October 2014 Issue- Week 6
November 9, 2014
Let’s keep Rodney Nelson in our thoughts this week, he ventured out for a much needed surgery. Red Dashboard will also be publishing his newest book, Words For The Deed. He is a fine westen observer and poet!
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It’s been busy around the pub office since we began 1 year ago October with publishing authors poetry and flash fiction books.
We would love to see some western genre manuscripts come out way, since there are so many of you submitting to this ezine.
See our submission guidelines at http://www.reddashboard.com for more information, dates are Oct 1st – Feb 28th.
Enjoy this months previous issues 1, 2, 3, 4 & 5!
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It takes a certain kind of person to step into the ring with wild animals, a certain kind of person to love it enough to get close for a good shot! And we’ve are fortunate to have a number of rodeo submissions come our way this summer! Keep a scrollin’ on down and enjoy! Click on photos to enlarge for a closer look…
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My name is Chrystal Berche, I am a writer, photographer and artist living in North Central Iowa. The following photographs were taken at the fourth of July celebration in my town of Osage Iowa, at the rodeo. I have included five, per the submission guidelines, however if there is anything particular you like about these and wish to see more of, I have well over a thousand images taken on that way.
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Arroyo Al on Loyalty
Through the doors came a yellin’, “What’s tied to that thar post?”
“Ne’er have I seen such crowbait; I thought it was a ghost!”
I downed my pint and at once that youngin’ I engaged,
That thar is my ol’ pony, it matters not that he is aged.
For we have ridden through snow and rain and that ragin’ sun,
To him thrice o’er I owe my life for outpacin’ the blazin’ gun.
O’course, ol’ fella, he’s a beaut – he said it with such sass,
And in His honor, with one hook, I laid him on his ass.
Nicholas R. Larche is currently attending the University of Detroit Mercy School of Law. While native to Rochester, New York and a current resident of the greater Detroit metropolitan area, Nicholas has set his eyes westward and will be relocating to Colorado this May. An adept researcher, Nicholas has recently accepted an offer for publication with the Seton Hall Legislative Journal for his work involving an interstate comparison of sex trafficking laws. In addition to his academic studies, Nicholas enjoys writing flash fiction and poetry. His work has been published or is forthcoming in The Literary Hatchet, From the Depths, Penny Ante Feud, Superstition [Review], and Drunk Monkeys.
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THE VALLEY OF NOT A SHADOW OF IT
a narrow rain cloud brought the pink
of sundown into one draw of
the valley and the ravens were
at work around your camp until
oh holy night which you would not
have given a thought to if you
had not heard drunken caroling
a mile off down there at the wells
and you could see the building with
a piano bar no doubt and
a tower sign in red and white
you could not read from where you were
but the unwindy desert air
let the singing carry and now
you got to sleep to it and with
an odor of wet mineral
maybe weed even though the four-
minute rain had long gone away
and the stars were brightly shining
when you drove into sunup on
oh holy day the building with
no doubt a piano bar looked
hung over but somewhere within
the revelers would be waking
to pine in sin and error and
the ravenhood were up meanwhile
and you could not have named a few
of the colors the valley had
begun to take on as you rode
your way in clarity out of
the valley of not a shadow
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The Photographer’s Bio:
Chrystal Berche dabbles, lots, and somewhere in those dabbles blossoms ideas that take shape into images. Many of her current pieces of artwork start out as three minute gesture drawings and eventually get paired with some sort of still life photography and a lot of playing in photoshop. She loves to take pictures, especially out in the woods, where she can sit on a rock or a log and wait quietly, jotting notes for stories until something happens by. A free spirit, Chrystal digs in dirt, dances in rain and chases storms, all at the whims of her muses.
October 2014 Issue- Week 1
October 4, 2014
“Better late than never!” our managing editor Ms. Stelling says. It’s been busy around the pub office since we began 1 year to the date publishing authors poetry and flash fiction books. And we look forward to more manuscript submission for next fall! We would love to see some western genre manuscripts come out way, since there are so many of you submitting to this ezine.
See our submission guidelines at www.reddashboard.com for more information, dates are Oct 1st – Feb 28th.
Enjoy this months issues!
(Click to enlarge)
Watercolor ‘Steeds’ by Anj Marth
Ocean steeds was inspired by a story my great-grandmother told me when I first started riding horseback. Selkies are beautiful horses that live in the sea, and come to shore to tempt people to try to catch them. If you bridle one, or get on its back (it will let you) it will drag you into the deeps with it, and there’s no escape.
Anj Marth was born in the early 70s, and grew up on the east coast of the US, near Philadelphia. She has since moved and traveled all over the country, by road. She currently lives in the Pacific Northwest and
considers it home. She works in a variety of mediums and has been a professional,licensed tattoo artist since the late 90s.
