Contents:
Crawling Across the Flokati, by Joseph Hirsch
Found and Kept (poem), by Murray Eiland
Invitation, by Bruce McAllister
Evolution (poem), by Marissa Lingen
Gramarye (poem), by Sonya Taaffe
Stitches, by L.M. Conkling
Moodless (poem), by Melissa Miles
Retaining Walls, by J. Hellend
Circle of Life (poem), by David C. Kopaska-Merkel
Art: John and Flo Stanton
To order a copy or subscribe:
A.I. Image - click for a larger version
Whatever else you might think of A.I.-created images, they do allow differently abled artists – e.g., the rest of us - the chance to produce pictures of things we’ve seen, imagined or dreamed. This is one of those.
When I was young, my family fostered quite a few abused and neglected children over the years. Most stayed with us for only a few months, but one, Alan, came to us when he was an infant. No parent or relative ever came to visit him. Without conscious memory, at least, of trauma or separation, Alan spent the next five years with us as a member of the family. He was my little brother.
One standout memory of Alan is always seeing him with his favorite toy, a plastic guitar. He’d stroll around the house like a miniature troubadour, strumming that guitar, improvising lyrics responsive to his thoughts and experiences at that age. If he ever reads this, I hope he takes my reminiscence as fondly as I do:
“Nebber, Nebber, Nebber
Pick Up Poopies!
I HATE Poopies!” – one of his hundreds of songs.
After a while, his plastic axe started to resemble one of B.B. King’s love-worn instruments, as the strum-wear around the sound hole began to show. I wondered if Alan had been a musician in a past life.
In kindergarten, when Alan was asked what he wanted to do when he grew up, he’d say:
“I want to play the piano. On the back of a garbage truck. On the moon.”
Back in the early ‘60s, it was a rule here that foster parents weren’t allowed to adopt their charges. Eventually, Alan was officially declared abandoned by his birth parents, and thus available for adoption. The day ultimately came when we were told he would be moved to his assigned adoptive parents.
Tears streaming down his cheeks, Alan promised he’d break a window and come home to us.
Alan, I wonder if you became a musician. I hope you’ve had a wonderful life, brother.
The
other day, I stepped out on our back porch, and to my left was a
“helicopter” seed, spinning, hovering – stuck in a long strand of spider
webbing. I grabbed my camera, but the seed flew off before I could
focus. About an hour later, above the fence in our driveway, there was a
leaf, just floating there. Also stuck in a spider web. This time, I got
it.
And the moon behind it
Contents:
Come Each Bird That Seeks Its Nest, by Jeannelle M. Ferreira
The Burnt Layer (poem), by Sonya Taaffe
Bridge, by Zary Fekete
The Intrepid Botanist Insults the Wrong Plant (poem), by Gretchen Tessmer
The Moon in His Eyes, by Francesca Forrest
Star-Clad and Howling (poem), by Beth Cato & Rhonda Parrish
Benny Was a Binman, by Aaron Long
Vestments (poem), by Susan Shea
Blue and Black, by Patricia Russo
Endlessness of Oracles (poem), by Devan Barlow
Art: John and Flo Stanton
Contents:
Still Life, by Gwynne Garfinkle
Locusts, by Francesca Forrest
A Passage Through Ruins (poem), by Jennifer Crow
Exstasis, by Sam Derby
Gentle Lullaby (poem), by Gretchen Tessmer
Snowborn, by Rachel Cordasco
Soporifia (poem), by Jordan Hirsch
He Will Make It Plain, by Sophia D. Merow
The End, by David Kloss
Tarnished Gold (poem), by Ed Ahern
Art: John and Flo Stanton
Yard Work
Frank’s next-door neighbor’s toy spitz’s given name was Pepper, but he usually called him Peter. Because it drove him bat-shit crazy. Frank had just to yell “Peter!” and the dog’s lips would curl back unsheathing those nicotine-stained needles. Then came the menacing growl, and lift-off. Usually followed by a resounding yelp when the leash nearly snapped his neck.
Frank caught the familiar waddle of Selma Pilchard as she strutted down her driveway and headed in his direction on her morning walk, no doubt to complain about the noise from his A.M. labors. Beak always pointing to the North Star, all she needed was a monocle to be the incarnation of a late 1920s The New Yorker caricature. As Selma stalked up to Frank, Peter bared his teeth, snarled and leapt from her arms. Frank took a step to his right. He felt a cold shiver of guilt as the mutt sailed past him and into the hopper of his Uncle Phil’s woodchipper. Selma shrieked, then dropped to her knees.
