All Over the Place: The night of the freight train

May 22, 2019, around midnight, Jefferson City, Missouri

By Michael H. Brownstein






When the great train exploded from the heavens
like huge bombs of gray napalm, the lights did not flicker,
they went out, everything deep in a cave black.

The Loneliest Liberal: Pop culture marks generations

Star Trekkers,
for example

By James Knudsen

When you get to a certain age, you’re not eager to provide a number. You hedge, fudge, lie, add a suffix — usually “-ish.” I like to provide a range. Telling someone who was President provides a range. If you were born during Franklin Roosevelt’s time in office, you can be in your mid-seventies to mid-eighties. I’m a Lyndon Johnson baby, which provides a smaller window. Any way you slice it, I’m in my fifties. The only upside is that it is rare to find a junior college student who knows that we had a President named Johnson and even rarer that they know when he was in office.

On Franklin Hill Farm: In the land of the great pastures (a poem)

With accompanying video

Posted by Franklin Hill Farm on Saturday, May 18, 2019

By Bettina Sperry

In the land of the great pastures
and fairy tale visions
of field flowers and blades of green
where mice and moles
and birds do play,

One lone Chevy in the big back lot (a pink poem)

By Geoffrey Dean

One lone Chevy in the big back lot
Grabs my eye as I find my spot.
No big deal, or so you might think –
’Cept this Chevy is a sparkling pink.

Movie Review: Black ’47

Or just when you think things can’t get grimmer

By Bob Boldt

If you are ever looking for a bleaker Irish travelogue, look no further than Lance Daly’s 2018 Irish period drama film, Black ’47, whose title refers to the most devastating year of the Irish famine, 1847.

Fiction: Sunlight in a Cave (a short story)

Author’s portrait painted
by Jane B. Mudd

A new telling of the Mike Magliano story

By Bob Boldt

[Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this story appeared here on March 20, under the title, “How the Wild Came to Rest.” Bob Boldt wrote it for a fiction-writing workshop, for which he promised there would be another version. When he submitted the new version, he alerted me that the story had taken “a quite divergent and surprising turn” – a turn that called for the completely different title.
    I asked Bob what happened during the rewrite? Did it surprise him? I think it only fair to share his response, which you might like to read before you read “Sunlight in a Cave.”

Poetry & Portraits: Chair

Drawing by Susan C. Price

Chair
By Eric Meub

[Originally published on December 14, 2013]

She closed no doors at home. Sometimes they’d shout
at her, slammed by the wind: a single clap
of violent conclusion, like a trap
to seal her in a room. Or keep her out.

Fiction: Justice Is Missing (flash fiction)

By Bob Boldt

Sooner or later somebody writing for the Alt Left was certain to report it, certainly not the most significant person, no one of consequence, in fact. In fact, later the authorities even questioned the reporter’s relationship to the missing person. All the usual sources took immediate offense at such an outrageous disappearance. A million op-eds immediately sprouted, while squadrons of right-winged hawks took roost on their bottom line. All our newsprint suddenly became stained with yellow ink. Some claimed that her disappearance was an invention of fake news. Others disagreed, while still others agreed, but only to disagree. Still others said they had seen her as late as last week. A sheriff in Tennessee claimed to have found her sword and scales in the back seat of a 1964 faded metallic green Buick Skylark convertible with a white top, in a junk yard hidden behind a Memphis motel. As of deadline, her blindfold is still being sought.

Sketches from the Twin Cities

Spirit Symphony

By Geoffrey Dean

Last month, I drove to Sioux Falls to participate in the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra’s season-closing concerts of Gustav Mahler’s Eighth Symphony (on April 27 & 28). Being one “of a thousand” inspired a poem:

Horizon light in peach pastel
Beyond the gray-limbed trees ahead
Gave grainy texture to my drive
To symphonize a state away.

Be Happy

It’s your choice

By Sharon Stoner

[Editor’s Note: Readers need to know where Sharon is coming from, in order to understand that her advice was hard won and does not come from a place of comfort and ease. Sharon has experienced much pain and suffering. I asked her three days ago how her hands and kidneys were doing.

Penny for Her Thoughts: Customer associations, with love

By Penelope Griffiths

As I said in my March 4th column, I work for a well-known drug store chain. I have been working as a customer associate now for almost nine months, long enough to have had a baby (which I haven’t, but one of my colleagues had twins!) and long enough to have “regulars” I know by name and date of birth (an ID is needed for purchasing tobacco and/or alcohol).

The Loneliest Liberal:Complicating her story

By James Knudsen

Spring has truly arrived: I have started cleaning my house. Note the use of the word “started.” I have indeed begun the process, but just as building high-speed rail through the middle of California is a “pro-cess,” so it is with getting my home into a condition that the authorities would consider fit for human habitation.

Roger’s Reality – The Jasper Chronicles: The Gas Station

By Roger Owens

My uncle Guy’s gas station sat just east of my Aunt Sue’s house, by the turn onto what is now known as North East 38th Street. But I much prefer the moniker it had back in the 1960s: “Buzzard Bay Road.” The station was just west of where Buzzard Bay met County Route 6, the main east-west highway, or what passed for one at the time, into Jasper, Florida. If you took Route 6 past the station and the house, you would arrive in Jasper proper in a few minutes; if you went Buzzard Bay way, you would meet up with County Route 51 north of town. The station sat on the north side of Route 6 facing a bit southeast, and across the road was a corn field that, to the eye of a child at least, appeared to begin at the barbed wire fence and form an impenetrable wall that just kept on going. Out the back was another just like it, but it contained some trees in the distance, which seemed to give a bit of perspective, and to suggest that these fields did not, indeed, continue unto the ends of the Earth.

Poetry & Portraits: Look

Drawing by Susan C. Price

Look
By Eric Meub

[Originally published on November 9, 2013]

The altercation takes her by surprise:
same boy, same busy street, same tug-of-war
about authority. Today her eyes,
all by themselves it seems, have shut a door.

Adventures from Bulgaria: Summer in the Mountains – Days 14 - 16

Detail from 18th photo

Destiny’s lessons in disguise

By Valeria Idakieva

[Sequel to “Days 12 & 13,” published on December 24, 2018.]

When I woke up on the morning of the 14th day of my trek along the E8 European long-distance path, I felt happy because I remembered going to bed the day before and praying to the God of the E8 path to remove the pain in my kidneys and let me complete the trek, and now I felt only a slight pain.