Preemptive Elegy for a Texan Friend

Roy Carpenter

November 2, 2025

How will his horses react

the first day he does not come

to stroke their long noses?

Their sloping necks will sweep low

not to graze but to mourn.

And though I’ve never been, I know

the ranch will be veiled in meshed shadows

cast compassionately by a wide Texas sun.

Friends’ souls will be in drought

among an unending blanching of bones –

such an immeasurable dryness,

so many souls

wind-blown over arid ground.

His song is a tilt of the heart:

when death absconded with his dearest,

I am sure he was polite.

He must have held her hand

as she climbed into the dark carriage,

taken a solemn pose to watch it

cross the arid plain.

And when the day comes that ends days

his horses’ necks will bend low

not to graze but to mourn.

I was one point on a wind-swept circle

of which he was the center.

We intersected where we had to –

the inevitable unravelling of the divine equation,

allusions to infinite love.

But when continents and oceans no longer lie between –

when God’s compass is folded again –

then we will meet and know what they mean.

I will have known him

as a traveler from Austin

whom ceremony did not accompany.

He came alone.

He held my hand and prayed once,

he said it was time to come home.

His greatness was his heart

and is still so for now.

But when it is stilled,

the strong, distraught

necks will bow down,

veiled by a wide sun,

prayers riding in on Comanche winds.

And he will beg leave

to take back his dearest again

and listen to the heart-songs

echoing back his way.

I will not know when it happens,

but his horses will carry the emptiness,

shifting restlessly against his absence

where the long grass is worn

and prayerful winds move in slowly –

and horses bow their strong necks lowly

not to graze but to mourn.

Roy Carpenter is (unbelievably) paid to pontificate about international relations, environmental management and the theology of Jonathan Edwards, but he prefers studying the baroque guitar and playing the banjo.  He does this in France, though he would prefer to do it in the Hudson River valley, where he comes from.

Love’s Lookout

Suzanne Morris

November 2, 2025

We always meant to visit

Love’s Lookout

from the time we retired

and moved up here.

Less than an hour from home,

driving north toward Tyler

and we’d heard the view

was spectacular

that you could see clearly

for miles.

Next time we’ll stop

we used to say

as we passed the off-ramp

to the narrow county road

beckoning upward

through a thicket of pine trees.

But there was always so much

to be done in Tyler–

from doctor appointments

to grocery shopping– 

so before we knew it,

we had run out of time

and besides, coming back, 

the off-ramp was on

the wrong side of the highway.

Maybe next time we’re 

headed that way, we often said

as the off-ramp disappeared

in the rearview mirror.

Before we knew it, years went by, then

one autumn day we agreed

never mind the inconvenience, 

we’d stop there on the way home

from your appointment

at the medical center

to stretch our legs and

take a breath of fresh air

once we knew for sure that

you were going to be fine.

We always meant to visit

Love’s Lookout

whenever we had time.

We’d heard the view was

spectacular

that you could see clearly

for miles.

Suzanne Morris is a novelist and a poet.  She and Asher, the dog, continue to reside in the home in Cherokee County, Texas, that Suzanne and her husband built in 2008.  Her husband passed away in 2023.  Since then, he has been the inspiration for many of her poems.

Along the Way

John Milkereit

October 5, 2025

1.            

What does it matter to cross an ocean?

The struggle of living can hide in a tomb

while I’m gone. To fly over the Alps

with baggage, awake, fastened in 

the little shell of a seat. I’m green,

a pistachio.

2.

Grin on street stones

under white wisped blue

sky, behind the heavy door,

a hallway and marble flights 

of stairs in silence, solid.

3.

Kumquats yellow in a tree. Did dreamers 

secure future romances to blossom 

forever? Young love in flux.

Fastened padlocks around a streetlamp

on the oldest bridge spanning the Tiber. 

I thought of my fractured architecture. 

The marine pines stand, imposing.

Was this Mussolini’s robust outlook?

4.

Romans accept summer early, 

pedal bikes. Spiral down to 

exit a labyrinth, or so I thought, 

but then entering the dark sphere inside

my outside peeled off. A cracked 

sculpture.

5.

In Ostia Antica, the mosquito grass 

acts like a sentry for cobbled benches 

without disturbing the other grass. 

Ally of sedges and cattails at the train station.

I want a soft brush to clean my ventricles 

and synapses. I feel unwashed.

6.

Pink geraniums flourish in clay troughs, 

Petals in the catacombs—memos 

to my psyche. A bright patio. I know 

my dirt will not stay ruined. 

I will return as beautiful as before. 

7.

The gray-green sea glistens, mature skin,

rippling, a curtain hiding what’s underneath.

Rescue boats arrive and then do not. Herculaneum.

Emergency’s long gown becomes carbonated wood.

8.

Volcanic stone path, red poppies 

sprout—gentle voices, mosaic 

diaries steam out, a bath house.

Don’t worry tonight, Pompeii.

White bits of limestone 

embed the road home.

