Featured Poet C.E. Chaffin

Galveston Dogs Lumbering, occasionally loping, ubiquitous as potholes, more numerous than mosquitoes, they pad dejectedly about. More often asleep than awake, ambulating plagued by rheumatism, hesitating for no specific reason, neither dodging cars nor challenging them but sleepily beholding their chrome grilles with indifference, they clutter the streets. Their unkempt fur reminds you of rabbit stoles for sale in downtown thrift stores or Persian sheepskin coats with the fleece turned out. Their fur is as brittle as jute. They have no self-respect nor any respect for man. They rarely bark, it is too much effort. You can blame it on the sun, on tropical worms infecting their heart valves or vitamin deficiency, but to watch them file so blandly in front of your car with the air-conditioning broken and your calf in spasm above the brake pedal infuriates beyond the personal, like an atavistic insult to your species. It's rumored that small dogs have run after bicyclists, but the large dogs, impurebred setters and lazy bloodhounds, de-canonized St. Bernards and timid Dobermans, would never commit such excess of motion. Running is undignified for these southern dogs, these indolent summer dogs. O if you saw the far look in their eyes, a canine disdain for all humanity, a royal dissatisfaction with the weather, a certain inevitably predestined contentment, you would wish with all your heart to run them over. But they have it on you, they have always been here. Before the tourists and traffic lights they drank with Jean Lafitte and howled at Andy Jackson, slept through hurricanes and yellow fever epidemics so fierce their masters fled.

Also by C.E. Chaffin: To The Madonna of Ft. Mason... How I Revisited CO Death Back To Sleep

C.E. Chaffin received his B.A. in English in 1976 from UCLA (Summa Cum Laudanum, Fine Bit-A Krappa), winning The Edward Niles Hooker Award for Outstanding Achievement in English (top prize for students in the honors program, in which he wasn't). He also served as poetry editor of Goldenwest Literary Magazine and Carrion while an undergraduate, rudely abusing his office to print some of his most execrable poems. Books: Elementary (poems), Edwin Mellen Press, 1997- 2nd printing now available at Amazon.com. Some of the journals where C.E.'s work has been published include - Agnieszka's Dowry, The Astrophysicist's Tango Partner Speaks, The Free Cuisenart, Kudzu, Recursive Angel, Slumgullion , A 2River View, Perihelion of Web Del Sol, and Zuzu's Petals. Stories countless submitted, two published. Ancillary degrees M.D. 1980, FAAFP1994 (Fellow of the American Academy of Family Physicians), Assistant Professor of Family Medicine at U.C. Irvine. C.E. is the co-editor of The Melic Review.