J. Fox Bedford: Wild Mares

~ amarillobay

“Wonder whatever became of Jack Destry?” Raylene took a sip of her sweet tea and rattled the ice cubes before she tossed her head back and drained the glass. Her long, thick silver braid snagged on the pink climbing rose threatening to take over the glider.

“Ow!”

“What’s wrong now?” Franny asked. “Is it these dadgum hornets?” She swatted at a red hornet, then reflexively ducked in case it swooped back to exact vengeance.

“Oh, nothin’. My hair just snagged on this old rose bush. It sure looks sorry. Why don’t you get to trimmin’ it one of these days?” Raylene asked.

“Like I don’t have enough to do around here as it is, what with . . .”

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Jill Jepson: Manzanita

~ amarillobay

“There was a bear here,” Dyman said. “It was pregnant, and afraid.”

He had driven Raylee into Del Puerto Canyon, the windows down, their hair wild in the hot wind. The fields of alfalfa and beans lay in brown and green squares. On the eastern horizon, the Sierra Nevada rose white-peaked against the blue sky.

Raylee was nervous at first about accepting Dyman’s invitation. He was new in town. She’d only met him a couple of times for Cokes and fries at the A&W. But when he looked at her with those blue eyes, and said, How about you and me take a ride? she couldn’t resist. She climbed into his old Chevy pickup eager for adventure.

They’d headed west into the rolling hills that lay along the border of the town. Dyman had stopped to buy two bottles of beer on the way. The beers hissed as he opened them with a bottle opener from the glove box. He handed Raylee one and put one between his legs as he drove. They were bitter and cold. The radio in the pickup didn’t work, but Dyman had a transistor radio, and Raylee held it up so they could catch KFIV in Modesto on and off. They drove several miles into the canyon before Dyman pulled over by a dry creek bed.

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Robert Wexelblatt: Petite Suite Non Résolue

~ amarillobay

1. Drame Amoureux de la Salle D’Audience.  Sarabande en ut-mineur pour piano et hautbois silencieux – frustrant, plein de suspense, épuisant, fastidieuse, et goûtant comme une dacquoise rance

On May 15 of last year, at four in the afternoon, Officers Desiderio, a veteran, and Verlock who had only a year on the job, responded to a call from woman reporting her son’s erratic behavior.  “She said her son is twenty-three and mentally challenged,” said the dispatcher.  “And unarmed.  I asked.”

When the officers arrived, they found a man on the lawn walking rapidly back and forth, alternately mumbling to himself and yelling at a woman near the open front door who was wringing her hands.  These were Ryan McKenna and his mother Vera. 

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Jeff Nazzaro: Cape Cod Songs

~ amarillobay

“Caldwell’s or Carney’s?” his mother called out, and Tim wondered why because they had only ever gone to Carney’s. But that didn’t bother him so much as the way she had pronounced “Carney’s,” tearing hard into the “r” like a newscaster on one of the Boston TV stations you knew wasn’t from here. He’d never noticed that from his mother before. No one—Tim or his older sister, Gina, from the back, their father, up front—answered what Tim took to be an odd rhetorical question implying choice. They never went to Caldwell’s. Without another word his mother pulled into Carney’s parking lot, maneuvering the minivan in a wide arc and backing it into the shadow cast by the giant lobster pot perched atop the sign advertising the restaurant.

They had first spent a couple of hours at Salisbury Beach and were now just over the New Hampshire line in Seabrook for lunch, the family, minus only the youngest, Molly, who was gallivanting around Europe with her new boyfriend. She’d been practically living with girlfriends and later boyfriends since junior high, and none of them blamed her, rather they marveled at her independence, envying her ability to set her own terms and stick to them. The rest of them were living under the same roof again: the father back from the West Coast and out of McLean Hospital, where heʼd been treated for major depression and anorexia nervosa; Gina back from a very short marriage that had lured her down to Florida; Tim back from the brink of alcoholic self-destruction. Only the mother came from the same steady place, the suburban home she had carved out at the bottom of a cul-de-sac, watching as everyone around her crumbled. She admitted them as needed into separate wards constructed on her personal terms, patched them up, and rallied everyone together for one more Fourth of July barbecue, Thanksgiving dinner, Christmas Eve gift exchange. One more trip to the beach.

