When we first came up with the idea of online publishing, we thought it would be a way of getting our own stories and poems out to be read, just as singer/songwriters cut their own albums. That original idea has evolved into creating BoomerLitMag as a writing community. Since then we have published work by writers from Massachusetts to Mississippi, from California to Pennsylvania, and of course writers from our own home state of Minnesota. This has worked out nicely, but we promised ourselves that from time to time, maybe once a year, we would put something of our own in the journal. In this special double issue for Winter and Spring we are happy to do just that.

The prose this time out is perhaps more varied than we’ve seen in a while. W. A. Coleman’s “Baby Bee” will take you for a compelling and highly unusual ride, and Julia Klatt Singer may just take you to dreamland in “Beauty Rest.” Speaking of going places, we are including another of Daniel Gabriel’s travel pieces, “Jamaica’s Maroons Persist,” which sheds light on a community established by freed and escaped slaves in the late seventeenth century.

In this issue’s poetry, Gail Newby ‘s poem about thrift store shopping in Shreveport contains the line, “Heading to Byzantium we are not.”  Indeed, many of this issue’s narrators are also headed somewhere far from any cultural or civic mecca.  Instead, we race through urban mean streets in Scott Laudati’s “Give a Lozenge to the Voice of the Archangel,” and land in a troubling town and childhood home in Diana Raab’s poems. But we also have the classic focus on nature in Jan Price’s poems and, if things are getting a bit too serious, just turn to the whimsical world of Morgan Grayce Willow’s “The Ampersand and the Zero.”

Happy reading, and Like us on Facebook,
Leonard Lang and Stephen Peters, Editors

Contents: Volume II, Numbers 3 & 4

Prose

Julia Klatt Singer
• Beauty Rest

Daniel Gabriel
• Jamaica’s Maroons Persist

W. A. Coleman
• Baby Bee

Stephen Peters
• Diego Rivera, Diego Rivera

Poetry

Scott Laudati
• Give a Lozenge to the Voice of the Archangel
• Sit with Me

 Gail Newby
• June 21, 1964
• Farmers
• Shreveport Bus Stop

Lyndon Nygaard
• The Barred Owl

Diana Raab
• The Creep
• Mother’s Neighborhood

Jan Price
• Closing Time
• The Familiar of Geese

Morgan Grayce Willow
• Mercury
• The Ampersand and the Zero

Leonard Lang
• Taking of Measures
• How You Lived
• Sound of the Sea

What We’re Reading

Stephen Peters & Leonard Lang