With KATIE CORTESE
Your Name: Katie Cortese
Current City or Town: Lubbock, Texas
How Long Have You Lived here: 5 years
Three Words to Describe the Climate: Sunny, windy, dusty
Best time of the year to visit: Every season in Lubbock has its challenges, but I like it best in either May or September when everything is green and flowering, the hottest days are still either in front of us or past, and the wind is slightly less intense (though it never really goes away).
By SUSAN HARLAN
CORSICANA BRICK CO. So say the bricks, cut within an inch of their lives, and the wet leaves like beetles’ wings, caught in the cobbles. We are the bricks’ leaves, they say, under my feet.
The color of the leaves is the color of the rusty railroad spikes that I gathered in the rain. Illegally, it would seem. Property of the train company, I’m told – possessed by others.
By GAIL FOLKINS
Tesoro, a blood-bay quarter horse, galloped toward me across the fall grass. The temperature had dipped 25 degrees from a few hours before, the wind’s sharp whine outside the barn colder still. Weather changed that fast in Texas, locals using the expression blue norther to describe Arctic air charging from the north without stopping.
By CURTIS BAUER
Grackles foraging outside of a Whataburger near North Lake Park.
Soon enough the grackles will truth
the yard out back beneath the wires,
the sidewalk cracks, the live oak roots.
They will lose their dying feathers, now glossed
By CURTIS BAUER
There is a bend to everything.
Edges melt into curves like winter
and then spring, snow sways from
white to gray, powder to crust
and too many dialects make noise
Down around Port Arthur the tumbleweed, that mobile diaspore,
flings its seeds in a race with time, dying in a pool of rain or oil.
And what they have is a lot of sky and oil tanks coddling crude
and girls in much more underwear than they wear way up North.
Mining land is deeply scarred and raw, the gravel pits alien,
like lunar landscapes or the bank where Charon plies his trade.
The young ones necking in their cars, the ugly bars, showed you
the rocking road away from that stripped coastal town.
By KURT CASWELL
South of Hugo, Colorado on Highway 287, the land is wiped clean, the prairie grasses and flowers of spring cut to the root by cattle, their shining white teeth. Dung, dark stains on the land running the fencelines, remnants of progress, the way we produce meat in this country. It cannot have rained in many days. These hard-pan flats, the leading edge of the Great Plains east off the Rockies, turn a dust devil against the horizon to the south.
By GAIL FOLKINS
The white horse at the railing stood alone, saddled and loose with no rider on his back. I searched for a person in charge, someone holding the reins and hidden from view behind the horse, but the gelding in the outdoor riding arena faced the morning clouds by himself.
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