My Muse Sings Only Country
My muse sings only country— An eighteen wheeler siren Crying, dying, going somewhere With a juke-box beat. I am road-house Homer; Honky-Tonk laureate, Truck-stop troubadour Singing to steel-guitar wails And humming tires. I am highway minstrel Teasing tears from good ole boys When waitresses are Didos In a cross-country Odyssey My muse sings only...
Read MoreType-Setting Tunes
The machine engulfed Travis, but he didn’t seem to mind. Travis chain-smoked unfiltered Camels; and one was always burning at his side as he pressed the buttoned keys for all the letters to appear, just as I had originally typed them. Sometimes, yes, he made mistakes but not often. And anyway, when the words appeared in print, I was the editor; I was the responsible party. And so I never mentioned Travis or his work to anyone. He was frail and hunch-backed. Stooped just in the form you’d expect from one who spent eight, maybe ten hours each day typesetting others’ words, making sure...
Read MoreFeatured Works: Week of March 9 (Music)
In his poem “Nameless Child,” Fred Dale contemplates the tantalizing promise of tuning up for a performance. In the short story by D.E. Fredd, “Full Frontal Idiocy,” a small-time journalist unwittingly causes tumult in a concert cellist’s life. In a poem by Sean Lause, “Leaving the Concert Hall,” a concert opens up worlds of imagination for a young...
Read MoreLeaving the Concert Hall
She is eleven, maybe twelve, but numbers no longer matter, for she has heard Bach and Mozart for the first time, has mastered the mathematics of the wind, the heart’s algebra, where A is not A and need not be, and now her fingers conduct the weather until it shivers with illuminations. She walks, then skips, then spins to a private pantomime that need not reveal itself, for she is the conductor. Silent notes come swirling around her in wizard colors of the new, and the ecstatic leaves whirl in xylophones of dance. She feels her joy float from breath to breath. Bezeled light dazzles round a...
Read MoreFull Frontal Idiocy
I take full responsibility for depriving the world of Soon Rae Suks’ talents. True, she was certainly not in the pantheon of the cellists like Yo-Yo Ma, Pablo Casals or Jacqueline du Pre. Yet coming in second to those luminaries is nothing to be ashamed of. And that was the track she was on until I came into her life and imploded a promising career. Not a day goes by that I don’t think of what she might have been, had our paths not crossed. I was hired to escort Miss Suks’ four-week New England tour. I was a part-time culture critic for the Portland Press Herald. The...
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