Above is a picture of Frederico Bruno, he is accused of pushing his ex-girlfriend and 3 month old child out of a window three stories high.  He climbs down from the same window, finds a metal bar stool leg and beats her with it as she is lying on top of the 3 month old baby who broke her fall to a concrete ground.  Read that over again.  Take a

               MARTIAN CHRONICLES (1950) I first met Ray Bradbury in the pages of his book The Illustrated Man way back in 1951. His easy flowing, poetic style of writing science fiction and fantasy hooked me into a love of these genres to this very day. From that book came others throughout the Fabulous Fifties and beyond. They were books I had to

THE LILY PAD, THE JAPANESE BRIDGE Painting by Claude Monet (1899); Poem by Sal Buttaci (1994)   Who could imagine what Monet was thinking when he took his brush to this! Ask him what inspired him  and he will no doubt lie, say "The Japanese Bridge" or "The lily pond: the way the lilies sit on the brown river" or "The mood I was in, the feeling  I h

THE CART: THE ROAD UNDER SNOW IN HONFLEUR Painting by Claude Monet, 1865; Poem by Salvatore Buttaci, 1994 The road under snow we ought best not to complain about! Yet we do so every winter, don't we? You say the jostling ride hurts your back or the old horse is too slow or that I see so poorly I cannot avoid the rocks jutting in our path.   As for

                                   BERTHE MORISOT                      Painting by Edouard Manet (1873)                      Poem by Salvatore Buttaci  (1994) "Too  much yellow!" I tell the painter. "You've made me out to appear  some pasty-looking, half-dead matron who has never seen the sun! Devotees of art one day  will stand before this canvas

YOUNG BOY LEANING OVER BAKERY COUNTER   Maybe it would have helped if I had raised my hand some decades ago and told my story. “My name is Jeremy and I’m a sugar addict. I’ve come tonight seeking help.” But I didn’t. Nor did I look to psychoanalysis to help me. My father had raised us to distrust “those meddling brainpickers.” In fact, even before

FLASHING MY SHORTS by Salvatore Buttaci A flash of painful remembrance, a memory of a wounded World War II veteran, a tale of Uncle Pete who wasn’t really Uncle Pete at all, and then the darkness of a life once lived in unrestrained laughter.    Encounter    Years of hard drinking had driven him to seed.  He slept under cardboard  on the coldest Ne

My scrapbook of Italian postcards ranks high on my list of conversation pieces. “I’ve always wanted to see Venice,” says my neighbor Bill.  “Oh, the Bridge of Sighs,” says his wife Pauline. “I saw it in a movie once.” Venice. Florence. Pisa. Rome. Four postcards to a page. A scrapbook of colorful wish-you-were-here attractions: churches, the grande