PhillySound: new poetry

The new issue of THE FOX CHASE REVIEW is now available online! Thanks to everyone involved with putting that together! I've already gotten a couple of e-mails from folks telling me the picture of me is scary, which made me giggle for no good reason. And as one friend wrote, "How the hell did you manage to wind up in a magazine with the goddess of slander and censorship!?" I won't share the second sentence my friend wrote about this poet, let's just say it's mean, and that I agree with the sentence wholeheartedly!

Frank Sherlock's poem is without a doubt one of my favorites in the issue! You'll see! And the thing that got left out about my two poems is that THOSE poems are from my collaboration with Frank, THE CITY REAL & IMAGINED: Philadelphia Poems. But that's fine, now you know.

The photograph of FOX CHASE in the snow is beautiful. I have to admit I've never been there, ever. For more than twenty years FOX CHASE has been a name on the side of a Septa train, R8 I believe. WHOSE CHASING THOSE FOXES is all I remember thinking the first time I saw it, LEAVE THEM ALONE! Maybe (like most places around Philadelphia) there aren't any foxes left. Further out where I grew up, in rural Pennsylvania, where "sylvania" still hits Penn's original sites, there are foxes. And the last time I visited my boyhood home I saw a "pest control" van drive down the dirt road leading to my old house, pictures of squirrels, deer, and foxes painted on the side of the van. Humans should be painted on the side of the van if you ask me, or if you ask a fox, or deer, or squirrel. But no, no one ever bothers to ask us!

CAConrad