Suisun Valley Review #26 by Suisun Valley Review

Suisun Valley Review

the literary magazine of solano community college issue number twenty-six spring two-thousand and nine

Fairfield, California

Editors

Travis Allas Richard Barnhart Trung Bui Chelsea Chavez Julia Croft Farid Haji Justin Hopper Robin Howell Beth Kreiss Chris Love Elfie Nelson Devin Pascal Barbara Schmidt Advisor

Michael J. Wyly

ยง Guidelines: Rights revert to author on publication. Submissions are accepted from November to March of each year. Simultaneous submissions should be noted as such. Successful submissions in fiction typically do not exceed 2,500 words. Two complimentary copies of the magazine received upon publication. Authors are invited to release reading held at Solano College in May of each year. Visual art must be submitted electronically and be of sufficient file size for printing. Suisun Valley Review (ISSN 1945-7340) is published annually by the students of English 58 offered each Spring at Solano Community College. English 58 is a course in the contemporary literary magazine including requesting and reviewing submissions, arranging contents and determining format. Suisun Valley Review, English Department, Solano Community College, 4000 Suisun Valley Road, Fairfield, California 94535. Email: <suisunvalleyreview@gmail.com>. www: <solano.edu/ suisunvalleyreview>; <myspace.com/suisunvalleyreview>. Print run: 300

Poetry

Contents

Poem .................................................................................................William Taylor Jr. Those Objects Closer Than They Seem ............................................... Lyn Lifshin Holy Day ....................................................................................................... Alan King An Excerpt From When There Were Seasons........................................ Joseph Reich Summer, End (for Parthenopi).................................................................. Jeff Streeby She ................................................................................................ Richard Alan Bunch Burying the Cricket ........................................................................Heidi Steidlmayer May is the Month of Our Lady ......................................................... Tim Donnelly The Sego Milk Plant Burned in ‘92 ............................................................. Jack Hill Lord Was I On Fire ............................................................................ Oscar Navarro Thanatography ........................................................................................... Jeff Streeby Hallucinations ........................................................................ Jeffrey H. MacLachlan Twilight Bleeds .......................................................................................... Pam Muick Good Morning ...........................................................................Chloe Taylor Evans Walls of Dignity ................................................................................. Mathias Nelson Eye .......................................................................................................... Zachary Craig Five Degrees Fahrenheit ................................................ Edythe Haendel Schwartz Tonight My Muse Is Mexican ........................................................ Mathias Nelson Revival ............................................................................................ Ashaki M. Jackson In Medias Red ....................................................................................... Zachary Craig Fuse .......................................................................................... Jeffrey H. MacLachlan Thylacine .......................................................................................... Michael S. Begnal Thanksgiving ............................................................................................ Anna Skelly Simultaneity ................................................................................................. Josh Neely Can You Feel My Heartbeat? She Places My Hand Over her Breast .................................. Red Shuttleworth Lifelines ..................................................................................................... Mike Swope Late Hunt .................................................................................................... Jeff Streeby Heron’s Rest Mass Energy .......................................................... Crystal Anderson A Study in Love ............................................................................. Joanna Grossman Frontage Road...Bars...Cafes ........................................................ Red Shuttleworth The Modern Persephone ...................................................................... Erika Amaya Dresden ................................................................................................... Jesse Bradley

3 4 5 6 8 9 10 12 13 18 20 21 22 23 24 25 41 42 43 44 45 46 48 50 51 52 53 55 56 57 58 59

Short Fiction Listening To Pink Floyd In A Thai Restaurant .............................. J.A. Goolsby Monastery ........................................................................................................ Jack Hill Late Hunt ................................................................................................... Jeff Streeby

14 38 51

Visual Arts

Caught ............................................................................................................Jami Beck Desk .......................................................................................................Mollee Weaver SHHHH ............................................................................. Candelaria Rivera Gedea Elevator Control Tower..............................................................................Jami Beck Bag o’ Bones ............................................................................................... Ezra Croft Untitled..................................................................................................Mollee Weaver Untitled................................................................................................. Vanessa Jensen Caught ...........................................................................................................Jami Beck

front

7 11 19 40 49

54 back

Featured Writer: Indigo Moor .....................................

Halo in Decline ....................................................................................... Indigo Moor The Procurer ........................................................................................... Indigo Moor Mississippi Barbecue.............................................................................. Indigo Moor Malaise ...................................................................................................... Indigo Moor Moonlighting ........................................................................................... Indigo Moor Messages from the Ether ...................................................................... Indigo Moor Puertas Abiertas ...................................................................................... Indigo Moor

28 29 30 31 32 34 35

The Quinton Duval Award ..........................................

Tatters .................................................................................................Barbara Schmidt

Contributor Notes........................................................

Editorial Statement Suisun Valley Review was established in 1981 as a way for the students of Solano Community College to learn the art and craft of editing a literary journal while putting together their own annual magazine. Since the first issue in 1981, these student editors have collaborated on a total of twenty -six issues of SVR, carefully selecting the contents from new and established writers from across the country. The students are also directly involved with creating the overall design aesthetic and narrative of each issue. Each spring, all of their hard work and endless creative energy is repaid with a bound collection of prose and poetry, sold and kept as a testament to sleepless nights. Special Note Concerning Editor Submissions: The annual production of SVR is facilitated by the SCC course English 58. The course description for this class states that any persons interested in submitting creative work to the magazine for consideration may submit. This description applies also to the student editors of that particular year’s issue, and it is past practice to publish accepted editors’ works alongside the submissions of the other contributors. In order to maintain fairness and impartiality, all editor submissions are considered under a pseudonym. Only after a piece has either been accepted/rejected based upon its own merit is it then revealed to whom it belongs. If the piece is accepted, the editor’s real name is used for publication.

Poem William Taylor Jr. Somewhere along the way we forget to be beautiful and this is where all other deaths begin.

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Those Objects Closer Than They Seem Lyn Lifshin the train slices thru too late March Virginia snow where there should be horses dark as tragic, gorgeous Ruffian, that black beauty I buried the last year in. Someone said you look in a horse for what you need, what is missing in yourself. For that year, she was mine on paper as snow mounded, ebbed where you couldn't see. Licorice daughter. Her blackness so black it glistened and I held on, suspended, the world going away as if the blues weren't the truest part of being alive.

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Holy Day Alan King When people love...they're relaxed and happy and friends with all the world –Dudley Randall, "A Poet's Not A Jukebox" And was that the case with your neighbor whistling on his way to the mailbox? It was a Saturday – sparrows dotted power lines like quarter notes on a staff, like sheet music for a ballad that might have been playing in his head. And weren't you as happy once – waking to find the sun squinting through Venetian blinds and blushing at what it saw, when even the flowers were astonished by the wind's gossip? Those mornings you could have been a canary with a song in your throat. But the road back to that place seems to go on like a yellowbrick trail, the one your neighbor might be skipping now on his way up the driveway to whatever waits across the threshold.

