The Expatriate Falls Out of Love

We're on the Reification Road again

Driving in the idea of a black sedan

Through some West Texas of the mind

"Make it real!" Vikki says

"Make it real right now!"

That night in a formless motel

In the incomplete sound of wind-chimes

The full flicker of neon

I look in my eyes in the mirror

And see castles

(Why are there castles in my eyes?

Why are there the serried crags

Of a Welsh hillside topped with ruins?}

"Let's go!" says Vikki

"Let's erase this joint!"

I will listen to Bitches Brew

The deconstruction of cool

I will see those slabs of layered color

Assembled by Rothko

I will eat pho in a

Strip-malled restaurant

And place my memories in a line

Split by the unconformity of jetlag

"That place is old!" says Vikki

"Make something new!"

The silvery shimmer of a pedal steel guitar

Rises over the machine-tooled country

That slides from the speakers

Music as distant and flawed as the moon

And it only makes sense here

On Reification Road

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Depression

your thoughts – clemmed, treacle slow, laden with seams of pit shaft dark – tread an endless groove, blinkered as a pit prop pony moithered by light your mind – dimmed, dunnock shy, cradled with songs of wind swept moors – dreams a fearless path clinkered as a wind squall diamond mantled with night your self – numbed, fossil still, layered with seals of sun starved gold – furls a nubless cloth crinkled as a sun coaxed rock rose ambered in time. by Helen Overell

Ley Lines #1

The concept of "ley lines" is generally thought of in relation to Alfred Watkins, but the stimulus and background for the concept is attributed to the English astronomer Norman Lockyer . [3] [4] [5] On 30 June 1921, Watkins visited Blackwardine in Herefordshire , and went riding a horse near some hills in the vicinity of Bredwardine , when he noted that many of the footpaths there seemed to connect one hilltop to another in a straight line. [6] He was studying a map when he noticed places in alignment. "The whole thing came to me in a flash", he later told his son. [7] It has been suggested that Watkin's experience stemmed from faint memories of an account in September 1870 by William Henry Black given to the British Archaeological Association in Hereford titled Boundaries and Landmarks , in which he speculated that "Monuments exist marking grand geometrical lines which cover the whole of Western Europe". [8] Watkins believed that, in ancie

Extinct Promotion

My story "Connect" was published last year in the anthology "Extinct Doesn't Mean Forever," edited by the formidable Phoenix Sullivan. On Tuesday, January 31, you can download the entire anthology Extinct Doesn't Mean Forever free from the Kindle store. On both Tuesday and Wednesday, you can download each of the 18 single stories for free, including my story, Connect . By any reasonable measure we are dead. Unity -- slow, cold and broken -- is leaving me behind. It’s a slowly boiling mass of speckled gray now. I’m walking away from it, building, understanding, memorizing as I go. And to do these things, to tie them together, I use my memories. Of being alive, of dying, of being dead. Other authors in the anthology are participating in this promotion: Chrystalla Thoma: "The Angel Genome" Peter Dudley: "Distractions" Shona Snowden: "Blood Fruit" Scott Thomas Smith: "In Ring" Jo Antareau: "My Own

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