Texas, May 1999

“Texas, May 1999” by Sylvia Fox is the second runner-up of the 2025 Nature Poetry Prize, selected by Aimee Nezhukumatathil. We’re honored to share this meditative poem with you.

Summer bruises over ghosts of bluebonnets I hardly know,
this so far south of pine shadows that birds’
southward migrations roosting overhead in winter
cast their little eyes on me where I lay low
by snake bellies and rabbits’ feet for luck.

Here I kiss the peach fuzz undersides of dandelion leaves,
of sharp-edged thistle for the tingle left behind,
my mouth a new land too with lemon-scented flowers
seeds and all, earth and ginger bitter middled summer
magnolias taste nothing like they smell.

And for all their chatter, not the birds who give me up
but roadside silent swaying cattle, tilted heads
angling bones round barbed wire, longhorns offering
their names as my father calls mine— the only way
to learn a place by mouth, to hear your name called out across its sunsets.