Moments later, Frank was in his kitchen pouring a glass of ice water for her, thoughts racing on apologies and penance; especially to his wife Pammie, who actually liked the diminutive Pomeranian snotball. Peter would eat kibble right out of her hand.
Through the kitchen window, he could see Selma, now rocking side to side, keening, sun glistening off her diamond earrings. As he opened the screen door, she stood tall for a moment, then dove headlong into the woodchipper.
“Why didn’t I turn the damned thing off?”
When he got back to the chipper, all that was left of Selma that wasn’t mulch, was a single red shoe where she last stood. As Frank jammed his thumb into the “Off” button, electricity shot through him. Everything went black. He didn’t know how long it was before he could see again, but it seemed like hours before he could pull himself up enough to sit.
“Mister? You OK? Did you hurt yourself?” A teenage girl’s voice cooed from behind tousled blond locks. Frank managed an unintelligible guttural.
“Dude, what the hell happened here?” echoed tinny from the male-thing hovering next to her. School must have let out.
“Two bits, four bits, six bits, a dollar . . .” they chorused. Christ, she’s a fucking cheerleader. Man-boy laced his fingertips together and the girl stepped in his hands, placing her palms on his shoulders. “All for Southwest, stand up and holler!” She arced gracefully above the horizon–the diesel whined while the chipper blades gnashed dense bones and gristle, then returned to its steady hum. The boy then threw a leg over the hopper, cheerfully doffed his cap and said, “G’day, mate!” in a fake Aussie accent before he slid in after her. Frank puked until there was nothing left to hock up.
“This isn’t fucking happening,” he could hear himself snort. “Maybe the mutt, maybe Mrs. Pilchard . . . but nobody is going to believe this shit.”
When he could stand, Frank kicked the crap out of the chipper; he hopped around with a broken toe, while it chugged menacingly behind him.
Leaning against a tree, Frank frantically punched the keypad of his cell until Uncle Phil’s phone rang. Meanwhile, a fat squirrel scrambled up to the lip of the hopper, sniffed the air for a few seconds, then flopped in. Uncle Phil’s phone went to voice mail.
Back in his house, Frank hobbled around the kitchen nursing a cold brew. “Who can I call? The cops? The fire department? The Bureau of Haunted Woodchippers?” He heard the damned thing whine again and bolted back outside.
The letter-carrier’s mailbag, stuffed with bills and advertisements, sat on the sidewalk. No sign of balding Bob, who had delivered Frank’s mail for the past six years. No point in looking at the growing pile of gore behind the chipper.
Frank backed the Mini-Cooper out of the garage and used it to impede about half of the access to the chipper. A few minutes later, while rolling a wheelbarrow stuffed with bulky garage crap and yard gnomes out to block off the other side, he saw the Fatso’s Pizza delivery guy scramble up the Cooper and do a cannonball into the chopper hopper. The more obstacles Frank placed in its way, the more determined folks became—it averaged four people and a critter or two an hour, for the next three hours. He could have sold tickets.
Frank jammed his shovel into the spinning flails of the woodchipper, and all he got for his trouble was a dislocated shoulder, which he slammed against the garage door frame until bone popped back into socket.
Only when he had stopped screaming did he notice the shrapnel in his leg.
Frank used his belt as a makeshift tourniquet. He hobbled back to the chipper and watched with fascination as it gorged itself on an elderly man’s leg. The old man sat on the lip of the hopper, weeping and wobbling, looking at Frank with pleading eyes. Frank obliged, and gave the old fellow a helpful shove. Moments later, the crimson maw spat out a titanium knee. It clipped Frank on his left temple.
With the thud of metal to bone came searing pain–and epiphany. Prometheus. Odysseus. Kris Humphries. Frank realized he had joined the roster of those royally fucked by the gods.
Frank laughed until tears rolled down his cheeks. He pulled out his phone and flipped between numbers in the address book. Wilmer Gerhardt, his boss. Pammie’s mother. Floyd Bishop, who had debagged him in high school. Clive Wilson, whom Pammie promised she’d never see again ….
“Eeny, meeny, miny, moe . . . which of you has got to go?”
Frank thought for a long moment, then dialed the number.
