Alanreed

Janelle Curlin-Taylor

April 14, 2024

“Where are your people from?” she inquired,

her voice as arched and pointed as that left eyebrow.

Twenty years in California had softened

my flat Panhandle accent. Was I really a Texas native?

“Alanreed,” I said nervously.

“Never heard of it” she announced.

“Get the Atlas.”

The Atlas, close as a kleenex box in spring

emerged from the side of the couch.

Alanreed:

Site of the oldest cemetery on Highway 66.

550 souls, including my young uncle

died of pneumonia.  Grandpa made him

fetch in the chickens in an afternoon rainstorm.

He was already sick.

Grandpa was a Victorian poet

admiring Emerson, given to prolonged trips to Austin

for books and dapper attire,

Justice of the Peace, dry land farmer

house full of children, frightened and often hungry.

What drew this prolific Texas poet to Alanreed

from his birthplace in Salado?

Did poetry gush from the pristine spring

that flowed into the springtank, giving the town its early name?

Was there poetry for both eye and tongue encased

in the ruby flesh of each watermelon plucked from the fields,

500 car loads a year down the Choctaw, Oklahoma, and Texas tracks.

Alanreed, home to the Gouge Eye Saloon.

Choctaw and Comanche once hunted buffalo here

life shattered by muskets in the 1880s.

10,000 years ago a forest – now petrified.

Alanreed: population 23.

Janelle Curlin-Taylor, a Texas poet living in Tennessee, inherited the poetry gene from her grandfather and her mother. Published in various Texas journals and anthologies, she is grateful for Texas Poetry Assignment for keeping Texas and poetry close.  She is married to California poet Jeffrey Taylor.

Old Harrisburg

Suzanne Morris

March 31, 2024

The once bustling town,

seat of the

Republic of Texas

leaves a dusty footprint in

the WPA American Guide Series–

Houston edition–

which is how I first

became aware of Harrisburg

as a place distinct

from its surroundings

even though I had spent

my childhood Sundays

in the pews of

Holy Cross Episcopal

nearby the railroad tracks

on Medina Street,

had passed by the

ghostly double galleries

of the once grand Milby house

gone to seed on Broadway,

and stolen nervous glances

toward Glendale Cemetery

where vandals crept among

the moss-bearded oaks

to spray paint the

monuments of

once-prominent

families.

By then the name Harrisburg

survived as a

boulevard running through

East End

in the hulking shadow

of the Houston Ship Channel

rather than the center of commerce

at the juncture of

Buffalo and Bray’s bayous

dreamed into being by its founders

a decade before the  town

that would one day overtake it,

as Houston, fluffed up with

moxie and swagger,

seems to eventually overtake

everything lying

just beyond its reach.

Suzanne Morris is a novelist with eight published works, and a poet.  Her poems have appeared in The Texas Poetry Assignment, The New Verse News, Stone Poetry Quarterly, and other online journals and anthologies.  A native of Houston, Ms. Morris now resides in Cherokee County, Texas.

In Retrospect: Epiphany in Wimberley

Betsy Joseph

March 24, 2024

In the second year of the Virus

we craved brief refuge from home

and silent neighborhood,

seeking safe weekend shelter

during that early Spring.

On the outskirts of Wimberley,

small central Texas town,

we read, hiked, enjoyed serene sunsets,

much thankful for the short reprieve

that lightened our hearts.

We masked in public places

as we had been doing the past year

protecting both others and ourselves,

all in the spirit of fairness and common sense.

And all went smoothly until it didn’t 

when visiting shops in the village,

planning to bring them some commerce.

What I construed as a strange remark

by one maskless shopkeeper—

that he did not appreciate patrons

who remained masked in his store—

escalated quickly when I did not comply.

All in a matter of seconds, it seemed.

Not offering a choice in the matter,

no, none at all, he continued to rail

as I remained stunned and masked.

I put back the item that had caught my eye,

turned back one last time in case he was jesting

(then saw clearly he wasn’t),

and quickly departed the scene.

I did take something from the store

that springtime morning after all:

a broader view of the infection

which this virus had wrought

that had morphed into anger and fear.

Betsy Joseph lives in Dallas and has poems that have appeared in several journals and anthologies. She is the author of two poetry books published by Lamar University Literary Press: Only So Many Autumns (2019) and most recently, Relatively Speaking (2022), a collaborative collection with her brother, poet Chip Dameron.

The Ghosts of Sherwood

Chip Dameron

March 24, 2024

Not the ancient royal forest

of fabled Nottinghamshire

but the first county seat

of Irion County, 28 miles

southwest of San Angelo,

now unincorporated, now

for all intents and purposes

a West Texas ghost town.

