Railyard

A blaze of activity, once,

trains rumbling, tucks arriving, 

unloading, loading, departing,

men shouting, arguing, laughing.

now a few train cars slumber

on rusting tracks, vines

illustrating security gates, 

walkways now paths

through weeds. But

the same clouds slide

overhead, sometimes

offering rain, sometimes

not.

 

This poem began its life as a comment on a photo posted to Facebook by Tom Darin Liskey. You can see Tom’s photo here.

 

Photograph by Fabian Kleiser via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Tuesday Readings

 

Threshold – poem by David Whyte.

 

Moth – poem and artwork by Sonja Benskin Mesher.

 

For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio – W.H. Auden at Kingdom Poets (D.S. Martin). 

 

Names across Water – poem by Catherine Abbey Hodges at Every Day Poems. 

 

“On the Harp Song of the Dane Women,” poem by Rudyard Kipling – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

Poems and Photos: Kelly Belmonte, Tom Darin Liskey, and “Transit”

You might say I was there at almost the creation of Transit by Kelly Belmonte and Tom Darin Liskey. 

Well more than a year ago, I was pulled into a Facebook conversation between Belmonte and Liskey. They had been talking for some time about a collaborative effort. Belmonte is a poet, a blogger, and a management consultant specializing in non-profit organizational development.  Liskey is a poet, author, and photographer and photojournalist. If you read Belmonte’s poems and study Liskey’s photographs, a collaborative effort is a no-brainer. 

 

At the time, they were talking the basics of collaboration: what to include and exclude, how large a work, what publishing venues should be explored, layout and design, and related questions. Fascinated, I listened and offered only a word or two. The collaborators had this project well in hand.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

“The Bridesmaid” by Tom Darin Liskey

Maximiliano Santillan is a private investigator. He was once a policeman, a very good policeman, in fact. But he made the career mistake of testifying against a crooked cop, who was wrongly acquitted. Santillan was banished to a remote post. He’s now a private eye, and he’s worried about his daughter and her involvement with drugs.

Then comes the call – from a former police associate. He’s told virtually nothing except to meet the car being sent to get him. He’s taken to what looks like a police raid on a brothel, except there are no television cameras or reporters or even onlookers as is common with police raids. Inside, he sees policeman gathering and counting wads of counterfeit money. And there’s a dead woman, the death badly staged to look like a heroin overdose. 

Tom Darin Liskey

The woman turns out to be the adopted daughter of the former admiral rumored to be the next head of government. Santillan’s mission: find out who killed her. Even if the admiral doesn’t want to know.

The Bridesmaid by Tom Darin Liskey is a novella set in a country that sounds very much like Argentina, complete with a former military junta that “disappeared” thousands of people and was brought down by a war over control of islands in the South Atlantic. That history looms large in the story, demonstrating that the past is never really the past, that it’s always with us.

For almost 10 years, Liskey worked as a journalist in South America. His stories, articles, and photographs have been published in such magazines and journals as Crime Factory, Driftwood Press, Mount Island, Biostories, Hobo Camp Review, Roadside Fiction, Blue Hour Magazine, Midwestern Gothic, and others. 

The Bridesmaid falls into the category of noir mysteries, and it’s exceedingly well done. Liskey sets the atmosphere and the characters just right for this story, and adds a few twists and turns involving a disfigured war hero and an activist nun. My only regret is that it wasn’t a full-length novel; perhaps the author can be prevailed upon to write more Santillan stories.

Related:

My review of This Side of the River by Tom Darin Liskey.

“This Side of the River” by Tom Darin Liskey

A boy is almost 12. He lives with his mother, who struggles, unsuccessfully, with alcoholism. She has a live-in boyfriend who seems, to the boy, to be rather worthless; the only thing he excels at is beating the boy’s mother. The boy keeps hoping that, one day, his mother and father will be reunited.

It’s telling that only the violent boyfriend has a name: Woodrow.

These are the main characters of four connected stories by Tom Darin Liskey and published until the title of This Side of the River.

In “Shelter,” the boy who’s called “the lush’s son” by his classmates is going trick-or-treating for Halloween. He and his mother have moved to a new town; she’s trying to evade the abusive boyfriend. What is a normal activity for most children becomes something of an ordeal for the boy, as he tags along with other families so that people will think he’s with them.

In “Wonderland,” the mother is back living with the abusive boyfriend. She convinces him to take the boy rabbit hunting, but it’s an outing doomed from the outset. The boyfriend had previously tried to raise rabbits, in some get-rich-quick scheme involving his understanding of Russian market dynamics. He’d ended up bringing them to the rendering plant, including the one the boy considered his personal pet. The rabbit hunt will not end well.

In “Motel,” the boy’s mother takes him to work with her when she can’t find a babysitter. In this case, work is cleaning rooms at a small motel. It’s Christmas-time, and in the car the boy and his mother sing carols together. They’re living on the razor’s edge, but come to know what “the kindness of strangers” actually means.

And “In Wilderness,” the boy is now living with his father in a nomadic kind of existence. His father cuts and clears storm-damaged trees, and more work is always someplace else. It’s something of hand-to-mouth existence, but storms always occur and the father manages to find enough work to keep them fed. Then the day comes when the father and the boy will have to make a journey that neither of them want.

Tom Darin Liskey

For almost 10 years, Liskey worked as a journalist in South America. His stories, articles, and photographs have been published in such magazines and journals as Crime Factory, Driftwood Press, Mount Island, Biostories, Hobo Camp Review, Roadside Fiction, Blue Hour Magazine, Midwestern Gothic, and others. He’s also the author of another work of fiction, The Bridesmaid (2016).

The writing in This Side of the River is spare and honed. Liskey sits the reader right there with the characters. The boy’s anger and despair becomes the reader’s. The mother’s weakness with both alcohol and the boyfriend become understandable as much as they’re detested. The people in these stories, however, keep moving forward, driven by a strange kind of hope. Hope is not always fulfilled, but there is always a promise of redemption.

Top photograph by Jessica Furtney via Unsplash. Used with permission.