Call Me Karma

There are threads that keep us tethered to this world; there are rules and beliefs that play us all for fools. Call Me Karma follows the journey of learning that fate pulls strings for no one. That Lady Justice sees every rise and fall, and that perhaps we were selfish for assuming she ever served us at all.

Grief, love, denial, reflection—there is balance to nature; for every sin on the scale there sits a virtue on the other side. The roadmap of life rarely follows a steady path; not every success is permanent, and not every failure is damning. There is a strength in accepting these simple human truths and in understanding that some stories call for a bittersweet ending. These poems are yours to embrace or despise, to comfort those they reach, or to patiently wait on the bottom shelf until the right time.

The Devil's Grapevine

A young woman in the late 1930s became the mother of an illegitimate child. She was living in a small, pious town, which was very judgemental. The conception of her child was by an infamous rapist. Interpol had been chasing him across three continents. There had been hundreds of rapes. His crimes made headlines around the world, and he was soon captured, sentenced to death, and electrocuted. Only the girl, her mother, and the authorities were aware of who impregnated her.

When the boy was three, she and her mother decided she must become anonymous for fear that Roddy may find out that the blood of this monster runs through his veins. Changing her name, she and Roddy leave the past behind and end up in California.

Roddy, now ten, ends up working in an out-of-the-way truck stop in Grapevine Village. Many adventures and complexities lay before them. Love, death, a boy’s fantasies, the FBI. and warring trucking companies transporting Mexican farm workers without proper papers, who are fighting over who controls the rights to use the highway called “The Devil’s Grapevine.”

Roddy and his mother are caught between the FBI and the warring truckers, which ends in a gunfight that ends up burning much of the village to cinders. All works out in the end with the mother, the son, and a truck driver who rescues them from the gunfire and flames.

Long Green

This book is about a New Yorker, Kob Hansen, whose parents were both born in Kentucky, though he had only visited as a child with his grandmother to bury them both after a tragic murder suicide. Yet, while teaching part-time at Columbia, he falls for a graduate student who is from Kentucky. They fall in love and decide to get married, and she talks him into returning to her hometown for the wedding and to live. There, things go awry as he learns about his own family and hers—his family poor Norwegian miners while hers rich Bluegrass elite.Meanwhile, Kob encounters a man known simply as Long Green, an old hermit who did twenty years for murder who, after his release, is shunned by the people of the county. The man he murdered thirty years before, Kob soon comes to believe to be his own grandfather, or so he thinks, until he begins to believe Long Green (Labe Cornett) may be his real grandfather.This changes his entire picture of his life and upbringing, all among the Southern culture and mindset of native Kentuckians.