Cartier2nd

The Cartier Street Review

Literary and Art Magazine July 2013

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Cartier Street Review Joy Leftow Principal Editor & Layout New York http://joyleftowsblog.blogspot.com

Bernard Alain Founding Editor Ottawa Website: http://www.bernardalain.blogspot.com/

Thomas Hubbard Editor Puget Sound Website: http://poppathomas.wordpress.com/

Marc Carver Staff London

Brad Eubanks Staff Texas

Dubblex Assistant Editor Website: http://dubblex.blogspot.com

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Chor Boogie

Cover

M.Miriam Herrera

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William Robison

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Chor Boogie

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James Maloney

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Chor Boogie

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Florence Weinburger

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Mariela Griffor

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Chor Boogie

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Joe Giordano

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Chor Boogie

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Thomas Hubbard

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M. Miriam Herrera

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Evie Ivy

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Williams

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M. Miriam Herrera

Kaddish For Columbus: Prayer for 50 0 Years

—Legend says Columbus was a Crypto-Jew escaping Spain's Inquisition, along with a boatload of illegal Marranos, in hopes of settling in the New World

I believe in my animal twin: Together we bellow and embrace in arms of darkened hills winding above the Rio Grande, along the Sangres and Santa Fe, up to the Pajarito plateau.

I believe in the air at this elevation, in its power of redemption. I believe by grace of some ineffable pronouncement, I live— Not like some newcomer fish thin-blooded, spitting out voiceless sounds, but with lungs and gills of a new-wrought beast, easy in water and sky.

I believe in the rattlers' sect— Tribes who shed skin for sake of divinity, and accept as fate to be steered by a blackbird's tail.

I meditate on the Boundless, on the Inspiration that looks upon sundown's ruddy expanse and bestows commandments:

"Roll in river mud, inhale sage brush, build your houses round, clay red as the upper thigh of a sun-burned woman— Live! Live!"

(I trust in these words.) *

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I believe my Grandfather's spirit, looselegged in khakis, still carries a rifle and hunting knife north and south along this same river valley.

I believe in the hemisphere where there are no borders, no papers required to prove his footsteps on this land for over five hundred years.

(I consecrate to his memory the number 500.)

I believe my grandfather creates new Sabbaths, when he looks in the river at his rough, holy image. I believe he'll awaken my own sleeping image with his odd beauty: Skin, all at once the color of mountain snow, of river mud and adobe. Hair like cornsilk or tail feathers of a red-tailed hawk, and a soul, shiny and tempered as loot from Obsidian Ridge. *

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I confess— My hallowed temples are lands of dry heat. I've kept sandy beds on too many continents, just to be caressed by this heat. I forgive my promiscuity, my love for each singular oddity, promising to give me a form unlike my own.

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I reaffirm my vows to the desert as I taste its salty mouth, and know why pilgrims and prisoners come here: To wander through pincushion gardens, to see miles of footprints in circles, to be engulfed by flashfloods.

I extol the amour of the cholla, saguaro, beavertail, horse crippler, spiny stars and cat claw.

I worship the slow-moving hunters, green-eyed masters who see what burrows below. *

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I say Kaddish for Columbus and forgive him. I bless his explorer blood cast within me— An alloy of iron, nickel, silver, gold, cobalt, moon and meteorite.

I bless our ancient shamans who changed him into a limping wolf, so that every year he too makes the pilgrimage with the Vietnam vets with the lame, the blind, the shattered of will, with the Penitente brothers to Chimayo's candle-lit chapel.

He too rakes with his paw at the replenishing hole for a taste of miraculous dirt.

He too looks up with longing at abandoned crutches and metal braces hanging on old adobe walls.

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Gray fur is his purgatory— but I believe that one day he will find redemption.

When the generations of his heart can sway, genuflect, sway, to the new humanity his celestial navigations have created? *

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I glorify the shadow of spirits at dusk, their aweful power as they close in— flat-out run on hoofs— thumping toward a wandering soul, swept against a cliff by force of animal will.

I swear, this tiny soul remembers its first summer, holds a breath under the breaking sky, reveres blazes of pink, purple, gold— and covers its eyes when a juniper bush appears to catch fire.

At dusk, the earth's veins give up their color to the Sangre de Cristo mountains. The hills put on purple veils and bow to the sky. *Originally published in Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry

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Biography:

M. Miriam Herrera

M. Miriam Herrera graduated from the Chicago’s University of Illinois Program for Writers with an MA in Creative Writing where she was awarded an Abraham Lincoln Graduate Fellowship. Her graduate advisors and mentors for writing poetry were the late Ralph J. Mills, editor of The Selected Letters of Theodore Roethke, The Notebooks of David Ignatow; and the late Paul Carroll, founder of the Poetry Center of Chicago, Big Table Magazine, and the Big Table Series of Younger Poets.

Mills writes about Herrera; "I first discovered—and I use that word intentionally— Miriam Herrera's work in the midst of the generally rudimentary kinds of poems one receives in a beginning poetry workshop, a course often taken by students whose knowledge of and ambitions in the realm of poetry are extremely limited. The first poem Miriam turned in for class stunned me with sophistication, directness, and force."

Paul Carroll writes, "Herrera proved to be one of our most gifted poets to have ever studied in our Program. Her Master of Arts thesis—a manuscript of original poems—was one of the finest I have had the privilege to supervise."

Miriam has taught at the University of Illinois in Chicago; the University of New Mexico, Los Alamos; South Bay College, Hawthorne, California; and Russell Sage College in Troy, NY. Herrera has held positions such as Technical Writer/Editor with the Los Alamos Technical Associates, in Los Alamos, NM; and Associate Dean of Faculty at South Bay College, in Hawthorne, California.

Herrera’s poetry has been published in Southwestern American Literature, New Millennium Writings, Earth's Daughters, Albatross, ArtLife, Blue Mesa Review, Nimrod: International Journal of Prose and Poetry, and other journals. Her first collection of 9

poetry, Kaddish for Columbus, was a finalist in the New Women's Voices Chapbook competition and was published in 2009 by Finishing Line Press. Miriam is a board member of the Hudson Valley Writers Guild and an active member of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers in Lake Tahoe, CA: the Academy of American Poets, the Poetry Society of America, and the Society for Crypto-Judaic Studies.

Miriam's enigmatic ancestry compels her writing. As evidenced by her family's uniquely hybrid practices and traditions. Very likely they descend from Crypto-Jews or "conversos" from the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas. These "conversos" were converts to Catholicism who fled the Spanish Inquisition and came to live in the New World.

Descendants of these conversos intermarried with Native Americans and old Christians populating the American Southwest. In her poetry, Miriam explores her Crypto-Jewish, Chicana, and Native American identity, writing about the paradoxical nature of identity and the many-layered process one must face to reconcile the splintered parts of one's self.

Herrera’s believes identity is fluid and changing and that immersion in one culture at a time-and in the very midst of one’s homeland is primary to the process. Miriam states, "This concept is worth exploring because cultural fusion is the natural unfoldment of our country's people. My poetic topics only concern race and culture, but are ultimately about the oneness of how this unity crosses all boundaries of race, religion, culture, and gender identity."

In her classes, Miriam encourages students to develop a flourishing writing process unique to each writer, to tap into obsessions and write from their unconscious depths that must be discovered, uncovered, and nurtured. Miriam stresses the organic nature of the poem, and how a writer must listen closely for guidance in unearthing what the poem wants to do in form, sound, image, and meaning.

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William Robison Divine Confection Once my mother made a big plate of divinity and I said to my brother, bet you can’t eat just one.

Well, we fell out laughing, thinking about the time when we bought a bag of chips from the sexy checkout girl and kept making jokes coming home from the grocery cracking up and wondering how the Lays lady lays with a cautious nod to the copyright attorney and all due apologies to Mister Bob Dylan, though a man who makes his living from clever wordplay can hardly complain whenever it crops up elsewhere.

That’s especially true because he dropped his real name for his birth certificate reads Robert Zimmerman and I wonder: what if his favorite poets were Robert Frost instead of the thirsty Dylan Thomas, unstoppering by a snowy wood when he got dry?

Would he now be Robert Robert, and wouldn’t people have confused him early on with Robbie Robertson?

Or perhaps to avoid that, he would have a nickname: not Boss or King or Slowhand, but something evoking a singer of poetry—maybe Oral Roberts But, oops, that would be even worse because there is that pompadoured Oklahoma preacher, once the healer of arthritic elbows and the occasional plague of boils afflicting the odd Old Testament martyr to whom Bildad appeared with a shopping cart laden with lizards, locusts, and stinging scorpions and said Take this, Job, and shove it, but the tiny wheels bogged down in sand, leaving him lamenting to leprous laymen I’ll bet you this never happened to Jeremiah!

Meanwhile, in the eighties, Dylan found the messiah But it was floral moral Oral who said he saw a hundred foot Jesus saying: raise me more geetus.

Now, I’m no dyspeptic skeptic, but I’ve never seen Jesus at all, though I feel his presence at Christmas Still, if his standing height in yards was the same as his 11

age when he hung on the cross, you could get him to hold up your TV antenna, and I’ll bet you would get immaculate reception. Of course I’d be cautious, though I’m not sacrilegious, about standing too close for fear of the lightning . . . but really I’m not worried If God hurled thunderbolts like mythical Zeus, He might take a shot at preachers for profit, who fudge truth and fiddle the books like Nero selling fire insurance But God lets us make our mistakes and have some fun, too Ben Franklin, our frequently foundering father, said beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy, and I would hasten to agree, though Franklin’s faith was not my own, for he was mere Deist not a Eucharistic fellow with chips for his brew and thus never tasted my Mother’s divinity

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William Robison William Robison teaches history at Southeastern Louisiana University; writes about early modern England, including The Tudors in Film and Television with Sue Parrill, is a musician and filmmaker; had poetry published by Amethyst Arsenic, amphibi.us, Anemone Sidecar, Apollo’s Lyre, Asinine Poetry, Carcinogenic Poetry, decomP magazinE, Forge, Mayday Magazine, On Spec, and Paddlefish.

