Robin Carstensen

April 2026 | nonfiction

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.

Michael Roberts, Featured Artist

April 2026 | visual art

Minimalist Complexity IV

Minimalist Complexity II

 

Michael C. Roberts

Michael C. Roberts is a retired pediatric psychologist and professor. He has digital and film photographs in Burningword, The Canary, The Storms, FERAL, Cholla Needles, Cantos, The Healing Muse, Cold Moon, Right Hand Pointing, Door is a Jar, Camas, Hindsight, Straylight, Thimble, Ponder, Closed Eye Open, Alchemy Spoon, 3rd Wednesday, The Right Words, Cardinal Sins, Human Obscura, Blue Mesa Review, The Word’s Faire, and elsewhere. In his recent photography, he has been exploring minimalism as projection and abstraction. The simplicity of minimalism reduces both nature and the human-made to their basics, revealing the essential beauty in structure and form. Although austere, these silhouetted images of nature allow the viewer to appreciate the world’s simple complexity and basic beauty.

Jane Hammons, Featured Author

April 2026 | poetry

Signal

 

Texas dawns humid

green anole at my feet skims

hot deck planks

 

pink dewlap

pulses orchid

throbs crimson

 

anole gutters

along downspout

adhesive toepads

cling

release

skitter

lust

out of view

in caliche cactus wood chip garden

 

When sun enough has ignited the sky

I call my mother in California

We laugh about how often we name upstairs

and down as recent destinations

Not beach or river downtown or lunch gym

84 she no longer drives; Covid she stays home

 

I order for both of

green anole toenail polish palette

Paint mine red    predictable

pad out to the deck          signal

 

Orchid my mother plants herself in the lupine bougainvillea

fuchsia gumweed garden at the cliff

Sea foam sketches the deserted beach

 

Blue whales

scoop krill

crack the Pacific surface

migrate south to Mexico

 

Jane Hammons

Jane Hammons taught writing for three decades at UC Berkeley, where she received a Distinguished Teaching Award. Upon retirement, she moved to Austin, Texas, for five years before returning home to New Mexico. Her writing appears in numerous journals and anthologies: Alaska Quarterly Review, Southwestern American Literature, The Main Street Rag, Yellow Medicine Review, Hint Fiction, (Norton), The EastOver Anthology of Rural Writers of Color, 2023 and 2024, The Maternal is Political (Seal Press), and Selected Memories, (Hippocampus Books). She enjoys photography as part of her writing practice, and three of her photographs are included in Taking It To the Streets: A Visual History of Protest and Demonstration, an exhibition of the Austin History Center. She is an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation.