Brinktown Proper

~ johnbrandall

Curving road.  Rust green of cedar,
red-brown leaves of oak still on their trees.
Pasture fences, their posts sometimes wood
sometimes metal but always run with wire.
Cow ponds frozen over, geese in the sky.
Firewood for sale, side of the road,
forty dollars will fill your empty truck.

Cattle in the fields, a few horses.
Silage wrapped and ready, greenhouse
vacant. Bright blue plastic bag snagged
on long grass in a ditch.  A cardinal, a
brand new brick house under construction. 
Pasture grass grazed down to the nub. 
Donkey, pony, a pile of loose hay,
somewhat eaten.

Chickens.  Mounds of cinder.  The turn to
Brinktown on Route N.  Last time I took it
glib, the water cooler capsized.  Stopped
in the first available driveway, I scrambled
to right it.  Their trash day, black bags 
stuffed and set out for the hauler, which 
was coming my way, two weeks ago today.

Shotgun shack.  No doubt there’s a shotgun
or two inside.  Along these roads stand
newly minted signs touting picks for the
Senate seat going empty; banners for
the guy in The City with the big house
who stood out in front with an assault rifle
aimed at protesters marching on the mayor.

Debris pile, bulldozed trees, gangly roots.
A bonfire I would have sparked by now. 
Atop a sycamore tall on the banks of the
Maries, a bald eagle.  Dog on the road.  Big
beagle, small lab.  Brown coat, orange collar. 
Hay bales arranged neatly in rows.  Uphill,
I lose my speed, a nod to Brinktown proper.

*This is an old(er) poem about driving through a small town in Maries County Missouri on the way to Farm. The predominant route recently was closed along Hwy 42 for months, sending a lot of traffic through Brinktown. The construction on Hwy 42 appears to be complete, returning Brinktown (at least for now) to what it was.

Entering Brinktown, May 2026 -or- Brinktown: A Town on the Brink

San Diego, Before and After

~ johnbrandall

Click on the photo or the post’s title to access the full updated post. What’s below is just an excerpt…

3 The San Diego Arch

I have a craving for; I crave hush puppies. What’s that about? Mitch’s is visible from the balcony. It’s nice out there. I’m on the fifth floor. The view is of the peninsula as it stretches south h before sloping into the sea.

There is some sort of sculpture out there. Mid-peninsula. Halfway down, halfway across. Higher up, along a ridge. It’s an arch…a three-pronged arch. A monument, must be. I’ll look it up.

The Shipboard Antenna Model Range (back left)

The Arch is some sort of antenna used by the Navy to study shipboard antennas? Something like that. Here’s an article about the place (link).

The arch/antenna is nonmetallic. Underneath is a flat disc meant to simulate the ocean’s electric current. On this disc are brass replicas of every ship in the fleet.

It sounds like I’m making this up but I’m not. I’m not that creative or inventive, not in that way. This is why I can’t write what looks like fiction.

Did you simulate the program or did you stimulate it? Is this a nice pace or a nice place? Maybe both…

For the entire post please click on the updated photo above or on the title for this post, “San Diego: Before and After.”

The Originals: Notes from the Shrine, 5.9.2026

~ johnbrandall

Tom wheels his wife Anna in. I'm on the other end of the assisted-eating lunchroom with my dad. Tom has an apartment over in the Independent Living wing of the community. He might eat other meals with Anna but he doesn't eat lunch with her. I've never actually talked to Tom, never said a word to him even though he's been here since the beginning. He has taken a seat next to Anna, who warbles in her fey way. Bubbly, playful, somewhat intelligible. I thought I heard her say, "Shiny."

After a few minutes pass, Tom gets up.

"Enjoy your lunch," he says to his wife, and he leaves. He has a shirt on that looks a lot like one my dad used to wear, and which I have since appropriated. It's a dark blue plaid with yellow and orange accents. I wear it here sometimes and I wonder if Tom sees me wearing it and thinks to himself, "Hey, I've got a shirt like that."

I am deep in this world. To leave it will be like a reincarnation but some part of me will always be here—will be left behind. Am I depressed, or am I just sad and refusing to fake being in any other mindset or state? There is an answer. If I live long enough I will find it out.

I look out into the hall to see Lillian being wheeled along by someone who must be one of her sons. She's shoeless. Her shoes, it appears, were left here as a result of breakfast.

At 12:05 it's just me, my dad, and Anna in here. Oh—speak of the devil, here comes Bob being wheeled in.

