Ann Walters

The Bicycle Mechanic

Excerpts from our

*#4*

Old Man

Managan

Lauren Strait

days marching by, cold and sexless as stones

In Time

Do me a favor Gill, don't tell the boys I'm reading books"/ What did Gill answer?

Muldaddie

Godless Fruit by Jo-Ann Newton

Spring, a Girl

Winging It

The High Tops

Jones

"Thank you, son. You know, Seminole has a meaning. The Seminole people were all kinds of tribes, but they fled to Florida because the Army was chasing them. Co-lon-neh and Sharp Knife would not leave them alone.

Do YOU write Sonnets too! Like Vivaldi's are they a test of Harmony and Invention?

My son escaped my attempt to kiss him though I pleaded for him to come back. “Un beso, mijito. Just one and I won’t ask again, I bargained.

But Frankie ran to Esmeralda, scampered up her body and into her waiting arms. As I approached, he screwed up his mouth like he was going to cry. He shook his head a stubborn, stubborn NO! before he turned and buried his face in my sister’s neck.

I reached out, but Esmeralda waved my hand away.

She patted his back, murmured into his ear. As she swayed, she looked over at me and said he was tired. She said that every time.

Excerpt from Chapter 12, "No Longer a Ward of the State," from "Point of Comfort," by Judith A. Lawrence," a Memoir in two parts, published January, 2023..

"The last weekend of June, Johnny and I drove to Maryland. We applied for our marriage license and were told we would be able to pick it up in two weeks.
We hoped to be married in the same Methodist church as Ben and Elaine.
On a Friday night Johnny pulled up in front of the house in his clunker of a car. I stole down the stairs with my beat up suitcase full of my personal things with a few clothes stuffed in. It would be all I had if Violet would not allow me to retrieve other things when I returned."

Gilbert Sorrentino was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1929. In 1956, Sorrentino founded the literary magazine Neon with friends from Brooklyn College, including friend Hubert Selby Jr. He edited Neon from 1956 to 1960, and then served as editor for Kulchur from 1961 to 1963.

After working closely with Selby on the manuscript of Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964). Sorrentino was an editor at Grove Press from 1965 to 1970, where one of his editorial projects was The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

There are two constants in the poetry of John Mannone: love and science… And they are intertwined--his poems flow effortlessly between poles of desire and precious, precise knowledge.

In the world of poetry there is no one who can mine science for metaphor the way Mannone does. Nor move to love so naturally.
--Roald Hoffmann, chemist and writer, professor emeritus at Cornell University and co-recipient of the 1981 Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Lilly impatiently buttons her coat while Presley wraps the new baby in a blanket and lays her in the carriage. They watch Mickey as he flies down the stairs. Smokey, his coonhound, trails after him. Lilly opens the front door and Mickey sails past her, sliding on the new ice forming on the sidewalk. He stretches his left leg forward, turns sideways, extends his arm and bends his knees, getting as much speed from the thin covering of ice as possible.
"Stop that, Michael, or you-ll slip and fall and mess your suit!" Lilly scolds. ...It is raining. The thin icy spots on the walkways melt. Inside, parishioners sing carols; candlelight flickers over the pages of the hymnals making the words dance.

"Yes Mother," Mickey replies, bending his knees a little more.

Old news.
I didn't understand why they had taken the rotating seats off the uprights at the lunch counters and when I asked my mother about it, people laughed and smirked, so she reacted enough to make her freckles turn colors and nearly jerked my arm out of its shoulder socket, tripping across those highly polished floor tiles as fast as her short little legs would go.

When asked again, she jerked even harder, glaring at some drugstore cowboy that was winking at her, and said "Ask that old boy there. I am sure the lazy-headed outfit has time to explain it all to you." It was one of my first glimpses at the face of hatred. The old boy-s face just froze under his ducktail haircut ...

"There, there, poor babies." Elizabeth pats the side of the red Playmate cooler