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An Excerpt From

When There Were Seasons Joseph Reich you still love to take in the smell of rubber cement orange peel wet clay from the potter's wheel deep sweet smells of burning wood with all those delinquent boys and seductresses huddling there in their smirks and goggles

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Summer, End (for Parthenopi) Jeff Streeby Where this frail shell of cool shade thins, sunshine trammeled to freckles is a simple bridge of air. Its stitches ripped, everywhere our firmament unravels— care carving the heart (the greater tale) in a blue way so rare Adam did not find its name. Here Cain simmered until his soul grew to bear him true fruit— his share of the bruised earth fails yet to mend him.

Soft August nights’ cool ground fogs crowd thick the low places. Earth rounds toward Fall. In harvest time, trees retire to their stiff silhouettes. A rime of ice rims ponds too black to salvage sky. Moons the color of eggshells float there. Shrill traffic spills south out of Portsmouth. County Line Road follows the folded living hills. Stars distant as hearts speckle vast cold tracts of Heaven. Headlights, taillights— everywhere breath of the herdsman brother sparkles like pollen.

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She Richard Alan Bunch This desk, the ebony one, white with heat. How I know it. Scribblings by lamplight circles, blustery nouns, arrows, dishwater adjectives all cross-fertilized and recrossed. Long into the nights she would write. These curtains swayed with each breeze. Summers and cicadas came and disappeared over the hill. Her words the broken eyelids she adorned, those pulled out tongues from chaos, were the symbolic moves forged by the collapse of distance between us. We are getting to know each other, she would say, pursing her lips. For her, each passion was a cloudtree from our ancestors who watch us while we sleep. And hers thumbprinted a mask with words in blood. Happy the silent listener, she would say, pensive, downing a Black Russian, who hides from us the fever-inclusive past. Sometimes in snow I can still hear her leather boots crunching choppy ice-fugues where the unimaginable aimed to reckon the dusted ambits of her soul. Even then we could winter with a winter's mind and find resolve in a concave mirror, a moon's rise for each lingering bird.

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Burying the Cricket Heidi Steidlmayer Chirp infinitely now on your arid bed of silences, doll in a tiny white box.

My husband mock-solemn digging with a child's trowel: yea, though we walk through the valley before I said stop saying that and the hole going deeper, my daughters throwing dandelions in, one two three--then the loose dirt top, and we all walked quickly away into a wind that seemed to be coming from our house. That night I dreamt a cat was digging you up like a fallen bird and when I turned to stop it from happening I vanished.

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May is the Month of Our Lady Tim Donnelly She wears cloud white and sky blue there is a snake under her bare feet her eyes are serene heavy lidded she can handle this her tiny palms turned out like whaddaya want fer nothen can I make you a sandwich J was a great Catholic mom she frowned on fortune telling games & Will Not buy me a 2-foot Mary statue for my room but in Sister Anna Mary's room we have an altarette Where we crown our lady with fresh flowers every day for a month sa vey sa vey sa vey regina the Mary icon I finally got for first communion was so small I was ashamed magnet on the bottom for dashboard stability but our school had lots of um

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The Sego Milk Plant Burned in ‘92 Jack Hill And I thought about when we lay our ears to the steel rails near the corner of “F” and McFarland

Where Pacific Engines shook the dead from the dirt and the grass holding them under Slate blue rocks piled around the rails and blue belly lizards burrowed Where we lifted our ears from the tracks when they rumbled and ran home thinking about the world outside this town we never had to know

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Listening To Pink Floyd In A Thai Restaurant J. A. Goolsby 3... 2... 1... The bells took flight like they do at morning during that slow minute before life starts again when the sky is brushed with Johnnie Walker Blue. We sat facing each other whispering because that is what people do at a Thai restaurant, the lights so dim, textiles draped red and velvet, pillows everywhere. Her brown hair kept falling, three strands lazy, irritating an eyelash. I watched her lips as she spoke, the slight curve she formed to blow quick puffs of breath to the hair in her eye. She fiddled with hemp jewelry and crossed her legs underneath a patchwork skirt, her eyes grey and white like spray—Adriatic, that one coastal view. I inhaled the entirety of her, took a big breath of Jenna and filled my lungs with the chime of her personality ringing like the bells in stereo spilling out of four old speakers mounted near the ceiling of four separate corners singing a chorus of alarms one after the other each sound individually recorded in an antique shop. Time. From this side of the moon where a man like me can sit with a woman like her quietly listening to Pink Floyd in a Thai restaurant. “So, it’s been years,” I said. “Why'd you call?" “It’s no big deal,” she replied, “and don’t make it out to be something it’s not. You always do.” “I’m not making anything. Wait. Before we start . . .” “Start what? I saw that thing in the paper,” she said. “Good Morning America? Who could of guessed that, right? Jared Jackson. Wow. Now he's in front of the camera.” “I don't get it. Why do you care?” “I can get a dose of you every morning. I can drink you with my coffee. It’s not like the news isn't depressing anyway.” “Still, huh?” “Still what?” she replied. “Still like this. Lashing out. The shit you always pull.” “I’m not lashing, just conversating.” She always said it like that. Conversating. I hated it before, a nerve tickler, but as I sat there with her I remembered the tickle fondly. Jenna leaned back and pulled a cigarette from behind her ear. She scratched fire against the table and burned the stick alight before giving it two quick puffs. Smoke drifted lazily from her nose as she turned away, staring off, wisps of second-hand laughing along the slope

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of her neck. “It’s no big deal. Really,” she said, her eyes rolling instead of meeting mine. She was just a girl when I met her on a dirt street just outside of Fresno. I was a cameraman newly introduced to porn—big tits, bubble-gum clits, blissful ignorance. She dealt pot by the pound but specialized in baked goods. She had a regular route hitting the set on Mondays and Fridays with cookies and brownies. Sometimes after a hard rain she would slip me a dose of mushrooms, the naughty kind that bring abandoned feelings in truck stop bathrooms for minutes that seem like hours. We shared our first night together at a La Quinta in Clovis. She fucked me fast and heartless with opiates in the air and the smell of menstruation on bed sheets. She let me rest my hand upon her thigh as she rolled a joint in the nude, nipples snoozing, sweat at her temples, cigarette cocked to the side of her mouth. “Enough about you,” she said. “I had a showing a couple of weeks ago. Thought I’d see you.” “I heard. Didn’t think much about it.” “Asshole.” “Why do you say that?” “Oh, fuck you and your stupid questions, Jared. Come on.” “You called me. I don't know why I have to keep reminding you of that.” “So, where’s this Sheila girl you’re seeing?” “Moved to Portland. How’d you know?” “I heard. Portland?” “Had someone else’s baby.” “What’s with your luck, huh?” “The winners . . . as my dad would say.” “I was a winner,” she said staring into a soy sauce container. “You were something,” I replied. She used to hit me when I didn't pay attention to the books she read aloud. She'd grab something near and throw it hard. She read Nietzsche and Flaubert, just not my style. She'd yell at me in French, and then laugh, and we'd fuck again. Jenna had a sexual desire for knives. She kept them on her body, her secret places. I guess she was some sort of ninja on her good days, and maybe that explained why she claimed to be Buddhist even though she sometimes whispered the Hail Mary in her sleep. “Something awful, probably,” she said, head down, smoke turning cycles in the air. Our old Thai waitress stared at us from across the room cursing in a language that upon listening never seems vague. The old woman slammed the cash register shut. The force knocked over a crooked sign that read, “You No Smoke Here.” “Probably,” I said, but wanting to say more.

