Xavier Review 37.1

R XAVIEREVIEW 37.1, Spring 2017

XAVIER REVIEW

Xavier Review, a journal of literature and culture, is published twice a year. Š Xavier University of Louisiana.

Ralph Adamo Editor Katheryn Laborde Managing Editor Thomas Bonner, Jr., Biljana Obradovic, James Shade, Robin Vander, Mark Whitaker, Nicole Pepinster Greene Contributing Editors Bill Lavender Graphic Design Editors, Xavier University Studies, 1961-1971 Rainulf A. Stelzman, Hamilton P. Avegno, Leon Baisier Editors, Xavier Review Charles Fort, 1980-1982 Thomas Bonner, Jr., 1982-2002 Richard Collins, 2000-2007 Nicole Pepinster Greene, 2007-2011 Managing Editor Robert Skinner, 1989-2010

Unsolicited manuscripts may be submitted in typescript or by email attachment with a brief letter of submission and a self-addressed envelope for reply to the Editors, Xavier Review, Box 89, Xavier University of Louisiana, New Orleans, LA 70125. Essays should conform to the MLA Handbook for Writers with parenthetical citations and a list of Works Cited.

Manuscripts accepted for publication will be requested as electronic files. Subscriptions are $20 for individuals, $25 for institutions. Editorial inquiries may be addressed to Ralph Adamo at radamo@xula.edu. All other inquiries may be addressed to Katheryn Laborde at klaborde@xula.edu. Xavier Review is indexed in the MLA International Bibliography and the Index of American Periodical Verse, as well as other indices.

Xavier Review is supported by the Xavier University Endowment for the Humanities.

www.xavierreview.com www.xula.edu/review ISSN 0887-6681

Editor’s Note

It is my privilege once again to curate a collection of extraordinary

writing by men and women upholding and expanding the great traditions of literature. I should step out of the way and let it begin, but I cannot resist saying a few things.

Most visibly and forcefully, this issue brings us insight into the thinking and practices of a powerful, prolific and increasingly influential American writer, Bill Lavender. For several years now, wearing his production & design hat, Bill has made Xavier Review and the press’s books look good. That work is an offshoot of his role as founding editor of Lavender Ink/Diálogos, a literary press that has produced more than a hundred titles in fiction, poetry, non-fiction, scholarship and translation since its beginnings in the 1990s. (In addition, he served as managing editor of UNO Press for a number of years, steering that university press toward translation and the avant-garde.) All this is in addition to his primary work as a writer of both fiction and poetry who continually explores the boundaries of genre and thought. While any editor would have been excited to receive the essay that follows, it is a special pleasure for me to publish it, as Bill has been a friend and collaborator of mine since his undergraduate days at the University of Arkansas, back when giants like C.D. Wright, Frank Stanford, Leon Stokesbury, Barry Hannah, Julia Alvarez, R.S. Gwynn and Jack Butler (among others, many others) graced that landscape. That’s a friendship of more than forty years, such friendships being one of the counter-balances for growing older. While many of us have been content (and grateful) merely to write our poems and stay alive, Bill has never ceased from thinking, an occupation many poets and most humans shy away from, fearful of the consequences, not to mention the labor involved.

As a result, many of us look to Bill for ideas and their formation, and he delivers plenty of both here.

Having James Sallis in this issue is another joy for me. Sallis is the author of dozens of books in multiple genres. A master of poetry, novels and short v

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stories, he is also a gifted musician (and author of books on the subject), as well as a keen scholar, particularly of the origins and masters of noir fiction, and of his old friend, the great science fiction writer Samuel (Chip) Delany; he has, of course, written books about all of that too. He lived in New Orleans for a few years in the 1990s, once volunteering to address a class I was teaching in fiction writing. Asked genre-specific questions by the students, he gave an answer that has stuck with me. He said -- kind of smiling, kind of bemused -- “It’s all writing.” Look for an interview with Sallis in the next issue (37.2) of Xavier Review, conducted by XR fiction contributor Tom Andes.

While I either do not know or know well the rest of the writers assembled here, I can say that their work moved and inspired me, and I trust that it will do the same for any reader that gives it a chance.

Xavier Review congratulates poet and contributing editor, Biljana Obradovic, on Cat Painters: An Anthology of Contemporary Serbian Poetry, which she co-edited, and which has just been published by Diálogos, the translation imprint of Lavender Ink. Finally, we’ve lost some great voices among writers and musicians since the last Xavier Review, but if Leonard Cohen’s death brings some new eyes and ears to his astonishing body of work, well, at least there’s that. .

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Xavier Review 37.1, Spring 2017 Editor’s Note — v James Sallis Two Pieces — 11 Jean-Mark Sens Going to the River — 17 Barry Fitzpatrick Inte störa, Inte förstöra — 18 Jo Gehringer Two Stories — 28 Robert Lee Kendrick Erosion — 34 Jianqing Zheng The Lake in the City — 35 Jeanne Emmons Five Poems — 36 Christopher Shipman The Movie My Murderer Makes: Season II — 42 Abigail Allen Two Stories — 46 Patrick A. Howell The Beast Hobbled and Laid Low — 52 Jose Luis Gutierrez Hebdomeros — 60 Probal Mazumdar Another Moon — 61

Bill Lavender In the Thick(et) of Poetry: Meditations on 50 Years in the Language Game — 63 Bill Lavender Poems — 94 Contributor’s Notes 37.1 — 115

James Sallis

Two Pieces These were written on commission and appeared in limited-circulation publications, the first for a fascinating journal of “fashion, fiction and poetry” titled Grey, the second for a Louis Vuitton exhibition in a Paris museum. Grey asked me to find a movie in my mind and write about it as though it were in the real world. Editors for the Vuitton catalog provided photos of items from the exhibition that I might use as springboards for original fiction. Okay, I told them both: Next dance is yours.

Zombie Cars: A film by James Sallis

Turn the clocks forward eighty years.

Oil resources are depleted, the cities have emptied, much of America has returned to rural living. Rumors begin to circulate, then “unconfirmed reports” by media: old cars and trucks are rising up from the ground and from wrecking yards like zombies of old, losing parts and drooling fluids as they move toward centers of population seeking gasoline and oil.

Little is remembered of the ancient technology.

But outside Iowa City, where the Amish have grown affluent producing buggies for the entire country, one boy knows about the old vehicles. Ridiculed as “car crazy” by peers, an exasperation to his single mother, he is obsessed by automobiles and the culture they engendered, his room filled to bursting with photos of classic cars, drive-in restaurants, filling stations and racetracks, his shelves sparsely but lovingly stacked with copies of Hot Rod Magazine and ancient books hunted down and purchased with the money he makes as an apprentice farrier.

Finally the reports can no longer be denied. The revenant vehicles are 11

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everywhere, lurching toward Bethlehem, Des Moines, Keokuk, and Cedar Rapids.

“Yet again the wretched excesses of our past come back to plague us,” a politician says on an election swing through St. Louis.

“Who would have thought undeath had done so many,” a poet intones at a rally near Gary, Indiana.

“We must reach down, down deep, to find the carburetor and differential within us,” a lay preacher implores from a Wisconsin pulpit.

And in a farmhouse outside Iowa City, the one person who just knows he can help, has to make the decision of his life: To go against his mother’s explicit orders, or to save mankind.

Meanwhile, among the revenants, factions develop, some crusading to wipe out the humans to whom they owe their existence, others to accommodate and co-exist. My personal favorite scene is a revival meeting held in the ruins of a drive--in theatre, a Ford F-150 truck preaching to a field of vehicles who hear his sermon and entreaties both through the malfunctioning speakers on stands and through the cracked speakers of their own radios. (Throughout, the vehicles speak with sound: motors, creaks, horns. Translations appear as subtitles.)

Another pivotal scene has Tim sitting in his room reading. He is listening to news about the zombie cars on a crystal radio he’s built into an ancient plastic model Thunderbird; from time to time he turns off the volume to hear, in the distance, the rumble of vehicles reviving and extricating themselves from the wrecking yard miles away. He is reading the end of Gulliver’s Travels, where Gulliver, after his time with the Houyhnhms, has become a misfit amongst his own, passing his time chatting with horses in the stables.

Finally Tim makes his decision, leaves a note for his mother, and strikes out, with a change of underwear, a Popular Mechanics guide and mechanic’s tools bundled into a bag at the end of a stick, as he’s seen in pictures of hobos.

He knows he can help. No doubt about it, none at all. Just isn’t sure how.

Following a number of encounters with humans and revenant vehicles, he almost becomes collateral damage in a zombie-human stand-off but is rescued by a renegade zombie, a psychedelic-painted VW van. The van 12

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once belonged (“for a long, long time – if, of course, you believe in time”) to a philosopher, and has learned to communicate through its radio speaker.

Together Tim and the van, who Tim decides has to be named Gogh, find their way through battling humans and revenants, lone wolf vigilante humans, and splinter groups including a small troop of revenant vehicles repeatedly “killing” themselves for the greater good, only to be again reborn. Eventually Tim and van Gogh encounter and join others like themselves, humans and vehicles who have formed alliances.

The way of the future, they all begin to understand, will not be one or the other, soft machine, hard machine, living, unliving -- but both.

“We’re not locked into Aristotelian logic like you,” Martin explains to Tim in one of his frequent philosophical musings, “we’re not locked into logic at all. It’s not either/or, Tim. It’s all one big and. Always has been.”

A shrewd critic* has written that in science fiction two endings are possible: either you blow up the world, or things go back to how they were before. Ever the team for challenge, for going that extra inch or two, and for utterly ignoring the reasonable, we figured out a way to do both – so don’t miss Zombie Cars when it comes clanking and leaking to a theater near you.

* me

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The World Is the Case

Tucked beneath my feet as I glide into the long, banking curve is the

briefcase, one foot in sensible shoe resting atop it. The city sits like a saddle in the sudden hollow of mountains. You come through a pass and it springs into being there below. Each time you feel as settlers must have felt. I duck my head to peer over the rim of sunglasses at the rear view mirror. I can’t see them, but I know the others are back there.

There’s the usual run of gas stations, quick stops and antique or junk shops on the outskirts, a lumberyard, three or four confusing signs with lists of highways and state roads. A building that’s half family café, half biker bar, whose pies are as it says right there on the front window world famous.

The car bumps as it passes over the remains of a squashed cat, raccoon or skunk. The briefcase under my foot doesn’t budge. The radio brings in distraction and disaster from a larger world, news that has nothing to do with this place, this moment in time, why I am here. Clouds nudge at sky’s edge, blind and feeling their way.

The briefcase, too, is from another world. Fine leather, roughly the size and shape of an oldtime doctor’s bag, with a hinged top closing onto a smaller section that tucks perfectly beneath the seat, as though car and case were made for one another.

All my life I’d waited for my ship to come in but, near as I could tell, the thing never left port. Instead I was steadily going down, the way they say Venice is sinking into the sea. Dive, dive, dive. Until I found the briefcase.

By then I wasn’t on my uppers, I was living on the memory of my uppers, hanging out in bus stations, libraries and parks, sleeping where I could, scavenging alleyways behind restaurants for food. Jackson Park’s a favorite, high-traffic so as not to stand out so much, midtown and close to the financial district so as to make for good, guilt-driven panhandles, and that’s where I was, leaning against one tree in the shadow of another, when a young man (fashionable three-day growth of beard, diamond stud left ear) 14

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in an old suit (narrow lapels, pegged trousers) walked past, came back, and sat on the bench before me. The bench had a four-color advertisement for Motivational Yoga on it. The young man had a thoughtful smile.

He tucked the briefcase beneath the bench and looked off into the trees where strands of bird song -- warnings, come-hithers, idle chatter -- wove themselves into thatch. After a moment he rose, leaving the briefcase behind.

And yes, I thought to call after him. Thought to search out some official to whom I might turn it over. But did neither. Instead went back to my tree and waited with it on the ground by me, in the same shadow as myself.

Maybe some things are meant to be, you know?

Once I found the briefcase, I began to find other things. Money, in a suitcase from a dumpster behind Durant’s. Emerald cufflinks and jewelry in the purse of a woman who shared my seat on the light rail and bounded off at the last moment as doors closed.

This car.

I pull into the next souvenir shop I come to, thinking about what’s inside: decorative shot glasses, pepper jelly, books of jokes and local history, hot sauce, spoon rests and ashtrays in the shape of cowboy gear, Indian jewelry. I look across the highway at brown, bare hills, scrub cholla and saguaro cactus as cars behind me pass, cars I have been tracking.

The desert is honest; it makes no promises. Is this why I’ve come here?

The dark gray Buick pulls into a quick stop just up the road. A middleaged man gets out the passenger side but doesn’t stray. He walks the car’s perimeter, makes to be checking tires. Like the man who left the briefcase back in the park he wears an old-fashioned suit. Skinny lapels, pant legs echoing their taper. I go inside, purchase an ice cream sandwich and linger eating it, standing by the car. The man up the way goes around front to raise the hood.

I pull back onto the road. Two or three minutes pass before the Buick floats up in my rear view mirror. There are few enough cut-offs that it can stay far back.

I reach down and run my fingers across the top of the case, soft and smooth as skin. My thumb rests on the monogram, brass like the hasps, hinges and feet, before moving to the lock. Even here, pushing ninety degrees outside, 15

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the lock is cold to the touch.

I have never opened the briefcase. And never will now, whatever happens, whatever comes next. It has done its work.

“Zombie Cars” first appeared in Grey Magazine, copyright 2012 James Sallis.

“The World Is the Case” first appeared in Louis Vuitton: Travel and Fashion (Rizzoli International Publications), copyright 2015 James Sallis.

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Jean-Mark Sens

Going to the River You went to the river to talk to the river and the river’s wind breathed to your lips as one among many of its promeneurs, barges, tugs, ferries slanting waters with their low horns.

A river is a form of prayer at its beginning and at its end, confluents, tributes of its tributaries, the molecules of its tribal alluvium and colluvium.

The saxifrage, saxophone and sexy phrase, and happenstance that play above its mouth, scuffing waves along wharfs, scull boats, panhandlers and circus tricksters, its plying industry to the flows of its mercy.

So you went to the river to talk to the river no Voodoo cult, occult magic—just the fact the river never denies an answer.

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Barry Fitzpatrick

Inte störa, Inte förstöra

Melanie’s head sways to a barely audible American pop tune on the

radio as she drives us out of Stockholm headed toward her hometown of Fagersta. It’s nearly ten in the evening but the sun is still above the horizon.

After passing an IKEA on the outskirts of Stockholm, the land stretches out in all directions and shakes the city loose. The silhouette of a trotting elk on a yellow sign flashes by. Golden stubs from harvested wheat fields, brilliant against the black, saw-toothed edge of evergreen forest, give way to pastures where cows and horses graze. Scattered in the distance are red houses and red barns next to birch trees sheathed in white bark.

Cool, pine-scented air rushes through my open backseat window, and I’m saturated with the notion that I’m really here, in Sweden. I listen to Melanie and her mother, Ingela, slip back and forth between English and Swedish, sometimes within the same sentence.

“See, Mama, the sign for Uppsala, I told you it comes first. Jag ar ratt igen.” (I’m right again.) She whips up her hand in a high five to Ingela who shakes her head and laughs, then wraps her fingers around Melanie’s.

“Ja, Mellie, what would I do without you?” Wearing wrap-around sunglasses and a wide royal blue headband, Ingela looks like an athlete ready for the slopes. Light shimmers off her platinum hair as she turns to me and says, “Melanie has no faith in me as a navigator. Doesn’t matter where we’re going, she tells my friends to pack an overnight bag when they’re riding with me.”

I enjoy the banter I had come to know when their family returned for yearly visits to New Orleans, where I live and where for many years they had lived. Ingela and her husband Martin met while working one summer at a kibbutz in Israel, later marrying and moving to New Orleans, where Martin was from. After both children were born, Martin grew restless not only to 18

leave the city but to move out of the States. He wanted the opportunity to live the egalitarian lifestyle Sweden is known for. Having visited many times and being an outdoorsman, he also longed for the rich woodlands where he could fish and camp. And Ingela missed her mother. So they packed up the family and moved to Fagersta.

For the last few years, they had urged me, Kom och besok Sverige.

Come visit Sweden. So I finally took them up on their invitation. I arrived a few weeks after Midnattssol, or Midnight Sun (summer solstice), when at midnight on the Arctic Circle the sun stutters on the horizon, then, begins its ascent again.

Curious about the prolonged daylight, I ask about sunset.

“The sun sets around eleven and is up again at three,” Melanie tells me.

She is living back home for the summer after completing her second year of college in Stockholm. “I have to sleep in a closet during the summer. Even though the windows have shades, the light still sneaks in.”

I think of my own bedroom with block-out shades and contact paper secured with duct tape covering transoms. I picture myself curled on the floor of a closet.

The countryside sweeps past my window. There are no signs of development aside from farm houses, barns, and roundabouts leading to small towns miles off the main highway. I ask about bathroom facilities, just in case.

“Oh,” Melanie breaks in with her big cheeky grin, and says, “We just… pop a squat.”

“You what?”

“In Swedish countryside, if you have to pee you just pull over and go on the side of the road,” Ingela tells me. “You don’t even have to find a bush to duck behind because nobody driving by pays any attention. As long as no toilet paper is left, it’s not a problem.” After a pause she adds, “And we don’t litter here.”

I like the simplicity of the idea, being surrounded by nature, breathing fresh air while you pee instead of being cramped in a smelly bathroom. And the idea isn’t completely foreign to me. Having grown up in the backwoods of Georgia in the 1950’s, I remember my mother, while driving the country 19

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roads, easing the car onto the shoulder, and then one of us running for the nearest bush. If we were lucky enough to have tissue, I’m sure we didn’t leave it behind.

