Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

On a flight to Kansas City just before the most recent Super Bowl, the pilot taunted Chiefs football fans. Just before takeoff, he donned his Dallas Cowboys baseball cap. In jest, he claimed, despite not having made it to the Superbowl, his team still carried the banner as “America’s Team.” Half the plane booed. He announced those who booed could remove their seat cushions and sit on iron the entire flight. The whole cabin laughed.

Texas often takes it on the chin. I, too, once decried the second largest American state maybe because my Eagles often lost big games to the Cowboys. My appreciation for Texas has grown over the years. A work trip to Austin gave me a chance to experience firsthand Tejano culture, Texas barbecue, and the city’s famed music scene. Some years later, the good people at Inprint, a literary non-profit organization in Houston, brought me out for a poetry reading. During downtime, I discovered the art in The Menil Collection and Rothko’s Chapel. I nearly missed my event, staring long at Cy Twombly’s Untitled (Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor).

Films deepened my appreciation for Texas, too. John Sayles’ murder mystery, Lone Star, offered a window into race relations, as did Giant, starring James Dean, as well as the brilliant volume of poetry that speaks back to the classic film, Scenes from the Movie Giant by Tino Villanueva.

Yet, what sealed my love for Texas was learning about Juneteenth, a celebration of the end of slavery that began in Texas a century-and-a-half ago.

They say “everything is bigger in Texas,” which led to the well-known dig “All hat and no ranch.” Texas-raised friend of The Slowdown Jason Schneiderman riffs off this famed putdown in his poem “Americana,” writing: “You’re all New York and no city,” …“You’re all margin and no center.”

Today’s poem celebrates and illuminates the complicated cultural attitudes of the “larger than life” state once written as the “mirror in which Americans see themselves.”

Ode to the Lone Star State
by Jubi Arriola-Headley

                  after Greg Abbott

For me it’s more than portion sizes; love
tastes best when it’s deep-fried. Someone said
once love is lard and I believe them. Pickles
and Twinkies subjected to the same God-
damned transmutation. The triumph of oil
in all things. In Texas if you ask for your 
steak well-done they’ll smile all the while
they burn it on purpose. To teach you.
Boo you if you can’t take a joke—the Texas 
state flag includes a single white star floating
on a regiment of blue, perpendicular to two
Texas-sized lies. I mean lines. Bravery, purity:
a cross-section of the national group-think
blown up to Texas-sized distortions. Everyone
knows Texas neighbors are the politest, even 
the ones would shiv you in church or
in the halls of the state Capitol. Texas
folk can always spare a good morning
or a how ya doin’ while walking the dog
or shopping for ammunition. The Texas heat
is disconnected from the rest of the grid.
Our survival instincts tell us when to show ‘em,
when to fold our faith into a gush of mustered
thoughts and prayers. The triumph of I in all things.

“Ode to the Lone Star State” by Jubi Arriola-Headley from BOUND © 2024 Jubi Arriola-Headley. Used by permission of Persea Books.