Friends, romans, countrymen… Happy Sunday morning. It’s raining here in Baltimore, thunder-storming, in fact, after a gorgeously beautiful Saturday. At least Spring has arrived, the flowers are blooming, the trees are blossoming in all their yellows and pinks and purples and greens. And the rats are coming out of hibernation. Did I say rats? Yeah, rats, the size of small ponies… Okay, maybe the size of miniature ponies… Okay, but I swear that they truly are the size of cats around here. This is Baltimore, after all.
So, you’re wondering, why is he giving me an update on Baltimore flora and fauna? Has he taken up ecology or something? No, sorry to disappoint – I just don’t have time for another career, what with the cyber-punk rock-and-roll poet-philosopher thing going on. Although I do enjoy pretty flowers.
This is all an elaborate ploy to keep you interested long enough to read the third paragraph, in which I divulge the fact that a short fiction piece of mine (or is it a prose poem? oh, the gray, nebulous divide) is appearing in the Spring 2008 issue of JMWW, a quarterly on-line journal. To be precise, the piece is called “Case Study: Part 16” and was inspired by/is a response to JZF’s poem “John Freemont Interviews #24”.
You can read 16 here:
http://jmww.150m.com/Langston.html
You can find the index and read the rest of the Spring 2008 issue here:
And you can watch this excellent piece of independent documentary film making about Baltimore Rat Fishing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Yv9I33uob0
Yes, Baltimore, where the rats are the size of cats and the cats run and cower in the corners… Or at least the cat I live with.
