Sep 2017

1

The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER- 2017

2

VOLUME: 2 - ISSUE: 6 - SEPTEMBER - 2017

Notes from New Delhi : Dibyajyoti Sarma 02 Columns:

Musings Of An Axolotl -C.S.Lakshmi 06

Letter from London-John Looker 12

The Wanderer - Andrew Fleck 20 P&P - Yonason Goldson 25 Non-Fiction: Deborah Bennison 54 Poetry:

Md Mehedi Hasan 31 Wafula Yenjela 38 Kristyl Gravina 42 John (“Jake”) Cosmos Aller 78 Glen Sorestad 88 G. David Schwartz 92 Fiction:

John Allison 45

Corey Hill 65 Book Review: A Song For Bela

Gayatri Majumdar/ Joan Dobbie 75

Wrapper Art: sculpture by Benjamin Victor.

THE WAGON MAGAZINE

KGE TEAM 4/4, FIRST FLOOR, R.R.FLATS, FIRST STREET, VEDHACHALA NAGAR, KODAMBAKKAM, CHENNAI - 600 024 Phone: +91-9382708030 e-mail: thewagonmagazine@gmail.com www.thewagonmagazine.com The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER - 2017

3

NOTES FROM NEW DELHI

About Bhupen Hazarika, on his birthday

If you were around in the 1990s, it’s almost certain that you have heard of Dr Bhupen Hazarika and at least one of his songs, ‘Dil Hoom Hoom Kare’, in Lata Mangeshkar’s haunting voice, from the film, Rudaali (1993). This was one year after Hazarika was awarded the Dadasaheb Phalke Award in 1992.

Recently, in an interview for a book containing 101 lyrics by the poet, Gulzar, who wrote the Hindi lyrics for the song, explained the reason why he decided to use the words ‘hoom, hoom’, to denote heart beats, as opposed to the popular alternative like ‘dhak, dhak’. Gulzar said, during the writing of the lyrics, he heard an old Assamese folk song where the words ‘hoom hoom’ was used to mean heat beats.

The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER- 2017

4 I have enormous respect for Gulzar, but his statement made me think of cultural appropriation and twisting of history. For, in fact, the song, ‘Dil Hoom Hoom Kare’ is a copy of music director Hazarika’s original Assamese song, ‘Buku Homm Homm Kore’ from the Assamese film, Maniram Dewan (1963). This music is the same, only the wordings have been changed, with the words ‘hoom, hoom’ making a smooth transition from Assamese to Hindi.

I am not bitter. I understand a history is the history of the winner.

So I thought, I would write something about Bhupen Hazarika, in a way of reclaiming some shards of history, especially because he was born this month, on 8 September 1926 in Sadiya, Assam.

Let’s start with his passing on 5 November 2011 in Mumbai, Maharashtra.

My father is not a crowd person. He does not even attend weddings. On the day of Hazarika’s last rites, on 8 November 2011, in Guwahati, however, he had decided to take a walk, even as the streets were filled with people. The ground, where Hazarika was to be cremated, was just a half-an-hour’s walk. That afternoon, my father could not even reach the place; it was a sea of people. Everyone was there to bid the iconic personality a final goodbye. It was an extraordinary sight, unprecedented, even in a place which has seen its fair share of public gatherings. It was a momentous display of how Hazarika’s music had touched each and every one in Guwahati, and in turn, in Assam. For the Assamese people, he was Bhupenda. A generation had lost its elder brother.

There are limits to how popular a single person can become.

For every fan of every personality, there may be a dozen others who do not care about him. But to be loved by an entire generation, an entire population is something else. There is only a handful who could achieve this feat. Perhaps Gandhi was one. Perhaps Michael Jackson, Rabindranath Tagore in Bengal, Amitabh Bachchan, among the living. In Assam, Hazarika wasn’t a person. He was, to use a cliché, a living legend, an epitome and a testament to the Assamese culture. He defined Assam to the world, and every Assamese person basked in his glory, in his almost god-like talent. There isn’t a single Assamese The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER - 2017

5 person, in Assam or elsewhere, who hasn’t heard about Bhupenda or know at least one of his songs by heart.

Personally, I owe my love for Bhupen Hazarika to my mother.

She knows all Bhupen Hazarika songs, even the obscure ones, courtesy the radio. She doesn’t sing, she recites the lines of the songs, and she has a song for every possible occasion, whether it’s happiness, sorrow, love, patriotism, life’s lessons, anything. You mention a subject, and there’s a Bhupen Hazarika song about it, and my mother can recite it. His are not songs, but poetry. They are epigrams. They are quotable quotes. They are life’s lessons. They are part of a community’s cultural history.

I have 431 Bhupen Hazarika songs on the hard drive of my computer. This is by no means a complete collection. I have no idea how many songs he had composed and sung in a career spanning half-a-century, from his debut as a child artist in the second Assamese feature film, Indramalati (1939), to being a singer of protests, attending public functions, to being a high-profile filmmaker and music director, who crossed over to Bangla and then to Hindi, and yet retained his roots. For the Assamese, he was the bridge between the past and the present. He was tutored by the luminaries like Jyoti Prasad Agarwala and Bishnu Rabha in the pre-independent India, fought for the rights of the oppressed and then, introduced the state to the world.

And, imagine, the man wrote all those songs, composed the tunes and performed, relentlessly, for more than half-a-century. The only comparison comes to mind is Bob Dylan. Like Dylan, Hazarika himself was the music. He was the voice. He did not need anything else, other than perhaps a harmonium. He just needed to sing, and sing he did, to last a lifetime, to last an eternity.

If you want an American equivalent for Hazarika’s music, Dylan perhaps is not a good example. Instead think Woody Guthrie, Paul Robeson or Pete Seeger. Like these musicians, Hazarika too sang for the common men, for their rights, for their dignity. He famously translated and performed Robeson’s ‘We’re in the Same Boat, Brother’ both in Assamese and Bengali. He took inspiration from the folk music of the land and popularised it among the people. So perhaps Gulzar The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER- 2017

6 is right. ‘Buku Homm Homm Kore’ is a folk song!

But, what is this enduring appeal of Bhupen Hazarika? I don’t know. But, I can identify with his songs, the same way my mother does, despite the fact that we are two generations apart. Hazarika sings about the people, the farmer, the fisherman, the worker, the office-goes, the idealist, the patriot. Even his abstract love songs are populated with people we know. His songs breathe the same air I inhale.

I cannot sing, but I know at least 50 Bhupen Hazarika songs by heart. It has been a part of my growing up. No, he’s not my favourite musician, but his music throbs in my being. He is not just a singer.

He is part of the Assamese consciousness.

Dibyajyoti Sarma 8 September 2017 New Delhi

“A gift from God” is how Benjamin Victor describes his ability to create spectacular works of art. Benjamin joined the ranks of Michelangelo, Bernini, and French by receiving his first large commission at only 23 years old. At age 26, he became the youngest artist ever to have a sculpture in the Nation’s foremost collection, the National Statuary Hall in the United States Capitol. Nine years later, he became the only living artist to have two works in Statuary Hall. Art critics and organizations, including the National Sculpture Society in New York City, continue to recognize the aesthetic and conceptual integrity of Benjamin’s artwork. His passion and drive clearly show in each of his unique and profound creations. With expressive features, exquisite detail, and thought-provoking content, the work of Benjamin Victor is sure to take its place among the great masterpieces of art history.

Biographical Review written by Ruth E. McKinney M.F.A. http://benjaminvictor.com/2012/02/gallery/monuments-large-works /where-cultures-meet/ The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER - 2017

7 MUSINGS OF AN AXOLOTL

C.S.LAKSHMI

The Hudhud Birds and A Sky to Fly

e are living in times when tolerance and freedom of expression are being talked about, with concern, in India and all over the world.

When Tamil writer Perumal Murugan wrote a novel which, a caste group alleged, hurt their sentiments and religious feelings, there were protests calling for censorship of the work by the caste group and the entire literary and academic world not only in India but elsewhere also stood by him and the matter was discussed in each and every forum. Awards were returned by well-known writers in protest against the act of intolerance and the perceived curtailment of

W

The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER- 2017

8 the freedom of a writer to express. Perumal Murugan, hurt by the protests against his novel and the deal he was forced to enter into, declared himself dead as a writer. When he won his case against those who wanted to ban his book and was told by the court to do what he does best, to continue to write, everyone rejoiced that freedom of expression had won over intolerance. Although the judgment itself did not resolve many other questions which remained unanswered as pertinently pointed out by Gautam Bhatia in his article “The fault in our speech” in The Hindu, May 11, 2017, where he says, “the law will protect works that have successfully entered the mainstream literary culture, but it will not shield the truly iconoclastic, the seemingly senseless, the incomprehensible. It will protect Perumal Murugan, but it will do little for Gustave Flaubert in 1860, James Joyce in 1920, or Saadat Hasan Manto in 1950….” In this list of writers who will not be shielded one can add the name of H G Razool.

As I stood in a curtained section of the ICU ward of a hospital in Nagercoil, last week, on the 5th of August, looking at the dead body of a fellow writer, H G Razool, I remembered the fight we did not put up for him. His book Mailanji (Henna) published in 2000 (Charam, Thuckalay, Kanyakumari District), according to him, was a way of asserting that there is no such thing as one Islamic way of life with which all Muslims, from whatever region and of whatever gender, can identify themselves. His poems, he said, were about multiple ways of seeing and experiencing. But Mailanji put him in an extremely difficult situation. He had written in a literary journal that while many critics saw him only as a representative voice of Islam since he belonged to that community, the religious leaders themselves had questioned him on his faith and stand on Islam. Fourteen people from Muscat had put his name on the list of Salman Rushdie and Taslima Nasreen and had sent a signed petition to the Jamaat, urging that action be taken against him. H G Razool was forced to apologise before the Jamaat of The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER - 2017

9 his village. Needless to say, there were no vociferous protests, no public discussions, no outcries that this cannot be done in our name precisely because people did not know what positions they should take on an iconoclastic book, which denied that there was one Islamic way of life. Even the Tamil Nadu Progressive Writers’ Association had soft-pedaled the issue expressing a mild protest against the stand of the Jamaat but had not made it a national issue deserving both condemnation and protest. So H G Razool apologised. Huge wreaths bearing the names of Tamil Nadu Progressive Writers’ Association and Democratic Youth Federation of India were placed on the taboot and his book on Wahabism explaining his longstanding position on there being multiple ways of experiencing Islam and living as a Muslim is going to be published shortly by the writers’ group.

Standing before his body and paying my respects I could foresee all this adulation happening after his death. I also knew how the question of tolerance and freedom of expression and what lay at its core, of asking ourselves what do we tolerate and what do we not tolerate, what do we understand by freedom of expression and who do we think can exercise this freedom would get muted when Razool will be promoted as a Sufi writer. A dead writer is someone one can quote and claim allegiance to. A dead writer is also someone one can forget conveniently after a while, especially when silence has to be maintained for strategic purposes on certain issues. But Razool who died at the young age of 58, would have gone through the agony of being a writer who was left on his own to deal with his writing and his views.

Razool’s poems are filled with the voices of women. When I wrote an article on Razool in 2001, I had said that “the voices of many women come through his poems. Be it the desire of a girl who wants pottu but wonders if her Umma would mind or that of the woman who is worried about the meat cooking on the gas stove and about completing her work at home before the men return from their prayers, or of the wise woman who spread Islam in Tamil Nadu and Kerala, or of the woman who says that the Koran, the words, and actions of Muhammad and the stories of the Sahabas, the friends of The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER- 2017

10 Muhammad, belong to her too, the voices of women come directly and indirectly in many different ways. Sometimes they come as fond memories of mothers, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers; sometimes they come as the language of women abandoned and suppressed and sometimes they appear as innocent questions of little girls. At no point do the poems seem like universal announcements.

There is anger but no proclamations. The voices of the women do not arise from a singular way of experiencing the world. On the other hand, they arise from different ways of experiencing and many varied ways of expression.” The title poem “Mailanji”, in fact, captures this feeling in just a few words: …Even then, All the fingers All the palms They don’t turn red The same way I translated some of his poems into English and the one where his little daughter asks about women Nabis is one I quote often and had quoted just a week before his death in a writers’ conference in Chengannur, Kerala. The poem is titled ‘About A Nabi Yet To Be

Born’:

Those religious lectures that spread in every direction said: One lakh twenty-four thousand Nabis came as saviours of the world.

The Holy Koran revealed: Those who bore the pain of words and stones and became history were the twenty-five Nabis The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER - 2017

11 Adham Nabi, Nooh Nabi Yusuf Nabi, Salih Nabi Dawood Nabi, Sulaiman Nabi Ayub Nabi, Yunus Nabi Moosa Nabi, Isa Nabi And finally was born The great Muhammad Nabi As I told this story my beloved daughter asked: Vappa, among so many, so many Nabis why isn’t there even one woman Nabi?

Razool also raised a wonderful question of language and a faith that is uttered and written in another language from another land. These questions he raised in the following poem titled Allah’s Language remain for us: Avval Kalima taught us the basis of the original utterances Allah is neither man…nor woman…

Nobody gave Allah birth nor did Allah give birth to anyone Can’t call Allah iraivan or with respect, in the plural, iraivar That would be considered shirk in Islam since it is a male term.

Addressing Allah as iraival The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER- 2017

12 the feminine, is also meaningless for Allah is not a woman either.

In my Tamil how shall I address my Allah who is neither male nor female?

