Xavier Review 38:1

R XAVIEREVIEW 38.1, Spring 2018

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. Editor Emeritus Thomas Bonner, Jr., Biljana Obradovic, James Shade, Oliver Hennessey 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

We present a shorter-than-usual issue, pinching a few pennies against

future need, but Xavier Review 38.1 is still loaded with dynamite, guaranteed to keep you on the edge of your seat.

We are especially proud to feature a long, personal essay-review of an important new book, UNO Press’s New Orleans Girot: The Tom Dent Reader.

The book is a hefty compendium of work done in many genres (poetry, fiction, essay, drama) by—as well as interviews with and recollections of— the extraordinary New Orleans writer Tom Dent. Our reviewer knew Dent and knows the material, much of it located in this city, that was his subject.

At the most basic level, Dent was a great storyteller, and naturally there are great stories about him as well. I wish I had more than one, but the one I have I cherish. After I had reviewed his 1997 epic examination of the sites where the civil rights battles were waged, Southern Journey, he wanted to talk, so he dropped by my house. Tom Dent was a tall handsome man, distinguishedlooking even in casual clothes. He had come to talk and he did, for hours, full of passion, humor, and a keen intellect. He reminded me of a priest friend of my brother’s and mine who, when he arrived, came for the duration; and like our friend, Tom did not bring small talk, but big talk tempered by humility, and powerful insight. Not much of a story, maybe, but this was 1997, and he was dead within a year; I had imagined we would continue our conversations into old age, that I had found an amazing new friend. For this reason among more important ones, I am grateful for this book, and for the careful work of editing done by Kalamu ya Salaam.

We are pleased to continue Xavier Review’s on-going examination of the work of writer Andre Dubus, with Matthew Duffus’s look at male friendship in the author’s short fiction.

I’ll let this issue’s absorbing fiction, three powerful and quite dissimilar stories, and its gorgeous poetry speak for itself. The final selection, by XR’s own Bill Lavender revives the tradition of the essay-poem, a piece that began as a response to the essay “Local Poets” in our previous issue and then grew iv

to be something else.

Xavier Review also wishes to congratulate its Editor Emeritus (who guided this magazine for 20+ years), Thomas Bonner Jr. who, with his wife Judith, has just published an updating of Sherwood Anderson and Other Famous Creoles (Pelican Publishing). A collection of Tom Bonner’s writing—fiction, essays, poetry and reviews—is also forthcoming, right about now, from Xavier University Press; that volume is called Parterre: New and Collected Poetry and Prose.

Finally, the magazine is most grateful for the work Xavier Review Press editor Nicole Greene has done in this and previous issues, helping us get the thing right.

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Xavier Review 38.1, Spring 2017 Editor’s Note — iv Eric Paul New Orleans Griot: The Tom Dent Reader — 9 Sabine Hilding Blue Ford Falcon — 19 Ruy Belo Three Poems — 37 translated by Alexis Levitin James McKee “Still Possessed of Those Effects” — 40 Jeanne Emmons Underdeveloped — 42 Henry Goldkamp Funeral Season — 43 Florangel Reyes A Reloaded Remix on a Junot Diaz Theme: How to Date a Brown Guy, Black Guy, White Guy or an Asian — 48 Paul Martin Clark Jealous — 51 Simon Perchik Two Poems — 54 Dar Kamenetz The Blues — 56

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Trevor Tingle Overture — 58 Jerry W. Ward, Jr. Imperatives 2017 — 59 R. Sebastian Bennett Fission — 60 Matthew Duffus Approaching the Sacramental: Male Friendship in the Short Fiction of Andre Dubus — 75 Stephanie JT Russell Preparations for a Catskill Winter — 84 Joseph J. Capista Two Poems — 86 Bill Lavender Foreign Poets — 89 Contributors — 92

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Photo by Alvin Simon, 1963. Tom Dent Papers. Courtesy of Amistad Research Center.

Eric Paul

New Orleans Griot: The Tom Dent Reader [with thanks to Cordell Dickerson for his recollections]

When I began reading the new Tom Dent anthology, New Orleans

Griot: The Tom Dent Reader, I was astounded from time to time, as I read, to come face to face with myself. I met Tom Dent at the tender age of 17. I was a member of the Congo Square Writers Workshop through Free Southern Theater (FST). Tom, along with John O’Neal, headed the workshop. That was 44 years ago. No, I don’t feel old, but at 63, I’m acutely aware of the passage of time, and in that period of my life I was a wild pony of sorts. It was quite an experience. It was 1973. My best friend and I were dating sisters, who acted in a number of productions in FST. It was a grand experience. Here I was, a kid, exposed to actors, playwrights, directors, production managers, set designers, and of course, writers; all of them black and all of them extremely talented. It was a fertile milieu of creativity, ripe for exploration. For someone as young as myself I felt at times I was on another planet.

I echo Kalamu Ya Salaam, the editor of New Orleans Griot: Tom Dent was the first writer “… I ever consciously met in person.” We interacted with someone who was engaged in the craft, and this had an enormous effect on both Kalamu and me. Thanks to my relationship with Tom, writing ceased to be some ethereal undertaking but became something concrete, not only possible for me but providing limitless possibilities. Of course, most of my writing from that time period was terrible, but I was driven to do it.

At the behest of Abram Himelstein, the director of University of New Orleans Press, Kalamu Ya Salaam agreed to edit a collection of Tom’s work.

Housed at the Amistad Research Center on Tulane University’s campus, Tom Dent’s material was significant in its volume, and Kalamu was amazed at what he found.

“I was stunned by both the breadth and depth of the collection…. There

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were more than five six—foot steel cabinets of writings, journals, notebooks, and letters on the second floor plus a healthy cache of photographs, tape recordings, books and other possessions housed in storage… Tom’s work amounted to over 149 linear feet of material.”

The task of wading through this mass of a collection must have been daunting, and just as confounding, deciding what to choose for publication.

I would imagine it would be similar to a treasure hunt; coming across work no doubt Kalamu had seen in print, as well as large amounts of unprinted material that must have been a startling discovery.

Believe me, there are easier things in this world than being a writer.

Whether it is fiction or nonfiction, both have their inherent dangers. With fiction you’re creating a world, populating it with ‘beings’ from your mind, controlling their destinies however you see fit. But here’s the risk. Will the reader embrace your creation? Will the reader understand the meaning you had in mind? With nonfiction you’re commenting on the known world. And with that you must have accuracy, knowledge of your subject. Your opinion, whatever it may be hinges on your acuity with the subject matter you are examining. If you leave holes in your observations, you leave yourself open to be pilloried for your mistakes.

Considering the upbringing Tom Dent had, I find it interesting he chose writing as a profession. He could have easily been a teacher or professor, and had he done so there is little doubt he would have been assisted in this endeavor by his father. Instead, he chose writing, which must have disappointed his father, who I assume felt his son could ascend to greater heights.

“Tom had been brought up in a leading middle-class family. His father had been the president of Dillard University. Given his childhood, which emphasized propriety and responsibility, throughout his lifetime Tom wrestled with doing what he deeply wanted to do and doing what he deeply felt he ought to do… unlike his father and brothers, he was never financially secure or socially celebrated by mainstream society.”

Possessed with a razor sharp mind and a vision of how writing could be used as a weapon for his people, Tom set out to delineate the trials and hazards of being black in America. He wrote of the myriad ways blacks 10

were oppressed in their own country, and equally, how black people could subvert these obstacles and if not thrive, at the least go on living. Like Ralph Ellison, whose masterpiece Invisible Man screamed to the world of the black experience, Tom was aware of the ‘invisibility’ of black people in America.

Sadly, he encountered this fact even at a black institution.

He writes: “I took a literature course at Morehouse College in Atlanta, which was enthusiastically taught but included no writers of our race, as if they did not exist. In none of my courses can I remember reading books by black writers, or hearing a consciously black line of thought, of comment, of reality. We were taught and prepared to ‘belong’, i.e. to become whites in brown skins by mastering white standards.”

Tom also wrote about the beauty of African American culture, and felt it imperative that black people not only be aware of their history but practice a standard of living that venerated their past while looking forward to the future.

Tom’s pursuit would be far from lucrative, but his work would sustain him spiritually and psychologically. In print and in action he would raise black self-awareness and black examination of reality. He sired truth on paper, with an eye to the powers of conviction and commitment. And he did all this without a hint of hubris or egocentricity. As long as I’d know the man he was always open and accessible. You could approach him easily and he would open his mind to you, and though he wrote little fiction, he was a great storyteller. As a teacher he was subtle. He would lead you quietly to what you needed to know for the craft of writing. He would guide, but only enough to get you to see for yourself what could work for you. In this he was a joy, a treasure, the Griot of the title. For me and any number of others Tom Dent was a stabilizing creative force. This is a review of a book, but more than that it is a memorial to someone who was very important in my life early on and in the lives of any number of creative black people. I am humbled, and at the same time grateful to spill this ink for a writer such as he.

New Orleans Griot: the Tom Dent Reader, is divided into five chapter headings: new york years/umbra days, free southern theater/BLKARTSOUTH, new orleans, griot work, interviews.

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Out of the 34 pieces in the collection, 13 of them were never published.

As Kalamu writes in the introduction, “During Tom’s lifetime, he probably published only one page for every couple of hundred he wrote. The work he published during his lifetime is dwarfed by the production of thousands of archived pages.”

Tom was a prolific writer, and it saddens me that much of his output never saw the light of day. As it is, all of it as a whole, and particularly the unpublished work, is truly compelling. Aside from the poetry, two plays, and two pieces of fiction, New Orleans Griot is a mass of essays. Early on, Tom realized the power in and importance of essay writing. Though he tried his hand at short fiction and poetry and had composed two plays, it was in the essay form that he found a calling and a home. His powers of observation, scalpel sharp and enduring, allowed him to immerse himself in the complexity and social conundrum that is New Orleans.

I will attempt to shine a light on some of what I feel are the highlights of this collection and, at the end, share a recollection of a friend’s experience with Tom Dent, which will, I hope, give you a picture of the man, both as a teacher and as a writer of great distinction.

I am thankful for Kalamu’s synopses. Reading his ‘lead ins’ made me flow through time and memory of Tom, and equally appreciate the relationship he had with him. He sets the ‘stage’ of the piece you are about to read, and gives you a view of the man as he evolved.

Kalamu writes: “Tom Dent understood that socially conscious writing was an arduous, sometimes painful, and often thankless undertaking.”

But he did it anyway. He didn’t make a lot of money. He received no celebrity. Tom was compelled to write what he did. He had to put down in ink the social and psychological fabric of being black in America. And as Kalamu noted, that could be quite painful.

One essay from the collection that I could directly relate to is “Report from New Orleans: Resisting the Poised Wrecking Ball of Progress.” Unfortunately, this piece was never published and that truly is a shame (Tom wrote it in 1973). In less than three pages Tom succinctly describes the socio-economic fabric of New Orleans, which he often referred to as “New O”.

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Whoever referred to New Orleans as the Big Easy obviously wasn’t poor and black and struggling in the city to survive. Tom opens the piece with a nod to how the Crescent City made its fortune in the early days of its history.