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“I’m glad you decided not to kill yourself. The guilt from a shotgun blast would have done me in. Were you even serious, Cobain?” “What the fuck? What kind of question is that? Was I serious? I was serious about a lot of things. And you know what? Guilt would’ve been nice,” I said. “You could’ve cared some.” “I was seventeen,” she said. “You don’t seem much different.” “I’m in my twenties now, and that’s pretty fucking different. Look at you, you’re thirty.” “I’m not thirty.” “Whatever. You’re different. We’re all different. Everything is different. Time is time is time, right?” After a year together and six months after I left God behind, Jenna left me in a hotel room with two Mexicans, an eight ball of coke and roses in the trash bin. It took me years to leave that room behind, and when I did I had to kick heroin because it was brown like her skin and smooth like the smoke that curled from her mouth, three joints down, two bowls in. “What are we doing here?” I asked. “Listening to Pink Floyd in a Thai restaurant.” Her beauty made me sick, now confronted with the curves of her again, the puffed folds of her ears, her hot breath, slow tongue. I couldn’t help but consume the visage of a woman I had done well to forget. She had been almost gone from me, the taste of her an incarcerated memory shoved in the same confinement where I stuffed the good times with my mother, but it all came back, the image, the emotion, the dark dreams of her breath against mine. “I loved you, Jared. I really did.” “Jenna. I still . . .” but she raised her hand. “I know.” It’s how she said it, resigned. “Isn’t it about time?” I asked, grasping for the sand slipping through our fingers. “Life isn't about time, Jared.” “I don't know,” I said, embarrassed, confused. We sat in silence for a moment, and in the quiet I realized how sad I was to see her, so sad to remember what it felt like to love and what it meant never to feel such a thing again. I looked away from her, and I could see out in the distance all the time between us drifting away with the smoke rings in the air. When I turned back to her I noticed a sense of euphoria building from the depth of me. I felt as if my body was sinking into the caverns of myself and the feel good of it all put me in a state of warmth that reminded me of a time in my life when my outlook was more free, the consequences trivial, and then I asked her, “What have you done to me?”

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“Just the thing that I always do,” she said, chewing the side of her lip, fingering her hair back behind her ear. “Did you put something in the food?” I asked. “The cook in the kitchen. He’s a client. Asian kid. Obviously, right?” She lifted her hand to the red drapery covering the windows and the paper lanterns with their soft glow. “He grows the best mushrooms in town.” “You didn’t,” I said. “You know I did, Jared.” “Fucking scandalous.” “It's about to hit you, Jared,” she said. “What are you going to do with it all?” Indeed, there was mind-fuck in my body. The high marched itself on singing lippy tunes, and I became more at ease because she was there, and she did this to me, she did everything to me, and even far apart we were the essence of it all, and I felt like a person feels when walking into a room where stands a long dead mother suddenly alive again, the womb of her arms so soft in the tight embrace, because it was her, because it has always been her, but even so, I was afraid because it had been so long, and I think I said all of that out loud. “I know,” she whispered back to me. “You no smoke here!” the old Thai lady cried. "You leave now. Go!" Jenna slapped her hands against the table, her cigarette writhed upon her lips as a pleased rage passed softly behind her eyes. Jenna stood quickly and tossed her arms to the air and said, “What about it, lady?” Jenna swiped both hands across the table sending Thai china to the floor, and I saw all of this in surround-sound, on Blu-ray Disc, shards of porcelain expanding like flowers in fast-forward bloom. I stood and my legs twisted like the palsy and my arms began to chacha-cha. “These are good shrooms,” I said. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.” I took Jenna’s hand and we stumbled over the meal on the floor. A Samurai in purple polka dots appeared behind us holding a butcher knife and a wilted rose. “Who are these people?” I screamed. We ran out the door into the night air, and the moon brought us to our knees. I forgot the beauty of it all, the twisted elegance. And she was there with me holding my hand staring at the same moon spinning in its own cosmic breeze. We heard sirens. The moon lost its priority. We ran laughing. The wind carried us on a whoosh of splendid inebriation, trees looming, cars purring, street lights fucking reality in the ass. It was almost like I wasn’t thirty anymore.

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Lord Was I On Fire Oscar Navarro The bus came to a stop and I strolled on out. It was a powerful sizzlin' day, and the bank was sitting there all pretty across the street. Briefcase in hand I made my way to the entrance. There was a guard, he smiled and said “Hello, that is a fine suit sir” I tipped my hat and winked. “Thank you, it's my big day.” I waited in line for my turn. There was a breeze, a soft breeze. Not the kind that runs wild through trees and under the wings of birds, but the kind that creeps around a bank and into the blouses of make-up'd woman. When the teller called me She was a pretty young thingI shot her a smile and showed her my gun. Oh, how she blushed. Her eyes began to sparkle like chandeliers and tear up. She must've been so happy to see her dream man. The kind who appeared in her girlish wishes. “Can you please give me some money darling?” Her pretty little hands were shaking like leaves in a city park, and suddenly it felt real quiet. “That'd be fine right there.” Half finished I drifted towards the exit and saw that nice guard again. “STOP! GET DOWN!” “What? In this suit?” The poor boy must've been crazy. I kept on drifting, and the closer I got the warmer it felt. There were some cheers, mostly women. It got warmer. I heard the jangle of a fire alarm, It got hot. People started to move around all crazy like My suit lit up. Lord was I on Fire.