We don’t litter here. I repeat the words in my mind. I’m aware of Swedes reputation as environmentalists, but I’m still a little stunned by Ingela’s confident delivery. Granted, Sweden is roughly the size of California but with only a fourth of California’s population, so it makes sense that fewer people equals less mess. But this commitment and their reverence for the land, as I would discover over the next two weeks, goes much deeper.

After passing a roundabout with signs to Englesberg and Riddarhyttan, Ingela tells me we’re getting close to home. She points toward the dark forest behind a meadow where two horses graze. “Good berry picking,” she exclaims. “We’ll come back here later. Those woods are loaded with strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, currents, and lingonberries.”

“Who owns the land?” I ask, thinking that it looks like private property.

“I don’t know, but it doesn’t matter. If it’s public land, we have free access because of Allemansratten. That’s our Constitutional Right of Public Access, the Right to Roam. Everyone can hike, pick berries, fish, and camp on all public land for free. Even though private property is excluded from the law, the same freedom is understood because most Swedes revere the land and want to protect it. We have a saying, Inte störa, Inte förstöra, which means Do not disturb, do not destroy.”

As a landscape architect, I’m familiar with the idea of the Right to Roam, but I’d never visited any country where this existed. England and Scotland also passed a similar law but in Scandinavian the rights of access are broader, less restrictive. In my studies, I’d discovered a movement in the States to establish this same right to walk on all wooded and open, uncultivated countryside.

Back home we have access to many national and state parks but there are often fees attached, limiting use to those with extra money.

Sweden’s welfare state model of egalitarianism has been transformed since their financial crisis during the 1990’s. A new more efficient model cut some of the social services provided along with reducing the high tax rate.

Yet the government continues to encourage a healthy lifestyle by guaranteeing 20

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healthcare, education and free access to nature.

The Right to Roam on public land makes sense to me. Extending this to private land where permission to enter another’s property isn’t needed because the owner assumes the intruders will keep a respectful distance from the home and that the land will be cared for, seems like a potential recipe for chaos. Especially when I imagine this idea in the States, where many people are disconnected to the land. Some think of it as expendable --possibly with even less regard than other property.

Theoretically, I believe land is a common heritage to be enjoyed by all and not just those holding legal title. But blurring boundaries of ownership goes against what my father drilled into me about land, his land. Land that I inherited.

In the early 1900s, my father’s family purchased thousands of acres in middle Georgia, land that previously had been part of one of the largest plantations in the Southeast. They bought the property as a commodity and segregated it with barbed wire and split-rail fences. No Trespassing signs nailed to trees edged the perimeter. His family farmed the land, growing peaches and cotton. In the early days, they also thinned trees to provide lumber for their saw mill.

Owning land and passing it down to his daughter made my father proud.

Over the years, he preached, “After I’m gone, hold on to the land. “There’s no more to be made. And during hard times you’ll always have it to fall back on.”

My father, who was sixty-four when I was born, died when I was in my mid-twenties. It was not long after his death, after I had already moved away from home, finished college and started working, that I began questioning my inheritance.

It was during those years that I read Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses, in which the author explores how land doesn’t belong to us. We can’t own it. He also explores another side of land ownership in the South. In “The Bear” the oldest son is positioned to inherit his family’s land. His convictions, which led him to refuse his inheritance, stemmed from a belief that it’s a curse for man to attempt to own the land, a curse that he thought had led to slavery and to the destruction of the South.

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Part of me wanted to run from the haunting memories of slavery in the land’s past. From a more practical side, I also wondered how I would pay the hefty annual land taxes without cutting too many trees. Identifying myself as a naturalist, I only wanted to remove diseased trees, or trees in overcrowded areas that threatened the balance of a healthy forest. I thought about endowing my land to the University of Georgia not only to avoid my tax burden but to allow others access to the land. I pictured students walking in the woods, gathering samples for studies to help preserve the native plants and wildlife.

And I could still enjoy the land whenever I wanted.

Those woods where I played as a child felt as if they were etched into my bones. I recalled the first time I walked over a carpet of ivory petals fallen from a cluster of dogwoods. White blossoms sprouted from branches that dipped so close to the ground I could reach out and touch the flowers. Those woods shaped who I was and who I would become.

On my first morning in Fagersta, after barely sleeping because of jet-lag and early sunrise, Ingela and I walk to Old Town Bakery on the edge of town.

When we enter the one-room kitchen cottage, an elderly woman looks up and exchanges a few words with Ingela while her hands continue kneading dough.

After she rolls and waffle flattens it, an elderly man in a baker’s hat and apron coaxes the unleavened sheet onto a platter-sized spatula, then shoves it into a brick oven. After a few minutes, he sets the honey-brown bread on a rack to cool before sprinkling on powdered sugar and packaging it. On our way out, Ingela tells me that many older Swedes, like this couple in their mideighties, continue working or volunteering after retirement.

As we walk, we snack on the bread and take the long way through town to get back home.

“This year we had one of the coldest winters I can remember,” Ingela says. “It was brutal. The snow plows never stopped.” She tells me that many days never got above -20 celsius. Martin, who works as an apartment building maintenance man, becomes a snow plow driver when the need arises.

Ingela is a psychiatric nurse and knows the dark side of being locked in 22

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ice and snow. Swedes often become depressed during the winter, a time when their consumption of Vodka rises. They long for warm days when they can trade their wool mittens and cross-country ski poles for work gloves and rakes.

On each street, men and women tend their gardens. The consistency of architecture, country cottages and boxy barn-style houses, is broken by jumbles of flowers that spill over garden beds and weave through trees.

Most yards have racks with several canoes. Ingela tells me that many Swedes build summer cabins near water on free, public land zoned for recreation. The cabins are often one-room with bunk beds, no electricity, and running water only at outside spigots. Outhouses are scattered among the cabins. They prefer to keep it that way, simple and unobtrusive.

That afternoon Ingela and I go to one of the three cafés in town. While eating pizza outside at a picnic table on a deck surrounded by woods, it becomes evident that this truly is a town within a forest. Knowing I’m interested in urban planning, Ingela tells me about the early vision of Fagersta.

In 1920, the owner of the local steel factory, who also held much of the real estate in town, collaborated with a planner/builder he met on a train while railing through the countryside on his way to Uppsala.

“They agreed to tear down the old drafty red cabins in one part of town and build apartment buildings no higher than four stories,” Ingela says. “Even though more land was needed for expansion, the plan honored one key factor; remove as few trees as possible and only ones that absolutely couldn’t be built around. They sealed the deal with a handshake.”

Land isn’t abundant, so development, then and now, tends to be dense like in other European countries. By the 1920s in the U.S., where land seemed limitless, deforestation was rampant to keep up with the growth/ boom mentality. In Sweden the land ethic has never focused on growth.

Conservation of their forest is part of the country’s cultural identity. And more. I recalled a book by Simon Schama, Landscape of Memory. He writes that the woodlands in Sweden are sacred. Preserving them is deeply rooted in Swedes spiritual connection to pagan myths of the forest, the “spirit of place.”

Their commitment to stewardship makes the Right to Roam possible.

Although over-picking by commercial groups of non-natives has become a 23

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problem in recent years, overall the practice seems to work.

Ultimately, I decided to keep the land in Georgia and not turn it over to the University of Georgia. I had come to the conclusion that I could be a good steward, possibly even better than a university. To help pay the taxes, I leased out the farm land and periodically thinned trees from dense areas. I would hold the title, but with the understanding that I was a caretaker.

My respect for the land had filtered down to me from my father. Although he held his property with a clenched fist and never would have wanted strangers roaming around — too much of a liability, he said, and too much litter — he found great comfort and strength when walking in the woods. Over the years when he became burdened by farm debt, he preferred to tighten his belt, cut back on expenses over cutting timber. I remember a few times when he did thin out trees, but he was even selective about that. And he never clear cut that I’m aware of. Rather than walking through fields of stumps, he wanted to leave his back door for an old-growth forest of towering pines, sycamores, and dogwoods.

Wendell Berry, professor, author and agrarian philosopher, writes about private (vs. corporate) land ownership fostering an intimacy between owner and “place.” He sees a connection between the health of people and the health of nature. The “place” and those who share it each mold and echo the other. This symbiosis, he believes, is necessary in our country for building a commitment to stewardship for the earth.

At present, I have an arrangement with the University of Georgia that allows them on the property for research on black bears. That region has one of the highest black bear populations in the state, but the bears are losing ground. Along with other nearby land owners, I’m trying to thwart the Department of Transportation as the State tries to take over land. The DOT wants to widen highways by adding more lanes to accommodate urban sprawl creeping toward the backwoods of Georgia.

On one of my last days in Fagersta, Ingela, Melanie and I drive to the Black Mountain Nature Preserve and park near the trailhead. With bowls and bags in our daypacks, we ease through the dense woods’ edge, brushing 24

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away large spider webs spun across the path.

“When I was young,” Ingela recalls, “my mother taught me to walk single-file and to remain respectfully quiet while in the woods. Today it’s different. We now have Skogsmulle -- forest kindergartens where children spend all day in nature, playing and learning.”

A few feet off the path a fat six-inch long slug with deep ridges oozes like glistening ink. “You’ll see a lot of these black arions,” Melanie says.

“And they’re even edible, although I’ve heard not too tasty. In the old days, they were also used to grease wooden axel wheels.”

We walk only a short distance farther before an old growth forest opens.

Light splinters through the canopy of towering larch and spruce trees muscled in among boulders spattered with orange lichen. Clumps of ferns have broken through the carpet of moss.

Interspersed within this terrestrial sea, bushes and groundcovers pop with berries. My eyes cut from side to side, locking on strawberries and blueberries. Crouching, I use one hand to steady the blueberry bramble while my other, between mosquito smacks, picks and eats. I think of the assortment of desserts Ingela has promised, so for every handful that goes into my mouth, two go into a plastic bowl. The berries are smaller than the ones back home, but much sweeter.

After filling our containers with berries, we climb onto a huge boulder to eat the lunch we’d packed. When we start back down the trail, we become giddy. With outstretched arms, we leap through the spongy moss before landing on an island by the creek’s edge. We recline into the soft cushion.

Above us, the leaves of birch shimmer like scales. We strike poses reminiscent, in our minds anyway, of the sultry Garbo and Bergman. Ingela tells a story about Huldra, the mythic Swedish siren who lures men deep into the woods before she turns into a hollow tree, leaving them lost and alone; and stories of the pagan history of trolls that dwell in the woods and elves that live in the meadows.

In some respects it would be easy for me to idealize Sweden: the modest lifestyle of its people, the vitality of the elderly, the abundance of idyllic 25

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nature, the freedom of endless walking without concern for boundaries.

But I can’t imagine enduring the darkness and the cold of winter. I’ve even become irritated by the long hours of daylight— on my third day in Fagersta, I’d made a bed of cushions in the closet in my room.

That evening, Ingela and I take our final walk from her house to the family cabin by the Semla River. After the now familiar two mile trek, we break from the forest into the sunny clearing. Doll-house-sized red cabins with white trim and blue doors dot the woods terracing up to our right.

We spread out towels and lie in the sun for a while before jumping into the chilly river. After swimming, we join Martin and his friend Anders who stand over an open pit, grilling herring they caught earlier that day. Buoyant and ruddy-complected, Anders talks about Midsummer holiday several weeks earlier. The festival is an ancient pagan ritual celebrated with bonfires, feasts, and dancing around maypoles wrapped in greenery and flowers. Continuous daylight for three days. Jokingly, he adds, “You Americans can’t wait to come to Midsummer. You think non-stop party. Great. But after the second day you run home like babies screaming, ‘I can’t take it anymore, no more drinking, no more partying.’”

After eating, Ingela and I sit on the end of the pier. She tells me how restless she feels. If it were up to her, she would move back to New Orleans.

She misses not only the tropical warmth but the music, the architecture.

And because Swedes tend to be reserved, she longs for the eclectic jumble of people and flavors—things I also missed by the end of my visit. But she can’t convince Martin. He’s still in the honeymoon phase with Sweden and wants to keep his base in Fagersta.

It’s interesting how easily we can be charmed by what is new or unfamiliar.

How we sometimes let ourselves believe that what we have isn’t as good as what others seem to have. How this certainty shines with promise of something better. When I arrived in Fagersta, I was immersed in their sensibility to the land, and I was envious. I want to live in a country like this, I thought. But their mindset has evolved over hundreds of years. It’s a consciousness that would take generations to cultivate back home. Being here reminds me that change is possible. It teaches me the importance of holding the land not with 26

Barry Fitzpatrick

a clenched fist, but on an open palm, always mindful of the delicate balance.

Over the river, swirls of apricot, rose, then, cobalt melt across the sky.

Shadows of darkness edge in. Kerosene lamps flicker on cabin porches. After midnight we walk out of the woods, all the way glimpsing the full moon that seems to sail through the trees.

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Jo Gehringer

Two Stories Kevin and Joe are Friends

I recently met the man who invented America.

He had been standing outside Jake’s all night, leaning up against the wall beneath an awning to avoid the rain. When I went out for maybe my fourth or fifth cigarette, he walked up to me and started talking loud and fast.

He said that his name was Kevin, and that he had invented America. I offered to buy him a drink, but he said No, no thank you, I can buy my own drinks, which if he had invented America, he probably could.

I asked him, Kevin, why did you invent America? I was not trying to blame him for anything. We had only just met.

Kevin grabbed my hand the way you might grab somebody’s hand if you were very intent on arm wrestling them, though I had a feeling he did not want to arm wrestle me. Joe, he said, I made America for many reasons.

I made America so squirrels would have a place to live. I made America to give you someone besides yourself to blame. But mostly, I made America because I was lonely and alone.

As he said this, Kevin tightened his grip on my hand and pulled me toward him. He put his other arm around me and slapped me in the middle of my back. It was nice, kind of. His hands were coated with thick black grease, like the kind that would build up on the pizza pans at Little Caesar’s when I would lie to my boss about having washed them after use. It made sense that Kevin’s hands would be greasy. He was an inventor.

I am not sure which of us decided to begin walking. Probably neither of us did. But the rain had stopped and I did not want to go back into Jake’s. The general vibe or atmosphere was weird in there. There had been an altercation 28

about a game of pool involving me, and everyone in there was pretty much pissed.

The water in the street was shining green and red and silver beneath every type of electric light as Kevin told me that Oh man, he used to be so lonely. Just then, I imagined kissing Kevin. It wasn’t that I wanted to. Not that I was particularly opposed to kissing him either. It was just something I imagined. In grade school, my teachers told me that I had a great aptitude for problem solving. Kevin’s loneliness seemed like a problem to me. And I was lonely too. A kiss was a possible solution. In equations with two variables, there are lots of possible solutions, and all of them are equally valid. For some value of Kevin, and some value of myself, a kiss was the only thing that would even work.

I thought about sharing these thoughts with Kevin, but I decided not to because I did not want to make him uncomfortable.

We walked a while without talking before we got to Palmer Park, and sat down on the edge of an old fountain with brown water in it and shitty tiles. Kevin began rolling a cigarette with one hand while scratching at the bristly hairs growing from his cheeks. He was a hairy guy, and it looked like he had probably shaved two weeks ago and not again since. Even though it was dirty, his skin was very smooth, probably from all the oil that that got rubbed into it at work and when he would scratch his face which was a lot.

When Kevin finished rolling the cigarette, we sat on the edge of the fountain passing it back and forth like a joint. If a cop had walked by, we probably would have got arrested. That was how we looked.

I asked him, Kevin, why were you so lonely? And he said to me Joe, before I made America I was all alone. All the places and people, they were still here, the fields of corn and poppies and eagles and vultures as well as smaller birds whose names nobody knows but which sing all the time regardless. And I would like, look up at the sky and down at the ground, and I realized that I lived somewhere in between. And the little bit of it in which I lived and where you are now I named America.

Kevin had probably not really invented America. If anything he only 29

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named it, and he probably didn’t even do that. I looked at Kevin. He looked like an old man with grease in his beard.

I love you, Kevin, I said. Thank you for inventing this great nation of America, I said.

Kevin turned toward me with his arms outstretched like for a hug, but then he grabbed my shoulders and pushed. I fell back into the basin of the fountain and Kevin held onto my shoulders and pushed me down so hard I thought I might die. So I grabbed his shoulders with my hands and pushed him under the water. And then I stopped.

I pulled Kevin out of the fountain, both of us wet and covered in rotting leaves. Fuck, I said, I’m sorry Kevin.

Kevin looked at me, not even angry and not even sad. Not even surprised.

He didn’t say anything. He just looked at me like he was waiting for the bus.

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Joe Gehringer

Salt

It was raining outside, but Tao Terrence barely noticed. He was trying

to remember something, but he couldn’t remember what. He felt that it was important, or that it had once been. He remembered that the unknown memory had once carried weight and feeling and urgency. By accident, he remembered something else.

Years ago, when he was maybe six, there had been a freak October storm, which had coated all the power lines in translucent sheathes of ice. Denver’s city council canceled Halloween, and nobody left the house for days. While Tao and his siblings played endless games of Yahtzee and Monopoly, their father had been stranded at the office, and along with his coworkers had managed to survive on a diet of decaf and packaged snacks from the vending machine.

Apparently, when the power went out, they’d had to smash the machine’s glass in with the butt of a fire extinguisher. Staring out at the whipping palm fronds and the froth of the hurricane’s wind and rain, Tao thought of his father, minorly emaciated and shivering, hunched over a bag of Cheez-Its like a caveman in a cubicle.

