Sonny
by Irving A. Greenfield

Want to make the stories in Amarillo Bay easier to read on the screen?

Sonny saw her as soon as he turned the corner. He was careful not to step on any of the cracks between the cement squares of the sidewalk. Stepping on them was bad luck. And his luck was so bad he didn't need anything else to make it worse. He got his report card. Except for an "A" in reading and vocabulary, it was terrible. And he promised his mother it would be better than the last one because the last one was awful too.

Pirates
by Robert Johnson
DEM-OH-GRAF-ICKS is what it's called.

The study of who's living and dying and what they are up to in between. How much flu, how many hearing aids, who eats what for breakfast. Demographics is a science that has come more and more to intrigue me. As I have been a people-watcher for years, I recently was surprised delighted, really to discover that what I had thought of as my own perverse pleasure-seeking was actually a kind of respected profession. People do this for a living.

Creative Nonfiction

A new report shows that more Canadians now live above the poverty line than ever before. But a statistic also shows that over one-third more of the 21 residents of Kitkabula feel most sad on Wednesday afternoons. I might have begun my newscast with: "A new report shows that one-third more Canadians suffer from mid-week depression." Of course, there is so much more (or less) which would follow this fictitious story's headline. But a headline's universality can plunge writers into their imaginations just as media headlines captivate "hook" readers. And writers who objectify their fiction jump-start their imaginations and harm no one.

A Nickel
by Martin M. Jacobsen
I heard the ping of a coin hitting the floor and automatically looked in that direction. A man had dropped a nickel on the floor, and it had rolled underneath the vending machine in front of him.
"Dammit," he said as he bent over to retrieve it.
"Forget the goddamn thing," said a fat man sitting at a nearby table. "It's only a nickel. Ain't really any more valuable than the dust it landed in."

An Old Man Leaves The Party:
An Essay on Mark Strand and His Pulitzer-Winning Poetry Collection Blizzard of One
by Marie Jordan
Mark Strand is one of the most imitated poets in America, but often not well understood. He has won major prizes for his work, including a MacArthur Fellowship, an NEA grant, and fellowships from the Ingram Merrrill, Rockefeller, and Guggenheim foundations. He won the Edgar Allen Poe Award by the Academy of American Poets, the Bobbitt Prize for Poetry and Yale's Bollingen Price for poetry.

Poetry

Note: You should start with the first five poems.

E-poem: five

Donny
I’m still stumped on e-poetry
e-mail makes sense but e-poems don’t

take that e e cummings what visited English class
dropped letters like cake frosting sprinkles
that normal?
didn’t make sense ta me