Tag: Thinking West
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This is West – Coral and Mesquite
“It’s not the same,” you remind her gently, still several dozen miles from your destination. Even though you can’t look at her, you can feel her eyes scanning the horizon, miles upon miles of sun-baked earth and yellow grass, mesquite bushes and cracked asphalt patched once, twice, a thousand times, the sealed lines spreading out with…
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This is West – Down Range
“I’m suffocating in all of this openness,” he said over a pecan beer and our favorite sugary sunrise. “Jerry, stop it. There’s plenty of room to breathe here.” We’d spent most of our savings on the move. On the truck we hadn’t needed in the city. On some specific sort of peace of mind. Quiet.…
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This is West – Light of the World
Look up, dear wanderer, dear withered man scorched brown by ten thousand rising suns. Look up over the wall of your mortality to the morning star that has finally stolen your life. Your ancestors worshiped the light of the world, wondered at the renewed blessings of illumination that wiped away the shadows from the face…
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This Is West – Red-Pepper Trailer
“There’s no magic here.” She said. Her hair was black ice, slippery shine. Her fat lips formed around the words as if she were praying to the god she couldn’t find again. She’d tried. Time and again, she’d tried. Bending knees never led her back to Mexico–the sharp incline of rock where her grandmother had…
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This Is West – Eyes for Living; Hands for Growing
Andrew stoops down to the snow-dusted earth and claws out a scoop of dirt into his hand. His four-year-old daughter Abigail, held with the other hand, watches him with searching eyes. She loves to watch her father move in his deliberate way, burly arms swinging beneath three layers of clothing in the new winter cold;…
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This Is West – Winter Nights
There is no stillness like winter nights on the plains, cold creeping through the cracks in the earth and the gaps around aged windows, chilling skin and bone even through layers as I stand just inside the screen door listening to the watery whisper of rain against concrete, chain-link, and dust. Nobody ventures outside these days.…
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This Is West – Not Mine
While I take a short break on my run I stand a few feet short of a barbed-wire fence, tumbleweeds stacked waist-high against the artificial barrier. For such an expansive landscape, Eastern New Mexico is ironically inaccessible. Frustratingly inaccessible. This must be how the cowboys felt way back when, the land shut off in front…
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This Is West – JJ’s Café
The coffee was stale already and the sun had barely risen. It was hot and the dry stuffiness of the diner made words thick and heavy. There was no time for nonsense in this kind of heat. The cowboy hats that sat erect across from one another with half-empty plates of hash browns and ketchup…
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This Is West – Railroad Crossing
Long, candy-cane-striped arms descend across the road in front Andrew, cherry-red lights flashing alternatively on the cautionary railroad crossing sign. “Damn it. God damn it.” Andrew will be late for his flight for sure now. He debates trying to beat the train across the tracks, but already knows he won’t do it. A train takes…
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This Is West – Wildflower Ranch
Dried rhubarb hangs from a small golden chain over a kitchen sink where his grandmother used to bathe him. “She thinks it keeps spirits away.” He says as he dips his grease-stained mechanic hands into soapy unfiltered water. He’s lived in this brown place all of his life. His grandfather helped lay the brick that…
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This Is West — The Exchange
Ours is a town of little oddities but this is by far the most perplexing event of my entire life. Because there, amidst the dead grass and dust I call my backyard, an unexplained can of meatless, dollar store chili is tumbling from one end of the fence to the next like it thinks it…
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The Approaching Deadline, Web Features, and Some Fun
It’s a little over three weeks until the submission deadline for El Portal‘s Spring 2016 issue. Prose, poetry, flash fiction, photography, and art are all welcome internationally, so be sure to submit your pieces in time for consideration! Deadline October 31st. For Terms of Submission: Click Here For Submission Guidelines: Click Here El Portal is also…
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El Portal is seeking submissions
We want stories and poems about West. West is a bullet-riddled ’85 Grand Marquis, a gleaming spaceship hovering over Roswell, a cowboy paying for latte with his Amex-card, an alien wondering where in the world to get the golden iPhone. West is where it hurts, West is the rattlesnake you didn’t hear, the dust storm…
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Thinking West: The West in Pictures
Check out the National Archives’ collection of pictures from the American West.
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Thinking West: Hunting West
In the mythic West, game the size of dinosaurs and mastodons roams the sun-parched land. This makes it incredibly difficult for those (new) western settlers from Eastern shores to obtain fresh meat. Thus, new settlers have needed to adapt their hunting techniques by seeking weapons only meant for the likes of Goliath.
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Thinking West: Have Gun — Will Travel (“Ballad of the Paladin”)
CBS’s Have Gun — Will Travel was a classic show about a mythical West, where gunslingers, bandits, and businessmen ruled the frontier–all brought to one’s television in crisp (4:9) black and white. The best part of the show had to be its closing theme music or ballad (“Ballad of the Paladin”) by Johnny Western. The…
El Portal Literary Journal 