Larry, Tao’s corgi, got up from his place on the sofa and pawed at the glass sliding door, growling a little. He saw something, or thought he saw something, or perhaps just wanted to growl, but for whatever reason, Larry pointed his ears and bristled his the fur on the back of his neck, intent on not shutting the hell up until he got Tao’s attention. Tao ignored this: he was intent on finishing his book. Since the storm had knocked the power out two days ago, Tao taken to sleeping 12-14 hours per diem, and in the time he spent awake, he read, either by the greenish light that filtered through the haze of the storm, or else by candlelight.

As Larry, defeated by Tao’s indifference, hopped on stubby, soggy legs back up to the sofa, Tao returned to his book. The book that he was reading was Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. Despite having been shut in for two and a half days, Tao had only made it to page 189. He found the book 31

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to be digressive, self-congratulatory, and more or less completely aimless.

Tao often paused between sentences, thinking to himself “what is the point of this?” or “what is this even about?”

Tao was both sure and not why he’d been reading so much. He was aware that he had nothing else to do, and of the handful of books in his apartment, this was the only one he hadn’t read, for reasons that had, to Tao, been making themselves abundantly apparent. He’d been given the book by a friend he’d lost track of years ago. They had said it was a work of genius.

Tao found himself unable to remember either the friend’s name or gender -- the only significant detail he could recall was a mismatched set of eyes, one blue, one green, which blessing/defect the friend had carried since birth.

Now, in the green half-light, Tao did not know whether to be upset with the book for failing to present its genius to him, or with himself for failing to recognize it. Reaching up to wipe his cheek with the back of his hand, he realized he was crying.

Tao had taken his last 10 mg citalopram (trade name Celexa) three days ago, and hadn’t been able to make it to the pharmacy to refill his prescription before the storm made landfall. Now, crying over what he felt to be essentially nothing, Tao remembered this, and felt both consoled and confused. Often, while on Celexa, which he’d started taking shortly after moving to New Orleans, he experienced things that would normally have made him sad, but felt nothing. Nothing, he had decided, was not the right word. In these moments, Tao felt aware that, unmedicated, he would have experienced sadness, yet all he felt was the absence of sadness. At times, Tao felt sad about this, thinking that in the absence of sadness his life was somehow less meaningful, or that less of its meaning was legible to him.

Larry began to whine. Tao had been dreading this. Over the course of the last few days, Tao had tried and failed more than a dozen times to find a way to deal with the issue of Larry’s having to make waste in the middle of a hurricane, but there was nothing for it. Tao stripped down to his underwear, grabbed the soaking leash from the nightstand, and unlocked the door.

The winds of the storm were sharp enough to bite at Tao’s neck and back. After the first trip outside, he gave up on umbrellas and raincoats. The 32

Joe Gehringer

rain seemed to be coming from every direction all at once, and within thirty seconds, Tao came to understand waterproof as a relative term. Better simply to strip down, and put the dry clothes back on with fresh underwear. Really, he only wore underwear for fear that he might be caught nude by a neighbor with a similar problem w/r/t dog shit.

Larry shook off once inside, but it didn’t matter much. His spot on the sofa was already soaked, and the apartment had begun to smell of dog. Tao went back to Infinite Jest. Having just towel-dried his face, he was surprised to find himself crying again, or perhaps still. He wasn’t sure why.

Tao imagined himself falling off a motorcycle. He had been imagining the same scene for days and wasn’t sure why. He just kept picturing it, the motorcycle skidding, slowly spinning sideways, and careening over his body as he tumbled off the road and skittered to a halt with what skin he had left.

Looking up, Tao realized Larry had come to lay next to him, which at first pleased him, until he realized that Larry lay directly on top of the still-open pages of Infinite Jest. The book was soaked.

Tao frantically scraped at the pages with an old paper napkin. There was nothing for it. The water wouldn’t come out. Tao felt himself crying again, and lit a cigarette, his first since the storm began.

He looked down into the boring book, and thought of his father, and the absence of light in his eyes when he’d come home from the office after the blizzard so many years ago. He began to read from page 200.

He continued crying and did not stop for several hours.

When the storm had ended and the city returned to life, Tao walked across the street to the Rite Aid and bought a box of Cheez-Its. He ate them one by one, savoring the sting of salt on his tongue.

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Robert Lee Kendrick

Erosion Swollen with rain, Six Mile Creek slurries low lying ground, uproots a sapling. No sudden torque or rent heartwood, trunk borne on the stream’s mud-cloaked shoulder, taken to Hartwell to lie in soft mire beneath maidencane, lake willow, wax myrtle.

Water smooths clay, clears debris from the new oak’s small plot near the spot where my friend Chris cast bait, watched ferns lean, and listened to bees, before his truck sailed a layer of water on asphalt, hood striking deep-rooted hickory, steel and glass folding like leaves.

Late summer sun fades name and date on the hail splintered cross, moss softens patiblum and stipes, cellulose slowly returns to red dirt.

Over five years, broken ground found its ease. I’ve learned no such balance. Each time down the hill, tightening breaths. Across from his spot on the bank, an undulant pull. Meanwhile, the creek’s thousand songs to the void. Old limbs give in wind, pass it to others.

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Jianqing Zheng

The Lake in the City After industrial wastewater pours into the lake that’s been dear in my memory since childhood, there are no more reflections of the blue sky no more camping or fishing for trout and bass, no more beautiful wake patterns from watercrafts, no more white egrets wading or standing in shallows, no more tourists coming to see plum blossoms, no more shimmering moonlight lapping the shore.

It looks like the thick and black sewage sludge with a stench going deep into the lungs of the city, going deep into the nostrils of each person living in the residential towers around the lake, going deep into the minds of those in power who care nothing but money.

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Jeanne Emmons

Five Poems A Tenderness Beyond The sky today is the color of old jeans, with worn places where the fabric seems so thin you think you could poke through and reach the skin of the cosmos, the part that can feel. Most days it’s more a mirrored shield. Or a metal mask you keep squinting at, to pierce it, always to see, past your reflection, a hand, an eye blinking, maybe swimming with tears, something beyond you but familiar, benevolent. I’m thinking that was why someone had to puncture a god, just to prove the steely sky could know pain, be sore afraid. We picked this star-struck, straw-stuck newborn with the five-pointed wounds, so that, after that, even the grass would stand up, sensitive, waving its cilia while the wind heaved these sweeping sighs, as a mother aching with tenderness rakes her fingers through her child’s hair. After that, everything would leave an impression, a wake

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gashing and closing up behind, a passion, a world wounding and healing itself. And yet nothing has changed, really. To the eye bathed in sorrow the world always was thin-skinned.

And in the tinnitus of ordinary grief, the ears have always picked up a ringing in the leaves, even on a still day. A music of our own making, maybe, though we keep asking: where does it come from? and answer hopefully: a tenderness beyond?

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The Frost Pattern Speaks from the Window You say pattern. Yet for all you know I am only a haphazard collection of intersecting lines, random starbursts. In me you will find swords or the cross, or the zig-zag seam of a web, or the key of F#.

You will feel the urge to weep or kneel, dance or change. You cannot help yourself. You will make me mean something. I exist on a cold vertical plane.

Otherwise transparent and without real identity, it is made to lead the eye on to something else.

I obstruct that. I stop your eye and you contemplate for once the middle distance. You will see pick-up sticks and think of childhood. Or barbed wired and think of Auschwitz. Alcatraz. You will peruse the one spot where the scores lie so close it is as if a scribe had begun and then had a second thought and tried to scratch out a message. All day you will try to crack my code, as if you cannot on your own decipher whether you are supposed to walk outside and lie down naked in the snow or rise on tiptoe and sing.

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Jeanne Emmons

Still Life With Papaya This moment I am trying to talk to myself in a voice I can want to go on hearing, the syntax either ripe or crisp, fluid or staccato. Skin of grammar unblemished, in green, gold, wrapping the flesh. The seeds secreted deep in the invisible core of it, biding their time. You could fine-tune the whole surface forever, stem end, blossom end, finger the smooth hips, rub the neck. But in the end you just want to cleave it clean in two with a sharp whack in the right place. And you might as well because the inside’s what you’re after. The beauty of it rocking on the cutting board like a canoe. The orange flesh of it, the green skin, the black seeds bunched up and clumped as fish eggs. You’re after the eating of it, the sweet cool slimy wet of it. And you’re after whatever in it will nourish you, will sift through your body from the soft mouthfuls, will sail and float into your blood, muscle. But more. This moment it’s just wanting to be true.

All right. That’s the whole of it.

Every moment that one thing only. Wanting it just to be.

True

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Reflection Until the wind, the lake reflects just the barren trees, the tangle of brush, an arc of fallen trunk, stripped and white in the sun, a sky faded almost to gray.

The bare fact of this doubling draws me, the way the trunk becomes a circle, broken, how the naked trees stretch down to something naked stretching up.

All this replication makes me look up again and again, makes me gaze and gaze, and for a time I am transfixed. For a time I am balanced on the very fulcrum of things, the point of some leverage that threatens to lift the earth a few inches above itself on feet of fire. Until the wind.

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Jeanne Emmons

St. Francis’ Day Under a blue uncertainty of sky, branches weighted with shivering yellow leaves are bent with longing or despondency over a bright pock-marked lake.

And then the breeze dies, and the blue gaze of the sky is returned, smeared with gold, and its deep kiss stirs and plunges into the depths of the leprous water.

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Xavier Review 37.1

Christopher Shipman

The Movie My Murderer Makes: Season II Episode I: A Circle of Sharks My murderer stalks an island at night. At the end of the day, when he has finished filming whatever momentous or mundane scrap of my life deemed desirable enough to capture with his fancy cameras, he packs up all his gear, clicks off the lights as if closing the eyes of the rooms in which they hang, and sends the extras home. My murderer’s home, as far as I can see, is an act of wandering off. I imagine him walking the back roads kicking rocks just for want of wandering; but, he assures me that once he’s out of sight, once he rounds the first corner, at the very moment of his absence, he silently circles the beach of an uninhabited island for the rest of the night.

When he is away he makes movies of the changing cycles of the moon. “Just to avoid boredom,” he says. I have wondered if he adds this bit of dialogue in for believability. I may never know. I’ve never seen any of the footage.

But what he does with the film somehow makes sense. Once the full moon’s final glow is swallowed by the morning sun my murderer projects his work on the white sheet he has hung on a wall of the closest cave. Before the final reel, without fail, my murderer rips the film from the projector and throws it to the sharks circling the island he has circled nightly, “as the moon moved through its many-faced hall.” My murderer is a capricious murderer, given to predictable petulance. The sharks know this. Anything my murderer touches has blood on it. The sharks know this. They sense a certain moon darkening their depth. He is coming soon. They know they don’t have to hunt. They know he will feed their hunger for blood.

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Episode II: Coming Soon Like a monster in a movie franchise that’s gone on too long, my murderer keeps coming back. One day I asked him which villain he identified with more, but I only got through Jason, Freddy, and Michael before he stormed out of the house. I didn’t see him again until the first time I took my wife to the movies. After I bought us tickets for Where the Wild Things Are I joined Sarah, who was finishing a cigarette and checking out the posters for new movies lining the wall outside the theater. My murderer had replaced all the movie posters with posters that depicted film adaptations of my past, each with its own theme and tagline. It was terrifying to see, but I didn’t mention it to Sarah. After the movie it was raining so I left Sarah by the door and went to get the car. When I picked her up she was smoking another cigarette and looking again at the movie posters of my past. On the way out of the parking lot she commented that all the movies coming out these days look like shit.

Then my murderer appeared in the rearview mirror, running from the theater though pouring rain, headed right for us.

Episode III: Commercial Break My murderer is trying to get a job that will allow him to decide when to cut commercials into movies aired on cable. He told me that if he doesn’t get an interview soon he’s going to march right through the door of FX— his favorite channel— and stand me up in front of the biggest wig to show them what he’s made of. When he’s finished rattling off his qualifications, like an old man who missed his chance long ago, he turns toward me. “Be ready,” he says.

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Episode IV: The Blinking Red Light We open on a snowy evening. The leaves are eating each other so white. A word is repeated between the teeth, like a mother who bites her child after the child bites a sibling. Like a gift that keeps on giving. Jump cut to the Christmas tree twinkle-twinkling. Jump cut to five years old. Jump cut to me behind the liner notes. See through the eye of the tattered angel tilted on the top of the fake tree. See through the history of a living room. See like the sun sees dust when it slants through the window in the door. See what dingy cloth sees. There, my grandfather is preparing for death with a 1,001 naps. Behind my grandfather’s red recliner my murderer helps me unwrap a present. The feeling you should have is like the feeling of taking the family video (playing for no one in particular) from the VCR and flinging it like a sheeted ghost at my grandfather’s face of raked leaves. His voice is the scrape of shovel against sidewalk. His skin, snow packed thick as a winter of fears, collecting. See me hide in the eyes hiding in the trees so white. I am a kid.

I am a dying camera.

Episode V: The Sound of One Hand Clapping The in-laws were watching America’s Got Talent when I went upstairs to get the baby to sleep. Her mother had appeared at the bottom of the stairs, rubbing red eyes. Defeated, she said, “my ass is sore from that chair,” which I knew was my cue to take over. She offered a sigh of confirmation and walked wordless to the bathroom. Upstairs, in my in-laws’ guest bedroom, the baby was standing in the pack n’ play, staring, as if at a spotlight shining down over a stage, into the glow of the nightlight thrown onto the wall, which held in its dim glimmer a small cluster of golden stars. When I picked up 44

Christopher Shipman

the baby our combined shadows assumed the space of that stage, stretching monstrously up the length of the wall and slanting sideways where it met the ceiling. As I paced the floor I imagined that I was a contestant on America’s Got Talent. I walked on stage with the baby in my arms and, without a word exchanged with the judges, the lights dimmed, a sudden hush fell over the audience, and I rocked the baby to sleep while everyone watched. Applause filled the auditorium, but in these imagined moments of joy it’s hard to not also imagine my murderer. Somewhere among the glow of cellphones filming my performance he was quietly critiquing my every move. Outside my reverie I assumed he was hiding under the bed with a knife between his teeth, or behind the mirrored glass door of the closet standing slightly open, or that at any moment another shadow separate from the strange shape of father and child would appear within the glow of golden stars. I thought I saw a shadowy hand reach out to find—if it had one—my shadow’s beating heart.

But I might have imagined it. I was busy trying to discern objects from flesh; lamps from hands; tables from legs. The baby had fallen asleep sometime when I was paying no attention. But not until after I put her down, not until after I was done rubbing my arm and chest where her growing weight strained my muscles, and not until after I tiptoed out of the room, gently pulling the door closed behind me, did I get a real glimpse of my murderer. He passed casually by as I walked triumphantly down the stairs back into the living room to share the news of my tiny victory. I didn’t look back, but that night I woke to find my murderer standing over me, one hand filming me sleep, and the other hand clapping.

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Abigail Allen

Two Stories Radish

Marie didn’t want to stay in the house with all the shades and drapes

drawn, so she had taken the boat over to the swamp to fish for a while. It was good to be out on the water, dropping her line over the side of the boat.

It was relaxing. She didn’t care whether she caught anything or not. It was better than being in the house. After she’d been out there for less than an hour, though, the sky began to look threatening, so she started the motor and headed toward the landing. She hadn’t even gotten a bite, but that’s the way it is some days, she thought. When she was pulling the boat up and attaching it to the hitch on the back of her car, the rain started, first a few big drops and then a torrent.

When she got in the car, she wiped her arms and neck with a wad of tissues. She was rubbing at her legs with more tissues when a couple started pulling their boat ashore. The woman was screaming at the man. She grabbed the cooler out of the boat and threw it in the water. The man told her to get in the truck, but she didn’t. He waded out and got the cooler and lid, which were floating, and threw them in the back of his truck. Then he hitched up the boat. The woman had stopped screaming. “I’m sorry,” she sobbed, “but you hurt my feelings.” The storm had passed, but they were both soaking wet.

Maybe the couple would make up, Marie thought as she pulled onto the highway. She hoped they would. The woman seemed to be at fault, as she had been unable to control herself, but Marie knew how a man could orchestrate that kind of outburst, saying just the right hurtful things, layering them one upon the other throughout the day, building a quiet monster that looked you in the face and told you (without actually stating it) that you disgusted him or that you were nothing to him, that he didn’t give a shit about you anymore 46

or maybe—probably—that there was someone else now.

Marie hadn’t been able to do much fishing today, but at least she would be home before dark. She would be safely in her house before the voyeur came around again. She had labeled him “the peeping tom” at first, but now she thought of him as “the voyeur.”

She had applied a plastic film to the window in the front door so he wouldn’t be able to look through it again, and the shades and drapes on all the other windows were closed tight. He had peered in at her a few days after her divorce was finalized. She had seen the shadow of his head rising behind the window in the front door. He had been crouching under it, on the porch, and then he rose very slowly and looked into the room. She knew what a dreary, unappealing sight he had seen. She was wearing an old rag of a nightgown, she remembered, and had just bitten into a radish.

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Garlic

They went up the steps to the front porch, and he knocked on the door.

“Grandma,” he called. Nora was standing behind him and off to the side.

“Come on, hon,” he said, putting his arm around her shoulder and pulling her forward. “She won’t bite you,” he said as the old woman was opening the door. “Grandma,” he said, giving her a quick peck on the cheek, “this is my friend Nora.”

“Come in,” she said. “Sit down, sit down. Sit anywhere you like.”

Nora sat in a chair by the window. He sat in the rocking chair to her left, and his grandma sat directly across from them on the sofa. “Is it hot enough for you?” the old woman said. She got a magazine off the coffee table and started fanning herself with it.