It was a thriving seaport, with cotton and sugar as a staple for its success.

He describes how the city was largely built by blacks, “slave and free,” but with those glory days more than a century in the past, the modern city was looking to cash in on tourism, and what that meant for many young blacks in New Orleans was service industry jobs: waiting tables, housekeeping in hotels, food service, and other jobs of a servile nature. These positions paid little, provided less, and hardly broke the orbit of poverty. Is it any wonder after years of pushing the stone and getting nowhere economically they consider leaving? ... a young black dude thinks about it all and then thinks about his plans to leave. He is any young man, just turned twenty... and he can’t get a decent job, if he can get one at all. He’s heard things might be better in LA or Chicago or Detroit or wherever in California his family has relatives.

Three years after Tom wrote the above, that was me. I was 22 years old and had had enough of scraping by in New Orleans. I was disillusioned, broke, and wanted something better, something more. I set my eyes on Washington D. C.; I had two friends there, ‘expats’ from the “New O”, and though I had my apprehensions, off I went.

Like any number of young black people from the Crescent City who had done the same thing, I experienced what I referred to later as missing the three Cs: climate, cuisine, and culture. Believe me, the transition was jarring.

There were certain foods I craved from time to time that could not be acquired in the nation’s capital, and when I did come across a variation of what was claimed to be ‘genuine’ the result was usually pedestrian at best, or execrable in the extreme. You should have seen the grimace that came across my face as I bit into what I thought would be a passable po’boy, which caused the waitress to ask, “Anything wrong sir? Those oysters are fresh from the can.”

Though the people were friendly enough, by and by, it wasn’t the same

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as meeting a ‘native stranger’ and holding court as if we’d known each other for years. As for the weather in Washington, the recent hard freeze New Orleans suffered made my flesh crawl, run, and dance the Watusi without so much as a lesson. In short I feel, as do many Crescent City natives, you can keep the cold, I’ll take the heat.

Like many before me and many after, I returned to “New O”, as Tom writes elsewhere in the collection.

The appeal of culture is why so many blacks remain in New Orleans, or return, seemingly against all economic reason... “Can’t make no money but no other place like it. [my emphasis]

The second line, po’boys, the smell of magnolias in full flower, gumbo, crawfish boils, the Black Indians on the DAYofDAYS strutting like multicolored giants, all this you can find nowhere else, and if you are a native it is a way of life you will truly miss if you leave. And the seduction of this peculiar sensuality will draw you back to the little city by the river.

Tom calls it.

Suddenly he hears Baptiste’s trumpet sound the call. He feels the excitement run through his body same as always; the Olympia is ready. The beat, the jump, the swift movement of rhythm, the entire crowd of his people carried away into unity of motion... Umbrellas raised... The drumbeats echo like shots underneath the Claiborne Ave. overpass... Our dude feels like he is a part of an irresistible and undeniable force... he realizes there is something deeper, and he is a part of it, something old and certain about what it celebrates.

Something he cannot put into words.

That nameless “something” also attracts those from other regions. From points North, East and West, people come to the little city by the river and are beguiled by its charms. Even they cannot explain that “something”, they only know that the allure of the city is irresistible, and soon they become residents of what one of my friends calls the “languid latitude,” New Orleans.

In “Beyond Rhetoric: Toward a Black Southern Theater,” Tom Dent gives a reading of the Free Southern Theater (FST). The vision, the mission

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of FST, was to bring to common black folk in the South an agency of selfidentity, black experience, black art, black cultural history, and other necessary imperatives for the black community.

Free Southern Theater was the brainchild of Gilbert Moses, Denise Nicholas, Doris Derby, and John O’Neal. With so many parents there was bound to be conflict. Disagreements concerning its artistic direction combined with being split between New York and New Orleans caused frictions. They had purpose. They had an idea how theater could be presented as a form of entertainment, yet at the same time be enlightening, thought provoking, and informative. But they weren’t so sure how to go about this endeavor. By the time Tom took over in 1965 he had examined the direction of the company and felt it needed to change. Tom wanted to dispense with the European aesthetic and concentrate on black plays for black people. He believed performing a play, such as Waiting for Godot, brought nothing useful to their black audience, nothing that could remind them of their lives or their relationship to the world they lived in. …FST was beset by a basic conflict; a conflict between “the deadwood of American liberal and aesthetic ideas” and a rapidly developing sense of a black aesthetic... FST could not continue to exist or in any sense justify its purpose as an expression of a white liberal ideology or aesthetic.

In 1968-69 the theater had offices in New York and New Orleans. Both offices had staff and supporters. The ensuing conflict this developed delivered a choice that had to be made. Tom wrote: …this thing can’t be in both places, it has to be one or the other... it has to be a New York group that tours Mississippi for a few months... or it has to emanate from New Orleans, stay there, work there, build a theater there.

Once FST was established in New Orleans many of the original members returned to New York, but thanks to the previous workshop activity from the late ‘60s “New O” natives were recruited to fill its ranks. Later, when FST moved to its Dryades Street location, many of those ‘recruits’ I personally

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knew, including my girlfriend of the time and her sister. Having locals participate in the matrix of the theater made it an organic native entity. FST had truly become a theater for the people by the people.

Theater, particularly, could provide a place of communion, a meeting place for Black people to come together, much like the church, transcending in importance the desire to see a particular performance. [my emphasis]

It was a magical time, filled with fire and light and passion. The passion of communication with common folk, who’d only known television or movies, and FST was giving them the ‘living art’ of theater. Their audience, sitting there in the dark, was witnessing what it meant to be black and human; those nights of drama, those nights of comedy, those nights of the heat and hell of black existence, living as best they could in the crucible of America.

I was there for the FST production of Raisin in the Sun. I watched two performances done back to back over a weekend. As fate would have it, after I saw the second show, the movie of the play was on television that night, which gave me the opportunity to compare the two productions. FST’s production was easily as good if not better in certain portions to the movie adaptation (which starred the great Sidney Portier). This could be attributed to the fact that the movie, being a ‘document’, was static compared to FST’s live theatrical production. I noticed how the FST actors changed certain aspects of their performance on the second night. These changes were subtle but noticeable; the cadence of a line, body language, blocking, the use of eye movement, all these things contributed to an engaging theatrical experience, especially after having witnessed the first performance. The audience was overcome by the third act of the play, not a dry eye in the house to be found.

The play resonated in them, and as they left the theater that evening I could sense that the power of the production was a kind of spiritual nourishment for them. That was the gift of Free Southern Theater.

New Orleans Griot: The Tom Dent Reader has a wealth of material spanning a number of subjects. First and foremost, Tom was a native writer.

He spent a good portion of his life examining and commenting on black New

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Orleans. The prism he used was societal, psychological, and historical. The anthology stands as a monument to his eloquence, his intelligence, and his urgency to put down on paper what he felt was of the utmost importance for black people.

As I noted earlier, Tom Dent was a very good teacher of the craft; he would guide, prod, and discuss the trajectory you were taking.

“Why did you use that line? How does that line help the rest of the poem?... What does that phrase mean in this context?” [my paraphrase] And so on.

He would get you. You would open your mind, not necessarily critical, but you would examine what you had written and the reasons why. Tom made you look at construction and intent. That is one of the most valuable lessons I got from him.

One of Tom’s ‘pupils’, an old friend going back almost 50 years, was in his sphere more than me. He remains a brilliant writer (don’t change your hat size), a Jimi Hendrix researcher, a poet, and a ‘race man’ of the highest order; Cordell Dickerson had made an impression on Tom, a consequence of being in Tom’s orbit where he did glide. Cordell notes: I first seriously set pen to paper after reading Ishmael Reed’s BEWARE DO NOT READ THIS POEM. In the early ‘70’s after a period of about 2 years as a member of Free Southern Theatre’s Writer’s Workshop led by John O’Neal, I decided to join Tom Dent’s new group of writers who would later be known as Congo Square. It was while in this group that I witnessed people compose and listen sometimes simultaneously. A member would read, and Tom would encourage us to begin to learn each other’s work to some degree. He explained to me that this would remove some of the ego tripping that could creep into the effort. It soon became possible for me to listen and make significant notes leading to other pieces later on. The use of a tape recorder became necessary, as there were moments of clarity that I could not write down fast enough. Not all of my recordings were committed to paper but the technique was often a matter of conversation between us.

He was a man who had Paul Robeson to throw him the football as a kid growing up, and I was amazed at the way he could summon

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coolness and order when he read. Our writer’s group was well received and welcomed wherever we went, and there were a few trips to Vicksburg and Lafayette which were memorable. I am today struck by an online description of him as a passionate groomer of Black Writers. I learned from him about how to pivot on the page between the heavy and the weightless.

Earl Billings (who is known today as the brother in all the AFLAC commercials) was a Congo Square member: I walked into Tom’s apartment one Saturday afternoon. He was on the phone and so motioned for me to have a seat. As I did so I could hear him tell the other person that there was a brother here who was a space poet. Oh Lord. He extended the receiver toward me and said, “It’s Ishmael Reed.” We actually got to speak for a short time. I last saw Tom in the late 70’s at Mardi Gras time. He greeted me at the door and as I walked in there was James Baldwin sipping coffee, warm and intense. One Saturday before we began to read he gave me a piece of paper upon which he had written the following: Intent/Content Project Inflect

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Sabine Hilding

Blue Ford Falcon

One Sunday morning, the Ford Falcon convertible carried us out of this

world and back, all of a blue afternoon.

My mother sent me some photographs of herself in her new place of retirement. One of them shows her from behind, cutting bread at the kitchen counter. Her legs look a little swollen, though the rest of her looks erect and swathed in beige (her favorite color for clothes) her shoulders pinched, one slightly higher than the other. This is what I have to look forward to, a little phlebitis, swathed in clothes, bowed a bit, wrinkled at eighty-four—if I live so long—a long life behind me, moving in another incarnation of myself.

She used to say, “Every seven years things change for me, a place, a life, a set of friends.”

We hardly see eachother now. A continent separates us. We can’t talk for five minutes without fighting. I tell her she has to exercise more. She acknowledges this and tells me about walking that morning to purchase groceries. She also says, “Oh, Terri is gone. He’ll be back in a week and I am really glad it is not so long this time, because I have gotten really involved with his current project and I cannot wait to take it up again when he’s back.”

Terry is her art historian friend, my age more or less. Then she talks about small irritations. “I have sent you a letter,” she says. “In it you will find my thoughts on internet mail accounts or whatever that is called. Terry had one, but they fiddled with it. I really wish you would not mention this point again.

This is always upsetting. We are simply not the kind of people who do this.”

“Right,” I say. “We just do not want one,” she says. I still cannot really fathom their internet fear. Then she proceeds to tell me a story which she told me last year, at least twice. “You know the woman who takes out our garbage?

Well, she has been gone four months now.” There is a pause. “To bigger and better things,” I was thinking, and then I said it, but she overrode me. “Have I

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told you the story about her? Well, before she left maybe a year ago, she was a gypsy and she was always pressing me to give her money. I finally had to say to her, ‘Look, we are artists. We are poor. We are like the wild tribes.’”

