Spring 2022

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The Chessmen

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Set in Dundalk and Baltimore City, Maryland, The Chessmen is Michael Wright’s second novel , available on Amazon in Kindle and paperback Sonny Wakefield is riding a rocket in the summer of '62, before his senior year of high school. Playing trumpet for The Chessmen brings him face to face with the adult world of bars, violence, and his first chaotic excursions into sex. Is he a pawn among the broken lives he encounters, or the knight he hopes to be? Set in Dundalk and Baltimore City, Maryland, The Chessmen is Michael Wright’s second novel after Down the Ocean: Summer of ’64, also on Amazon. Chapter One “Damn it all to hell and back!” Sonny threw his racket against the chain fence and dropped to sit cross-legged on the green court surface. How could he have lost to this jerk? He yanked his laces loose and threw his shoes off. He was miserably sweaty, his feet wrapped in fire. He grabbed the racket and held it above his head, about to smash it down, looking for the satisfactio...
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Portion of a new short story

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 Excerpt of the first story in the collection, Purely Gone and Other Departures : PURELY GONE   CooCoo tilts down Harvard Avenue like a carny ride in slow motion. With the blare of the Buckaneer Bar behind him and only the gas station on the corner as his next marker, he is moving carefully through the haze of two a.m. in late September. It is cool enough to see his breath, though he wonders if the clouds from his mouth aren't just pure alcohol exhaust. "5 Dom $7" is what the Buckaneer sign reads, and that's CooCoo's kind of place, in spite of the cutesy spelling of the name. No complicated list of beers from around the world, just your five basic cold bottles of nearly tasteless amber liquid, guaranteed, in sufficient quantity--and chased with enough whiskey--to set the nightat its proper angle. He sings to himself as he lurches along, not caring what song it is, just extricating words from his weary brain in clumps, like the clots of green bile he hocks ...
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Roses and Ginger

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under the throw of roses and the smell of ginger, each to each, march. under the burning sky and beneath the bridge crossing sighing water, move in step. through portals and domains intersecting sense with sense, reaching for hours, teaching naught, giving aught flying by the sight of a single star, all must think anew. this is the better news of an old song, the hieroglyphs tell the rest, everything in clock-top shape idling for yet another hour, while whatever’s padding in the forest begins to pick up the scent. the pace must increase, it’s only natural, and in time there will be new flows of roses and ginger, a tapestry full of diamonds. yet for now and for the next, whatever rises is only makeshift and the smell of vanilla claims the air, for it is thought that stalks, thought that gives to kill, thought that strangles the vines themselves, no longer content with merely taking the life of the tree, no symbiosis here or there, nor in the foreswearing of sentiments baked too lo...
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