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Author: Kaylee Lowe

Rio Grande

Written by Kaylee Lowe. Posted in Poetry.

This ground has always been cruel:


the way plate collided
with plate 36 million years ago,
the way heat then bubbled up.
The result? Volcanoes, hot springs,
minerals, the Rio Grande.


Or the way Luis Carvajal
raided the Rio Grande in 1582,
capturing hundreds
of Indians, selling them
as slaves to Mexican haciendas.


Or the way an 18-pound cannon
ball carved out Thornton’s
chest in 1846, the result
of a skirmish at the Rio Grande,
the year that Polk
declared war on Mexico.


Or the way 15 Mexican males
were rounded up in Porvenir,
a city on the banks
of the Rio Grande, then shot
by Texas Rangers in 1918.


Or the way Gov. Abbott
traveled to the Rio Grande,
signed into law S.B. 4,
allowing arrests
since 2023 of anyone
suspected of illegal entry.

Yes, this ground has always been cruel.

Yelping Bar 342

Written by Kaylee Lowe. Posted in Poetry.

If you leave a message that means anything,
I promise I’ll call you. Here’s proof:
It was imperative that I return Ren’s purse
that she left looped to the chairback at the bar last night
when she got blackout drunk.
I texted her three times before realizing
the phone that I was texting was in the purse I held.
So I began the inverse of the long walk
I’d taken home to retrieve my car
to leave the purse with the day bartender
since I had no way of contacting Ren
and I imagined her first move would be
to call up to the bar to see if anyone
had found a purse the night before.
Jimmy, the owner, had bought me that last shot
of Canadian Club, raised his glass, and said,
“One for the ditch,” but if I made
one good decision last night without endorsing
some lax notion of free will, it was because
I didn’t know I’d hear the Edsel Ford
marching band’s bass drum, snares, and brass
over the din of traffic on Outer Drive this morning
with the west wind at my back.
If this is pep—banal, monosyllabic, metaphysical—
I’ll un-stopper it and put it in my step
before kicking fallen sugar maple leaves.
That school’s namesake takes a belt
of Cutty Sark for how woefully he’s been
forgotten and composes a letter to James Couzens
with fountain pen by lamplight.
If, like Ford and Couzens, I had a freeway
named after me, if it were a ’38 Lincoln Zephyr
I was retrieving, my car with its silly domed roof
and balding tires and my friend Ren
wouldn’t be in the Bar 342 parking lot
when I walked up, and there would be more
to do than wait for the door
of that windowless cinderblock building to open.