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(probably still is)

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Thanatography (for Georgia)

Jeff Streeby The projector’s motor whines and mutters. Fixed in the drive wheel’s notch, a blank leader winds its narrow way through stiff gears. 8mm film, its pictures precise, clear as little cartridges stuttering, rattles past light enough stray years through the motley ribbon spool out briefly bright against our makeshift screen. Out of brittle celluloid, a thin shrine growing yellow as crowfoot, yellow as flax, the clattering machine uncoils our strip of memories, each in the mechanical convexity of the camera’s eye now different, holy. Queenly matron, dark, domestic heirophant, trailer-park Hatshepsut watering your rare lilies and poppies, your absence will always wear its first dimensions here. Like sand-blown alcoves of a Pharaoh’s roofless colonnades, this entablature, this small mute arcade of frames, your flickering tribute of elaborate hieroglyphs, this memorial charade unrolling, laddering reel to reel, measures out for us with each cartouche that lost world we still keenly feel, however raggedly captured to our contemporary wall. Behind you, African violets blooming on a window sill— a cold day, a lowering sky, workers changing shifts at a rundown mill— chill dusk on a dead end street, coal soot on snow, drab tenements— carved granite faces in a row— Rocky Mountain sundown, a shrill cone of famous steam backlit lavender and rose— trail’s end, the river spilling downstream, white mules against red sandstone cliffs— “Sinatra” on The Sands marquee— bars of golden light paying through a canopy of Redwood trees— Disneyland rising toward the sky, its ranks of extravagant cupolas planted with pennants— webs of eminent orange (towers strung between with heavy graceful harps of cables)— a ship’s rail and a following sea— across an elegant table, a view of Diamondhead— a slender moon— and inch on inch playing down the wheel, a parade of vague companions allowed to steal a scene or two reveal to us the loneliness of your afternoons. So do all those weddings, showers, reunions, birthdays, graduations spread across your calendars. The end interrupts forever one last self-conscious gesture. Final frames chatter past the lamp. Our screen goes white. Dull doggerel in a pulpy funeral pamphlet. Black Cadillacs in a row along a curb. The reel spins on, clicking like a metronome. Words, few, cut small in stone. Rosemary. Pansy. Rue. Old home movies too.

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Hallucinations Jeffrey H. MacLachlan You should have pulled over miles ago. The sun slopped away like canned beets and now the moon is a serrated lid. That white rolling lump -- corpse or grocery bag? Frequent blinking. Circular saws rumble from somewhere. That darkened van

up ahead disposes of bodies and an eye appears in their side mirror. Nautilus inky pinhole eye. Suddenly, it recoils into an osmena pearl from a sharpened branch's stab. Trees drag dry tentacles along trunks and doors, jiggling locks.

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Twilight Bleeds Pam Muick

The mind flutters after opalescent moths lured to moon mirroring blossoms, is swallowed by a spiraling bat, is nabbed by an avenging owl and later, coughed up in a packet of woven gopher bones, fur and cricket legs.

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Good Morning Chloe Taylor Evans

When the day's infant dead pull the dirt to the earth like a blanket at evening I am on the continent of lakes and radios and cacti and my baby does not die. It is how in the country money is not talked about. That clean smell is sage.

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Walls of Dignity Mathias Nelson I’m still peering through holes father punched through the door. Mom’s flying down the stairs like a ghost on speed, her moon white nightgown waving with her descent, feet moving so fast they’re unseen. She leaps down the last gloom steps, screams “I wish you died!” He chases her, lifts her, pushes her against the kitchen cupboard, grinding, salivating. And I five and terrified, yell “Just stop, please, stop!” Until he drops her, crumbles into his own callused hands as she continues to shoulder through drunk, invisible barriers, walls of dignity, while I meander into the night with my toy gun, sneer at neighbors cooing to each other in unlit porches, aim at their shadow forms and not only imagine the killing of love.

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Eye Zachary Craig Developing nations are susceptible to plagues of locust; our cities are kept safe by spyplanes the size of beetles. A population that cannot tell if it is being watched takes the possibility for granted. The cuckoo is not here to tell time, but to lay eggs in your nest. Her simulacra are actually representations of their users, unaware of the darkness until forced into light.

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Suisun Valley Review

presents the poetry of

Seven previously unpublished poems from the recently completed manuscript,

Ethos and the Dreamwheel

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Indigo Moor Indigo Moor’s “Tap-Root” was published in 2006 as part of Main Street Rag’s Editor’s Select Poetry Series. He is a 2003 recipient of Cave Canem’s Writing fellowship in poetry, former vice president of the Sacramento Poetry Center, and editor for the Tule Review. He is the winner of the 2005 Vesle Fenstermaker Poetry Prize for Emerging Writers, a 2009 Pushcart Prize nominee and 2009 Jack Kerouac Poetry contest winner. Other honors include finalist finishes for the T.S. Eliot Prize, Crab Orchard First Book Prize, Saturnalia First Book Award, Naomi Long Madgett Book Award, and WordWorks Prize. He has received scholarships to the Summer Literary Series in St. Petersburg Russia, the 2006 Idyllwild Summer Poetry Program, the Indiana University Writer’s Conference, and the Napa Valley Writer’s Conference. His work has appeared in the Xavier Review, LA Review, Mochila Review, Boston University’s The Comment, the Pushcart Prize nominated Out of the Blue Artists Unite, Poetry Now, Cave Canem Anthologies VIII and IX, The Ringing Ear, the NCPS 2006 Anthology, Blue Moon Literary & Arts Review, Breathe 101: Contemporary Odes, and Gathering Ground. Indigo is a graduate member of the Artist's Residency Institute for Teaching Artists. Collaborative efforts include readings for the Artists Embassy Intl. Dancing Poetry Festival, the Livermore Ekphrastic Project, and the Davis Jazz Arts Festival.

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Indigo Moor

Halo in Decline

Paul Delaroche’s La Jeune Martyre Paul Delaroche christened a halo to drain the glacial shine from your cheek as you float, martyred to the rolling Tiber, the world around you thick, cast high by camel hair and steady, steady hand.

Minutes after Diocletian’s tyranny marries you to current— your body still warm enough to trail steam across the river’s roiling skin— Paul summons expensive oils, and over-priced brushes to petrify you to canvas. Each man believing the other’s heavy-handed strokes blur you into the Tiber’s darkness.

A hundred years later your body is still drifting past moored boats. There is ritual evident in your wrists cross-bound, roped to your waist, every line of you sloping down into the shimmering cold. Driven sweet, the day bitters, glows and trickles along your tonguebeckoning throat. Your hair, once autumn’s great mane, is now dulled and wintered. The frigid bedding brilliantly peaks your rosy hue, your insolence. Your flint and spark was snuffed, rescinded by the emperor’s night, but, no less so by Delaroche’s ambition. Dare I say: despite both men, you radiate still— that damnable resolve, irreverent smile that surely hastened the hammer’s fall.

