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We Didn't Start The Fire

The King checked out on August 16, 1977.

The King checked out on August 16, 1977.

Elvis was caring and generous.

Great For School Lunches

Back in the day...

My Back Pages - An Anthem

Bob Dylan's 30th Anniversary - a celebration his music.

Recorded in October, 1992 at Madison Square Garden in NYC.

Bob Dylan - 30th Anniversary

Thought you should know.

WTF is this???

Poetry by Greg Sellers

 Occasionally, I find poetry that I'm particularly taken with...like the work of Greg Sellers. Not only does he write poems, he has one of the best literary blogs around ( see below ) where he ferrets out and posts remarkably good art. Scores of us addicted to his site find we need to visit daily to read, view and listen to the poetry, prose, paintings and music he posts for us to enjoy.


Weltschmerz

     

Between these limbs, an emptiness

branched blue above the center of this

abandoned orchard, the afternoon

sky adrift like a dreamer’s thought,

if not for the blunt, occasional thud,

drawing attention to the ground

and over-ripened peaches the color of hurt.

No matter how still the moment, how deep

one retreats into the wooded row & column

of neglected fruit trees, there is always a reminder

that somewhere, someway, someone

is feeling a presence that has no feelings.

Each weighted limb, a burden of wrong,

each momentary tremble, a wind’s memory

of suffering. Sunlight softens the dark

stigmata along a gray trunk’s wound.

Flecks of insects glint like mica in granite, bits

of everlasting light among this amber ache.

Published in the Zócalo Public Square

Elegy for Those Not Yet Departed

This much I'm sure. It is hard to believe

in another morning's gift now that the evening

lawn has learned to grieve. Tonight moonlight

keeps sending its condolences, as if forgotten

whites on the line at the far end of the yard

can no longer bear a body's absence, and

that faint slant of lost light from a kitchen

window is not enough to bring anyone back.

Yet no one has left to forget that familiar way

home, those simple names of neighborhood streets:

Elm, Oak & Maple. Outside this window empty 

   trees

keep rehearsing a sadness I wish I could ease.

Restless curtains ghost about as if they have

   some

other place to go. The once sure shadows 

   have

now grown weary of their own quiet visits. Still

this room tries to hold onto everything it can.

Dresser mirror shines. Full moon shifts

to leave itself upon the polished floor—spent 

   soul

too tired to find its body. But this is not a 

   scene

where the sheet is slowly drawn over the 

   head, or

the doctor helplessly closes his black leather 

   bag.

The lawn has no reason for its plain, dark suit,

this solemn night—its one pale 

   chrysanthemum.

Soon daylight will slip between the limbs,

begin to soften the lonesome, walled sorrow

of shadows. Even the last geese

that shall rise across this endless, gray longing

will not make much of what they leave behind

—

no winter song for lifeless trees

nor grief given nights in the glove-quiet 

that a pallbearer wears, finding

what it's like to touch & not feel.

Published in the Clackamas Literary Review

For more about Greg and more of his poetry. 

Check out Greg's blog:

http://memoryslandscape.tumblr.com

Robert Earl Keen

A favorite REK song.

Amy Greene is back!

   

I've pre-ordered and I am anxiously awaiting the February 25, 2014 release of this, her second novel. I first came across Amy Greene's writing as I chased my passion, short stories, in literary magazines. 

Amy and her husband, Adam, live in Eastern Tennessee with their two children. 

Buy her book. You won't be disappointed.

From RandomHouse.com

"From the critically acclaimed author of Bloodroot, a gripping, wondrously evocative novel drawn from real-life historical events: the story of three days in the summer of 1936, as a government-built dam is about to flood an Appalachian town-and a little girl goes missing.

Long Man: A novel by Greene, Amy (Feb 25, 2014)

