Cozy Reads

Love Scribble  by Subhadip Majumdar

I wish that I could capture your beauty for ever.  So that with each blue moon, passing white clouds flying wings of birds I can see you always within me. I know that pain would be there.  It always would be there. I break myself thus through all the thousand deaths I suffer and like a phoenix I come back again. That one touch of rain on your eyelids. The one drop of rain on your lips. The first blush of sun on your face. The flying cascade of hairs between the first storm of the summer. You still carry the spring with you. I see you within every bit of madness that I possess. The turn of the page of a half read book,  the breakaway in a night station and to get lost in darkness, to visit that forgotten wrecked door dug in sand which still hold whispers for me,  the lit embers of a cigarette and a room full of scented coffee, that room of Madrid where below the summer moon we made love, that wandering across the village and then jump at the river. Everywhere you are there. In all the broken hallucinations of dreams and erased faces that comes back to say those words which are lost in calenders of ages, those little tears that pour down my eyes and mixed with my sweat with my blood with my words. I gather them all. Before the sun sets and the moon rise again and the wind picks up and somewhere a gypsy sings, I write what I can say to you. 
Yes just this much.

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A Day At Mick's

by

Will Mayo

So I walked into Mick's drinking establishment and sat down where Donnell was tending bar.

"So how's it going?" I asked.

"Not too good," he said. "I've got a warrant out for my arrest." He paused. "Attempted murder with an axe."

I hid the fear behind beer fogged glasses, took the pen out of my pocket, scribbled a while.

"I'll tell you what. You go down to Wayne, he's a lawyer I know." I gave him directions. "He'll set you up.”

So I enjoyed my drink a while, read the newspaper that was laying there on the counter, then exited the bar. In the days to come I heard that Donnell gave himself up to the cops there at Wayne's law office after which Wayne took care of him nice and fine. Donnell spent enough time behind bars to get him away from the public but not enough that it got to be a habit. And, of course, he learned a trade besides tending bar, welding in his case, and I didn't have to worry about him messing up my drink. Which damn it all, tasted fine just the same. It was but another afternoon at Mick's, a bar long gone from the world.

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