I tried to imagine the wild tribes, envying their surroundings—grasses, the sweet smell of unpolluted soil, an earth in harmony. Reality check: hauling water, dying in childbirth, undernourished.

Outside, I notice the leaves have popped out bright yellow green within just a few hours. On my side of the world it is morning. On her side of the world it is evening after dinner, alone on her fifth floor flat overlooking the old city. A small city where she can afford the rent on her retirement income.

There it is urban evening, lights down the canyons of streets, with the traffic noise far below and birds and bats flying to the potted roses on their porch. My memory is overwhelmed with shopping with her there last year and looking at white cotton lace to dress these same porch pillows.

She continues over the phone, “Then she left us alone. She understood we were the same.” Ah yes, I thought, that we are. “We even got to be friends talking.” I wondered what they had talked about. The price of bread, the universality of family, their travels in many countries…? I think about her travels before I was born, a young woman trying to get home across a war torn country, with nothing but her rucksack containing, among other things, a memoir of a free thinking woman poet of the 18th century and a flat iron for clothes—the kind you set on a stove to get hot. As she would often say, “An iron can be a very good thing to hold onto.”

And then, I am catapulted back in time and memory. I am eleven and my mother is aged thirty-five. It is a weekday morning and she is in a fantastic hurry to get to work on time. ***** It’s early morning, weekdays, and the blue Ford is in the driveway warming up. She stands on the enclosed porch amidst pink wallpaper roses (painstakingly put up by herself even though we don’t own the house) drinking a cup of coffee and smoking a few settling puffs of a cigarette, a still life caught in time. Suddenly, she stubs the saucer, leaving behind a butt smeared

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with dark red lipstick, faintly smoking on our Mexican glass-top table. “Call me at work if you need anything,” she pulls a dollar from her purse. Her hand flips my bangs over to straighten them.

I see this woman in my mind’s eye, face freshly made-up—base, eyeliner, carmine lips—hair in a French twist, replete with false hairpiece kept up with a cloud of spray (a daily struggle involving frenzied teasing, sometimes taking three tries) and a last touch-up on her coral nails. She wears a cream chiffon blouse, a pearl gray tight wool skirt (both home-sewn, she is quite a seamstress of Elegance and Simplicity) and three inch stiletto heels. I admire the forthright tock of those shoes. She wears her costume jewelry—clasp on earrings with matching necklace of alternating copper, silver, and gold. My mother is “all gussied up,” as the folks in our Southwestern farm community say, a requirement for her job as the Cosmetic Counter Lady at Malone’s Drugstore.

With a wave and a “See you later,” she is gone to work at the drugstore, there to complete her morning ritual by dousing herself with Mitsouko (her favorite) or Je Reviens (my favorite), and I am left to finish my modest schoolgirl ablutions in the steamy bathroom. My step-father is still asleep.

During the week he has the late shift at the Safeway where he is “Manager of the Fruit and Vegetable Department” while on weekends he goes in all day.

I hoist up my books and walk six blocks to Alameda Junior High. I could get there in three, but I want to avoid the mean gang of boys on the corner. ***** Now, memory melts time like a Dali clock. It’s the weekend and one of our Sundays where my mother and I have his car. There have been other outings, but this is the one I’ll always remember.

First, she gives in to my pleading. “Oh please let’s go for a drive, and go somewhere.” We will leave early and drive south down the length of our valley, through morning haze and a faint tang of crop dusting, past irrigated pepper fields, pima cotton, pecan orchards, alfalfa, and cross the Mexican border to shop. Goods there are colorful at a price we can afford. We will blast out of our dim house, joyous and light with the delicious anticipation of

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shopping in the stalls of the main Mercado—string puppets, huipils, tooled boots, silver butterfly pins! ***** Friday, his night off, they had a fight. Usually they’re quiet fights and I can tune them out, though her sadness is something she can’t entirely hide.

We don’t talk about the fights. Their having been is like they never were.

But this time, I joined in and threw an alarm clock. Neither of us can forget it so quickly.

Even today, the memory sticks like the after-image of a painting or photograph, the three of us in a diorama—my arm in the air, the clock in the air.

We are a “living picture” like the ones I saw on a fourth grade fieldtrip to the Fountain Theater—that tradition still alive in our small southwestern town long after its demise elsewhere. “Blue Boy,” “Washington Crossing the Delaware,” and the complicated finale of “The Last Supper.” After a lot of thumping and bumping and movement of furniture and the flop of the backdrop as it hits the stage, there is a hushed silence. The curtain rises squeakily revealing (gasps of admiration in the audience of children) motionless people posed in dress to match a famous painting—“The Pageant of the Masters.”

In our case it was the more humble naturalism of “The Hurled Alarm Clock.”

The scene of our own frozen Friday night tableau vivant lingers. I am standing in the doorway with my arm in the air, trembling, (not exactly motionless) having just followed through with the clock like a baseball pitch.

They are looking at me, surprised. He, fully dressed, red faced and scowling, having just dropped his hands from shaking her shoulders. She, dressed in a robe, her arms in the air protecting her face, hair disheveled from her head rolling back and forth on her neck.

In the sound vacuum left by their screams is the crazy broken ringing of a wind up alarm clock, which I have thrown just shy of his head. The clock, the fourth vital element in our tableau, crashed first to the wall, then to the floor, followed by a chunk of plaster. As an actor in the scene and now the audience of my memory, the ringing still continues in my head.

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My mother, always so quick on the uptake, steps forward between me and him—“Come, stop that, don’t do that,” pretending she didn’t need my help when she did, “Honestly, darling, you must stop that behavior,” hustling me out, closing the door on them, and protecting me from him going after me. ***** Again fast forward memory melts into Sunday morning after the Friday night fight. My stepfather is at work stocking produce. We have the car, the Ford Falcon.

This morning I have decided we are leaving and never coming back.

Running from house to car, filling the blue convertible, I think about my aunt’s story of the “scram sack.” They always had one ready to grab and run. Her own scram sack had contained, “important papers, a map, and a knife.” Also, “schnapps, razor blades, cigarettes, a gold baptism medal from my grandmother, stuff to trade for food.” My own scram pile is composed of childish necessities. I pack games, books, clothes, and life savers.

I am very excited, already imagining a new place and a happy new life. We will ride and ride and not come back, not that night or the next day, not ever.

I babble incessantly of our new future and repeat that we will leave, that we must leave, as though repetition will help make it true. “We can just leave, take our things and go somewhere else. We can find another place.”

My mother says nothing to curb my enthusiasm and stop my frantic packing. She is strangely abstracted and silent. She has become malleable and childlike. I am making the decisions. I worry about this a little. At the same time I so desperately wish for the relief of getting away. I feel strong and powerful enough to do it. I will make it work.

In my revisionist view, she is also packing her stuff—clothes, make-up, sewing machine, jewelry case—the back seat of the Ford Falcon is overflowing.

“We’ll go over the mountains,” I announce, putting in the Road Atlas of the United States. “We can take a picnic lunch.” Eggs are boiling for sandwiches. We can eat them for days. “Be sure you take your passport,” I remind her, and run back into the house for my yellow stuffed lion, plus the radio, which is ours since my mother bought it with her work money from

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being the cosmetic lady at Dillon’s Drugstore. *** My mother’s job deserves a digression here to explain how things really are for us.

Dillon’s is a tradition, a landmark, and the only drugstore in the whole valley. It does not have a soda fountain. Dillon’s is more serious business.

Besides the main drug counter in back, the layout features aisles of display cases with women’s beauty products. High shelves along two walls are stocked with cosmetics—L’Oreal, Estee Lauder, Max Factor, Hazel Bishop, Dorothy Gray, Coty, Revlon lipsticks like Kissing Pink, Cherries a La Mode, and Tawny Beige, my personal try-out, and there are real hair extensions and huge buns to match all of Miss Clairol’s hair colors. And nail polish, body powder, eye liners, and creams. And “gift items” like compacts, glass brooches, and music boxes.

My mother stages these wares to season. At Easter, she glues sequins onto eggs. At Christmas, she shapes wax into angel faces topped with blue hair set on metallic paper skirts. In summer, she makes paper roses.

Moving back and forth in the free space behind a display counter, my mother fields questions about skin, hair, and intimate relationships. “My skin is so dry Marylou, what can I do?” or “Which of these hair colors do you think would work for me?” or “I need some pizzazz in my life you know?

Oh Marylou, I’m so tired of livin’ alone!” or “It hurts me when my husband and I, well, you know, have you got a cream or a moisturizer for…down there?” And the occasional cowboy, “Ma’am, you got some lineament, for a horse, name a’ Turf?” ***** The all-purpose cosmetic lady my mother has become speaks perfect English with only a slight British accent, learned in school. Few people know or care she emigrated from post-war Europe, that she is the daughter of a missionary doctor, oldest of four, speaks fluent Arabic from seven years in Aswan as a child, later drove her father in a VW Bug to remote farms and

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helped him with childbirths at sixteen, knew how to tell gonococcus from staphylococcus on a microscope slide at fourteen, drafted into the air force at eighteen, capable of disassembling and reassembling a rifle, now wife of my second stepfather. With the first she had five miscarriages.

What people do know is that she seems to have everything altogether and they like her advice on make-up and beauty. My mother handles them as though she were dealing with patients, a thing she has some familial experience with.

She is really overqualified, but, except for farm labor, valley jobs are scarce.

I know she dropped out of medical school to have me. Also that she tried going back, leaving me with my grandmother. “But I was unhappy leaving you behind. I did not do very well,” she explains. As for my father, “He’s dead,” she says with finality. “He died crossing the border.” My aunt affirms this, but first she asks, “What has your mother told you?” I tell her the story.

“Well then,” says my aunt, “That’s it. That’s what happened.”

Some years later, my mother studied at a European Cosmetology Institute. I admire her two volume thesis on scents illustrated with black paper silhouettes of perfume bottles, and the photograph of the graduating class—two rows of well groomed women in white shifts—herself seated front and center, long legs crossed. She was selling jewelry at Ciro’s when she met my second stepfather. Her fluent Arabic helped sell to Middle Eastern oil sheiks, the only ones with buying power in those days. She left that job to marry him, took me—her nine year old daughter—out of boarding school, and immigrated to a small Southwestern border town.

Folks have no idea she has already lived enough life for several people.

They just see the competent, stylish woman with her confident public persona.

She keeps herself to herself. Privately, I know the public confidence is matched by a secret fear. Maybe all women who are schooled to do the beauty thing have it. I cannot recall ever not knowing about the two-faced beauty thing, and how it’s short lived and you’d better make the most of your beauty and sexuality. Rarely, she makes a mean remark about men as a whole. Generally she uses the beauty thing at work.

My mother prides herself on not complaining. She says nasty things about people who “dwell on sentimentality”—“Honestly, all that whining!”

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She has little time for gossip or even much for sharing her get-along-skills with me. “You take life as it comes.”

Nobody can pronounce her name, Majlis, so she becomes “Marie-Louise,” which is converted to “Marylou,” while her husband calls her, “May.” With disgust, she relates how the middle aged druggist told her, “Every store has a sex symbol, Marylou, and you’re our sex symbol here at Dillon’s.”

People are always asking her, “Who does your hair?” “Who does your clothes?” when she ‘does’ them herself.

