What happens when a jaded publishing heiress comes face to face with Satan himself?
You can witness the confrontation in “The Devil and Amanda Ogilvie,” published today on the front page of The Piker Press:
“The Devil and Amanda Ogilvie”
Thanks yet again to Managing Editor Sand Pilarski for allowing me to be a part of this rewarding creative community. 🙂
I am absolutely honored today to see The Argyle Literary Magazine publish four of my poems: “Quiet White Dog Short Poem,” “My Mother’s Apartment,” “March Midnight Window” and “Sullen Robin Haiku.” You can find them at the link below:
Four Poems by Eric Robert Nolan
The Argyle is a superb eclectic online quarterly that strives for “an immersive experience of words and images that feeds the mind, stirs the soul, and disturbs the quiet of blank spaces.” I am grateful to Founder & Editor-in-Chief David Estringel, MFA for allowing me to join in its literary tradition.
“Adolescence.” Color lithograph. From The Four Ages of Man calendar for Chocolat Masson.
There was a parade through town that was led by firemen. And later I think I heard church bells. I’m pretty sure it was a remembrance of 9/11.
This really is a wonderful little city.
From Les Douze Mois (The 12 Months), published in Cocorico magazine.
Source: The Thoughts Library on Facebook
September 11, 2001.
We were a different country then: wounded, but undivided; scarred, but undeterred; enraged, but not at one another. The America that rallied and unified in the wake of the terror attacks seems as vanished now as the Towers themselves.
We were a nation of neighbors, as though the dust thrust up from a burning New York City had cleared to reveal an even greater Republic. We huddled together under the smoke blowing up from the charnel pit, then reached to lift one another to higher ground. We bolstered one another with whatever words we could find, in the interminable spaces after our dead had fallen silent, after the soot in the emptied streets had muted even our own footfalls.
We rose up as one to retaliate — and struck out across the world with a single fist. We were more than a superpower, more than an aggrieved people. We were these United States.
I want to believe that we can be that country — those people — again.
That is why today, fully two decades later, I will picture who we were. And I will tell myself, never forget.
— Eric Robert Nolan, originally printed in Newsday, September 11, 2021
Photo credit: UpstateNYer, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 