“Yes,” Nora said. “It’s hot enough for me.”

“You want me to crank up the air conditioner, Grandma?” he asked her.

“No,” she said. “I’m used to the heat.”

He rocked back and forth in the chair. She looked out the window at the big Catholic church next to the old woman’s house. There were a couple of little vines hanging across the window, but they didn’t obstruct her view of the building.

“That’s an old church,” he said. “It’s one of the oldest churches in the state.”

“Oh,” she said.

“How old is it, Grandma?” he said.

“Eighteen hundreds,” she said. “Eighteen hundred and something. I forget the exact date.”

“That is old,” Nora said. She was remembering a story he had told her about spending the night here when he was a child, how he and one of his cousins got out of bed and came down to the kitchen when the old woman was asleep and watched the mice take cheese out of the traps she had set out.

“I wanted your cousin Doody to get married there,” she said, “but they 48

Abigail Allen

eloped, you know.”

“I know, Grandma,” he said. “But they’re happy, so who cares.”

Nora looked across the room at the old lady, who had been staring at her and quickly switched her gaze to her grandson. “Happy,” she said. “She trapped him into marriage.”

“They’re happy,” he said, looking down at his hands.

The old woman switched her gaze back to her and said, “She got pregnant.”

“She’s a good girl,” he said, getting to his feet. “Where’s that tree you want me to deal with?” He went over to the window and looked out.

“Oh, yes,” she said. “It’s in back. You can see it from there.” The old woman looked at her again, and Nora could feel her disapproval, as though the woman suspected Nora had been sleeping with her grandson. “But sit down,” she said to him. “Wait on that. I made ice tea. You like ice tea?” she said, looking at her again.

“Yes,” Nora said, “if you’re sure it’s no trouble.”

The old woman left the room to get the ice tea, and she got up and went over to the window and looked out at the yard with him. “Is it that little tree next to the ladder?” she said.

“That’s the one,” he said. “It looks dead.” She imagined the mice scurrying around in the old woman’s kitchen as he and his cousin watched.

She pictured the mice slipping the cheese out right before the huge traps had sprung, then squealing and dancing around on their hind legs in celebration.

The old woman returned to the room with three glasses of ice tea on a tray and set it on the coffee table. They each got a glass and sat in the same places they’d sat before.

“That’s good tea, Grandma,” he said. “Just what we needed, right, Nora?”

“Yes,” she said. “Thank you.” It was extremely sweet. She sipped it slowly as she looked out at the old church, which he’d told her the old woman attended several times a week.

“Don’t get me wrong,” the old woman said, looking at her grandson, “I love the girl. She’s Doody’s wife, no matter what.”

“I’m glad to hear you say that, Grandma,” he said, finishing off the tea.

He put his glass on the tray, then sat down again and rocked back and forth.

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“You got to admit, though,” the old woman said, “she smells like garlic.”

“No, she doesn’t,” he said. “That’s silly.”

“I’m not blaming her,” the old woman said. She looked at Nora quickly.

“You’re not Italian, are you?” she asked.

Nora shook her head. “No, ma’am.”

The old woman looked at her grandson again. “You been in their houses,” she said. “What do they smell like? Garlic, that’s what.”

He got up and went toward the front door. “I’ll go get that tree down for you,” he said. “Where do you want the wood when I get it chopped up?”

“Just put it by the shed,” she said. “Somebody can use it in their fireplace.”

“Maybe I should go with you,” Nora said as he was walking out the door.

“No,” he said. “Finish your tea. It’ll only take a few minutes.” She heard him bounding across the porch and down the steps, then saw him walk by the window on his way to the back yard. Most of the ice in her tea had melted, she noticed, but she took a big gulp of it, trying to finish it off.

“I never went to college,” the old woman said. “I already knew everything I needed to know, and I didn’t have to get it out of a book.”

“That’s good,” Nora said.

“Have you learned anything over there at LSU?” she said.

“Sure,” Nora said, taking a few gulps of the tea. “What do you mean, exactly?”

The old woman crossed her ankles and stared at her, smiling a fake smile, Nora thought. “What do they teach you over there, anything?”

“Right now I’m taking a psychology class, a literature class, and a journalism class.” She finished her tea and stood up. She put the glass on the tray and walked toward the door. “Thanks so much,” she said. “The tea was wonderful!”

“I’m glad you liked it,” the old woman simpered sweetly, getting up to collect the tray. After she picked it up, she turned and looked at Nora with undisguised rage.

“Can I help you wash up?” Nora offered, grasping the doorknob.

“I don’t need any help,” the old woman growled.

“Well, thanks again,” she said walking out on the porch and shutting the 50

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door. Before she went down the steps, she noticed a dead cockroach lying on its back near the edge of the porch and kicked out into the yard. The levee was before her, across the two-lane road. The church was to her right. She turned and looked at it, then went to the back yard, where he was finishing up with the chainsaw. “How did you and Grandma get on?” he asked, setting the saw on a wooden picnic table under a huge live oak tree.

“Great!” Nora said. She went over and put her arms around his waist.

“Just like you said, she’s a treasure.”

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Patrick A. Howell

The Beast Hobbled and Laid Low I don’t have no fear of death. My only fear is coming back reincarnated.

Tupac Shakur Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth passed away.

John the Evangelist, Revelations 21:2, The Bible

He forgives himself?

Did he say that to me? On his death bed? I forgive him too. Who am I to judge?

That’s not my mission. He lies down for a final rest- Dads, my fatherflawed human, beautiful man, king for a time, fallen warrior and tragic villain.

Unseemly “discipline” in the name of lessons, honor and being hard on me so life wouldn’t be. “In God We Trust/ In Cash We Pay” herr CEO would always bellow. I honor him. Tortured soul. I judge him. I love him. And I rise. Eat me some sweet mango, kiss Moms and after some preparations get on that flight Manhattan bound.

I am motionless on the flight back to NYC La Guardia. I sleep, like a baby in the womb. No dreams. Like the expired in a tomb. I feel so light, unburdened like I could have made the trip to NYC without the nuts and bolts of a plane. I could have done it on my own intuition and grace. Or maybe this flight makes it on the grace and power of angels on a mission? A stewardess, kind, young and beautiful, gently touches my shoulder. The plane is empty.

I must have been in a coma. “Sir”, she says softly, “you’ve arrived at your destination. We’ve landed in New York City”. I know I should have woken up sooner but she is looking at me so strange. I grab my duffle bag and find the Lincoln Town car driver I ordered in Oakland. The driver has the same look as the young stewardess. I must look like a holy mess.

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But, I rise. I rise, I rise, I rise. It’s Sunday. Holy day, day of rest, 7th day- when are we gonna get to 8? 8 represents infinity. Forever. I’m a mess – suede purple jacket, jeans, a gold Sean Jean tie and leather sandals.

The Ace Hardware Store in Fort Green is a nice place without a lot of fuss – zero pretention. Small. I’ve always liked it. Cozy. Straight forward with less than 10 isles. I used to come here when I first bought my Park Slope Co-op and buy supplies for contracting projects in kitchen, bathroom as well as for electrical and plumbing projects. I am looking for something simple, an ax when wielded, held firm and held high on principal can cut right through bronze if need be.

In isle 7, the instrument of my desire is there in plenty. Axes line a section of the isle. Axes with wooden handles, axes with steel handles. Axes with wedge blades. Axes like scythes. Black and silver steeled axes. I call for a store clerk. I consult and ask a battery of questions. I explain I need to cut pipe in the basement of my building and insert new pipe.

“It was wielded into one piece for some reason- and this is my last ditch effort or I have to hire a contractor and bite the bullet on costs.” I explain.

“What do you do for a living?” he asks, I think, more from curiosity.

“Wall Street. Investment banker.”

“And you can’t afford a contractor?”

“These are dubious times at best. Cash is a commodity. Work ethic and industry... Focus with purpose - those are in high supply, effective and cheaper.”

“I see what you are saying. Dig it,” says the red headed, freckled faced clerk. He points to a black bladed, red handled instrument. It is the object of my desire, that which I desire. The packaging reads: Used by sportsmen, foresters and scouts for an effective axe with a light carrying weight. Dependable in all weather and uses. Fine tempered, forged, one piece solid steel construction to eliminate loose heads.

I think of the untold stories, priceless publicity and free branding that will follow and smile. “How much?” I imagine Charlie Manson asked the 53

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same type of questions with the same clinical detachment when purchasing ingredients for cyanide and what not. Or maybe, even, John Allen Williams, the Washington DC sniper, when he was mentoring 17-year-old Lee Boyd Malvo on the how-to of being a domestic infamous homegrown American terrorist. Or, most proudly, I imagine myself akin to Nat Turner having magically ridden an Arabian carpet to the 21st and taken over the body of one Bishop W. Kingston.

“There’s a sticker on there. It’s 40 and change or something. Say, man you ok?” I pull out my black Amex card, so he continues “But if you want to have some adventure… have some fun and get the job done? There is always the Series K760. It’s behind the counter up front.”

We go to the register and he reads from the packaging, “Twin 9-inch blades provide high cutting speed and power. It’s a little more expensive.”

Of course.

I pack the beautiful object in my travel bag. I also purchase a blow-torch and the ax with the red handle and black blade, just in case. I order my driver to make a beeline for Wall Street, Broadway and Morris Street. Over the Brooklyn Bridge, I relax in the black daytime steed, soothed by smooth jazz coming from the radio XM. George Benson is crooning real smooth allegro, “the love of my life/ my very heart and soul/ to make you happy is my life’s goal.”

This comforts me. In some infinitesimal magnanimous manner of being, the sax solo coupled with the jazz legend’s smooth aesthetic balances what I am about to do with its counter effect- Peace before doom. Black and white.

Hot and cold. Heaven and hell. Earth.

I give my driver, a middle-eastern gentleman with a purple turban, a healthy tip and bid him adios – “Be well brother,” he says thoughtfully and gently, “take care of yourself and remember – God is with you.”

Charging Bull, sometimes referred to as the Wall Street Bull or the Bowling Green Bull, is a bronze sculpture.

The beast is cold. It was originally guerilla art by Arturo Di Modica. The sculptor used $360,000 of his own money for the sculpture and ultimately did similar versions in Shanghai and Amsterdam. I figure it’s no different from 54

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the pagan bull statues in 1300 BC created by Moses’ great grandson Micah, before God gave Moses his Ten Commandments.

The first strike at the bronze cow rings hallow. I feel the clank in my bones. Wall Street Bull ain’t no piñata. It clangs like a bell and rings hallow.

I smile as my mighty strike at bronze is still reverberating through my bones, blood and nervous system. I breathe. I close my eyes and center myself, breathing just like Dr. Angullo Cruz has helped me to do. Inhale. I sense the universe within and strike again. Exhale. I release those demons and they let go of my soul, howling in high frequency screeches at the same time as the metal rings and sings. Rage lets fly. Lust howls. Pride stumbles, falling into the harbor. Next time, I apply the blowtorch first.

I yell without a single solitary hint of humility, “Abomination!” The shame falls from me and this time the ax takes. I pull it out brusquely, then take my shirt, tie and jacket off. My black skin glistens in a day time highlighted by blue winter accents. The ancestors are with me now. I hack again and again, until there are five indentations scattered on the neck of the great bronze beast. “Abomination! Abomination!” I am yelling with increasing authority at each strike.

I hear the sirens in the distance nearing within blocks and, perspiring, let the ax fly – while applying heat - until there is enough of an opening at the neck – I pull at the neck with my hands then hang my frame off the neck, hoping to pull it. The saw works like a charm – magnificent craftsmanship.

The neck is pulled to the side and looks ajar. Clearly the beast statue has been wounded, nearly decapitated.

All around me there are feathers rolling in a Sunday breeze. Feathers littered on Sunday on a quiet nearly barren street in Bowling Park. Like an angel felled to earth as a meteorite, busting through the hemisphere, burning bright, hurdling to earth at the speed of light. The feathers are large with an eerie incandescent aura fading about them. I feel as if I am an amputee and smile. I wonder if I am the only one who sees these feathers? I’m looking for the carcasses of bird bodies. There are none. Ain’t no black burnt carcass except for my body. I am the only burnt skin man in this modern Babylon.

Revelations. Transformation. Manifestation. I smell the eerie scent of burnt 55

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blood in my nostrils. And I realize I am spotted with second degree burns from the blow torch and the crimson spots of my own blood from cuts.

They say on the day Jesus was executed... put to the wooden cross and crucified…that a dreadful darkness befell the earth. As the story goes, mountains trembled terrible in earthquakes and rocks broke until it seemed that creation itself would tear from the fabric of reality. They say there were odd formed and colored clouds in the sky – black, orange, purple and blue, like a black eye or bruise or something.

They say after Noah rested his boat on land after the earth had been destroyed in the floods, that is when the first rainbow appeared in the calm sky- that the rainbow is the covenant between God and his people that he would never destroy the earth that way again. But I always remember that rainbow as an angel party – that we were celebrating separating that Spirit Force of the universe from its task of destruction. Brother James Baldwin wrote, I believe, impassioned and explicitly, about the rejoinder to this solemn oath between a god and his people- called it the Fire Next Time.

My face is painted with gold glitter and white staccatoed indentations and dots under my eyes and I release a deluge of tears sobbing uncontrollably.

Blood. Sweat. Tears. My salted sacrifice is complete.

Well, the skies are blue today- crystal clear blue with nary a cloud.

Electromagnetic vibe. End of times. These times. Maybe. Maybe not. It’s my blood that burns. Maybe this is Heaven already and it is beautiful enough?

But I have completed my mission and helped to launch a business for the New Age. The sun is burning through the sky in an autumn mood. There is no cold blue crisp in the winter air whatsoever. Although hot wind blows, howls in the vacant Sunday allies of these Wall Streets. Time collapses into a singular continuum. And an African man in America stands at the symbolic apex of Wall Street in its midst no longer a rising king but, instead, a fallen angel.

With that thought, an unmistakable dove flies from the seeming explosion of white feathers as a dart, shooting west over Battery Park into the sun- like a fleck into the iris of a burning eye.

In ancient Canaan 1300 BCE after the ancient Israeli’s exodus from Egypt, they spent some time in another ancient land as Canaanites burning 56

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incense packs of frankincense and sage offering sacrifices to a metal cow not unlike the bronze beast I have just slayed. They would blow their horns and say prayers to the gods of money. A few years later, Moses got the commandment to write: Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me

Are these bible chapters and verses merely the myths by which we shelter ourselves in this so-called modern age? Are these the stories by which the modern Roman American Empire reigns over its populations? Controlling us with HBO, NBA and NFL. MSNBC, CNN and Fox News? Democrats and Republicans, religion, Catholic Church and organizations. Opiates for the masses, Socrates would call them. Is nothing new under the tired sun?

I am high as a spirit.

Although I am confident my stock on Dun and Bradstreet has plummeted, so has the rest of the Street and this game is graded on a curve. We shall see but money hasn’t bought my ancient soul, replaced for its weight in gold by the ancestors. We are the gold of the most loving Spiritual Soul Global.

I have a renegade story to launch, a brand and all the free publicity of this media story gone viral. But that’s not why I did it. Well, not completely.

Needless to say I am arrested by law enforcement. I think momentarily of invoking the Occupy Wall Street Movement that was in the New York Times on my flight from Oakland. And this makes me think of the ACLU and their historic defense of free speech – perhaps my cousin Jesus esquire knows someone there. But I find my center, the calm within and I breath, reverent- When God is near have no fear.

John, the Last Israeli of Time is here. New York Times Square Holy gangster. His hair has grown and is now braided and I see he and the Black Israeli group’s robes have been upgraded to a white traditional Ethiopian netella with borders of colored embroidered woven designs. Very nice- I paid for his and the Black Israeli a tidy sum for their presence and work 57

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covering my break down. Break the mother fucker down- he-he. He is applauding with tears in his eyes- big ‘ole crocodile balls rolling like ocean waves lapping up a beach shore. Our eyes meet. And there is no need for further acknowledgment. We know what the deal is. So he talks anyhow.

“I got it all on video little brother. It’s going viral. Believe that. The people and the world will know. YouTube power!

“You will see. Kingston. You see? You are the symbolic now. Ingest meaning. Excrete bullshit. Get that BS out of your system brother. Be at peace. Be a man. This, you see, you will decipher, you will reveal - you will find is the spirit life, personal apocalypse, poetry, incessant musing and dismantling… err, ultimate redemption of Bishop Kingston… a ticking time creation. You are a creation brother. A nebula manifesting with infinite possibilities manifesting. Know that.”

That and about $50,000 and I can make bail this evening, right?

The cops have formed a perimeter around me and begin to take notice of the bearded man of God. He steps into an old silver Infiniti i35 with the other Israelis. And this comforts me. Infiniti, 8, forever. Gives me a hope in my mental moment of tribulation. My stoic face probably breaks a smiley. They probably think I am a madman lunatic. This is going to make the New York Post… fa’-sure. But more to the point: it’s marketing and branding, right?

The police put me through the motions- asking me to drop my “weapon”.

I do not resist in the slightest. Of course they tackle me like I am a threat to national security. But the television crew and blogger team I had emailed about my intentions make their presence known. They ask me my name, “Bishop Kingston. I am a Vice President with Wall Street’s Berkowitz and Stephens. These policemen have not read me my Miranda rights.”

“Are you a terrorist?”

“No. I’ve been terrorized.” There are in fact a couple media groups taking my picture.

“By whom, sir?”

“Well without a lot of detail, let’s just say, in no particular order, White America, corporate America and Wall Street. My Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filing is a matter of public record. I am Bishop 58

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Kingston. Part and parcel of the Googol.”