My Allah who is beyond language and community now needs a language. (*shirk means ascribing a partner or rival to Allah in Lordship (ruboobiyyah), worship or in His names and attributes.)

Razool is no more. Someone among the group gathered at the hospital told me he was planning to write a novel for he had just retired and had time to write more. I don’t know what the novel would have been about but I am sure at least some of it would have revolved around the Hudhud birds, which he speaks about, which seek truth and have their wings broken but still have a sky to fly. Razool’s last breath would have mingled with the winds of Kanyakumari region he belonged to, and those winds would carry his truth-seeking words all over the world, where they belong for Hudhud birds never die.

They continue to fly seeking truth. ***** --Translated from the original Tamil published in the book Mailanji --Hudhud, an Arabic word for Hoopoe bird mentioned twice in Quran, is a colourful bird found across Afro-Eurasia, notable for its distinctive “crown” of feathers.

C S Lakshmi is a researcher and a writer who writes in the pen name Ambai. She is one of the founder trustees of SPARROW (Sound & Picture Archives for Research on Women) and currently its director.

The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER - 2017

13

Letter from London - 10 from John Looker

This month I’d like to tell you about an unusual poetry project that would never have taken shape before the internet. There are several reasons for that.

Do you know the poetry of Carol Rumens? She is a celebrated British poet with several collections published as well as short stories and The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER- 2017

14 a novel. She has won prizes, she teaches creative writing at Bangor University, is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and contributes a weekly poetry column to the Guardian newspaper. Recently she has contributed two poems to a new anthology. More important than that: she wrote the foreword, endorsing and promoting this remarkable book.

As Carol Rumens explains, about forty poets from many different countries around the world have donated poems to this anthology. The work of those poets came together through the internet. The book is on sale around the world through the online giant, Amazon. And all profits go to an international charity, The Book Bus. (http:// www.thebookbus.org/)

The anthology was the inspiration of Deborah Bennison, a British writer who set up an independent publishing firm a few years ago called Bennison Books. She has already published several writers, covering poetry, short stories, a novel and non-fiction. Her small company is itself a testament to our internet age. Bennison Books promotes its publications worldwide through all the now-customary ‘social media platforms’, including Facebook, Twitter, a Wordpress blog and an email newsletter. Her publishing venture is The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER - 2017

15 based on the new principle of print on demand. There are no print runs, no warehouses or shops holding stock, no remainders or unsold copies pulped. Having formatted her books through an Amazon subsidiary, she sells to the customer anywhere in the world through Amazon and the customer’s copy is printed to order and despatched within hours from the nearest regional centre. The process is efficient and it keeps costs down – although we have to regret that traditional bookshops lose out.

Deborah Bennison’s bright idea was to invite poets writing in English, anywhere, to submit poems for a new anthology. In essence, this would gather poetry through the internet, many of the poems having been published already online. Others would have been unpublished or published in books and journals.

And the response was thrilling. Contributions came in from a dozen or more countries: from Europe, the Americas, Africa, Asia and Australasia. Some were from writers whose first language was not English. The final volume contains the work of over forty writers and I think I’ve counted eight prize-winners among them including Carol Rumens.

You might be interested to learn that a few of the writers have have been published in The Wagon Magazine: Karin Anderson and Bart Wolffe for example, and also me.

Mentioning Bart Wolffe reminds me of the sad death of two of the contributors during the months of production. One was Bart himself, living in Britain, out of Africa. There are three very pleasing poems from Bart of which one, called Eclipse, begins: Soundless and without warning the sky Sucked in its breath. A shadowed hand Of the demon darkened the light, swollen As if announcing war over the nature of things.

It is natural to wonder whether the writer had intimations of his forthcoming death while composing those lines. We know that he was ill for some time.

The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER- 2017

16 The other sad death was of Cynthia Jobin, a New England writer who was largely unpublished but immensely popular and is now muchmissed online (here we see the internet again). Her poems in this anthology include The Sun Also Sets which contains these lines: I do not want to go, or let you go.

I want to dare this ending, call its bluff, delay our parting with a sudden overflow of words – too many and yet not enough – while you, my dearest one, would choose blunt disappearance, the mute way to stanch an agony – those deeper blues along the skyline fire – as if to say the sun rises, the sun also sets.

So let it set. Let us let it. Let’s.

What I love about this anthology is that it’s full of unpretentious, intelligent and moving poems. It should appeal to readers who like poetry from time to time but don’t buy a great deal – maybe it would make good presents, or be a good idea on someone’s wish list? It’s also bang-up-to-date with poetry from North America, the British Isles and many other countries so it gives a good sense of what mainstream poetry can do right now – and that is valuable for regular buyers of poetry.

As Carol Rumens explains in her foreword, readers will have the added satisfaction of knowing that their purchase is helping to hand on the pleasure and power of language. All profits go to The Book Bus, according to whom one in six adults around the world have come through childhood unable to read and write – due mainly to a lack of books and the opportunity to read. In Deborah Bennison’s words: “This amazing charity aims to improve child literacy rates in Africa, Asia and South America by providing children with books and the inspiration to read them.”

I have written this entire letter without giving you the name of the anthology, although you might have guessed from my title that it The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER - 2017

17 is Indra’s Net. That was the sugestion of Cynthia Jobin. Most readers of The Wagon will know that Indra is a Vedic god above whose mountain-palace hangs a marvellous net with jewels sparkling at every intersection, each reflecting the others.

Cynthia saw that Indra’s net could be a metaphor for universal inter-connectedness – she had in mind specifically the internet today and this anthology of poems from all over the world.

If you are interested, you can look up the anthology (and read the first few poems) at http://amzn.to/2tPnDzQ And Bennison Books can be found at http://bennisonbooks.co Cynthia Jobin was raised in the foothills of New Hampshire’s White Mountains, attended a variety of New England schools and colleges (Master’s in art education, PhD in metaphysics), teacher of various subjects: French, English, Calligraphy, Aesthetics, History, Research Methods.

Cynthia Jobin’s Works: The Elegant Useless Le Petit Hibou Au Coeur Class Poets of Emmanuel College Bart Wolffe, after a long career in media, television, radio, film and the stage, left Zimbabwe in 2003 to live in exile in the United Kingdom.

He was an essayist, poet, playwright, short story writer. Most of his plays had been published in ‘Africa Dream Theatre’, consisting of 13 plays, 10 of which are one-person plays while the other three are two-handers. Bart Wolffe was arguably the leading one-person show specialist

John Looker lives with his wife in Surrey, south-east England. His first collection of poetry, The Human Hive, was published in 2015 by Bennison Books (through Amazon) and was selected by the Poetry Library for the UK’s national collection. His poems have appeared in print and in online journals, on local radio and in ‘When Time and Space Conspire’, an anthology commemorating the 25th anniversary of the Austin International Poetry Festival. His blog, Poetry from John Looker, is at https://johnstevensjs.wordpress.com The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER- 2017

18 After reading the column by John Looker, I invited Deborah Bennison to share with the readers of The Wagon Magazine, her valuable thoughts and the experience of creating Bennison Books. Here it is.- - K.P

In Praise of Independent Publishing

by Deborah Bennison, founder of Bennison Books

Who are the arbiters of literary taste? Why are gifted writers rou-

tinely rejected by the established publishing houses? Just why is it so difficult to ‘get published’? These are questions that continue to puzzle and frustrate many people – writers and non-writers alike.

They are certainly questions that frustrate me and this frustration was instrumental in my decision to set up Bennison Books, an independent publishing house. My aim was to publish the work of writers that I admire and that I strongly believe deserve a much wider audience. But where was I to start?

Inspiration and encouragement came from an unexpected source. I happened to be reading Hermione Lee’s wonderful biography of Virginia Woolf and became fascinated by Lee’s account of how Virginia and her husband Leonard bought a printing press and set up their own independent publishing house, Hogarth Press. It is a wonderful story.

Lee explains how they first thought about buying a printing press (no powerful computer programs or ‘print on demand’ available at that time in the early twentieth century!) on 25 January 1915, The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER - 2017

19 Virginia’s thirty-third birthday. They eventually made an impulse purchase of a small handpress machine plus ‘teach yourself how to print’ booklet from a shop in London in 1917.

It is now almost impossible to imagine how intricately difficult and slow the work of typesetting and printing a book by hand would have been. Virginia had to learn the painstaking work of compositing, using individual pieces of type (letters and punctuation) to physically build up words and sentences until there were enough to print onto one page at a time (Leonard’s job). It was a huge undertaking, and as well as publishing Virginia’s work, Hogarth Press went on to produce many other publications including notable poetry, fiction, novels and memoirs (527 titles in 29 years). Perhaps ironically, given its independent beginnings in the Woolf ’s dining room, Hogarth Press is now one of many Penguin Random House imprints.

Inspired by this story, I realised that with the benefits of modern technology, plus social media as a marketing tool, I too could set up an independent press, and so Bennison Books was born. In the four years since, Bennison Books has published outstanding prose and poetry by English, Australian and American writers, as well as an international anthology of poetry (Indra’s Net),the profits from which are going to The Book Bus charity. Laid out, edited and designed to exacting standards, these books bear visual comparison with any produced by the mainstream publishers, and the quality of the writing is also second to none.

It is one hundred years since the Woolfs began their publishing venture, revelling in the excitement, autonomy and independence it gave them.And crucially, the establishment of Hogarth Press meant that Virginia no longer had to rely on her half-brother Gerald DuckThe Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER- 2017

20 worth to publish her work – a dependency she had long resented, saying that he “could not tell a book from a beehive”.

I would argue that independent publishing is equally if not more important today. Of course, both mainstream and independent publishers will always run the risk of publishing “beehives”, but the existence of independent publishers such as Bennison Books will continue to play a small but important part in helping to ensure that gifted authors who are – sometimes inexplicably – overlooked by the major publishing houses, can still leave a permanent legacy in the literary world. bennisonbooks.com

The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER - 2017

21

The Wanderer Andrew Fleck

The Great Wen

The one quotation about London that everybody knows is Samuel

Johnson’s opinion that ‘When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.’ Johnson liked to nettle his friend Boswell about his romantic view of his home in Scotland: Johnson much preferred the great company and liveliness of the capital. Many English poets liked to romanticize the English countryside too, but more preferred to spend their time in the capital. Marlowe’s A Passionate Shephard to his Love is probably the most well-known pastoral poem in the English language, but its writer spent most of his working life in London – whatever words Marlowe put in the mouth of his shepherd, he seemed to think he could ‘all his pleasures prove’ in tavern and play house more than by brook and field. The grand old poet of nature William Wordsworth wrote one of his most popular poems about the view from Westminster Bridge, exclaiming ‘Earth has not anything to show more fair’ than the sight of a sunrise over the vista of England’s capital.

London continues to inspire great loyalty and love to this day: The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER- 2017

22 recently the English journalist Brendan O’Neill wrote that he would rather be poor in London than rich in Hull. So it’s true –Johnson’s line reflects a certain truth about the English - or many of them - and their attitude to London.

But there is another quotation about London that deserves to be as well known, and speaks to another truth about the attitude of the English to their capital.

What is to be the fate of the great wen of all? The monster called, by the silly coxcombs of the press, ‘the metropolis of the empire’?

So asked the polemicist, pamphleteer and rural commentator, William Cobbett, about the capital of Britain, indeed of the British Empire, as he quite gladly turned his back on it and made one of his Rural Rides out to the provinces. London, he casually opines, is a giant monstrous pimple. It is difficult to classify Cobbett’s politics, not least in today’s terms, but perhaps ‘reactionary radical’ would be closest to the mark. He is an entertaining, acerbic writer full of surprising and original opinions on everything from the Reformation to the importation of swedes (the turnips, not the people) into England, and he is perhaps the first writer I can think of to have brought up what I think we can fairly describe as ‘the problem of London’– a problem we have talked about since and still talk about today. In short, London is too big, its growth is unchecked, and it drains life and energy from the other parts of the country– perhaps in Cobbett’s day, from other parts of the empire too.

Living in the same era as Cobbett, Horace and James Smith, two successful London brothers – one a stockbroker and the other a solicitor, both writers of light verse, would have had more reason than most to celebrate London’s greatness. And indeed they did just that. In their poem, The Spread of London 1813, they described the replacement of fields, trees and wildernesses with buildings: The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER - 2017

23 Saint George’s Fields are fields no more, The trowel supersedes the plough; Huge inundated swamps of yore Are changed to civic villas now.

What sane person, after all, would prefer inundated swamps to civic villas?

There is a small tinge of regret, perhaps – in the ‘violated sods’ they go on to mention, or the lost yew trees – but this gloomy, if romantic, scene had been replaced with ‘velvet lawns’ and ‘acacian shrubs’, markers of a nature tamed and beautified by the hand of man. And, yes, London is to this day, even while home to over seven million people, blessed with green spaces and spacious suburbs, not to mention a surprising plethora of wildlife.

The problem for some is not so much that London is too big in itself, but that in its ceaseless expansion it absorbs and changes the rest of the country. A poet of the later 19th century, Stephen Phillips, wrote in A Nightmare of London: I dreamed a dream, perhaps a prophecy!

That London over England spread herself; Swallowed the green field and the waving plain, Till all this island grew one hideous town.