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Seven Poems from Ethos and the Dreamwheel

The Procurer

Lucien Freud’s “The Procurer: Man in Headscarf” By God, it could be anything: a vase, curved or a candlestick, slender this person you lessen, intensely, with such mute articulation piece by piece by inch and avarice. But always your title demands: this acquisition must be female. Your fleshy nose probes the crooked ways. Lucien gave you his uncle’s eyes— tender wicked seeds that pockmark your forehead— set aslant above the raw, puffed cheeks; alternately stroked: violent pinks, translucent grays. Fixated upon you (as you, I) perhaps canvas is the portal by which you view me as valued product of oils and thinners. Cloaked as clergy, swaddled in ochre headscarf, your lips pursed to suit as if in prayer; though if you are priest, your allencompassing head the heaven-seal that binds the world, then I am cast off rosary, beyond sin, beyond sin and hope, beyond sin and hope and prayer Always, I am left whispering my tongue fingering your name: The Procurer gatherer, provider of flesh. For hours, for days, for those truculent lips, I keep a despairing vigil: waiting for the moment when that dark-hinged gate swings open— exit the solemn breath— the choice, the damned: “That one. Her.”

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Indigo Moor

Mississippi Barbecue Postcard #80 from “Without Sanctuary” exhibit Sliced away and soaking in jars the sweet parts: tongue, eyes, genitals saved for luck and souvenirs. The negro ablaze, back arched as if in ecstasy. Having lingered once too long on a white woman’s face he is reclined, bullet-ridden, languid on the blistering pyre. Centered in the tableau, still-life positioned for the cameraman’s steady eye. Twice, the magnesium flash sparks through the dapper crowd: two score fedora&bonnet-crowned heads lean into sightline. Swamp-rot and blood-lust crawl through the eyes. Later, there’s potato salad & sweet cold tea. Soaked in blood, soaked in piss, the hunting sack lies crumpled into itself at fires edge, smoldering. Rumor is the postcards will be a dollar.

The body now chalking, hollowed, is left to children; lipless, it grins, crackling in tinder. The Sheriff’s youngest boy rattles a cane ‘round the ribcage ‘til it caves like a miner’s tomb. A fiery halo blossoms on the chin. Bits of charred flesh flake away, float lazily on the night breeze. Flame-struck and spellbound, the pastor sucks absently a rib-bone, prays the children understand the need for cleansing.

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Seven Poems from Ethos and the Dreamwheel

Malaise Your feet moored to autumn planking, empty boardwalk. I snap pictures— rocks wish-washed clean in tidal pools. Summer has moored itself over the great unwashed horizon. I snap pictures— seagulls anchored to stone clouds. You want a remembrance of the two gulls skidding over the placid surf. I fake snapping a picture. Upset about something earlier, forgotten. I am reminded how everything is not a poem today or ever: not the dead fiddler crab— Trojan horse shell of maggots— gracing the shoreline. I have a camera today proving this nothing is everything worth writing about: the turtle, back-wobbled by the Doberman, slobbering. claw-prodding, interesting, yes, but not a metaphor for anything save that even Death can lose its way, sunning on a lackluster beach unnoticed if the haze is just so.

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Indigo Moor

Moonlighting The circus now packed in mothballs and crates for the winter, tigers stowed, elephants anchored to dust. Down from my perch removed from bright lights, I am nothing. Certainly, no longer the Tattooed, Albino Snake-Man, not with popcorn machines rusting, cork-loaded popguns hibernating, unpolished. Today, I am just a thin-tall freak sipping Earl Grey, natty housecoat & slippers, house shades drawn. Mesmerized by TV (no sound) news of The Little Girl Trapped 30 feet beneath earth, devoured by hunger: the open maw of a ghost-dry well. No fireman, no policeman, no holyman can reach her. Savor the tension, hands wringing. All thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s missing is big top glare.

On screen, exasperated, the sheriff picks up a phone to call, finally meâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; an albino thin-tall carnie, sipping tea, not surprised by the phone jarring, vibrating away the silence.

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Seven Poems from Ethos and the Dreamwheel

Maybe, superstition makes me the last person called or perhaps itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the scarlet robe I theatrically cast off my illustrated skin, carnival freakshow attraction turned savior: Snake! Molting!

Man!

once more, body a supple tongue twisting along forbidden paths.

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Indigo Moor

Messages from the Ether Your first text message put you in The Decameron, tracking Boccacio through love’s sickness and deep, moist erotica. You leave no name, your number unrecognizable. Weeks later, I’m in City Lights coaxing Jane Shore to raise the trapeze artist once more from concrete and straw. I read you are hours away from winging above my head through fog and spring on your way to Hong Kong. That night, I dream dragon-smoke scripting my name against a flame-red sky. A month later, Man on Wire traps you between two towers glued to a wire swaying over a man-made chasm. I’m in bed nursing a knee swollen around an ACL stretched to disbelief. You say Petit left you dizzy, mind spinning unhinged above the rubble that will be decades later dragging glass and ruin beneath autumn’s indifference. Three months pass before I ask who you are careful of the fragility of names and faces made concrete, easily shattered. It’s Eva you reply from Boston, from the Fogg, from theater and poetry reaching through static and distance. Eva, my friend, as I write this poem, Boston should be past the flowering season, heat hovering over the Charles, dragonflies rustling. I imagine you on the North Bank, sitting lotus-style, your hair a knot that trails down your back. You lean over your phone, concentrating on every letter and symbol before winging them across ether.

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Seven Poems from Ethos and the Dreamwheel

Puertas Abiertas Oil on canvas by Marco Rosales Understanding the hubris inherent in Dorian Gray’s psyche, you paint flesh with flesh, cast heart pulp down as if it were Toro Bravo. Slowly you pump varying shades, red across four chambers of canvas. Always mindful of the shaman’s warning: Never sell this original. In all its frangibility enfolding, slow synthesis of blood and fervor we are reminded: this is your chest split-ripe, the heart still beating like a blacksmith’s forge. Royal chestnut bleeds to dark Venetian top to bottom as your strokes contract and relax, diastole & systole, piston-work of your passion. Through the left and right atrium, crimson ripples, raised in relief, hold court with an orange Cordoban hat, throbbing like an autumn sun. Below, calming fervor is woven into your ventricles: flamenco boots in blurred motion. A noose-thin tie laid flat, restrains a wan river cascade. And all the while the canvas tinged with undulating waves, as if in afterthought you offer up your trackwork of nerves in sacrifice, pulsing with cryptic lightning.

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The Quinton Duval Award in Creative Writing

To honor Quinton Duval, Professor Emeritus of English and Creative Writing and long-time faculty advisor to the Suisun Valley Review, an award in creative writing has been established for current students at Solano College to praise and recognize our students’ literary endeavors and to remember the contributions of the award’s namesake.

