Amarillo Bay Contents
Volume 8 Number 1

Current Issue

We are pleased to present the first issue of our eighth year, published on Monday, 6 February 2006. We hope you enjoy browsing through our extensive collection of fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry! (See the Works List to discover the many works in our collection, including the ability to search through the issues.)

Fiction

Full House
by Marlys Pearson
I get out of the cab, hoping I'm not drenched with sweat by the time I make the door. You would think the obvious place to hold a convention for online poker players would be Las Vegas, right? I mean, hello, casinos? Plus, it's Convention City, hosting close to six million conventioneers every frickin' year. These folks know their way around a large group meeting, so even if all twenty-six thousand members of Poker Playground showed up, they could handle it. Continue

Manny by the Sea
by Paul Silverman
After all this time the father still thought of the old buckskin Indian woman. As he drove home in the late afternoon he thought back, for the thousandth time, to that way she'd prepared an orange for him, how she'd hacked the skin off with a large machete-like knife instead of peeling it, his way, his whole family's way, with a small paring knife. It was a paradox: even if he spoke perfect Spanish, or she spoke perfect English, the different approaches to a mere orange still would have given them away as coming from opposite worlds. Continue

Trespasser
by Mark Spencer
Rick squints through the dirty windshield at the narrow road, a splash of gray in the headlights. He turns at every crossroad, then finds himself descending a long Kentucky hill, no driveways, no houses, no barns, no shacks--nothing on either side, just a continuous drop, trees close to the crumbling edges of the asphalt. Finally, he hits bottom and crosses a one-lane, wooden bridge over a frozen creek. Then, abruptly, he's at a dead end. Continue

Creative Nonfiction

Cultivating Pomegranates and Figs
by Rebecca Spears
From any vantage point in the yard, I could see the pomegranate and fig trees crowding the back fence as lovers negotiating in a cramped space--the fig's large, green hands reaching into the pomegranate tree. As a child, I imagined loving intimacies, not knowing exactly what these meant--the stewing mix of love, loathing, jealousy, pleasure, and boredom that I would later know. Had my grandmother considered this intimate entanglement when she planted the trees in her garden? Continue

"Thank God For My White Man"
by Hellena K Martindale
"Thank God for My White Man." I knew the title of my online post would cause controversy as soon as my fingers pranced across the keyboard. New members to the "Nappy Hair" group usually started out by sharing their journey of how and why they left the practice of straightening their hair. "Nappy Hair" is an online group of African Americans who come together to celebrate our natural "nappiness." Continue

Poetry

Before Closing Time
by Lynn Strongin
cooling.
Creep into grief, shot, the soul's core Continue

Comes a Morning
by Lynn Strongin
dropped out of a sack
of black apples. Continue

Second Notification
by Lynn Strongin
One step ahead of death,
you bend darkness
dreaming of passing the blue-lines around. Continue

Rescue Man
by John Grey
in the corner of your forehead
a scar from a long ago accident Continue

Tour of the European Battle-fields
by John Grey
Hard to believe that sixty years ago,
these people were killing us. Continue

Works List

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