My mother’s alternate at the Cosmetic Counter is the owner’s daughter.

Jackie Dillon makes Marylou’s life difficult by being stupid. She also wears cakey make-up to cover a bad complexion. Jackie is one of the unfortunates of the world, says my mother, who “wants to, but can’t.” This phrase covers a whole bunch of sins.

When I visit Marylou at work, Jackie’s expression turns even sourer seeing an employee’s daughter hanging out at the store. On school holidays, I sit on a stool behind the counter and help make decorations for window dressing. I duck down low when Jackie comes by.

The cosmetic selection dramatically improves after my mother is put in charge of “Ordering.” Dillon’s knows they couldn’t get anybody like her again in a million years, especially at the salary they are willing to pay, and so my mother works there for seven years—‘good lil’ ole’ Marylou.’ ***** Parallel to my mother’s work life, my main duty after school is to avoid my stepfather. I do after school field sports and excel in the standing broad jump. I do homework in the public library or wile away time in the mulberry trees along the irrigation ditches separating the cotton fields back of our subdivision.

Lately, I have been studying drawings of the internal combustion engine.

My perch overlooks our neighbors’ driveway. Manny, the Gamboas’s son, likes to work on cars without his shirt. I admire Manny while trying to memorize car parts. If I knew about cars, I could so impress him. But the text describing cylinders is simply another language. If boys can do it, why can’t I? What’s

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so mysterious about the internal combustion engine? My stepfather would never show me anything about cars (he wants little ladies); and anyway, his very presence next to me bending over an engine would make me cringe. ***** This is the backdrop to the living picture of the thrown clock and our lives then. ***** In the yard that Sunday morning, my mother stands in the sun staring into space. “What a wonderful day.” She sighs. Her unmoving figure faces the purple mountains visible from our house. “How beautiful the mountains are this morning,” her murmuring voice.

May has already been up early making breakfast for my stepfather, off to work the weekend shift. Morning dishes dry on the rack. The living room is straightened up and some clothes to be altered are draped on the couch.

I skip back and forth in the already mentioned frantic activity, occasionally making the point once more about how, “We should just leave!”

Friday night’s drama still hangs in the air. Nothing specific is said. I sense she is ashamed of my behavior. She, too, wants me to be a little lady and my aggression worries her. I am veering from the path of lady-ness. She worries how I shall fare in my future. All of us were shocked when I threw the alarm clock.

I want to make my mother happy—she is all I have and I know she tries hard—but I can’t fit in with my stepfather whom I have loathed for a long time. ***** Maybe it started that time in fourth grade when he carried me around on his shoulders. I was wearing shorts and felt his bristly cheek between my legs.

I squirmed to be put down, yet I felt guilty and embarrassed. Real girls are supposed to like that kind of thing. Why else would he do it and she not stop him? You saw guys do it and the girls squeal with pleasure. Then he began criticizing my laziness at household chores. Then he criticized me whenever he noticed me. Suddenly everything that meant anything to me was greatly

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endangered if he found out about it. I began by trying to be out of his focus.

Not speaking at the table when we ate together and not looking in his eyes had become as simple as breathing. Avoiding him in halls, in rooms, in the yard, even in the car by sitting in the back was easy. Twice he intruded only to make me hate him more. One time, he saw me playing Indians outside, alone, target shooting with my cousin’s bow and arrows, bare chested, flat, barely sixty pounds. He shoved me in the house, bellowing, “Get a goddamn shirt on!” Another time, after one of their fights, I ran away. He found me buying a movie ticket at the Plaza. He yanked me out of line and dragged me home, gripping my wrist so hard I knew he would break it if I struggled.

After that, I was even more scrupulous to keep a low profile. I tried to be invisible.

My mother stayed with him in the new country. He was younger than May. He had been an army photographer at the desert missile range near our town, and he got work at the Safeway after he left the Service. He helped us come over by marrying her. He had taken me on too.

Later, I learned he had fathered a child by a married woman in town while he was married to my mother—my aunt got a sly kick out of revealing this.

“That woman just fit the child into her family as though nothing happened,” she said.

I can still hear how he yelled at the cat and threw the kittens around, “Get her outta here!” the slam of his doors, the way he revved the engine when May was late if he was driving her anywhere.

Once my mother said, “I got so sick, you do not remember, but he was very good to me when I had the bad heart and that pericarditis.”

She also said, “It is important in life to have someone to love. It is more important than to be loved.” Maybe she felt herself unlovable deep down.

But she had the better job. She was about to go back to school.

He tried to buy my friendship with a cedar box on my eleventh birthday.

It gathered dust under my bed. Every now and then, when I cleaned my room, I came across that damned love box. I would open it, drawn to the good smell, and glance in the mirror pasted inside the lid—to reflect the dear girl’s face as she peruses her own inviting objects—and shudder because it 28

felt as though the space inside really was my space and he was trying to open my space and get in. It served as a reminder, a mnemonic device, “Don’t let your guard down!” I’d slam the lid, turn the small brass key, and shove the box back under the bed, empty as a vacuum.

In my twenties, I once asked my mother about that time. She made light of the situation and said it had been my duty to fit in better. “Well, nothing really happened to you,” she said. “Did it?” ***** My mother often quoted a piece of advice, allegedly from her favorite great aunt. “Always try to be the most beautiful. And if you can’t be the most beautiful, then try to be the smartest. And if you can’t manage the first two, then at least try to be the cleanest!” She meant this in relation to other women, the other women out there. She didn’t like women in groups. “Women are better alone,” she said. “In the company of other women, they compete for men.” She had gone to an exclusive girl’s school early on I learned later. She probably had some experiences.

And she often said that beauty was universally achievable, wrought with persistence, attention to detail, and the art of good grooming.

Clearly I wasn’t attentive. My shape was not curvaceous. “Honestly, that figure, we really should get you a waist cincher!” It sounded like an instrument of medieval torture, so I sucked up my non-existent paunch. My shoulder blades stuck out so much they could be hooked over the back of my school desk. “Stand up straight; you look more intelligent that way!” My hair hung limp. I couldn’t manage hair curlers by myself. We had fights in which I begged her to roll up my hair and she admonished me for my inability to learn this simple task.

She wanted to raise “a daughter from a good home.” She frequently checked my physical appearance by this standard and often found me wanting.

Among her aphorisms for fortification were, “Always tell the truth because lying makes you weak,” and “It’s a waste of energy to worry about what people think of you, because people are much more worried about what you think of them,” and, “If you’re ever afraid of something, go up and touch it!”

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Later, in high school, she painstakingly sewed for me late into the night.

I’m ashamed to say how reluctantly I wore the ‘nice clothes’—a beige wool suit, an Oleg Cassini knock off pattern with three cloth covered buttons. (Mr. Coker, my drama teacher, complimented me.) A green tube dress, my choice of color and pattern, in which I looked like a string bean. Three pleated wool skirts, over the knee, ordered from Woolworths, her choice, because my taste couldn’t be trusted and we couldn’t afford mistakes.

From those years, I recall only two visitors: Harue, a young Japanese neighbor, who appeared out of nowhere one evening with blood on her face.

My mother drove her to the bus station to help her escape her battering G. I. husband. Why Harue ran to our house may be explained by my mother’s deep empathy, which others could feel without too much talk. She liked to quote her father’s favorite saying, the old surgeon and missionary, “Never let your left hand know what the right hand is doing.”

The other visitor was Petra Guzman, a woman who worked as a maid; though she came from a family so ancient it predated Coronado. She brought us a basket of Christmas tamales with a charming old world graciousness we absorbed like thirsty plants absorb water.

Mrs. Guzman once invited us to a small family gathering for her grandson.

After detailed preparations involving apparel and hair, my mother decided we needed to contribute to the festivities with a musical presentation. She chose a folksong, (set to music by Haydn) a canon for two voices, the “NachtigallenKanon.” The idea for this suddenly evolved half an hour before the party.

She drilled me with an authoritarianism that was rare for her, “Not that way!” she snapped, “This way!” On the way over in the car, she made me sing the minor key harmony again and again.

Our a capella presentation (sometime after the piñata) yielded polite smiles, and a scattering of aplauso among the Spanish speaking guests. I wanted to sink into the floor. I felt we were silly. But my mother held her head high and bowed graciously. Nobody understood what we had sung.

In translation the words were, “All is silent, nightingales, draw with sweet melodies, tears in the eye, heaviness in the heart.”

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***** The convertible is full, its top neatly buttoned under a plastic tarp. The backseat load is battened down with a blanket. Sunday morning’s wild staging is now finished. We’re really going to leave.

My mother is dreamy and agreeable. “It’s your decision, darling,” she says when I ask where we will go. “We’ll go over the mountains!” I declare, enjoying the power of making decisions. I feel more like the kind of girl I really am, not the pale shadow who avoids my stepfather. New beginnings are possible on the other side of mountains.

Still, my mother seems to have phased out. She is remembering something or reliving something or just relaxing, standing in the morning sun with closed eyes.

I wait for her, leaning against the convertible, and imagine my ideal future. My new bedroom in our new place will be all white gauzy curtains with a lacy tester bed and a fancy dresser. My fantasy is greatly influenced by a drawing then common on the back of boxes of Kotex pads. The scene made an indelible impression. There is a bedroom and a girl in the picture— the newly menstruating teen. She is pictured in profile—pointed bra under a full slip, perfect pony tail, hourglass waist. She is pictured with an all white backdrop of nice girl accoutrements—prom gown strewn on a sumptuous canopy bed, baby dolls, frilly bed-lamp, dressing table. In the Kotex bedroom, no color like shaming red mars the virgin white of good girls. I want to be like the girl in the picture—enviably in-crowd with appropriate clothes. This is the “daughter from a good home” that my mother wants—wasp waisted, erect, good hair, comfortably feminine, fearless. I imagined my new room and the feeling of being that girl.

By contrast, my own bedroom had a short bookshelf, baskets holding socks and assorted clothes, and a single bed without head or footboard covered with a serape. There is a chess set, some rocks I collected, and a Miro poster.

Some months before, I had another decor inspiration. I put all the stuff in my room in brown cardboard boxes—he brought them home from work. Then I push-pinned yards of un-dyed burlap onto the walls for a minimalist effect.

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Pretty soon the burlap frayed and started to come down, plus it stank. For a few weeks, I lived in this brown disturbing mess (exacerbated by rummaging in the boxes to find things) stuck in indecision and unable to help myself. I was grateful when my mother came in one weekend and quietly helped me clean up my room. ***** The blue Ford Falcon fires up, there is the sound of tires scrunching gravel, a bump out of our driveway, and then the tires grip the paved road. We’re off.

My mother wears sun glasses. Her perfectly manicured hands rest on the steering wheel. Her teased French twist is wrapped in a sturdy scarf. I, too, am wrapped in a scarf, but no sunglasses, and I’m the kind of girl who bites her nails. The picnic basket crowds my feet, along with the Road Atlas.

The weather has not yet turned hot, there’s been some rain, and the desert is in bloom.

