Pictured Within

Deep Purple, from In Concert with the London Symphony Orchestra, 1999. Vocal by Miller Anderson.

The DVD is available for streaming on Netflix.

Merciful Dark

A truck had just pulled out from the well and I followed it up through the woods past the merciful dark of Augie’s house.  I hadn’t been farther up Barlow Hill since the year I quit 84 Lumber.  You learn the back roads driving a delivery truck.  Then you forget.  Dark and raining doesn’t help.  The road climbed steadily.  One-sided trees leaned in.  Ahead brakelights flashed and bobbed like the truck had run over something.  I slowed. Runoff had strewn stones, debris across the road.  I geared down, eased over.  When I looked up the truck was gone.  

At the top of the hill the woods ended.  Wide rolling fields fell away into night.  Ahead a tall hedgerow, buckets hung from sugar maples.  A Bobcat loader, stacks of blocky shapes defining as pallets of fieldstone wrapped in chickenwire.  Remains of a wall older than the trees, picked for three hundred dollars a ton.  The stones didn’t care.  Why should I.    

Caitlin's Boots

Happy to have a small story, 'Caitlin's Boots', in the May issue of Word Riot. As always, my thanks to editor Jackie Corley, and fiction editor Kevin O'Cuinn.

A Higher Calling

A Higher Calling                      Charcoal, Graphite; 6 3/4" x 7 1/2"

Two versions of this new drawing are available at RedBubble.  If you'd like a print, choose Original Format. If you prefer a postcard or greeting card, choose Card Format. The original will be framed shortly; if you're interested, message or email me.

River Road

The last time I saw Augie in town he’d sold a painting and he was celebrating with the girl who’d modeled for it. She was a grad student at Chaney and she didn’t have much to say to me so I said how’d he get you naked?  She shrugged.  He asked.  It won’t work for you.  A week later I was clearing a storm drain on Howe Plaza and she walked by.  I said hey.  She kept walking.  Her friend said what was that.  

Tremont’s Chaney’s town.  It’s relentlessly gentrified, determinedly artsy and enlightened.  But pedal your Trek out the River Road on a rainy day and the ivy withers quick.  NO FRACK signs thin out and when you look up you’re in Northern Appalachia:  Failing dairy farms, new wellpads.  TOPSOIL.  FIREWOOD.

Waiting at the railroad crossing for a long line of graffitied tankcars I wondered what looked different.  One new wiper slapped the windshield post.  When the last car passed I saw the slumping barn that had stood across the tracks was gone.  They’d leveled the site, already leased the space: A row of watertrucks was parked there.  Where the new ground fell away raw and chaotic a corner of the milkhouse stuck out like a whitewashed outcropping from shredded asphalt, broken sidewalk slabs.  CLEAN FILL WANTED.  The crossing arm went up.  I went on. 

Slow Time

Slow Time                                        Charcoal, Graphite

This drawing, Slow Time, is available at West End Gallery, Corning. Call or email the gallery for info.   More recent drawings are here.

My poem Collegetown is included in the May issue of Short, Fast, and Deadly.  My thanks to editor Joseph Quintella.  A related flash, Caitlin's Boots, will appear in the May issue of Word Riot.

As friends who stay in touch via facebook may know, I'm gradually becoming more comfortable calling one current project a novel. May not pan out that way (he sez cautiously) but it's starting to look at least somewhat more likely. Our Story So Far: Rock and roll noir with tragic deaths doomed guitar heroes ruthless women and a smalltime weedseller trying to keep his custodian job at an Ivy League university plagued by student predators and suicides and ex-Seal security leaning on Our Antihero.  Minimalist, unapologetically genre, big fun. Here's the link to an outtake called Little Yappy Dog. 

Thanks for looking, and reading. Hope you enjoy.