Thunder Pie

1 week ago | sergebielanko.substack.com | Serge Bielanko

A picture is a secret about a secret, the more it tells you the less you know. -Diane ArbusWe did a tour. It was long ago now, before I had three kids. I had two then. And in the picture I have from the day we were leaving, they are in my arms, sagging in my grasp. It is a photo I hadn’t seen in such a while that I had forgotten it existed. With photographs you either are looking at them or you aren’t. And if you aren’t, then the memory is probably faded or even gone.

2 weeks ago | sergebielanko.substack.com | Serge Bielanko

When the lambs is lost in the mountain, he said. They is cry. Sometime come the mother. Sometime the wolf. - Cormac McCarthy, Blood MeridianBy the recycling dumpsters down in Centre Hall, I am pushing a trash bag of cans into a dark space when I hear the goats. They make goat sounds from across the big road, from their pen in a small field behind the Dunkin’ Donuts, and I hear them and I stop what I’m up to. Many, many years ago, I tell myself, I was a dirt farmer in a far off land.

4 weeks ago | sergebielanko.substack.com | Serge Bielanko

Yesterday on the later side of the evening, I was sitting in the back door listening to Billie Holiday. I had no booze in me and none in a glass. I had eaten a bunch of cheeseburger quesadillas I made for the kids and I was feeling like a statue. I needed to sit down with my art. The evening was half decent/ warm, I guess/ but it could have stormed. Things were sunny and gray at the same time. Sometimes the sky is both. Sometimes I’m both, too.

1 month ago | sergebielanko.substack.com | Serge Bielanko

jawn /jôn/ noun - (chiefly in the greater Philadelphia metropolitan area) used to refer to a thing, place, person, or event that one need not or cannot give a specific name to. Jawn is a neutral, all-purpose noun used to reference any person, place, situation, or object. In casual conversation, it takes the place of the word ‘thing’. _____jawn one. My hair in the front is thinning outpretty fast. Ilook in the mirror, see my scalp at times; it’s yet another surreal reminder that I am dying.

1 month ago | sergebielanko.substack.com | Serge Bielanko

At the farm pond last Saturday evening. It was a hot spring day today and now I’m watching Henry throw a buzzbait up against the bank. His casts are almost all pinpoint accurate. He lays the lure down where the water runs up into the cut reeds; he starts reeling before it even lands, just like I taught him. A largemouth slaps at Henry’s offering/ we both watch the V in the water where its dorsal fin approaches like a shark keying in on a seal. There’s not much difference.