Eligible recipients are current students at Solano College. Submitted creative works are also considered for publication in the Suisun Valley Review during our normal spring semester reading session. Finalists are selected by Solano College creative writing faculty, and the winner is chosen by Quinton Duval. The winning author has his/her name added to a memorial plaque located in the Solano College Library, is awarded a stipend and will see his/her winning piece published in that year’s Suisun Valley Review. Announcements and corresponding deadlines for the 2010 Quinton Duval Award will be released during the fall 2009 semester. For more information, please direct inquiries to Michael J. Wyly, English Department, Solano Community College.

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2009 First Annual Quinton Duval Award in Creative Writing Prize Winner

Tatters Barbara Schmidt The sunrise greets the end to another sleepless night Closing my eyes, thoughts and memories claw at me Like unwanted tormentors, reminding me of the loss And all that is left are tatters Tatters of what once was: Our room with the golden walls The sweet soft security of our bed Your voice whispering good night The mirror where we brushed our teeth And hung notes expressing our love The way it felt making love with you on the beach The joy after being told we had a healthy baby girl The way I trusted you completely Saturday morning pancakes And how the kids loved the way you made them The old red leash for the dog And our early morning walks The hot tub where we drank and laughed deep into the night The way you touched me when we were alone Thanksgiving and Christmas, laughter, and loving The way I felt you slipping away The company party and shopping for the perfect dress The black Betsy Johnson gown I wore When I found out about the lie The elegant marble floor where I knelt sick from the truth Driving home in the pouring rain How strange the house looked as we pulled into the drive The diamond ring I stripped from my finger

The way it felt to say good bye.

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Monastery Jack Hill Ben no longer cared if he lived or died. He hadn’t tried to kill himself, but he wouldn’t have protested proceedings of the sort. The strains of depression had no bearing on his state. Most evenings he paced over and counted the greasy wooden crossties which supported the steel rails that shot parallel with McFarland road. His kin, Ari, was buried in the town cemetery that lay by the old tracks which traced past the rubble of the Sego Milk Plant that burned down back in ‘92 and the rusted Galt water tower. Ben and Ari hunted blue belly lizards near those same tracks most evenings at dusk, when the lizards came out from under the rocks to feed on crickets. Ten years back, Ben told Ari to grab a large lizard he spotted mere inches from the steel rails, under some gray stones. They heard the train whistle scream, but Ben didn’t think it too close because the crossing arms hadn’t begun to fall. Ari scrambled for the creature just as a Pacific Engine roared by and carried a loose cable that whipped Ari across the throat and face. He died before the ambulance arrived. The smell of manure collided with the sound of the train bustle. The sun’s array of reds fell to the West as Ben drifted along the hot tracks and rail spikes laid in 1869, the time when the dead town of Liberty moved a few miles North-West and became Galt. A slight silhouette just fifty feet South stood on the tracks. Ben froze up. He reached for his blade. The silhouette moved North and shouted. “Hey! Hey, kid!” Dusk faded the silhouette into a young man; blonde and slender framed. Ben hadn’t recognized the kid. He kept his hand firm on the handle of his blade. “I’ve seen you -- seen you on these tracks ‘most every night -since I moved here -- ‘few months back -- I live ‘cross the street,” the blonde pointed to a yellow duplex, “figured you might want some company.” Ben turned his gaze to the East and shook his head. He sidestepped around the blonde and continued to count and balance on the cross ties where his memory served him last. With both arms stuck straight out into the dust specks and dirt that rose from tractor tires that smashed into the pavement and the air and with his fingers spread apart, he reached around the sun while it drowned

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behind the old sleeping neighborhoods and worked farmland as dusk turned to darkness. The blonde back peddled in front of Ben and tripped over the rocks that piled on both sides of the rails: “I jus’ figured you’re always walkin’ out here. You don’t have to say nuthin’ -- I’m jus’ bored -- nuthin’ to do here -- know what I mean? I don’t know, man. This town’s all right, I guess. So, why you always out here? I miss my friends. I was about-” “You know, there these monks that don’t do a thing,” Ben looked the blonde over, “They don’t eat, don’t talk, never sleep, but they don’t commit suicide -- they think life’s pointless -- I guess it makes suicide pointless to ‘em, I don‘t know” Ben spoke as if for the first time; he watched the letters float from between his lips, form the words, then the sentences he’d just made. The letters shone gold in the dusk light. When he reached forward to touch each word, they fluttered away. He went back to counting crossties.

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Five Degrees Fahrenheit Afghanistan, Winter

Edythe Haendel Schwartz Daybreak in the killing frost. A man waves from a makeshift platform at the out of focus sea of faces flattened by the telephoto lens. Behind the camera’s eye: A mother holds her cold– hardened baby, three days old, his blanket, in shreds, her mouth agape as if to bare a sore tooth. An AK 47 leans against her tent. Hanging from the rifle’s butt, a child’s sock. A father feeds his children Opium exposure lengthens.

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Tonight My Muse Is Mexican Mathias Nelson

Dark messy, balding hair, pillow muffled laughter— Kill me, he says as I shove his head down harder into the soft whiteness. Hard as I can. His fists beat the mattress with giggles; his feet kick the strength from my arms and I let go. He turns over under me, crazy with whiskers and a wide, crooked grin. I smash his nose with my palm, make bone infiltrate brain. Ha! Ha! Ha! he laughs, blood streaming from his nostrils, red mires between his teeth. Haw! Ha! I twist his neck all the way around and back, over and over, crackle-crackle-crackle his neck grows thinner each time, taller like it’s made of clay; his mangled face looms, floats above me in the moonlight and his dry, rough tongue rolls out, licks words across my eyes: Sí, escribir esto.

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Revival Ashaki M. Jackson

Hum the halogens. Pinch the tubes between our Latexed fingers and blow bubbles in the catheter bagâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s red clay. Here is where the body returns to dirt or pot. Let us pine. Pinup our hair in this sterile kitchen. grandmotherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s overcooked meat.

Stir

Let us Sufi spin in these gowns until we are breathless. The breath falls falls out like the Holy Spirit out of the working lung like silver coins into breathing machines.

falls

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In Medias Red Zachary Craig You tell me you don't believe in fairies, and fall down cold. A bell rings, and you ascend into the smog. In basements all across heaven, angels recast halos as bullets. The desired results of traditional Western institutions are successful marriage, childbirth, and slow, expensive death. To fly below the radar, we wear cloaks of poetry, which is assumed to be a traditional Western institution. The second star to the right is detritus from a satellite collision. The bell is still Big Ben, wishing to cry out every time the clock's hands resemble crucifixion. If I die to show my love for the world, they'll claim it was for art. If I die for art, they'll claim it was for attention, and keep it below the radar. If I die for attention, you'll be the first to know.