Her condensed portfolio can be seen here- Anj Marth Portfolio
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KODACHROME BOOTS
This here’s a tale bout widow Beall and me,
a very close call as far as I can see.
Nearly hung myself from a stout oak tree,
when she proclaimed she’s “a gonna marry thee”!
Now, widow Beall was a comely lass,
much appeal and a cute little…….well.
Dumb as a sheep and not much class,
spit fire temper and a whole lot of sass.
Not fix’n to marry, ner give’n a dang hoot,
rather ride me a bronc, raise hell and shoot.
Single I’ll stay, til I be a grizzled old coot,
and all this started o’er a Kodachrome boot.
A life riding single with a little spare loot,
I’d spent honest big money on Kodachrome boots.
With huge eagle wings, patterns fanciful stitched,
never reckoned on them boots a get’n me hitched.
Them knee high boots just glowed by day,
bright yellar and red with horned lizard inlay.
Strong ride’n heels built up real high,
with side seam piping, blue as the sky.
Chartreuse pull straps above scalloped top,
a rainbow of colors that seemed never to stop.
Big ole eagles, blueish green and dark taupe,
tawdry beauty from some boot makers shop.
Kodachrome boots made from the best of cowhide,
brash as a peacock cowboy on an afternoon ride.
Clean shirt, fresh hat, pants stuffed inside,
One of a kind boots, whispered ego and pride.
When corralled by the widow, I couldn’t break free,
She’d always look down and then I could see,
her eyes come alive, twinkling romance and glee,
It was them boots she truly loved and not really me!
I hatched an idea to get me outta her plan,
and git back on the trail as fast as I can.
Just need to convince my first cousin Stan,
widow Beall needs some lov’n and he is her man.
Got Stan a new Stetson, wild rag and new suit,
a bath, and some tonic, why he looked darn right cute.
And to sweet’n the deal, first time in the chute,
I gave him my pair of those kodachrome boots.
Marc Bradshaw– Though raised in the hills and hollows of central Kentucky, the southwest U.S. beckoned immediately after high school graduation. Over the next 50 years California’s San Joaquin valley and parts south of Bakersfield, in Santa Fe New Mexico, and currently Mesquite Nevada were home to life and
work.
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COME HAVEN OR LOW WATER
when we hear the recorded whoop of
a cowboy cello we’re not truant
only away from our home butte
on the Niobrara
we are the men of earth we have been
and when we reinvent the odor
of horse and hay we ride and forget
what larrupt us to town
there won’t ever be a flareout of
the world or a man-roping event
in the oil range we hold the dream to
on the Niobrara
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COWBOY OF THE SEA
His name is Keealani,
a cowboy of the sea.
Needs the wind upon his back,
that bucking ride to set him free.
He wrestles surf and ocean
gripping tight and holding strong,
waiting for horns blowing
counting seconds short and long.
Got his lasso round his ankle
his bolo tie, a string of shells,
biggest difference in this cowboy
is his fishy stinky smell.
No manure or dirt upon him,
just the residue of sand,
cause this cowboy’s ride is over
when he steps upon the land.
Heather M. Browne is a faith-based psychotherapist and recently emerged poet, published in the Orange Room, Boston Literary Review, Page & Spine, Eunoia Review, Poetry Quarterly, The Poetry Bus, Red Fez, The Muse, An International Journal of Poetry, Deep Water Literary Journal, Electric Windmill, Maelstrom, mad swirl, and Dual Coast. Her first chapbook, We Look for Magic and Feed the Hungry has been published by MCI. She just won the Nantucket Poetry Competition, a semi-finalist in Casey Shay chapbook competition, and has her first collection coming out this winter with Red Dashboard Publishing. Recently widowed from her love of 21 years, she lives with her 2 amazing teens, and can be found frolicking in the waves. Follow her: www.thehealedheart.net
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December- Week 3
December 20, 2012
Elizabeth Akin Stelling, Managing Editor- CPP traveled to Hawaii this past fall with a quest to find Polynesian Cowboys, and that she did. A chef and poet and sometime photographer her poetry and photography has been published in Referential Magazine, Tuck, Linden Lit Press, Curio, and many others. (photo taken on south side of the big island of Hawaii).
Fat and Sassy
He laughed when he said
I like my women like my horses
Fat and sassy.
I answered
A little hunger’s not a bad thing.
He said, nah
Fat and sassy’s the way to be.
His wife pointed to her geldings
Turned out together in the arena.
The chestnut with the white blaze and two white socks
And the brown with a little star
Kicking up their heels
In a lively
Dusty
Horse dance.
