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the blanket of my love

THE BAX

2006 – MAY 17, 2017, 6:06 PM

Baxter died of kidney failure Wednesday evening.  I held him in my arms as he went painlessly, fearlessly and peacefully into that good night. If there is a literal heaven, then surely Bax passed through whatever doggie door there may be into that Eternity.

Much thanks to Muttville, Joe and Raphael for the gift of Bax. They saved him from premature death in a rescue that has a kill-policy. Muttville is an elder-dog rescue with a no-kill policy. They rock big time.

Much appreciation for Dr. Linda Hall of Peninsula Avenue Veterinary Clinic in San Mateo for compassionate and professional care. We love her and recommend her without reservation.

We are fortunate to have Pet’s Rest Cemetary and Crematory available to us in this area. They also provided our family with gentle and respectful service when our feline family member, Gypsy Rose, died a while back. Javier is kind.

Our love and appreciation for professional jazz singer and world-class friend, Candice Hawley, for getting us back and forth to Linda Hall and Pet’s Rest and other related appointments and errands. Before we went in for our last visit with Dr. Hall, Candice took Bax’s paw and sent him off with a prayerful good-bye.

And most of all our love to my son, Richard, and my beautiful daughter-in-law – writer, blogger and photographer –  Karen Fayeth –  for loving Bax so much and having my back in this as in everything. ♥

I hope to return to email and Facebook and to my regular posting schedule on WordPress this Sunday with Sunday Announcements. Meanwhile thank you for the kind and understanding comments (here and Facebook) and for the messages and emails.

Warmly,
Jamie

Tribute To A Best Friend

Sunlight streams through window pane
unto a spot on the floor….
then I remember,
it’s where you used to lie,
but now you are no more.
Our feet walk down a hall of carpet,
and muted echoes sound….
then I remember,
It’s where your paws would joyously abound.
A voice is heard along the road,
and up beyond the hill,
then I remember it can’t be yours….
your golden voice is still.
But I’ll take that vacant spot of floor
and empty muted hall
and lay them with the absent voice
and unused dish along the wall.
I’ll wrap these treasured memorials
in a blanket of my love
and keep them for my best friend
until we meet above.

– Anon

 

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Thanks to
Cindy Tailor for sending this cartoon. Sweet and it did make me smile. xo
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dogs just don’t live as long as people do

“. . . owning a dog always ended with this sadness because dogs just don’t live as long as people do.”  John Grogan,  Marley and Me

I am sitting with Bax. His kidneys are failing. His time with us is about to end, so forgive me for the delays in posting. He needs my undivided attention and I need to say goodbye. I’ll be back soon with poetic responses to last week’s writing prompt and with this Wednesday’s Writing Prompt.

To be featured:
Renee Espiru
Paul Brookes
Sonja Benskin Mesher, RCA
Colin Blundel

Thank you for your patience.
Jamie

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The BeZine, May 2017, Honesty & Transparency, The Post-truth (Post-factual Politics) Era

May 15, 2017

“In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
—George Orwell

This is an extraordinary time; a time when post-truth culture is thriving in Russia, China, America, Australia, Britian, India, Japan and Turkey. This political climate is founded and furthered by appeals to emotion and on conclusions based on ignorance of and resistance to hard science and well-documented history. A perhaps unprecedented level of bombast replaces common sense, honesty and sincere promise creating a climate that rests on disinformation, intimidation and divide-and-conquer as its primary weapons of control. This all combines to undermine rule of law, free speech and free media. We have administrations evolving in the spirit of Orwell’s 1984 where diplomacy and statesmanship have devolved into manipulative spins calculated to influence the gullible and solidify the power of would-be autharitarians.

With the mixed blessing of social networking citizens seem unable – or perhaps unwilling – to distinguish lies from truth and fact from fallacy. President Obama is described as “obsessed” with this problem (hyperreality) and the mixed ecosystem of professional journalism and social network reportage in which “everything is true and nothing is true.”

