Hiatus

Composed by

OUR THANKS
Thank you so much to all of you for your patronage and support of COA over the past four-plus years. We’re taking a hiatus from new content on the blog here. As with anyone, the leadership team has to direct our focuses (foci works too) on other efforts. This includes developing art and merchandise for the COA shop on Redbubble, which, like many elements of our brand, will soldier on. We’re not sure whether COA will be an active online journal at some point in the future, but all the art we’ve given to the world already will continue to exist here.

EDO TRAINS
COA family member EDO Trains is now a triple threat, with the merchandise stores, a vintage and rare railroad videos initiative, and a fine scale model railroading design and manufacture division featuring exquisite, never-made model kits and hard-to-find or never-made detail parts.
eBay Store / Redbubble Store / YouTube Channel

KEEP UP WITH OUR AUTHORS
All our writers will continue their craft beyond COA. We hope that you’ll stick with your favorite writers and artists from the COA family.
CHARLIE MONTE VERDE: Twitter
NIA SIMONE MCLEOD: Website / Instagram / Tumblr / Twitter
EMMIE K. STRICKLAND: Website

Always remember that we’re all in this together, that we have more in-common than we do differences, and that each and every one of us is no better than the other.

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

CDMV

Fire on the Mountain

Composed by

On the train to Rostock, looking out at the hazy summer sky, the wide green fields that stretch on in gentle rolls, punctuated by twirling turbines. The green hits me- no longer the young varied green of spring, but already more mature, fuller, deeper, more sure of itself. I’m looking out the train window and picturing the huge column of smoke thousands and thousands of miles away, where a place I love is burning.

Here, white trees form an open-air tunnel for the train to speed through, and the tunnel opens onto fields edged with pine forest. My heart, how many aspens have turned to ash, how many ponderosas are nothing more than charred remains? They are fire-loving trees, the ponderosas, but they are no match for unchecked flames that lick their sides and engulf their crown, suffocating them and burning from the inside. Can you hear them crack and scream as they fall, as they crumble?

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