Amarillo Bay Contents
Volume 3 Number 1

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We start our third year with our issue published on Monday, February 5, 2001. We hope you enjoy browsing through our fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry!

Fiction

Bone Yard
by Nan Leslie
"Stay out of sight." That said, a bearded pipe fitter named Joz lit his third cigarette in as many minutes and disappeared around the corner of a stack of valves the size of a tanker. In the predawn light, the place had a graveyard feel to it, a quarter square mile of barbed wire fencing encasing great pallets of cast iron pipe, steel beams, cement blocks ten feet wide and six feet deep, giant spools of cable, and all manner of oversized building materials for the latest government brainchild: Milestone Nuclear Power Plant. I was a temp. Summer help that had been brought in under the heavy hand of my father, shift foreman for the local pipe fitter's union, lost somewhere high up in the scaffolding. In the distance the skeleton of Milestone One rose from the earth with its cavernous bowels designed to hold the core and all the life support systems needed to generate a 660,000 kilowatt nuclear reactor. Ten years and five billion dollars later construction would taper off with the completion of Milestone One, Two, and Three, but for now there was only the start of Milestone One and the hard gleam in the eyes of the men who knew they'd have work for years to come yet. Steady work.

The Bag Woman
by David Halliday
Things were not going well. Persuaded by my parents, I had bought a condominium on the edge of the city, two bus rides and one subway ride away from my work. My mother wanted me within calling distance so that if either of my parents died in the middle of the night I would be close at hand.

Graffito
by John Palcewski
I have to tell you about an odd dream I had three nights ago. Some man I don't know is telling me, "I would really like to be reincarnated as one of those little plaster things that are used as models in drawing classes. You know, those white blocks, spheres, and pyramids." "Why?" I ask him. "Because none has a penis," he replies. And then suddenly he disappears and I'm alone, thinking about what the stranger has just said, and somehow I realize there is a connection between those white plaster models and the Chopin mazurkas I have been playing at night to mask the dreadful Forio street noise. In the dream I know one explains the other, but nevertheless I can't see exactly how. Then I awaken, vaguely puzzled, and mildly anxious.

Creative Nonfiction

Ash Wednesday: a Meditation on T.S. and my Students
by H. Palmer Hall
It is Ash Wednesday which I celebrate by re-reading the T.S. Eliot poem not by giving something up. Eliot's "Ash Wednesday" is penance enough for one year. "And God said / Prophesy to the wind, to the wind only for only / The wind will listen."

Poetry

Looking North
by H. Palmer Hall
I am up much too early today
not to watch the sun rise
but because of some restlessness
some desire to move from
this one spot where the earth

Marriage
by H. Palmer Hall
So, I got married and I was almost good
though I would not wear a tux, wrap my waist
with a silly piece of shiny cloth, put diamond
studs through a frilly shirt, do all the silly stuff

A Refusal to Mourn the Possible Death by Observation of Schrodinger's Cat
by H. Palmer Hall
Not once until stars collide
And galaxies whirl into unobserved
Oblivion, until birds, beasts
And flowers shed no more sperm, pollen,
And the dark night comes
When waves wash upon
The last wide-beached shore

Two by Two Walking out of the garden
by H. Palmer Hall
Heat along with a forgetting of the past
Had taken them up the evolutionary trail.
First cause? The Bunsen burner oh boiling the ooze.
They could not have halted soon in any case,

Two Virgins in Moonlight
by H. Palmer Hall
When we walked behind the house that night,
you just 14, me 12, we did not know
the phases of the moon, the feel of damp earth
on body parts never before exposed.

Funerals
by Troy Reeves
The rich and would-be rich refuse to show
Their grief. Like children strung out in a row
For wolf-over-the-river, they form a picket
Against the beast rustling in that dark thicket

Red River
by Troy Reeves
The ropes we were reeving in fell slack
As the river bucked and we tumbled back
In the rocking boat and watched our catch
Crash into view, a netted silver batch