Of course this didn’t happen – for one thing, the green belts have put a stop to its expansion, and if it ever does reach from sea to sea, the process will take centuries not mere decades. But Phillips’ poem describes a ‘prophecy’ and prophecies can be interpreted in more than one way. London may not have physically spread over the rest of England, but its culture and its habits of speech certainly have. One is no longer shocked, for example, to hear the school children of the far north of England pronounce their ths like fs, like the Cockneys of yesteryear, or that a man is now commuting every day from Yorkshire to the capital. But in a way, this is the speeding up of a process that has always happened in England – just about every The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER- 2017

24 big cultural and political development since the Norman Invasion, from the Reformation to the Great Vowel Shift (with the possible exception of the Industrial Revolution) has started in the capital and spread outwards. And, if it ever was, the sea and its ‘sanctity of foam’, as Phillips has it, is no barrier.

If the Smith brothers associated the growth of London with civilisation and prosperity, other native Londoners noticed the attendant growth of poverty and misery, best captured in William Blake’s celebrated London: I wander thro’ each charter’d street, Near where the charter’d Thames does flow, And mark in every face I meet, Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

By the 20th century, after Baudelaire had made great poetry of the sleazy demimonde of London’s sister city Paris, poets were finding great beauty even in these darker and poorer corners of the capital: think of early T.S. Eliot and his ‘faint smells of beer / From the sawdust-trampled street’. Louis Macneice, meanwhile wryly commented on the dreariness of the London celebrated by poets past: I jockeyed her fogs and quoted Johnson: To be tired of this is to tire of life.

I suspect that Macneice, unlike Johnson, thought being tired of life quiet forgivable– he often sounds a little tired himself. But there is truth in Johnson’s line, whichever way you spin it. Johnson meant that all of society and culture was to be found in the capital, and if you are tired of that, you are merely tired. My spin is this –that London is life as it is, rather than life as we wish it to be. Like many a provincial, I often wish England had the great regional capitals the likes of which Spain, Germany and, indeed, India enjoy. But we don’t. Instead we have this sprawling, messy, unplanned city, with much as much vulgarity as beauty (which fellow Wagon columnist John Looker details each month), and with a great deal of accidie and alienation alongside its great The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER - 2017

25 architecture and culture. Perhaps that was something that could have been changed in Cobbett’s day – but to try to roll back the capital now is to tilt at windmills.

Still, one can enjoy indulging one’s quixotic fantasies once in a while. One such fantasy – my favourite poem about London, I think – is provided by D.H. Lawrence. In keeping with his contempt for all things industrial and technological, as well as much of the history of civilization since at least the Romans (he preferred the Etruscans), Lawrence describes: London, with hair Like a forest darkness, like a marsh Of rushes, ere the Romans Broke in her lair.

Credits Most of the poems in this week’s article are in the public domain. I found them in John Bishop and Virginia Broadbent’s London Between the Lines, Simon Publications, London, 1973: Horace and James Smith’s The Spread of London 1813; LouisMacneice’s Goodbye to London, Stephen Philips’ A Nightmare of London, William Blake’s London and D.H. Lawrence’s Town in 1917.

The T.S. Eliot line is from Preludes, Collected Poems of T.S. Eliot 19091962, Faber and Faber 1963.

Andrew Fleck, who has been a secondary school teacher, proof reader and EFL teacher, among other things, writes on poetry and history at sweettenorbull.com.

Currently, he is working on a historical fiction set in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, a project that he hopes will come to fruition at some point in 2017. Originally from the north east of England, he currently lives in South Korea with his wife and two small children. www. sweettenorbull.com.

The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER- 2017

26

PROVERBS & PROVIDENCE

YONASON GOLDSON

It seemed like such a good idea at the time.

I took one look at the picture in the do-it-yourself book my wife brought home from the library and immediately fell in love.

Doesn’t every kid want a tree house? I certainly did. However, we had no suitable trees in our yard, so the idea was a non-starter.

But now it was different. With my own children just old enough to enjoy it, that big elm tree in the center of our yard seemed heaven-sent for such a purpose. The creative design cried out to be turned into reality, and I The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER - 2017

27 made up my mind on the spot. My wife didn’t even try to talk me out of it.

The illustration showed how the tree house would seemingly grow right out of the elm’s trunk, the base hovering six feet above the ground and the top about as far beneath the lowest branches.

Four sturdy beams would angle down from the corners of the floor, secured into notches cut out of the hoary bark and held in place by railroad spikes. Beams on the top would mirror those on the bottom, over which panels would form a sloping roof.

It looked simple enough. After all, my father was an amateur carpenter and a professional contractor. I had grown up with a garage full of hand tools and had used them to build soapbox racers, bicycle jumping ramps, and every kind of contrivance my youthful imagination could conjure up. With a clear set of instructions, a treehouse would be child’s play.

Well, it might have proven a jauntier undertaking if I hadn’t chosen midsummer to get started. The midwestern heat, humidity, and buzzing insect life made the outdoors unpleasant enough without the added exertion of sawing and hefting and hammering. And with my father’s workshop 2000 miles away, I had to improvise for want of the tools that would have made the job easier.

I did have the foresight to buy treated beams that would resist rotting and warping. But they also resisted the blade of my hand saw and the bite of my chisel as I labored to cut the pieces down to size and carve out interlocking notches to form the structure’s skeleton.

Even more challenging was the adventure of trying to saw a semicircular hole in each half of the floor, discovering to my dismay that a tree trunk does not define a perfect circle.

My friend Jerry volunteered to be my wingman. His expertise as an engineer for Boeing seemed like a valuable credential, but the application of aerodynamics to airborne construction turned out to be quite limited.

Nevertheless, we managed to get the skeleton up in an afternoon. From that point forward it became a one-man job, and Jerry gratefully returned to his airconditioned living room.

The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER- 2017

28 After cutting and re-cutting, I finally secured the floor panels, after which I finally hit my stride. The slatted walls went up easily, and building the ladder was actually fun. After all, when do you ever get to build a ladder?

A major whoops! awaited me the first time I climbed up onto the base: my neighbors. Their fence had not been designed for privacy from birds, squirrels, or little children whose father just gave them a squirrels-eye-view into their backyard windows.

I laid out the situation to my children, explained to them the concept of privacy, then modified the southern wall with a single sheet of plywood.

Crisis averted.

The roof never quite took shape. Measuring four triangular panels with perfectly rounded tops to match the arc of the tree proved more challenging than I had imagined. We tried a piece of fabric on one side, which worked reasonable well. But without enough material for the other three sides, that’s as far as we got. As it turned out, my kids didn’t care. They only played outside in good weather, and the canopy of leaves and branches over their heads was roof enough for them.

The children liked their tree house. Their friends may have liked it more than they did, spending afternoons high off the ground, almost touching the clouds. Only the children knew how their imaginations ran free with the big, wide world made bigger and wider from their castle in the sky.

Yes, they liked their tree house. But they didn’t love it.

It’s a strange kind of disappointment, and one of the many challenges of being a parent. You want your children to have everything you didn’t. Sometimes you’re able to give it to them. And when you do, you discover that it doesn’t mean as much to them as you believe it would have meant to you.

What if I had actually had a tree house of my own? Would I have spent hours every summer day aloft in the company of friends real and imagined? Or would the novelty have worn quickly off until it became just another familiar diversion that I took for granted?

The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER - 2017

29 And isn’t it much the same as we get older? We spend so much time missing the things we don’t have, even after a lifetime of experience teaches us that we rarely enjoy our dreams half as much as we enjoy dreaming them.

The children grew up and went off to make their own lives.

Perhaps one day my grandchildren would delight in the tree house.

That’s what I thought, or hoped.

The tree house showed remarkable resilience. A wicked storm uprooted a neighboring elm, which dealt a glancing blow as it crashed to the ground.

The structure remained intact, but not entirely undamaged.

The back panel was no match for even a brush with the falling giant.

The base and support posts stood firm, but the railings were slightly skewed and twisted, like wax figurines left out in the summer sun.

But then a more subtle enemy beset the tree house: the old elm itself.

The instructions had said that, over time, the bark of the tree would grow out and around the support posts, which it did. What the instructions did not say was that the tree would grow to fill in the gap around the center hole in the floor, which it also did.

And then it kept growing.

Ever so slightly, one millimeter at a time, the floor began to buckle. You could never see it happening, any more than you can see The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER- 2017

30 glaciers forming, sand dunes shifting, or the motion of the stars. It took years, but inexorably the floorboards separated and warped and the frame convulsed as if made of putty.

Every so often, we found a slat or rail laying lifeless on the grass. We removed the ladder, since the tree house was no longer safe. Children visiting with their parents looked wistfully upward.

Eventually, the tree house was reduced to a mess of timber splayed at all angles and in all directions. My wife demanded repeatedly that I take it down, and I answered repeatedly that there was no reason, since the tree itself would take care of the job in good time.

In truth, I didn’t want to let it go.

But when it’s time, it’s time, and it’s a man’s job to shoot his own dog and put down his own horse. So I went out last month with my chainsaw and started the beginning of the end.

The divestiture went much faster than I would have had imagined. It takes so much more effort to build than to destroy. In scarcely half an hour, there was nothing left.

Well, not quite nothing. The four support beams were fixed into the bark. I could cut them back, but there was no way to get them out completely. A section of the floor board was embedded in the trunk as well. It looked as if the tree had taken a bite out of the tree house and, like a stubborn terrier, wouldn’t let it go.

Or perhaps the tree house wouldn’t let go of the tree. If you The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER - 2017

31 used your imagination, it looked almost like the tree was smiling.

And within that Mona Lisa smile resides a gentle reminder.

For nearly two decades the tree house ruled the tree. But time and slow, steady pressure gradually displaced beams and nails. Like a river coursing through the canyon and the waves lapping upon the sand, the relentless beat of time and nature inevitably relegated the work of my hands to memory.

As the Talmud says: Nothing can stand before a person’s will.

We can’t stop the steady advance of time. But we can turn it to our own advantage with the proper measure of determination and perseverance.

And so, with the wisdom of hindsight, I have to say that building the tree house was a good idea after all.

Rabbi Yonason Goldson, keynote speaker with 3,000 years’ experience, lives with his wife in St. Louis, Missouri.

He is a former hitchhiker, circumnavigator, newspaper columnist, and high school teacher.

His latest book, ‘Proverbial Beauty: Secrets for Success and Happiness from the Wisdom of the Ages’, is available on Amazon. Visit him at yonasongoldson.com The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER- 2017

32

POETRY

Md Mehedi Hasan

The Thief: Acrostic “Father’s away! My father’s away!”

Right at the beginning, the diary does say.

“Odd! In my third year, I grew old.

Mother tried but the manly little hands were cold.”

Thief! Thief! He took all the charms away.

Hell! Neither could I love nor write: Enough to be jealous, so do I criticize.

“Lone, the lonely soul loves Augusta Over my sister’s beauty a mother does stay The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER - 2017

33 Vision of the goddess is all over my diary; thoughEpicure they say: Of my pain nothing do they know; Fence can border no true love.”

Granny murmured: “Everybody knew him.

Once there was Krishna Restless lover, sweet devil was he God even if warned, I would love my Govinda.* Europe knew yet women were mad to commit the sin.”

Granny says whatever she wants: “One walks in beauty; Reason is the bard flirts.”

Diary howls, granny’s experience falls On my word: womaniser.

No? Or may my sight be miser.

Lord’s life- wine and women are all Opium alike in him finding joy, I call.

Rode to Greece for glory and fame: Do a poet and I be the same?

“Born Childe Harold so was I. Yearned to see my daughter’s feet Rumours! Rumours! With rumours my days fly O Christ! Not a cursed one did I meet.

Naming a hero- Juan, here, I say bye-bye!” * Govinda: also a name of Krishna The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER- 2017

34

Journey It’s too early, still dark.

An unrested traveller, can’t sing though a lark I’m; with hunger and sleepiness travelling.

Can you hear the mosque’s calling?

Red, the next village’s also burning; Smell of burnt flesh wished a morning.

My horse criedI couldn’t but saw a bride: The cold morning’s breeze’s flying her black hair Even God couldn’t touch the red sari, I bet dear.

Groom? I looked with love and pride.

“Are you…” couldn’t say, only cried.

The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER - 2017

35

Rape and Call Me- Whore Rain’s the forecast I repeat- rain’s the forecast Stay inside, Stay dry.

If you get wet, rain isn’t responsible nor are we.

But your dress is, you are.

I repeat- rain’s the forecast.

Rain washes manhood away; With an eve’s reddish sky, cries May: “She’s a child, sons!

Go one by one!”

Last night a girl came to me Wearing green and with a bleeding heart, saying: “Rape and call me- whore!

Wasn’t 1971 better?”

I didn’t care, asked her name With a greedy sigh; “Bangladesh”, shouted she.

I don’t care, do I?

The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER- 2017

36

Song of a Winter’s Tree Winter haunts me All my leaves dropped down.

Alone, ugly, unloved I standBegging: love me, love me, love me.

Don’t water me, it’s cold.

Angrily one word she said, “Sold.”

Knowing the taste of setting free, Standing I’m- a winter’s tree.

A little girl’s playing beneath my shadow; Heard: her mother’s a widow.

Last night the widow danced with an unknown heSinging: love me, love me, love me.

The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER - 2017

37

They Call Me Tiger Widow When I was twelve I saw a colorful day A girl became woman.

Love, I didn’t understand But in Falgun1, while leaving for the forest He looked into my eyes Freezing in shame, I remembered Bonobibi2, and said: Let the look live, take my life instead!

I didn’t dress my hair, wash clothes Nor did I quarrel Yet Falgun went away with Aleya’s3 father O, the season of honey!

“Ousted! My son died for you!”

Mother- in- law cursed more than she cried.

My Aleya, a fine woman of eleven I set her marriage to a blind but well- off man Blind husband is better than hunger, no?