As the convertible speeds up, the roaring wind makes us communicate by shouting exclamations. “Look at the wild flowers!” exultant meadows of them, interspersed by seedy trailer parks among the creosote brush. We are zooming on the highway through the outskirts of town. “We can drive all day!” I am in high spirits. “We’re the bears going over the mountains!” She laughs and flips the radio to some lively música del norteno, “It is a lovely day!” I am grinning, wiping away the wind tears caused when I stick my face over the side to take in a lungful of sweet air. Our scarves flap but stay firmly knotted. My right hand shapes waves.

In under an hour, we reach the pass in the mountains, the same ones visible from our front yard back home.

We stop to explore a 19th century ghost town nestled in the pass near the old Santa Rosa Mine. The miners’ houses are now desiccating lumber piles, but the schoolhouse of mountain granite still stands, glass intact, replete with a bell tower.

After we exit the overloaded convertible, we play tag. I am surprised that my mother can still catch me.

While eating our picnic on the old schoolhouse playground, we amuse

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ourselves with imagining the new home.

I do all the planning. We will buy the schoolhouse and paint it all white inside. The house has glorious views, high ceilings, and a solid plank floor.

The large room will be partitioned for a kitchen and a living space. The stone walls will keep us cool in summer. A fireplace will keep us warm in winter.

We will decorate with Mexican crafts, a large wooden table and chairs carved with flowers, Talavera tiles, and Indian rugs, like at my aunt’s house. We will live an aesthetic life and read. She will have time to sew whatever she wants, and there will be blue velvet, crepe de Chine, raw silk, and ‘hound’s tooth’ wool. We will have all the books and records that we like and a piano, and beeswax candles, and she will have time to cook specialty dishes like poulet a l’orange (I commonly heat an after-school hot dog for myself) and a lovely garden with honey suckle. Even the desert flowers she has grown to love like the yellow prickly pear blossoms, which she picks with an old pair of his photography developing tongs and floats in a glass bowl. There will be a wrought iron bench on the patio, an apple tree, an apricot tree, squash vines, climbing roses, a dog, a horse, riding lessons, piano lessons, ballet lessons, and a trip to Paris.

We exult in the vision of colors and spaces to be shaped into the very exact space on earth for optimal happiness. We seem to be at this for hours.

The sky goes on forever, a few sporadic sheep clouds chase overhead, a roadrunner runs past, a distant airplane drones far away.

Then, despite the sun, there’s a sudden chill. My mother gets up, shakes the crumbs from the blanket, takes up the picnic basket, and heads in the direction of the car.

“Well,” she says, “we’d better be getting back home now. It’s already Sunday, and I still have a lot of work to do.”

I don’t remember the drive home or how the car got unpacked. I understood the fragile niche we had, but I chafed against knuckling under, and doing what you have to do. The pain of abandoning my fantasy of getting away to a new life still moves me in memory to this day.

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***** It wasn’t until two years later—two years in which I practically lived at the Thomas Branigan Memorial Library—when he came home early while my mother was still out, and he finally cornered me in the kitchen and tried to kiss me, slobbering on my neck. I pushed him away as hard as I could. It wasn’t the fear he saw in me either that stopped him, it was my cold loathing.

When I told her about it, she finally left him. I was glad, but guilty. Her life would have been easier without having to drag me around. A few times even after we moved into the campus barracks called “Student Family Housing” (we camouflaged the walls by hanging bedspreads) he came around to sleep with her.

But by then, she had quit Dillon’s and was finishing undergraduate school.

By then, she was on her way; three jobs at once—selling books on weekends, college bookstore cash register, (that year I got An Illustrated History of France by Andre Maurois for my birthday) and helping her younger brother (he had also emigrated) in his watch repair business—plus going to college full-time. She was on her way to getting a Woodrow Wilson scholarship, (in those days you still got your choice of graduate school for free with it) earning her Ph.D., and becoming a professor later in life.

As for me, I had a work-study job as a dishwasher in the high school cafeteria, then fryer at a doughnut den, and inventory at the same college bookstore (I gave her Toulouse-Lautrec: His Complete Lithographs and Drypoints by Jean Adhemar, from the sale table)—plus the usual small town girl experiences like cutting Latin class to smoke behind the gym, and football games where the girls cheered on the boys, and making out in the desert.

Though not things like Cotillion, so integral to the cultured sons and daughters from good homes in our town. We made fun of that crowd as provincial and stuck up. She did buy me a silver flute—two years of monthly payments at Melody Music—so I could join the marching band. I still have it.

By the time she entered the private university in a new city, I’d graduated from high school. I joined her there to go to the state college, and took out loans whose re-payment took me half my life. My grades were not that great.

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I got in trouble. I never had much of a waist. I still bite my nails.

A few years ago, I chanced on a description of myself in a letter she had written to someone else. “Even though I raised her alone, both of us got advanced college degrees,” she stated proudly. ***** When I was twenty-seven, getting over a divorce, I flew home to mom for some comfort, the way you do after a shock. She was then teaching college in another country. She finally told me about my father. “We were in medical school. We had been together about a year, renting separate rooms in the same house. He took me to visit his family. I heard his mother in the next room. ‘Why did you bring home such an ugly one?’ He made up a story about another man. He wouldn’t acknowledge you were his,” she said. “Then he was dead to me.”

Later, I got the court to order a mouth swab that vindicated her. But in those days, the process had been more complicated. She had been proud and deeply hurt. It is too easy to say my mother’s life was shaped by those words, and that she worked so hard at beauty to prove my father’s mother wrong. I wonder what our lives would have been like without the shaming secret. Or what it would have been to have another parent, not merely us and those stepfathers.

For decades after we moved apart, she continued to make me outfits (tailored skirts and knitted sweaters) well into my thirties. For many more years, scented birthday packages arrived containing beige blouses I could not stand to wear, but also charming things like delicate necklaces or a wild silk scarf or an embroidered table cloth of her own cheerful design and handiwork—Aesop’s Fables, replete with fox, grapes, rabbit, turtle, and the moral proverbs stitched in red. ***** When my uncle, my mother’s youngest brother, died decades later, I went back to where I grew up for the cremation. She did not attend. She was already far away, retired with pension, living with an art historian, helping

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him translate Arabic texts, learning the language of yet another country on the opposite side of the world, living one of those new seven years, which, when they roll around, mark the cycles of her life.

Afterwards, I was walking around town. I didn’t recognize the valley under the explosion of real estate and people. But in a few places, vaguely familiar as old haunts, the scene suddenly morphed back to the ‘living picture’ of my childhood, with the same backdrop, the same sleepy town I remembered.

On the corner of Alameda and Main Street, an older woman came up to me, Hispanic, well dressed and preserved, hair swept into an elegant bun, and trailing a cloud of Madame Rochas. “Ai bendito! I know you!” she said.

“La hija! Aren’t you the daughter of the cosmetic lady at the old Dillon’s Drugstore? How is your mother!?”

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Ruy Belo

Three Poems translated by Alexis Levitin

Humphrey Bogart He had that face and then it was gone but it was never as visible as now His gaze is water pure water invading us it gives a name even to grief He became ours as we lost him. One doesn’t lose a gaze ain’t that the truth brother humphrey bogart?

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On the Beach Race of mariners what else can we call you ladies who with so much dignity at the moment when the heat is most oppressive crowned with grace and majesty stride through the water to piss into the sea?

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Explanatory Literature A sunset in espinho isn’t sunset not even sunset is exactly sunset It’s that we’ll never die it’s going along hand in hand with someone or with just ourselves years before it’s reading leibnitz living with the medicis eleven kilometers south of Florence on left-overs of unrest visible on street-car tickets Since when has the sun been going down in espinho?

Did they see that sun the liberals at sea or antero beside the hermitage?

The sun that sets here where does it rise? To whom do we pass on this sun? Who gets up where we lie down?

Sunset in espinho is our having been happy is feeling as our own our left arm Or rather: is having nothing else and no one else women outlined against window panes olive trees in the rain men at work things all things left to themselves No longer fragments of voices the solitude of window panes no longer men things that think things in solitude no longer that sunset but only sunset

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James McKee

“Still Possessed of Those Effects” Memory, that staid impresario, prosceniums your past; repertoried stagings, a familiar cast.

On quaintness of sets and costumes you smile from your box, then wince suddenly, like a Claudius when The Mousetrap locks.

Spotlit: the very worst thing you’ve ever done— a backstory you haven’t told anyone— you never got caught— nobody saw— no one even talks about it anymore— (Setting aside that character who may yet, of course, uncage a long-starved revenge on your bleating remorse.)

So here you sit, unpunished to this very day,

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hardly the sticky end scripted for the villain you play.

Now what would be tragic, is dreading some fifth-act brawl, as if justice were poetic after the curtains fall.

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Jeanne Emmons

Underdeveloped to my mother

You said I was developing, so you took me to buy my first bra, confessing you had always felt flat-chested, underdeveloped.

They called the department “Foundations� and it sat in the middle of the store, so everyone could see a young girl fingering the lace.

How I longed to slip behind the slips, to disappear beneath the girdles and hose.

In the dressing room, you sat on the bench while the kindly clerk measured, delicate.

With her tape around my bare chest, I cringed, too mortified even to meet your eyes.

Now you are mortified, measured and fitted, entrenched in the foundations. Today I strain to find you where you live, to fix your features.

The old polaroids developed on their own, humming out of that squat box, the image a ghost at first. And then you waved your hand and the picture deepened in color, clarity.

Come to life! Your face lightens, recedes, underdeveloped, You fade, blanch and blur.

With a buzz and whir, you withdr1aw again into the narrow slot of the camera obscura.

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Henry Goldkamp

Funeral Season 1.

Grownups smoke on the doublewide porch, teasing the kids before the wake.

Mountain dews speckle the property, the teeth of its people. John members when Cuz thought a urinal cake was soap, turning its pink wetness over his fat little hands.

Laughter carries far in the dry air, its throbbing cartilage. Termites beat a heart in the chasm of an oak arm. Itching a crotch, tugging at denim: do not vote young man do not. It’s worth noting nothing.

Grace’s mama coughs. If I find out you know French I’mma shoot you in the head myself.

I ain’t au courant! Missouri talks how scrap metal is good money. All money good money come to think—food on the table, oil splats on cuts of steak discounts. Don’t even need a knife. Each second is an apocalypse. Ashtray for ashes. Dusk to dust.

Say the world and I’ll be heeled. Hey Grace

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you sure don’t talk much.

2 The backhoe wails how hard the dirt freezes. Its exhausted fumes dab a row of persimmons grey.

Runny carpools dribble in a fresh poured parking lot. Daddy admires a nice view, what this is. Limousines squeal out Mama’s eyes like a Dallas Waffle House. Grace sniffs fresh asphalt—a hunting knife up her nose scraping boogers. Death is an adventure.

It’s a brave thing to smile at a stranger.

Ant’s dentures escape her lips as if sugar cubes, her face a mare’s smeared with plenty blush. Its public lung stunk like tackle, buried with her barbie zippo and curling crosswords.

They couldn’t find her apron with ribbons threadbare. She was best at cooking meals for 20 people under 8 dollars. Green bean casserole with pickled tips, usually. A steal.

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A sorrow. There’s better places than this paunch of country-life. Heaven is above the poverty line. The bluffs stack themselves slackjawed, stomping the horizon.

