False Penelope
Did I expect an Odysseus-like reception? The unknown child, now grown, a manikin of loyal longing? And would she want to see the scars where I once bled?
So the journey continues — longer than the war with Ilium or my travels here.
Instead the dead crowd the past, the dying present here.
Suitors past and present have seduced her and left; I was snared by Circe’s brown eyes as the mists congeal, swirl, part, and curtains fall.
The players change and grow, blight affection, meter heart. Pain, pain; age, age the echo comes — the suspect sounds of arteries clogging with regret, parts played out without rehearsal, no chance for correction before opening night.
Go Ask Alice
She is the blank canvas hers is the face upon which nothing is wrought everything going on somewhere deep be- neath the surface the wonder of it apparent in the twin windows of her mask.
Like so many women of her generation she finds it difficult to pretend that she is bigger than she is, or smaller; she has eaten many mushrooms, drunk much from the nameless cup.
Why, then, are our expectations any greater where she is concerned, any less than those of ourselves?
Who is Alice, what is she, that all our instincts think they own her? Why should not Violet shrink from all the men that do offend her?
Where is the blank slate dark as night when wet but washed-out gray when dry?
There, in the set of her jaw and in the ageless features of her face, content to reveal all and nothing, in the same instant.
Jamie Brown earned his MFA from American University, where he worked on his fiction with Frank Conroy, Terry MacMillan, James Alan McPherson, Joyce Kornblatt, and others, and worked on his poetry with Henry Taylor, Myra Sklarew, Linda Pastan, Kermit Moyer and others.
A native of Washington, D.C., he taught for over a dozen years at George Washington University, for eight years concurrently teaching creative writing at Georgetown University. He taught the first-ever creative writing workshop, an eight-week intensive workshop on poetic forms in poetry, at the Smithsonian Institution.
His fiction has been published in Cup of Joe: Coffee House Flash Fiction Anthology, The Delmarva Review, The Fiction Review, Gargoyle, Ginosko, Linden Avenue Literary Journal, Mediterranean Poetry, Sulphur River Literary Review, The Washington Review, and Wordwrights Magazine. His poetry and has been published in dozens of literary magazines, including California Quarterly, Gargoyle, Gypsy Blood Review, Negative Capability, Howling Dog, Kipple, Maintenant, Midwest Poetry Review, Minimus, Musings, Nebo, Phase and Cycle, Poet Lore, Poetry Motel, Rat’s Ass Review, San Fernando Poetry Journal, Sulphur River Literary Review, Tekintet (in translation in Hungary), and Voices International among others.
He won the Best Book of Verse (2013) for Sakura: A Cycle of Haiku, and Best Chapbook of Verse (2019)f or The Delaware Bay: Poems from the Delaware Press Association. His most recent chapbook, Aftermath and Other Poems, is forthcoming from Moonstone Press, Philadelphia. His full-length collection, Conventional Heresies was published by Bay Oak Publishers in 2008.
He’s a member of PEN, American Academy of Poets, National Book Critics Circle, and operates The Broadkill River Press. He was presented with the first Legacy Award by the Eastern Shore Writer’s Association for his contributions to building the literary community on the Delmarva Peninsula.
Five of his plays have been produced “off-Ken-Cen” in the Washington, D.C. alt-theatre corridor of Fourteenth Street in Washington, D.C., a revival of one of which, “Death Comes Twice,” a comedy about Sex and Death (and Sex with Death), swept the awards in the 2007 One-Act Play Competition in Milton, Delaware (Best Play, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Costuming). The revival of “Re-Education of the American Proletariat,” won the Best Actor Award the following year.