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Art Work Courtesy of: http://www.ChorBoogie.com

Chor Boogie posing in front of his artwork.

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James Maloney

The Assignment Jackson saw the yellow-toothed grin. It was in the mirror, reflecting between the lines of vodka and rum bottles. There, grossly exposed among shiny people - a shuffle of locals and college students – like a beacon. It was Lowenstein.

Jackson moved towards the bar mirror, towards that yellow; his own red-ivy beard and gaunt cheekbones and t-shirt ripped along the collar sponged with sweat stains appearing. His own reflection; his own body – worsened by the room’s dim mini-pendant lights. We’re pathetic around any normalcy, he’d boasted once to a Scottish documentarian in Cairo. Pathetic now, after he’d sped in an Iran-funded rebel Humvee from one countryside to the next, after he snuck over a half-dozen borders. More so after his flight into Heathrow.

Over the pond to JFK, to O’Hare, to Memphis National, and hitchhikes down 55 South through Hernando, to Gerantown - cotton fields and “Jesus Saves” billboards, pickup trucks on the left and right – surprised God-fearing Baptists hadn’t tossed him change. He was dropped on the city limits of Oxford, Mississippi. He walked into the town, more pathetic all the while. Home base was in the center of the College Square, up in the second-floor bar where the man who got him into the madness sat to drink whiskey and hold court. He was smiling at Jackson now with those good-timing, disastrous teeth.

"Made it back! My best photog!” the teeth said.

“Hey, Lo,” Jackson said, reaching in for a one-armed embrace.

Lowenstein was surrounded by four young leathery round-faced guys. Mexicans, Jackson thought. He’d heard news of Guadalajara; cartels, the massacres. On the bar was Lowenstein’s cane – his aid for a useless right thigh and midsection, tore up from shrapnel years back. But Lowenstein still had his connections in New York, London, Paris; Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, The Sunday Times.

“Mujeriege,” he nodded towards Jackson to the Mexicans. They laughed. "I got some girls here for you,” he said back to Jackson.

"Yeah? Where?”

Lowenstein gestured towards the bar’s deck.

"What'd they say?" Jackson asked.

"Shit."

"So why you saying they’re here for me?"

"Why not?"

Lowenstein raised two fingers to the bartender, who nodded and poured a whiskey.

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“Loosen up. We’ll talk in a bit.”

The old man shifted back to the other men and began in on some idiomatic Spanish. They leaned in and Jackson took the whiskey.

His mentor was far into his evening bar post but sharp eyed, booted in python skin and scheming. Lowenstein was most alive in these moments - dispatching these recruits, dancing them out with press credentials and wagering on the aperture and composition of torment they'd wire back stateside. Be patient, thought Jackson, you know how it gets with this asshole. Never trust anyone who’s seen too much life or too much death.

Jackson walked past the kid who was sinking his fingers in a piano to a familiar eight note hip-hop set and thought of his guitar and his band The Familiar Thieves playing at Nashville dives. He was too old now. He had never learned to read music - only tablature sheets and improvisations. He should’ve taken theory classes or a few private studies. And the rest: his athletics, his church-going when things felt rough, the jealousies and arguments with girlfriends. He should’ve been nicer; at least to Lauren - she gave him so many chances. Or overseas as he'd understood it back then; the cheap weed and hostels and those other girls the Italian and Spanish and German and French girls - giving exactly as they pleased, and he, the American boy, glad with whatever he got. He was too old for it all now.

Jackson walked outside and pulled out his smokes.

The girls were in circles on the deck – did they know him? Seen his work, his credits? They were sipping from plastic cups. One of them walked up. She was skinny. Jackson saw her skirt as a breeze came - a flash of bony leg. He saw her face, too - articulate and flush from cocktails. Too young, for this occasion, but about the best of the lot. He could imagine Lowenstein saying, 'some nights, gotta play the hand you're dealt.' As if Jackson fucked for the both of them now.

"Spare one?" she asked in a voice that matched her body.

He handed her a Marlboro Light and flicked his Zippo. She ran her tongue along the cigarette lengthwise before her lips took it in. Reminded him of Poltava and the Ukrainian girls. Military boots and furs - black and gray en bloc - standing along University square or the hotel fronts with the palest of skin and mouths turned down, fashionably. He’d sat with his Nikon and waited for gunshots. Why had he gone? The adventures, the travels. The other girls on the deck - good Christian girls, on the whole – were boozed up, too, stumbling.

Jackson thought of the Misrata district and another stumbling woman; dust covered and frantic, her infant’s forehead gashed open. She was screaming something like, “Waled-ebniWaled!” He had adjusted his lens. The mother pressed her palm to slow the hemorrhaging and blood splashed from her fingers. Screaming. Screaming. Her child would die. Click.

"Where you from?" he asked the girl who’d taken his cigarette.

"Tupelo."

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He lit her, lit himself, and dragged in the smoke. He stood silently.

"How about you?"

All he could feel was pressure out to his fingertips and ringing across his eyebrows. He pretended not to hear. War was on his lips, like a smacking Mojave thirst, and he looked up, exhaling his white breath. Not this: not this coed or how good she may be drunk and naked in two hours. But yes: the fires, the hatreds, the miseries; moments captured on his memory cards and Steno pad scribbles. He stepped back inside.

"Place is dead," he said to Lowenstein, who was still huddled by the men.

Lowenstein nodded.

For the next few hours, Jackson drank. He was going off, Lowenstein by his side. The Mexicans hovered. The lights flickered for last call.

“So come on, whaddaya got?” Jackson slurred his words.

“State senate primaries,” Lowenstein smiled.

They all laughed. The Mexicans – no English skills among them - laughed the hardest.

Lowenstein gripped Jackson’s shoulder. Lowenstein had done his riots, his wars, Chechnya and the like. Before settling for college adjunct - before his gut was blown out - he’d shown the disgust of the world in gloss.

“Listen. Lowenstein said, “Syria. What do you think of Damascus?”

“Gotta be better than here.”

“Gotta be better!” Lowenstein echoed triumphantly. He grinned and those teeth came back out.

Jackson saw all those cinematic eyes. Pure red fury over bandannas. Pure white fear hidden in alleyways. Gathered bit by bit, eyes for his lens – his shield – to capture.

Lowenstein was looking at Jackson’s ragged tote bag.

“Let’s get you ripped out of your skull tonight!” Lowenstein proclaimed. Glasses raised all around.

“Get you on some planes tomorrow!” He was still smiling, holding up his drink.

“Get you killed by the weekend!” Lowenstein crackled in laughter and he drank down his whiskey.

The Mexicans – off to photo the cartel victims – kept along laughing. Jackson felt the pressure still and the whiskey burning in his stomach but he laughed too. He was in a strange way, as though a flood surge was on him at once vivid and clouded, advancing and retreating. Her, huddling her child, the baby's blood washing the dust from her face. Her, tears coming down tears and blood - alone completely, but he was ten feet away, framing them like a landscape.

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Could he touch her? Behind them he saw water jugs clay-casted and painted red and yellow and blue and orange - and now she’s submerged, the kid too, blackening to blackness – faces distorted and screams in a swirl of alcohol and warm Mississippi air.

"I don't know.” Jackson said in a throaty whisper. “I don't know."

The Mexicans had cleared out. The overhead fluorescents were on and the piano had been wheeled into a corner.

“Sure, sure,” the old man said, “You’ll have a good time.”

Lowenstein raised his fingers again, and another glass of whiskey was slid down the bar.

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James Maloney is a Boston-based writer who has written two collections of short stories. He is currently working on his first novel. Maloney can be reached at JamesMaloney703@gmail.com

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Chor Boogie

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Florence Weinberger

Coping Strategies for Psychological Adjustive Disorder The day starts for a woman who lives alone by the sea. Her window open to event and circumstance, she tracks the lust of pelicans, the phallic plunge of dolphins, and sketches from memory the clerk who will soon lose his job in the local market that is closing. She stops for a lunch of roots, seeds and wheat, then rests as if she lives on a street in Paris and all the stores shutter at noon. The hymn of tires ceases. The sound of bees drunk from sipping agapanthus wine diminishes to midday stillness.

As day slips into dusk, she fixes dinner for custom, dines with distant battles, the bloodletting of coral reefs. She sweeps up, plugs in an obscure film she can talk about to an obsessed movie fan she knows. Clearly the sub-titled lovers have said so much more.

The chapter she reads from a novel on her bed filters desire. Finally solitude becomes what the darkening sky leads to.

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Florence Weinberger is the author of four published collections of poetry, The Invisible Telling Its Shape, Breathing Like a Jew, Carnal Fragrance, and Sacred Graffiti. Twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, her poetry has appeared in numerous literary magazines, including Another Chicago Magazine, Antietam Review, The Comstock Review, The Pedestal, Solo, Rattle, Ellipsis, Poetry East, and anthologies such as Family Reunion: Poems About Parenting Grown Children, So Luminous the Wildflowers, Images From the Holocaust, and Lifecycles: Jewish Women on Biblical Themes in Contemporary Life.

Flopetw@vertizon.net

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Mariela Griffor

THE TALE OF TWO UNCLES I grew up seeing his pictures everywhere in the house.

After the coup d’ etat we hid his pictures in drawers as you do with those uncles you need to hide for whatever reason.