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Fuse Jeffrey H. MacLachlan “All Bedlam, or Parnassus, is let out:” —Alexander Pope, “Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot” Her howl of Niagara grapes in rain, the diesel fragrance of wine like pleasant knuckles underneath the split lips of a cave. There, she sips thuja oil while taking a pen to lines. Then she sweetly sings have some jeweled words, taunting the camphor to breathe closer. It was a mistranslation, she adds, my real name is fuse. The rocky ground is littered with blackened crocuses, dry letters, and the spoiled and rank fingers of poets outstretched with bottle flies. A buzzard with fires in each cheek lingers as pigeon-blood rubies from the cave explode in echoed epistrophes.

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Thylacine Michael S. Begnal With a loping run across a road he disappears again into trees, the loneliness must be much more than just a drag,

as when I woke up in a dream in this couple’s apartment, didn’t know them at all and had to leave immediately, but that stuffed thylacine came alive and smiled, his eyes glowed then and seemed almost to speak • on black-and-white film he paces a cage, why should I be tortured like this? antagonized and confined, stripes evolved for grasses, bush, not bars or chicken-wire, the difference between a ‘solitary nature’ and involuntary seclusion— to be denied the camaraderie of fellow furréd beings— I am forced into this room— through the door, her insoluble angers

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• or, stripes evolved for individual recognition, the smile of his happy jaws crushed out yeah that’s right— fuck you imperialism or whatever, just fuck you and never again trouble us or our pouched species fuck you and your northern hemisphere reference points, of “hyaena” or “wolf” or “tiger”— you don’t understand our point of view you leave our carcasses to rot, you bring yourselves bad weather • don’t you understand, nobody has ever acted like this toward me before, and it is really freaking me out/ a marsupial face emerges from the tree line edged in sun on the beach, another one exits behind rocks, and they will never see each other again

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Thanksgiving Anna Skelly Sit for thirty minutes with your back against the commode. You're shitting out turkey and dirty martinis, staring at the white door with two squares and pewter doorknob. Second guess yourself -it's most likely nickel. Feel glib about never having seen cocaine in person. So above it all. Ask yourself why he's kissing the brunette instead of you..

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Simultaneity

after Hiroshima Mon Amour

Josh Neely A poem leaps backwards up a cross-cut redwood – time is a ring – and there is a woman in a white dress in front of that ring. This virtual green. And she falls, has fallen, is always falling. Now I don’t want to alarm you, but how did we get up in this bell tower in the first place? • At that instant she read his face with her hands he read her face with his and there was no doubt that their past was a language transformed. A new syntax. An underwater tea room with an automatic jukebox. Her plane leaves tomorrow. The curves of the earth fall away in two directions at once.

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Can You Feel My Heartbeat?

She Places My Hand Over Her Breast Red Shuttleworth The town's lousy with fluorescent lights, warped wooden coffins sloppy-stacked behind the lone saloon... pudgy women blustering to each other over ailments of the barren womb and shrunk spine. The great thing is to drink from the train desperado's skull cup. The gnarled, craggy face mutters like an old frontier juggler in a dream of dancing hogs. See the seller of robins in wicker cages. See the two-fisted banjo man hiding in that stone church east of Scottsbluff. Badgers at bay, no school after fifteen, ghostly meth girls are arrows made of bone. And listen to the hymns in the mulberry trees. Near steady, I tap down on the motel clock radio. How strange to own a sixty-three year old face, coyote hair growing wild from my big ears.

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Lifelines Mike Swope I cup her breasts in the palms of my hands, her erect nipples teasing the taut lifelines found there, excited and anxious as a newborn deer taking its first steps, confused as the ripples in water spreading from the rocks and sands on the beach near the miles-deep dark Atlantic. She is warm and heavy with expectation, her toes curling under like wet chips of Red Cedar, head thrust forward trying to see into herself like an hourglass, counting the seconds, hours, millennia until the waves wrestle to the shore and carve their presence into the stone. Strange animals lurk beneath the surface, swimming, hiding, hunting, as gracefully as sandsharks, smelling concentrations of blood less than one part per million, howling like timber wolves in the tree line, warning of lives to come in upheaval of the wooden dock bubbling on the surface. I feed her to the beasts beneath her skin and they devour us as one, saved only by the lifelines etched into my palms by the mysterious genes of my parents, which have preceded us into the sea and battled the unfamiliar beasts and passed the wisdom through their hands.

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Late Hunt Jeff Streeby On a day this cold, you don’t even need the shotgun. They’re easy to spot, too, those beautiful birds dying in the tumbled stubble of harvest. Find their long tail feathers riffling prairie wind and you can take them alive out of little pockets in the snow. When you lift them from fencerows at the edge of empty pastures, from beside trees in abandoned orchards, withered fruit clattering overhead, from fallow ground where they shelter under shining plowcut rubble of clods, they look up at you unmoved, eyes empty mirrors, odd ice in morning’s raw glare. Tonight, below the Interstate, a cold familiar wind scours river ice six feet thick. New snowbanks build high under the bridge. Pearl is deserted, its few streetlights haloed in soot and old snow that spill in blizzards from downtown rooftops. That fine, chill powder when it dusts your face, melts, streaks down like tears. In front of Eagle Pawn Shop, where ragged spikes of rust-stained ice depend from eaves, tall, bistered drifts find hard shapes, slope knee-deep into the street. A plow, yellow lights flashing, growls across the intersection headed up Sixth. Rising over the vague skyline, the moon, oddly distinct, bright with an orient luster, counterfeits a silver coin in a deep pocket, an empty locket, a salver for a vanished chalice, every girl’s pale dowry. Along snow-choked back streets from Greenville to Riverside, lights glow behind curtains in cozy rooms. And all you’ve got is a narrow bed in another cheap hotel. All you’ve got is a place where you can close your eyes while out here in the dark the world freezes over. All you’ve got is an accidental nest where like a winterworn bird you can wait unmoved as what hunts you tonight approaches through the cold. Full moon— trees in silhouette cast silver shadows. Gaunt wolves eat snow.

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Heron’s Rest Mass Energy Crystal Anderson Heron downloaded, splayed a crest indicative of a demand when it stood still on the rock that broke through the lakeskin. This coruscation enlivened as back-building potential energy. It’s black eye spilled out filaments of bird speech without ever parting its beak.

A fish transferred by – then disappeared as information often does. No crackling of bones transpired but inertia began with gulps and water spray.