"I just about...."

"Just about what?" asks the CNA who has brought him in.

"I just about stepped in a hole!" he says.

The CNA shakes her head and leaves to get someone else to bring to lunch. Bob's voice is rough, gravelly, garbled. Sister Shiny walks in, leaves something in the sink.

I used to write a lot more about this place but it's gotten hard to see the point. Anna OG, Bob OG, Sr Shiny OG. Nurse Cheryl Ragsdale is working today. She is here only part-time. I don't know if she's an OG but she's been a nurse a long time and has the stories to prove it. She worked the VA at Jefferson Barracks way back when, and those vets were known to throw punches around, even at their nurses.

Bob is slurring.

"Huh?" he says. "Talk to me."

He sounds like he's been to the dentist, like his mouth is numb. But he's still talking! Earlier my brother was telling my dad goodbye and my dad didn't say anything, he didn't even look my brother's way.

"Tomorrow, huh?" asks Bob, picking up on a conversation from the hall, thinking that the words are being directed to him.

This is why I'm in the lunch room. Panning for gold, looking for an end to this story. Except it isn't my story to write. Keep back, hold vigil, write it down...


Find the rest of the post here...

Recent Work at Advanced Leisure Magazine

~ johnbrandall

I have recently had some of my writing published by Advanced Leisure, an online arts magazine. Some of my recent work—three poems—were published in their dedicated literary journal, Divagations. Below, I will include links to these pieces.

This is the link to the general Advanced Leisure site (link)

I have a short prose poem called RI that is still currently headlining the site. I wrote that poem while in Rhode Island with Brook and Hugo in 2023. Link here.

Then there are three poems in the most recent issue of Divagations, link here. The poems are called "I've Never Seen So Many Sunflowers," "Two Mountains," and "Three Haibun."

There is also a way to download a PDF of the issue. (link here).

A little further back, they posted my wasp essay, "A Holdover in Wasp Country." (link here)

There is also a page at their site that has everything of mine posted on Advanced Leisure. (link here)

Thanks to Emily and Jamie for posting all of this writing over the last few years.

Clasping at Stems

~ johnbrandall

They were the plants of abandoned fields.  If you stopped to look you’d notice they populated roadsides.  Freight as it swept the country swayed them in numbers where they stood thick along railroad tracks.  These plants were not picky.  Any pasture would do.  They were at home in idle fields, they could make camp along the mouths of woods.  Some were capable of forming impenetrable thickets from the root sprouts of mother plants.  These plants had funny names from older times.  Goatweed, ragweed, hogweed, horse nettle, mare’s tail, snakeroot, burnweed, sow’s thistle, buckbrush, ironweed, Spanish needles, dogbane, henbit, bindweed, nightshade, lambsquarters, fountaingrass, ladysthumb, foxtail, dogfennel, knotweed, morning glory, butterweed, meadow garlic, panic grass, coralberry, farkleberry.  They could be happy in a dry ditch, a farmyard, overgrazed pasture, wasteplaces, rights of way, fencerows, orchards, river banks, glades, bluffs, rocky woods.  If not arrested, patches of these plants would overtake any available area.  They had allelopathic properties, which is a nice way of saying they waged war on other plants, on each other.  They were considered undesirable.  To those desperate enough to taste them, they proved bitter and toxic.  They dropped burs, brandished thorns, refused to release from the ground.  When handled they bristled with dense stellate hairs that irritated one’s eyes.  They were unpalatable even to cattle.  They made their way into our milk, they killed a president’s mother.  They rooted at the node, they toothed at the margin, they had lobes that clasped at the stem.


One Road

~ johnbrandall

Mark of leaving, memory contusion discolored by time.  Experimental car door mutters yesterday’s weather.  The wide thumb of a Saturday afternoon eclipsed by eventide even when sobriquet sojourns unspool from undropped acorns.  Where will I go to tire myself, to sweat myself pounds lighter?  Borne of sunscreen under floppy hat, searching the breeze for mint.  I don’t want to unwire myself but every hair on my body is magnified.  That’s when the phlebotomist leveled with me and said, “I don’t know if I should tell you this, but most of the good writers don’t become famous until they’re dead.”  Among the dust and the dry fields, surrounded again by engines.  That was twenty years ago.  I am in the blue hollows, I am in the cold van.  Makeshift huts and lean-tos, living on the sidewalk.  There is only one road in and one road out, one road.  Moonlight wades into spent grass, and keeping books is wrong.

