No Place Like Texola
Poetry by Ryan Clark
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Poetry by Ryan Clark. Abandonment, sense of place, ghost towns, & those who stay behind.
No Place Like Texola
for Texola, Oklahoma (population 40)
There’s no other place
like this place
anywhere near this place
so this must be the place.1
Texola winged it over and into the letters of the Texas-Oklahoma border,
a supply of room to the two states as forms, a wing each sign could retain.
Is the town a sidewalk or a curb,
and which survives the ruined root of US 66.
A crack is a line forging its emptiness in a surface stayed too long unneeded,
as a building will let its surface stay too long among weedlawn,
among ancient highways touching a route.
This is a way to call home historic,
to shut the eyes I-40 removed as bypass.
Time makes us ghost towns, though the road housed us as it could,
shone us as a jewel of bar dust full of wood and metal light.
Bypass the cemetery still only half-full,
& the forty who stay
to add their lines inside the fence mounting the hill
outside the wreath of fairly located bricks
and cars itching the grass.
A passing is a labor with engine.
1 Message written on the side of the last remaining bar in Texola, which had at one point been known informally as “Beerola” for the town’s once-large number of bars, being just over the state line from a dry county in Texas.
For the visually impaired or those using TTS reading aids: this is the end of the poem.
Ryan Clark is a documentary poet who writes his poems using a unique method of homophonic translation. He is the author of Arizona SB 1070: An Act (Downstate Legacies) and How I Pitched the First Curve (Lit Fest Press), as well as the chapbook Suppose / a Presence (Action, Spectacle). His poetry has appeared in such journals as Diagram, Copper Nickel, Cherry Tree, and The Offing. A native of Old Greer County, Texas, he now lives in North Carolina with his partner and cats.
Header Credit: Gorup de Besanez, Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International, cropped
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