Everything changed. The most profound and the most simple. I didn’t die, as I used to think, if I didn’t live in Santiago. The sun used to rise between the mountains and the certainty that when the sun was right behind the tallest tip of the mountains facing the city was the time to go to school. I didn’t need a watch to know the time. At evening when I went back home a dusky red entered my pupils and produced a fast pace to my heart every time. Santiago was a dirty city with pollution year round, full of danger and poverty, excitement and wealth, two small worlds for too many people.

Allende wanted to do something about it.

Uncle Sam looked at him severely.

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Mariela Griffor was born in the cit y of Concepcion in southern Chile. She attended the University of Santiago and the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro . Griffor l eft Chile for an involuntary ex ile in Sweden in 1985. She an d her American husband retu rn ed to the United States in 1998 with their two daughters and currently live in Grosse Pointe Park, Mi chigan. She is cofound er o f The Institute for Creative Writers at Wayne State University and Publisher of Marick Press (www.marickpress.com ) . Her work has app eared in perio dicals acro ss Latin America and the United States. Mariela Ho lds a B.A in Journalism and a M.F.A. in Creative Writing from New Engl and College.

Mariela Griffor is the author of Exiliana (Luna Publications) and House (Mayapp le Press).She is Honorary Consul of Chi le in Michigan. Her translat ion of Canto General by Pablo Neruda is forth coming from Tupelo Press.

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Synthesizer Chor Boogie

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Joe Giordano Big W hales Don’t Cry

Blaine pointed his finger at Robert. “Meet Ito in Maui, wine him, dine him, get him laid. Just land the business.” CEO Jack Blaine was a tall man whose personal saint was Narcissus. “I’ll have to order a big lay off if we don’t get the license to Ito’s product line. Plus I’ve guaranteed Chairman Bosworth and the Board we’ll get the contract.”

Robert said, “I want another set of ears in the negotiation. I’ll take Chad.”

Blaine said, “Take Jessica. Japanese flip for blondes.”

Robert wondered if Blaine knew about his relationship with Jessica. “Got it. Anything else?”

“Yeah, remember the Spartans: come back victorious or dead on your shield.”

Jessica stretched back on the poolside lounge in a bright orange bikini. She rose, slipped into white flip-flops, and clipped her blond hair into a ponytail. Eyes around the pool turned toward her, but Robert and Chad peered off the resort’s infinity edge pool. Robert was dark and in shape. Chad was white-skinned, red-haired and showed a belly roll. A wispy blue sky blended with the turquoise Pacific that flashed in the bright sunlight. Rippling waves crashed into lava-brown rocks thrusting white foam into the air before settling into eddied pools. Along the shore, pink flowers poked out of thick, green foliage like knife thrusts, and the long, gray trunks of palms held dark green fronds that cast lengthening shadows in the afternoon sun. The scent of ocean spray was in the air.

A Humpback whale broke the surface of the ocean.

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Robert said, “There he is again.”

Jessica put her hands on her hips. “Love those whales, do you Robert?”

“The ancient Hawaiians considered whales gods.” Robert backstroked in the pool.

“Well, maybe you can ask Ito to stop the Japanese from killing them.” Jessica sat back on her lounge.

“Hey,” Chad said, “I heard they eat the genitals as an aphrodisiac.”

Jessica said, “Lovely.”

Robert said, “Look guys, no whale comments in front of Mr. Ito. Face is everything in Japan. He’s scheduled to land at Kahului after nine tonight, and our meeting is tomorrow morning.”

The three left the pool to get ready for dinner. Robert stalled in the hallway until Chad was inside his room and then he doubled back. Jessica opened her door wearing a striped bath towel. She smelled like jasmine.

She said, “I was going to take a shower.”

Robert stepped inside. “Later.”

The first time Robert saw Jessica, she’d stopped conversations in the conference room when she appeared in a tight suit. She walked to the podium at the far end of a mahogany table large enough to have deforested the Brazilian Amazon. Mid-level executives manned the table and sat against the money-green walls like a gauntlet. Robert was at the head of the table. Jessica’s Department had just been put under him, and she was to pitch her annual plan for his approval.

Jessica turned her blue eyes on her audience. “All of us must do more with less,” she

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said. Jessica tapped a button on her computer, and the first PowerPoint image popped on the screen. “Our approach is to change process for productivity improvement. Technology is key; metaphorically we will develop tractors to replace our horses and plows. In this way we can reduce headcount through attrition and achieve our goal of five percent annual cost reduction.

Now I’ll give you the specifics in our plan.”

Robert sat up and leaned forward for the rest of her presentation.

Later that week Robert dropped into Jessica’s office and invited her to join him for dinner after work to discuss the budget. They walked to a Manhattan restaurant in the 60’s, just off Lexington. The dining room was cream with red accents, and one of De Kooning’s Woman prints hung in the entrance. The maitre d' knew Robert, but the joint was crowded so they sat at the wood and white marble bar. Sinatra sang My Way over the drone of dinner conversations and tinkling tableware. Robert looked at Jessica’s profile, a turned up nose, and wisps of silken hair behind a cherub’s ear.

Jessica tilted her head at Robert and said, “Does this qualify as a date? I’ve never gone out with my boss before.”

“Uh, no. Dates are defined as liaisons planned well enough in advance to get a table reservation. This is a spontaneous business dinner between colleagues. By the way, sorry for us having to eat at the bar.”

“No, this is great, I love the atmosphere. So is it true that the best spontaneity is well planned?”

Robert smiled and looked at the wine list. “They have a Meursault that will go well with your Dover sole. Sound okay?”

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Triptych: First Panel from “Young Que ens” Chor Boogie

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“Whatever you say, boss.”

After the bartender poured, Robert lifted his glass. “To your success.”

“Thanks.” They clinked glasses.

Robert said, “By the way, your annual plan is approved. Great presentation the other day.”

“Thank you. My main goal was to keep my voice steady.”

“You didn’t look nervous.”

“I was the only woman in the room.”

“True enough. Take pleasure that you’ve overcome obstacles.”

Jessica said, “Thanks. These days, all I do is work. You’ve never married?”

Robert took a sip of his wine. “No. Every time I see a married guy trudging into work exhausted, fat, and bald as Sisyphus’s rock, I’m reminded of Shiites who flog themselves bloody during a religious pilgrimage. There must be a reward for all that pain, but it’s not obvious.”

“Tell my mother, she has my biological clock marked on her calendar.”

“Mothers are all the same. Mine drops hints, which I ignore.

“Sure, sons do what they want, daughters are raised to please.”

Robert chuckled. “You have any brothers or sisters?”

“I’m an only child, and my father is a disciplinarian.” Jessica let out a sigh. “Even now he tries to run my life. How about you?”

“I have a younger brother and sister. We’re pretty close.”

Jessica picked up her glass and looked at Robert’s reflection in the bar mirror. “So what

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do you do outside of work?”

“I box. There’s a club in Harlem I use. I used to think about entering the Golden Gloves competition until someone bent my nose, as you can see.”

“Oh, they did you a favor, the look of the mysterious bad-boy.” Jessica touched Robert’s hand. She said, “That’s a nice watch.”

“Yeah, I gave myself a present when I made V.P.” “You’ve done well. The rumor is that pretty soon everybody will be working for you.”

“Hey, don’t say that too loud, Blaine will hear you.”

A few days later, Jessica walked into Robert’s office and leaned on his desk. She said, “So my dinner conversation was so boring that you decided you couldn’t bear another date with me?”

“You know that’s not true. Dating a subordinate can be complicated, for both of us.”

“How about I sign a sexual harassment waiver? Maybe you can tell I’m a big girl.”

Jessica smiled.

“Yeah, I can tell. What I’m saying is that when the rumors start they’re always ugly, and I want to be fair to you. You know what I mean.”

“Okay, how about this. Come to my place for dinner Saturday so no one sees us around town. We’ll keep it sotto voce, get to know each other, and then we’ll see if we can dare to let the world know.”

When Robert arrived at Jessica’s apartment he smelled bread baking.

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Jessica wore a sleeveless blue dress that came just above her knees, and she was barefoot. “Pink roses, how romantic, thank you. Come into the living room while I get a vase.” She said over her shoulder, “You caught me, I hadn’t finished dressing.“ Done with the roses she ducked into the kitchenette. “I’m being very domestic for our first date.“ Jessica talked above a sizzling pan she’d uncovered. “Next time we do take-out.” Robert picked up a book lying on a glass cocktail table and sat in an Eames chair. He heard an oven door open and close.

“I’m making steak pizzaiola, I hope that’s okay?”

“Hell yes. I thrive on red meat.”

“Ah, good guess on my part. There’s a bottle of Chianti on the table, why don’t you open it. Dinner’s almost ready.”

Robert moved close behind Jessica while she was at the stove and put his lips to her neck. She bent her head back with the touch of the caress, and then turned into his arms and whispered, “I suppose we could re-heat everything in the microwave.”

After they’d made love, Jessica hugged close, and Robert sensed her eyes were wet.

“Hey,” he said, “I don’t usually do this on a first date.”

Jessica smiled into his shoulder and then lifted her head and gave him a kiss.

Over the next six months, restaurants throughout Manhattan saw a marked up-tick in take-out business supplying clandestine dinners for two at Jessica’s.

The Maui hotel conference room featured black vinyl chairs and a dark wood veneer

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oblong table. Robert sat in the middle of the trio on one long side as they waited for Ito to arrive.

Chad swiveled his head. “Why do we have our backs to the door?”

“We’re the hosts, and it’s polite Japanese custom. During the shogunate it signified that the guest would not be attacked from behind.”

“Nice culture,” Jessica said.