My Bishorgo4 became a man Of twelve and earns Dream doesn’t survive in saline water I married him off as they offered a boat.

My son, my Tommy, God sent the precious!

No regret but hunger in those manly eyes.

Red! Red, red water, I saw- my son bleed!

The killer Kholpetua5 killed!

The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER- 2017

38 And I know what the reason is: The witch and her boat it is!

The witch and her boat it is!

I, a woman, never went to the holy land Sundarbans6 I ask Bonobibi no more to fightSome things just look good in black and white.

1.Falgun:

Falgun is the eleventh month in the Bengali calendar and

Nepali calendar.

2.Bonobibi:

Bonobibi is a guardian spirit of the forests venerated by

both theHindu and the Muslim residents of the Sundarbans

(spread across West Bengal state in eastern India and Bangladesh)

3.Aleya is a Bengali female name.

4.Bishorgo is a Bengali male name.

5.Kholpetua: The Kholpetua River is located in southwestern Bangladesh.

Md Mehedi Hasan is a student of English Discipline, Khulna University, Khulna 9208, Bangladesh. His poems have been published in The Daily Star, The Daily Observer, and The Independent and also in various literary magazines.

The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER - 2017

39

POETRY

Wafula Yenjela

VANISHING ROOTS The cow I used to milk Is no longer mine She kicks whenever she sees me The cow I used to milk Charges in hostility whenever I look at her udder The cow I used to milk Will never listen to my whistles again The cow I used to herd is called Njeye Njeye gives her milk to strangers‌ I brought her grass from the mountains Because grass at the foot of Mt. Elgon is tender I brought her salt from the flamingo-patronized Lake Bogoria The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER- 2017

40 And water from the spring in the sweet valley overlooking the Nile Where I used to herd her in the evenings As we trekked from the Congo But the cow I used to milk scowled morosely She mowed with rejection Friend, it’s the cow I used to milk that makes me weep Because now I know it’s hard to live without milk Now I know that mowing is music I weep Because her udder is now beyond me How I long to herd her in the sweet valley at sundown How I long to embrace her in our annual festivals Of communing with my ancestors, pouring libation The herd of the Bamasaba is stolen, forever, The herd of the Bamasaba is vanished And here I lie down among my ancestors Wrapped in strange veils instead of the rich cow-hide

A Dirge for Sandaal We toiled together In the rains and in the sun We laughed together In mockery and in merry We sailed together In stormy seas and in still waters We chanted in unison In despair and in happiness We swallowed them all The silent curses and the shallow envy We drank from the same cup Of betrayal and of redemption Even in wilderness we wandered The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER - 2017

41 And discovered our vanity Through thick darkness we raced And crushed forbidden gourds In dangerous rivers we waded But survived an ambush by crocodiles For we were a portion In sorrow and in bliss Then came the executioner’s bullet And infallible revelations that you were A disgrace to humanity, A menace to society, A traitor to your country, A terrorist.

You? Sandaal, you whom I knew?

Now you go alone, on a lonely journey You who never told me of divine rewards For aggression against infidels You who never treated me, a kaffir, disdainfully Have dived into the gaping jaws That have always opened for others And abandoned me in a nation seething with vengeance

Thin Tears Call me softly, and let your voice caress my ailing heart Touch me tenderly And let your hand sing melodically in my hen-pecked heart Embrace me silently And let your breast sweep across my sad soul Kiss me calmly And let these forgiving lips nurse me with the sweetness of your life Take me home The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER- 2017

42 And let me live for you For you have stolen my faithful God Don’t go, my love, don’t go For in the fathomless chambers of my heart Is where I have hidden you.

Return with the dew Return with the mist Return to me with a waking dream.

My plea is too late?

Cursed is my late tongue A tongue slackened by love unquenchable That untamable love that soars over fortresses A tornado is sweeping Deep across the jungles of my heart She has gone away forever Forsaking this sighing body But my casualty soul shall forever write her nurturant name On every gemstone in the universe With these thin tears that shall never wither.

Wafula Yenjela is a postdoc fellow at the Department of English Studies, Stellenbosch University, South Africa.

The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER - 2017

43

POETRY

Kristyl Gravina

As She walks by The elegant heel of a stiletto she walks by…

Her auburn wind-blown hair softly wrapped her oval face never glancing sideways she walks by…

As the tables littering the little café fill up where I sit, sipping my scalding coffee waiting impatiently in front of an open newspaper to hear the bells chime at eight The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER- 2017

44 the sound of clicking heels she walks by …

Never looking my way yet every day, same time and place I wait Just to watch silently as she walks by

Time Ticks by Never looked back Didn’t really think about life until I realised the ticking clock bundle of past memories not history will die with me random thoughts and little secrets pleasures, fears moments of passion, feelings Fading away …

Forgotten

The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER - 2017

45

Self Preserving At times I am like water crystal clear and pure giving life to everyone easing pain And yet I am warm too Like the sun you bask in shining brightly, radiant As I scorch, burn your skin I am like a flame burning red hot and passionate banishing cold comforting yet, you are my moth And I burn you too Because I dread loving you

Kristyl Gravina is from the island of Malta. Her work has appeared in several print publications including Haiku Journal, Third Wednesday, Ink Drift, The Literary Hatchet as well as forthcoming issues of Glass: Facets of poetry and Night to Dawn among several others.

The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER- 2017

46

FICTION

John Allison

The first couple of dogs Izzy encountered just minutes into his hike

were leashed and well mannered, their owners responding positively to Izzy’s “Hey, thank you folks for using a leash.” Izzy began the steep upward trek that appeared not too far from the entrance. Brimming with sanguinity, he headed for the crest.

Then, heading directly toward him at breakneck speed was a dog weighing at least eighty pounds covered with a coat of thick, short hair having the muddled appearance of scrambled eggs with brown gravy stirred in haphazardly, ears flapping like flags in a stiff breeze, a wide grin revealing the rapture of newly found freedom.

There could be no doubt of the animal’s eligibility for Trump’s just-announced ‘Happiest Dog in the Whole USA’ pageant. It wore a harness to which were attached what might have been a lesser version of the saddlebags on a movie cowboy’s trusty horse had they not been red and purple.

The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER - 2017

47 The trail was much too narrow for comfort at this point, and Izzy froze for an instant before stepping quickly to the side and falling to his knees to regain his teetering balance. His front to the trail and his back to the nearly sheer drop-off, he closed his eyes. When the animal had flown by and Izzy found himself still on the trail and alive, he exhaled. A thirtyish woman came along several seconds after the dog, a leash uselessly looped under her belt and paying Izzy no heed until he lashed out, “There’s a goddamned leash law, and big signs all around. You think you’re special? The law doesn’t apply to you? Goddammit!” The woman turned her head toward Izzy as she passed, presenting him with a patronizing smile clearly bespeaking the view that Izzy was a quaint, doddering old man requiring patience and pity. Izzy fumed.

Frannie called his twitchy-lipped protestations “grumbling, mumbling, and rumbling.” She should know. For some reason she seemed to like him anyway, at least part of the time. Most of the time? Even part of the time made him feel good.

A few feet beyond the top of this first steep climb, his spirits already revived by the beauty of the place and the magnificent weather, Izzy came to a fifty-foot-long plateau. On the left side of the trail, next to the woods and away from the steep slope on his right, Izzy spied an 18-by-24-in. white poster that, because of its nearly pristine condition, apparently had been stapled only recently onto the sharp-edged, gravely bark of a hackberry tree. At the top of the light-weight cardboard rectangle someone, presumably the owner of the thing portrayed below, had stenciled in large black letters: “LOST DOG.” Below was an exploded 8-by-10 color photo of a scarred, bumpy, brown-and-white head that Izzy estimated to be the size of a thirty-five-pound watermelon with flaccid ears, protruding eyes, and a red tongue like a Wall Street power tie hanging from a cavern protected by inch-long teeth that could only have been sharpened by serious work on the petrified bones of a woolly mammoth. Beneath the cavern were strands of viscous drool, and folds of skin resembling living-room drapes hung from the jaws and neck.

Dog, my ass, Izzy mumbled. I’d know that thing anywhere. It’s The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER- 2017

48 Grendel, for god’s sake, or Grendel’s huge-assed mother. Of course, he wouldn’t have said this aloud to anyone unless he knew that they too had recently tried for the eighth time to make it all the way through Beowulf just so they could say they had done it. Below the picture he saw, in slightly smaller letters: “ANSWERS TO ARTHUR. JUST A PUPPY. IF SEEN, PLEASE CALL TOM at . . . .,” followed by still more subordinate printing: “Note—photo taken before recent raccoon encounter.”

“Puppy my ass,” Izzy again mumbled, imagining that the caption should continue with “180 POUNDS MINIMUM. A REAL SWEETHEART BUT ALWAYS HUNGRY, SO IF YOU FIND HIM KEEP HIM AWAY FROM MEAL-SIZED CHILDREN UNDER THE AGE OF TWELVE AND ANIMALS SMALLER THAN A YEAR-OLD STEER.” Pondering what the raccoon might have done to what already appeared to be a serious genetic mistake, Izzy continued to grouse, “god, he’s an ugly bastard,” and turned from the sign as he resumed his journey. The hour was just past 9:30 a.m., and Izzy began seeing more people on the trail, most of them appearing to be serious hikers with proper gear. No sandals this morning, which when he occasionally saw someone wearing them on a trail he wondered whether there was a contest to determine who could contribute the most to Ivy League college funds for children of orthopedic surgeons. He was pleased to see so many folks out there, for it meant not only a healthier population that was good for his health insurance premiums, but also that fewer citizens would be sitting in church pews, the latter being to Izzy’s mind an especially worthwhile social benefit. **** Not long before on this sunny Sunday morning between semesters, Izzy had stopped his twenty-one-year-old bluish green Volvo on the side of the street next to Walker Hill Park, removed his walking shoes and fit his calloused, bunion-plagued feet into the once-expensive, now humbly tattered hiking boots whose soles were just beginning to seek freedom from the leather uppers. Sitting on the edge of the right-side rear seat of Algae with her door open wide and his legs The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER - 2017

49 extended to the curb, he had been careful to double-tie the laces. He took out his phone and switched on the software that mapped and measured the ground he traversed, and that estimated the calories he burned. He also turned on the wrist receiver that converted analog signals from the heart rate monitor around his chest to a digital readout on the watch-like display. It did not matter that he had measured the distance (10.2 miles round trip unless he took a wrong turn as he sometimes did), calories (usually 742-752, if he didn’t get lost, of course), time (five hours ten minutes, give or take a little, subject to the aforementioned caveat), and heart rate (130-148 while going steeply uphill) countless times before on this trail. He needed to do it again. He might do a minute or two better this time.

Then he forced ear buds into his ears just outside the hearing aids, the buds connected to the MP3 player in his phone, and switched on the book he had been listening to about how inorganic molecules had transformed into organic ones that formed the basis for life once the planet had cooled sufficiently. After locking all doors of his beloved car, the name of which had won out in a close contest with Phytoplankton shortly after he bought it, Izzy prepared himself to be immersed in nature and science for the next few hours, with the pleasing knowledge that the other hikers who frequented this park and its trails were generally more considerate than those at the Greenbelt and a few other places he sometimes visited.

Izzy used several different trails within and just outside the metro area of the city that was split by a north-south interstate highway, flat, uninspiring farmland to the east of the divide and lovely limestone hills covered by Ashe junipers (“cedars� to the locals), several varieties of oak, and a pleasing variety of other trees to the west. The hills were a consolation prize for him, since he would rather have lived in the mountains. But the hiking here was good, and it satisfied him between those occasions when he could travel to mountain ranges around the country and, every once in a while, overseas. Frannie had talked about moving after retirement, and Izzy knew he would probably join her, not only to be near the mountains but also to be far away from this deep red state where it was perfectly okay to wear a The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER- 2017

50 large pistol in a holster like Wyatt Friggin’ Earp but illegal to own a dildo. Then there was the additional fact, he knew, that he could no longer imagine life without her.

On several mornings the previous week, Izzy had begun his hike near one of seven entrances to the Cedar Creek Greenbelt, that entrance being not more than five miles from home near the point where the creek emptied into El Peligroso River, a waterway nearly one thousand miles long, the name of which most people shortened to The Peligro. The hiking was good there and one could get an efficient workout during the workweek because not far from the beginning of the trail a rocky path began a rapid descent that covered two-thirds of a mile, and he had found that traveling down and back up four or five times was a fine thing to do. That part of the Greenbelt would have been ideal were it not for the astonishing amount of dog shit frequently deposited and left here and there along the sides of the trail and sometimes squarely in the middle of it. And for the many dogs brought there and allowed to roam at will by thoughtless scofflaws.

On this morning, Izzyhad stayed away from the Greenbelt and its annoyances, instead having driven eighteen miles to Walker Hill Park just beyond the northwestern edge of the city. Near the end of his trip, he had turned off a divided highway and driven through a neighborhood of homes that he could not possibly have afforded, but that he wouldn’t have bought had he been able because he thought it was silly to spend a fortune on a place to eat, sleep, and work. He needed walls and a roof that didn’t leak too badly, and that was about it. The home he had shared for several years with Frannie, one she had solely owned since her husband had fallen prey to a horrific tumor almost twenty years before, and ten years before Izzy had met her, was modest but comfortable, and he was grateful that she felt as he did about the matter.