A dense fog rolled in a couple of nights ago. I grabbed my camera to get some fog shots, and as I panned around, I noticed a shimmering something up in the air, beneath the power lines. Zoomed in and found two huge spider webs, in unique circumstances for me – the higher one was about the shape and size of a kite, while the lower one was maybe the size of a bed sheet – mist from the fog coated the webs, and a nearby street light was just at the right angle for the moisture to catch the light, so I grabbed as many shots as I could before the sun came up. As it did, the webs became invisible once again, though if you knew where to look, you could see a speck in the middle, no doubt the architect of the artwork. I’ve not seen that from the wires before… though I shot the spider in “Spider Moon” right out the back door… now I wonder how many webs that size might be dangling from power & cable lines up high.
It was odd, eerie, interesting… for close to an hour, the sky dimmed slowly – then at totality, it got dark rather suddenly – enough that the street lights came on. An action cam I had set up on us to record the ambience captured the darkness, as did my trail cam, which switched to IR mode for the nearly 4 minutes of totality.
Flo wasn’t expecting to feel weird, emotionally – but, quite unexpectedly, became dizzy and nauseated, which lasted a while after the event. Migrating geese tend to stop-over here this time of year, and they went a bit nuts Monday, flying, flapping and honking as if they were quite disturbed; other birds made more noise than usual, and zipped around as if they were confused. Our cat Marcus, who likes to hang out with us outside, sat calmly on the front steps, bathing, as if nothing at all interesting was happening. Near where I stood, a swarm of ants appeared; they weren’t there just before the totality – I have no explanation for that.
For me, it was… pleasantly eerie. Jet contrails randomly criss-crossed the sky Monday, dozens more than are normal for here, but the sky was clear enough for the eclipse duration. It was much darker than I’d experienced at a partial eclipse years ago, and I have to agree that totality is more intense and odd-feeling than any partial. Some of that, of course, is just the novelty – if this routinely happened once a week, it wouldn’t be a big deal, I’m sure. Still, it does manage to tug at the emotions, on a primal level. A predictable glitch in the routine continuity of what we label as normal.
Photographically, I seem to have a bit of a theme going on
here. Years ago, for a magazine illustration, I photographed a coyote skull and
placed it in front of a full moon. Last summer, I captured a huge bat fluttering
across the Super Blue Moon. While at the computer a few years back, I heard Flo
shriek as she looked out the back door – a huge spider was spinning a web the
size of a bed sheet, between the gutter and the back porch – I photographed the
spider, then later added a full moon I’d snapped out front, to the image. Here's a 4-second video of a bat flying across the Super Blue Moon last August:
The last total solar eclipse viewable from Indianapolis took place in September of 1205, C.E., and totality then didn't completely cover what would someday be the entire city, as its original 1820 boundaries were later redefined by Unigov to encompass the majority of Marion County.
Pioneers once claimed that the forests here were so dense that a squirrel could hop tree-to-tree from the Ohio border to Illinois, without once having to set foot on Indiana soil. That might have made the viewing parties a bit trickier, back in 1205.
Click here for Flo's take on the eclipse:
At the beginning - Action Cam
(Click on the photo for a larger version)
While thinking about going to bed, I remembered it was a Super Blue Moon out, and decided to take a crack at it. The weather was quite comfortable, with a slight breeze, when I set up the tripod in our driveway. Still, at the extreme zoom necessary to get the shots that night, the slightest hint of a breeze caused a noticeable wobble on the camera’s screen, so I used the timer. I took a load of stills, and several times shot a minute or two of video. While keeping an eye on the screen, during one of the videos, I noticed something zip past the moon, and after I downloaded the files, located that particular video. I was delighted and rather surprised to see such a large bat zip across, reverse course and flutter to the top of the moon, then down in the direction it had come from, almost as if it was acting for an opening scene of a horror movie.
If I’d still been shooting stills, I’d have missed it. If I hadn’t been a bit lazy, I would have driven to a favorite spot away from city lights, where I’ve frequently done night photography, and once again, I would have missed that bat. Examining the videos from that night more closely, I noticed that the bat crisscrossed the moon several more times during my shoot, though none of them nearly so close.
My family moved to this neighborhood in ’62, and we’ve been at this address for more than 30 years – I’ve seen many bats flutter around the street lights, eating insects – but they’ve all been tiny, and I’ve not seen one that size at all, in Indiana.
All things considered, I was quite lucky to manage to capture that bat, at that time, at that angle, hamming it up for the camera.