Robert grimaced at her. “The hotel will serve Japanese tea, and it tastes like hot seaweed; you don’t have to drink it. When they arrive, we exchange business cards so treat their card deferentially. When you address them, add “san” as an honorific. Ito-san probably speaks English, but he’ll use his assistant to translate so he can watch our reaction.”

Chad asked, “What about bowing?”

“No need, Americans are exempt.”

Jessica said, “Good, I don’t do curtsy.”

“Look guys,” Robert looked at Jessica, “This meeting is important, let’s be charming, okay?”

Jessica nodded.

There was a rap at the door. The male assistant, rail thin and jittery, in his thirties, carried a notebook, and opened the door for his boss. Ito was a wiry man with dyed-black hair in his fifties dressed in a gray suit. He walked up to Robert and extended his business card.

The assistant hurried behind Ito to make the introductions in English. Ito was stone faced when he walked in the door, but he gave Jessica a twitchy smile when they exchanged cards.

The meeting began with a short welcome by Robert and the serving of tea. Ito made a statement in Japanese that the assistant translated for the Americans.

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“Mr. Ito is honored by your invitation to talk about a U.S. license for our new product line. Our company has great regard for your CEO, Mr. Jack Blaine, and it is out of this respect that Ito-san has traveled from Japan to tell you personally that we have completed negotiations for the U.S. license with another company. So sorry.”

Chad gave an “Oh shit” glance to Robert. Jessica looked up at the ceiling.

“You’ve had your head up your ass for months.” Blaine’s voice sliced like a razor, and Robert winced at the other end of the phone.

Robert said, “Ito had a deal before he came to Maui; I never had a chance.”

Blaine’s voice rose. “I don’t want to hear your excuses, you’ve undermined me with the Board. Didn’t I tell you what to do? Now I have to take over, and that makes you superfluous. Don’t bother to come into the office, our attorney will contact you.” Blaine hung up.

Robert slumped back on his chair. That was it, fired? No discussion, no consideration of what he’d done for the company? Maybe, he thought, he could appeal to Blaine when the CEO calmed down? Robert shook his head; Blaine was a shark who’d smelled blood. He’d probably issued the announcement of my dismissal five minutes after he got off the phone.

Robert took some deep breaths to ease the sickness in his gut.

He thought of his parents, and recalled his CCNY graduation day and his father’s challenge, “Now we’ll see how far an educated member of this family can climb.” The company was filled with Yale and Harvard graduates, but street smarts and eighty-hour workweeks succeeded. Robert recalled the day he paid off his parents’ mortgage, and

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his pride, mixed with mild embarrassment, when his father bored friends boasting of Robert’s success. He shuddered at how the news of his dismissal would look on his father’s face. His mother would obsess that he didn’t have a job and, his employment status would be the main topic of every phone call.

Well, he thought, soon everybody will know, and his face flushed. He imagined phony sympathy spiked with a thinly veiled needle; he would be shunned like failure was a contagious disease.

Robert ran his hands through his hair and massaged the stiffness in his neck. He slammed his fists into the armchair. “Wait,” he said aloud, “Stop this self-absorbed bullshit.” He’d get another job, and he still had Jessica. Robert smiled wryly to himself: now he wanted everyone to know about his relationship with Jessica, but please don’t mention his career. Robert needed to get to Jessica first; she should hear the news from him.

Robert called her room, no answer, and he thought she must be at the pool. Crossing the lobby Robert stopped short; Jessica was in a corner talking to Ito, who had a smile on his face.

Robert thought, I knew he spoke English, and approached them. Ito’s face soured when he saw Robert, and he rushed off without even a nod. Jessica stood; her face was furrowed, and she hugged herself with her arms.

“You’ve heard already.” Robert put his hands into his pockets.

“Yes, I’m so sorry.”

“Yeah, well. Blaine called you?”

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Jessica said, “Yes. Did he tell you?”

“About what?”

Jessica looked away.

Robert said, “Is there something I need to know?”

Jessica closed her eyes and took a breath before she spoke. She said, “Robert, I wanted to be with you as soon as I heard. I knew you’d be hurting, but I didn’t know how to tell you.

I’m sorry, Blaine gave me your job.”

Robert stiffened.

Jessica moved closer to Robert. “This isn’t how I wanted to get my chance.”

Robert tilted his head at Jessica and said, “There’s more, what else?”

“Blaine spoke to Ito and got him to agree to reopen the discussion for the U.S. license. I’m going with Ito to Tokyo tomorrow morning. If we make a sufficient counter offer, we can sign the contract next week.”

“You’re going with Ito to Japan? Are you serious?”

“This is not the way I wanted things to go.” Jessica bit her lip.

“Jessica, do you understand that Blaine is using you as bait to get this deal? You know what Ito wants, and you’re going along with it?”

Jessica’s voice raised an octave. “Don’t say that.” She took note of the faces that had turned toward her in the lobby, and she quieted down. “I know you’re angry, Blaine treated you like dirt. But please, Ito-san is a business partner, that’s all. I can handle the situation.”

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Robert looked up at the glass crystal chandelier, and puffed out a breath.

Jessica said, “Robert, you need some time, this happened so fast. Please, I need to get packed; my flight leaves early tomorrow.” Jessica put her hand on Robert’s arm. “I don’t want to lose you over this.”

“How could you fall for Blaine’s crap?”

Jessica’s face reddened, but she didn’t respond. She sighed, and then she walked away.

Robert stood alone in the lobby. When she was out of sight, he walked toward the elevators.

The doors opened, and Chad stepped out.

Chad said, “Hey buddy, I heard. What happened?” Chad put his hands on his hips.

Robert shrugged.

Chad rubbed his chin. “Did Blaine know about you and Jessica?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Well, he’s been hitting on to her for months. Now he’s gotten rid of a rival and expects Jennifer will be grateful for her promotion.”

Robert straightened.

“Look,” Chad said, “As soon as you get settled in a new job give me a call. I want to work for you again. But I need to get a quick bite; Jessica wants to meet later. Okay?”

“Yeah, sure.”

Robert went to his room, and emptied the mini bar of scotch. While he drank, he paced the room. Had Jennifer just played him? Was she just using him, waiting for a misstep so she could take over? If Blaine had hit on her, why hadn’t she told Robert? He took off his suit jacket and flung it against the wall and sat down hard on the bed. He drained the last of the

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booze in his glass. In the fading light of the afternoon he lay back and closed his eyes and passed out into sleep.

In his dream, he was in Blaine’s office, and Jessica was sitting on the couch wringing her hands. Blaine sat with his arms folded like a Persian king of kings. He offered Robert a chance to rescind his firing.

Blaine said, “Ito will be here soon: drop your pants.”

“What?”

Blaine grinned, and Ito walked in the door...

Robert sat straight up in bed; his head was pounding, and the sheets were clammy. The sun had cracked the horizon; Robert got up and went into the bathroom. His mouth was dry and he cupped his hand under the cold water and drank, and then splashed some on his face.

He walked out onto his balcony and sat in one of the wicker chairs. Birds were chirping, he picked up the scent of gardenias, and he could hear the surf washing up on shore. The rising sun’s rays flooded the Pacific creating a glare; Robert put the flat of his palm over his eyes and peered into the distance as a whale breached the water. Robert rose from his seat as the animal shot up from the ocean like a fist pump, a triumphant thrust that reached an apex with the entire whale suspended in air. Seemingly in slow motion the humpback turned 360 degrees and landed on its belly, a foamy white curtain punctuated the performance; an ovation splash followed the slap of its tail. Robert thought, you can hunt me, you can kill me, but I will not give you my spirit.

Robert walked back into the room and picked up the letter he’d started composing to his father. “Dad, I’ve got bad news...” Robert crumpled the paper in his fist and threw it across the room.

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Robert waited until Manhattan had woken up and called John Bosworth, Chairman of the Board.

Bosworth had a domed head and wore round horn rim glasses. You bullshitted him at your peril. He took Robert’s call, but by the Chairman’s tone, the weather in New York had turned frigid.

After some preliminaries Robert said, “The reason for my dismissal was that I wouldn’t go along with Blaine’s scheme to win a Japanese contract by trading for sex with a female employee.”

Bosworth’s voice rose. “Whoa, you better have proof of that charge.”

“The employee doesn’t understand that Blaine has put her in a kabuki theater squeeze.

I’m headed for Japan tomorrow morning and after this thing plays out, both of us will come to you in New York. For now she’ll stay anonymous.”

Bosworth was silent until Robert feared he’d lost the connection. When he finally spoke, Bosworth voice was monotone. “You’re angling to get Blaine fired. Have anyone in mind to replace him?”

“That’s a Board decision, but I think you’d be the perfect candidate.”

Again Bosworth took some time to respond. “Okay, come see me when you’re ready.”

He hung up.

Robert thought, if Jessica has been straight with me, when Ito comes on strong, I’ll back her. If she’s playing Blaine’s game and sleeps with Ito, I’ll have proof of a sex for business scandal that will bring them both down. Robert stood from the desk and looked over the ocean. The sky looked a brilliant blue to him. I’m famished, he thought, and picked up the phone for room service.

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Joe Giordano was born in Brooklyn, and grew up in a blue-collar section of New York City. He and his wife, Jane, lived in Greece, Brazil, Belgium and Netherlands. They now live in Texas with their little Shih Tzu, Sophia, where Joe studies writing at the University of Texas in Austin. Joe's story, "Small Men have Trouble," was featured the weekend of March 23rd in "Black Heart Magazine,� and his story, "To See that Look Again," will appear in "The Summerset Review" in June.

