John Counts On The Internet

I contributed to the Wayne Literary Review from the memoir L-Town Elegy:

First paragraphs:

I offer this as memoir but with necessary adjustments and embellishments as memory is fluid, a living thing, until we die and take it with us. Mostly, however, it’s an elegy, which implies the author learns something about the mysteries of life and its dim conclusion through the death of another. I didn’t learn much more about the truth of death when my childhood friend Jay Buck was killed fighting in an Atlanta parking lot at a 2000 Halloween party by a squatter punk named Jimmy Skaggs (foot goes up, boot hits face, Jay goes down), but life certainly did change shape. Death is an inscrutable study and conclusions about it are as fleeting as the raw materials of life: a full belly, a good sleep, an orgasm.

The elegy is an ancient form dating back to my blood ancestors, the Greeks, and continued on through time by my English-language ancestors, guys like John Milton, in Lycidas, and Shelley, who wrote Adonais as an elegy to John Keats who died at 26, not much older than Jay when he was snuffed out. Those two mourned the lives of other poets, and while Jay Buck could barely spell, he lived life like a manic poem he was authoring on the fly, skateboard beneath him, coasting down the street like a mad prophet. My aim is to give chase, try to toss the lasso of language around a life of blurry action. Just as it was when we were kids, I am always trying to catch up

Here’s a link to the read the whole journal online. 

The Bonecutters of Bear County in Knee-jerk

First paragraphs:

Todd Bonecutter began acting out his dreams, making them true. Last night, he dreamed about a video game machine filled with oil, the kind that lubes cars, makes them slick inside. Todd was nineteen and loved video games and hated to do it, but he took his X-Box, went out to the garage and grabbed a can of Pennzoil from a dusty shelf. He knew his grandmother was watching him from the window, the nag. She could see him across the yard, strewn with shit from Terminator, their German shepherd, solid brown deposits sunk heatedly in the snow.

Read the whole story at kneejerkmag.