Just a quick reminder that my supernatural horror story, “The Song of the Wheat,” appears this month in “Under The Bed,” which can be purchased here for just $3.99:
http://www.fictionmagazines.com/shop/u-t-b/under-the-bed-vol-02-no-08/
Here’s a summary: “Under a limitless black firmament of summer night, an isolated Kansas farm holds secrets for two young children. Because when there are stories to tell and strange new friends to discover, little boys and girls need never be lonely.”
And, incidentally, it comes from an amazing soundtrack from one of the greatest films of all time.
“HAVE YOU EVER SEEN A PORTAL?”
Weird $+I+ that only my writer friends say to me: “We’ll put an effigy of Mao Tse Tung in the back of the Cadillac.”
[This is about a planned vacation to Vegas. Dennis, Bro, you’re my Wingman, but every once in a while, I find myself out of my depth with you.]
Irises arrive
by mail — Amanda
thanks me for her poem.
❤
… nearly half the women I know are on their way to a “Color Run.” Which is a fundraiser where women in shorts and t-shirts throw paint at each other while running a race or something.
No matter how well intentioned the fundraising is, I’m pretty sure a guy came up with the idea. You should see the pictures my Facebook friends in TX posted last year. It’s like Rainbow Brite meets the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders.
At any rate, to fuel your athletic spirit, here is Agatha the PreCog cheering you on, girls.
Now, RUUUUUUUUUUUUNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN!!!
“Together, Spying Cardinals in the Snow,” by Eric Robert Nolan
Together, spying cardinals in the snow,
you ask me
if it’s crimson sorcery,
the manner in which
their alate frames
make furtive flames
flashing,
mid-air,
momentary roses, racing
fleeting ‘V’s, speeding
eye-height,
at morning light,
manic scarlet letters?
And I here I was
ever the ready pedant,
already snatching at Latin,
finding families from memory,
reaching for genuses, species.
“Cardinalis Cardinalis,”
I dryly recite
In tones as cold as the snow,
Amanda, Dear, you know
how nomenclature comforts me,
how I like to confine
images to categories,
visions into ordered words,
feelings to their well-deserved
lexical cells. Fearing them,
I make locks from similes,
manacles from metaphors,
prisons out of assonance.
Ever-present measured meter
Is a vigilant warden.
Emotions, so sentenced,
are convicts at the stocks.
Publication makes
a neurotic victory —
“See here,” I tell all,
the writer as proud jailor,
“What I’ve confined to page.”
I pen deadbolts.
Chapters incarcerate.
Life is a locked book.
Nocturnally, they creep,
lithe, limber felons —
catlike colors through the bars
thinning red escapees to commit
Misdemeanor spectrums in my dreams.
“You have a word for everything,”
the flash of your half-smile —
that angular dip in your red lips
is like a scarlet cardinal
leaning in its flight.
“So, tell me,” you repeat,
your half-joking query,
“Is it a kind of sorcery?
“Has magic made
“cardinals be our company?
“Are their quickened roses
“made by magic from enchanted trees?”
Magic —
an older language than Latin
instructs your erudite eye,
rich in the texts
of childhood’s apocrypha:
all those lost books and invisible pages,
the tomes from which we evoked
sorcery as happy boys and girls.
As authoritative
as any Church Cardinal,
we fashioned faerie,
invented their enchantments,
and then made heroes for their aid,
at the age of eight.
You’ve never forgotten.
I have.
You painted for me once
on a trip Out East,
drawing, as you’re wont to do,
from magic. Your blue hues
made a nascent moon.
Yellows yielded stars.
Errant reds raced
down your shirt in their escape
making a hasty cursive —
angled scarlet letters —
the ‘V’s” of diving birds, perhaps
or maybe “L’s for Love.
When all of your
various roses elope, you only
let them go.
You easily release the reds:
they’re only innocent dissidents.
You are an open book
and pages of flaming magenta.
We are
Together, spying cardinals in the snow.
My Love, you are my better, though.
Where dry science constrains
and skepticism cages,
You’re adept with red
spectrums. All your spells
color the cold air
and liberate the day —
with skyward scarlets,
furtive quickened roses,
manic magentas,
crimson sorcery.
(c) Eric Robert Nolan, 2014
Originally printed in Dead Snakes, 2/14/14: http://deadsnakes.blogspot.com/2014/02/eric-robert-nolan-poem.html
… when a new character pops into your head and you keep seeing her and imagining her thoughts.
And she’s just so sad.
Cheer up, Marybeth. None of what is happening is your fault. He’s the one who is culpable. It’s a failure of leadership, but not your own.
1) Find “24” actress Mia Kirshner’s home address.
2) Show up outside her home one evening holding a boombox overhead, like that kid in that John Hughes movie. (I don’t watch them.)
3) Play Barry Manilow’s “Mandy” for her, thus winning her affections.
(I love this actress and character so much. Mandy is the Boba Fett of the “24” universe. The character of Ari Kirshner in my novel is named after the actress. I so want her to reappear in Season 9.)
What I learned today — when squirrels gather en masse, they no longer fear me.
Most adorable apparent animal threat anywhere?
THROW THE CRUST DOWN AND RUN.
“IT WAS THE BEST OF GRIMES, IT WAS THE WORST OF GRIMES.”
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 