Contact: jagintx@austin.rr.com

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Thomas Hubbard

TCSR Interviews M. Miriam Herrera Miriam Herrera, a multi-cultural poet currently emerging onto the national stage, spoke with me recently by telephone from her current home in upstate New York. She most graciously shared with us a glimpse into her poetry, into her teaching at University of Texas Pan American, and into the fast-paced life she lives. She somehow finds time for quiet walks and birdwatching in addition to reading tours, teaching, writing and making a home with her husband. Here's the conversation as nearly as I can report it.

TCSR: As we begin our telephone conversation today, Miriam, just where are you?

I'm in Edinburg, Texas, near the University of Texas Pan American, where I work. I live in deep South Texas part-time, and during the rest of my time I live in upstate NY, near Albany.

TCSR: What is your current occupation aside from writing poetry?

I'm a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Texas Pan American. My students there are much like me, so I relate to them easily. Some were migrant farm workers, mostly in their young twenties. And most of them are the first in their family to attend college. They are simply amazing.

TCSR: Notes on your Facebook page mention your "converso" or "crypto" Jewish background, Miriam. What can you tell me about that?

Crypto Jews were Jews who either escaped Spain after the expulsion around 1492, or converted to Catholicism, yet kept remnants of their Jewish culture.

TCSR: That was around the time of the Inquisitions, when non-Catholics were sought out and sometimes tortured, or expelled from Spain; hard times for that side of your family. Does that affect your own outlook?

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All my life I've felt different from other minorities — a minority within a minority culture you could say. My family always had the urge to hide and I never knew why. To this day I have retained the typical cryptoJewish attributes of secrecy and reticense about my family and daily life.

TCSR: So fast-forwarding to the present, where in the US (or world) do you feel most at home?

That's a toss-up between Jerusalem, South Texas, and Northern New Mexico.

TCSR: As you change locations, how does your poetry change?

I am a nature lover, so my poems usually reflect the current landscape in which I find myself.

TCSR: Do you consciously address the crypto-Jewish part of your background in the poems you write?

I used to in my earlier poetry, but now it's become more subtle. In those earlier poems, I was constantly searching, asking myself "what is a Jew?" How could I be Chicana and Native American and still be Jewish? It was a constant search for identity, and since it's a hybrid identity there are periods in my life when I explore each part separately and immerse myself in that identity. Today, my crypto-Judaism comes out more in the ecstatic feeling I experience in nature, and nature as a symbol for the Skechinah, or the Jewish notion of the feminine attributes of God. My poems are no longer overtly religious. I am more concerned today with writing about what nature reveals of life and the human condition; how God, or the One Source is in everything, and how I as a hiker, birder, and naturalist, may find that in nature.

TCSR: Being myself a mixed-blood descendent of two eastern American tribes (as well as some caucasian) I feel privileged to ask this without offense — how does having Native American blood affect your outlook?

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I suppose I acquired my love for nature and the earth because of this heritage. My grandparents and parents always lived and worked close to the land and had much knowledge and reverence for nature. Even though we are also Hispanic, we always had the feeling of being "more American" than most Hispanics or caucasians because of it. I think this gave me an advantage in that I feel an inherent right to the land on which I live.

TCSR: Do you consciously address this native side in your poetry?

Sometimes I do, as in a poem I have called "Kiva at Chaco Canyon," although usually less overtly. Being Native American shows more in my poetry as a reverence for nature, and I sometimes include totem animals — in the sense that animals give us signs about our personalities or emotional needs at the particular time we encounter them.

TCSR: Which is more important in your life these days, Judaism or your native side?

I suppose Crypto-Judaism is much more important in my life right now because it was hidden for so long, and I am constantly seeing new ways in which it has shaped my personality without my even knowing it, while my Native American heritage was always acknowledged. You might say that Crypto-Judaism is "newer" in that I'm still trying to reconcile it within my identity as a Chicana.

TCSR: How do these aspects of your heritage manifest in your writing ?

I am very conscious of writing about things that are hidden or beyond the surface, or something that appears to be one thing but is really something else. Usually those things are natural objects or animals.

TCSR: Do you feel called upon to advocate for these viewpoints?

I don't feel it is my responsibility, although I do feel that it is a poet's primary responsibility to be authentic and that means mining all the hidden parts of ourselves and telling the truth — especially to ourselves.

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I find myself constantly searching for what is hidden, but the question of advocacy usually comes down to advocating a being's innocence, the soul, the spirit, the One source.

TCSR: What do you want readers to understand about your heritage?

Readers should know that I am multi-racial, that I am not made up of one race or ethnicity — that when it comes down to it, I believe we, including nature and animals, are all one.

TCSR: How do you include aspects of your background without allowing them to become overtly visible and controlling in your poetry?

I rely on the use of symbols. Even as a child I was very interested in symbols and read every book and dictionary I could about how they are used in writing and in everyday life. It might have to do with my cryptoJudaic heritage, or at least in trying to find a way to express myself yet still remain hidden.

TCSR: How do you weigh poetry as art against poetry for social change?

I think they are two very different things. To me, poetry can only be art.

Social change can happen because of poetry, but I think it needs to come from a very personal and internal space and perspective. Social change might be a result of art, but I don't believe in art as a vehicle for social change. I am not very popular in typical Chicano poetry circles because of this viewpoint. I think that much of social advocate poetry will survive because of its sociological or historical importance, but not because of its artistic merit. I feel almost afraid to even come out and say that because I have taught Chicano literature. I still "believe" in Chicano literature, but I think that much of the true art has been overlooked because it doesn't function as a vehicle for social change.

TCSR: What poets do you read? And why?

I am quite old fashioned in that regard. I find myself reading and re-reading Theodore Roethke, Lucille Clifton, Gary Soto, and Neruda, Paz and Lorca. I 45

also love Yusef Komunyaaka and Li-Young Li. I love the expression of the ecstatic experience and musicality in Roethke, the Latino poets, and Li, and the economy of words and powerful expressions of Clifton and the breathtaking intelligence and authenticity of both Clifton and Komunyakaa, and the identification with Gary Soto’s artistic rendering of his culture, especially in “The Elements of San Joaquin.”

TCSR: We thank you for talking with us, Miriam, and here's one final question: What do you wish for readers to take from your work?

That we are all one.

©Thomas Hubbard, 2012

——#—— * Note to publishers: This material is copyrighted by Thomas Hubbard. The Cartier Street Review is hereby granted one-time serial rights for electronic and print versions.

Ownership remains with the author, who may re-publish it elsewhere.

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M. Miriam Herrera

Judean Dreams

I. Who can forsake a wife of youth— His first pale breast, milky thigh, and the rousing at dawn?

But we are a history.

Our dead can't be revived, from the ovens or the bloody fields of Palestine.

I've come to Judea to sleep with my palms in the sand, to plant love letters to look for fountains where the earth, rugged and first-born opens to springs of patriarchal youth.

II. Only the desert now can penetrate bomb shelter walls.

It's only the desert.

A gust of wind snaps like a kite— over the walls of Masada's lime and plaster, flicking arms and rifles of teenage soldiers scaling the Snake Path to the fortress, each upswing heavy, blackbooted.

Another generation pledges victory—or suicide— drawn from living land.

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III. Our calculated betrayals are written in lines on my forehead, on the calluses of your left-hand fingers, in the pain of your phantom rib.

I was always your sea creature, echoing an eerie heartsong, jarring the root of you.

IV. Every night I dream of gangly legs and skinny arms that stay and stay.

The matriarchs call from the barrens: "Love object, You're a fox bruising a trail through our vineyards, you're pretty— as overripe fruit."

V. A gritty mist from the Dead Sea awakens me: Salt stings, knee scrapes, razor burns, half-healed sores, tiny cuts I didn't know were there.

And by day, sonic booms reshape the inner ear, remind me of the heart's new rhyme: I'm here, I'm here! crisscrossing the wadis— daring the flashfloods— for patches of her tender green.

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Evie Ivy

Cinquain

The Clock

(for Pascale)

She calls me and laments time passing, the changing of things, and the Moon that travels away.

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E v i e I v y is a dancer/poet in the NYC poetry circuit. Writing since childhood, her work has been heard in venues throughout the Tri-State area, on radio and Cable TV. Her “Dance of the Word” programs, a fusion of dance, music and song, usually in praise of the seasons/holidays, have been seen at the Nuyorican Poets Café, Bowery Poetry Clb, Cornelia Street Café, and The Knitting Fac tory among others.

Evie has three chapbooks out, including Cinquain, My Dear Cinquain . . .

Selected Cinquains. Her book, The First Woman Who Danced is poetry about her experiences as a dancer/instructor. She's been published in Brooklyn newspapers , Tribes Magazine, CLWN WR, Momoware , First Literary Review (webzine), plus several anthologies, including Off the Cuffs, How Dirty Girls Get Clean.

Evie has been hosting poetry readings for over 18 years. Presently she hosts one of the longest running poetry venues in the NYC area, “The Green Pavilion Poetry Event” in Brooklyn.

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COURTESY CHOR BOOGIE

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Williams

Maine, 1944

Paul Collier stepped out of his family’s one-room cabin and closed the heavy door behind him. His breath bloomed instantly in the cold fall air. He walked out and stood in the bend of the road where it was swallowed by trees, to watch for Dwayne Pelletier’s truck.

Dwayne was paid by the school district to collect the dozen or so kids who lived out Paul’s way and take them into Fisheye, where the school was. Dwayne drove an old Studebaker rack-side flatbed he’d had since the late 20’s; he’d nailed canvas all over the top and sides so as not to lose any students along the way. If the roads were too snowy or muddy, or Dwayne got too late a start, or if he could make more money transporting lumber or potatoes that day than students, he just gave up. And the only way for Paul to know if this had happened was to wait on the roadside for an hour or so to see.

