Category: articles
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You Will Never Find Me This Way
Before we get to You Will Never Find Me This Way, We of the Showbear Family Circus write with a heavy heart to tell you that the author of these three poems, Jonathan Dowdle, passed from this life between acceptance and confirmation of terms. There was an 8-month delay. We learned 10 days ago that…
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Write Fearless
Before we get to Write Fearless, We of the Showbear Family Circus write with a heavy heart to tell you that the author of these three poems, Jonathan Dowdle, passed from this life between acceptance and confirmation of terms. There was an 8-month delay. We learned 10 days ago that the reason for the delay…
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Heart is full of everything
Heart is full of everything,days and nights just a swing,I am in a whirlwind.
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Greeting the New Year
Large shapes shy and neigh on the edges of our circle. An outline across the flames is you, beneath blankets, unwilling to face night’s sure vast loss. Morning’s approach is less heard than felt. A silent crescendo, a change in the air, a long breathless sigh. The horses, knowing dawn, further range. Then I see,…
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Sloppy Grows
Cluttered stalls line the market streets And merchants lift up their offerings with both hands Knowing they have the public in their palms. What used to be shunned as a practice of the unrefined – Now exalted as the height of morality and health. All those hours spent in brightly lit bulk warehouses Are now…
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Pomegranate Wine
I arrived in New Orleans’s muggy dawn haze to see a team of men spraying last night’s vomit into the chunky gutters of Bourbon Street. Mucus water rushed down the drains like my romantic hopes for the city, leaving behind a beery stench and your troubled narrator, puzzled over where to begin. Following the example…
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The Existentialist Starter Kit
It was a dark and stormy night when we received the late-night call that every parent of a college student dreads. “Dad,” my son said, struggling to present a brave front in the face of the disaster that had apparently befallen him. “Yes?” “I’ve become an existentialist.” I gulped, covered my eyes with my hand, and shook…
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Harvest, 1992
A muddy irrigation ditch, a few solitary power lines and an occasional pole barn were all that interrupted the otherwise tedious repetition of flat cropland. This was fly-over country. Today however Ms. Watson’s fifth grade class, with their shouts of excitement and disbelief from the open windows of the old school bus, ruptured the monotony.…
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Beyond Belief: Harry Houdini in the Age of Alternative Facts
If you’ll believe in me, I’ll believe in you. Is that a bargain? Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass Independence Day Eve 1878, at the age of four, Hungarian-born Erik Weisz immigrates to the United States with his pregnant mother and four brothers. The Weisz-turned-Weiss family settles in Appleton, Wisconsin, and later, in a boarding house…
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A Friend In Need
Knitting doesn’t cure the hopelessness. It only distracts. He never tells anyone. About either. He sleeps with the afghan—his finest work—and every morning stuffs it in the closet with his other creations. Green mittens. A red toboggan. Tonight’s drive to the liquor store is particularly cold. He rubs a circle on the fogged windshield with…
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House Cat Pantoum
In the window, I watch and sit. Birds light and peck the ground. Into the air, they dart and flit. I meow and make no sound. Birds light and peck around. Bumping the glass and twitching my tail I meow and make no sound. Such slender necks, weak and frail. I bump the glass and…
