Amarillo Bay – February 2009
Volume 11 Number 1
February 2009
Quarterly
Henry F. Tonn
With the presentation of this volume, Amarillo Bay is celebrating its eleventh year of existence, certainly a notable accomplishment, and welcomes the reader to browse its archives which contain over four hundred works. The latest edition has four short stories, one piece of nonfiction, and six poems to choose from.
With the presentation of this volume, Amarillo Bay is celebrating its eleventh year of existence, certainly a notable accomplishment, and welcomes the reader to browse its archives which contain over four hundred works. The latest edition has four short stories, one piece of nonfiction, and six poems to choose from.
One of the better pieces of flash fiction I have read recently is “The Window” by Elizabeth Esse Kahrs. It is a simple but poignant story of an old man in his home watching a distressed young man on his motorcycle. The old man has something important to tell the boy about life, but the young man is impatient to meet his destiny. Things do not end up well. Another good one is “Alpha Male” by William Powers, about a mission worker in Sierra Leone, a beautiful nineteen-year old native, and a huge alpha male chimpanzee which resides in a protected reserve. The possibilities here stretch the imagination, but it’s easier simply to read the story. Notable also is “Urbs Fabula Sine Argumentum Est” by Robert Wexelblatt, the story of a complicated relationship between a photographer and a writer.
Nothing is more obnoxious than poetry with pretense, and I am happy to say that Amarillo Bay avoids this trap. The cutest poem is the lighthearted “Speeders” by Dale Braun, a twenty-five year veteran of the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department appearing for the first time in print. A good visual poem is “Angularities (at Dawn)” by Charles Inge, about the angular slant of clouds in the morning:
making the world
seem to be
angling all one way,
but another cloud
another day –
or other birds may
turn it right around.
There is an easy, natural flow to this website, and when one scrolls to the bottom, the archives begin immediately in descending order. This online journal has been around for a while, and perusal of its contents today would lead one to hope that another eleven years of production would be to the benefit of all.
[www.amarillobay.org]
