PLAN B PRESS Issue Tony Brewer This is a funny story, which is why it take two poets to tell it. Tony Brewer and Joseph Kershbaum each sent manuscripts to one of our earlier contests, and while they didn’t win, I thought highly of each. I suggested they contact me during our open season. We accepted Brewer’s first as I thought it was a brilliant short novel in poetry form (I maintain that view) and then we accepted Kerschbaum’s. It wasn’t until we got into the “nuts-and-bolts” of publication that I noticed they both lived in Indiana. Then I discovered they were part of the same poetry troupe, the Reservoir Dogwoods. When I wrote them to mention this, it was news to each of them. They didn’t even tell each other they had submitted to Plan B Press! Their books were scheduled to be published at the same time, which led to their mini-tour which occurred the first week of April 2010 to the Poetry Lab in Vienna, VA with stops in Columbus, OH. Brewer and Kerschbaum work well together and individually. It was our good fortune to end up with both of them on the Plan B Press imprint. .Brewer's book is titled Little Glove in a Big Hand.   THE DEAD DON'T GET OFF EASY Haven’t left, always leaving enough of themselves behind to impress the veil between us. Filled with hidden anger and a disquieting need for attention amid a constant human static only the most violent revenant can penetrate, we hear and ignore weak spirits who never make their presence known and so remain transparent. It’s loneliness that catches and keeps our memories of a life, while ghosts only want to be here again, climbing back through the vault of our senses to arrive where we would rather be left alone. Their echoes sound in empty rooms we have just departed, reminding us we too are not long for this world and the next is just bearable upon release if one can withstand the solitude pushing a draft through the window sash and billowing a curtain into something vaguely familiar until we become see-through ourselves. Tony Brewer's poems have appeared in Bathtub Gin, decomP, Flying Island, and Poetry Midwest, and the anthology And Know This Place: Poetry of Indiana (Indiana Historical Society Press). His first book is The Great American Scapegoat (2006), and Plan B Press released his chapbook, Little Glove in Big Hand, in 2010. He lives in Bloomington, IN.   Published in Volume 11, Number 3, Summer 2010.