ll place her 7 foot
cardboard cutout of
Albert Einstein next
to your hospital bed
to scare the doctors
and nurses at 3 a.m.
Good neighbor:
she’ll call you
from the Farmer’s Market
to get what you need.
Good lady:
a Golden Rule
planet-saver
community builder
lover of art and culture
devoted to her husband
and to all dogs and cats.
Slim, civilized
in a bright colored outfit
with matching shoes.
Darby Riley is a lawyer and Sierra Club volunteer in San Antonio. He has hosted a monthly poetry writing workshop since 1992. His poems have been published in several anthologies, including Lone Star Poetry, and several local publications, including the San Antonio Express-News, La Voz de Esperanza, and Voices de la Luna.
Stavros: A Good Shepherd
Betsy Joseph
June 8, 2025
The rocky climb to the Acropolis is long and steep,
the pitch of the return descent posing challenges of its own.
Even walking streets of cobblestone ancient and well-trodden,
uneven stones so worn they have become slick as marble,
even these surfaces can present unexpected danger
to the most confident of travelers.
Through our headsets Stavros shepherds us,
his voice even and strong.
Three small words our guide intones, three brief syllables:
“Mind your steps.”
They become our mantra, unwavering and reliable,
like a steady arm to lean on.
At times the mantra shifts to a warning:
“Mind your belongings”
or, sometimes,
“Mind your head”—
all good cautionary advice.
Never does Stavros instruct us to mind our p’s and q’s
for we are grown-ups and generally well-behaved.
In odd moments even now
his protective voice still echoes in my ear
from a place 2,500 years and 6,000 miles away,
and I further contemplate.
Surely if I continue to mind my steps,
then my steps will remind me.
I feel sure Stavros would agree.
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.
When First We Met
Suzanne Morris
June 8, 2025
you made away with my heart
and though I chased after you
for more than sixty years
I never could retrieve it.
When first we met,
you popped a pal’s bare butt
with a towel
in the boys’ gym locker room
then made away
ramming your toes into a
big metal garbage can
you didn’t know
was there.
I fell for a boy on crutches.
When first we met,
you owned a gold cable-knit sweater
that I took on loan to wear
so I could hold your
charged warmth
against my breast
when you weren’t there.
When first we met you said
you loved me more than
I loved you.
Maybe it was so;
you were always
running ahead.
Now that death has
stopped you cold
I’m back to
where we started:
holding all you
were to me
against my breast
chasing after
memories of that time
when first we met.
Novelist and poet Suzanne Morris married J.C. Morris, her high school sweetheart, in 1963. Both native Houstonians, the couple moved to Cherokee County in 2008, where Ms. Morris continues to reside. Mr. Morris passed away in 2023.
Demographics
Milton Jordan
June 8, 2025
Bettina Corrales, our colleague
in Sociology and Social Work,
scattered the printouts and fact sheets
from her developing dissertation
project analyzing Texas population
patterns from the seven census counts
since the Second World War across two
long tables in our crowded office,
seeking somehow to detail the changing
profile of our state’s typical citizen:
race and gender, age and birthplace,
employment and family status;
surprisingly, save for her employment
outside the hourly-wage labor force,
Bettina fit the profile perfectly.
Milton Jordan lives with Anne in Georgetown, Texas. He co-edited the first Texas Poetry Assignment anthology, Lone Star Poetry, Kallisto Gaia Press, 2022.
Cinquain Playful Portraits
Irene Keller
June 8, 2025
Happy
building Lego
cities of bright colors
speedy problem-solver she is
-Ava-
Cheerful
pages to see
watercolored stories
of fun adventures she creates
-Addy-
Irene Keller enjoys listening to poetry, reading poetry, participating in poetry groups, and playing with language in hopes of creating poetic melodies.
Cutlines for a Photo of Famine
Chris Ellery
June 8, 2025
“Palestinians in Gaza were still waiting for aid to arrive, U.N. officials said,
two days after the Israeli government said it had lifted
an 11-week-old blockade that has brought the Palestinian
enclave to the brink of famine.”
Reuters, 21 May 2025
Shown here arriving in the Gaza Strip
the bastard child of Strife. At once both male
and female, old and young. Incarnate want,
a shriveled chickpea, sad and dry. Privation
inside a dusty hide stretched tight and stitched
onto a scaffolding of sticks. Where its shadow
falls between the sun and life, the vines
will not require more pruning, gardens fail,
and fattened flocks flee to the winter hills.
Insatiable vultures fly away in disgust
from its pitiful ribs—more meat on a greasy rag,
more protein in a warlord’s mercy. No
sane country wishes for this vagabond,
less loved than Pharaoh’s vermin, more despised
than all the well-fed mice of his granaries.
Hate is its invitation, and when it comes,
it comes to stay. It forages burned fields.
It reaps the rubble of cities bombed and razed.
It feasts from the larder of deathcamps.
It makes its bed in waiting graves. Too weak
to wail, it stares at pity as at unreal bread.
Unlike a lost, emaciated cat or dog,
some starving stray, kindness will not make
it stay, and feeding it drives it away.
Chris Ellery is the author of The Big Mosque of Mercy, a collection of poems based on travels in the Middle East, including Israel and Palestine. His essay "A Boy of Bethany" received the X.J. Kennedy Award for Creative Nonfiction.