“Google? Why did you do this, sir? Are you with Occupy Wall Street Movement? What is your message?”

The beast is hobbled, laid low. The sun glows magnificent- incandescent.

And I think about the reporter’s question being carted and folded into the back of a police cab like chattel. The leathered seat in the back of the cab is hot and uncomfortable against my raw back, cut and sore. If I am going to make it out from under the weight of legal and institutional heavy about to be laid on me, I’m going to have to commit myself to psychiatric attention and keep cool. But that’s another time. In this here time I write on a mental tablet, I write a New Age verse- the one after the book of Revelations: Filled with free spirits, Jerusalem’s gates opened.

Sunny shook we all

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Jose Luis Gutierrez

Hebdomeros Piazzas where the wind alone holds court.

A tower winking phallicly in the distance.

Statues embrace the solipsism of stone.

Arches loom and multiply, telescoping into false perspectives where a train chugs in the limbo of an impossible sunset.

Occasionally two figures strike a clandestine agreement, their shadows conspiring against them in the failing light.

The blur of a girl spinning a wheel down a street where a lone trailer stands.

While standing at the Ventimiglia railway station, de Chirico had a crisis of light, sensed himself vanishing into autumn’s great conflagration.

It was then he decided to pursue absence as his only subject.

Not as your greatest calamity.

But as a kiss, rain, a seed— seed bursting in the astonished earth.

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Probal Mazumdar

Another Moon The newspaper stands trembling at the door, the weight of the globe on its frail shoulders.

This year the soil didn’t house laboratory seeds, but the bones of those who tilled it.

This year disrobed forests and gouged hills stand mute like girls whose ripeness is stolen.

Somewhere impossible dreams float away in red streams from cut-wrists to water-holes.

Restless, I push myself outside.

The day’s hungry tongue slurps me in.

Faces here have the look of a lonely street and the eyes stream light of fake gemstones.

Racing around like balls in a bagatelle, all are trying to score something, however narrow.

Through a window I see, a baby walloped for tearing the drapes of his parent’s ambition.

The wind has also learnt the tricks to mask the defeat of ideas with the gloss of desire.

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Beneath the lavish bricks, the buried ponds can no more wash the mud of misery off my feet.

True, they have left, the ones who ransomed themselves to give the land its lost lantern, mankind its mirror.

As the empty comfort of my shack draws me in, the moon dangles from the sky as a question: As if the planet is striving to be another moon‌ Luminous and pleasing, pretty but soulless.

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Bill Lavender

In the Thick(et) of Poetry: Meditations on 50 Years in the Language Game My mother used to read me to sleep from 101 Best Loved Poems. 101 Best Loved things—poems, hymns, prayers, etc.—were popular back in the ‘50s, sort of like the Best American Poetry of _____ books are now. Dover is still hawking a 101 Best Loved Poems, virtually the same as the one my mother read from, except it’s only in large print now. Momma also liked long narrative poems that could continue from night to night: Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha, whose meter still haunts, and—the one that made the biggest impression on me—Alfred Noyes’s “The Highwayman.” That vision of lovers who would die rather than succumb to the Law had great fascination for me, and still does. That my mother would even read it to me seemed darkly conspiratorial, as if the ethical and legal (maybe even grammatical) rules she drummed into me during the day were suspended at night. It taught me, among other things, that rules can be broken at certain hours, and that sometimes secret, unspoken realities lurk behind the content of what people say.

But it wasn’t until high school, in the late ‘60s, that I started to think of poetry as a thing I might want to do. I remember the first time I wrote something and showed it to friends. My memories of that piece are merely graphic—it was a long, skinny poem—and contextual, from my friend’s reaction. “You didn’t write that,” he said.

“Oh yeah,” I said, defiant. “Then who did?”

He had to mull this over a bit. He looked down at the sheet of notebook paper in his hand. His lips moved as if he were rehearsing things he might say. (For, though he did not know the answer, he was going to say something; he was going to have the last word.) “It was either… Franz Kafka or Frank Zappa.”

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would be accused of plagiarizing from work I did not know was infuriating.

“Fuck you” was the only conceivable response.

For me, poetry (poetry as a vocation, an identity, a life’s work and obsession) did not come out of English class but out of passing notes in the back of it, handing around scraps of paper that one would get in trouble if the teacher saw.

I went to college in my hometown, Fayetteville. I hung out with the graduate poets and hippies, marched against the war, did lots of drugs, didn’t go to grad school. Instead, I moved to New Orleans, had kids, and made a living carpentering, at first, and later in the construction business. Though I stayed in touch with local poets, read and wrote during this period, in the end the exigencies of family and business took me far enough afield that I began to feel my identity as a poet slipping away.

Now, despite having devoted a long and varied lifetime thinking, reading and acting on the matter, I cannot tell you why such a thing as the poetic vocation should have such a hold on a person. I can tell you that it isn’t that feeling of gratification one gets from hearing applause or laughter at a poetry reading or getting a letter of acceptance from a magazine or a press or winning some award. These are, in the end, cheap thrills more easily (and probably more meaningfully) obtained by other means. I can only tell you that when it occurred to me that poetry was about to slip away from me, I resolved that I would do most anything to hold on to it. There followed, then, a couple of years of burning bridges after which I lifted myself out of the wreckage and went back to school.

I went back to school not because I felt I had anything to learn—though it did turn out I learned a thing or two—and not out of any real respect for the academic milieu—though I did gain an appreciation for scholarly endeavor from the experience; I did it because I couldn’t think of anything else to do.

I had to do something, and school was what was at hand.

When I graduated the University of New Orleans offered me a part-time gig managing their summer writing program in Prague. I was offered this not because of my writing or academic record but because of my 20 years experience in business, for this program was foundering in its success; they 64

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had more students than they could manage. I knew how to manage things and people, and I knew how to use a budget and negotiate contracts because these are things you learn in construction.

Before that time, I had never been outside the US except for a brief foray into Canada in the ‘70s. Afterwards, I went abroad for extended periods 15 summers in a row. At first I didn’t teach. Later, they gave me adjunct faculty status. Ever the entrepreneur, I set up a low residency MFA program attached to the study abroad program. This was my introduction to university politics, that proverbial game in which everything seems so important because nothing is at stake.

They put me on the graduate faculty. I sat on and chaired dozens of thesis committees. I took over the university press. I had a big office with five GA’s, a full time study abroad coordinator, and a bunch of computers and printers. Then they fired me, and I was, after a brief flurry of petitions and irate letter-writing, relieved.

Now I’m back in construction. This time as an employee, though a wellpaid one. And I run my little press from my house, with help from my wife, New Orleans writer and scholar Nancy Dixon (hereafter, Nanc), and the occasional volunteer and/or intern. And though there is always this problem or that, and though I work too hard and there’s never enough time for this thing or that (including writing), it’s pretty OK.

= I have watched, over the past few years, my two granddaughters acquiring language. “Hold you!” Celeste commanded me one day, putting up her arms.

A precocious language learner, she seemed to be picking up the words faster than she was learning the complex laws of their use. She knew that “you” meant herself when Nanc or I or her parents said it, but she hadn’t yet figured out that it indicated something quite different when she herself said it.

This set me thinking about pronouns and the strange ways they work.

In point of fact, I realized, she could have said the correct version, “Hold me!” and the meaning would have been the same, and been just as “wrong.”

Because there is no you, no me, no them. There is no you that I can 65

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point to and no I that I can point with. There is only a system of relationships among the terms themselves, and it is within that thicket, that weave, that text, that the Self is born.

This linguistic relativity does not apply only to pronouns. I wanted to be a Poet, but the moment I decided to be a Poet, the moment I wanted Poet to be my career, I doomed myself to failure. From that moment on, Poet became the one thing I could not possibly be, the thing that with every fiber of my being I would now and forever lack.

Like Celeste’s “you,” the moment I said it, or thought it, “poet” became a word I could only use to refer to some other one.

To be a thing is to chase an ever-receding point, one that stays, asymptotically, always just out of reach, though at every step you approach nearer and nearer. Like Zeno’s arrow forever halving its distance to its goal but never arriving, identity can never quite be attained.

= Somewhere along the way, somewhere between the lines of my bio, I realized I needed to make a book. I went through my reams of poems and drafts again and again, arranging and rearranging, playing with the order, struggling with their titles, with conventions of punctuation, etc. I arranged them in groups, thought about book titles and subtitles and sub-subtitles. I tried and tried to arrange them into an order that made sense.

This was vexing because each individual poem seemed worthy. I loved them, every one, and so did the people I showed them to. I read them quietly to myself. I rolled them on my tongue. Actually, I didn’t have to read them because I had all of them memorized. They were revised and condensed to crystalline perfection, for I worked on them constantly. I didn’t have to be at my desk to do this work; I could visualize them and consider different versions in my head while I was mitering a door casing or doing the laundry or playing with my kids or vacuuming the living room rug. And when I had a moment I could run to my desk and quickly make the revisions.

And yet, I couldn’t come up with a book. I asked friends, other poets, to help me out. I showed them various groupings, and they would page through 66

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and say “I like this one as an opener,” or “This one should definitely be toward the front,” or “To my mind, this is the closer.”

I sent versions off to a press or two, but in truth the effort was halfhearted because I never really believed in them myself. Today, I’m glad no one accepted them.

What I didn’t realize at the time was that the problem wasn’t my ability to arrange the poems but deficiencies in the poems themselves, that poems don’t exist in a vacuum but in the thicket of other poems.

Then one day it occurred to me to write not a poem but a series of poems.

I considered it nothing but an exercise in form, to write 16 poems of similar length and appearance, four quatrains each. The mathematics of it appealed to me.

I was going through an emotional upheaval at this time. My marriage of 20 years was dissolving, my construction business was bankrupt, I and my ex and our sons were all miserable, and it felt like (and indeed was) my fault.

It was so horrible I didn’t want to write about it but escape it; this formal exercise was a way to take my mind off it. I didn’t care what the poem be “about,” except that it not be about me and my life at that moment. So I made a game of it, traversing it with a series of puns and what felt at the time like meaningless language play.

I wrote them very quickly. I used a lot of repetition because I didn’t really have “something to say.” Since it was conceived as a series, I felt no compulsion to give each poem a dramatic resolution. In fact, I felt each one needed to be left incomplete, so as to open into the next.

I never thought about these poems except when I was actually looking at them at my desk. They were impossible to memorize because they were all so similar and because they were not organized logically but by puns and repetitions which caused them to blur together in my mind. Once I thought of something I wanted to change, but when I went back to make the revision the part I had imagined wasn’t there. I finished this exercise, or actually I just grew tired of it, and I didn’t look at it for several weeks. When I did go back to it, it read as if I’d never seen it before, as if someone else had written it.

And all that emotional baggage I had written the thing to avoid, that whole 67

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dark thicket of despair and death and desire, was all there, and in a form much more subtle and true than any way I could have thought or “expressed” it.

I didn’t send Guest Chain anywhere. I made it into a chapbook with black pages and white print. It was the first publication of Lavender Ink. And all those hundreds of poems I had memorized and struggled with perfecting for years? I think they’re in a box somewhere.

= I want to say—without prejudice to all I owe to the institution that took care of me for 13 pretty good years and two very bad ones, and without a blanket condemnation (for I do think universities are important, indeed essential, players in the world game, the one and perhaps only bastion of hope to feed the masses who are starved in body and mind, in truth the only chance there is for the survival of the species), in fact with great hope that all the promise of human intellect and its quasi-mystical compatriot, poetry, may one day be fully realized and something approaching paradise be built upon the Earth—that the best thing that could happen for both poetry and the universities would be that all those frigging MFA programs disappear tomorrow. “Creative writing” has no more business in the university than does “Business.”

= One thing we’ve all heard, again and again, is what a solitary vocation the writer’s is. The poet sits, alone with the work, mining his or her deepest thoughts, emotions, memories, sensations, until the poem is finished. Then, as a sort of afterthought, or afterword, it is put into the world, where it may be seen or not, read or neglected, heard, recognized or passed over, all without affecting the innate status of the work.

But one needn’t consider very long to realize this is not the case. Language is social, and not only in the sense that one speaks or imagines to speak to an Other. Language, that which we speak and which courses relentlessly through our minds, comes to us from the Other; it belongs to the Other. It isn’t like blood which courses through the body, present at birth and before; 68

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it is something that is learned, memorized and repeated, drilled into us by a million instructors.

When you say “I am ______,” the number of words you can use to fill in that blank, either adjectives or nouns, is not infinite. You select a response from a multiple-choice list given to you by the culture, by the long, bloody, political history of the world.

= The Traveler wanted to raise various questions, but after looking at the Condemned Man he merely asked, “Does he know his sentence?”

“No,” said the Officer…

“He doesn’t know his own sentence?”

“No,” said the Officer once more…. “It would be useless to give him that information. He experiences it on his own body.”

—Kafka, “In the Penal Colony”

= When I first read these lines of George Oppen’s: For the people of that flow Are new, the old New to age as the young To youth

it felt like a revelation. Somewhere, a long time ago, I read in a textbook about poetry that it seems to say “something you always knew but didn’t know how to say.” There is a recognition, a deja vu, a sensation of recalling something learned long ago and then forgotten. I felt it when I read Of Being Numerous, and I felt it when I read that line in the textbook also.

When one points out a truth with a sensitive observation, something is transferred from the world into language. It is almost not a metaphor to think of the process as moving a physical substance from one place to another, like shoveling coal from a bin into a firebox.

But here’s the rub, the thing we don’t want to admit: once the truth is 69

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put into language, it is elided from the world. It is moved, not copied. The moment the truth is spoken, it leaves the realm of the real and enters the realm of desire, which is the realm of absence. It is, so to speak, spent, and thenceforth may not be lived but only spoken.

Poetry, when it succeeds, succeeds at a level beyond truth, which is the level of the real. This is why in poetry such paradigmatic issues as lineation matter, and why the sound and look and feel of the words is not arbitrary.

Poetry can’t be paraphrased or summarized because its least important aspect is the transference of concepts. Truth is a regime (as Foucault calls it) that poetry rebels against.

= Do poets have a responsibility to make poetry more accessible? I’ve heard this question asked again and again at conferences, on panels, in magazines and online, etc. And every time I hear it, even though I understand, through repetition and context, what is being asked, I always see a fleeting image of that little wheelchair symbol. Now, even though it seems like a remote, even esoteric, concern, maybe it behooves us, as poets talking shop, to consider this faint glimmer of connotation. Does it have meaning, in this case, or is it just one of those unfortunate homonymies that merely distracts the reader from the intent of an otherwise well-honed statement? Because we all know the question that is being asked is if the poet doesn’t have a responsibility to speak in everyday language, to convey his or her meaning without recourse to non-standard grammatical forms, weird punctuation, strange lineation or obscure references.

Perhaps the question needs to be refined, so that it conveys the meaning we all know is intended without this American Disabilities Act echo, which, of course, if it were intended, would actually imply a certain arrogance, even condescension, on the part of those (poets) inquiring. As if they would be saying, “I, of course, understand it, but let’s make it so everyone, even our disadvantaged, disabled readers, can grasp it also.”

But how, precisely, would the question be restated? Maybe the argument is, in fact, exactly that. Maybe every connotation is, in the final analysis, just 70

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as intentional as the denotative meaning on the “surface.” Isn’t it odd how language can make these twists and turns, how an argument can be, in reality, exactly the opposite of what it purports to be? How do they navigate it, the normal people, without someone like us to explain?

And yet they do, somehow, every time they open their mouths or ears, every time they pick up a magazine or a book or listen to the news. Every average Joe, every mechanic or cashier or driver, every uneducated musician, every Spanish-speaking day laborer, they somehow manage to find their way through the thicket of language without assistance from white guys with elbow patches.

The problem with the argument for accessibility isn’t that poetry ought to be obscure or esoteric or so compressed it requires research to read or indeed that it ought to be anything, but that this ostensible critique of obscure poetry is actually a critique of the audience, masterful, condescending and shot-through with ideology.

= I am writing this in a small apartment in Paris, on Rue de Seine. Nanc is here taking a seminar on diasporic literatures, and I have come to join her in the last few days, though I am not staying with her, but in this apartment a few blocks away. It is a sweet place to write, ground level in homage to the foot I broke falling off a scaffold two years ago, but inside, off a courtyard, and at 2 a.m. on this July night it is quiet and cool. I’m in that phase of jet lag where I think I am over it but am discovering I’m not. I went to bed early, about 10:30, very sleepy, thinking I would at last be sleeping through the night, but came awake at 1:30 out of a vivid dream.

In this dream I am back visiting my parents’ house in Fayetteville, the same one in which Momma read “The Highwayman” to me. Nanc is with me, and Momma is too. Somehow I know that Momma is already dead, but it doesn’t seem strange that she is also still there. She’s puttering around in her nightgown, and I am checking out the house as I used to do when I would visit after she had gotten old and infirm. I look in the refrigerator and note that the light is off. Then I see a mouse run across the shelf. This frightens 71

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me and I close the door. I’m worried, now, because I realize that the mouse means the power has been off in the fridge for some time and that the food in it must be spoiled.

I go outside to check the fuse panel but am immediately distracted by what appears to be some sort of major construction going on in the back yard. There are great piles of rough shoring material and huge wheels and mechanical parts lying around. They have built a kind of tunnel across the back yard, as if to protect the house from the project, and while I’m looking a truck roars through it.

Then I notice, near the road, my motorcycle. It is parked on the shoulder, not in a good place, and I want to move it. I don’t know what my motorcycle is doing there. I can only assume that I brought it up there on a previous trip, left it behind and then forgot about it. I get on, start it, and pull it up by the back door. I had forgotten how good it feels to ride and decide I want to take it out, but I need a helmet. My bald head feels fragile and exposed.

