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An Excerpt from Streetscape:
A Jake Soho Mystery By
Carl Waldman He
walked the neighborhood to work off restlessness. Along Bleecker Street he stopped in front of a window with three mannequins.
They seemed to look at him with contempt. Women out of his past frozen behind glass. Best to revisit them when dreaming,
not awake. What he found for sleeping this
night was a first for him - scaffolding in front of the corner empty building at King and MacDougal. It had been poorly assembled,
like something out of a shantytown. Missing pieces left a convenient hole within the overhang though which he could wiggle
to find refuge on top. Jake dreamed of
his hometown upstate - not New York City. Hiding
in that big tree house. Jake! Jake! Little
sis Caitlin was calling him. But Jake
ignored her. Carl Waldman is
the author of a number of reference books on history and popular culture, including Atlas of the North American
Indian. He also has co-written several screenplays, including an episode of Miami Vice
for NBC and The Legend of Two Path, a drama about the Native American side of Raleigh's
Lost Colony, shown at Festival Park in North Carolina. Streetscape: A Jake Soho Mystery may
be found at ALVA Press, Inc. As I Watch You Sleeping Helmy
Kusuma It was minutes before the
dawn When bunnies were meandering the lawn, And the cock was preparing to adorn The morning that was yet to born. The misty cold wind gushed swiftly Yet you were steady, Unmoved by the notion, Undisturbed by the supplication. You are innocent, Peaceful, Beautiful, As I watch you, sleeping. **** Helmy Kusuma
makes his home in Jakarta Utara, Indonesia. Indonesia is the fourth most populace nation in the world. There Kusuma
writes in both English and Indonesian. Kusuma
has published two novellas: Mementoes of Mai and Cinta 3 Sisi;
a thriller short story, 'There is Hope', and a collection of flash fictions, A Flash of Inspiration.
He can be found at http://www.helmykusuma.com.
Love
Poem
Lorna Tychostup
The nights I sleep with you between my legs - your absence as profound as your presence - I dream of jungle rivers,
bloodied swimming pigs, sunlit mountain waterfalls, those three colorful bodies swirling facedown in the water, cool nights and
steamy days. Sounds and smells bring you close to me... the
roar of a bus, the Chinese takeout's kitchen emissions, good poetry... The poets here have nothing
political to say. Their tongues are caught fingering their egos in
this freedom called consumerism. Even the best ones drink your coffee,
eat your bananas, your piñas... while moaning about their loves, their meager lives, their never enoughedness. And you...
you stand there asking for freedom to live, to grow your crops,
to work your land, to live with without the corporate prostitution
of your people and the army that would kill them all for a few barrels of oil.
There was a time here when the people fought, took out their pens and carved pages leading others to freedom. That was before
the sedatives arrived... T.V., alcohol, sex and other opiates. What drives me to write are others that do
but say nothing Academic hooha, playing with forms, iambs, tercets...
killing all emotion. And
there is so much to say. And what began as a love
poem has eroded to this... You ask me from your mountainous perch so far away, - your soul well hidden from those who would stop your breath - Am I angry?
And I would answer yes - at your absence from my life,
which makes it all the more meager at the vision of a moon I watch alone
wondering if you can see it as I do... And I would prefer
to stand within your heat, to smell the salt of your ocean, to
wrap myself around the howlers shrieking through the moon's full night.
And I would prefer to love you openly, bring you here to my home,
eating tortillas con huevos. I
think to travel to other places where there are less cracks to fall into,
less hazards, less love to finger... But it is always you I come back to, listing
at your irreplaceable shore.
March 5, 2000 Lorna Tychostup
is an international journalist, photographer, and communications consultant. When Senior Editor of Chronogram
Magazine, her reporting took her to Mexico, Morocco, and the Middle East, with a long-term focus on Iraq. She
has BA in Cultural Studies from Empire State College SUNY and a MS from NYU's Center for Global Affairs. Her
poems may be found in Poet's Gallery anthologies and publications; Dyed-in-the-Wool, a Hudson River Poetry
Anthology; and her book of poetry, Tales from the Revolution. ALVA Press, Inc.
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"Krista" From Depression Cookies by
Tia Silverthorne Bach and Angela Beach Silverthorne Looking through the dingy school bus window, I felt the emptiness of losing another place. I wasn't losing a home;
my family knew better than to get attached to a location. It was worse than that. The persona I had created would stay behind;
so in essence, I was dying. I never knew what I would have to become on the other side. The North Carolina girl was an illusion
I had yet to create, and the real me was a reality I had yet to know. Late at night, I would often think about the many characters I had created over the years.
I could imagine how actors felt. They become each new role only to lose that part at each premiere. Now, through the cruelty
of fate, I would lose another me. I was heading off to start a new movie, a new role. ***** Tia Silverthorne Bach
and Angela Beach Silverthorne, are the co-authors of Depression Cookies, a Finalist in the Chick
Lit category of the 2011 Next Generation Indie Book Awards. Depression Cookiescontrasts the perspectives of Krista,
a 13 year old, and her mother. The excerpt above is by Tia - an avid reader and blogger and the mother of three girls. Website: http://depressioncookies.com
An Excerpt from Lily White Liesby Kathy Reinhart "Meg, when this happened we all agreed the truth could never come out." Lowering
her head, she continued, "I may have had a little too much to drink and chirped like a bird the last time I saw you,
but I'm not so sure that telling you was for the best." "Why?