The yellowing grass above her grave looks expensive and thick and wormless.

Cuz ruffles Grace’s bleach hair, excited for the bonfire later. A capful of wind tips through, catches the whole family off guard. The grass shivers, thick with thieves.

3 Funny how tomorrow was a carnival behind the concession stand. Show me your show-me state. They call him Tallboy, Cuz’s buddy. He cute, from Osage Beach.

Grace shares him with a virginia slim; Tallboy picks burrs out his jncos.

Those two are a pair of canaries, a heap of old weedwacked grass. The sizzler gets at Cuz again and he’s off to the john.

Cuz prefers licker for its quickness.

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Whisky is a breath. Whisky is a duh.

Grace and Tallboy are alone, inhaling laffy taffy, ripping punchlines in half.

He washes down soggy chicken fingers with a drag. They make out ok. The circus has left them for the floodplain, its shoalwater.

The boys will be boys, the future tense.

Like a wax paper cup could contain them.

4 Can one boyfriend make winter bright? Tallboy puts out his cherry with a sugary dribble of spit, machetes a turtle into strange pieces. Grace fantasizes out in the chill, pictures it : her grandshits racketing around the backyard as noise and blood for summer; her sipping ice water with an unlonely slice of lemon.

Memories don yellow skirts, snaggleteeth skipping drunkenly for California lemon groves.

But weather is honesty and this winter is.

It’s the future that fleets: Cigarettes whisper through a bottom tooth. Postcards hit mailbins

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and pellets break the skin. The Missouri River brews a hogwash. But angels ain’t boyfriends.

Cuz punches 58008. Tallboy grins, a stringbean cherub who can bottleneck, skateboard, nosegrind boxes of coke on the front porch. The town is pregnant with complications. Passiveaggressive is a big word.

The limousine does donuts in her brain. Do we have to go home? This is the best winter in the world.

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Florangel Reyes

A Reloaded Remix on a Junot Diaz Theme: How to Date a Brown Guy, Black Guy, White Guy or an Asian *

If you’re a good little immigrant daughter who still lives at home though

you’re damn near thirty and you’d rather let your family think you’re a weirdo misanthrope than introduce anyone to them, wait until your sister, her two brats and your mother have left the apartment. You’ve already told your sister you have un monton de cosas to do and you can’t watch her kids. She didn’t believe you, but she found another victim and told you, fine, you lying loser.

Don’t feel too guilty. Your sister has spent the last decade juggling school and motherhood and is just trying to catch up on her partying. Your mother conveniently works six nights a week and she would never ever, not even during a natural disaster, or a terrorist attack, miss a day of work.

If your parents were once crazy enough to blow their life savings on one party, then hide that picture of yourself at your quinceanera, where you’re sporting the crunchy curls and shiny-gallons-of-gel-cowlick-bangs plastered across your forehead. If the guy is as ghetto fabulous as you, any drawer will do, but if he can’t really relate to your world, hide it in your mother’s tacky vanity dresser. Yes, the dresser whose mirror is completely covered with funeral memorabilia, the dresser which proves that your mother is resembling your grandmother more every day. I promise you, no guy will want to go near it.

Before showering, wrap your hair in a tight doobie, cover it with an old clean shirt, a plastic bag and a shower cap. When the guy arrives, you will purposely take out the booby pins in front of him. He will say the doobie * One of the stories in Junot Diaz’s Drown, is “How to Date a Brown Girl, Black Girl, White Girl or a Halfie.” Years later, Nelly Rosario wrote, “How to Date a Thug, Art Boy, Nerd Boy or a Papichulo: a Remix of a Junot Diaz Theme.” Therefore, this story is A Completely Reloaded Remix.

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brings out your good bone structure. Don’t insist that it’s not really a hair-do.

Instead, sit up straight and play the part of an ethnic goddess. If you’re one of the black and brown women who have gone “all naturale” and have declared “F straight hair and the salon,” then you’ve been a goddess all along, baby.

If you and your date are walking somewhere close by, don’t point out the alleyways where you made out with boys during middle school. And, pray you don’t run into those exes who still live on your block. The worst is Street. Yes, that’s his nickname, which he’s trying to live up to. That 6’3, slim, coconut-husk-color-skin, pretty bastard should be strutting down a catwalk.

Instead, he will suddenly emerge from a bodega and say, Yohanny, I know that’s not your bitchass boyfriend. You’ll ignore him.

Hope you at least run into the lesser of two evils, Amaury. He’s the nice nerd you dated that one week you almost dodged your need-to-date-intenseguys daddy issues. When Amaury sees you he will say, “Your body is your temple, mi hermana.” He means well, but something about his phrase will bother you. The old folks say he has some loose screws, but that’s only because he’s one of the few Latinos they’ve seen with dreads –Toño Rosario* was probably the first. Your dark-skinned grandma still hasn’t gotten over Toño’s hairstyle and clothing choices. Every time she sees him on TV she screams at the screen. “Look at that moreno with long blond hair and a skirt!” In reality, grandma is just jealous that Toño rocks those bleached dreads and kilt so well.

A black guy may tell you not to worry about the day he meets your mother. He’s very aware of every ethnic mother’s deep-rooted fear of having grandchildren even darker than you. Plus, if he’s a keeper and hangs around long enough, he’ll make your mother remember why she fell for a man as dark as your father.

You have female friends who were dumped—one by a Korean guy, another by an Indian—because both guys were under family pressures of Montagues vs. Capulets proportions. You’re not a bigot, so you won’t assume all Asians are alike and still go on that date with the Filipino. Maybe you can break *

Toño Rosario is a Grammy nominated Dominican musician. Think of him as the Michael Jackson of merengue, with the less talented siblings and all.

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the ice by discussing why he has a Latin sounding name or you can make a fool of yourself by naming all the Asian food you like. If things move along, don’t be surprised if you have to work hard to convince his Asian mother that you’re not a slut.

The Portuguese guy from Jersey or the half Italian/half Irish guy from Bensonhurst may start calling you “Babe” by the end of the first date. If he or any other guy says that he loves dating “immigrant girls” because “you’re so family-oriented and traditional,” restrain yourself from burning your bra and slinging in his face. He means this as a compliment. He has no idea those words trigger thoughts of your aunts slaving over no good men.

If you’re not a good little immigrant daughter and you’re still in your rebellious stage and are looking to piss off some relatives, bringing home some tatted-up and pierced white guy probably won’t do the trick. A white guy would have to be a complete sociopath to even ruffle the feathers of those ethnic family members we should call the Self-Loathing Posse.

When the guy (or girl, that deserves its own story)—of any ethnicity but your own—is ready to lose his mind over the beauty of your otherness, you should randomly start telling him “fun facts” such as the reality that the Dominican Republic celebrates its independence from Haiti, not Spain, or any such thing that will inform him of your wokeness. The person you end up with needs to grasp that you won’t settle for being an exotic trinket on anyone’s mantelpiece.

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Paul Martin Clark

Jealous I am jealous of the rain that falls baptizing the sugar cane fields closer than my hands in years I am jealous of the rain I am jealous of the wind that ripples through sucre of Cane and Haiti closer than the shadow veiling the ship on river I am jealous of the wind One mile high on Saint Vrain minus rain I am jealous of rain that rolls from Borgne to Pontchartrain to Maurepas I am jealous of the nights That smell like bayou ocean Magnolia flowers in Crescent uptown South Claiborne and Carrollton Ave I am jealous of the nights I am jealous of the full red moon over Laura on River Road linking James, John, and Wallace

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in the transport of a free ferry no longer traversed by a lone archer Could we have the best all this world gives there would not be need to forgive brides of Christ who push us toward 333 exploding into a million pieces of a new constellation poised over a fork in the road I am jealous of the way My father always said ‘Little by little a little becomes a lot’ nurturing 40 high school students on Melpomene and Thalia who wrote 10-page essays in 6 classes every day while his eyesight failed over 44 years of English Lit This Tanzanian Proverb echoes rainfall spewed from Lower Nine to Lake Victoria as I sink in memory of brown sand colored at Lincoln Beach on Hayne All I do is cry behind this smile that wells post Hurricane Katrina which took away my Paris Ave and the Lowerline of Grand Mamman

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Thank the breathless stars the quadrangle is left not even the raging canal could devour its planting.

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Simon Perchik

Two Poems * You sleep on one side though it’s the bed reaching out for a pillow where a heart should be –what you hear is darkness being made the way everything in this room is leaving as corners thrown to their death –no, there’s no smoke, just the steady night after night returning alone as if it once was a fire had a name that was lost –its ashes each evening calling to her from the half that’s hers.

* And though this cup is shabby you still tinker with the rim —some daylight is needed: polish could restore the slow turn that’s sacred, fill it the way dirt softens the Earth with your fingertips

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–needs the smell from an embrace that once was wood, lets you grieve by leaning over as if this bottom stopped circling for broken teeth for the handle that’s missing

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Dar Kamenetz

The Blues I. What is so blue that to understand it you must first give up everything you know or think you know, or should know or someone once told you but you forgot, although you promised not to and now— it’s still out there the color of everything all at once even this darkness?

II. The surface of the water pulls inward and away to make the sky above an absence it shrinks from.

A woman pulls nylons up her leg to make a skin so tight, even light flies back to tell the sky of nothing but its own blue.

III. And when there are no more croaking frogs dying, no more bats dripping to the ground, no more leaves of grass teeming in autumn

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fragrant with a solace no one remembers how to conjure—Will the earth still spin upon a tilted axis, still float in a vast expanse of ever-blue?

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Trevor Tingle

Overture He has two ears with which to hear.

One is a copper humming bird following the rot-pollen scent of lies to his own swollen tongue: a flower from which he feeds.

His other ear is a bear pressed to the earth, ready to lead his head from a cave of doubt at the first sign of spring.

He checks his mirror, judges his reserves, polishes the tarnish from one, tips his hat to shelter the other.

He is ready to meet you.

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Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

Imperatives 2017 The mask wears a face— deceptive, canonical, beatific, abysmal— a satin doll face Frankenstein stitched and starched.

Obviously, the mask needs no music—suffered to be played, no 45 record of demise.

Obviously, the face— anthropocene, branded curated, daemonic— maps territory so familiar it fails to ground governance.

July 20, 2017

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R. Sebastian Bennett

Fission

When I move the brushes in circles, it sounds like rain.

The metal strands swish and patter on top of the snare drum. It’s a cloudburst on a tin roof, a staccato shower of raindrops in perfect rhythm with the piano. Pee Wee, the piano player, sits on the edge of the bench as he improvises. He holds out his elbows and raises his palms above the keys as if he is about to capture them in his bony white fingers. When the melody reaches a crescendo, I hit the high-hats or punch the bass. I’m the drum man.

During a break, the waitress Shirley comes over to me and I try to act nonchalant. “Hey Drum Man, have a drink,” says Shirley. She smiles. Her skin is deeply tanned. There are freckles on her chest, which you can see because the top three buttons of her dress aren’t fastened. “Come on, a big guy like you needs a drink.” She rubs my forearm. Her hands are soft.

“Drum Man doesn’t drink,” says Fritz. His lips are always moist, even when he isn’t holding his trumpet. “Drum Man doesn’t drink—he just eats...”