“In an age where there’s so much active misinformation, and it’s packaged very well, and it looks the same when you see it on a Facebook page or you turn on your television, where some over-zealousness on the part of a US official is equated with constant and severe repression elsewhere, if everything seems to be the same and no distinctions are made, then we won’t know what to protect…If we can’t discriminate between serious arguments and propaganda, then we have problems.”
—Barak Obama

We’ve decided this month to address the challenges that face our countries and the world. We’ve addressed these in essay and poetry, sometimes head-on and sometimes by a thread. Though perspectives and solutions may differ to some degree, there is clear agreement that the concerns are real as is the need to “resist.”

♦

A last note: Thanks to Michael Dickel for further technical refinements to make this zine more accessible and readily readable. Thanks also to the members of our core team, to our guest contributors and to our readers for continued support, encouragement and the pleasures of our shared values.

In the spirit of peace, love and community
and on behalf of The Bardo Group Bequines,
—Jamie Dedes, Founding and Managing Editor

“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. ”
― George Orwell

For this issue of The BeZine

  • Click HERE to read the entire magazine by scrolling (includes the intro above) and
  • To learn more about our guests contributors, please link HERE.

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SUNDAY ANNOUNCEMENTS: Calls for Submissions, Contests, Events and Other News and Information

CALLS FOR SUBMISSIONS

Opportunity Knocks

THE MUSE, An International Journal of Poetry publishes two journals a year and accepts submissions rom July 1- November 10 for December and January 1- May 10 for June. Details HERE. The Muse has a call open for its fourth annual anthology.  Details HERE.

THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POETRY is published twice-a-year.  Both emerging and established poets are featured. There are no style or form restrictions and long poems are welcome. There is a reading fee of $5. Submission Guidelines are HERE.

QUIDDITY International Literary Journal and Public-Radio Program “is a multimedia arts venue featuring an international literary journal (print and audio), a public-radio program, and a visiting writer and artist series.  Quiddity is published and produced in partnership with NPR member/PRI affiliate WUIS, Illinois Public Radio’s hub-station.” Quiddity features prose, poetry and poetry for radio broadcast. Reading period ends December 15. Details HERE.

THOMAS McSWEENEY’S QUARTERLY CONCERN! publishes fiction and nonfiction. Details HERE.  “Poetry can be wonderful, but is not something we publish in the Quarterly. Please send completed book-length poetry manuscripts to poetry@mcsweeneys.net.”

VOICEMAIL POEMS “was created by jamie mortara during National Poetry Month in April 2012 with a simple idea: Set up a phone number (1-910-703-POEM) for people to call and share their poetry.” Submission guidelines HERE.

THE BeZINE submissions for the June 2017 issues (theme: Environmental Justice/Climate Change: Farming and Access to Water) should be in by June 10th latest.  Publication date is June 15th. Poetry, essays, fiction and creative nonfiction, art and photography, music (videos), and whatever lends itself to online presentation is welcome for consideration. Please check out a few issues first and the Intro./Mission Statement and Submission Guidelines. No demographic restrictions.

PRETTY OWL POETRY, an online quarterly journal, is supportive of emerging and established writers. This zine publishes poetry, fiction and visual arts, all style and artistic collaborations. The editors say they like “something shameful. something surreal. a deluge of desire. confessions of crimes & hearts teeming with rattlesnakes. a merry-go-round that makes you dizzy.” Submission guidelines HERE. 

THE YALE REVIEW offers no formal guidelines other than reading their journal before submitting, which is really a basic rule for every magazine whether stated explicitly or not. Editor: J.D.McClatchy. Editorial contact is HERE.

580 SPLIT is a publication of Mills College in Oakland, California. Calls for submissions are open now for Issue 19 (2016/2017). The top submission in seach category will receive a cash prize. Categories are: long and short form fiction, creative non-fiction, essays, novel/graphic novel excerpts, poetry, visual/digital art, conceptual art and design, photography, comics, interviews, scripts, transcripts, translations, Details HERE.

