The Showbear Family Circus

Category: articles

  • Flyer Poem #128: North

    Flyer Poem #128: North

    I felt your sarcasm in Cook County. Into this world, I land on the ceiling. Born in the heights of Arlington and raised in the culture of Wheeling. Discovered and connected, forever part of this Midwest city. Chicago, baby: my drug, my love affair. Redesigned and resurrected, a whole new man with none of the…

  • Flyer Poem #74

    Flyer Poem #74

    Spirit lady, you are now a mental maybe. Hard to shake off the tribal dance of heartbreak. A hall face, a yearbook picture, forever wandering into the ether that we all fear the most. She is the unknown, but we are unknowing of her next critical move.

  • Salad

    Salad

    Not an oak, but a simple laminate, I step, I go to the kitchen, I cut the salad, bare feet and such support, if only the brilliance of the monitor shone. If I have a salad and guess why the leaves of the clover are left – feet do not need slippers, I will also…

  • Recent Work (II)

    Recent Work (II)

    Josh Stein presents four paintings. For more, see “Recent Work (I).” In my current work, I find myself drawn to the use of metallic, iridescent, and fluorescent colors in combination with textures that lift the paint from the canvas, creating what I call deep patterns, almost Jungian in a way because they seem to tap…

  • Framed

    Framed

    by the kitchen window, an old apron set to dry on the black boughs of an ancient cherry tree.   Here and there flowered fabric petal-thin from many years of flour-handed use.   So worn that as the wind lifts it, the May sun shines through.   Earlier, as I hung the apron, there was…

  • Blank Verse for the Intertwined

    Blank Verse for the Intertwined

    I found them just before the killing frost. In the garden, with my rake, I uncovered 3 roots, interwoven. But the roots opened   their eyes and had in their faces the light- shy look of old women—like root grannies. Holding them, I felt stirring or quickening. They made whispery sounds, a moth and milk-…

  • Recent Work (I)

    Recent Work (I)

    Josh Stein presents four paintings. For more, see “Recent Work (II).”

  • Dog Days

    Dog Days

    It’s a sullen spring morning in Southern California.  The gray atmosphere sticks to everything in the living room–  the sofas, the mounted tv, the tall bookcase, the record player.  It’s spring in Southern California  not the one with beaches for blocks  and congested freeways weaving skyscrapers,  coughing up cars from one exit to another.  No,…

  • Timber

    Timber

    We split like firewood; I’ve seen it in movies. One long thwack and we were clear of each other, clean. I never thought I could feel so splintered.   You fueled a lot of my fire. Not with, dare I say, wilderness survival in mind, but with gallons of unleaded gasoline, all tipped over,  pouring…

  • Lines

    Lines

    There were two lines for the pharmacy, each as straight as two lines of coke on a mirror edged by a social razor. She was in one, and I was in the other. It was a simultaneous connection, like a quick addiction, but one without any immediate fix since we were both kept in line…

  • Two Lips! Click!

    Two Lips! Click!

    Nothing is sadder than two lips meeting again for the first time in a long time, they’re basically strangers   Nothing’s more awkward than that hallway dance of, “who’s going which way?” Switch, and ebb, and flow, but no one’s truly wanting to go, so, they both stay pressed against the other for nostalgia   …

  • The Wisest Woman

    The Wisest Woman