Two Shot: War Medal and Fat Chance by Hosho McCreesh

Hosho McCreesh strikes again with stories that crawl inside your head and stay there.
In the first of two short stories available at http://www.smashwords.com , War Medal, a young boy named Henry spends his day with Buck, a man that was best friends with his father in the armed forces. Buck gets around by using a wheel-chair and Henry gladly spends time pushing him around town on his birthday which happens to be the 4th of July. Buck is out-spoken and bitter, cracking unseemly jokes and causing “scenes” wherever they go. Buck is a vet with a drinking problem, Henry is a boy of 12 trying to understand the jokes Buck spouts and the emotional reactions Buck has to the world around him. Buck spouts off about losing his legs, about a bottle of booze breaking on the sidewalk, and to Henry’s delight, reminisces about Henry’s Dad. For those who know someone like Buck, this story will make your skin crawl. For those who don’t, your skin may crawl anyway as we read about a grown man dealing with the loss of his legs, his best friend, and his attempts to befriend the son of his dead best friend. Told from Henry’s perspective you get a sense of Henry’s innocence, his desire to hear all he can about his Dad, and his longing to make sense of someone like Buck. The ending to this story is disturbing, it has the makings for tragedy of the worst kind and then leaves us hanging. So many lives never tie up neatly and the ending leaves us believing the same thing for both Henry and Buck—how their lives will continue on with loose ends dangling.

The second story, Fat Chance, is about Patrick, a working class man in a working class neighborhood who gets a call from a woman he knows and she asks if she can crash at his place and catch some sleep while he goes to work. He says it’s fine and spends his day thinking about her, forgetting about the hardships of his working shift, dreaming of the things they’ll do together after work, such as heading to the bar Fat Chance. Patrick is the underdog, a man who endears himself to you as you champion his dreams for the night. Does he get the girl or not? To find out how it ends, you’ll have to read it for yourself.

Hosho McCreesh’s stories are always dead-pan and startling, taking the hard-working and turning life on its ear. I highly recommend reading these two stories,War Medal and Fat Chance, are available as a “double shot” for a mere .99 cents at:

http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/106823


To learn more about Hosho McCreesh and see what other poetry and stories he has published, visit his web-site at:

www.hoshomccreesh.com
Thanks always for reading, please drop in January 2nd when I have returned from spending time with family and friends for the holidays. I wish you and yours Happy Holidays and Happy New Year…

Nerve Cowboy Open Submissions

If you are a poet looking to break in, this is a great place to do so, they were my first acceptance and I am proud to be part of their journal. They also publish great work by seasoned veterans along with artwork and short stories, it’s a well-rounded journal that’s been around for a long time—they like attitude and you need to visit their web-site and/or order a journal to see what I mean.

Having said all of that, they are open to snail-mail submissions year round: Send up to five pages of poems with your contact information on each page along with a Self Addressed Stamped Envelope to:

Joseph Shields and Jerry Hagins, Editors
Nerve Cowboy
P.O. Box 4973
Austin, TX 78765

For more details, go to:

http://www.jwhagins.com/submission.html

and

http://www.jwhagins.com/nervecowboy.html

Good luck to all who submit, please stop in tomorrow for a review of two short stories…

Poems Found by Poet Hound

http://juked.com/2011/12/breakfastinslidell.asp
“Stopping for Breakfast in Slidell” by Ann Barngrover

http://www.sundresspublications.com/wickedalice/young.htm
“Little Red Riding Hood” by Jessica Young


Thanks for clicking in, please drop by tomorrow for more open submissions…

The Accidental Navigator by Henry Denander

Henry Denander’s latest collection of poems and one short story, The Accidental Navigator, is published by Lummox Press and has a conversational, close-friend tone that is familiar and comforting. The poems themselves describe Mr. Denander’s amazing life (amazing compared to mine, anyway) of his time working for a record company and meeting such famous people as Leonard Cohen, Miles Davis, Chet Baker and Keith Jarrett. In addition, living on an island in Greece affords him wonderful tales to tell in poetic form as well. From poetry to music to every day life, Mr. Denander covers it all in a natural way that has you reading page to page before realizing the stories are coming to an end. I look forward to more poems and more stories from Mr. Denander and I’m happy to share a few of them with you:


Beauty Sleep

I am sleeping with a CPAP,
it’s a device that blows
air into my nose.

