Log Book. Camp Mystic, Kerrville, Texas. Northern Hemisphere, Planet Earth
Texas lawmakers failed to pass a bill to improve local disaster
warning systems this year. . . Texas Tribune. July 6, 2025.
July 10th, 2025—173 children still missing along the Guadalupe River, Texas Hill Country:
We bet on our chances down to the last community card we call the river, playing Texas Hold’ Em. We spoke in a hush how the nature of any river is to rise if there be a notion to rise, and we watched on TV how the Guadalupe rose up and ravaged everything—the clouds just pouring out a beast. No warning shot or godly thought for us, the parents hobbled, waiting and crouched by their phones for a word. Cabins and trees in flood alley washed away, hands grasping edges, branches, rocks, and then there was us the next morning, the next night still alive in our usual aliveness but clinging to our crosses and submerged in our minds with the children, clawing with them to breathe, rise from the cresting water, keep their heads above for god’s sake as long as they could, for god’s sake may the legion of angels have lifted their souls out of their blameless bodies before the hypoxia strangled, before those of us left behind warbling the cosmos wracked our senses to make it make sense, to find redemption for our gods and our savage governance—no emergency alerts, no disaster response; sirens drowned in the fellowship halls and house bills of mammon. Is it all on us, every loss for Christ’s sake, isn’t there a trail to the highlands of some verdant loveliness? For holy sake, bring us a map and compass, a chance to behold, all the missing children blossoming from the Guadalupe to Gaza to Iran to Sudan and the sons of Russia sent to slaughter. There’s got to be a path, a second chance, a field the children are playing on, their wizard hats and healing balm flashing under the moon, is this what they chose to do for the sake of us, for our unfolding consciousness, once upon a time before time and Camp Mystic, then to the river, then to the radiant fields of lantana where they must be, must, they must have.
Robin Carstensen
Robin Carstensen’s work is recently published in RiverSedge and many more. Club Plum Lit also recently published and nominated her flash for a Pushcart Prize, 2024. Her chapbook In the Temple of Shining Mercy won first-place and was published by Iron Horse Literary Press, 2017. She is the senior executive co-founding editor for The Windward Review, now in Volume 24.