For most of Paul’s years, school had been uninspiring. His teachers were a handful of grim men who had served in the First World War, lost legs or brain chunks, and found themselves teaching because it was one of the few jobs in their part of Maine that didn’t require all of one’s wits or limbs. The exception to this template was old Madame Boulay, who smelled like formaldehyde and wore a fox fur stole around her neck complete with the fox’s head and catlike feet. Paul’s brother Jeb had an endless supply of crass jokes about her, which irritate Paul, who enjoyed her classes.

From this long parade of one-eyed misfits and creature-wearing old biddies came

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one fine stone: their current teacher, James Hornsby, twenty-one years old and teaching for the first time. A veteran of the current world war, Mr. Hornsby had spent nine months at Walter Reed after losing his left leg plus part of his face in the Battle of the Coral Sea. At first, some students were wary of Mr. Hornsby. His injuries left him unrecognizable from the fit, intellectual young man who’d left Fisheye two years before. A few older students, not expecting much from their teachers as such, eased out of school increasing the stats for dropout rates.

Those who stayed on in school felt grateful for their decision, because Mr. Hornsby turned out to be a good, fair, personable instructor, possessing an occasional spark of enthusiasm. Mr. Hornsby all in bright flashing images. He described Napoleon dodging the Royal Navy and landing at Alexandria, then fighting the Battle of the Pyramids and knew the Pyramids were once covered with limestone and shined bright white and that the ancient Sumerians had invented the wheel, the plow, and the concept of zero.

Paul realized there was a huge gulf of experience between himself and Mr. Hornsby.

Nothing grave or revelatory ever happened to Paul, a quiet, shade-grown creature who hardly left his patch of woods. In contrast, Mr. Hornsby had sailed across an ocean, crouched on the U.S.S. Yorktown as it was pelted by Japanese bombs and heard the chutting motors of lowdiving planes, while witnessing the terrifying descent of dark-green bombers with ominous red circles on their sides.

“Looks like your savior ain’t coming today,” said a voice behind him. Paul resisted the urge to turn and scowl. He smelled his brother Jeb’s perpetual minty odor, his bristly and stubbled face clear down his neck and the noise his careless feet scuffling through pine needles made. The worst was looking into Jeb’s shiny, non-stop roving evil eyes.

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“Surprised you’re even out of bed,” Paul muttered.

“Me too,” said Jeb. “What made you decide to come out here?”

“Ma was cryin’ about somethin’. I didn’t want to hear it.” Jeb drew in a breath of air and winced sharply – he had two rotting teeth that he’d refused to have pulled for years, and they brought him no end of misery.

Small, hard flakes of snow appeared out of nowhere, whirling towards the ground until they disappeared.

“What are you squinting for?” Jeb snorted. “You are not gonna see that damn truck.”

“I’m giving Pelletier half an hour,” Paul said, with what he hoped was a firmness and maturity.

“Half an hour of you being stupider than you already are. I didn’t think it was possible. You’re like some hound dog lookin’ for its master. You in love with that cripple teacher or something?”

“Leave off,” said Paul.

“A veteran of that fuckin’ war. That makes him so much better than everybody else.

A goddamn saint ‘cause he was stupid enough to leave his leg on some Navy ship.”

“He didn’t mean to leave it there,” Paul bleated, embarrassed by his adoption of Jeb’s idiot language; by his plaintive, younger voice.

Jeb pulled out his watch, a gift from their grandfather, of whom Jeb had been an early favorite. He flipped it open and held it up so that Paul could see the time. Paul kept his eyes ahead, on the cold mud of the road, frozen into miniature hills and gulleys.

“Oh, God, don’t cry about it,” said Jeb in awe. “Are you crying because Dwayne

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Pelletier didn’t come?”

Paul looked at Jeb now: sneering, teetering, favoring that right side of his mouth so no air would touch his crumbling teeth. What Paul really wanted, he suddenly realized, was to leave his home and never go back, let his rotting house and everyone in it just sink into the mud and moss.

He turned from Jeb and began jogging down the road.

“Where are you going?” Jeb cried, his astonishment sounding like agony.

Paul didn’t answer. He was saving his breath for the journey. The air entering his nose was brain-chillingly cold.

“You’re gonna die, you dumb kid. It’s snowing,” Jeb shouted, his voice was already muffled by the trees. Paul realized with delight how little it took to blot out his brother’s voice, to render his homestead invisible and mute.

“You’ll never make it,” were the last, faint words Paul heard as he picked up speed.

His schoolbook bounced against his chest as he ran, and his feet slipped on the ice-slicked mud. He did not look back.

The hard, pebbled snow piled along the sides of the road now, in little drifts a few inches high. Every now and again, one of Paul’s feet would slide out from under him, and he’d catch himself, jogging on.

Paul figured he’d been running for an hour. His legs wobbled from sliding and catching himself and his heavy boots confined his pace. They were his only shoes. He’d worn them for four years, and his feet had grown so that now his toes curled like creatures in a trap.

He wiped his forehead. He was sweating in his clothes, which could be dangerous if he needed to stop. The dampness would chill him, he knew.

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Paul was certain he wouldn’t make it. He asked himself how would he run thirty miles in one day? Even if he made it to school, it would be dark everyone would be gone. Now there was no way to turn back, show his sorry face at the cabin, and give himself over to a year’s worth of fodder for Jeb. A scraping sound startled him, and he whirled, peering into the woods. About ten feet away a raccoon struggled to grip its feet into the base of an icy tree. It panicked, dropped to the ground, and crossed the road in front of Paul with a weird, hunched lope, like a miniature bear. It weaved slightly as it neared Paul, who noticed he was thinner and patchier than he should have been. The raccoon seemed to briefly forget Paul, then jumped again and showed his teeth, revealing black spit gums. Paul slapped his book hard, shouting, and looked for a rock to throw. Raccoons were nothing to fear, unless they’d gone mad. If a mad animal you, you’d likely die. Although Paul had never seen it himself, he knew you’d die a most horrible death.

“Hey,” Paul shouted, “Hey, you get.” He waved his book in the air over his head then threw it. It sailed right into the side of the coon, who screamed in a humanlike way and fell over, legs scrabbling. Then he staggered to his feet weaving further away, his back legs stumbling into his front legs, tripping himself as he made his way to the other side of the road.

Paul cursed under his breath, picking up his book. His toes, crushed and bent inside the too-small boots, hobbled him. He stuck out his tongue, and snowflakes made their tiny, weightless whirls crashes into his tongue. He caught snowflakes on his tongue nursed them for water. Then, with a small groan, he began jogging again down the long road.

An hour later, Paul’s toes were so painful that he limped to the side of the road and pulled off his boots. For a moment, removing them felt more terrible than wearing them.

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He inhaled sharply, struggling to uncurl his toes, each frozen toe unrelenting. In this weather they should especially not have their circulation cut off, but Paul was no remedy.

Paul set his feet on top of the boots to rest them. He cocked his head listening and over his panting breath, he thought he heard the rattle of wheels. He shoved his feet back into his boots, laced them up clumsily, and jumped up to wait.

It took a minute or two for the source of sound to come into view, but when it did, Paul recognized Skinner Schuler riding in a trap pulled by his rangy mule, Gleeful. Paul thought Gleeful had earned his name in the first few hours after birth, but that spirit had left him twenty years before. He looked like a resentful creature who felt he should’ve rightfully been retired. Skinner’s name was more apt; he was a fur trader and had lived in these woods for decades. His profession brought him in to town about once a month, so everyone knew him.

“Collier boy,” Skinner called, in a rough voice more accustomed to tobacco than conversation. “What’re you doing down there?”

“Do you think you could give me a ride, sir?”

“I’m going to Fisheye.”

“Could I come along?”

“Sure thing,” Skinner said.

“Thank you, sir,” Paul responded gratefully feeling final relief for his suffering hurt feet. Skinner acted like he didn’t notice and yelled “yah!” and slapped the reins on Gleeful, who slowly began breaking a trot. Paul grabbed on to the back of the cart, hopping up with one foot and tossing his book into a huge pile of furs. Never was there a more welcome sight than all those furs. Paul dove in to all kinds furs, ermine, badger, hare, raccoon, fox, and even.

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black bear furs. Many retained dead brainless heads that reminded Paul of Madam Boulay’s stole. He thought they were like an army of limp creatures who had no God. He took his shoes off and plunged his cramped, aching feet under the furs. A delicate fox face stared up at him with unseeing eyes. Paul held it up, noting how aquiline it was, how slender. He pressed a finger against the pinpricks of its bared teeth.

Sitting in all those furs, in that rocking truck, felt like he was in some heavenly (though weirdly hairy) womb. Paul drifted in and out of sleep, as Gleeful lurched on and Skinner hummed and spat, slapping the reins for no good reason and to no effect.

Eventually they reached the outskirts of Fisheye, with its lines of small houses, the forest carved away around them like a pattern in bark. The forest was suffocatingly relentless, surrounding them everywhere. Paul was sure that if every soul left Fisheye, the town would be covered over by moss and saplings in a less than a decade.

Skinner pulled up in front of the general store. Paul hopped down from the back of the cart, limped to the hitching post, and tied the mule for him.

“You got the look of somebody who’s running from somethin’,” the old man said.

“I do?” Paul asked.

“You didn’t do no wrong back home, did ya’?” Skinner asked.

“No, sir,” Paul said, startled.

Skinner snorted. “If I was you, I’d wanna do a little wrong back home.”

Paul said, “I don’t know what you mean, sir.”

Skinner was quiet for a few minutes. “Well, I’m gonna go inside. Help me lug these furs? It’s too damn cold out here.”

“I’ll help. Thanks for the ride,” Paul said. Skinner shrugged and drifted into the store.

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*

*

*

Fisheye School consisted of three log buildings side-by-side. The logs were slick with green moss on the outside, but smooth inside, where the constantly-lit fireplace kept the students warm.