After a couple of long streets and several shorter ones, he had come to the large, lovely park befitting the clientele it drew from the multimillion dollar homes surrounding it. The city maintained the park and the trails within it, which meant that area residents couldn’t The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER - 2017

51 keep out people like him who lived outside their rarified environs.

He didn’t know whether those who lived here would want exclusivity, although on other occasions he had noticed a couple of disdainful looks as he walked from Algae to the trailhead. He didn’t know the cause of those possibly imagined visual scans, but the issue, if there was one, had been mooted by city control before it could arise.

Izzy Stratham was a small man. Not a homunculus, just small.

His body was fit, and he was strong for one of his size and age, a state brought about by decades of challenging himself physically, for the past several years on difficult hiking trails. Iz—a diminutive often used by those close to him, most loudly when he frustrated them— thrived on difficulty. He enjoyed overcoming it, and also possessed a knack for creating it, mainly for himself but occasionally for others as well.

Years earlier, before a thigh tendon had expressed its outrage at prolonged overuse, Izzy had been a runner. After the leg healed, he switched to hiking after noticing too many of his running acquaintances getting new knees, and hiking too had become an obsession.

Izzy had been on the faculty of a large research university for a long while and had typically approached his work in much the same frenetic way. Izzy worked hard at teaching because he cared about his students, but knew he was not a natural and with some frequency wished that he didn’t have to do it.

He loved doing research and would have enjoyed it regardless of the field, but if he was being totally honest he would admit that his favorite part of the job was the ability to do most of his work outside the classroom or lab when and where he pleased, which allowed time during the day to hike followed by working late many evenings after he and Frannie had dinner and listened to music, watched a movie, played cards, or fooled around. There had been a time when he worked seven days a week, but that habit had contributed to the loss of one good woman, and he was determined to not misplace another. He knew there had been more to it, from both directions, but his work hours had been an undeniable factor in the years-ago split with his first and only wife.

The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER- 2017

52 He had met Frannie through an online dating service after months of dates with women who ranged from interesting, attractive, and nice but clearly not interested in Izzy, to those who were attractive gold diggers and seemed to want only an expensive dinner with vintage wine on a first date, to those who had flagrantly misrepresented themselves on the web site and were now at least fifteen years older and thirty pounds heavier than their photos, to . . . well, to Frannie. After emailing for over a week and first meeting in a coffee shop, they went to a movie and held hands. Both of them liked holding hands. Izzy loved any kind of touch from a woman. They ended that date with a hug, which Frannie also seemed to like, and Izzy was smitten. He suspected that he was likely to fall for any intelligent, progressive woman who was physically fit if she showed any real interest in him, but he tried not to think about that, and naturally had never said it.

Later, during a conversation with Frannie about something he could not now remember, he pointed out to her that she had been the one to contact him first through the hookup site. Making sure he knew that he was no singularity, she told him that she had contacted quite a few men who appeared to have some brains and could at least support themselves, and he just happened to be the one who responded most quickly and pursued her. He was deflated, but soon got over it and, in any event, he was used to that feeling in his dealings with women. And, regardless, he had to admit that he was just nuts about Frannie. Besides, she performed the great service of making sure that he was never unaware of his shortcomings.Frannie was also his hiking buddy when possible, but her hours working as a medical software developer and coder were not as flexible as his, and during the workweek he usually hiked alone.

One of the things Izzy did like about this part of the world was that winters were mild and short. It could occasionally get cold, but usually no more than a few degrees below freezing for just a few days after a cold front had moved through. This was not one of those times, the temperature recently ranging from the mid-fifties to the low seventies. Izzy normally would be at home reading the New York The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER - 2017

53 Times with Frannie and hiking later in the day, but she was visiting Alicein San Francisco where the young woman had moved with her boyfriend after graduating from college with a degree in computer science. Alice was a lovely little nerd with a huge creative streak that served her well in designing gaming software, and he cared for her as though she were his own. He had rejoiced in becoming a surrogate father to Alice just before she became a teenager, their bond built partly on the deep curiosity about the world that they shared. When she began learning to write code not long after he arrived on the scene, she taught him as she learned, but by the time she was sixteen, he could no longer keep up with her. So, they reversed roles and Alice became a pretty darned good amateur biochemist, he a decent amateur programmer in a couple of computer languages, and they both had a monumentally good time poking fun at each other as they went along. **** He loved Walker Hill Park, which was home to Palomino Creek Nature Trail, undoubtedly the most difficult group of paths in the three-hundred square mile metro area, having many precipitous rocky climbs and descents along ravines and back-and-forth over a creek that ranged from practically dry to treacherously full and fast, depending on the season and the recent whims of the sometimes violent storms that could be generated by moisture and heat. The occasional level spots for catching one’s breath made it doable for someone his age with a lower back crapped out by the collapse of several intervertebral discs and the balance-impairing scoliosis that resulted. In Izzy’s case, these sections did double duty as spots for urgently stepping off into the woods to deal with the consequences of blood pressure medication that cast his bladder in the role of a nuclear power plant nearing meltdown.

Izzy’s mind often wandered while hiking, hop-scotching from one topic to another, sometimes generating his most creative ideas for writing and teaching, and sometimes going nowhere at all. Several times during a hike he would switch off the audio book so as to not lose his place and let the current train of thought wear itself out. SomeThe Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER- 2017

54 times he even jotted notes in his phone’s email app and sent them to himself. Whenever he paused for any reason, he made a mental note of when the interruption began and ended, deducting this period from his total hiking time so it wouldn’t count against him.

Izzy said “Good morning, great day, isn’t it,” smiling as a medium - sized black-and-gray-mottled mutt approached, linked to the hand of a lovely young golden-haired woman whose outdoorsy-looking male companion of ambiguous age tagged along closely behind. “Hi,” the young couple replied in unison.

“May I ask what sort of dog that is?” It made Izzy feel better to be friendly, and sometimes he also learned interesting things by striking up conversations with strangers. In doing this, however, he tried to visually ascertain before speaking whether they might be enlightened progressives or primitives who subscribed to several gun magazines and strove to shutter Planned Parenthood facilities.

Most people out on the trails responded warmly to Izzy’s expressions of sociability, and he had convinced himself that anyone who was silent or surly in return had a belly ache.

“A rescue dog. Don’t know what he is. A mutt. But we love him,” the pretty young woman said.

“You’re good people for taking him in. Have a great hike,” Izzy said, walking past them.

On the still-level ground no more than ten feet beyond the nice young couple, he saw it. “Goddammit!” There was a fresh pile of brown nastiness that had been deposited at the edge of the trail on his left. It would have put off steam had the weather been colder.

That cutie, the blonde? The rescue pooch? He was flummoxed for a moment before anger began to rise. “Goddammit! Son-of-a-bitch!” roared Izzy, intentionally loud enough so that the couple might hear, but they showed no sign of noticing as they happily went on their way. Izzy fled fromthe palpable stench as he and the trail began to climb steeply once more on steps formed by a combination of rocks and creosote-treated timbers that had been impaled to the earth by short sections of the steel rebar builders use to reinforce concrete foundations.

The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER - 2017

55 Two of Izzy’s greatest sources of angst in life were grading essay exams and encountering the results of canine owners’ negligence or recalcitrance. Evaluating students’ written work had proved to be traumatic several times each semester for many years, occasionally having even led him to drink excessively late at night after he had graded for many hours and Frannie had gone to bed. The latter was more complicated. He was not afraid of dogs, and although he couldn’t be called a dog lover, he got along with most of them reasonably well.

His real problem was not with dogs but with their owners. Loose dogs on the hiking trails he loved so much sometimes crossed or stood directly in his path, and had actually tripped him up a handful of times. Only one had actually attacked Izzy, a long-haired, venomous thing that leaped many times its eight-inch height to slash at his arm with knives, Izzy reacting by whacking the vicious little beast across its back with a hiking pole as he chased after it with murder in his heart, the young female owner instantly snatching it up and running for the top of the trail as Izzy flew along behind them. Then Izzy had stopped and paused, and he was sorry. And he saw that his arm was unmarked.

Izzy was uncertain about where to place unclaimed dog shit in his typology of woes. It could be a third major classification of angst-catalyzing agent, or it could be a subcategory beneath unrestrained dogs, but Izzy wasn’t sure whether free dogs with owners presumably nearby were more or less likely than unfree dogs to do their business in undesirable places. Moreover, he did not know whether there was a positive correlation between dog owners’ tendencies to let their dogs loose in public places and their propensity to not pick up their animals’ vile leavings. These were empirical questions, but Izzy could not for the life of him figure out how to construct a controlled experiment.

Frannie surmised that he had an “emotional issue” resulting from his having been mauled at age eight by Duke, his dad’s black German Shephard on the small farm where he grew up, but Izzy denied any such possibility. He had wondered, though, whether his dad had been more sorry that his son had been attacked or that Duke had to The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER- 2017

56 be given away to a rancher who never had kids around.

The next hiker was a lone, greying middle-aged man with a paunch that didn’t seem to slow him any as he scurried down the steep path to Izzy’s left, both he and the man acknowledging one another with nods. Not far behind him traipsed a boy and girl of nineteen or twenty giggling at who knows what, perhaps a teacher they and their friends had agreed should have retired ages ago. Such thoughts creeped into Izzy’s head after having read the previous semester’s written comments on the university’s required course-instructor evaluation. “Not very engaging most days. Prof getting to the end of his career and should stop teaching soon,” read one. “Fuck you,” Izzy muttered to himself. “Professor Stratham can be interesting, but he rambles. On and on. God, will he ever stop?” said another. “Ignorant little twit,” Izzy retorted audibly. “Old guy knows a hell of a lot, but he takes this stuff way too seriously. Most classes need jazzing up,” vomited another.

Izzy thought, “Do the little bastards think they’re talking to someone else? I’m the only one who reads these comments. They’re talking to me, for god’s sake. Do they know that? Do they care? Just after the word cretins came to Izzy, a different thought smothered it. No, they’re just young, and maybe I’m not all that good.

At the top of this climb, Izzy observed with caution the ravine to his right that extended downward at an angle of about sixty degrees to a point he could not see because of trees and thick under growth among the countless stones littering the landscape. Then he again began thinking about Frannie, and how lucky he had been to meet her. She was a smart, strong, independent woman who told her close friends that, with hiking, Izzy had managed to positively channel the, uh, that, well, that disorder of his that had once driven him to try picking up every single grass bur from the ground of a wild half-acre plot of land between the fence by the road and the regularly mowed front yard of the home they shared. Only the grass bur plants—Cenchrus spinifex, a few assorted weeds, and the indestructible Johnson grass grew there.

Those grass burs were not wimps, Izzy thought as he recalled the itchy, burning pinholes in his fingertips after the things had The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER - 2017

57 dug into his flesh when he seized them, the sweat burning his eyes, the near crippling ache in his back after bending over for hours in the desperate afternoon sun to pull the heinous plants out by their roots and seize each stray sticker on the ground and deposit it in a trash bag. When he had looked up and scanned the hard, dry, weedy ground around him, he viewed a landscape of demon sticker weed in all directions that only an artist infinitely crazier than Van Gogh could tolerate painting.

He remembered his socks full of the little weapons that inflicted even greater injury as he removed and burned them in an old barrel.They couldn’t go into a simple trash container;the goddamned things had to be burned as he watched with glee. After all, he had figured, each one was a seed, or, actually, a pod containing up to three seeds, so eventually he would surely purge the area of this plague. It stood to reason. Three years of this did not put a dent in the Cenchrus spinifex population. “For a damned smart guy, you can be dumb as hell sometimes, Iz,” Frannie had once announced. His mind then wandered back to a summer afternoon before Frannie’s daughter began her senior year in high school. She had been in the parlor, looking out a large window at the front of the house.

“What are you laughing about, girl? Girly girl. What’ve you been doing today?

“You’re giggling. Alice? Alice.”

That look. “Are you laughing at me?

“Don’t you have something to do besides just sitting there by the front window?

“What is it?” Izzy tried to see through the teenage eyes. A tough thing to do.

“Do I look funny? I’m drenched. It’s hot out there. How long have you been up? What did you do last night? Where’s your mom?

“Damn, Alice. Sorry for the language. Yeah, I’m dirty. What about my hands? Yeah, they’re bleeding. But only a little. I can’t pick up those things with gloves on.

“Are you laughing at me, little girl? I love you, you know.”

“Remind me when your birthday is. Seventeen, right? Wow.” The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER- 2017

58 “Well, I’m glad I’ve given you some entertainment. A good laugh is a fine thing. Get out of here and be productive. Your mom must need some help with something. She’s always busy.”

“Ok, you’re stifling another giggle. Just let it out. I can take it.

You think I should stop doing that? Those things, the grass burs, proliferate, you know? Shouldn’t I pull them up? And pick them up?”

After that, Izzy tried some therapy. It helped. Izzy gave up on trying to rid the land of Cenchrus spinifex and began mowing the area with the deck of his lawn tractor set way down low before the plants went to seed. He forgot about sticker plants. There had been other manifestations of the condition that had so often left him frustrated and exhausted, but these too seemed to be behind him.

Emerging from this latest reverie, Izzy said to himself, damn, I’m glad to have that monkey off my back. He stopped to fast-reverse his audio book after realizing he hadn’t been paying attention to it for several minutes, estimated and made a mental note of how long he had stopped hiking, and then continued on. But before building up to his normal speed, he used the tip of his left hiking pole to scrape from the trail two oak branches that, though small, fit the eight-inchminimum length requirement he had semiconsciously established as a criterion for removal from all trails.

