"Welcome to Texas"
By Matt Smythe
Juxtaposed with an unlikely six-hour jazz session
on a straining, static and likely below-the-radar
bible-belt AM station, the featureless August midnight
blacktop and black backdrop beyond the headlights
on route 30 outside of Jonesborough
is a lonely straight-through stretch
from Little Rock to the Texas border. Just
southwest of Hope, the jazz struck
in some recess. Quiet, incessant, soft
saxbasspianocornettrumetsnare
lowing their mellow rap in my mind’s corner.
Playing to an empty club
save for the one man in the suit and loose tie,
eyes closed and harmonizing
with his thin rocks glass, and the sad woman
in the midnight-blue strapless.
Slow turn and sway and swish. Heels
on the empty dance floor. The road kept on.
Sunrise caught me somewhere
between Hope and the border
and I read the sign in its lone star largess, jazz
and dawn aching through.
The crazy riff of sage
and red-eyed 80 miles per hour.
Matt Smythe from the Finger Lakes region of western New York. An Army veteran and lifelong outdoorsman, Matt suffers from an inability to sit still. If he’s not in the woods, or on the water, he’s scheming ways to get there. His work has appeared in Free Range American, Gray’s Sporting Journal, the Fly Fish Journal, The Drake, Southern Culture on the Fly, Revive, Midcurrent, TROUT Magazine, and a handful of other non-outdoors-related magazines and literary journals. He recently published a book of poetry with Dead Reckoning Collective titled Revision of a Man.
Follow Matt’s blog, Glorious Mayhem here.
What’s happening at VetRep…
Now showing at The Parlor is “The Absurdity of it All” by Chris Soucy, a VetRep Resident Artist. Chris is an Army veteran, co-founder of Odd Lot Improv and the Savannah Shakes Theater Company, and has worked as an actor, puppeteer, writer, director, and filmmaker, with over 30 years of experience in the theater industry. We are thrilled to produce “The Absurdity of it All”, as the first full-length play written for VetRep by a Resident Artist, promising a truly unique performance you can’t get anywhere else. Get your tickets before they sell out!
We would also like to extend our gratitude to Arts Mid Hudson for awarding VetRep the Dutchess programmatic grant in support of this production.
This project is made possible with funds from the Statewide Community Regrants Program, a regrant program of the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature and administered by Arts Mid-Hudson.