Once a bustling hamlet

and birthplace of my father,

my grandmother, and home

to her pioneering parents,

sheepman Jeff Mills and wife 

Ida, birth mother of twelve.

When Big Lake’s oil boom hit,

Dad’s family headed west.

Sherwood began its decline

in the early 1900s when

the railroad bypassed town

by two miles and made

Mertzon its next destination.

Today Sherwood’s courthouse

still stands, but not much else

for the few folks around.

Several miles north, nearly 

700 people lie at rest,

their gravestones dotting

the Sherwood Cemetery.

Just inside the entrance

sits a windmill, its creak

a product of the dry breeze

that scours the landscape.

Perhaps at night the ghosts 

of Jeff and Ida, along with

other Millses and Damerons,

wander over to Spring Creek

or down to the courthouse,

revisiting the past or looking

for the ones who departed

and have never come back.

Chip Dameron’s most recent book is Relatively Speaking: Poems of Person and Place, which combines a collection of his poems with a collection by poet Betsy Joseph. He is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters and a former Dobie Paisano Fellow.

Coming into Castroville

Vincent Hostak

March 10, 2024

In the 1840’s, the “Republic of Texas” was in debt and sought aid, even from Europe.  In 1842, a French banker, Henri Castro, paid to settle a colony west of San Antonio.  He relocated families from the French province of Alsace to the town, each attracted by rumors of greater freedom in Castroville.

The whirring through a failing rubber seal

on the passenger window of our old Toyota

is the road whispering the old meanings of things:

This is not the Pan-American Highway,

those are not freight liners headed for Kansas.

It is the Shawnee Trail to Sedalia,

those clay-dusted cattle, their wildness has been nearly erased.

It is the Camino Real,

those are the Spanish chasing away the French.

This is the trail of the Coahuiltecan from the south,

gasping as they vanish along with their old names.

Coming into Castroville from San Antonio,

you listen for the old meanings of things,

knowing there is always something older to be heard,

like, this is not Texas, it is Little Alsace,

that is not a house, it’s a half-timbered haus.

This haus wears a wood frame on its plaster sleeve,

flanked in the patterns that Roman roads make,

like those over the Field of Mars,

diamond-shaped boundaries that divided

a world once named Everything, 

that belonged to Everyone.

Many roads lead to confusion.

So, we stop to eat and drink.

Our forks heavy with Coq au Vin,

we take too many sips of Gewürztraminer, 

not sweet, which is to say not German,

not dry, which is to say not French.

We are drawn to the flow of the Medina River

to watch a Green Kingfisher, fixed to a limestone cay,

scanning for lunch in rapids below a bald cypress.

We are drawn to make a late day’s harvest of sleep,

to dream a parade of the old meanings of things.

Vincent Hostak is a poet, essayist, and media producer. He’s held long-time residences in Austin and Colorado, where he’s also worked in documentary and network television/film production.  His poetry may be found in the print journals Sonder Midwest (#5)/Illinois, The Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas, and the 2022/2023 anthology Lone Star Poetry: Championing Texas Verse, Community and Hunger Relief. He is currently appointed to the 2024 editorial team at Asymptote, an international journal dedicated to the art of English language translations of contemporary world literature.  He’s a two-time Summer Scholar at Naropa University’s Summer Writing Program, directed by Anne Waldman.

Baytown

Milton Jordan

February 25, 2024

We arrived in June five months after

two towns and that unincorporated

settlement farther up the Channel

merged after a clamor over names,

diehard townies holding out for their own,

but neither Goose Creek nor Pelly expressed

the proper image of progress.

The rescued community of boomers

gathered around the refinery gate,

welcomed the prospect of good pay

but cared little for naming the place,

simply shrugged when theirs was chosen,

and those towns’ names appear now on tee shirts

stubborn residents wear for Old Timers Days.

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

Windom

Thomas Hemminger

February 25, 2024

The Cotton Belt Route

lies drowsily along side

the two-lane Texas highway

measuring the distance between 

the “Five-Mile Cities.” 

Near to the one that’s mine,  

a monumental water tower

and set of grain silos are situated 

where the tracks had room to switch, 

back when they still needed switching. 

Just down main street from there, 

arrayed in yesteryear’s beauty, is

the old bank, the city hall, a laid-back country buffet, 

and the perfect park for any Fourth of July party.

“A Small Town with a Big Heart,” we say. 

Right south of Windom is our family farm,

where anyone can see how the town earned its name

as the uninhibited wind sweeps across

golden acres of lengthening hay,

and the country birds sail across the open sky.

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.