Fritz laughs. His laugh is too high, really. It’s almost a bleat. He pulls up his pants which are already hiked above his navel, but he tugs them up even more so the fabric is tight against his crotch. Then he thrusts his pelvis forward.

“Shirley babe, get me a gin-and-tonic, huh?” he says.

Shirley is rubbing my back now and automatically I suck in my stomach.

“Sure you don’t want anything?” she asks. I can smell her perfume. She smells sweet, like a fruit-and-coconut scented candle. In the dim light of the club, her eyes shine.

Above me dangles a shellacked swollen puffer fish almost two feet long.

Its skin is ridged with spines. Its teeth are fanged. On the wall across the room hang two taxidermy swordfish posed face to face so their spears touch.

A saltwater tank containing a small octopus and a rock sits near the window.

When the club is crowded, the octopus gets nervous and squirts out its ink.

But this late, the place is almost empty. It’s 2:30 a.m. already. We played

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six sets. My eyes burn from smoke in the bar, but I’m not tired. I’m never tired after playing. I keep the energy going. I’m the drum man.

Fritz walks over with a drink in his left hand. His right hand is tucked in his back pocket. “You played good tonight, man. Solid…” he says. “Maybe we’ll keep you on.” He pulls the hand out of his back pocket and pokes me in the stomach. I’m embarrassed by the way his fingers slip into the soft flesh of my middle. The heat rises in my cheeks. But I don’t tell Fritz that he’s an asshole. It’s his gig, and he splits the cash four ways straight each week.

The drum set isn’t mine. I don’t have my own set, just some sticks and a practice block at home. But I have good sticks from Italy. Dolce Ducto brand, made of pear wood. The other musicians are putting away their instruments—Pee Wee unplugs his cords, zips up his electric keyboard; Fritz pulls off his mouthpiece and blows into it backward so the saliva drips out the metal rim and onto the floor. I just slide my drum sticks into my pocket.

The bar door opens and I can see Pacific Coast Highway, almost empty except for a few cars at the Stop-N-Go market and a motorcycle outside Ray’s Handguns. The door stays ajar. I wonder if it’s being held open by the wind. Then, in walks Juice.

I’ve never talked to him. He doesn’t seem to like jazz. Shirley never introduced me, but I know Juice is her boyfriend, all six-foot-five of him.

He’s blond, broad-shouldered, with a page-boy haircut in the standard surf fashion. I’ve seen him three times and he is always wearing the same black T-shirt with a “Mr. Zog’s Sex Wax” emblem. I wonder if the shirt is part of a set, or just washed frequently.

Juice sits down at a table near the door and takes a can of Heineken beer out of his pocket. Shirley doesn’t say hello to Juice. His gaze follows her around the bar as she wipes down the tables. From a small refrigerator near the cash register, Shirley brings out some raw hamburger meat, squeezes it into a slot on top of the octopus tank, and watches as the creature scuttles out from behind its rock, tucks the meat in two tentacled legs, and opens its beak.

Then Shirley brings out the vacuum. It is a commercial unit the size of a lawn tractor. She turns on the machine and tugs it over to the area where Juice sits. Still, she hasn’t said hello to him. The machine roars to life and 61

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Shirley works at the floor, pushing the head of the vacuum closer and closer to Juice until it bumps into his shoes and he is forced to raise his feet while she vacuums under his table. Then, with no further attention to other areas of the rug, Shirley drags the vacuum cleaner back into the closet and walks directly over to me. “Hey, Drum Man,” she says. Her eyes widen and sparkle.

“Juice and I are goin’ to the beach. You wanna come?”

Juice makes a snorting noise. But it’s Fritz who speaks. “Aw, Drum Man doesn’t like the beach. When he was little, the kids called him Whale-rus.

That’s how he got into music, right?”

I stare at Fritz’ small face. His skin is stretched tight so his eyes protrude like a rodent, a ferret or a vole. But Shirley is tickling my ear. She pulls on my earlobe playfully. She winks and her eyes sparkle even more. Suddenly— although I do hate the beach, and I know that Shirley is just using me to get back at her boyfriend, and Juice looks about as happy to have me along as to have a urethrectomy—in spite of all this, I find myself nodding. “Okay, Shirl,” I say. And with my left hand, behind the wall partition so Juice can’t see, I touch the small of her warm, curved back.

Juice drives an orange jeep with enormous tires. Stenciled on the doors in dripping black paint are the words “Ocean Assault.” The back seat of the jeep has been removed to accommodate an array of surfboards, six or seven nested one atop the other. Juice climbs behind the wheel and turns the ignition. Shirley jumps in, grabs my hand, and motions me up. There is only one seat for us. I sit as far to the edge as my size allows. I try to create as much space as possible so that Shirley will have room. But there are only a few inches of vinyl remaining, and Shirley is forced into a half-crouch on the floor. Then she swings one tanned leg over mine and straddles my thigh.

Her dress rides up to her hips. Out of the corner of my eye, I see that Juice’s square jaw has tightened. He says nothing and stares straight ahead.

As we pull out of the parking lot, the knobby tires of the jeep dig into the gravel and spit rocks behind us. Juice pushes a cassette into the car stereo and punk rock wails out of the speakers. As if to protect me from the noise, Shirley rests her head against my ear. Covertly, she takes my hand again and 62

gives it a squeeze. Then she lets it go.

From Sunset Beach down to San Onofre is a long way, over an hour even at high speed. The trip seems longer with icy night air rushing in your face and guitar-crazed Sex Pistols music blaring in your ears. Yet I am not uncomfortable as we make our cold, noisy way down the freeway. Above me is a blue-black sky with piercing stars. On my lap, with warm legs clasped around my thigh, with her hair tickling my face, is my first date in months.

I lean back and close my eyes.

“Drum Man! Drum Man, look!” Shirley is shaking my knee and pointing at the sky, where a squadron of ten helicopters flies in formation above the San Clemente cliffs. On the tail of each copter is a yellow light flashing intermittently. Three flashes, a pause, and three more. Three-fourths time, it seems...

I have to press my lips close to Shirley’s ear so she’ll hear. “They’re flying low. It’s a night reconnaissance mission,” I say. “Night reconnaissance.”

“Mmm,” says Shirley.

Juice pulls off the freeway. We drive along the service road, winding past abandoned kiosks and rolls of barbed wire. After a small parking lot, the road narrows and I see a white marker with a sign: TRAIL 1. Juice doesn’t stop.

Instead he accelerates and we rush past five more signs numbered 2 through 6 consecutively, and then come to a dead-end. The jeep screeches to a stop.

We are at the base of a hill. Halfway up is a chain-link fence with a dense row of bushes in front of it. Another sign is welded to a post: DANGER. NO ENTRY. UNITED STATES MARINE CORPS AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. Shirley puts a hand on top of the windshield and lifts herself off my leg.

The spot where she was sitting feels hot, then instantly cold. Suddenly Shirley is thrown back into my lap as Juice downshifts, guns the jeep off the asphalt, up the hill, and directly toward the fence. Shirley gasps. The engine roars.

“DUCK AND COVER!” yells Juice.

We careen into the brush. Branches rake at the side of the jeep and scratch the top of my head. Shirley screams. But we don’t become entangled 63

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in chain-link mesh—miraculously, we are on the other side of it in an open field. I twist back to see a neat rectangular opening in the fence, formerly camouflaged by brush. Now the entrance is blatant and mocking, guarded only by a few falling leaves. I glance over at Juice. A smile flickers across his lips, then disappears.

“How did you know the fence was cut there?” I ask.

For the first time, Juice speaks to me. “The surf can’t be confined,” he says, as if this is an axiom and I’d argued otherwise. Then he is silent again.

We drive for a few more minutes, over sea grass, sage brush, and gopher holes. We drive as far as possible—to the end of a cliff overlooking the ocean, where even the omnipotent Juice decides to stop. He parks the jeep in front of a white marker with a single painted number: 9 “Where are we?” asks Shirley.

Juice waits before answering. He jumps out of the jeep, pulls a new bar of surf wax from his pocket, rips it open, and begins rubbing the wax onto a surfboard. “This is the jungle trail,” he says.

There is no time for additional questions. Holding his surfboard under one arm, Juice grabs his wetsuit and starts down the trail. From the bottom of the board, the skeg protrudes—thin, curved, and dangerous, like a wasp’s stinger.

I climb down the path, holding on to rocks and trees for balance. Shirley is behind me. Her breaths are high-pitched. I hear her slip in the loose dirt and she lets out a soft grunt. Branches snap back as Juice barges ahead in front of me. I hold up my arms so the plants don’t whip in my face. Then I stretch the branches forward so Shirley can pass, unscathed.

The sun is just beginning to rise. The air is fresh. From a distance, the shrill call of a gull alerts its brethren that we are approaching. Soon we are down on the beach. Over the dunes, there is a reddish haze. The sand is not completely firm. Each footstep sinks in about an inch, and we leave ghostly steps behind us. I reach down to take some sand in my hand, to feel its dampness. To the south, the ocean water is dark and the beach is wide and deserted. But when I turn north, I catch my breath at the sight of the mammoth, girdered structure. It is an immense half-sphere—one hundred stories tall with vast pipes and tubes and tanks attached. The perimeter is 64

lit by rows of blinking lights like landing beacons of an intergalactic vessel.

It is the San Onofre Nuclear Power Plant. From deep inside, it emits a low, throbbing sound.

“I’m going in,” says Juice. He peels off his shirt and his trousers, unconcerned about exposing his naked buttocks as he steps into the wetsuit and, one leg at a time, tugs it on. He pulls the suit over his muscular shoulders, slides his arms through the sleeves, and walks backward toward Shirley. “Zip me,” he says. And she obeys.

Far past the shoreline, almost a quarter mile away, I can make out a line of breaking surf. I hear the roar of the waves. Juice heads for the water. He splashes around, rubbing cold water in his hair. Then he lays stomach-down on his board, lifts his shins and feet in the air, and paddles forward with long steady strokes.

Shirley flops down in the sand and kicks off her sandals. “Drum Man,” she calls out. I take one step towards her and stop.

“Is that your real name, Drum Man?” she asks. “It doesn’t sound like a name, more of a nick—” “Alfred,” I interrupt.

“What?”

“Alfred. That’s my real name.”

“Oh.” Shirley tilts her head and smiles at me. “Where are you from, Alfred?”

“New Orleans. I moved here with my Mom when I was a kid.”

Shirley glances out at the water. Juice’s body is a dim outline against the early morning light. “Do they have beaches in New Orleans?”

My left foot is starting to sink into the sand. I pull it out and step to the side. “Most people go to the lake. Pontchartain. There really isn’t much of a beach in the city.”

“You’re just afraid of sharks,” Shirley giggles.

“It’s not that. There are actually sharks in Pontchartain. Bull sharks.

Bite your butt…”

Shirley’s hand strokes the side of her neck and rests over her chest. She gazes up at me. “Just your butt?”

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“Maybe a couple other things... Depends on what looks good.”

“It’s romantic at the beach this early, don’t you think, Alfred? Come sit by me.” She pats the sand next to her invitingly. “Come sit down. I’m cold.”

