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Hill Country Galleria
The kestrel tilting on the wire
surveys the hundred-acre site
that just last winter was the field
that fueled her lilting falcon flight.
She watches rock saws slicing trenches
and dozers climbing piles of dirt
three stories high, toppling gigantic
boulders--each a buffalo's girth.
The grass is gone.
(Flocks of sparrows.)
Soil, gone.
(Mice, their burrows.)
She's living on the brink
of locally extinct.
Robert A. Ayres
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Ayres in Austin
at
a Dos Gatos Press
reading
at BookPeople.
This
is Ayres' Third
appearance in a
Texas Poetry Calendar. Ayres,
of Austin, has had poems appear recently in Iron Horse, Laurel Review, Marlboro Review, and Rattle.
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West Texas Rite of Passage
Night's changes make brittle bones
even at sixteen. Tumbleweed fences
tear tissue from bones, cuticles ruffle
like the corners of well-loved books. Sixteen,
always forgetting gloves. Face half-striped
from relentless sun beating
with its golden hammer, a bandana
guarding nose and mouth leaves those parts pale.
The test: to bring one more live out of crazy #27,
a spook cow so wild she'd blow snot in your pocket
as she chased you over the corral fence.
Ribs stretched wide now, she's too old
to damage much desert, too old to domino alone.
Wrap the calving chains neat, and wench 'em
to pommel and horse. When she pushes,
crank like hell. That slick calf, a dark tadpole,
darts out, at once sprouting legs. Blood thumps
out of that cow making muddy slush
and she falls, shaking the ground.
Granddad waits at the barn, hands shoved in jeans,
shoulders hunched against the chill.
"Morning, Biggun," I holler.
"Hey there, sweet girl. How's my sidekick?
How'd you do?"
"A squirmy black-faced lepe.
But the cow--
Well, I lost the meat--no freezer.
Here's the hide."
Solana DeLámant
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DeLámant in Dallas
at
a Dos Gatos Press
reading
at Half Price Books.
This
is DeLámant's second appearance in a
Texas Poetry Calendar. DeLámant,
of Dallas, is published in the U.S. and abroad, and she is currently
working on translating poems of several contemporary Mexican women
poets.
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Wintering
It
snowed last night--
crystals
floating
down
a white-aired silence
enveloped the bones of trees,
swept a trail of tortured groiund
to the rusted harrows
of an old John Deere
sowing iron,
wanting
to ravish one last acre.
Oscar Peña
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Peña in
Houston
at
a Dos Gatos Press
reading
at the Blue Willow Book Shop.
This
is Peña's second
appearance in a
Texas Poetry Calendar. Peña,
of League City, was a juried poet at the 2007 Houston Poetry
Fest. He has poems in the Rio
Grande International Poetry Festival Anthology.
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My Husband
Says I Smell Like
a cross between
mesquite barbeque and a telephone pole,
from this waxy herbal ointment on my arm--
a recent skirmish with a spiky yucca plant having left me
with the angry red souvenir of a rash.
It's a Texas thing, I write to a friend in the northeast,
in confessing my somewhat nostalgic addiction to this
slightly disgusting, but strangely familiar scent.
He admits not knowing much about mesquite,
"But what is it with you and creosote?"
He says they no longer put it on phone poles,
it runs off into the drainage
and makes the frogs "grow extra things."
I can't explain it, ticking off the label's ingredients:
tallow, pine tar, olive oil, chickweed.
This pungent memory must live under a rock,
somewhere in that reptilian part of my brain,
where it recognized its own and has crawled out,
sniffing.
Martha K. Grant
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Grant in San
Antonio
at
a Dos Gatos Press
reading
at the Twig Book Shop.
This
is Grant's second appearance in a
Texas Poetry Calendar. Grant, of Boerne, with poems in such
journals as New
Texas, California
State Quarterly, and others. is the
author of three poetry chapbooks.
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Blue
Norther
Winter
of '79 I fainted.
I remember walking
into an Amarillo 7-Eleven
out of a wind chill of five degrees
and snow blowing sideways
through barbed wire fences.
The heat inside the store
rushed my head like a cattle train.
I felt it coming and tried to sit
on a case of Texaco motor oil
but tumble-weeded head first
onto the concrete floor.
I woke up sprawled
as flat on my back as a hippie
high on Colombian redbud.
Strangers leaned over me,
wind-beaten West Texas faces
scrunched in concern. "You think
we should call an ambulance?"
"No," I shook my head
as a cowboy pulled me to my feet.
"It's just the flu," I lied
and hurried out the door.
That was thirty years ago
and I've remained
too embarrassed to visit
Amarillo again.
Travis Blair
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Blair in Dallas
at
a Dos Gatos Press
reading
at Half-Price Books.
This
is Blair's First
appearance in a
Texas Poetry Calendar. Blair,
of Arlington, is the author of Train to Chihuahua and
has published in numberous small journals.
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In the Land
of the Urban Cowboy
Row after row of
pickup trucks
cover the asphalt lot,
some with gun racks, bumper stickers
declaring their owners' love
for Darleen, Jimmie Sue or Verdanell.
It's Friday night at Gilley's,
pay day.
Through wide doors past the ID check
a warm-up band is playing for couples
two-stepping round and round and round again.
Her left hand hooks to his belt loop,
his right hand locks onto her shoulder
as boots sweep the floor with soft, swishy sounds.
Fiddlers crank it up for the Cotton-Eyed
Joe;
lines form on the dance floor.
The regulars are here,
wandering in from nearby plants;
the smell of the paper mill
lingers on their clothes.
Reaching for a cold one and a cue stick,
they'll play a game or two or three
before heading home
to the waiting wife and kids,
paycheck partly gone.
Kay Cox
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Cox in Houston
at
a Dos Gatos Press
reading
at the Blue Willow Book Shop.
This
is Cox's first appearance in a
Texas Poetry Calendar. Cox, of Seabrook, is published in the
anthologies Tapestries and
Crossings
and conducts creative writing workshops in the U.S. and abroad.
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Dos
Gatos Press
1310
Crestwood Road
Austin,
Texas 78722
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