Nights in Texas

by Annie Neugebauer

Trying to catch the lull
between August heat
and the far side of gloaming,
I tug weed after weed
from my garden.
They are bright green,
and I hold them in my
glove, shake them at the grass,
chastise: “See? Brown is out.
Green is in, and it can be done.”
But the grass, if anything,
seems to shrivel more
at my badgering, so I
dump the clump
into a plastic bucket
and work my way
deeper into the night,
remembering March,
remembering rain.

Annie Neugebauer is a short story author and nationally award-winning poet living in Texas. She’s had poetry published in the Texas Poetry Calendar by Dos Gatos Press, Wichita Falls Literature & Art Review, Eunoia Review, Adrent! Poetry, Versifico, the Poetry Society of Texas’s A Book of the Year and Voices de la Luna. She won second place in the 2011 Edwin M. Eakin Memorial Book Publication Award sponsored by the Poetry Society of Texas and has work appearing or forthcoming in The Spirit of Poe, Underneath the Juniper Tree, the British Fantasy Society journal Dark Horizons and the National Federation of State Poetry Societies’ prize anthology Encore. Neugebauer is also vice president of the Denton Poets’ Assembly as well as president of the North Branch Writers’ Critique Group.