Aren’t they marvelous creatures
She breathed into the wind.
The most marvelous in all god’s creation.
I leaned on the fence
And I watched with her
And I kissed my mare
On her velvet nose
How a woman does love her horse.
Riding Lessons
When I was a girl
I rode horses.
Beneath me
Muscle
Sinew
Coarse hair
Sweat
Horse musk.
Now I am a woman
And I ride young
With equal vigor.
Julia Barrett grew up in rural Iowa. She’s married to the love of her life. They have three amazing children. She’s a writer of poetry and prose, a Registered Nurse and a trained pastry chef. Julia loves to travel and she’s visited or lived in all fifty states. You
will usually find her hiking with her dog or riding her horse. If she’s at home, she’s cooking, baking or writing books. Julia can be reached via twitter: @JuliaRBarrett or her website: http://juliarachelbarrett.net or her Amazon Author page: *http://tinyurl.com/czph8lu*
June 2012- Week 4
June 25, 2012
Steve Cartwright “It’s well known that an artist becomes more popular by dying, so I’m typing this with one hand while pummeling my head with a frozen mackerel with the other. I’ve done art for several magazines, newspapers, websites, commercial and governmental clients, books, and scribbling – but mostly drooling – on tavern napkins.” He has also created art pro bono for several animal rescue groups. I was awarded the 2004 James Award for my cover art for Champagne Shivers. I recently illustrated the Cimarron Review, Stories for Children, and Still Crazy magazine covers. Take a gander ( or a goose ) at his online gallery: _www.angelfire.com/sc2/cartoonsbycartwright_
TO MARILYN MATTHEWS
(1943–1991)
your father had given you the blood and last name of
Thomas More and your mother what had taken a breast
from you and hidden with it but you were not remiss
trying meditation and catholicism and
sweat lodge anything to wash you rid of it that you
not have to have a next appointment
you were only
coming a bit weakened out of the last when we met
and I from a night of my own we both emergent
into entire day on the plateau
I wanting
fire time in the high desert had taken to trails
had joined and begun to love a shadowy woman
friend of yours there who invited me to hike with you
and another in Abineau Canyon and Bear Jaw
on the north flank of the peaks
June heat and drought
did not reach where we went dancing up with you
a quick and intent slight woman of laughter that knew
which boots to wear and the way to achieve a mountain
did psychotherapy for a living knew how to
talk and would talk of it too
we got to quakenasp
every other leaf on them in direct sun and
you called
thank you god
in joy it had to have been
that
you and I would revisit on our own later to
hold colloquy about metempsychosis and young
Everett Reuss who had fused with the nature he loved
and you thought of the holied ones saying goodbye to
vivid earth in the knowledge they would not come round
again and we did not mention Edward Abbey’s or
any name
when I was looking you had and did not
rent a room to me which sort of educated my
liking and you had had reconstruction and worried
what a man would think but we took hikes together in
the hardpan country often on the Weatherford road
to Doyle Saddle
keeping up with you I would write was
like chasing fritillaries you were that good on the
vivid earth we inhabited at our one time
and could see from such height
you had me to dinner on
Thanksgiving and the two children you had left in New
Mexico on running away with your profession
two other
men at the table to rival me I
thought but you gave me the head of it refilling my
glass with wine you did not drink anymore letting the
children know how you wanted them to vote
nothing would
come of you and me however beyond a hug and
a long impromptu monsoon-evening talk when I
worked on the Navajo Nation every thirteen-
hour day a lifetime I needed of red dirt of
Indian chatter anglo country on kay-tee-en-
en
maybe like the holied ones on their goodbye round
we had a knowledge we did not have to say only
act on and I might even have been fearing night as
I got in with a redhead saltimbanque whom you
had seen and warned me of whom I enjoyed and suffered
in the only more time on earth that would have remained
to you and me
might have been cathexis not fear when
I heard it had come to you again I wanted day
so much that kept me not with you
we did meet in a
hospital waiting room and one afternoon you had
a turban on were puffy I took you to the mesa
walking rather than hiking but we hiked on the south
Wilson Mountain trail with a group
you and your nurse
not making it to first bench the autumn under way in
Verde Valley and later you in the restaurant
joking
who
drove to the agency every day
to talk with clientele
I ran into you out on
the avenue and said we ought to get together
averted nod
at the car door
no talking or look
but on another
street in February a honk
a wave a smile from the same car moving and in a
week the word you had had to go in had said you were
tired of this
they were not letting nonfamily
visit I tried to get to you one evening the
next morning and another day could not
late night a
ting-ringing in my ear might have prepared me for the
news to come Marilyn but I have not been knowing
of such am not
your children and brother were taking
your ashes to the mountain
we would have known where to
find her anyway
I wrote to our circle
as
we got out of your memorial meeting it hailed
Rodney Nelson work began appearing in mainstream journals long ago; but he turned to fiction and did not write a poem for twenty-two years, restarting in the 2000s. So he is both older and “new.” See his page in the Poets & Writers directory
http://www.pw.org/content/rodney_nelson
for a notion of the publishing history. He has worked as a copy editor in the Southwest and now lives in the northern Great Plains. Recently, his poem “One Winter” won a Poetry Kit Award for 2011 (U.K.); it had appeared in Symmetry Pebbles. His “Upstream in Idaho” received a Best of Issue Award at the late Neon Beam (also England). The chapbook Metacowboy was published in 2011, and another title, In Wait, is due this year.