Again practicing his use of positive reinforcement to accomplish behavioral change, Izzy said, “Hey, guys, thanks for using the leash,” as he smiled broadly at two men in their thirties, both with a military bearing, who moved to their right allowing him to pass on their left as they managed the steep descent. Their German Shepard, also behaving as though it belonged with a battle-ready battalion, politely moved over with them and stood calmly as Izzy clomped by. Averting his eyes from the breed, Izzy’s spirits nonetheless lifted.

Later, at a point where the trail flattened and widened considerably along adistance of about twenty-five feet, he caught sight of a black Lab accompanied by a skinny, pale, twentyish blonde guy with a very pretty not-so-skinny black woman who appeared somewhat older than her companion. Several black dog poop bags tucked under her belt, the woman held the black dog on a slackened leash, the The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER - 2017

59 couple apparently taking a breather on a large rock, the Lab lying on the ground beside them. Izzy passed by them on his way to the next upward section and then did a double take and looked back.

Overhalf of the docile animal’s right hind leg was missing, and a prosthetic limb was held firmly in place by a metal band extending to just beneath the dog’s rump. “How about that . . . what a guy,” Izzy called out. “Good for him. And good for you. I’ll bet you’re proud of that guy. He’s a real trooper.” The woman returned Izzy’s grin as she rose and led her companions on their way toward Izzy’s rear.

Not far before the end of this, his favorite trail in the park, where it reached what Izzy had carefully calculated to be its highest point, laya long, steep downward portion. At the bottom he would turn and reverse course. This part was relatively narrow but still wide enough for one person traveling in each direction. Feeling as though he was just warming up after the nearly five miles he had come, Izzy did not look with foreboding on the return trip that would begin with his almost immediately climbing back up this stretch. Triggered by the recollection of what he’d seen on another trail a few days earlier - a man sporting a tam-o’-shanter and garish gold plaid Bermuda shorts, his pallid plaster-like jowls remarkably similar to those of the English bulldog accompanying him—Izzy’sbrain lapsed deeply into thoughts of dogs and their owners. Did they really tend to resemble one another?

He had heard this more than once, and there sometimes seemed to be an element of truth in it. If so, was it the image of a dog on its owner’s retina over time that changed the human’s face, or was it the result of the owner’s having unconsciously picked a dog resembling the picker? The chicken or the egg, he wondered before the scientific Izzy wrestled the temporarily primitive Izzy to the ground. Izzy felt the need to scratch himself all over.

Just then, one eye caught the faintest glimpse of brown flashing by a few feet into the woods to his left. As he jerked his head toward the movement, Izzy’s right foot lost the support beneath it. The hiking pole that had been in his right hand skittered off the side of the trail and down the sharp declivity, Izzyand his other pole following immediately thereafter. There were trees and rocks of many sizes along the The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER- 2017

60 steep slope, but at this spot they were not dense enough to completely stop his rapid migration toward the bottom of the ravine where the creek lay. In the moment before the stump of a long dead Red Oak rendered him unconscious, Izzy wondered whether there was any way for him to measure the distance to the bottom and who would teach his classes in the spring semester. He then careened from one chunk of limestone or granite to another, bounced off too many small juniper trees and stunted oaks to count, and came to rest a few feet from the edge of shallow water and lay very still. **** The one eye that would open did so, but only enough to allow a squint through the dried blood caking both his upper and lower eyelashes and threatening to pull them from their follicles as he strained to see. Izzy could not tell whether it was day or night, or possibly some previously undiscovered third interval in the passage of time. He was not sure whether he was dead or alive, but because he harbored no illusions of an afterlife, he assumed that any degree of consciousness meant that he was still living.

Izzy became aware of his head as it mimicked a white dwarf star in its final throes of collapse after losing the last of its nuclear energy.

His left arm would move only a couple of inches before the shoulder above it screamed, audibly it seemed to Izzy before he realized that the sound was in his throat, stuck there like one of the hairballs that Frannie’s long-haired gray cat, Frida, sometimes hacked up after an agonized effort. The other arm worked well enough to feel around on his head where he first noticed that his Glacier National Park cap was missing. He tightly closed his single seeing eye, even minimal light increasing the hammering inside his skull, the other eye forming an unopenable slit in one of the many painful, oozing lumps on his skull.

Reopening the one eye and craning his neck, he saw that the right leg was oddly bent to one side several inches below the knee, but the other looked structurally normal. He was nauseous but couldn’t bring up the contents of his stomach as he wished to do. His mouth had withered and he couldn’t locate his water bottle. Izzy danced on the edge of wakefulness for a while before consciousness again fled.

The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER - 2017

61 **** When Izzy next became aware, hours had disguised themselves as seconds and he could barely make out a concentration of brightness in the sky at either ten or two o’clock that was substantially obscured by the live oaks that don’t lose their leaves until the early spring and the thick evergreen needles of the prolific junipers.

This light was nevertheless far brighter than at his previous waking.

He lay in and out of sleep for what seemed a long time until it was dark. Dark again? Had it been dark before? The emptiness in his stomach made him feel as though he had never eaten before, but the thought of food sickened him. His throat was sandpaper and he tasted dust, the tongue in his mouth a sticky foreign thing like a rotten sausage that he desperately wanted to disgorge. After wanting to do so for a long time, he was able to expel vomit, but the stuff did no more than dribble from the corners of his mouth. His working eye would open a bit wider than before. Izzy had no choice but to stay where he was, but did feel as though he might be able to make his voice heard, so he tried to shout. Very little came out. Izzy wondered how long he had been there. He again felt sick to his stomach. He had pissed himself, probably more than once, but his pants had mostly dried. Izzy thought about the manifold utility of the quick-drying synthetic fabric used to make hiking pants. He occasionally tried to make noises, though he could not be sure whether he emitted any sound. And he heard nothing around him but for the occasional, mournful Hoot of an owl. **** Later Izzy felt something like coarse sandpaper scrape over the right side of his face, and the skin there was wet. An odor carried by bursts of warm air reminded him of a decomposing rat in the wall. He knew that he himself stank. His bowels had emptied. But this other smell was different. Needles clamped onto his bad shoulder and withdrew quickly when Izzy recoiled and let go a primal screech.

Then there was a powerful force tugging on the tightly laced hiking boot shielding the foot of his apparently undamaged left leg and his entire body moved a bit. What must have been small rocks flayed The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER- 2017

62 the skin on his back as he was dragged a short distance before the motion stopped and did not resume.

What the hell has me? What’s it going to do with me? He knew there hadn’t been any bears in this part of the country for decades.

Too many people. No place for them. This thought gave him a degree of comfort as he could not think of a creature in this area that would dine on him. On the other hand, he was at the mercy of something with complete control over him, and he had neared the point of no longer caring what happened. Later, Izzy began to shiver. This continued until he was almost numb, but then he felt a furry warmth covering a good part of his torso. It was heavy as hell, but did not impinge on the shoulder that had something busted inside. His body did not shiver while the weight remained. He again slept for a time and when he woke there was no light and he became cold as before.

After a while, the ponderous warmth returned.

Light came anew. As it grew brighter, he thought he could discern distant voices somewhere above him. Time still dragged, and he could see the same dense but obscured light he had observed before, this time on the opposite side, which he surmised to be in the east. His urethra was on fire, but he didn’t believe he could pee again, may be ever, as he ached for water. The nausea had passed. He then thought he heard voices somewhere above him, but he could not see anyone. Later, there were bestial sounds. Was someone coming for him? Or some thing?

No one came.The pain lapsed into numbness as long as he didn’t try to move. Another unrecognizable sound rose in the distance. Then it passed. Still later, the concentration of light that leaked through limbs and leaves hanging perhaps thirty feet above him was now higher in the sky, and he again heard something. This time it was clearly the barking of a dog, deep and low-pitched, halfway between a bark and a growl. He shouted at it, or at least he thought he shouted. Izzy couldn’t know whether anything audible was coming from him, but he kept trying. The growling was nearer, but he still couldn’t pinpoint its source.

Izzy again felt heat, as well as wetness on one side of his face, and a thing snorted and blew at him in fits and starts. Turning his The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER - 2017

63 face toward the stinking warmth, he pried apart the lids of his operational eye with the thumb and nearest two fingers of his right hand. A colossus imposed itself on Izzy’s senses, and then left. The globe of blurred light, which he now understood to be the sun, had sunk low again, his head having cleared enough to conclude that it was in the west. To the east must have been the trail. **** The next thing Izzy knew, someone was working down around his crooked leg. He could see two pieces of long, red board-like material being strapped tightly to each side of his bad leg, which from the knee down almost to the foot was close to twice its normal size. Another person was holding water to his lips, but Izzy could only taste it. He could not swallow despite wanting the water more than he had ever wanted anything.

Izzy was now being carried by two red and yellow men on a flexible stretcher to which he was tightly strapped. Was there a third somebody nearby? And was something else next to him? Where the hell am I, goddammit, and why do I feel so damned stupid? They were all moving. He could twist his neck more than before and after a while he saw that they were approaching rock steps laid out in a Z pattern leading upward. They made a sharply ascending trip one step at a time to and fro along the switch-backs heading upward. At the top, on the trail, the brightly colored men set him and the stretcher on the ground for a short time, and then began to carry him carefully for what seemed to be a long while before again setting him down while they unfolded a wheeled contraption. They lifted Izzy and the stretcher, strapping both to the contrivance. Izzy could see a needle stuck into a vein on his right forearm, with a tube attached to the needle. The tube led upward to a bag of liquid at the top of a short metal post fastened at its bottom to the moving bed. One of his caretakers said to the other, “This old guy either has the hardest skull I’ve ever seen or he was just incredibly lucky that those bumps must have been caused by trees and not rocks. No signs at all of a concussion.

And he’s pretty darned alert for what he’s been through.”

Hearing this, Izzy retorted, “And I want to stay that way, dammit, The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER- 2017

64 so what the hell is in that IV? No damned dope. No morphine, no hydrocodone. And no damned oxycodone, not even codeine.”

“You an addict?” asked the other medic.

“No, goddammit, the evil shit just makes me feel like hell.

Besides, I don’t need it.”

The same rescuer said, “That leg by itself would make most folks beg for morphine, but for now, there’s only saline solution in the bag,” “Don’t want anything else. Don’t need it.”

Then, relenting a little, Izzy said, “Maybe Tramadol... if you’ve got it,” knowing this to be a codeine molecule that had been chemically modified to remove the worst of its addictive properties.

The beginnings of rehydration caused Izzy to feel better. He could also see better. Enough of the dried blood had been washed from his right eye so that he could open it most of the way. A third man and an animal were nearby. A dog? On the wheeled carrier-he worked hard but unsuccessfully to recall the word “gurney”-Izzy was at the level of his attendants’ waists, and the animal was allowed to come close. He now got a good look at the thing and saw that its legs extended from the ground to stretcher level. Above the animal’s legs, Izzy saw a head he recognized.

“Grendel?”

Izzy croaked, recalling the poster at the side of the trail early in his hike. Now, though, one of its eyes was bloody and swollen, and one of its ears was mangled. The handiwork of the raccoon, Izzy wondered? My Dog Skip this was not. The gigantic head breathed on him, and wiped its huge tongue across the side of Izzy’s face. Bloody drool strung from the dog’s mouth and tongue, leading Izzy to wonder whether the thing had recently eaten some rowdy kid. This was not an animal that thrived on asparagus. Then he realized that the blood was probably his own.

“Damn, you stink,” Izzy managed to say.

“Grendel? Goddammit, Grendel, is that you?” The beast backed away from Izzy and loosed a feral roar sounding more like a locomotive than a dog. Izzy had never seen a dog that big. Ever.

The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER - 2017

65 “Goddammit,” Izzy wheezed, “damned thing should’ve been on a leash.”

Then a voice came from the third man said, “Mr. . . ., well I don’t know your name, but meet Arthur. Yeah, I suppose you’re right.

I’ve got him on a chain now.”

Izzy and the others approached the back of what appeared to be an ambulance, and he was loaded into the rear, one of the men remaining with him. The door was closed, an engine started, and the vehicle moved. As it did so, an unknown sensation crept over Izzy.

During the minutes that followed, he struggled to identify it. It wasn’t pain, although there was undeniably some of that. No, this was . . . something else, something totally different. He felt . . . . He didn’t know how he felt. He felt . . . what, goddamnit? He felt . . . .

As they neared the emergency room, a single word came to Izzy.

Free?

John Allison is on the faculty of the University of Texas at Austin, and is widely published in the field of intellectual property law. He has previously published one piece of short fiction, in the magazine Mount Hope (2016).

The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER- 2017

66

FICTION

Three years ago, I met Karen at a party.

I was out on that back porch because I couldn’t listen to the dolphin shrieking inside anymore.

It looked like the pod had gotten to her, too.

“Can you believe these people?” I asked.

“I know. It’s strange, right?”

“I don’t think I can handle another conversation about pastries.

I refuse.”

“It does seem ridiculous,” she said. “I also have no interest in discussing how much it costs to live here, or the fog, or whatever tech company one of these assholes has equity in,” she said.

Some blue joules dislodged somewhere inside me. “It gets to be exhausting pretending all the time.”

She paused, glanced at me, went back to her examination of all that lay before us.

“You have to consider all of this. The city, the view, you know, everything,” she said.

“Everything? That’s a lot to consider.”

“But you have to. Consider. I don’t think there’s any other way The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER - 2017

67 to do it. It’s all or nothing,” she said, “it’s either examined in the way it deserves to be, a careful consideration, everything, all pieces, whatever it turns out to be, whatever the answer is no matter if it turns out to be something you didn’t want, or not at all. We owe it to ourselves.”