I go inside and ask Momma if I have, by any chance, left a helmet there.

She says, “Well, if you had, I imagine I know where it would be, back in your room.” Then she gets up and disappears behind a curtain in the corner. Nanc and I look at each other, questioning her strange and sudden exit, but I leave Nanc there and go back to my room. I feel a little bad at leaving her to watch Momma while I go off on a lark, but I really want to ride so I do it anyway.

The light in my room doesn’t work immediately. Rather it comes on very dim at first, then gradually rises to a brilliant clarity. My room has changed drastically. There is no longer a bed in it and it has been modernized with lots of glass shelves, and it appears to have grown with me, seeming about the same proportion as it must have been when I was a child.

I look around on the shelves for a helmet, but all I see is an assortment of brightly colored hats, and even though I don’t remember them I assume that they, too, must have been left here on previous visits. I pick up one of them and examine it. It is a cloth cap in a colored pattern, Moroccan style. From across the room it had appeared bright, but up close I see that it is well worn and the colors have faded. There is a sweat line starting to show through.

Still I want to put it on, and I do. Though it is coarse and stiff in my hand, 72

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on my head it feels incredibly soft, like cashmere.

I wake from the dream then and lie in the dark, not remembering where I am. This half-sleep lasts for several minutes. I am briefly terrified. Then reason returns, and I come fully awake.

= What I discovered when I wrote Guest Chain was what Jack Spicer calls “composition by book,” a notion he brings up in After Lorca and which he develops, later, into his idea of the serial poem. It is, basically, writing in an environment in which each individual poem is merely a part of a greater whole and in which, for that reason, the importance of each single poem is diminished. I had been striving to make perfect little poems, but they bore no relation to each other, and because of that they actually bore no relation to the world.

If the world is a thicket, a book is a vine running through it. It reaches in and through; it entwines with other vines. An individual poem is like a leaf that draws its water from the vine and sends its light into it. Some leaves will be perfect, some may be misshapen, some are bigger than others, but all of them do their part. A leaf can fall from the vine and the vine keeps going, but if too many fall it dies. But cut the vine at the root, and all of them die.

This conceit works at a number of levels. Consider that the vines are rhizomes and root again and again, that they flower (the buds pop out just where the leaf attaches to the vine) and share their pollen. That they bear fruit. That they strangle.

The thing to glean from Spicer’s lesson is that everything is part of something larger, and it’s important not to be hypnotized by the details, except momentarily. To see the thicket around the vine.

= One of the most prescient aspects of the occupation of Zuccotti Park in 2011 (i.e., Occupy Wall Street) was the refusal of the occupiers to give a specific list of demands. This refusal was wrongly cast as an inability and was often used as a critique of the movement: “They can’t even say what it 73

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is they want.” But the occupiers’ silence on the topic did not arise from their ignorance of their own desire. The silence arose, rather, from the realization that merely to articulate a “list” would be to lose the battle, as that would have moved the struggle out of the field of action into discourse, where it would be left to expend itself in an endless, impotent argument, that disingenuous field of political debate.

This phenomenon can be seen in any number of movements which have burgeoned in discourse even as they disappeared from reality. One example is the fight to reign in that abomination of the Western world, the penitentiary system, which has flourished into the most profitable sector of the American police economy even as the scientific data proving that it is the source of the very criminality it purports to suppress has filled the library.

= A Poetry Game, a la Wittgenstein: Imagine that it is your job to teach someone what a poem is. Imagine that your student is of age, intelligent, in full command of language, and yet, for whatever reason, has never encountered a poem, or poetry, or ever heard it spoken of or defined.

So you place on a table in front of your student: a poem a recipe a story an article a dictionary Then you point to the poem and say, “This is a poem.”

Then you tell your student to go into the closet where texts are stored and bring back a poem. And the student does so.

What has happened here? How does the student recognize the poem?

Does she take the sample poem with her into the closet, place it on top of the things she finds there, one after another, until she finds one that the sample, as it were, disappears into?

Or, you might say, there is no need to take the sample with her because 74

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she can bring with her a mental image of the poem with which to compare.

But if a mental image is necessary for comparison, how can the student verify that the mental image is correct? Is another mental image necessary to compare that one to? And that?

Isn’t the answer to the question simply: “The student goes to the closet and brings back a poem”?

= This morning I went to a Paris Orange store to get a European sim card for my phone. On the way, I realized I had left my sunglasses in Nanc’s purse last night, so I was going to be squinting today.

The Orange guy offered me a prepaid sim for 40€, and I said oui. He opened up my Samsung, put the new one in and handed me back the phone.

But when I turned it on a message popped up saying “Invalid sim card.”

He told me then, in halting English, that the sim card wouldn’t work in my phone so I would have to buy a cheap phone for 32€ more in order to have a phone in France.

I mulled this for a moment, finally decided I really didn’t want a phone anyway, and reinstalled my old sim to continue to use my phone solely as a camera and GPS. I came back to my apartment, wrote that little Wittgenstein paragraph, then was suddenly sleepy. I decided to sleep for an hour and lay down.

I dream I am at a mall store, back home. They don’t have what I need and I am heading out when I notice that it is too dark in the store. I take off my glasses and realize that I have on someone’s sunglasses instead of my own, clear, glasses. It occurs to me that I must have put on someone else’s glasses when I had taken mine off in the store, even though I can’t really remember doing that. Then I see a woman who I remember was beside me, recently, and I ask her if, by any chance, she might have picked up my glasses by mistake.

“I think you’re in luck,” she says, and she hands me her purse. It’s a small purse, but when I open it I find 7 pairs of glasses of various description, sunglasses and clear, hip reading glasses, glasses of differing shapes and frames, like the ones I’ve been seeing in Paris shop windows. It seems that 75

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the only glasses not there are mine.

I give up on this problem and go out to my truck in the parking lot. I find my truck pulling away, being driven by a scraggly guy I vaguely recognize as someone who works there, in the warehouse, and the truck is loaded up with junk. He pulls up beside me, rolls down the window, and says “Hey what’s up?”

I’m livid, of course, at his appropriation of my property, and I start yelling at him.

“Dude, what’s the big deal?” he says. “It wasn’t anything last time.”

To my admonition that he get the stuff off of my truck and give it back to me he finally agrees, though he is exasperated, and tells me to get in. We drive around to the warehouse and park outside to unload it, but instead of beginning this process he wanders into the dark warehouse and strikes up a leisurely conversation with co-workers. They occasionally look in my direction and chuckle at me standing awkwardly in the door.

Finally I say “Look, if you’re not going to unload it I’m just going to throw the stuff off right here,” and I start tearing angrily into the pile.

It is a tangle of scrap metal that I have to drag off in clusters. I finally get to the last bit, but there’s no room left on the ground behind the truck so I drag it just inside the warehouse door, drop it and return. But now I find that the truck has been reloaded by another worker. This time it is neatly loaded with uniform white boxes, as if for delivery. In addition, I now see that my tailgate has been removed and damaged in the process. The latch on the right side is broken off.

“All right,” I say, “I’m reporting this.”

I walk into the warehouse, past the still chuckling group inside, past the time clock, up the unfinished stairs to the employee entrance. Inside I ask someone behind a desk for the Employee Manager, but she is obviously used to dealing with inventory, not people, seems, even, not to know who or where an Employee Manager might be. She motions vaguely in toward the store.

Now a man in a suit steps up with a concerned look and asks if he can help. I don’t get the impression that he is a Manager or even an employee, just a concerned bystander. I tell him the bizarre problem. He nods empathetically, 76

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then tells me that he knows this warehouse guy and that this is not the first time this sort of thing has happened. He will intervene, he tells me, and perhaps get it settled, though he can’t guarantee anything.

I follow him outside, and we get into his car and leave the parking lot. I ask where we are going, and he says, “I think it best that we go to his house and confront him in front of his family.”

I’m not particularly happy with this plan and start to object, but at that moment the phone in my pocket begins to vibrate. I pull it out and realize that this is not my phone, which I can still feel in my other pocket, but another one that I must have picked up somewhere. It is actually for this reason that I decide to answer it rather than continue the conversation with my new benefactor.

“Bill, this is ____ ____,” the voice on the phone says. The connection is bad and I can’t make out the name.

“Oh, of course, hello,” I say, assuming that the identity of the caller will come across in context.

“Bill,” he says in a concerned tone, “I’m calling about ____ ____.” Again, I can’t make out the name. “Have you ever thought about inviting him?”

I have to think for moment but decide that the call is about the poetry festival I’m organizing, and that the caller is a lawyer we retained to do something for the fest. I am incredulous that this lawyer, whom we had hired to consult on legal matters, wants to make suggestions about what poets we should invite, but I infer from the lawyer’s tone that this is a poet, who, if we did invite him, might make our legal problems a little easier to smooth out.

= I know a lot of poets, and I love them. I would be sad—really sad, to the point, I think, of suicide—if I didn’t have lots of poets in my life.

Poetry isn’t an art form like painting or music or novel writing, for unlike these forms it involves, in a definitive way, being a part of the community of poets. It is more social than other artistic forms, requiring a level of agreement and empathetic understanding among its practitioners that other artistic endeavors do not.

It is perhaps out of this realization that the arguments about “inaccessibility” 77

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grow. One doesn’t read Jack Spicer’s “A Textbook of Poetry” then put it down and say, “oh isn’t that delightful.” In order to truly read a work like this, it is necessary to read the greater part of Spicer’s ouvre, prose as well as poetry, and to write about it, write through it, answer it, argue with it and, hate it or love it, be consumed by it. And the same is true of any poetry, no matter how “accessible” it may appear at first glance.

But really the same is true of any text, no matter how banal. If you can read it and put it down, having understood, all that means is that you’ve done some very complicated homework in advance.

= In psychoanalysis, it doesn’t matter if you lie. This is because the goal of psychoanalysis is only to confront the reality of one’s desire, and desire is expressed just as truly, perhaps even more truly, in the lie than in truth.

In psychotherapy one must tell the truth because the goal is to stop lying, or at least to imagine what to stop lying might mean. But, ultimately, all that can be spoken is one’s desire. Truth itself is desire, and what is desired is necessarily what is lacking.

Psychotherapy trains you to live in a culture. It wants to make you feel better, to get you through your day and your life productive and happy.

Psychoanalysis stirs up your unhappiness. Its goal is to teach you the meaning of that culture you live in and are a product of. It wants to make you aware of that which has come to live inside you, the thing that speaks for you, that says “I” and “you.”

= On Bastille Day Nanc’s seminar is over, and she is free. We ride the Metro to Republique to join the demonstration for fair treatment of Africans in France, which is also joined by some representatives of the Black Lives Matter movement from the US. It is a large but not huge gathering, perhaps 300 people. We can’t really understand the speeches, but join in as best we can. Nanc buys a tee-shirt, but they don’t have any that will fit me.

When the march goes off, we break away and walk around the corner to 78

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view the shuttered Bataclan nightclub. There isn’t much to see. Construction barricades. We head back toward the Latin Quarter. We pass by Metro stops along our way, but for one reason or another we end up walking all the way back.

Along this walk we are having a fight. There is nothing, really, at stake in this fight. It is a series of silly arguments about which way to turn at a given corner, or whether the map or the GPS on my phone represents the best route, whether we should take the Metro or walk, etc. Each of us is offended when the other does not trust our opinion of the best path and enraged when we make a misstep and walk a couple of blocks out of our way.

Finally we sit down at a café just outside the Louvre and have a drink and a snack. We are both tired and tired of fighting, and we are making an effort to be civil. Somewhat refreshed, we walk through the Louvre’s grounds and courtyard, check out the architecture for a moment, then cross the Seine on the footbridge outside.

We have dinner, with wine, a little later, and head back toward the hotel.

We pass in front of the Sorbonne and sit at one of those cafés outside and look at it. We have a nightcap, and the bitchiness returns, like a cloud descending on the square. It feels horrible, and I want to do anything to make it go away, yet I can’t seem to control my own speech. Even as I realize that the slights I am feeling are exaggerated, even imaginary, and would be insignificant even if they weren’t, I can only react from inside them, and the conversation becomes a series of digs that only get worse as we continue to talk.

Whatever I think, whatever I feel, what I speak seems to come from some Other, some paranoid, bruised ego.

Finally, I realize that the only way out of the trap is to be silent, and I do. Nanc seems to come to the same realization at the same moment, and we look across the table at each other with something like recognition—and do not speak.

As we leave I take a picture of the front of the Sorbonne, where so many of the thinkers who have been most influential to me studied and taught.

The next morning we go down to breakfast at the hotel and discover that while we were sitting in front of the Sorbonne there had been another attack 79

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in France, this one in Nice.

= When I say, above, “There is no I that I can point with,” there appears a certain paradox. Robert Creeley invokes this same paradox when he says, in “The Pattern”: As soon as I speak, I speaks.

In other words, when one begins speaking, something else, something third person, other, immediately takes over and starts using our mouth.

Speaking is a kind of suicide, an erasure of the very thing that one attempts to describe. Creeley continues: It

wants to be free but impassive lies in the direction of its words.

Creeley is trying, here, with the slightly wrenched grammar, with the pun on “lie,” to get at something which cannot be spoken but only (as Wittgenstein puts it) indicated. “It” is like an unnamed pronoun. It is that hesitation of whether or not quote marks should be put around the word, that something else that struggles to be released from the “prison house of language” (as Jameson says).

It is that thing which is forever and irrevocably mute, the thing that didn’t want to have that fight with Nanc that “I” was having. It’s the I that isn’t the I, the one that opens its mouth but then immediately kills itself in its self assertion.

Like that truck driver in Nice.

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= Once my other granddaughter, Roxy, asked me for a cracker. In our cupboard all I could find, at that moment, were some fancy little flatbreads we’d bought to accompany the cheese at a party.

“That’s not a cracker,” she said.

I tried to explain that while the flatbread wasn’t a cracker of a type she’d ever seen before, it was indeed a cracker in a more general sense, simply made in a different way, better, actually, for being hand- instead of machine-made, in the way that crackers were made before the advent of mass production, food automation and agribusiness which produced the identical little circles and squares she associates with the term.

“No,” she said firmly. “That’s not a cracker.”

Her absolute certainty of this fact in the face of her grandfather’s superior knowledge and experience made me wonder. It wasn’t, I realized, that she doubted my authority on the subject, for while she may not have known that she was talking to someone, her PawPaw, who had devoted his life to the study of and obsession with those slippery things, words, in one form or another, via grammar, rhetoric, linguistics, philosophy of language, but mostly from the hypersensitive point of view of the poet, who is required to hear, say and be responsible for all the above, all the vagaries of multiple meanings and etymologies, sliding and vague referents, socio-linguistic markers, double entendres, unconscious intentions, slips, puns, homonymic or metaplasmic traces, subliminal ideologies, all those disparate courses of study—each of which, alone, constitute a complete discipline—which make up the tangle that is language… no, it wasn’t that she doubted my expertise in my field or in my capacity as grandfather or linguist or poet or general adult, for wasn’t I actually one of the ones she might go to with the question, should she have one (and she always did) concerning the mapping of words and world, concerning, most specifically at her age, the bridging of the gap between herself, her body, and that vast area that it was not, that great realm which contained everything that her body, her self, she, might need, crave, want or flippantly wish for, having learned, or being in the process of learning, that 81

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words could be a more efficient means of coaxing those tasty little morsels from the plate or the shelf or the fridge or the baby bag to her mouth than simply fidgeting or crying or screaming—for wasn’t I someone she would direct the question to if, upon spotting one of those squares of processed wheat flour that she was now remembering, and having, at that time, no word for it, but wanting it, or perhaps not even wanting it but wanting to know about it in case at some future time she might want it, as she was suspecting she might since they were placed on a table or a plate after the fashion of other things she had wanted in the past, if she wanted to know what it was called— wasn’t I someone to whom she might direct her inquiry? Wasn’t I, the very one whom she was now contradicting, someone to whom she might look to for an answer to her pressing question, that same question asked by so many mouths and pens, in so many languages, from the dawn of civilization until now, from Democritus to Deleuze, fundamental question of ontology, and about most anything, not just a cracker: “What’s that?”

And in the split second it took this particular language event and familial anecdote to unfold, I puzzled over the fact that she might challenge me. Me, who could well have been the one who defined that term, cracker, for her for the first time, though of course it could also easily have been her Mom or Dad or Nanc or any of her many other grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, teachers, etc., or it could also have been her little sister... It really didn’t matter who had said it... It mattered when they had said it. Though I was reluctant to admit it, my status as the language philosopher of the family had no bearing on this challenge to my definition of what a cracker is, because in fact Roxy would have taken at face value whoever gave her the word first, even if it had been a stranger or one of the other kids in pre-school, and really what surprised me here was not that she had acquired an incomplete notion of how the word could be used, but that she was absolutely adamant, beyond any argument or insistence on my part, that she knew what a cracker was and that I was mistaken.

= For quite some time, I wrote down all my dreams. Sometimes I would 82

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force myself to get up and record the dream immediately, even if it was one of those from which I awoke in the middle of the night. Sometimes I would wait until the next morning or evening or even couple of days to record them.

I also tried to record some dreams I remembered from years past, including a handful that haunted from early childhood.

At first I was seeking some sort of psychological illumination, and I often included interpretations of the dreams, and I also sometimes included what I felt to be relevant context from reality, what I was going through at the time, the real correlative to the dream event, etc.

But gradually I lost interest in the fascinating psychology of my self and began to concentrate solely on the craft of recording: how to write the dream.

