SUPER SHENANIGANS

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When I was a kid, I was crazy about all things Superman. Viewings of all four Superman movies (and even Supergirl, for that matter…Helen Slater! What a babe!) were a religious rite in my house, and happened with such alarming frequency that I surely wore out my poor mother’s nerves. I still have the first and second films memorized frame by frame. Even at that young age, I was cognizant that Three and Four weren’t exactly great, but I didn’t care. It was Superman! How could that be a bad thing?

When it came to comics, I had a bunch, but probably none so loved more than John Byrne’s classic limited series Man of Steel. Byrne’s unique take on Superman was a sort of reboot after DC’s Crisis on Infinite Earths event closed out the Silver Age incarnation of the character. Man of Steel re-introduced him to younger generations with a version more in line with the public consciousness of the time. Byrne’s stories might have been hit-or-miss, but his incredible artwork remains arguably one of the best and most widely known depictions of Superman in comics, and hold up well alongside such legends as Curt Swan, Jim Lee, and Gary Frank.

And I haven’t even gotten into

THE NIGHT IS FIRE: A POEM IN BLANK VERSE

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 The following is a poem I wrote for my poetry class during the 2019 spring semester at Sul Ross State University.

Many thanks to Jack Palance, the legendary actor and surprisingly great poet, whose criminally underrated and little-known work of poetry, "The Forest of Love," inspired this work.

🔥 🔥 🔥

The Night is Fire

By Matthew D. Berkshier

4/22/2019

Submitted for Category #14 – Poem Modeled After a Favorite Poem

The day succumbs to night; the night is fire,

Midnight embers stretching out into black,

And I walk home, your kiss still on my lips.

A gentle breeze

EXORDIUM

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The following is a revision of a descriptive essay I wrote for my composition class during the 2018 fall semester at Sul Ross State University.

If the Flir ever happen to see this...thank you for the music. You were Golden.

❅ ❅ ❅

I sift through the music playlist on my phone, searching for the perfect auditory experience for the winter scene I’m about to write. I’m looking for something in particular—something that evokes cold, lonely nights, crunchy snow drifts, sharp icicles, and the sting of the frigid air in my lungs with each breath. I find it in The Flir’s inaugural album Please, Please, Please.

I press “play” and lose myself in the white space of the blank Word document. At once, the music chills me and warms me to the bone, and suddenly it’s the winter of 2007. I’m sitting in the security office in the facility, listening to this very same music, shivering despite the thermals underneath my uniform. The stark walls contrast the blackness outside the large bay window. Hidden somewhere within that blackness is snow—more snow than I’d seen in years. Records had been racking up in the area for weeks, making this the coldest, snowiest January in fifteen years.

This facility sits in a half-mile