Gram, I have the right to know; besides, without knowing who my real parent's are, I have no way of knowing who I am or who
else I may be related to." I hesitated. "Gram, what I'm trying to say is... I could be marrying a blood relative." "Well for the love fo God, child, what wretched thought!" Reaching for her purse,
she added, "If it'll help put your mind at ease, Brian is not relation." "So then you do know who did it?" Taking a swallow straight
from her flask, she looked around the room and pulled her chair in closer to me. I instinctively glanced around the room also,
not sure who or what I should be looking for. ***** Kathy Reinhart is the winner of the 2009 Brighid's Fiction Manuscript contest
for Lily White Lies. Reinhart conducts weekly interviews with fellow authors at Ink Drop
Interviews on WordPress while working on her latest novel, The Red Strokes, due out next year. Lily White Lies on Amzaon!
Trauma
and Writing A Blog by Novelist Nancy Means Wright Good writing often comes out of adversity-out
of trauma. My first novel back in 1973 was written in a boys' boarding school where the headmaster wouldn't allow me to teach
English, my college major, because, he maintained, it was a man's subject. Writing the book was a way to cool the slow burn
in me, but even so, in the end, my faculty wife-heroine slowly anesthetizes herself with Sherry. Years later, after two more
books, I left a difficult marriage and went down to the mid-Hudson Valley, New York, to teach in a small liberal arts college.
I missed my family and friends; I felt like a pariah in this new place. I couldn't write anything longer than a poem! But then I invented an alter-ego called Fay, a gutsy, older woman divorcee who lives over a
Video King and toughs her way through life. I wrote and published almost one hundred poems, many in her persona-poems thrive
on adversity! The alter ego helped, but I still craved order in my life. I wanted to go to bed and wake up mornings knowing
that all was right in my world. And it wasn't. I read a newspaper article
about an assault on two elderly dairy farmers that appalled me, and decided then and there to write a mystery with a single-mother
sleuth (like myself) that would begin in chaos and end in order. I hadn't ready a mystery since fourth grade when I penned
one inspired by Nancy Drew that my mother threw out. To my surprise, Mad Season was published by St. Martin's Press, five
books in all before, in 2005, my dairy farmer sleuth's cows in Mad Cow Nightmarewere to be euthanized, and my editor
and I jointly decided to end the series. I had remarried, but just after
the demise of my series, my husband died of cancer, and I almost quit writing altogether. But I slowly picked up the pieces
of my life and went back home to Vermont. Already I had three grandchildren! Enough to live for surely, but a writer must
write. I wrote two kids' mysteries - one won an Agatha Award. Yet I longed to write another adult novel. I taught a course in Women and Literature, and rediscovered 18the century feminist Mary Wollstonecraft
(A Vindication of the Rights of Woman). Wollstonecraft became governess for an autocratic Anglo-Irish family - an often humiliating
position like my job in that boys' school. There were cries of horror when her Vindication came out, advocating breast feeding
for all, and coeducation - they called her a madwoman. And like me, feminist Mary had a dilemma: despite her insistence that
marriage was little more than slavery, she liked the company of men. In Paris during the French Revolution she fell in love,
got pregnant, was abandoned, and shunned by society all over again. After that she suffered myriad traumas - but a resilient
woman, she kept on writing. Her novels Mary: A Fiction and The Wrongs of Womanare largely autobiographical. I, too, after divorce and widowhood, find writing a therapy. With Wollstonecraft my protagonist,
my mystery novel Midnight Fires, set in Ireland when Mary was governess, will be out in April from Perseverance Press
(aptly named.). Sometimes, it seems, it's hard to distinguish real life from fiction. This fall a number of traumas affected
my family, and my personal anguish has colored the psyches and events in the lives of my fictionalized Mary. Writing, I find,
is not only a mediation, but a way of processing our traumas, a way to instill order and a measure of peace in our lives. ***** Nancy Means Wright
is the author of fifteen books, including five mystery novels from St. Martin's Press and a historical novel, Midnight
Fires (Perseverance Press). She was an Agatha winner and nominee for two kids' mysteries, and has published stories in
American Literary Review, Ellery Queen, Mystery Magazine, et al. Website:
http://nancymeanswright.com
On Writing and Trauma Products
of the Tree by Kristen Henderson There's a pressure at all hours of the day only a poem can assuage. Born at the bottom of a margin, fringe in a brood beat for generations and desolate at the root of the family oak like the rest of my nuclear crew, I could not lay the seeds for my own progeny, i.e., tomes, unless I learned
to write myself out of the paper bag self-esteem I had been living in, too. So, at midnight or noon I can look into the opaque
mirror of a blank page and make a new legacy of my
personal estate, pen my ancestors back with words yet too modern for
their graves and simultaneously heal their ghostly pain - all while tilling my symbolic womb should another hopeful sapling
donning my name bloom. ***** Kristen Henderson's poems have appeared in many
literary journals throughout the US. She has an MFA from University of Arizona and an MSW from University of Albany. Kristen
runs the Cherry Branch Gallery in Cherry Valley, New York. Her recently published book of poetry which includes "Products
of the Tree" is available at ALVA Press, Inc. Tags: Alva Press Inc, eBook Publisher, Editing, Self Publishing, Distribution, Line
Edit, eBook Design, Book Publisher, eBook Distributor, Roberta Roy, Kindle eBook, PDF eBook, BN eBook, Lybrary.com eBook
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