Because I began by seeking both self-knowledge and knowledge of how dreams work, I wanted my record of the dream to be as accurate as possible.

Consequently, my initial descriptions are lengthy and rambling, and even then I always felt there was more to be described. For one thing, dreams, at least in my experience, do not have beginnings. They always take up in media res and proceed toward the moment of waking, which is itself not an ending but a fading away, as if the dream kept going somewhere out of my ken. And, if you think about dreams very hard, as when you are trying to write them down accurately, often—always, in fact—you’ll find yourself remembering earlier and earlier moments.

With further contemplation, you will also find the dream expanding in space, for the more you think about it the more images will come to you and the more complete each “scene” will become. You will remember details, small items present in the room, say, perhaps things that your dream self didn’t seem to “notice” (and yet must have, for you are now remembering them) at the time but which, once remembered, are seen to be quite important to the dream’s structure or plot or meaning.

And then, beyond these spatial and temporal elements, you will discover the area of the dream widens around what we might vaguely call affect, that is, the range of what you feel about the dream events while they are happening, like desire, fear, joy, vertigo, etc. Quite often, also, it is the lack of emotion around certain dream features that seems worthy of note (as in my lack of 83

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surprise that my dead mother would be in the room with me, above.)

And there is yet a fourth dimension in which dreams expand as one contemplates them, and that is in the number of ways they expand. It isn’t only their temporal, spatial and affective terms approach infinity but also their n terms. Substitute anything you want for n: intellectual, psychological, rhetorical, social, sexual, political….

The dream, then, has no limit. And yet, we describe dreams, usually, in only a few words. We describe the dream we dream we have had. We describe what we wish we had dreamed.

The same is true of all descriptions.

= We have left Paris and come to a cottage near the village of Villefranche du Perigord, between Cahors and Bordeaux. It was a mistake, we decide, to rent the car in Paris and drive all the way here, six hours if you don’t fuck up, and we fucked up. Actually, I fucked up. We have some disagreement over those pronouns, I and we. We fight, again, and then we stop and don’t fight any more. No one wins. Nothing is decided. But somehow, anyhow, we stop, and gradually, even suddenly, it is better, and we are in the gorgeous French countryside, among the ancient fields, farmed as they were in medieval times, and the old villages like Cazals and Montpazier, where the weekly markets are still put on, even if they are supported mostly by tourists, now, buying the “artisanal” products.

We tourists spend hundreds of euros on the bread and cheese and olives and peaches and melons and tomatoes and wine, especially the wine, liter after liter, which we drink with every meal, and between every meal. Cahors, where the best wine of the region comes from, is an ancient settlement, with the foundation of a Roman ampitheater that seated 60,000 on display in its underground parking lot. The Celts were here even before the Romans came in 51 BCE. Located in a bend in the river Lot, and a map resembling, for that reason, a miniature New Orleans, it was apparently a major crossroads for a time. Henry IV had a house here, I guess as one of his Norman outposts, and it is on the tourist guides and in basically good condition, though it is 84

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shuttered and closed and appears utterly neglected, dusty and unpainted, with vines growing up and threatening to cover the ornate and very English-looking insignias carved in the stone lintels.

Evenings we sit outside our gite (which is basically a finished off barn) and grill sausage (boudin noir, blood sausage) on the barbie. Our landlords, Thierry and Cindy, live just beyond the hedge, and we hear snippets of their French as they play with the kids who are visiting. Sometimes they correct their grammar and pronunciation, especially when the kids say “wenhh” for oui. Then Thierry corrects them. “Wee” he says.

Occasionally I hear what sounds, initially, like thunder, but which crescendos into the familiar roar of a jet engine. Fighters, apparently, exercising or patrolling above our heads.

We make friends with a pair of burros in the field. The cicadas buzz at dusk. At night it is utterly silent but for the occasional moth that buzzes me in the bed, attracted by the light of my kindle. I am reading Assia Djebar’s Children of the New World, when I am not reading submissions to the press.

It’s a cruel thing to do to those asking me to publish them.

Though both our sleeping hours are off here, somehow it seems ok that we go to bed at radically different times every night, that we may sleep for a couple of hours then wake up and read or write for a while and go back to sleep. I may go to bed at 11, wake up at 2 and write for three hours, during which I must appear as a ghost floating in the light of the laptop when Nanc wakes briefly, sees me across the room, and drifts off again.

It is luxurious to have this license. I stare into the dark, contemplating the subtle shapes of fantasy that move within it, feeling the familiar, delicious stabs of the anticipation of death, and out of these I rise back into the writing.

= To tell the dream, then, is already to interpret it. The Pharaoh in Genesis 41 already knows the meaning of his dreams when he asks Joseph to interpret them, but he does not know that he knows. Joseph merely reminds him. Thus the deja vu of recognition is accomplished, the Pharaoh has his revelation, and his world is formed according to his desire.

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The “magicians” fail the Pharaoh only because they complicate the task.

They get stage fright and stammer. The tangled logical knots they encounter when they try to assign meaning to the kine and the wheat stalks are the bonds of the Pharaoh’s power, the threads of their own desire (for wealth and privilege, for the Pharaoh’s protection, for escape from that life of hunger, slavery and anonymity outside the palace.)

For Joseph it is easy because he is already dead, already a slave, without hope, without desire. He speaks the prophecy in monotone and has no interest in it. Genesis 41 tells us nothing about dreams, but it says a great deal about the Master and the Slave.

= On 21 May, 1944, at dusk, the 2nd Panzer division of the Nazi army rolled into the tiny Perigord village of Frayssinet-le-Gélat. Suspecting a “terrorist” cell, they gathered all the people in the town center and began questioning them with rifle butts. They also began searching the houses. In one of the houses, a soldier was shot. They drug an 80-year-old woman out of that house, threw a rope over the power pole outside the church and hung her. They burned that house and “searched” all the others in the time-honored manner of the warrior, taking with them every crumb of food and every item of value. They loaded bicycles onto their trucks. They took goats and chickens and bread and cheese, tobacco and coffee, and the little cash and jewelry they found.

They brought out 11 men of fighting/working age and shot them in the street. Two more women were hung and one shot. Then the 2nd Panzer division headed out toward Tulle and Oradour-sur-Glane, where they would repeat the carnage on a grander scale, leaving the women and the children and the old men of Frayssinet-le-Gélat destitute and wailing in the road.

We pass through Frayssinet and read the monument aux martyrs de la barbarie nazie without getting out of the car, on our way to the market in Cazals, where we sit in a café and have coffee next to a German family on holiday. They speak German among themselves but order in English, the common language. In the crowded market German is the language we overhear most after French and English.

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If Europeans held grudges, the economic engine of the EU, of which tourism is no small part, would grind to a halt. People have short memories, especially of things they would rather not remember anyway. It is easy to find the historical roots (the brutal French conquest, colonization and partition of North Africa, say) of the attacks we read about every day, but people don’t act in response to the stories they read or that their grandparents tell while gazing out the window. They act in response to what happened to them yesterday.

= I was criticized, recently, for not supporting Copper Canyon’s kickstarter campaign to raise $50k to publish a recently discovered selection of Neruda’s poems (published this year in English as Then Come Back: The Lost Neruda Poems.) There is an open letter on my website (lavenderink.org) in which I discuss in detail my refusal to support the project. In a nutshell, I was told that, by refusing to contribute, I wasn’t being a “champion of poetry.” After considering this, I decided that they were indeed right. I’m not a champion of poetry. I’m a champion of a certain thing poetry does, or of what some poetry does. Poetry in modern times is part of a struggle, and in the end it is the struggle that matters, not the poems.

To read Neruda outside his political context, outside the struggle that he devoted his life and work to, is not to read Neruda but in a way to read his antithesis, a glossy, sanitized, “accessible” version that is quite at odds with his rough agrarian vision, his championing of the oppressed people of Chile and the world with his lifelong commitment to communism and the struggle against the corporate fascism that finally triumphed in Chile, with the help of the CIA, and likely killed him in 1973.

When Pinochet’s soldiers came to search his house at Isla Negra, Neruda said to them, famously: “Mira a tu alredador—sólo hay una cosa de peligro para ustedes aqui—la poesía.” (“Look around—there’s only one thing of danger for you here— poetry.”)

This new volume pits Neruda against himself. It presents a series of disparate poems as a book, for one thing, as if they had some sort of contiguity, 87

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when they are in fact “drafts, scraps, notes he hid away and never intended to publish,” exactly the thing the translator indicates, in the Prologue, that he was glad they were not.

And despite the copious notes the book provides, there is not a single mention of Neruda’s politics. It retains his rhetoric, his signature metaphors, the beauty of the rugged people and landscapes of Chile, but it strips away the danger, the challenge to the power hierarchies of capitalism that his work always posed, that quality and context of his poetry that brought Pinochet’s soldiers to his door.

= We leave the Dordogne and drive back to Paris, actually through Paris, to Roissy-en-France, the small village that was decimated (or “renewed,” depending on your aesthetics), some years ago, by the construction of Charles de Gaulle airport. We return the rental car and then check in to our airport hotel, which is full of travelers like us, there for one night only, as well as lots of people with airline logos on their lapels.

We walk into the village and sit at a small café that was recommended to us. A nearby table is populated, it seems, by four Madrileños, somewhat in their cups, talking their rapid-fire Spanish. Madrileños talk so fast it can be incomprehensible even when your Spanish is pretty good, but Nanc spent years in Madrid, when she was young, and the dialect is utterly transparent for her.

Overhearing Madrileños always makes her happy. A bit of a language whiz (unlike me), she can bone up in a night or two and function in most any Romance language, but it’s work for her to speak French as she has been doing, now, for three weeks, and she literally sighs with relief. “That’s so beautiful,” she says. “I didn’t realize it wasn’t English, at first.”

I want to know what they are talking about, but she shrugs off the question.

They got drunk last night, couldn’t find a taxi; one of them fell down. I was imagining they would be talking about Garcia Lorca’s assassination in the Guerra Civil or Unamono’s Tragic Sense of Life or Velasquez or even the Torero who was recently killed in the ring, but they are, of course, talking about the same inanities most of us talk about over the table.

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After we order, four white American guys walk up and sit down at the table beside us. They order coffee only and begin talking, loudly, about their own inanities. In their case the preferred topics seem to be motorcycles and guns. We listen to them—impossible not to—while we eat, as they discuss with rising enthusiasm the road-gripping ability of the new Honda or the destructive potential of the pistols they carry. Then the discussion turns to race and how they handle themselves in Black neighborhoods back home in Atlanta, when work forces them to drive through these dangerous climes, one of them commenting, “yeah, when I drive down MLK I take the pistol out from under the seat and put it my lap.”

At this point Nanc can bear it no longer and stands up and confronts them.

“You ought to try actually reading Martin Luther King,” she yells, among other things more expletive, “you might learn something.”

Silenced for a moment, they stare up at her bewildered, like dogs who can’t figure out what they’ve done wrong by killing the neighbor’s cat.

= …from the floor above, long screams reach her. They’re torturing a man, she thinks, and is panic-stricken…. She covers her ears, and in a gesture recovered from her childhood she begins to pray for the first time: “My God, my God!…” Snatches of Koranic verses rise to her lips.

She stays that way for a long time. Finally she gets up, stands erect in the middle of the cell, facing the skylight, and begins to listen, carefully, sorrowfully, clenching her teeth; the screams form a long chant, a threnody. She trembles as if she were cold, but clenches her teeth again, stretches her willpower to stay upright, her hands now glued to her thighs as she listens. Why run away from it? One should listen! She is seized by a wild exaltation. “This is the song of my country, this the song of the future,” she whispers.

—Assia Djebar, Children of the New World (trans. Marjolyjn de Jager)

= When we are in Madrid, Nanc is perfectly fluent, not simply communicative.

That is, she isn’t only fluent in speaking and understanding, but also in the 89

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semantically empty but socially important games of street talk, the phatic “hey how you doin’… nice day huh…” banter that binds the culture but isn’t mentioned in grammar books. Sometimes she will talk to someone for several minutes, with me looking on pretending to understand, but when I ask her, afterwards, what they were saying, all she can answer is, “Nothing.” Their conversation had no real content; there is nothing to translate.

Sometimes, too, I will ask her what some word on a sign or something that I am reading “means,” and she will not know. When I pull out my dictionary she is just as curious as I am. I can stumble along in Spanish, but no one in Spain has ever mistaken me, as they have her, for a local.

The language, then, is more than the dictionary. The dictionary is, at best, one of many language games we play. At worst, it is a perversion of the language, a sublimation of its diverse functions into a single avenue, like a fetish. We may find it hard to believe, today, that there were no dictionaries prior to the 18th century. In all the long (well, fairly long) history of humanity, no one had an authority to consult on the “proper” use of words until then.

Until now.

= Inside CDG, trying to get checked in. There is a snafu with the flight; my reservation is cancelled; we must take our argument, increasingly irate, to desk after desk. Finally, someone says “Voila,” and I have my boarding pass.

In the midst of the bustling throng of humanity, a little girl, about seven, stands crying. It is like she is inside a bubble; all the busy travelers veer around her. A soldier stands nearby, a young man about 20, in fatigues, with a machine gun over his shoulder. There are several of them stationed in the terminal. He stares in the direction of the little girl, but over her head, into the crowd, alert for other kinds of suffering.

Am I the only one who sees her? I say to Nanc, “Look, she’s lost.”

We go over; Nanc bends down and talks to her. She speaks English.

American, I think. We take her to someone in an AirFrance uniform. He asks if she’s having a good time in France, if she likes chocolate, if she would like an AirFrance insignia. She’s confused by these questions, having to 90

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switch registers from terror to banality, and yet she is compelled to answer through her tears as if they were the most important questions in the world.

Yes, she’s having a great time. Yes, she likes chocolate. OK, he can put the AirFrance pin on her.

Finally her father appears, pulling his roll-aboard, looking around. She runs to him and hugs him around the knees, almost pulling him down. He pats her on the back, talks to the AirFrance guy; he’s harried and distracted, almost angry. They have a plane to catch.

= The Dictionary The Dictionary is the pride of the Nation.

It could be a metonym, like a crown without a person under it.

Children pose beneath it while parents take pictures.

College students stand under it and take selfies.

Once, however, the Dictionary sailed with a banner on its prow.

It landed here and there.

And everywhere It landed, It named.

It gave places names like America and Algeria.

Places had Names before the Dictionary came, but It changed them.

The Dictionary built towns. It built towns on top of towns.

The Dictionary brought the Entrepreneurial Spirit.

It brought tractors and automobiles and tanks.

The Dictionary tilled the farmland and built squares and markets and statues and garrisons and prisons.

The Dictionary hooked up generators to irrigation pumps and to people’s genitals.

It brought back these pictures and people from its exotic travels.

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= An inverse correlative to the identity rule: The more White Poets protest their being branded as such, the more they are exactly that.

= If we were to truly revamp the canon and reinvent the University, if we were to replace The Norton Anthology of _______ with, say, the Joris/ Rothenberg anthology Poems for the Millennium, thus substituting a worldoriented view of literature for the nationalistic, idiom-based representation of colonial power that such collections as the Norton are… If we did this, what exactly would we lose?

But isn’t it—whatever it is, this thing we are so afraid to let go of—actually already gone? Isn’t—I should say “wasn’t”—the Norton the proverbial nail in the coffin? For the Norton was invented as a defense against something that had already happened. Once the Norton arranges the work into its nationoriented chapters, once it puts its name on a collection, that work is removed from the realm of experience and put forever into the realm of ideology, which is the realm of a wish, a fantasy of national identity, the death of the very thing, the literature, the poetry, it purports to preserve.

= Dear Future Ones: I hope you don’t need poetry, because that will mean you have found a way of living that is not consumed by the longing for death. It will probably mean, too, that you have found a way of being that doesn’t entail killing each other and laying waste to your world so as to guarantee your own extinction.

It will mean, quite simply, that you have learned how to live. For poetry was what we invented when we realized we did not know how to live.

Best regards, Bill

= Back in the states, I have to go back to work. I am glad to be back to my 92

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familiar routine, even though I also already miss those brief weeks of nothing but leisure and writing.

First morning, I get up early and go into the kitchen. Momma is there, at the sink. Her mother is there, also. I’ve never met my grandmother, as she died before I was born, so I’m very curious, but she keeps her back to me, sometimes quickly turning so I can’t get a view of her face.

I’m groggy and need coffee, and they are, in that way that even dearly loved guests can be, rather in the way of my morning routine. Also, Momma is miffed about something. I can tell by the way she slams the dishes around in the sink. But I can’t remember what I did to offend her.

I say, “Momma, I have to go to work now.”

She says, “Just go on then.”

New Orleans, Paris, Frayssinet-le-Gélat: June-July, 2016 for Ralph, who suggested the topic for Nanc, mi luz, mi vida

Nancy Dixon and Bill Lavender, Mardi Gras 2012, by Michael Dominici

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Bill Lavender

Poems from Guest Chain

9 The chains are the sequence for each there is a before for each there is an after but the ghosts don’t know now from now.

To a certain extent before and after are blank.

It is not whether before and after are right but the ghosts that come between.

The lovers wishing that they were present send their mail before and after and the ghosts are a present that comes in the mail.

Now the ghosts come between the lovers and the guests are shifting in their chairs.

The sound of the chains is the mail the lovers wear.

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10 The lovers make a present of the present they send to themselves.

The presents are the ghosts’ presence between the sheets.

The ghosts come after the guests’ before marked by death none of them know.

Death before the after and after the before, the ghosts are fake sheets the guests put on.

The lovers make a present of their love they make love in their present, but their present is fake sheets the ghosts write on.

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13 The lovers write music and send it through the mail.

