Amarillo Bay Contents
Volume 4 Number 1

Current Issue

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We are pleased to present our current issue, published on Monday, February 4, 2002. We hope you enjoy browsing through our more than 100 pieces of fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry! (See the Previous Issues list to learn about all the works in our collection.)

Fiction

Listening to God
by Jason Gurley
The Pacific used to mean something--the way it stretched endlessly away from the corrupted Western coast, moving in great surges and swells away from America and in the direction of Japan, of Russia, of exotic lands where nothing ever went wrong.

Nom de Critique
by David Breeden
Little praise falls to men brilliant at reading the newspaper. That's why no one has heard Omar Hardesty praised. Well enough. Truth to tell, no one has heard of him at all save the editor of The Banner News of Summit, a weekly newspaper in a backwoods town.

Strange Waters
by Kenneth Cook
When he left for school that morning, it didn't look like rain, but on the bus ride home, the water comes down thick and ominous. Barry is soaked after running from the bus to the apartment, his hair plastered to his head, his shirt and jeans clutching his body, the butcher paper covers on his books so wet and nappy that he can peel them away in tender sheets, like sun-burnt skin.

Creative Nonfiction

The Book of the Dead
by James Strickland
I erased the old words on November 10th. I started out just to change computers, and to re-use the disks I'd paid so much money for the new machine. I moved everything I thought of value. But somewhere in the shuffle I forgot my roots. As a writer.

Why I Am Hiding
by Ian Randall Wilson
There is a fire in a residential block of a suburb twenty minutes from the downtown that kills a brother and sister not even two. What is the prosody in this act of love? Junkies die from bad heroin. Do men sharing needles transfer the spirit with their blood? A young mother is taken at gunpoint, her body found in a dumpster three days later. Her husband grieves for the camera, her best friends weep; she was an angel, flawless and never heard to speak an angry word. Are the things we string together and term life visible to the eye behind us?

Poetry

Aftermath of 9-11
by Janine Goss
The line at the Dunkin Donuts is long again
people are considering
a honey dipped and a hazelnut dunkacino

Enlightenment
by Janine Goss
She preferred fat friends
whose weight she could count on
big safe flesh
to cushion her bones

It Was So Dry in Midland
(West Texas)
by Larry Thomas
even grown trees died
if they weren't watered.

Jonnie Acrid
by Charles Levenstein
Jonnie Acrid starts his day
in a usual way. He's barred
from salt, measures calories,
surreptitiously jiggles his belly
to check the progress of a new
diet regime, no discernible effect
although an already sour
disposition is getting worse.

The Skeleton
by Larry Thomas
Of Mexican clay,
in the classic
Mexican mockery
of death, it hangs
flat against a wall.

Within Minutes
by Larry Thomas
the draws
sparkled like wounds
of gaping garnet