Alaskan & Western Reflections

by  Jerry D. McDonnell©2014 In 1890 100 Starlings from Europe were liberated in New York’s Central Park. And there it was. A campground with wood table, travel trailer parking just off the less traveled Iowa county road surrounded on two sides by a corn field forest, a farmer’s house across the way. The Midwest. Apple pie peace USA. At summer’s sundown the Starlings came out of that Iowa cornfield forest shattering that Midwest apple pie peace        like rabid rockets over London,             like bombers over Berlin,                  like armed atoms over Nagasaki. Starlings came by the thousands like an exodus, their liberated wings colliding, fouling and fearing the air, the ground, the ears, thousands, tens of thousands of wings battling for space. churning the air into ...

by Jerry D. McDonnell©2012 Published in Cirque Journal: Volume 5, No. 1, December 21, 2013         Skiing into the snow and wind-swept eternity of the Bering Sea at 10 degrees below zero Fahrenheit my strength quickly reduces to routine. I soon fall into a kick and glide trance across the width of winter on a solid, adjourned Sea. Brantley Harbor and Port Clarence north of Nome are far distant set pieces in this landscape of ice ridges, wind-packed snow shaped by a willful wind that artfully imitates a permanent landscape. Only the occasional seal-hole interrupts the illusion of a desert bleached by sun. The Bering Sea’s boundary is noticeable only by skiffs imprisoned by drifting snow and small cliffs that one can visualize as land. Inland, snow coats the rolling hills with a sensual texture interrupted only by the white pointed heads of ice wedged polygons jutting up like alien creatures. It is not too difficult to believe one has left...

by            Jerry D. McDonnell                           Copyright©Jerry D. McDonnell, 2013 Published in Over The Transom #24, Dec. 2013     Like an intersection in a big city anywhere four Italian males in their late 20’s sat at Max’s restaurant down the block from the Curran Theater on Gerry Street, home of the Actors Conservatory Theater, actually on the corner of Geary and Mason Street, not that they’d been to the theater, but rather to a bar, or maybe more than one bar, not that they were Italy Italians but rather San Francisco Italians third generation and had never traveled in their over two decades of life even to the edge of the city limits in this city in which they had been born and raised and all were still living at home in flats in a neighborhood on the west slope of Nob Hill say like on Hyde Street with grandparents and great grandparents...