Each letter is a sequence.

Their music is electronic.

Their music is a chain its sequences are a sentence a sequence a sound of chains that cannot be revoked.

Their music is the chains and they cannot free themselves.

They’re music in their chains between the sheets.

The ghosts breathe between the sequences that come in the mail.

The guests breathe among the sentences.

They cannot see themselves.

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14 The lovers are the ghosts of a gone music, they don’t know now from know, they arm themselves in sequence.

The lovers rise from the bed they step out of the sheets they put on their chains they part.

Apart they are a part of the sequence of a sheet music of the chains that trail behind.

The lovers are the guests they’re fake they’re nothing behind their mail their nothing behind there, male.

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from Memory Wing one night she called me and said lets meet and i rode the three o five down onto the campus in front of old maine and she walked up there and we sat under the big oaks as she told me she was feeling constricted and wanted to be able to hang out with her other friends and at first i was just saying oh sure no problem but then it was like some light bulb of adulthood went off in my head and i say oh you mean and fuck them? and she said well yeah and i said oh and then i got on the bike and drove down dickson street to dickson street liquor went in and stuffed a pint of jim beam down my pants then rode over to michael’s and drank it every drop everyone just shook their head at my plight but of course i was the only one surprised i guess i had it coming and i held it against cynthia for a while but she would come back into my life a little later under a strange circumstance and i’m going to walk around as i talk its so cold in here is that fire ever going to warm up the 98

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room? the poets were an interesting crowd there was like i said brazier and then gary ligi what clear and brilliant minds those two had that came seemingly to naught and there was ralph adamo and carolyn later to be c.d. wright and biguenet whom we called big net and crazy john stoss whom i saw get up on stage with r.d. rucker at a rally against the war where we hippies were chanting peace now peace now and r.d. got up and took the mic and said look i’m gonna tell you how you find peace you’re gonna find peace by picking up the gun you ain’t gonna find no peace till you learn how to shoot and defend yourself from the man and stoss got up lumbering three hundred pound white guy and said it’s time we put our guts on the line we’ve gotta stay here until we’re arrested no backing down let’s tell them and lots of people raised their fists though there were lots also who just kind of looked around and thirty minutes later it all dispersed nothing irritated you more though than a bunch of hippies yelling

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peace like that time i was marching and saw you on the sidewalk caught your eye and you waved me over but i pretended not to see we were chanting peace now and later you said it reminded you of nazi germany the way everyone was chanting and you said the rhythm without the words chanted hey hey hey hey hey hey and i thought it was strange like you hadn’t heard what we were saying only the rhythm of it as if we’d been speaking german or something and for just a second there i saw it as you did the indistinct mass of derelict humanity fists raised chanting idolatry in babel and there was me among them like a foreigner in your own house an alien from your loins and i felt your paranoid tomcat discomfort when i was in the room felt it in the brain’s marrow beyond articulation seething in it four decades the rage sustained me wishing you dead seems petty now that you are of course but then so does everything else so here one more time for the eons let me say again fuck off there’s no peace now as there was no peace then

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liars and torturers at the head of our table now as then nixon to the tiger cages we used to shout he pardoned calley who machine-gunned an entire village of women and children when his soldiers had to turn away sickened now as then the waterboarding fatherführer phallic ambrosial in a way your petty racism your idiotic theories about racial intelligence seem quaint compared to what’s going on on earth today you would have bristled at the idea of a black president but now as then anyone can fill the role anyone can be king for a day torturer for a day black white man woman now as then someone will come to lead the slaughter someone will puff themselves up with a noble cause and high sentence a syntax that is in the end only a chant only the dumb thrumming beat of bootheels marching now as then when leroy baugus who’d enlisted right out of high school and came back almost immediately in a wheelchair then let his hair grow and carried a sign that said thank you richard nixon and we on the hill above the stadium with our crosses that spelled my lai when nixon’s helipcopter passed

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right over us and the crowd growled like an animal the father führer now as then when cynthia told me about the night her father died how he came to her door in his underwear and she knew he was dying and went back to bed thinking thank you god…

…and in the summer of seventy-one dave said he could get us jobs at yellowstone so i said great and filled out the form but instead they gave us jobs at fort courage arizona it was the original set from f-troop they moved it to a rest stop on the i-forty just across the line from gallup we drove out there in my ford wondering what we’d gotten into we stayed in the barracks of the fort and walked across the yard every morning to work in the restaurant like the soldiers used to pretend to do and there were two honda trail nineties tied up outside that we could use whenever we wanted and every day or two hippies

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would pass through on their way to california and we’d cop acid from them and drop and ride out into the desert ride the trails until we got lost nothing between us and the stars we were reading castoneda but that really didn’t make any difference just being there was the thing and the guy who ran the place was one of those desert nuts he caught us smoking a joint on the roof once and took us down to his office sat us down paced around back and forth couldn’t decide what to do with us he finally decided that we should write confessions and sign them and he would keep them so that if we fucked up any more that summer he could send them to our parents and our school and the fayetteville police and the arkansas state police and he might even have to notify all the state police between here and there new mexico oklahoma texas arizona he didn’t have to worry about because the state troopers for that corner of the state lived at fort courage there were two of them cordoba and ryan cordoba was roving so when he was in he bunked with us in the barracks sometimes he would come in with

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evidence bags of hash and sit down and smoke it with us and us scared shitless lest we make a wrong move once he took us for a ride in his patrol car a hundred and twenty down the freeway lights flashing siren wailing passing the hash pipe back and forth ryan was a different story he lived behind the fort in a trailer with his wife he liked to sit on the overpass with his radar and bust everyone as they came over the rise and he would harrass the hippie hitchhikers and search them and we used to comb the grass down on the ramp where they were likely to be stopped and salvage the dope they’d dumped when he drove up and ryan always watched us we’d see his head follow us as we drove by and one day i’m sitting in the restaurant on break drinking coffee and smoking and ryan’s wife sits down in the booth across from me saying hey how’s it goin and fiddling with the salt shaker and she looks out the window at some navajo kids playing under one of those scrub desert trees one in diapers and three or four older one in little cowboy boots and ryan’s wife says to me look at them out there will you that’s

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what they do they play around under a tree for while and then they die it’s all so stupid and she put her elbow on the table and her chin in her hand and lolled her head to one side and says so what do you do around here after dark? and i said not much there ain’t really much to do and she rolled her eyes back at me and said yeah i’ve been looking around for something to do and she looked me right in the eye and i was scared shitless not because i wasn’t interested but because i was but lucky thing next day dave and i drove to albequerque jethro tull and mott the hoople were playing and we stayed in the park which was nothing but a tent city for hippies with open-air cassette stores which also sold hash and whites and mescaline and whatever and we got high and joined the crowd at the arena gathered outside the doors with everyone getting restless because they were refusing to open the doors until fifteen minutes before the show and some guy in the crowd

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put a brick in my hand saying throw it when you see the first one go but we decided to check the back entrances while all this was brewing and that worked great we walked right in the side door for free great show everyone barefoot and flipping peace signs and the arena full of smoke like some giant pleasure dome and mott carried us away the crowd awash in mescaline floating above itself in a skein of smoke and light and beach balls and big balloons drifted around the room leaving long trails behind them and they would go on stage and the band would bat them back some nights we would go and play at a bar called charley and mary’s right on the arizona new mexico border on sundays it was packed because in arizona bars were closed on sundays and it would fill up with navajos and cowboys and road trash and we were there buying beer one sunday and dave just went up and asked the band if we could sit in and they said sure

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they weren’t really into it anyway and we went up and played johnny b. goode or some such with the drunks wheeling on the dance floor and people puking in corners and we had a great time until that day when a navajo at the bar started talking to me head nodding he mumbled on about this and that and then his words seem to come into focus for one moment when he said i just wouldn’t want to see you guys get hurt and after that the room had a different look i saw the drunken eyes tracking us from under their hatbrims and we never played there again on our way back to arkansas we found a classic longhorn skull in the desert i tied it on the hood and drove all the way with it up there as if to say look where we’ve been in the valley of the shadow

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From transfixion kinder kite & wilderness what joy to measure in a cave her silken flanks w/ garlands drest then bang & we emerge with barfly remorse a whisper dies the meaning of her black eyes the richness of her manner the slightly dishonorable past in the day she feeds birds but hasn’t got the holes half full what difference does it make if her firmament spills into the room on the french coast I will stand a long time recovering pleasure the heavy surface of what was said by the oral to the written 108

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indecipherable cause neither arnold’s intersection nor whitman’s simple folk we’ll walk through the valley through the herbs & sweet­cress though I will feel lost waters from mountain springs trail between love & state a confirming skin a temple to colonize my probe into your anus ovalness where my love is the age­old rock star becomes an autobiography a male is not less nor more a flow of clear liquid official greeter a loss that will not seem so dancing on your breast amorous & slippery I was ten when you buried me & the gates of the body with two cracked handles secret writing trails from the heaven you create

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soon when the proud son returns to earth wanting to know child of its flesh happy genius of the household his book being gift of all this together supposing it was actual like pomegranates splitting on the banks of a stream where mermaids sing with yellow drawn shades or moon’s sickle this earthly hell makes all feel better burning & gunning in america & dusk a gash of neon a flowery tale of something upright & earnest like the folds of a bright girdle astride the dreary intercourse of daily life spring like a perhaps wheelbarrows similarly plastered a valorous legend for the church of hygiene the blank bulk of us & a language to dream in snake with no hiss 110

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no olives no fasting day after day the bone china of man’s calamity yet I wouldn’t doubt that under its wrist is still a pulse stabbed & shot untapped & untappable where the families all disperse to their kitchen wars & the leaves bid spring adieu & the studio guests play their clapboard hopscotch with a brass coin & a burlap veil dying before we had time even to be stripped of foliage small iridescent flies furies of complicated precession gutter glare earth in adolescence trying to rebuild embers need poking heart & head unheard & grey as a magic button in the bronx where one all-loving motion flares at the center of a great yellow flower 111

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from A Field Guide to Trees French Quarter Haikus the sweet olive smells strong as the cheap perfume on a straight girl

= you can’t step into the same river twice is heraclitus’ advice & the same is true of bourbon street

= the night’s young you’re not

= when I get within 2 blocks of the bar the poems take on a different author

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= this guy’s running away from a mugging this guy’s running to a very important meeting

= bars smell of pine-sol xmas lights draped on balconies jingle of a dog’s collar waterfall

= walking home still drinking broken plaster raw brick in patches ovals like the asphalt on the street

= my dream is far away as if someone else were dreaming and telling it to me

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= wild guitar solo through the night the moon is playing lead

= i’m of two minds but only see one shadow

= the cop beeps his siren at me— standing on the sidewalk writing a poem isn’t necessarily illegal but sure as hell is suspicious

= text message from percy shelley: see ya soon!

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Contributor’s Notes 37.1 Abigail Allen grew up in Tangipahoa Parish, Louisiana. Her stories have been published in numerous journals, including Birds Piled Loosely, Big Bridge, Pilgrimage, Coup d’Etat, Xavier Review, Mississippi Review, Mid-American Review, and Confrontation. She has stories forthcoming in Valley Voices, The Louisiana Review, Numero Cinq, Big Muddy, and Columbia College Literary Review. She has also published work in New World Writing, Many Mountains Moving, Forge, and Phantasmagoria under the pseudonym Hiram Goza. Her novel, Birds of Paradise, was published under that name in 2005.

Jeanne Emmons has published three books of poetry: The Glove of the World, winner of the Backwaters Press Reader’s Choice Award; Baseball Nights and DDT (Pecan Grove Press), and Rootbound, winner of the New Rivers Press Minnesota Voices Competition. She has won the Comstock poetry prize, the James Hearst Poetry Award, and the Sow’s Ear poetry award, among others.

Her work has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, The American Scholar, Carolina Quarterly, Louisiana Literature, South Carolina Review, North American Review, Poet Lore, Prairie Schooner, The River Styx, South Dakota Review, and many other journals. She is poetry editor of the Briar Cliff Review.

Barry Fitzpatrick has an MFA in nonfiction from the University of New Orleans, where she was an associate nonfiction editor for Bayou Magazine and three time finalist for the Samuel Mockbee Award in Nonfiction. She is published in Pioneers: Shaping the American Landscape, and she has a Master’s from LSU in Landscape Architecture. Prior to her writing life, she was a self-employed gardener for twenty-five years in New Orleans.

She currently volunteers to teach creative writing to some of the inmates in Orleans Parish Prison.

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Jo Gehringer is from Omaha and lives in New Orleans. They are the author of two self-published chapbooks, Anonymous/American (2015), and Screaming at Birds (2016). Their work has appeared in Paper Darts, Spy Kids Review, MICRO//MACRO, The Soul Stoned, New Bile, and elsewhere. They tweet at @JosephGehringer, and they love you, like, a lot..

José Luis Gutiérrez is a San Francisco-based poet. His work has appeared in Eratio, The Cortland Review, Hawaii Pacific Review, Scythe, Margie, Caliban, Poemeleon, DMQ and is forthcoming in Kestrel and Jet Fuel Review, among others. He works as an interpreter and translator in the Bay Area. His first book of poems, A World Less Away, was published in 2016 by Pariah Dog Press.

Patrick A. Howell says: “My stories deal with race, moving the current Black Lives Matter conversation from the streets to the corporate suites of Wall Street.” His early works have been published in the UC Berkeley African American Literary Journal and Daily Cal. His critiques have been published in the Quarterly Black Book Review, interviewing such luminaries as Ishmael Reed and New York Times bestselling author Michael Datcher. In 2014, he co-coined the movement “Global International African Arts Movement” (Global I Aam), introduced at the Harlem Book Fair that year. His stories are scheduled to appear in Killen’s Review, Foliate Magazine and the Mandala Journal in the coming months.

Robert Lee Kendrick lives in Clemson, SC. He has previously published, or has work forthcoming, in Tar River Poetry, Louisiana Literature, South Carolina Review, The James Dickey Review, Main Street Rag, and a chapbook, Winter Skin (Main Street Rag Publishing, 2016). He can be found at robertleekendrick.net.

Bill Lavender is a poet, novelist, musician, carpenter and publisher living in New Orleans. He founded Lavender Ink (lavenderink.org), a small press devoted mainly to poetry, in 1995, and he founded Diálogos, an imprint devoted to cross-cultural literatures (mostly in translation) in 2011. His poems, 116

stories and essays have appeared in dozens of print and web journals and anthologies, with theoretical writings appearing in Contemporary Literature and Poetics Today, among others. His verse memoir, Memory Wing, dubbed

by Rodger Kamentetz “a contemporary autobiographical masterpiece,” was published by Black Widow in 2011. His novel, Q, a neo-picaresque view of the surreal world of the future, appeared from Trembling Pillow in 2013.

A chapbook, surrealism, was published in 2016 by Lavender Ink. He is the co-founder, with Megan Burns of Trembling Pillow Press, of the New Orleans Poetry Festival which takes place every April (April 20-22, 2017; nolapoetry.com).

Probal Mazumdar won the first prize in the All India Poetry Competition in 2014 conducted by Poetry Society of India, New Delhi (APIC). His other notable publications have been in Wasafiri (U.K, Vol 67), Acumen (U.K, Issue 86), OtherPoetry (U.K, forthcoming issue), Indian Literature (Sahitya Akademi), Chandrabhaga Literary Journal India (Editor, Jayanta Mahapatra) and few others.

James Sallis has published sixteen novels, multiple collections of short stories, poems and essays, three books of musicology, reams of criticism, a classic biography of Chester Himes, a translation of Raymond Queneau’s novel Saint Glinglin, and the novel Drive, from which Nic Refn’s award-winning film derived. He worked for many years as a reviewer for the New York Times, L.A. Times and Washington Post; served for three years as books columnist for the Boston Globe; and maintains a books column at The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. He’s received a lifetime achievement award from Bouchercon, the Hammett Award for literary excellence in crime writing, and the Grand Prix de Littérature policière. Recent work includes Black Night’s Gonna Catch Me Here: New and Selected Poems (New Rivers Press), a reissue of his spy novel Death Will Have Your Eyes (Mulholland Books/Little Brown),

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and the novel Willnot, out last spring from Bloomsbury..

Born in France, Jean-Mark Sens has lived in the American South for over twenty years. He recently taught in a start-up culinary program for Mississippi University for Women and lives in New Orleans where he works with Goldring Centre for Culinary Medicine. His work has been published in the U.S. and Canada, and he has a collection, Appetite, with Red Hen Press: The present poems are part of River Lips, a collection in need of a publisher. He is also working on culinary book Leafy Greens & Sundry Things.

Most recently, Christopher Shipman is co-author with Vincent Cellucci of A Ship on the Line (Unlikely Books), co-author with Brett Evans of T. Rex Parade (Lavender Ink), and author of a chapbook of short prose pieces, The Movie My Murderer Makes (The Cupboard). His work appears in journals such as Cimarron Review, PANK, and Salt Hill, among many others. Shipman’s poem, “The Three-Year Crossing,” was a winner of the 2015 Motionpoems Big Bridges prize, judged by Alice Quinn. Shipman lives in New Orleans with his wife and daughter and teaches English and creative writing at St. Martin’s Episcopal School.

Jianqing Zheng teaches at Mississippi Valley State University where he also serves as the editor for Valley Voices: A Literary Review and the Journal of Ethnic American Literature. He was a recipient of the 2014 literary arts fellowship in poetry from Mississippi Arts Commission, and has poems are forthcoming in Tar River Poetry, Poetry East, and Hanging Loose.

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New Releases from

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—Darrell Bourque, author of Megan’s Guitar and Other Poems from Acadie

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