We could see most of the city from up here, all the way out to the ocean, the white caps dotted across the bay. We were leaning against the railing on the balcony, high enough above it all that the sounds on the street are reduced to something approaching melody, the sounds inside muted by the closed door to negate their debates about the best place to find ramen, the upcoming midterm elections.

We were faced only with the wide angle of what is, the black outlines of buildings set against the cerulean, pink splayed across the bellies of the clouds.

I considered carefully before I answered her. “Spectacular.” <<>> We hesitated at the top of the escalator.

Below us stretched one hundred thousand square feet of shouting blinkering capitalism. Vendors, wares, disruption, buzzwords and t shirts and pens with logos. They all gathered here in one place, distracted by the teeming horde of swag-seekers and hand-shakers. It is the perfect location for our second date, an immediate confirmation that she is also an agent of subversion.

“They certainly have considerable resources at their disposal,” she said.

“Indeed. But they’ve grown indolent.”

“Last days of the Roman Empire,” she added solemnly.

“And we are the Barbarians,” I said.

“Visigoths,” she clarified.

“We will be invincible,” she said.

“I agree, nothing will catch us, ever, we’ll be too fast,” I said.

“Make sure your shoelaces are tied,” she said.

The alarm bell rings, the lights flash, and we take off running.

<<>> We found an alcove in the park, surrounded by jasmine bushes, an eight foot by eight food redoubt. Everything was green, white, red, The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER- 2017

68 blue, pink, pulsing. In this one illuminated sliver of the city and the world, the flowers won out, stronger than everything else.

We breathe deeply, theatrically, for nearly a minute.

“This is it,” she said.

“Yes,” I said.

She pulled off her underwear more quickly than I would have ever thought possible and I was inside her.

The moon extruded through the leaves of the nearby trees and slurried our bodies and it looked like a school of fish was swimming across her back.

Something about the way we merged, as if we knew that at any moment an asteroid might careen through the ionosphere and nullify all our efforts.

Something akin to hunger, thirst, an elemental thrust to these early efforts of ours, and the certainty that eventually we will win out.

<<>> We spent hours like this, frantic, she a heathen god waving arms and breathing creation in a single afternoon spent sweaty on the couch with miles of skin for fingertips, teeth, tongue.

“You can only recognize the apogee after the fact,” she said.

We were really getting somewhere. We have gone months without repeating a single conversation.

“Meaning that the true shape of things is impossible to take in while you’re actually experiencing it?” I said.

We chased swans in the park. We ducked out of engagement dinners with barely plausible excuses. We were together, on the ascendant, I was certain.

“Something like that,” she said. <<>> You can only recognize the apogee after the fact.

We are indigo-scaled marine iguanas, languid tail swirl, Galapagos dreaming. A can of beer floats in the bathtub with us.

Karen drifts in and out of sleep, bubbles of words sputtering from her mouth.

It should be an answer. I feel like after this, after the effort we’ve The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER - 2017

69 put in tonight, this city should have yielded something up to us. We should know so much more.

They raise their glasses, I watch a single bead of whiskey sweat on the side of the glass in my hand. Tequila, rum, everything ever distilled, we will make an honest effort.

“Happy birthday!”

We raise our glasses. Noise and friends, packed tightly into the apartment, surround us.

And, we are emptied once more, just the two of us, in the bath tub.

The beer can lazily knocks against her shoulder.

I bring the whiskey to my lips and I feel just like they do. They smile and I feel just like they do.

“Happy birthday, Karen!” I shout over the crowd and she is in constant motion, then, never stopping until every person has left and the bathwater is filling the tub.

I consider whether what we thought we could achieve is possible.

“Happy birthday Karen,” I say and even though she is asleep, she smiles at this and I think through the logistics of getting her out of the tub.

They smile. I smile. I think they are the same thing.

We raise our glasses.

A tentacle lurks.

<<>> In the morning Karen makes it to work albeit an hour late and I am left to clean, and it is a significant undertaking.

Underneath the water, I am the empty cup, the ringing bell.

I exist only in five meter increments, my lungs burning, breathing every three strokes, turn of the head, gulp. I make it to the state championship for the 200 meter freestyle and the 100 meter breaststroke in high school.

I don’t believe there have ever been this many empty bottles in one apartment. I consider calling Guinness.

I emerge from the pool and they predict a series of unending victories, Olympic medals, a Senate seat, or at the very least a nice The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER- 2017

70 apartment somewhere. There are high fives and a call from grandma.

I move into the city and ride around in one of those opentopped busses, snapping pictures for my momâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s archives. I go to the gym four days a week. I drink mostly water. I get to work early.

All of the bottles into the recycling bin.

Slowly, surely, the mess is reduced.

I emerge from the pool to a wall of sound. I will sign the papers where I am supposed to sign.

The dirt falls onto the shoebox that contains the recently deceased dwarf hamster Charles. I bury him in the narrow space between my house and the neighborâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s fence.

When I am done burying Charles I go for a bike ride towards the half-built house at the end of the street, and take a few moments throwing rocks at the last remaining window.

I clean the apartment and it takes all day.

We will simply need to accelerate the pace if we are going to have any chance. <<>> I consider the white lines neatly arrayed on the counter.

Karen and I are alternating currents. Everything we touch is amplified. This nightclub, this bathroom, the countertop, and strangers we dance with.

These lines, the other lines, the lines of streets, of refugees awaiting entrance to camps, the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s mess to be contained with geometric precision. I inhale it all and we are dancing and sweating and alive in a way that has to be unique to only us.

We have mastered the manipulation of time. When the appropriate opportunity presents itself, which is often, we have a multitude of accelerants at our disposal, and thus we are able to complete so much in half the time, far exceeding the meager output of the sluggards in our midst.

Something about the ragged way it all heaves beneath us like a just-darted rhinoceros, the great groaning mass of Janes and Johnnies living and dying precisely one point zero times, while we skip from needle tip to needle tip.

The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER - 2017

71 Our control is nearly absolute, with only the occasional slip-up.

I inhale.

Our control is nearly absolute. <<>> I consider the crushed up hydrocodone.

We must achieve balance, so sometimes we are forced to draw down from orbit, to release a gel over the cityscape that slows the streetcars, traps the tourists where they stand, something to blunt the diamonds that escape into our capillaries, to enrobe the synapses so that their charge is less. <<>> It is the time in the city when it rains. <<>> There is a mystery jutting from the sea of vomit, a yellow archipelago emerging from clotted slurry of disgusting whatever the fuck and bile. I shift, knowing immediately that we are both covered, that we are still wearing what we were wearing yesterday, that this is who we are.

I am struck by a massive instantaneous squirming in my internal apparatus.

“We are both covered in bruises,” she said.

I look down at my arms, and see that up and down the full length, purple and blue ink blots. Karen the same. I stand up, and I am nearly struck down again the concrete mix in my cerebrum is so thick.

Jesus we were thorough.

“What happened to us?” I asked.

“Not exactly sure,” she said.

I take off the disgusting clothing.

I am standing in front of the mirror examining a body covered in bruises.

The things in there are multiplying, slithering, writhing.

I hear laughter from the other room.

Karen is holding something up.

“I found it,” she says. “Our totem.”

The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER- 2017

72 A french fry. A complete, undigested French Fry. <<>> This is not a city that does well in the rain. Too much is loosed. <<>> “I don’t think I can make you happy,” I said, after much consideration.

She was walking in front of the window, but I’m not sure she saw what I saw. I thought I saw a flicker of movement in the window, of the sidewalk turning to grey flytraps, but I wasn’t sure. Things were happening like that all the time. Conversations were drill bits cracking open my rib cage. Inside where my guts should be there were only disgruntled weevils. Sidewalks were flytraps and I would walk onto them thinking I was going to get a bottle of Gatorade and a bag of Doritos and look up at the grey slick of the sky and then I wasn’t getting a bottle of Gatorade and a bag of Doritos I was still on the couch. I would stare at them from my window and think about going somewhere and then think about their stickiness and think better of it. Sidewalks were walkways between fast food restaurants and dry cleaners and meetings and birthday parties and it was different mostly but I was always the same which was really the problem because I would look at these people and I thought I was doing what they were doing but it seemed like no matter what inputs (and I tried many) my outputs weren’t their outputs and this struck me as grossly unfair.

“Of course you can,” she said.

“So you’re happy here, all this? The city? Us? The ash tray over there?”

“The ashtray?” she asked. Maybe I hadn’t explained the ashtray to her. I had to take another tack. I had to find some mechanism to at the very least reconfigure some of the fray.

“Did you ever think that you weren’t equipped for it all?”

“I always thought we were going to win, actually,” she said.

“And now?” I asked. <<>> She is pacing it is Wednesday it is March and the blinds are drawn closed and the couch and the locked door and it is Thursday The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER - 2017

73 it is September and the blinds are open but outside there is only a carapace of fog and it is more difficult than ever to see what hides in the folds.

I consider the crushed up hydrocodone.

I do not consider the pizza boxes, the ash tray, the newspapers, the phone calls from her boss my boss her parents.

They will send emails and carrier pigeons and they will say they are coming to visit and we will plan to move some things off the table and couch and floor but we will forget and they will wait a long time before they say anything.

Karen paces in earnest and in profile she is like a predatory bird. <<>> We are drilling down as deep as we can go, to see if there’s some hairy beast down at the center operating the switches with something like a plan, or just an I.O.U. note in bad handwriting.

We will keep drilling until we either pierce through the mantle or the bit is ground to nothing. <<>> Occasionally we slip up. <<>> I have turned Karen to her side and her breathing is irregular. I lift her eyelids. Her breath is ragged, her color is off. <<>> Occasionally we slip up. <<>> “How did we get here?” she asks.

“I don’t know,” I say.

I am scratching the band around my wrist. Grey rain dancing lazily on the window as she rummages through the glove box for the scissors. This is the second or third time we’ve tried this. Once together, once for me, once for her. They are successes and failures simultaneously. They are expensive.

Twice for me actually.

How long?

The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER- 2017

74 Six weeks.

That seems like a long time.

It’s not a long time, they say.

It seems like a long time.

It’s a small price to pay, they say.

It doesn’t seem like a small price to pay. It seems exorbitant.

This will be better, they say.

Better than what.

Than the other options, they say.

Inside these white walls I am faced with a hollowness so complete that it is nearly unfathomable.

What kind of story do you want to tell?

Where does it start? Who is the villain? What were your parents like? How old were you the first time you drank alcohol?

I think more than anything they ask the wrong questions.

“One of us will have to be the one. And I don’t know if it can be me. I don’t know if I have it in me, not anymore.”

“What do you mean?” she says. <<>> “You can only recognize the apogee after the fact,” she says.

“Does it really matter then?” I ask. <<>> “It’s like a nuclear football. We both have to turn the key at the same time,” I say.

“Oh,” she says, barely audible, so quiet it’s possible she didn’t say anything at all.

She looks so tired.

We are all so tired, every single inhabitant.

“I don’t know if I can do that,” she says, more loudly.

Everyone is tired.

I see it in their faces, in the morning, when the sidewalks are wet.

I am not sure about this place, about any of it, about the hot dog smells, the piss slurries on Market Street, the massive homeless encampments with blue tarps flapping in surrender.

The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER - 2017

75 “How did we get here?” she asks.

I consider the question.

“How did we get here?”

“Do you think we still have a chance?” she asks.

My hand seeks out the window control of its own accord, clicking the button one two three. Flit of the city outside the window and the low drone of the engine as we drive towards the parking garage, drive towards an engagement dinner, towards the redwoods where we find banana slugs under leaves, towards an apartment with an overflowing ash tray.

“How did we get here?” she asks and the question implies a series of fixed points arranged sequentially and I am not so sure.

We will drive home and I will get out of the car.

“How did we get here?” every time she asks and snip snip snip the bracelet comes off, we are staggering on the shit caked sidewalks or standing on a balcony above it all and we are free to find our place in it, never quite sure exactly where we stand in the trajectory, but hopeful that the horizon can extend as far as we need it to.

Corey Hill is a human rights activist, journalist, parent, and occasional tree climber. His works have been featured in Yes! Magazine, Earth Island Journal, AlterNet, and more.

The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER- 2017

76

BOOK REVIEW

Review by Joan Dobbie A Song for Bela By Gayatri Majumdar

Flying home from Pondicherry, India, to Eugene, Oregon, after

much discussion of the possibility of our two cities becoming Sister Cities, I happened to watch Amy Schumer’s Trainwreck.

“OMIGOD,” I exclaimed to myself. This “trainwreck” of a woman is the American “sister” of acclaimed poet/editor/ Brown Critique publisher Gayatri Majumdar’s Sara in Majumdar’s first novel, A Song for Bela.

Like Trainwreck’s ‘Amy’, Majumdar’s ‘Sara’ is what we might call “a functioning addict,” a talented young woman, able, if just barely, to hold one job then another, who drifts in a haze of drugs and alcohol, in Sara’s case, from city to city, in both cases, from bed to bed, drunken party to drunken party, hangover to hangover, in search of the love and stability that her own childhood The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER - 2017

77 had been unable to give her.

In Sara’s case, the dysfunction of her childhood family was as much a reflection of her homeland, India’s, political dysfunction in the wake of British colonialism and the Muslim/Hindu ethnic struggles which resulted in the 1947 creation of Pakistan that came with British withdrawal as it is of her Marxist father’s infidelities and her mentally ill mother’s inability to mother; her mother’s suicide.

