come spring

our two old cats in spring
start their day black furred.
roll and squirm and wiggle
outside in the sunny yard.
by afternoon they are
covered in dusty pollen.
green as moon cheese.

Cavalucci

Amanda Demanda droned on with an escalating edge.
Stacking his short comings and infractions one atop another.
As her tower soared, so did his imagination.
He wanted to be somewhere else.
No, that wasn’t enough.
He wanted to be something else.
An Italian pastry, with a cute name,
beloved by all.

by-Doug Mathewson

News from the world of indie publication

For the last four years or so I have been running a small quarterly lit mag named
Blink-Ink. It is fifty word fiction with some photography. It is fun and exciting
but I wanted to try something new. This week we will be mailing a broadsheet called
“The Mambo Academy of Kitty Wang”. Kitty has been in a few stories I have written,
and she may well turn up in more. Broadsheets have been around worldwide for hundreds
of years. Most recently I have been impressed by “Graffiti Kolkata” published by
my friend Subhankar Das in Calcutta India. This “First Dance” issue includes the work
of Robert Masterson, Jim Wittenberg, Rafael Gonzalez, and myself. The first run of 250
is going out this week. Anyone who would like a copy, while supplies last, just email
me at doug dot mathewson at yahoo dot com. Wish us luck!

Table Top

“Larry, hey how are you? How’s the wedding planning going?”

“Okay. No, better than okay, things are great, and it’s a lot more fun than I thought. Laura wants everything to be for us, they way we want and not traditional at all. She’s funny though, Laur took me to Gleason’s Department store downtown so we could pick out a china pattern if you can imagine that. I liked the real modern ones, triangular
dishes, weird oval cups and wild colors. She picked the most conservative old fashion pattern they had. Tectonic Plates! They’ve been around like forever.”

by-Doug Mathewson

Six Words

Smith Magazine in NYC publishes six word fiction.
Their most recent prompt was “Prom Night”

Big night, rented tux, no clue.

A Good Day

Yesterday was a good day. Around the corner from our house the local keeping society has restored a complete working far from about 1830. They were having a tag and bake sale. My wife and I went early, just to show support. Rain kept most people away. Attendance was poor among both sellers and buyers.
With the exception of the Boy Scouts most of the sellers were elderly. We bought a purple Schwinn bike for our oldest grand daughter.
From an elderly couple moving south I got a peavey hook with a stand, which is a forestry tool used to roll logs up off the ground so
you don’t run your saw into dirt and rock. From one old boy we got a very ugly black cat cookie jar and what may or may not be an Occupied Japan cat figurine. He said his wife had passed five years back and all the cat stuff was hers. It was only him and his dog now.
His dog barked as if on cue and he told me “She’s a Beagle. Beagles hate to get wet”. He sold a little glass creamer bottle to a woman.
She was from the nearby town the now closed dairy has been located in. I told them about years ago in big cities, when milk was delivered by
horse drawn wagons the horses were shod with rubber horse shoes so as not to wake people with their clips and clops at five am. She thought it
was to protect the horses feet, he thought I made it up.
I asked him if due to the weather if he and the others be back Sunday, the following day. He said no, “Most of these people go to church”, and gave me a funny half smile. I wasn’t sure what that smile meant. The rain was getting heavier, it was starting to flood near where we parked. Egrets waded in the rising water, the little beagle found a dry spot under a table of old coffee mugs and candy dishes, and we headed out.