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A Study in Love Joanna Grossman we pause to gauge temperatures in the naked eye absorbing twinkles into our bloodstream like the tranquilizing effect of fortified wine similar stares of knowing absurdity displeasure and pleasure glowing like fireflies against the unseen smile of a waning moon “bioluminescence” you interrupt to note the origins of this mongrel word like “automobile” and “parasol” antipodal roots should never mix

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Frontage Road . . . Bars . . . Cafes Red Shuttleworth I walk slow from my orange carpet motel room to the nearest cafĂŠ. The music is not Townes Van Zandt, and it ought to be, but I sit for a chicken fried steak, green beans, marionberry pie, iced tea. It's just another borderland, lonesome-eyes highway. God's cunning, some guy says to me, unable to order a Diet Snapple with whiskey. He's about ready to tilt over into my booth. So I tell him, There's absolutely no reason for us to know each other, because I realize he said, coming, not cunning. Outside there's a splash of green in a storm-pewter sky and it's starting to hail marbles onto cars, loud as a knock-kneed whore on cheap blow.

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The Modern Persephone Erika Amaya In the back of a Chevy pick-up truck, Maria packs camóte, maíz, and tomátes, a ready harvest, knowing she must leave. At home, her husband waits by the side of the road, kicking loose rocks and sand with the toe of his boot. In the heat, the grains stick to his sole. Across the border, Maria makes her preparations and tells el campesino she will be back next Spring, ready for work, si Dios me da licencia.

The sun dulls the dust in her hair as she walks on broken huaraches, leaving a barren trail as she goes to her place of saguaro and mesquite. The seeds will wait for Maria’s return, to announce her arrival. She will carry something strange about her—a body and tongue of the darkest sand, a foreign taste. A reminder.

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Dresden Jesse Bradley The blanket wraps around you like a fallout shelter. You fill your hands with the currency of bed sheets. When you wake up, we will sift the ruins, rebuild.

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Contributor Notes Erika Amaya recently graduated from UC Davis with a Bachelor's degree in English Literature and Creative Writing. She is a former Solano Community College student and editor of Suisun Valley Review, an experience for which she will be forever grateful. She wishes to thank the editors, Quinton Duval, and the COD, Michael J. Wyly, especially, for giving her both something to live up to and something to go back to. Crystal Anderson is a writer and educator. She holds a BA from Baylor University and an MA from University of California at Davis. She currently lives in Davis with her cat, Tonks, and teaches writing for Axia College at University of Phoenix. Jami Beck is a photographer from Mt. Morris, Illinois. Jesse Bradley is based out of Orlando, FL. Recently, his work has appeared in decomP, Poetry Midwest, and Welter and forthcoming in Ozone Park, Dash Literary Journal, and Breadcrumb Scabs. His blog, Failure Loves Company, is located at <iheartfailure.wordpress.com>. Richard Alan Bunch teaches in the Humanities Division at Solano Community College. His works include Summer Hawk, Rivers of the Sea, Running for Daybreak, Santa Rosa Plums, and South by Southwest. Thrice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, his poetry has appeared in Windsor Review, Poetry Cornwall, Oregon Review, Fugue, Many Mountains Moving, and The Cape Rock. His latest work is Hawking Moves: Plays, Poems and Stories. Zachary Craig is originally from San Diego, California, and currently studies creative writing at UCSC. His work has appeared in Rapt, Matchbox, and Chinquapin where he currently is a co-editor. Tim Donnelly is a Special Education paraprofessional and Union Activist in addition to poet and artist. His work has most recently appeared in the SOMA Literary Review, and his drawings were used to illustrate francEyE's Grandma Stories. He reads frequently in Berkeley, San Francisco, and Los Angeles County. J. A. Goolsby is a writer from Amarillo, Texas, the birthplace of George Saunders, and the town where Oprah was once sued by cattlemen. He is nearing the end of a three-year struggle with his debut novel Girls against Yoga. Joanna Grossman is a graduate student in English at Harvard University. Her primary research interests are Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama. Vincent Gutierrez is an English major studying at College of the Canyons in Valencia, CA. This is his first publication, and he enjoys writing during his summer and winter breaks. Brian Anthony Hardie was born and raised in Portland, Oregon. His poems have appeared in The Pebble Lake Review (Houston, TX), Conceit Magazine (San Francisco, CA), Hudson View (NYC/South

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Africa), Decanto (UK), Ditchpoetry.com (Canada), SALiT Magazine (International), DaveJarecki.com, WordSlaw.com, and Angel Exhaust (UK). He is the bass player for experimental rock band Microtia. Jack Hill currently studies creative writing at Sacramento City College and plans to attend Humboldt State University next Fall. Ashaki M. Jackson is an ethnographer by proxy who re-invents her family history using obsolete cultural practices. Her work has appeared in The Drunken Boat, Cave Canem, Splinter Generation, and Mujeres de Maiz among others. In her spare time, she is a social psychologist. She currently lives in Los Angeles. Vanessa Jensen and her sister bought their first camera together two years ago and have been doing their best to figure out this magical world they have discovered while also doing their best to capture perfectly moments of joy and delight. Alan King has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as Alehouse, The Drunken Boat, and Black Renaissance Noire. In 2006, he selfpublished his first chapbook, Transfer, followed by his second in 2007, The Music We Are. He received fellowships from VONA (Voices of Our Nation) in 2003 and Cave Canem in 2007. He works as a reporter for The Afro-American Newspaper in Baltimore. Jeffrey H. MacLachlan has forthcoming work in Weave, The Iguana Review, and Beeswax Magazine. He hails from Skaneateles, NY. Pam Muick is a writer from Fairfield, CA. Oscar Navarro is a 22-year-old student at CSULA and enjoys the delicious results of misconceptions. Joseph Reich is a social worker who lives and writes in the strange state of grace of Massachusetts. He is a displaced New Yorker who sincerely does miss diss-place, most of all the Thai food, Shanghai Joe's in Chinatown, the fresh smoothies on Houston Street, and bagels and bialys of the Lower East Side. Barbara Schmidt is a student at Solano Community College who loves to express herself through writing. Red Shuttleworthâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s most recent poems have appeared in Rattle, Minnetonka Review, Concho River Review, and Weber: The Contemporary West. Jeff Streeby grew up in Sioux City, Iowa, where he attended Morningside College. He holds a Master of Fine Arts Degree in Poetry from Gerald Sternâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s program at New England College in Henniker, New Hampshire. He is a horseman, cowboy poet and performer whose work has been published in Western Horseman, The Big Roundup, Cowboy Poetry: The Reunion, Lynx, Rattle, Simply Haiku, Flashquake and others. Mollee Weaver is a photography student at Solano College.

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Special thanks to Philip Andreini, Bruce Clark, Quinton Duval, Jay Fields, and the Creative Writing faculty of Solano Community College for their continued support and efforts for the Suisun Valley Review.

Suisun Valley Review English Department Solano Community College 4000 Suisun Valley Road Fairfield, CA 94535 suisunvalleyreview@gmail.com

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