Fiction: A Killing on a Bridge (57) A historical fiction

Saint Sebastian River Bridge
[Click image to call up
all published instalments]

By Roger Owens

Sunday,
March 31, 1918,
concluded

Moses sent Gaius running ahead to the prison, and by the time they got the wagon there, the gate was open and Warden Blitch was shouting and pointing, organizing a search party. Nine men galloped off right after the work gang got through the gate, all carrying twelve-gauge semi-auto shotguns and riding far better mounts than the poor mutt led by the young black convict.

Museful Mornings: Pre-Pandemic Poetry (#4)

By Geoffrey Dean


Slipped Up

I slipped in the shower once upon a time

From a major buildup of bathtub slime.

Moral is, I could have written “grime”

And who’ve cared – it’s still a rhyme.

_______________
(5/16/2019)

Copyright © 2022 by Geoffrey Dean

Highways and Byways: The Drowning (Part 1)

Beginning of my preamble to a poem

By Maik Strosahl

I was driving up through west central Illinois on a recent day off with my younger son. With a couple hours of driving left to our day, he was lamenting the lack of a decent internet signal for his iPad near Macomb. I was encouraged that his brain had retracted back into his head so he could actually converse.

Fiction: A Killing on a Bridge (56) A historical fiction

Saint Sebastian River Bridge
[Click image to call up
all published instalments]

By Roger Owens

Sunday,
March 31, 1918,
continued

Marcus was on the ground, gasping, his breath knocked from him. The horse had jinked sideways and thrown him, and likely on purpose. The shotgun had gone flying into the grass somewhere. That old bitch knew he was a shitty rider. He didn’t like horses, never had, and in his limited experience the feeling had been universally mutual. Horses scared him.

Fiction: From Chapter 6: New Orleans (Part 2)

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all published parts

Walt invited some soldiers recently returned from the war in Mexico to join them, because one of these was General James J. Shields. Walt, familiar with the legend of the Rebecca letters and subsequent duel, asked him for the real story, which he was glad to relate, because he was still rather vain and had to try his capacity to charm the beautiful blonde lady seated puzzlingly with these two possibly disreputable fellows.
    “I begin at the site of the action, and, as I felt neither of us truly wanted to be there—we had been friends theretofore, or friendly rivals—I dissembled calm by conjecturing a comparison of ourselves to those other famed duelists Hamilton and Burr. I asked if such had occurred to him.”

All Over the Place: Early Spring Storm

By Michael H. Brownstein


[This poem is an example of a Waltmarie—at least ten lines long (it can be longer) and every even line has only two syllables. This one was published in the Last Stanza Poetry Journal.]

within the context of hush, a vocabulary of whispers

snow fell

time was not essential—Friday evening into Saturday morning

quiet

the valley filled itself with white evergreens

no wind

an infinity of snowflakes erased sight lines, landscapes

silver

we went into the fields tobogganing snow angels

ice warm.

Copyright © 2022 by Michael H. Brownstein Michael H. Brownstein’s volumes of poetry, A Slipknot Into Somewhere Else and How Do We Create Love?, were published by Cholla Needles Press in 2018 & 2019, respectively.

Acting Citizen: Trump’s Journal for January 6, 2021

By James Knudsen

Former President Donald J. Trump is known for communicating using unconventional methods. Conventional for a mob boss, but unconventional for the Leader of the Free World. Unknown to many is that he frequently used a journal to record daily thoughts and observations. It is difficult to decipher in that it is composed entirely in crayon and Sharpie, but we present here the 45^th President at his most introspective on that most consequential day of his presidency, January 6, 2021.

Fiction: A Killing on a Bridge (55) A historical fiction

Saint Sebastian River Bridge
[Click image to call up
all published instalments]

By Roger Owens

Sunday,
March 31, 1918,
3:45 PM

John Ashley had been in Raiford Correctional Institution for exactly 16 months, to the day. He had, on the advice of his lawyer Alto Adams, pled guilty to armed robbery in Palm Beach County on Thursday, November 23rd, 1916, and had been sentenced to seventeen and a half years in the state penitentiary.

Museful Mornings: Pre-Pandemic Poetry (#3)

By Geoffrey Dean


Definitions

Gritted too fierce – tooth chipped.

Stretched too far – pants ripped.

Turned too much – screw stripped.

Bird on branch – talons gripped.

Wit too sharp – one-liners quipped.
Thirst too strong – slurped, not sipped.
Psychedelic – on acid tripped.
Kitchen puddle – faucet dripped.
Sudden wealth – generously tipped.
Expedited – already shipped.
Invisible – unnoticed, skipped.
Nails too long – get them clipped!
_______________
(5/16/2019)

Copyright © 2022 by Geoffrey Dean

From “The Scratching Post”: Medievalism, Part 2

By Ken Marks

[Opening from the original on The Scratching Post, August 16, 2022, published here by permission of the author.]

