The Note

I've spent nearly all of my life living in places that don't have a lot of curb appeal. A smallish town near Little Rock, Arkansas; Memphis, Tennessee; and Birmingham, Alabama. I know, I know. My history of addresses is pretty much a civil rights bus tour. But, as it turns out, Little Rock is kind of a nice place to hang out.  Memphis has a lot of good things going on. And, hey, Birmingham is...ok it's Birmingham.  

I've been thinking that Birmingham might be a microcosm of where this country is heading. We've had a long run of years, at both the county and city level, of really bad and often corrupt leadership. And the county I live in just declared the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history. Nice. In spite of that, if you catch some breaks, like being employed, you can make a good life in Birmingham. You can make a good life in many other places. 

Some years ago, there was an article in our local paper about families from New York who get transferred for work to Alabama. Most of them described crying for weeks when they got the word. Then they got here and they discovered that, you know, there are shoes, running water, even a good art museum, and parks, and universities, and medical schools, and it's kind of a nice-looking area and, you know, it's home. Granted, there's a really horrific immigration law, but it's home.

So, here's the Cities issue. It's a double issue, which we're offering for the same price as our regular issues. It's big. There are a lot of cities here, because there are a lot of cities and they are (almost) all worth writing about. In fact, according to my calculations, the cities that inspire these 32 poems represent only a fraction of the cities in the world.

In addition to our able fiction editor, F.John Sharp, I got a lot of help from our little group of readers, Eric Burke, Doug Draime, Howie Good, Vivian Faith Prescott, and Scot Siegel. Thanks to those folks.

Enjoy.

Dale

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