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Eugene Datta: The World I See

~ amarillobay 
The rolling, tinkling sound is gossamer-
thin – rising and falling, stopping and starting 
 
like a child who’s just learned how to walk. 
Sitting at one end of the wide sunlit yard, I spot 
 
the source: a rough-edged disk of aluminum 
foil sent cartwheeling by the spring breeze –  
 
each new gust lifting it up and carrying it further 
away, making its ring wane a little thread 
 
of pings at a time. What I see is how my mind 
looks: it is the world I see. Looking closer, 
 
I notice a foraging ant turn into an unmoving 
spot on a brick-shaped cement tile as brightly 
 
sunlit as the rest of the place: my son, whose 
unintentional footstep caused the transformation, 
 
the end of the movement, continues playing, 
unawares. If he had noticed, he’d have paused, 
 
taken a close look at the stillness and the texture 
of the spot and pondered over its difference 
 
from what it was moments ago. A gossamer-
thin pang of remorse might have shot through 
 
his heart. I didn’t mean to…, he’d have said 
to me, hoping I’d believe him. Though there’s 
 
a world out there, where I can sit in the sun, 
watch and hear a disk of aluminum foil being 
 
blown about by the wind, witness the accidental 
end of an insect’s life, what I see is the fruit 
 
of my mind, just as a dream is: a bit of what 
it looks like now is a blemish on the cement tile, 
 
containing a one-tenth-of-a-cubic-millimeter 
ant brain, one-third the size of a grain of salt,
 
with 250,000 neurons mashed into exoskeleton, 
eyes, antennae, mandibles, the tinkle erased 
 
by the wind. In this world (& there are more 
than 5000 worlds outside the solar system) it’s now 
 
time to go home: my son asks how much longer 
he has to wait for his sister; he’s hungry.

For more on Eugene Datta, please see our Authors page.

Glenn Wright: Fall in Anchorage

~ amarillobay 
Home is where we anchor our lives,
the place to which our hearts return
when in wild storms our sails are torn,
when we need to be held by our dearest loves.

My home, Alaska, holds my heart
despite the swings of dark and light.
The summer sun that lingers late
heals the winter’s chilling hurt.

Fall holds nature hostage, like
a furious spirit, whose unfair
imprisonment kindles colors of fire
and forges frosts that freeze the lake.

Some creatures now who cannot flee
seek sleepy peace with sorrowful sigh.
Those who can escape we see
in chevrons pointing where they fly.

Longer nights crowd shorter days.
Restless as Icarus, young geese try
their wings.  A Midas-touched birch tree
drops its golden ransom and dies.

Rutting moose are charged with life.
The busy creatures become less tame,
feeling the running out of time,
hearing the goose’s scornful laugh.

For more on Glenn Wright, please see our Authors page.

Glenn Wright: Nightfall

~ amarillobay 
The emboldened nights
come earlier in the fall,
thuggishly crowding themselves
against the defenseless afternoons,
suffocating the heavy sun
in bloody billows,
pushing it down
into the unyielding horizon,
squeezing out the quickly fading 
alpenglow, orange and pink,
onto the snowy peaks
of the jagged mountains.

The crescent moon appears,
a fingernail clipping
absentmindedly brushed
from the lap of some demented goddess.
Planets encircle the world,
peering at us
like nosy peeping Toms.
Finally the stars
bloom on the chill, black sky,
their beauty almost
making me forget
their sinister intent.

For more on Glenn Wright, please see our Authors page.

Terence Culleton: Lotus Eaters

~ amarillobay 
Always, it seems, at this
hour, they’re shuffling
along in cinched slacks,
 
pastel jackets, hair crazed,
or no hair, eyeing what
scintillations the mall asserts:
 
palliative, spatial,
flashing colored lights and
turbo-crazy big block letters
 
tilting, tumbling—hot dogs,
chips, crinkle fries, crullers:
finger food for lotus eaters.
 
Or sitting on benches short
of breath, with orthopedic
canes and crossword puzzles
 
looking like they’d rather
not face anything for just
an hour or two. Today,
 
though, is Kids’ Day,
kids running everywhere
in flashy Tin Man hats
 
cocked like nose-cones
at the mezzanine, this
being freedom, a zone
 
for randomness, not
aware of these others
at the end of everything
 
facing them over walkers,
silent, patient, knowing
more than anything
 
what it all comes to.

For more on Terence Culleton, please see our Authors page.

Holly Day: Interactions in the Park

~ amarillobay 
The tiny bird ruffles its feathers, flutters its wings
in a call-and-response game with the plastic bag in my hand.
I can’t sing or whistle or chirp like the bird
but somehow, I can still communicate my appreciation
for his little dance in the tree.
 
Beneath the freeway overpass, blue-black grackles
erupt in a cacophony of car alarms and sirens
gleaned from years of nesting so close to so much traffic.
Sometimes, it’s hard to appreciate nature
when it exerts itself this much
to celebrate us.

For more on Holly Day, please see our Authors page.

Jim Krosschell: Killing Fish

~ amarillobay

 “He drove beneath a canopy of elms, then along a stretch of open shore, then past the municipal docks, where a woman in pedal pushers stood casting for bullheads. There were no other fish in the lake except for perch and a few worthless carp. It was a bad lake for fishing and swimming.” Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried

A novelist vivifies memory with a well-chosen image or two. An essayist negotiates among memories, and walks through a certain amount of hopeful haze.

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