GETTYSBURG REVIEW, a publication of Gettysburg College, is published quarterly. The reading period for poetry, fiction and essays is September 1st – May 31st.  Submission guidelines HERE.

POST-TRUTH is a website started on U.S. inauguration day, which “invites artists, filmmakers, writers, scholars, to contribute work reflecting on living in a post-truth society. We hope this can be a site and community where artists can know that their work related to the times we live in will be shown, heard and respected.” Check it out HERE.

THE MATADOR REVIEW is an online literature and art quarterly featuring fiction and creative non-fiction, flash fiction and poetry. Submissions for issue 5 (Summer 2017) will close on May 31. Details HERE.

CONTEST/AWARD

NEW LETTERS MAGAZINE sponsors awards for writers – poetry, fiction and nonfiction – of $1,500 each. Entry fees of $20 and $15. Deadline May 18th  for the 2017 awards. Details HERE.

CALL FOR PAPERS

NORTHEAST POPULAR CULTURE ASSOCIATION CONFERENCE – WORLD LITERATURE welcomes papers that explore both individual works of world literature as well as contemporary issues in the field of World Literature.  Questions under consideration could include how to understand what world literature is, how best to teach works of world literature as well as the exploration of current trends in postcolonial, world and comparative literatures. Deadline June 1 for the fall conference, October 27 – 28 at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, MA. Details HERE.

For more calls for papers on a range of topics link HERE.

EVENT

KUDOS …

Kudos and congratulations to Krysia Jopek on the debut of her new online publication, DIAPHANOUS PRESS on May 15, 2017 at Noon, U.S. Eastern Standard Time at DiaphanousPress.com.

This  biannual journal publishes and promotes contemporary experimental and postmodern literary and visual artists side by side in a free publication.The name “DIAPHANOUS” implies Krysia’s desire to showcase finely crafted literary and visual art that has a life of its own independent of the artist or author and is not completely transparent or “accessible.” Not that the work is purposely abstruse but that the work requires the reader or viewer to determine its possible meanings through interaction with it. This kind of art is not disposable–it demands to be read and viewed repeatedly because of its power to arrest, engage, and “haunt” the reader/viewer.

Krysia Jopek, the founder and editor of Diaphonous Press offers thanks to contributing editor Michael Dickel, specifically for his WordPress design help in making this labor of love an online reality; Poetry Editor Thato Andreas Mokotjo, a young, South African poet and passionate poetry enthusiast; her remarkable staff of Contributing Editors: Meg Harris, Dale Houstman, James Audio, Kinga Fabó, and Eric Traska—in addition to all of the supportive writers and artists included in the debut issue of Diaphanous Press as well as everyone supportive of its vision of poetics / aesthetics.

Submissions Page: https://diaphanouspress.com/diaphanous-press/submissions/

DIAPHANOUS PRESS Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/diaphanouspress/

♦

Kudos to JORDAN BLUM (The Bookends Review) for his cover to cover interview of MICHAEL DICKEL (Meta/Por(e(/Play). It’s an absolutely delightful and wide-ranging discussion about books, music, poetry and more.  Check it out HERE.

THE BOOKENDS REVIEW: “Founded in 2012, The Bookends Review is an independent creative arts journal dedicated to bringing you the best original fiction, nonfiction, poetry, interviews, essays, book reviews, and visual/musical works from around the world.”  Link HERE.

JORDAN BLUM holds an MFA in fiction and teaches composition and creative writing at several colleges/universities. He’s published creative and/or scholarly pieces in several places/ jordanblum@thebookendsreview.com.

Writer and photographer MICHAEL DICKEL has work in several print and online publications. He co-edited Voices Israel Volume 36 (2010), and was managing editor for arc-23 and -24. His most recent book, The Palm Reading after The Toad’s Garden, came out in 2016. Previous books are: War Surrounds Us, Midwest / Mid-East, and The World Behind It, Chaos… He has taught at colleges and universities in both Israel and the U.S. Michael is a contributing editor to The BeZine.

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