9.

A girl is pushing a pink stroller 

in Terni, near a fountain. 

She leans over the ledge as if 

for a baptism, a mirror.

10.

Poets stay at La Romita birthing

poems. Inside the sheep pen, 

two newborns arrive and rest in hay.

No escape from the mattress-spring

gates. Under olive trees, cut wood

in small piles is ready to burn.

11.

In Spoleto, a cat shades 

under a white van. Then prances 

ahead as if to say, follow me, 

I’m the priestess of this church. 

Enter. Confess. Forgive. 

12.

Listen to a droning organ concert 

or 

unfurl a paper scrap 

to win a miniature nativity scene (cut 

under a pine arch, splotched snow, ceramic 

gold star, white tea candle).

Which trinket is the better deal?

13.

A sparrow lands, cheep-cheep-cheeps

from the window ledge.

The world yearns 

beyond the cypress. 

Awaken. It’s morning. Again.

John Milkereit lives in Houston, Texas, working as a mechanical engineer. He has completed an M.F.A. in Creative Writing at the Rainier Writing Workshop. His poems have appeared in literary journals such as The Ekphrastic Review and The Comstock Review. His fifth collection of poems is forthcoming from Kelsay Books.

Angkor Wat Siem Reap Cambodia

Sandi Stromberg

September 7, 2025

I even love the monstrous roots

of ancient trees straddling temple walls, their tentacles 

clinging to sandstone. Carved faces

of gods look down on me, waiting, as they have

over centuries, for offerings—rice and pineapple,

clinking coins. In this land of harsh jungles,

a hot wind blows dust. Across the pond,

pink and white lotus sway. 

Beside the water, under fluttering scarves, 

stall-keepers sit on their haunches, birds 

with folded wings. A position of long endurance 

and patience unknown to me.

Three monks pad up narrow stone steps, 

four more pass through hallways, 

ignoring voluptuous apsaras dancing in bas reliefs. 

The pedestals of stone nagas, their menacing cobra heads, 

send shivers through my body. No matter 

their semi-deity status, their myths—

dragons of water, bringers of rain, 

linkers of sky and earth with their rainbows. 

A snake is still a snake. It’s no wonder 

they were worshipped. Don’t most religions

compose prayers to placate fears?

At sunset, elephants plod the steep hill 

carrying tourists to a temple and its view. 

A cacophony of voices fills the air, 

a Babel of languages as cicadas sing. 

Then, as sun touches the horizon, 

the jungle falls silent. Hush. Elephants

kneel as though in prayer, awaiting

the star’s descent. In its afterglow, 

my mind fills with the soft sibilants 

of Sanskrit—sacred, enduring, mysterious. 

Sandi Stromberg lives in Houston, Texas, after 20 years as an expatriate. Widely published in small journals, she has been nominated four times for a Pushcart Prize, twice for Best of the Net, and was a juried poet in the Houston Poetry Fest eleven times. Her poetry collection Frogs Don’t Sing Red was released by Kelsay Books in 2023. Her second collection will be released in early 2026. She is an editor at The Ekphrastic Review and guest edited two volumes of poetry: Untameable City: Poems on the Nature of Houston and Echoes of the Cordillera with Lucy Griffith.

Out of Your Way

Milton Jordan

August 3, 2025

You will notice on your highway road map

the route through our town is not the shortest

distance between the two points people choose

to visit traveling through our high traffic state.

We’ve always been out of the way people

who mostly get in one another’s way

and seldom drive the shortest route.

Some of our sisters and a brother or two

found other roads in their atlas inviting

and drove away to points that tourists visit,

cities with larger dots on those roadways

whose names sound much more familiar, but you

might drive down that winding road that tracks

the river and curves into town some miles

out of your way and some years behind your style.

Milton Jordan, native to the area, prefers to drive East Texas back roads on his trip to Paris, rather than prepaid airfare and lodging travels to the European version.

Sunset Prayer at the Citadel of Aleppo

Chris Ellery

August 3, 2025

If you want to feel how heavy history is, 

meet me and Nasruddin at the Citadel. 

Stand in the keep and contemplate the mass 

of the darkness forgetting you. Measure 

the arrow slits high in the battlements, and fly 

on the arc of a shaft to your enemy’s heart. 

Excavate your bones from the bloody ground, 

and rise among the corpses below the walls 

to see the mullah on his knees looking for

a missing key. Inquire among the passers-by 

if anyone among them has seen a key. 

Ask first the men, bunched like arrows in a quiver

leading their women, then ask their heaven-eyed 

wives hanging behind in clusters on vines 

of coming night. Not finding mullah’s key, 

for you will find no key at the Citadel, 

counterclockwise circumambulate 

the tell. Passing cafe and coffeehouse, 

notice the games of backgammon and chess, 

observe the players, how they hold the hose 

of the hookah pipe while moving their knight 

or rolling the dice. Hear in their speech and laughter  

the ancient, undying delight in conquest 

and slaughter. Keep on walking. Do not try 

to count the stones in the bridge. Recall 

with every step how centuries of sacrifice 

and siege could never breach the Citadel. 