Sara is suffering from what might be described as “post gene -rational PTSD.” She is a survivor’s daughter. A suicide’s daughter.

(Sara’s mother, who barely survived monumental losses of home and loved ones, who could not in fact distinguish the inner demons from the outer, could hardly be expected to have raised happy, well adjusted children.) Sara (as is Amy) is longing to give and receive love. But she doesn’t know how.

In Trainwreck Amy’s case, all problems are solved when she finds, and learns to accept, “the right man.” Gayatri Marumdar’s ‘A Song for Bela’, however goes deeper. In her spare room, the one packed with memorabilia she hasn’t had the heart to discard, Sara meets ghosts: the spirits of the displaced, including a dark boy child who calls himself “Nirvana,” her own mother as a child, eventually even her own young self – and then there’s “the voice.”

(Could these be manifestations of Sara’s own psyche, made nearly material through the gift of possibly hereditary schizophrenic hallucinations?). It doesn’t matter. As these buried parts of her people/herself express in vivid detail their losses and suffering, they force her to face her avoidances head on. Through this sort of “ghost therapy” Sara begins to understand who she herself, result of historical/personal suffering, is. And as the hallucinations/ ghosts rapidly grow from childhood to adulthood, her own psyche also “grows up” and thus Sara becomes a functioning adult, no longer needing to hide behind alcohol, drugs, and destructive relationships, at last able to forgive, to accept her damaged family members for the worthy human beings they are, to accept even her own damaged self as worthy of love. And so healing begins.

The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER- 2017

78 This all takes place in an India I, as an American, am only beginning to meet, but which Majumdar’s detailed and sensual place descriptions (as Sara travels back and forth between Mumbai and Delhi) gives me a sensual experience of. Besides the sounds and the smells and the sites of Urban India, her characters’ voices give me a sense of the minds, the language, the inner as well as the outer perspectives, of young Urban Indians living in the wake of generations of struggle.

Whether you are Indian, a foreigner interested in India, or merely a member of the modern human family, Majumdar’s A Song for Bela is a book worth reading.

If you’d like to get your copy, please drop in a line to Gayatri Majumdar (browncritique@gmail.com) for a neat 10% discount!

You can also purchase the book directly from sales@prakashbooks.com.

ISBN: 978-0-9961240-8-9 Price: Rs. 250/$5.99

Poet Joan Dobbie lives in Eugene, Oregon. She is also a yoga Instructor at the University of Oregon and yoga Instructor at Emerald Park.

The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER - 2017

79

POETRY

John (â&#x20AC;&#x153;Jakeâ&#x20AC;?) Cosmos Aller 1. the voice of my doom walking deep in the woods high above the city near the airport I heard them then saw them hideous black crows looking at me cackling at me laughing at me mocking me calling me names I asked what they wanted they laughed and said nothing but your doom and they flew around me dive bombing me and surrounding me calling me names in Korean and English as I fled down the trail with the demon birds hot on my trail The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER- 2017

80

2. Donald Trump and the Vulgarians Rise to Power I hear them coming I see them coming I fear them coming Trump and the Vulgarians Lusting for power and revenge It ainâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t right they say I hear them coming I see them coming I fear them coming The white man has been given the shaft The nigger president gone too far And now they want to make a bitch President I hear them coming I see them coming I fear them coming They have gone too far they shout and scream Anger pouring out of their faces and their whatever Rabid dogs from the no fly lands I hear them coming I see them coming I fear them coming The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER - 2017

81

The elites on the coast Continue to look down on the Trump Say he is a clown say he is a simpleton Say he is dangerous demagogue I hear them coming I see them coming I fear them coming But the more they sling at him The more they deride him The stronger he gets I hear them coming I see them coming I fear them coming The deplorable who support him Know that they have got the elites right where they want them Behind the barrel of their proverbial guns I hear them coming I see them coming I fear them coming The fly over country the fuckistanian Jesus land multitudes Are on the march on the coastal elites Rabble rousers out for blood tonight

The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER- 2017

82 I hear them coming I see them coming I fear them coming And blood they will have If their hero their champion their Donald Is denied his right to rule over them?

The rights to them have sold To the highest bidder I hear them coming I see them coming I fear them coming And Donald knows that he is a fraud A con man a film flam artist But he knows his marks knows his rubes And gives them what they want Gives them what they need I hear them coming I see them coming I fear them coming As they give the whole rotten system A god damn finger up the ass Hoping to blow the whole thing down I hear them coming I see them coming I fear them coming

The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER - 2017

83

3. You Will Be Punished You Will Be Punished for Protesting The Principle has a message For those who don’t stand for the National Anthem: Obey or be punished.

“You will stand, and you will stay quiet.

If you don’t. you are going to be sent home, and you’re not going to have a refund of your ticket price, YOU WILL LOVE THIS COUNTRY OR ELSE, YOU UNDERSTAND ME?!

I would love to see some brave students defying Nemeth’s idiotic

proposal by conducting a mass sit-in during the Anthem at the next game.

He can’t do anything about it.

It’s appalling, really, because you have to wonder how awful the government classes must be at his school Is his school in the US? Or in North Korea?

Do they not teach students about the Constitution anymore?

What happens to students who refuse to say the Pledge of Allegiance?

Are they punished, too?

What happens to athletes who remain seated during the Anthem?

Will they be allowed to play at all?

When will Nemeth issue an apology?

(When he stops being an ignorant fool, I would also love to hear him explain — in a video to the students — why he’s wrong about this issue.)

The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER- 2017

84 “The statement made by the principal of Lely High School arises out of a context in which students in the stands at a school athletic event we’re being disruptive at the start of and during the national anthem.

He has spoken with our students to explain that his statement was based upon the disruption that school administrators observed occurring.

The district recognizes a student’s First Amendment right to express his/her thoughts and ideas.

For now But if President Trump Becomes President All bets are off Ha ha ha However, the law refuses to see As Frank Zappa sang so many years ago That there is no great society As it applies to you and me Unless your uncle owns the store if a student paid to see a game and sat quietly in the stands during the national anthem, we would not remove the student.

The student is seeing the game at that point as a member of the public.

True patriotism is upholding the First Amendment right to free speech.”

All Hail President Trump The invincible Leader of our great country The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER - 2017

85

4. Strong Wine One night I was starring In my wine glass Deep in thought When I saw Something in my wine That haunts me still I saw in the bottom of the glass Evil doers abandon evil And became saints I saw rich men give up Their awesome greed And poor people Awarded dignity And all men Became brothers All women Became sisters And war ended once and for all And peace broke out And hatred disappear And I stared Into my glass wine I drink the wine Hoping the vision The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER- 2017

86 Would infect me And change the world But alas the world Remained the same The evil doers came back The rich continued to conspire And the poor still remained poor And the war continued on and on So I drank my wine And went to sleep

5. Yesterday Morning Yesterday morning, I awoke Like most mornings I was still dead I walked Out of my drug infested slum Into my computerized car Down the freeways of my mind Searching for the pot of golden dreams I stopped in at a restaurant Drank copious amounts of free coffee And saw all the people One by one disappearing into the crowds All I knew was wrong Or worst yet a figment of your imagination Every person changed Transformed into an interchangeable computerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s robot The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER - 2017

87 All the same All the same Everything living in instant suburbia Moving their meaningless life All the same all the same Not me screamed my coffee as I sat Yet another victim Of our creeping collective insanity Just cogs in the wheel Cogs in the wheel And so I go down the road And get in line

John (â&#x20AC;&#x153;Jakeâ&#x20AC;?) Cosmos Aller is a retired US diplomat (foreign service officer) for the U.S. State Department and have served overseas in Korea, Thailand, India, Antigua, Barbados, Dominica, Grenada, St Lucia, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and Spain. He has served in Mumbai from 2000-2003 and visited Chennai in 2005.

He has completed 10 volumes of poetry, three SF novels, and an unpublished collection of short stories.

The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER- 2017

88

6. The Shape of History Once I too had ambition I had the usual dreams of glory and grandeur All I wanted to be was to be a great creative genius Only I did not know How to kiss ass creatively Once I had dreams of greatness I would be glorious and free All would envy and admire This man so noble and great Now I am tied down in mirthless mire Once I hustled Once I took no shit from anyone Once I wanted the universe Now I am contended to shit And refuse to bustle Why bother anymore In the gathering gloom Of the foreseeable future One thing is certain I do not want a room On the scrap heap of society And yet that might be my fate

The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER - 2017

89

POETRY

Glen Sorestad

The Greening of May

Each Spring, the sight that moves us is that first surprise of palest yellow-green, as each new leaf grooves to melodic riffs of sun, sky a miracle of azure.

Through winter cold and its treachery of ice and smothering snow we long for those hues that hold our hearts just so -nothing less will suffice.

Now the mounting sun of May frees the sap, sets the stage for pale aspens to flaunt their green.

No matter our age, we always re-see the same surprise.

The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER- 2017

90

Joshua Trees Across the Mojave Desert of the Southwest these cacti, yucca brevifolia, may tower thirty feet, while other plants cower in the fierce glare of desert sun.

Obtrusive as giant Redwoods, they served as stand-in trees for early Mormons who named them after the Old Testament leader.

Found in only four states, this strange Mojave cactus is sometimes called yucca palm, but it is disappearing from its only desert, possibly another global warming casualty by centuryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s end.

Then where will migrating birds perch during long cross-desert flights in annual pursuit of winter or summer?

A weird combo of cactus and tree, the Joshua seems a thick-armed oak upon which yuccas have been grafted, arms upward and outward, as if offering whatever they may have to whoever is in need.

The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER - 2017

91

Old Man, Old Dog Most mornings we meet the twosome along the park path. It may be drizzling or dazzling sun, dead calm or blustery, the pair of them are always the same.

Neither the bent-backed old man, nor his curly-haired small mongrel says anything, except on rare mornings of inescapable beauty, when failing to acknowledge it would be a sin.

He hobbles painfully and slowly behind his dear friend, who stops from time to time, as if to be assured his master is indeed still there, holding the leash that binds them, if only to satisfy a city bylaw that requires the illusion, if not reality, of control.

They both accept the charade.

Time has weathered them about equally. We often muse, after our morning meeting, as we continue our morning circuit through to its terminus, how many more days and walks will this duo be granted? And what of the two of us, we who watch this pair and feel, though we do not know their names, an unexpected kinship with them?

The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER- 2017

92

It Must Be Spring How do we know itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the first official day of Spring?

Demonic wind hurls horizontal darts of snow and ice.

Exposed winterlitter swirls through frigid air, tossed by demonic wind that seeks whatever is liftable airborne.

Glen Sorestad is a well known Canadian poet whose poems have appeared in many countries, have appeared in over sixty anthologies and textbooks and have been translated into at least eight languages.

He lives in Saskatoon on the western plains of Canada and is a Member of the Order of Canada.

The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER - 2017

93

POETRY

G. David Schwartz

Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m going to shave my eyebrows To make my sight see long Not looking through a forest Which does honestly just bore us But now it makes sense Repetition leads to coincidence And my eye lids Like lids on the container Me me think Thank goodness something does Of what I had for dinner And how I had to look real close And fringed my eyes and nose Thus and that is why To prevent a little cry I, yes I, Am going to shave my eye Brows

The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER- 2017

94

This Is Not A Brag I had a heart attack It hit my like a skiver And I am glad I had implanted a defibrillator

I May Be Slow As Molasses I may be slow as molasses But I don’t need my glasses To be running on the track Half a mile down and then back I am not quick as tungsten And if I just don’t win I be here to race again.

And with age I many be slower But yet I’ll still be goer Slow as molasses may be funny Ok, then, I’m slow as honey

Outside The Clouds Go Marching Outside the clouds go marching Inside the sun don’t shine Was down in the basement Not seeing either crime The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER - 2017

95

Laugh Lightly Just go ahead and laugh lightly Just stay behind and laugh loud Just think something funny Well do anything you like, you mushroom silly cloud.

How Am I? Not bad, not great but I guess thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s just fate Sitting in a local Subway But misunderstanding quite bit Trains donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t go into it

I Saw Her Mouth Moving I saw her mouth moving But I heard not a word And I thought that weird Quite like a bird Now I understand All those crooked knee English men Calling, her I explain British and other women, birds

The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER- 2017

96

She Was Walking Round She was walking round With her head Stuck up in a tree The branches holding two birdies I thought to help her pout then second, I thought not And but two hours later I had just forgot.

Sorry Here, My Navel Is So Big sorry my navel is so big when we went to hug and you went falling in and falling on your bum sorry my legs are so short you went crazing done and as you squirmed around i laughed falling down sorry that my eyes did get so humorously larger and i will never forget that you called me a barge The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER - 2017

97

Standing Between Us And Them standing between us are simply years of tears climbing up the banister ladened down with fears you cannot eat the daises at least you alight not there may have been a reason but i have here forgot Daydreams donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t do danger nor dorms drinking wine and if you think thats true donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t go bazooka buying I have a favorite author Been him for thirty years And he never wrote a based song Never brought out sad tears

G. David Schwartz is the former president of Seed house, the online interfaith committee.

Schwartz is the author of A Jewish Appraisal of Dialogue (1994), Midrash, and Working out Of the Book (2004). Currently a volunteer at The Cincinnati J, Meals on Wheels.

His newest book, Shards And Verse (2011) is now in stores or can be order on line.

FOR PRIVATE CIRCULATION ONLY

Published by K G E TEAM, Chennai, India - 600024 The Wagon Magazine - SEPTEMBER- 2017