When the River Speaks

17/11/2025

TODAY'S POEM - Clutch by Trish Hopkinson

FROM THE POET - “This poem is intended to honor the messiness of transformation—what is relinquished, and the triumph of what endures. Inspired by my journey from raising young children to supporting them in adulthood, it reflects shifting family dynamics and coming to terms with my own upbringing. In this second half of life, I’ve learned to confront inherited trauma and celebrate the strength found in letting go. As family roles evolve, so too does the self—unclutched, reshaped, and resilient.”
—Trish Hopkinson

14/11/2025

LET'S WRITE - grab a pen/pencil and paper or your keyboard and let the creativity begin! If you like what you wrote, send it in
[email protected]

TODAY'S POETRY PROMPTS

1. art can be great inspiration - write about a particular work of art that you really like or really hated; describe it and how it makes you feel.

2. Imagine having a superpower - what is it? do you use it for good or evil? how has it changed your life?

3. Write about an animal or an insect that got into your home - how did it get in? who first discovered it? what type of havoc did it cause? how was it removed?

art credit: Katsushika Hokusai, Under the Wave off Kanagawa

13/11/2025

13/11/2025

TODAY'S POEM - The Poet by Mary Cornelia Hartshorne
ABOUT THE POET - Mary Cornelia Hartshorne, born circa 1910, was a poet of Choctaw descent. What is known of her work is published in The American Indian, a magazine for which she later served as a contributing editor of the poetry section. She died in 1980.

12/11/2025

Homecoming by Landis Grenville

One bridge and then another over the fisherman’s net
of steel water and high, secreting grasses.

Here the bare cypress trees throw themselves from the banks
like wailing women, their hands scraping at the sky’s silent faces
in the grey rags of Spanish moss.

This home is always shifting, the water reaching up to take
what it will. There are days I cannot find myself

between the steps of my parents’ home and the long sigh
of afternoon rain. Each time I leave

it is the last time. Time passes faster when I am not there
so now she does not know my face

and the house has sunk further into unkempt green.
How far can we carry memory before it is som**hing else?

How long can a man at sea call himself her husband
and not someone who is lost?

Between here and what’s not, I come, as all strangers,
to the door to wait for the stranger who answers.

A FEW WORDS FROM THE POET-“At times, life feels as marked by dislocation as it does by location. There is the home of where we have been and the home of where we are. And I have been thinking about the way time passes differently between them. To return to any one is to confront time as itself a figure there. Return is built on the knowledge of absence. I didn’t expect to find Odysseus at the end of this poem, but, of course, he is a man as at home at sea as he is on the island that claims him.”

11/11/2025

Not one more refugee death by Emmy Pérez, Texas Poet Laureate 2020

"A river killed a man I loved,
And I love that river still" —María Meléndez

1.
Thousands of fish killed after Pemex
spill in el Río Salado and everyone
runs out to buy more bottled water.
Here, our river kills more crossers
than the sun, than the singular

heat of Arizona, than the ranchlands
near the Falfurrias checkpoint.
It's hard to imagine an endangered
river with that much water, especially
in summer and with the Falcon Reservoir

in drought, though it only takes inches
to drown. Sometimes, further
west, there's too little river
to paddle in Boquillas Canyon
where there are no steel-column walls

to read the rest of the poem & others by Perez, visit
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/91472/not-one-more-refugee-death

10/11/2025

Congratulations to Diana Garcia, Harleigh McGowan, and E.D. Watson, WTRS team members who’ve all published books this fall! Check out their work and see what they’ve been up to besides making the zine!

10/11/2025

For Grandma Maria (who crossed over in 1910, at age 5, with her father, Teodoro Flores) by Demetria Martinez

Juarez, El Paso.
The border
did not swallow
you up
or sink
into your ankles
like fangs.
A train carried you over
the threshold
like a new bride.
No veil
made of razor wire.
Sunlight, brilliant.
Song of the train’s
whistle.
Young, brown,
innocent,
at the birth
of revolution,
history let you
cross with a wave
of the hand.

09/11/2025

Lowering Your Standards for Food Stamps
By Sheryl Luna

Words fall out of my coat pocket,
soak in bleach water. I touch everyone’s
dirty dollars. Maslow’s got everything on me.
Fourteen hours on my feet. No breaks.
No smokes or lunch. Blank-eyed movements:
trash bags, coffee burner, fingers numb.
I am hourly protestations and false smiles.
The clock clicks its slow slowing.
Faces blur in a stream of hurried soccer games,
sunlight, and church certainty. I have no
poem to carry, no material illusions.
Cola spilled on hands, so sticky fingered,
I’m far from poems. I’d write of politicians,
refineries, and a border’s barbed wire,
but I am unlearning America’s languages
with a mop. In a summer-hot red
polyester top, I sell lotto tickets. Cars wait for gas
billowing black. Killing time has new meaning.
A jackhammer breaks apart a life. The slow globe
spirals, and at night black space has me dizzy.
Visionaries off their meds and wacked out
m**h heads sing to me. A panicky fear of robbery
and humiliation drips with my sweat.
Words some say are weeping twilight and sunrise.
I am drawn to dramas, the couple arguing, the man
headbutting his wife in the parking lot.
911: no metered aubade, and nobody but
myself to blame.

08/11/2025

Cappuccino at the Marconi Hotel in Venice
By Max Garland

07/11/2025

This Sunday, come hear Mrs. Ofelia Vasquez Philo's life story as told by Diana Garcia, local teacher, Amiga of Centro and volunteer with When the River Speaks.

07/11/2025

Destiny by Rosario Castellanos

We kill that we love. The rest never lived.
No one is as close to us. No other is so hurt
by forgetfulness, absence, mere nothingness.
We kill that we love. Enough choking breath,
of breathing through another’s lungs!
The air is not enough
for both, nor the earth
for our bodies entwined.
Hope's ration is small
and sorrow cannot be shared.

Man is made of solitudes,
a deer in flight, bleeding,
pierced by an arrow.

Ah, but hatred,
its insomniac glare of glass:
repose and menace.

The deer lowers its head to drink,
discovers a tiger image in the water.
The deer drinks the water, the image. It becomes
before devoured (astonished accomplice)
equal to its enemy.

We give life only to what we hate.