Author: Matt Mullins
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Matt Mullins: On Edgar Allan Poe and the Short Story
There would be no National Short Story Month without Edgar Allan Poe, the man at the fountainhead of genre. In his criticism and his stories themselves, Poe essentially defined what the short story should do: become a bomb in the reader’s hand that explodes with meaning before it can be set down. Poe believed a…
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Carrying the Blues on a Ladder with Robert Johnson after Consideration of the RPM Conundrum
I’ve long loved you as the voice inside another time Making seal on the doctored whiskey’s wet lipped lie I’ve read: one laced bottle, two, or none. I’ve bent knees At all three markers, left strings, guitar picks, pennies Thumbed into dirt just to get that much closer to you My ethereal, black angel, the…
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Three Ways of the Saw
I’m at the kitchen sink washing down pills when they bump up my driveway in a blue Toyota pick up, its bed eaten through with rust so bad I can see past the holes in the body to the frame. The driver, a big, middle-aged man with stubbly cheeks and a ball cap on, throws…