*This poem was originally published in Michigan by Dunes Review in 2024. They cut the last half of what appears above as the last line.


3 AM Eternal

~ johnbrandall

Just a speck of lucidity
there in the early morning
used diaper kicked to the floor
I can’t quite see him but I know
he’s there, on his final throne
in the bathroom of what
when they built the house
my parents called the maid’s
room but it was really just an
extra bedroom until my wife
and I made it into our room until
my dad couldn’t do the stairs to
their bedroom anymore so now I 
am sleeping on the couch which 
allows me to hear when he gets up
thump thump thump goes the cane
and I have to go too so I use the
small bathroom near the back door
which shares a wall with the one he’s in
and I can hear the dull porcelain sound of 
him occasionally shifting his weight until he 
is done and I am done and as I’m going back
to the couch I ask into the dim light
Are you there, Dad?  He answers with the
voice he used to have, bright and direct and
curious.  Yes, that’s a good idear—he hangs 
onto that r—Yes, I am still here, thanks for
checking on me.  Two men up early with their
prost(r)ates tinkling in the dark of December,
the flag across the lake whipping in the breeze
and kept bright by a bulb from the ground facing
up into the night and staying bright until the morning.

*This poem originally ran at Sheila-Na-Gig Online in 2024.

Talismanual

~ johnbrandall

In the Serengeti
Of the night

A wild dream melts on a dark wing.

I’m all tangled up in my wine face
Looking out of an open

Window, its screen baleen to
A moth in the way of Jonah.

No mountain light, no cactus light.
Even the wind took itself away. 
But glimmer still the stars in heaven
As I’m looking north, northeast to

Polaris, Cynosure.
Something familiar 
At the end of Ursa Minor.

A kinship spans a galaxy.

Mach 34: Notes from the Shrine, Late September 2024

~ johnbrandall

We're out on Porcupine Hill, the weather is pleasant, late morning. Chickadees flit around. Cumulus humilis clouds drift across the sky. Sounds trickle uphill from the palette factory down below, unseen.

Father Maes is out here.

"I guess I'll watch the leaves fall, too," he says to us as he walkers out. He was in Dammert for some rehab earlier this year. I remember seeing him sit and read under the light of a skylight. Now he's back in his right place in St. Francis Center. He is a peaceful soul. He's awaiting a delivery, he says.

My brother was here yesterday but my dad does not remember it. There is some solace knowing he probably doesn't miss me when I'm gone. Was I just here or have I not been here in two weeks? It doesn't seem to matter to him. The last time I was here—Wednesday—he asked me to take him back inside after we had been sitting here outside for a mere 45 minutes.

"That's about enough for me," he said.

In all these Shrine/Dammert visits, he's never asked to go back inside, no matter how long we've been outside, no matter the weather. He never complained about or commented upon the heat and humidity out here at any time this summer. The only time he ever wanted to go inside was so he could go to the bathroom, and it was always implied that he would be ready to come back outside once a CNA could put him on and he could do his business.

Here comes the delivery Father Maes said he was waiting for. It's another, younger priest carrying a rosary pouch.

"Is that my Mach 34?" asks Father Maes, standing up against his walker.

"There is no Mach 34," says the younger Father. "How about a Mach 3? Sit down, we'll visit a minute."

I am not trying to eavesdrop but my dad and I aren't conversing so what else is there to do? Father Maes and the younger clergyman are talking about pawpaw, the tree fruit. They are native to Missouri; supposed to taste like a custardy banana. I've never had one before. I've looked for them. Now they're saying something about somebody making a pawpaw pie.

I've asked my dad several questions. He offers a brief answer but then he sandbags. "XYZ, etc, but what do I know?"

A breeze, my dad dozing. Because I don't have a tractor anymore. This pen is on the skids. At some point, darn darn this pen. The old darned man, this old darned pen. Pen fail. I like it when it writes well but it's not working. I cannot write through when there is no—

New pen. Butterflies and baseball and breeze. Leaves of the river birch holding onto green here at the care facility. Asphalt crew out patching potholes, filling holes in the road with the rock-and-oil equivalent of duct tape. Does my dad hate his life? I ask him how he is doing. He says the real answer inwardly to himself, then tells me he's doing OK.

I shared with him the news of Kris Kristofferson passing away, news that managed to get through to him, stung him. I told him that a famous country music singer had passed away. I wanted him to come up with the name. I said, "This guy was a country singer, an actor, and more than anything this guy was known as a songwriter." And he got it...


Read the full post here...