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.