Inside, there was a desk for the teacher, and a fireplace as tall as a man. The responsibility for the hearth rotated among students week by week. Paul took an almost juvenile pleasure in maintaining it when it was his turn. It could be swept out to look so clean, with the wood stacked in the cradle, as if that corner of the earth were the definition of simplicity.

The class was reading part of the Iliad aloud as Paul walked in. There was one copy for every two students, so their heads were together, reading somewhat stiffly. Several students turned as Paul entered, bringing a gust of snow with him. Mr. Hornsby, seated at the front, nodded at him once, and that was all.

Paul made his way to the front corner of the room as quietly as he could. He bent to stoke the fire, sighing with relief at the warmth on his face; held his bare, chapped hands in front of the licking flames and stretched his stiff fingers. For a moment his eyes closed and he felt himself dozing off, as his classmates’ voices filled the air around him.

Then the voices stopped, and he jerked his head. Mr. Hornsby was writing something on the board. Paul made his way to his seat – a wooden chair with a platform on which to rest his book and his right arm -- and tucked his legs under him, discreetly untying his boots so that he could slide his feet partway from his shoes as he always did. He felt as if his toes were broken.

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He allowed himself to close his eyes again for just a minute, hearing the clicks of chalk scratching against the board sounding like insects talking to each other at night. He could hear the washboard slide of Mr. Hornsby’s crutches scraping across the wooden floor. *

*

*

It wasn’t until the fourth day that Mr. Hornsby discovered Paul had been sleeping in the woodshed. Each evening Paul had curled up by the woodpile, with his coat over his head and his legs pulled to his chest, in an attempt to sleep. Several times a night, he’d be forced to get up and do jumping jacks, or simply march in place, because he was shivering so hard that he feared he might die if he fell asleep too deeply.

He was marching there early one morning and didn’t hear Mr. Hornsby approaching the shed from outside. Suddenly the door swung open and there was the teacher, looking at him.

“Paul Collier?”

Paul froze, dropping his hands to his sides, mortified. “Mr. Hornsby, sir.”

“Why are you marching in my woodshed?”

“I don’t know, sir. I apologize, sir.”

Mr. Hornsby stared at him for a long moment. “Please come inside the classroom. And bring some firewood too.” The teacher turned, dug his crutches into the snow behind him and completing his pivot with ease.

Paul’s hands shook, from cold and shame, as he gathered wood. He kept his eyes downcast as he limped into the classroom, where he dropped the wood to the floor more clumsily than he’d intended and stuffed the fireplace with agitated vigor.

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“You are not building a trench in France, young man,” Mr. Hornsby smiled. “Don’t smother that fire before it gets good and started.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Come sit down.” Mr. Hornsby eased back into his desk chair, propping his half-thigh on another chair in front of him and patting the seat across. His brown pants were knotted below the stump, the extra fabric trimmed off. Paul thought it odd that Mr. Hornsby had cut off such a nice pair of pants. It hit Paul then; it wasn’t as though his leg could grow back.

Mr. Hornsby propped his crutches against the desk. He said, “A lot of students miss school and don’t sleep in the woodshed.”

Paul looked out the window at the cold, steel gray sky. There was no way to explain himself.

“How long have you been sleeping there?” the teacher asked.

“Three nights, sir,” said Paul.

“Have you had food?”

Paul shifted. “The bakery on Main Street throws out more than they should.”

“I’ve seen what they throw out. It’s usually moldy or hard as a shoehorn. Do you think your parents are concerned about where you may be?”

“They’ve not come looking, sir.”

Mr. Hornsby pulled out his wooden pipe and tin of tobacco from the front drawer of his old desk. He held the pipe between his knees and used his good hand to pack the fragrant tobacco in with a tamper.

“My one indulgence,” said Mr. Hornsby with a twinkle in his eye. He lit his pipe and puffed, closing his eyes for a moment. He shifted his leg, winced, then exhaled and

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relaxed. “Collier, you are neither being interrogated nor crucified. Would you like a pipe?”

“I’ve never…”

“Bah.” Mr. Hornsby re-opened the drawer and pulled out a second pipe, handing it to Paul along with the tin of tobacco and the wooden tamper. “I was smoking a pipe by age six.”

He chuckled. “Actually, that’s a lie.”

Paul had chewed plenty tobacco before from the Spearhead cans that all men purchased in the lumber camp, but he’d never smoked a pipe. He tried to fill it, but his hands were too stiff and cold. Strands of tobacco fluttered to the desk and floor. Embarrassed, he passed the pipe back to Mr. Hornsby, who filled and lit it for him.

The teacher concentrated with his one seeing eye. The other was small, half-closed, and the skin around it unbearably pink and shiny with ridges that ran across the surface of the closed lid down to his chin. The shiny pink skin looked softer than a baby’s, like scraped skin, but the ridges seemed as hard as tendons. With his good hand, Mr. Hornsby passed the pipe back to Paul.

Paul took a puff and managed to exhale before smoke came out his eyeballs. His throat burned and he stifled one cough, two. It rumbled inside, an odd thudding sound as if a bullfrog lived in his neck. Mr. Hornsby, smiling slightly, wavered in his vision, from Paul’s own asinine tears.

“All right,” the teacher said, “now if you sit back a little and relax your death grip on that chair, you may actually enjoy it. You look as if you are about to be forced to recite ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.’”

“I think,” Paul coughed, “you’re having a cut-up at my expense.” He did not feel as hurt as he sounded, for everyone liked to try a new thing; the pipe was almost a stand-in for

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food; and he felt as though he were being initiated in a special rite, an intimacy he’d never experienced before with his own brothers. Tim, his eldest brother, had been away at war for a year, and Jeb had an inexplicable cruel heart against Paul.

Mr. Hornsby shifted again. Paul watched his leg stump spasm. “Why do you hate your home?” Mr. Hornsby asked.

“I don’t hate my home,” Paul said. Then blurted, “I plan to join the military too,” and looked around to see if it was really he who’d spoken.

“Sitting here with me inspired you?” Mr. Hornsby asked. “I’d think that someone like me would have the opposite effect.”

“I don’t want to…” Paul stammered, “It’s not that I want to…”

“Lose your leg, hand, and an eye?”

Paul said quietly. “I just want to be useful.”

“Well, you’ll have a while to wait,” Mr. Hornsby said. “You’re only fifteen now.”

Paul jerked reflexively. He hated his age. “Someone will take me,” he said. “I’m tall.

People always think I’m older than I really am. I helped my dad in the lumber camp before.”

“As a chore boy,” said Mr. Hornsby, not cruelly.

“I tended the horses. I worked up to swamper at thirteen,” Paul said, recalling the long days of chopping roads through the woods so that the deckers and drivers could follow with tall sleds of logs. In the past year a rail line had been extended through that same lumber camp, and he’d heard the work was hard still, but different. “People told me they thought I was sixteen, I’m so big.”

“This is not the Civil War, Collier,” the teacher said. “They are not letting fifteen-

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year old drummer boys on to the battlefield. Listen,” He leaned slightly forward, “You’re a smart young man.”

Paul listened, polite but doubtful. The pipe had given him an odd buzz, as though his fingers and toes felt strange, like his brain suddenly possessed an unusual and uncoordinated energy. He decided to sit very still.

“Smarter than average, smarter than I was at your age. Don’t waste yourself getting blown to confetti two days after you get to France.”

“I’m a good shot,” Paul said. “I hunt all the time for my family. I am very disciplined.

I can get by on very little.”

Mr. Hornsby considered this. Paul worried that the teacher would mock him, or dismiss this strange, heartfelt outburst. But instead Mr. Hornsby said, “The Navy will never let you in at fifteen.”

“I could try the Army,” Paul said.

Mr. Hornsby sat there observing Paul. Several minutes passed. “I can see in your eyes that you only want to get the hell out of Fisheye, grab a gun and see the world, in that order,” the teacher said. “Your enlistment is your ticket. But that’s a pound of flesh and then some you’ll be paying for it.”

“I’m willing to do it.”

“I would like to see you do something that takes brains,” Hornsby said. “At least try to consider possibilities for a better future. The Army will take anyone with a war on, but they also need men who can learn languages, men who know science.”

“I don’t really know either of those things, sir.”

Mr. Hornsby smiled a small half-smile. “I imagine you could do anything you set your

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mind to.”

No one had ever made suggestions before like this to Paul, and it both thrilled him and made him uncomfortable. He’d remember these words every day of his life. He writhed under the kindness of Mr. Hornsby’s esteem.

Shuffling sounds could be heard outside. “Ah,” said Mr. Hornsby, “it seems your fellow classmates have made it through this weather for another scintillating study of grammar. Mr. Collier, thank you for being smart enough to sleep in the woodshed to ensure your education. I also thank you also for being smart enough to never do it again. It would be an unpleasant surprise to find your frozen corpse out there one morning.”

“I’m sorry, sir. It was stupid of me.” Paul stood shakily stumbling on his own stillfrozen feet.

Mr. Hornsby looked him in the eye. “I mean it, Paul. Go home tonight, please.”

“I will.” The teacher had never called him by his first name before, and it felt odd, almost intimate, like seeing a familiar face without glasses.

Mr. Hornsby gathered his crutches and pushed himself to standing. He hopped forward once, and his half-leg fell back into the straight position, with a strange, muscular jump. “Shall we start our day, then?” he asked. “And let’s put that pipe away please. No offense to the others, but this privilege is not for everyone.”

Paul handed back the pipe, felt spreading warmth in his chest, along with the delight of a shared secret with a measure of acceptance he never felt before. The other students straggled in, sleet beading on their coats like stars.

Paul stood by the edge of the trees surveying the fading outline of his family cabin.

