What’s worse than “biting the hand that feeds you” is ignoring it. Thanks UTSA, fraught with your timid Timothies and timorous Tabathas, for the utter dearth of submissions sent in this week. In a hermaphroditic manner akin to last week’s submission, I attempted to nurse you, with The Paisano as my breast, in an effort to nourish all you unmotivated poets and poetasters. I gave you fodder for your muses, and your muses burped it up.
I’d call you chicken, but I think the animal you resemble more closely is chronicled in the poem below. Remove your fetters of apprehension – your binds of caution. Be published! When you’re applying for your MFA at Brown in two or three years’ time, I don’t think it’d hurt to say, “Oh, by the way. Did I mention Will Sharp published me in oh-10?” (My name’s as ubiquitous and celebrated as Sinclair Lewis’s. Don’t hesitate to flaunt it).
But let my begging for submissions in no way discount the quality of the following poems. Mary Halfmann’s “Mrowl”, with lines rivaling Whitman’s in length, is a poem keenly aware of sounds and mortality. With this particular combination of aspects, I am reminded of Macbeth’s despairing toward the end of his play, “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,/ That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,/ And then is heard no more. It is a tale/ Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/ Signifying nothing.”
If my comparing kitty literature to Shakespeare is too reminiscent for you of Angela from The Office with her cats’ performances of the bard’s work, I’m only partially sorry. Mary earned it.
And after Mary, we’ve got Meagan Stallings with her “Heart of the Author.” Every poem needs a strong close, and this poem doesn’t miss on that opportunity. Let this be an example to the fearful among you who’ve failed to submit poems to end strong, close wittily and climax hard.


Mary Yatti Halfmann
Senior

“Mrowl”
(For my cat Stumpus)

I.

I saw the best felines of my generation enamored by deranged, pallid
     wrinkled faces,
dragging themselves through vapored corridors at dawn looking for a
     theta wave,
furheaded catsters purring for a neural heavenly acquaintance to the
     astral generator in the appliance of the dark,
who stimulated their roomies to positive neural messages vibrating
     from the brain and playing soothing  sounds of Thetadom.
who beggary and tailleur and bright-eyed and high sat up smoking
     paws in the supernatural darkness of dorm flats floating across the
     tops of respirations contemplating death,
who bared their alpha waves to Heaven under Francis of Assisi  and
     saw Hemingwayan angels staggering on tin roofs luminously,
who passed through corridors with narrow eyes imagining Spirits
     and Ghost-like passing among the has-beens of San Antonio.
who were released from the veterinarians for zany and marking urine
     codes on the doorways of the mayors.
who cowered outside forbidden rooms, mroweling to uniformed
     humans, and listening to the Dying through the wall.
who ate gizzards in Medicaid dorm or drank  Propylene glycol  in
     Blissful alley, death, or purgatoried their pussy’s night after night.
with REM, with Aricept, with screaming nightmares, whiskeyed
     milk, theta waves and endless pussys.
who yowled all night in subdued light of Morningside’s corridors
     floated out and sat through the stale air  afternoon in desolate
     catrooms, listening to the crack of doom on the Ariceptic jukebox,
who hid cigarettes in dumpsters dumpsters dumpsters shoveling
     litter through pine toward loathsome smells of grandmothers
     night,
who inhaled ghosts in dank dorms or snatched tunaoil in Trashcan
     Alley, or limboed their Patooters night after night
who disappeared into the laundry to lose tinker bells exchanging
     stethoscopes, labcoats, wristwatches,
with dreams, with drugs, with screaming nightmares, Catnip Pie and
     milk and endless salmon,
incomparable Oscar  nights of shuddering cloud and lightning in the
     mind leaping towards poles of Birth & Death, illuminating all the
     motionless world of Time between.



Meagan Stallings
Junior

“Heart of the Author”

Broken spirit
Shameful lies
Reckless soul
Tear stained
Desperate longing
For love divine
A shattered heart
Forever Mine

Delicate whispers
Dance about
Carefully I listen
Each word pronounced   
Guarded precision
Every syllable and sound
My heart is the author
I am its mouth