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2005 Edition
The 2005 edition of New Texas has just been published.
Excerpts
- from "Fairlane"
- from "Lightning"
- from "Hatchery"
- from "Above the Timberline"
- from "Snowdeaf"
from "Fairlane"
by Lisa Sandlin
Her marriage, her memories-lost, as she had known them. The house was for sale. She'd sold the television already, to the real estate broker who'd listed the house, that was easy, and the freezer to the neighbors, Earl and Velma Farmer. The bedroom sets from the extra rooms, the scarred bunk beds in the garage and the kid's old bikes, she'd advertised in The Green Sheet. Robert's fishing gear and his shotgun had gone to their son Phil; otherwise, she'd have advertised those, too. She'd promised the Whirlpool to a young mother down the street, as soon as the house was sold.
Almost there. Eliza looked up from the tray to see that the envelopes had disappeared, the drawer was replaced, there were two cigarette stubs in the jar cap, and the air of her living room, stale to begin with, was marbled with smoke. Mr. Red was rubbing his forehead, Widge grinning. She wondered if Widge was on hourly, Mr. Red on commission.
"Lookit, ma'am, when does your husband get home?"
Why didn't they know? What kind of backward company did they work for? The obituary had run for three days. Death records, even house listings, were more public than automobile contracts. Eliza found it easy to imagine that everyone knew, as well as her whole neighborhood and her church congregation and her two children and four grandchildren knew, that her husband was dead, that he'd spent most of his savings, mortgaged their house, that he'd lived for the last four years with two wives.
from "Lightning"
by Brandi Willis
Summer gold sprints across fields
of cinderbox sweet hay,
the air electric with approaching rain.
You stand on the porch
pointing to the south, and we become stones
listening to static whispers
of wind and wild weed,
grain against grain.
There is no fear here
except that of wildfires,
and I cannot explain
the troubled beauty
of your anxious figure
and that gold, gold grain
against a bruised sky.
Running to the tin-roof barn,
the clouds come stumbling,
and I climb to the peak,
untroubled and breathless,
and toss my prayers,
seeds to the sighing stalks, hoping
the wind will take them
wherever you are.
from "Hatchery"
by Stephen Graham Jones
Martin had once tried to shoot a fish he put in a barrel. The first two shots, through the rusted bottom of the barrel-55 gallon drum, really, one of his father's-would have drained it after a few hours, but Martin wasn't that patient: tracking the silver flash of the fish with his shotgun, following the fish up the side of the barrel, to the water's surface, he shot his best friend Grandy in the shin, turning his whole lower leg to tatters. As punishment, Martin's father made him wash Grandy's blood from the air-drowned, otherwise unharmed fish, cook it, then eat it for dinner. Martin was done long minutes before his father set his own fork down, said to him, "So you learn your lesson then?"
from "Above the Timberline"
by Catherine Rainwater
When I was a child and played outside through the long, summer afternoons, I'd sometimes pause to watch as shadows crept across the lawn. Before the sun disappeared behind the gangly palms and wispy mesquites that lined our yard, it flared up brightly for a moment; then darkling spaces lengthened, broadened, merged in twilight that seemed less an affair of the sky than a sleepy exhalation of the ground. Shadows trembled in the coastal breeze-gray, diaphanous spirits of things that ventured out to breathe as earth rolled away from the sun toward starlit space.
Such sudden changes in the light have always filled me with vague and groundless hope. They appear like signs in a wordless language-ancient, archaic, cellularly encoded-promising favorable transformations, as when crisp, dry air from the north arrives in fall to banish sweltery September. Even when I was only three or four, I recall exhilarating moments when fat, rain-swollen clouds suddenly blocked the sun, or when, at dawn, darkness lifted swiftly from the jetties like a drape drawn back from one of my mother's pearly pastel landscapes. In suspense you wait, your heart anticipating marvelous disclosures, but nothing comes. Night falls. Day arrives. Rain pours down. The seasons turn. The pulse resumes its ordinary cadence.
from "Snowdeaf"
by Jerry Bradley
Separated from the drove, the angus calf
cries all night, his mother dead he fears,
fallen in the snow somewhere
Shy of the warm lot and the hay-filled barn.
She does not answer his weakening call.
Even the young know the dead cannot return,
but still he bawls and bawls for the lost herd,
the other newborns, and the cozy udder,
afraid of the dark and its jagtooth eyes
harbored in the thicket of warm mesquites.
Stepping away from the drifting fence,
he measures the farm he has barely known,
sways as the wind whips the hardening flakes,
freezes the slobber to his chin,
his thin eyes frosting. The crystals click
like the second hand on a watch. This is a farm
without cemeteries, a place where the dead vanish.
Cattle trucks carry survivors to stockyards and
slaughterhouses,
and cow families split like thin ice, their plaintive
protests ignored by the idling motor,
the old bull roaring, the herd dog's bark.