The single window glowed with lamplight, and as the evening grew darker, the glow got

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brighter, the cabin outlines blurring, dissolving into the air around it.

He wondered if he could outwait Jeb. Maybe his brother was already asleep. Maybe he’d wandered off to visit Locust Delane down the road. Paul could not stand outside in the woods all night. He knew he had to go inside to face whatever punishment awaited him.

The door was locked when he first tried it, so he had to knock. It took several seconds before Jeb’s gruff voice slurred, “Who’s there?”

“It’s Paul. Let me in, Jeb.” Jeb opened the door and stepped back. Paul slid past him, keeping his eyes low. He pulled off his mittens and hat and clopped across the board floor to hang them by the fireplace.

“Take off your boots, for Christ’s sake,” Jeb said. Paul was aware that he had tracked mud across the floor, but he also knew that taking off his boots was going to be a difficult task. His feet had been in them for a few days now, and he been unable to remove them since one particularly cold morning. He’d tried to remove them in class but found it impossible.

Paul sat in front of the fire and looking at his ma, who sat in her rocking chair across from him, utterly still. One could probably be in a room with her for hours without realizing she was there. Paul thought of her as a whip-poor-will, a nightjar species that could blend into a tree stump so thoroughly that it was difficult to tell where its body ended and its face began.

“I’m sorry if I worried you, Ma,” Paul began, trying to keep his eyes on her though he was aware of Jeb’s lurking shadow, advancing slowly towards him from the left. He untied his boots with stiff fingers and worked on moving the leather away from his toes.

“You did worry her,” Jeb said. “You worried her sick. What kinda’ stupid kid leaves his ma for a whole week in the dead of winter? What if something had happened to Ma?”

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“Well, you were here,” Paul pointed out, then perceived with bleak amusement that Jeb wouldn’t consider himself to be capable of protecting their mother. “Also, I’m not a kid.

And I wasn’t gone a whole week.” He didn’t know why he kept talking. He felt some useless urge to defend himself. He also was trying to gain time before Jeb attacked him, and he had slowly become aware that his toes were now frostbitten. He didn’t know how bad it was yet, and he was dreaded the prospect of seeing them.

Jeb was still talking; Paul tried not to ignore his droning accusatory voice. With sudden decisiveness and a roar of agony, Paul yanked his left foot free from his boot. This startled his brother, and for a second the imbecile shut up. Paul peeled down his sock, his hands shaking from his feet pain. He confirmed what he’d feared: the two smallest toes on his left foot were dark violet. He cursed and rubbed them, but the pain was so severe he feared he’d vomit. He didn’t even want to take the sock off his right foot, which hurt more. He hoped all of his toes were still pink on that foot, for at least if they felt pain, they had circulation.

Paul replaced the sock on his left foot and, with the same quick pull as before, dislodged his right foot from its boot. But he kept the sock on and sat gritting his teeth, hoping that once his feet thawed, the pain would lessen.

“What, you walk all the way home from school, too?” Jeb asked.

“Naw,” said Paul, sucking in his breath. “Dwayne Pelletier brought me home.” He exhaled shakily with the words.

“How’s your cripple teacher anyway?”

Paul stared straight ahead.

“Your lover boy? The one-legged man? Did he lose his balls in the war, too?”

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Paul knew his brother would never leave him alone. This had to end with blows, and he cursed himself for having come home, for having been stupid enough to remove his shoes.

Now he was trapped; there was no way he could stand and run; Jeb had him between the fireplace and the door. He had walked willingly into this snare, like a dumb rabbit, and Jeb would keep him dangling and jerking here for his own amusement.

Jeb leaned over him and shoved his shoulder, and Paul could smell the alcohol on his breath, with an undertone like carrion from Jeb’s rotting teeth.

“Jeb, that’s enough,” their mother said quietly, although Paul wondered later if he had imagined it. Perhaps she’d never say anything decisive. His mother was totally insubstantial like a snakeskin, or a cicada’s shell.

What he did know was that Jeb’s leering, bloated face facing his, coupled with the pain in his feet, was more than he could take. In a swift lunge he grabbed the shovel near the fireplace and swung it wide into Jeb’s shoulder. He could easily have struck Jeb in the head; or, with a little forethought, could have stabbed him with the nearby poker. But he hadn’t really thought first, and he didn’t want to disable his brother, just make him go away. For that one blessed moment he wanted to sit in silence and endure his own pain on his own terms.

Jeb fell over with a grunt, but at best was only bruised. In a few boozy seconds, Jeb stood over him again. Paul was quick enough to grapple the shovel off the ground and slide it against the far wall, away from Jeb, but he couldn’t stand on his feet. Jeb raised his fists, moving in. Paul put his arms over his head. Jeb grabbed Paul by his shirt, heaving him up against the wall. Paul kneed Jeb in the gut. They grabbed at each other, wheezing breathing hard seconds before Jeb got hold of their father’s iron gunsmith vise and slammed Paul in the head. Paul felt himself drop to the floor, and the last thing he remembered was searching the

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far wall with his eyes, unable to tell if his mother had left her spot or if she were simply camouflaged there so completely that he could not see her at all.

*

*

*

When Paul awoke, it was early morning and the cabin was silent. His head sloshed as he sat up, like some kind of gut sack filled with fluid, and when he moved his stomach flopped over.

It took him a few minutes to get to his feet. They throbbed steadily, as if they had grown their own small hearts, and the left foot sent tingling cramps up Paul’s leg with every movement.

He measured his breaths, trying to ignore these eerie sensations.

Working shakily, Paul filled a small canvas pack with two strips of jerky, his other shirt, his other pair of wool socks, a hunting knife, a strip of matches, and a canteen. He thought of taking the rifle and black powder, but could not bring himself to leave the cabin undefended.

In the yard he gathered his Plumb axe because he loved it, and two potatoes from the cellar, though they were shriveled by now and looked like the testicles of some mummified creature. As a very last thought he returned inside, where his mother slept under her quilt, barely raising and lowering the fabric with her breath. He took her oil pencil and Bible from under the bed and wrote, “Paul Samuel Collier, left for Army boot camp April 3, 1944. Take care Ma.” Then he untied his own boots and slid them off his feet. He glanced at Jeb, snoring lightly on the wooden pallet, having sedated himself with whisky a few hours before. His brother would kill him if he knew what Paul was about to do. Paul picked up Jeb’s heavy,

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larger boots from beside the door and pushed his feet inside. They fit just fine. He laced them quickly and shuffled out the door, trying with every step to walk more smoothly, more upright. He made his way across the pine needles and undergrowth. When he reached the road he paused before stepping out. In the moment between throbs, it felt wonderful to wear boots that fit.

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Chor Boogie, born Jason Hailey in 1979, was raised in Oceanside California a small city by the sea with in San Diego County. Originally from San Diego, the artist known as Chor Boogie currently resides in San Francisco but is an internationally known artist and has traveled extensively to exhibit his work around the world. At the mere age of five, Jason’s teacher handed him a paintbrush and he immediately began painting. He fell in love with the creative process immediately, telling his teacher "When I grow up I am going to be an artist."

A deep spiritual healing and recovery from addiction nearly a decade ago transformed his life and had a major impact on his style of color techniques and creative innovativeness. Chor Boogie moved to San Francisco in 2007, taking the leap to pursue a full time career in art. His visionary works ignite hearts and minds of worldwide masses. There is no color that goes unused.

Fueled by passion and drive, Boogie studied renaissance artists, such as Michelangelo, Da Vinci, and Rembrandt in addition to more modern artists like Klimt, Van Gogh, Dali, combining a street culture of modern day spray paint. Mentors, such as Phase2 and Vulcan helped guide his lifestyle into an art style. Exposed to the spray paint medium Chor Boogie learned how to process his trials and tribulations that changed his life. Chor Boogie accepts life and art as a duel challenge. An artist of modern times, understanding himself and the world through color, Chor has redefined originality. Chor Boogie is one of many masters who leads the pioneering craft of spray paint in its diverse art form. He uses a wide range of forms, pioneering his inverted can technique which slows the pressure of the paint and creates dense, rich tones giving room for more detail on a broad perspective.

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As an artist, Chor Boogie is a conceptual genius, a street romantic and master of illusion and technique. His originality in technique and style define his works. His works have healing effects by his use of unique and unmatched colors, which bring deeper meaning and wide interpretation to his works. Every vibrant piece has a story attached to it. Chor Boogie's colorful paintings attract A-list celebrities, art galleries and museums.

Chor Boogie's dynamic range of artistic styles manifest as soulful, deftly shaded portraits to color therapy, geometric elements adding up to half hidden faces, and a minds’ eye or two to encourage the viewer to see the obvious while searching for the obscure. His works evoke emotional and gut reactions.

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"With his innovative techniques and spiritual color philosophies, Chor Boogie is the king"SAN FRANCISCO BAY GUARDIAN "If you ever visited or live in the Bay Area, you've seen at least one of Chor Boogie's striking murals. Boogie's work ends up looking more like fine art, which is pretty impressive considering he paints solely in aerosol"- JUXTAPOZ "Internationally acclaimed virtuoso of spray-paint Chor Boogie presents his solo show: Romanticism, where imagination and emotion meet the healing power of color therapy.

Having emerged, in part, from the world of "Graffiti Art" Chor profoundly expounds on the genre in style, technique, form, composition, and conceptual underpinnings, as he can no longer be simply categorized as such. Viewers often find it nearly unbelievable that his masterful works are created almost solely from spray paint."- NBC "Chor Boogie (born Jason Lamar Hailey) is taking spray painting to new heights in the art world"- DUB Magazine "Chor Boogie is one of the premier American spray paint artists and muralists working today"- ART is SPECTRUM

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