Stop where and when Nasruddin stops, 

and buy boiled corn from a cheerful vendor. 

Savor the sun and rain still in the grain. 

Savor the flavor of the soil of al-Sham, 

where men first learned to farm the earth. 

Smile for the gift of friends, Nasruddin and me,

and smile that we left the key at home,

and smile that there never was a key, 

and, showing your teeth like grain in the ear, 

chuckle at the kernels in mullah’s beard,

as every Aleppo minaret entreats 

the faith again to evening prayers. Listen. 

See the slaves of God unfurl their rugs.

You want to feel how heavy history is. 

The heaviness of history is the heft of those prayers. 

Chris Ellery is the author of The Big Mosque of Mercy, poems based on his experience as a Fulbright teacher/scholar in Syria. His most recent collection is One Like Silence. 

Driving Lessons

Vincent Hostak

August 3, 2025

Children, 

I will teach you an escape plan 

from the Exquisite Boredom of Travel by Car

How there is always a way around coercion

Meet Child-Mind, the Trickster,

Your Forever Friend.

We learned Morse Code 

when commanded to go dumb for just one half-hour

our feet tapped upon opposing backseat windows: 

‘Are…we…there…yet?”

“For…THIS…we…get…ice...cream?”

Listen, these are important skills

I took the wheel once and

it’s good to know that you take yours’

Up here

the destination’s never clearly in-view

It’s outside your control, but

you can count the telephone poles piercing the sky,

let your eyes glide along the wires caging the clouds

Free them!

Spy swallows guarding a nest behind a billboard

they’re antagonizing a Red-Tailed Hawk, master poacher.

You may be a swallow someday. You’ll meet poachers.

There’s a reason we have no rear-view mirror in the back.

I-10’s the endless ribbon you were warned about,

spans the wide shoulders of the state, runs dawn to dusk.

It must end; it runs out of ground. There are no counties in the ocean.

After Van Horn we reverse the clock (“THAT...makes…NO…sense”)

Later,

You can take the curves too swiftly,

mutter warnings, consequences for behavior

“Don’t…MAKE…me…stop…the…Car”

But this one is true:

when recording the plates from other states fails you

see a fortress of scrub-speckled-mesas near Junction

the Southeast declining behind you, West inclining ahead

It’s a gravy-soaked landscape

Paper Fortune Teller says:

There’s Chicken Fried Steak in your immediate future.

It’s counterintuitive: how you may never tire of this.

I might today, but you should never tire of this.

You have the wheel.

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.

Preserved in Amber

Betsy Joseph

August 3, 2025

Disappointed that Becky’s Seafood restaurant was closed for the season

and we had missed the chance to try her legendary lobster roll,

we continued down the county road back toward Bar Harbor,

idly passing and glancing at New England clapboard homes.

I leaned forward peering at a soft yellow saltbox just on the right,

my attention divided between two sights:

the sign announcing “The Clutter Shop” in large block letters

and the older woman sitting alone on the narrow porch.

The sign spoke truthfully, for clutter of all kinds

lounged lazily in haphazard positions on patches of grass,

contents indiscriminate from my viewpoint.

My focus, as we drew alongside the shuttered saltbox,

then drifted to its probable owner.

She seemed unaware of anything but the end of September sun,

tilting her face to receive its benevolent warmth,

knowing it would become all the more rare

as the calendar ticked along, as the last of the wild Maine berries

were raked from the bushes, soon destined for freezer or jam.

What would become of the scattered clutter, I wondered,

then supposed these idle items would rejoin

their assorted and mismatched kinfolk indoors. 

My thoughts returned to the woman unmoved, 

eyes closed in wistful repose, face still reaching for the sun,

wishing perhaps that summer could be harnessed

and time preserved in golden amber

while knowing that temperatures of twenty below

loomed as a certainty in the months ahead

as they predictably did most years in this place

where she chose to reside with her many treasures.

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.

Icelandic Moon Walk

Chip Dameron

July 6, 2025

Drive off the Ring Road

in a Super Jeep outfitted

with massive tires and weave

across a rocky lava field

dotted with clumps of moss.

Ease onto a black glacier,

darkened from volcanic ash,

and wander across its surface,

rough and rumpled from eons

of eruptions. Look closely,

and you might get a glimpse

of a snow-white Arctic fox.

It’s not surprising that NASA

sent dozens of astronauts here

sixty years ago to prepare

for landings on the moon.

The lava fields and glaciers

simulate the moon’s volcanic

conditions much better than

anywhere else on the planet.

One wonders if Neil Armstrong

found a patch of fluffy thick moss,

lay down, and dreamed about

taking the first step on the moon.

Chip Dameron’s latest book, Relatively Speaking, is a shared collection with Betsy Joseph. A member of the Texas Institute of Letters, he’s also been a Dobie Paisano fellow.