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Reginald Blisterkunst, Ph.D.
Among the Remembered Saints: My Life and Subsequent Death
Pluto Wars

Greg Chandler
"Bee's Tree"
"Local Folk"
"Roland's Feast"
"Pond Story "

Doug Childers
"The Baptism"

Gene Cox
The Sunset Lounge

Clarke Crutchfield
"The Break-In"
"The Canceled Party"
"The Imaginary Bullet"

Jason DeBoer
"The Execution of the Sun"

Deanna Francis Mason
"The Daguerreian Marvel"

Dennis Must

Charlie Onion
"Love Among the Jellyfish"
Pluto Wars
"Feast of the Manfestation"

Chris Orlet
"Romantic Comedy"

Daniel Rosenblum
"A Full Donkey"

Deanna Frances Mason
"The Daguerreian Marvel"

Andrew L. Wilson
"Fat Cake and Double Talk"


Come Back
Jackson Davis


I saw three crows in snow

fall from a white pine branch,

dead frozen before they fell.

Their dark forms became

these fields, hemmed by bone-

pale locust fencepoles.



When the ice was deep

on the surface of the lake,

and the mountains were sheepswool,

dark and white, I tried to plant

white pines in my yard, forgetting

the frostline and the frozen water,

and the fields given up for years.


My rooms then had

low ceilings, countries always

with fences, and the mountains

rose up like a fever-dream I had,

when I flipped a nickel to a

dark pine floor, and columns of coins

grew over the window, too fast to reckon,

and fell over toward me, and I


in my frightening, gathering richness,

called out to my father, grandfather,

grandmother, who stood in the doorway

leading into the hall saying Son, it's time

for you to start counting.



When I planted pines

below the house, the husk

of his throat could not

make words; there was no advice

about how deep to dig, of what to do

if it never thawed, or why before

he died he drew

a picture of the mountain

above our plot, and put

in the lower corner an azalea

constantly blooming above the snow.


Hunting, I have heard my father

calling down crows from a dark

treeline, knowing they couldn't see him

until they got too close.



On a river in Tennessee,

when my gray canoe spun down

a rapid, twisting like a

broken snake, my own voice

became my fathers,' Remember

the rocks, keep your feet up

damn it, and I thought I was Hamlet,

entirely sane, come back just to

try the fishing. My laugh went

deep into the trees.


And I've come back, here, as well,

hearing in myself a bone-song

working out, old fragments rising

to the edge of flesh:

the older words

that a man might make,

standing by a field he knows,

of the grasses that have died

and the grasses come back,

of the houses left behind

like skins, with his voice

going out into the quiet

of small lights burning across three fields,

out beyond the fences and the dark.



About the Author

Born then, not dead yet.
Fairly well-read; on occasion somewhat agreeable to talk with.
Thinks good country folk are, in fact, God's Chosen People, and thanks his God for Jane.
"No other marks or brands recollected," as Lincoln repeated.


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