Emily and Martha

By David Macpherson and Tony Brown

Emily and Martha are sisters. They have issues with their father. Who doesn't? They are trying to grow up as best they can.

 

Emily and Martha are sisters. They work for criminals. Who doesn't? They kidnap people and do other low level chores from mobsters

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Two vastly different visions of Emily and Martha.

 

First, they were in a series of poems by Tony Brown. They are thoughtful and insightful. Then, David Macpherson asked to "borrow" the sisters for a group of noir short stories. He made them criminals. Don't blame Tony for that.

 

This collection has Tony's poems and David's stories featuring Emily and Martha. It is a wild ride of contrasts. Beautiful poetry and sharp crime fiction in one volume, who can ask for more?

• Language: English
• Publisher: David Macpherson
• Release date: Sep 9, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393115755

Book preview

A Note On The Poems

I’m not going to say a lot more about these poems than Dave did in his introduction to the stories, other than to corroborate what he says about their origins and back story.

In going back deep into the past to look at these again, I’m struck by how fresh the memory is of writing them, of trying to live in the poems and the world created by the poems.  The girls were real to me back then – real with lives of their own, independent of the actual people who inspired them.

I’m also surprised to see how few of them there actually are, at least within my archives from the mid-90s.  I had assumed there were many more, but this is all I have access to at the moment, and I’m hard pressed to think of any more at any rate.

I hope you enjoy them and Dave’s stories of Martha and Emily as well.

Even if they are brats.

—Tony Brown

January, 2017

Chrysler

I hear his Chrysler

crunching up the driveway and I toss

my cigarette into the gravel, since we are

supposed to be quitting. As we load the scatterguns

into the truck we both lie

about the day before, boasting about not smoking,

saying we don’t even miss nicotine.

All morning long we lie in the blind, blasting and rejoicing

when we kill. When the hunt is over we go home

and my girls come running out to meet us, calling first his name

and then mine, hanging off of our knees as we

carry the quarry to the front porch.

We sit for two hours with Martha and Emily

while he plays my guitar, I think, better than I ever will. Once the girls

have run off we have more coffee and he says to me:

'So is it all you thought it would be, now that you've settled down?'

And I say

nothing, until I can come up with

some half-obvious ghost of a facsimile of

some half-obvious half-truth, and then I say:

'Sure. Best thing I ever did. I feel right about it.'

And we sit for another half hour,

watching each other not smoking,

while the morning’s blood is drying and old habits

crust over the distance I half-believe lies between us.

We keep silent, thinking

of the children.

Jim Hangs On

Before bed

I tell Amy

I'll check on the children,

and I do what I always do:

hold my breath

when I brush a lock of hair

from Emily's forehead;

listen to her coo and watch her curl tighter

around the Pretty Pony blanket

we can't get her to give up,

even now that she's ten;

look into Martha's room

and see her on her back,

face turned to the window.

She's too old at sixteen

to need me to brush away

the hair from her brow,

so I resist the tug toward her bed

and turn back toward our room.

Amy's sleeping already.

I crawl in beside her, weak

as an addict, coming back

for the dose:

the way she breathes, so like the way

our daughters breathe.

I sleep and only once

do I dream: a dream of bridges

and a goal out there that lies

over stone and through the dark,

but the Voice says, there is a way

if you close your eyes.

Put your hand on my shoulder

the Voice says, and when I do

I can feel long hair

under my hand.

At dawn

before anyone awakes

I get up and look again

at my wife, my children,

my shining home

shifting under my feet.

I shut my eyes

and reach for the shoulder,

for the rails of a bridge I can't see.

A Letter From Spidergate

Dear girls:

here is what I would like you to remember—

It was Columbus Day and you were out of school so we went to lunch

Afterwards you both said you were looking to have an adventure

Something spooky for October

I racked my brain and finally suggested that we go

to find again the scariest place I know

A place I last saw twenty odd years ago

A haunted cemetery called Spidergate

You were both game

We drove it seemed