For years I’ve been snoring heavily and
suffered from sleep apnea.

With this tube attached to my nose
I no longer snore and I have a
good sleep.

But when I strap the mask on at night
my wife realizes I no longer look like
the handsome young man
she married

but more like Hannibal Lecter.

But I think she prefers
the Silence of the Lambs
to the Thunder in the Night.

This poem made me laugh. If you don’t know or remember who Hannibal Lecter is he is a character in the movie Silence of the Lambs and is known as a murdering psychopath. I love that this poem is conversational in tone, as though the poet is leaning into you and telling you this story.



The revenge of the couch potato

Zapping through the TV-channels
I stopped at Jeopardy, when I
Recognized a familiar face from
35 years ago.

It was an old teacher I remembered
for his beard and his clogs.

He was a besserwisser and here he
Was on prime time and I was sitting
on my couch watching him miss
almost every question.

At last he got what was coming to
him, Mr. Know-It-All.

I wish I could’ve been there in the
studio to tell him to do his lessons
better next time.

Mr. Denander’s story of sweet-sweet revenge watching a teacher who harassed him as a kid failing at Jeopardy is another one that makes me laugh aloud. We all know this type of person and we all feel grateful when they are put in their place, another great poem.



Accept your name

Henry Chesney Baker
and Henry Charles Bukowski;

if I had known about these guys when
I was young perhaps I would have liked
my own name better.

My name is OK now but I was never very
pleased with it when I was a kid.

At that time no one here in
Sweden knew about Chet or Buk
but now it’s god to be able to
tell people that both of them were
named Henry.

And no one needs to know that
Buk never liked Henry
but used Charles instead.

This poem is one I can relate to, I hated my name as a kid. My grandmother still doesn’t like her own name. This poem’s title is simple and true, accept your name, and then discover other people you admire with the same. A lovely poem that gets you thinking.



The SASE

On eBay I bought a self-addressed and
stamped envelope that the poet Charles Bukowski
sent to Chiron Review in the 80’s.

This is the system, you send poems to a
magazine or a publisher and if they like them
they will use the SASE to reply to you.

More likely they will not use your poems and
return them in the SASE with a brief standard note
telling so.

Many poets have written about how they received
their first rejection letter or how they have their
drawers full of rejection slips.

Even Bukowski got rejection slips. In the early days.

I have framed the Bukowski envelope and
it looks nice on my wall.

It’s a nice conversation piece; when someone asks
about it I tell them the story of how it works and also,
sort of by the way,
I tell them that the Chiron Review is
actually the magazine where I had my
first poem published.

And I don’t mention any of my
rejection letters.

This poem is a tribute to all writers, in my opinion. All of us pine for a personal piece of a writer we admire, we all have those rejection letters saved (some of us shred them or delete them from our e-mails but we always have one or two saved). This poem is a guilty pleasure of mine to share with you all, simple as that.


If you enjoyed this review I urge you to Lummox Press for a copy of your very own. There are so many poems I would like to share but feel it better for you to indulge yourselves by finding a copy for yourself. To purchase a copy of The Accidental Navigator by Henry Denander for $15.00 (not including S/H), visit Lummox Press at:

http://www.lummoxpress.com/

To learn more about Henry Denander go to:

www.henrydenander.com



Thanks always for reading, please click in tomorrow for more Poems Found by Poet Hound…

Press Press Press Blog

Every year around this time I make sure to include a link to this blog because they showcase the latest published chapbooks by the small presses and this is yet another great way to find that perfect gift for the poet, writer, or reader in your life:

http://presspresspress.blogspot.com/

Thanks for clicking in, please stop in tomorrow for another featured poet…