At night, if you’re quiet, you can hear the campfires gossiping.
They laugh like javelinas at our episodic sleep.

Whooping cranes and blue herons, in February, litter Sundown Bay.
Save the wintering waders, the coastline is anemic.

It’s like living in a place where there are too many dogs—
this jammed choir of Camaros on the causeway to Mustang Island.

Last year on South Padre, six co-eds screamed to ash in a car fire.
The population ratio in Woodsboro is 92.6 males to every 100 females.

Once, in Matamoros, members of a satanic cult ate a few Americans.
We are each born with a patron demon to watch over us.

 

Scott Chalupa lives and writes in an attic apartment with doorjambs barely tall enough for head clearance. A winner of the Howard Moss Poetry Prize, he served on the nominating committee for the 2014/15 Houston Public Poetry series. He is currently pursuing an MFA in poetry at the University of South Carolina in Columbia. His work has appeared/is forthcoming in several venues, including Houston NPR, The Allegheny Review, Houston & Nomadic Voices, and Dark Matter.