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THE INLAW
He called himself THE INLAW. Rolled from town to town in either a beat-up Buick or a crippled brown mare, depending on which version of the legend you believed. Road up and down the streets, pilfering possessions and identities out of mailboxes.
He was Bigfoot. Never fully captured on film, little variations in all the descriptions. A man of such infamy should’ve been apprehended. We were talking millions of federal offenses.
One day I heard the clomp clomp clomp down my street. There he was, on a crippled brown mare, tattered white sack overflowing from his shoulder. The horse moved slowly, but THE INLAW was practically a flash. Hand in and out of each mailbox before you could even recognize he’d taken anything.
He was on the other side of the street, but I knew he’d make his way over to my house. I figured I had plenty of time to plan my action since he probably did a big loop, but I didn’t think it was as simple as running and grabbing the mail before he got there. Sure, that would prevent him from grabbing my bills or the nude mags that usually came on that day, but didn’t I also have a duty to my fellow citizens?
I shuddered on the porch as I watched him slink from box to box. Even though there was nothing singularly terrifying about the man, the whole situation creeped me out. No matter how many boxes he visited, the sack never grew, but I watched him put countless items in it.
I stepped off the porch and marched past rows of daisies to my own mailbox. Just as I was planning my big intervention, my citizen’s arrest, THE INLAW pulled a quick U-turn and called out, “Hold on there, partner.” I tried to avoid eye contact, hoping he was talking to the horse, but curiosity eventually got the best of me. It always does. THE INLAW was staring straight at me, surprising warmth on his smiling face.
“Just stay right where you are,” he said with a policeman’s “stop” gesture.
I bolted for the mailbox. It was the boldest move I’d ever made, and I hoped it wouldn’t be my last. Somehow THE INLAW and his sloth of a horse beat me there, almost like they teleported. The horse bit at my reaching hand.
“I told you to hold on,” THE INLAW said, smile still covering his face.
I pissed myself right in front of them. There was nothing else I could’ve done. They had me and I knew I was a goner. I deserved that final moment of relief.
While I was soaking my lower half, THE INLAW reached in his hand and dropped a handful in the sack.
“The rest is yours,” he said. “And if you ever tell anyone about this…” he warned before riding the mare to the next mailbox. When I looked to my left, sure enough, they were riding off into the sunset.
Nathaniel Tower writes fiction, teaches English, and manages the online lit magazine Bartleby Snopes. His short fiction has appeared in over 100 online and print magazines and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. His story “The Oaten Hands” was named one of 190 notable stories by storySouth’s Million Writers Award in 2009. His first novel, A Reason To Kill, is was released in July 2011 through MuseItUp Publishing, and his first novella, Hallways and Handguns, is due out this spring. Visit him at http://www.bartlebysnopes.com/ntower.htm.
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Piggin
A lariat, some lines and rope kinda frayed,
Was discussin’ their uses, how they was played,
When out of collection of some tack in a bin
Another voice piped up, “I don’t mean to butt in,
But fellas , don’t forget the handy piggin.
For ropin’ to tie down, say at brandin’ time,
Aint nothing better you could ever find
Than seven short feet of good piggin string
Tossed round them hooves for a mighty tight sling.
Straighten’ a post that’s been set in soft sand?
Piggin’s as good as another cowhand.
Five miles out and your bridle reign snaps?
Just reach for that piggin tied to your chaps.
He aint long like a lariat, nor strong like a bull,
But the piggin’s always good for a short quick pull.
And a quick mend on the range for plenty of things
Like chokers and chinches, breechins and reigns.
So when dishin’ out praises to long braided things
Remember those handy sweet piggin strings.
Gary Ives is a retired Navy chief- lives in the Ozarks with his wife and two big dogs where he writes and grows apples. His short stories have recently appeared in Frontier Tales, Tales of Old, Hisstories, The Rusty Nail, Efiction, and Freedom Fiction.
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