In Part 1, Congresswoman Greene talked about the futility of fighting climate change. She favors confronting it stoically, as brave people have always done in the face of natural disasters. She declared her love for science when it manifests God’s glory, but she resists the timeline that science assigns to the development of life. She disparaged homosexual marriage because it doesn’t respect Nature’s demand for procreation, and she warned that changes in our sexual mores would soon lead to our extinction. She conceded that she hated Democrats and blamed them for instituting a policy of immigration without quotas. She predicted this blunder would destroy the culture that Americans had come to love.
    Obviously, her enmity ran deep. I wanted to explore this further.
        •
        •
        •
Please tell me more about the disputes with Democrats that push you toward hatred. Maybe it’s still possible to find common ground.^*

I see you’re slow on the uptake, Ken, so I’ll spell it out for you.

Please do.…
_______________
*

Copyright © 2022 by Ken Marks Ken Marks was a contributing editor with Paul Clark & Tom Lowe when “Moristotle” became “Moristotle & Co.” A brilliant photographer, witty conversationalist, and elegant writer, Ken contributed photographs, essays, and commentaries from mid-2008 through 2012. Late in 2013, Ken birthed the blog The Scratching Post. He also posts albums of his photos on Flickr.

Fiction: A Killing on a Bridge (54) A historical fiction

Saint Sebastian River Bridge
[Click image to call up
all published instalments]

By Roger Owens

Wednesday,
July 19, 1922,
concluded

The moon was on the wane, just a sliver in the eastern sky this early in the night, but it was enough for Red to find his way. The lake to his left showed as a dark border of cypress and bush along the bank a quarter mile away. Fisher Creek was a line of river brush ahead, to the east, over where the sickle of moon showed him the way.

Fiction: From Chapter 6: New Orleans (Part 1)

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all published parts

“Madame,” began Walt, in a voice of deep and assumed majesty, “I require a cup of your coffee, but only if its taste is as rich and pleasing as its aroma.”
    Whitman spoke to a Creole woman in a stall in the marketplace in New Orleans. Her head wrapped in a lime-colored scarf, she squeezed the juice from an orange in her large palm into a pitcher of glass.
    She turned and smiled at him, scrutinizing him behind a hard-to-maintain modesty, but he held up a finger of warning. “Wait!” he cried. “Do not lie to me now, or exaggerate its quality in the least, for I can be violent before I have had my coffee, and I require the absolute best!”

All Over the Place: How It Came to Be This Way

By Michael H. Brownstein

[There were days I would get off the elevated green line train at 43^rd and violence permeated all of my senses. It would be so great, its stench would actually burn my nose. I had to cross a large empty lot—well, I didn’t have to (I could have stayed to the main streets and sidewalks)—next to Mr. Stubb’s building, the son of a sharecropper who came to Chicago in the fifties. I didn’t know this, but his wife always watched me cross the lot just in case.

From the Alwinac: Summer Song: The Ashland (Wisconsin) Grand Opera House

[Click on image to
go directly to
the Alwinac’s home page]

[The Alwinac blog is part of the schroeder170 project, honoring the life and musical career of cellist Alwin Schroeder (1855-1928) and exploring the history of cello playing in the US.]

I discovered the Ashland Grand Opera House on a recent trip to the Chequamegon Bay area on the southern shores of Lake Superior. A city of about 8,000 inhabitants, Ashland, Wisconsin, was founded in 1854. For a time it was the third busiest Great Lakes port, behind Chicago and Buffalo, with ships loaded with northern Wisconsin pine, brownstone, and iron ore departing from Ashland to supply the rest of the Midwest and points beyond. The central ore dock was, at the time of its completion in 1925, the largest concrete structure of its kind in the world….
    We first learned of the ore dock on a tour through the streets of downtown Ashland, where more than twenty expansive murals adorn as many facades, each visualizing a chapter in the story of Ashland and its citizens….
    One of the murals is a tribute to local railroad workers and located near the former train depot, an impressive brownstone structure two blocks south of Main on 3^rd Ave. W. As we walked along 3^rd Ave., a smaller building on the east side of the street caught my attention. A painted, poster-like sign identified it as the Ashland Grand Opera House. An attempt had been made to visualize a fanciful operatic scene through mural art on a more miniature scale. The familiar likeness of famed operatic tenor Luciano Pavarotti in full voice covers an upper window, while a Wagnerian soprano holds forth from another. The boarded-up doors, no doubt leading to the second-story performance space, and twin abandoned store-fronts on the ground level make the prolonged disuse of the building painfully apparent. But the signage seems an encouraging indication that the opera house is still a source of local pride in Ashland….
_______________
Read on….

Copyright © 2022 by Geoffrey Dean

Fiction: A Killing on a Bridge (53) A historical fiction

Saint Sebastian River Bridge
[Click image to call up
all published instalments]

By Roger Owens

Wednesday,
July 19, 1922,
continued

“Mister Middleton here says you’re still in the market for a parcel of lumber, that right?”