1. $10.99 Kindle Edition

1. Available for Pre-order. This item will be released on February 25, 2014.

1. $25.95 $16.41 Hardcover

1. Available for Pre-order. This item will be released on February 25, 2014.
2. Other Formats: Audio CD

Like a classical myth or a painting by Thomas Hart Benton, Greene’s second novel (after Bloodroot), set in the summer of 1936, transforms a period of cataclysmic history into a gorgeous, tragic tale filled with heroes and heroines. After the Tennessee Valley Authority builds a dam to electrify rural Appalachia, the river that folks have always called Long Man rises a little more with every turn of the page, and most of the families in the town of Yuneetah, Tenn., are long gone, scattered to other cities to take up factory jobs. In days, the hardscrabble farm fields they abandoned will be overcome by water, and Annie Clyde Dodson’s family farm, too, will end up at the bottom of the lake. Only Annie Clydewon’t leave; she’s determined to hold out so that her three-year-old daughter Gracie can inherit her ancestral land. But Gracie disappears with her dog Rusty during a terrible storm, the floodwaters rising by the hour. Only a few—the sheriff, Annie Clyde’s aunt Silver, and the mysterious drifter Amos, among them—are left to help Annie Clyde and Gracie’s dad, James, search through the tangle of sodden woods and fields already knee high in muck. Greene’s enormous talent animates the voices and landscape of East Tennessee so vividly, and creates such exquisite tension, that the reader is left as exhausted and devastated as the characters in this unforgettable story. (Feb.)

Reviewed on: 11/11/2013

Old, Old Print Ads

This Lard one's a spoof:

He said he once briefly dated a girl from Mississippi whose father thought she wasn't eating properly in the big city. So he came up here and loaded a nice bucket of bacon fat into her freezer. I'm not sure it made her any happier, but it did help him retain his position as Regional Secretary of the Lard Information Council.

Don't whine. Help is available.

A Compelling Tribute.

by Barry Basden

RAY'S PEOPLE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN SOLDIERS

Shiloh

Ray's great granddaddy, a Tennessee Volunteer, lies wounded between the lines all night, thirsty, crying, moaning in the darkness. At daybreak, he's carried under a flag of truce to a field hospital where his right arm is added to the other arms, hands, feet, and legs piled in a wagon near blood-spattered surgeons. Feverish in a Nashville ward, he composes a letter to his anxious parents with the help of one of the Sisters and a laudanum haze.

Chateau-Thierry

Ray's uncle is eating salt pork in his rifle pit when he smells something funny. He puts on his mask and climbs out to find a gas shell not fifty feet away. He is halfway up an apple tree to hang it as a warning to the rest of the company when something knocks the shell out of his right hand. He stares at blood spurting from where his trigger finger should be. It is just gone, and he will be called Trig for the rest of his life. 

Bushido

Ray's older brother won't talk about the string of ears he brought back from the Pacific. He doesn't eat much and keeps mostly to himself back in the woods, sitting on a cane bottom chair in front of his little trailer, smoking hand-rolled Prince Albert's, guarded by mean dogs and a Japanese sword.

Yalu

Ray cracks the ice, drinks a cupful of halazone-laced water, and washes up for the first time in two months. He puts on socks kept dry in his helmet, then pries open a can and eats cold beans. No fires allowed. He curls up, shivering on the frozen ground, and stares into darkness, watching for lights on the opposite shore, wishing he could smoke.

NVA

Ray's boy sets up the Claymores. Then, with the rest of the patrol, he lies and waits. The moonless night is alive. Wings whir near his face and something slithers off to his left. In the distance a big cat roars, followed by a monkey's scream. A rank smell rises from the damp earth and wetness soaks through his fatigues. His raw crotch and rotted feet burn, long past itching. He could use a doob. Toward dawn the patrol humps back up the hill, grateful nobody came along the trail this time. 

Tikrit

Raylene sees a flash. When she comes to, she's on her back, strapped to a litter in a medivac chopper. Rotors beat the air. Doc puts a canteen to her parched lips, squeezes her arm, and says something she can't hear. She can't feel her legs either, can't move them. The price of a ticket home. Maybe one day she will play softball on fancy new ones, bounding around the base paths like other robo-vets.

Fort Sam

The young man with a tape recorder visits Ray again in the hospice wing. In his hand is a genealogy note he found online today: Ray's great grandfather, wounded in the frontal assault on Grant's army, moved to Texas with his young bride after the war. The man turns on the machine and Ray labors to tell more about his warrior family. A half hour later he stops talking and nods toward a letter that sits framed on the bedside table. The lined paper is yellow, its pencil scrawl faded. "That was written right after Shiloh," he says. "You can take it with you." Ray turns toward the window and stares out at bare trees lining the far side of the driveway. They stand in precise formation, straight and tall against the evening sky.

Previously appeared in  LitnImage magazine

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How it was.

A-country-divided-Segregation-Jim-Crow-South.

Careful.