I don’t answer, just push my drum sticks deeper into my pocket. Then, one knee at a time, slowly so as not to make a thud, I sit in the sand. Something dark—a bird or a bat—flaps its way toward the hills behind us. It circles and dives out of sight. Juice is far out near the breakers now. He is shouting.

Perhaps he is singing. Shirley ignores him.

“I’m glad you’re here, Alfred.” She picks up a little sand and sprinkles it on my arm. I take some sand and sprinkle it back on her hand. “Don’t,” she coos, and waits with her hand extended until I sprinkle some more.

Suddenly a loud buzzing sound cuts through the misty dawn. It is a hateful noise like a fire alarm, and it comes from the power plant. On top of the enormous dome-shaped tank, a red beacon is flashing. The light emerges from a cylindrical nodule which looks like a concrete nipple. “May be a rupture,” I muse. “Now we’re toast.”

Shirley laughs. “No. That just means they’re ventilating chamber one.”

“Quite an authority, aren’t you?”

“Juice taught me.”

“Oh.” Juice has caught a wave. He streams down the face, trailing one hand behind him. Soon the breakwater engulfs him, flowing over his head and around him like a soft, foamy blanket. I swallow hard and realize I’ve been holding my breath.

“Let’s play tic-tac-toe,” says Shirley. She leans on one elbow and begins to draw the lines of the game grid in the sand. “You go first, Alfred. You’re X’s. I’m O’s.”

With my index finger, I etch in a wobbly X in the center of the grid. Then, in turn, I put two more X’s in the corners, and I’ve won.

“Cat’s game!” says Shirley. She laughs and with quick scratches of her fingernails, like extended claws of a feline, she destroys the board. “Let’s play another,” she says.

Out in the water, Juice is screaming again. These are not joyous shouts of 66

adulation for the sea. These are harsh, frantic cries. I jump up and run down the beach toward Juice. Visions of a great white shark—double-rowed fangs, bloody gums, pulsing throat, ridged gullet... But Juice is not flailing in the water. He has no severed limbs. He is lying atop his surfboard, chest propped up, hands gripping the side-rails of the board. His face is turned downward and he seems to be screaming directly at the sea, bellowing into its depths.

Shirley runs up beside me. “What’s he doing?” I ask her. But she says nothing.

Juice begins to move. His surfboard is drawn toward us rapidly, as if carried by a strong current. He holds tight to the sides of his board, and it soon becomes clear that no current would tug him this fast through the ocean, intersecting swells. Then—and I blink—Juice’s board is lifted a foot or so above the water, and there is something underneath him. It is big, about twelve feet across, fifty feet long, covered with clots of greenish slimed sea weed. It is a large ribbed form, and it swims steadily. I start to shout, to yell, but then close my mouth when no sound comes out.

Shirley has grasped my arm. Her fingernails dig into the flesh of my biceps and she is shivering. “Drum Man!” Her voice is a shaky whisper.

“Drum Man, my god, what—” Juice has stopped screaming. He is straddling the board now. His knees are buried in a mass of seaweed on the back of the creature—or is it a creature?

A low clanking noise comes from the water. There is a slight whir, as from an engine. My legs are numb, but I manage a step forward. Then another.

The thing is closer now, and its oblong form is clear. It is a craft of some sort, a ship or a submarine. The noise it makes is loud, churring, offset by heavy metal clanks. Juice’s head jerks from side to side. For a moment, I wonder if he is going to make a jump for the water. But then a line of lights flashes on at the front of the vessel. They are bright, searing—more intense than halogen—and they cut through the layers of dangling seaweed like lasers.

Shirley has wrapped an arm around my shoulders and pressed her body against me, as if the craft might somehow tow her into the water and I am an anchor. She is shaking, trembling. The ship is heading directly toward the beach. It doesn’t slow down. It gives no indication of turning back to the 67

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sea. It is moving directly towards us. The craft has a new motion now, not smooth like before, but a jerking and bobbing propulsion, accompanied by grinding noises. Juice has begun to slide off to one side, and again he seems to be deciding whether or not to allow himself to fall back into the ocean, or stay on top and ride the thing in.

More of the ship is exposed above the water. It is dull gray with a graduated, pointed front like the wedged head of a prehistoric fish. On the sides are a series of angled pipes, grill-like barbs from which dangle more seaweed. The back of the ship houses two round pods, one on each side. A thin spray of steam emerges from the tail, as from a blowhole.

For some reason, I am not surprised when the craft crawls up the sand on a complicated system of treads. Perhaps I would not have been surprised if the thing had sprouted wings and zoomed into the morning sky. My gaze is drawn to the triangular three-hubbed wheel sets holding the treads in place.

Fins protrude from each axle. I glance up at Juice. His eyes are wide. His mouth hangs open and the tendons bulge at the base of his neck.

A motorized hatch opens on top of the craft. Two doors angle up from the mid-section. As they rise, Juice slides off. He falls twelve feet down, and I can hear him exhale when he hits the sand. It is a low empty sound, as if the wind is knocked out of him. His surfboard falls next—a loud scrape of fiberglass on metal, and a final smack when the board hits the beach.

I stare into the bright diamond-shaped lights and have to shield my eyes with my hand. A head emerges from the craft. I blink, see a man’s torso, arms.... He jumps down—a tall, slender, middle-aged man with an athletic grace. He is dressed all in black, in a uniform it seems, and he wears a scarlet beret. Curiously, no insignias or badges are evident. From his belt hangs a holstered pistol and an array of tools and equipment pouches. The man’s face is lean, with pockmarked cheeks. His eyes betray nothing.

He stares at me for a moment and then gazes at Shirley. Finally he speaks.

“Bohemians,” he says, and there is a trace of an accent which I can’t quite make out. But there is something else in his tone as well, a lilting sarcasm.

“Communists...” he says.

Another similarly dressed man, with white hair tucked under his beret, 68

is now jumping down from the hatch. “There are no more communists.” He has a similar accent but a softer voice. “Soviet Union is dead.”

“Anarchists,” says the tall man. “Anarchists sabotaging the power plant.”

He lets out a dry laugh.

From the far side of the craft comes a scuffling noise, and Juice runs out to stare at us. In his wetsuit, with seaweed dangling from his shoulders and hair, he appears even odder than the two uniformed men. He takes a step forward, a step back, and finally one more step ahead. Then he begins to shout, a swaggering chest-puffing bar-room shout. “WHAT IS THIS SHIT ANYWAY? WHO THE HELL ARE YOU? YOU CAN’T JUST—“ Instantly the tall man has punched Juice twice in the face—lightening blows to the chin and cheek which make sharp cracking noises on contact.

Juice is knocked backward with the force. He falls down in the sand, unconscious—which is surprising, as Juice is big-boned and wide-shouldered and looks like he could have taken a punch. A line of blood runs from Juice’s nose.

Shirley makes a low wheezing sound. I’m not sure if it’s a breath or a sob. I feel the entire length of her body tense. The white-haired man steps forward. “Take it easy,” he says. My chest constricts. My heart beats.

Now Shirley is yelling. She has stepped forward, thrust out her face and her bosom, and she is wiggling her chin, screeching, “YOU BASTARDS! WHO ARE YOU? YOU THINK YOU—“ Instantly she is silent. The tall man has glided behind her, twisted one arm behind her back, slid his leg around hers so she can’t kick, and clamped his right hand over her mouth. The hand is clamped hard and fingers gouge into Shirley’s cheeks. Her eyes bulge. She works her jaw as if trying to bite the man, but his hand stays firm—it is protected in a thick, flesh-colored rubber glove. “I told you we would catch some,” he says. Then he reaches around with his left hand and rips down the side of Shirley’s dress, exposing a full round breast which bounces slightly and glows in the early morning light.

I’m not normally an aggressive person. I never push in shopping lines or cut in front of others in the parking lot. Yet I pride myself on a certain inner strength, and in that instant I decide to use it, along with the only weapon 69

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that I have access to. Slowly I reach down to my side pocket and slip out one of my drum sticks. Then I grit my teeth and dash forward, conscious of my own heavy steps in the sand, aware of the way my feet sink into its dampness and have little traction. I hold the stick in front of me and I rush at the tall man. The pointed drum stick is my spear. I am the Drum Man, and a steely burst of adrenaline drives me ahead.

Of course, I am not successful. The sinewy biceps and forearm of the white-haired man clasp around my throat. My cheeks burn. Immediately, I realize the futility—in fact the comedy—of my attempt. Yet I am not ashamed.

I am exhilarated, really. In my proud defeat, I gaze at Shirley’s breast.

The white-haired man grabs the drum stick from my hand and breaks it in half against his thigh. He tosses it backwards over his shoulder. “Nice try, Orson,” he says. He moves closer, squeezes his arm tighter, and I can feel his starched collar against the back of my head.

I manage to speak, gurgling a bit from the pressure around my throat.

“Are you Marine Corps personnel?” I cough and try again. “Are you, plant security?”

The tall man looks at me, lips set, brows creased in an expression which manages to combine condescension and intolerance. It is a look reserved for annoying retarded persons dripping jello from their chins; or stuttering toll booth attendants who must be dealt with. “We, don’t, exist,” says the tall man in four monosyllables. “Officially....” His right hand has begun massaging Shirley’s abdomen and moves up toward her chest. He pauses a moment, turns to look at Shirley and gaze at her soft neck. Then in a sudden motion he rips down the other side of her dress and she stands there exposed, a fertile captive maiden. Her face is flushed, and her eyes stare vacantly ahead, gray and luminous.

The next few seconds are quick, jagged, surreal. With a single motion, the tall man thrusts Shirley forward, pulls a short knife from his belt pouch, and slices open the back of her dress. She inhales sharply and the dress falls from her body. But the blade has not broken her skin. She stands perfectly still, nude as the day she was born.

The tall man begins to unbuckle his belt.

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I wrench my shoulders, twist my torso, try to break free—like a bull in the chute. The grip around my neck tightens, bruises, until I can’t breathe.

The blood rushes in my ears and I hear my captor speaking to his comrade.

“Don’t. You can’t...” he says loudly.

The tall man doesn’t stop. He has pulled Shirley toward him. For a moment she jerks her head, writhes. But then she relaxes. Her shoulders drop, her head reclines.

The white-haired man is shouting now. “TWELVE-C!” he yells.

“TRACEABLE INTERFERENCE PROHIBITED!” The tall man freezes. He is motionless like a statue posed against the outline of the sea—a slender figure holding a nude women in front of him, fingers digging into the soft flesh of her arms. He is silent. Then he turns his head to gaze at me, to stare through me it seems—to stare at the beach behind me, and the bluff behind it, and the miles and miles of earth and trees and country beyond that. His eyes glaze over for a moment as if he is looking at nothing at all. Finally he speaks. At first, the words seem nonsensical.

“Take off his clothes,” he says quietly. “Take off his clothes,” he says again.

“He’ll do it...”

My stomach tightens, twists, and my legs are unsteady. I expect the white-haired man to protest. Oddly, I expect him to protect me. I anticipate divine intervention, deus-ex-machina escape. I envision a laughing host popping out from behind a rock to tell me that it’s all just a gag, and point to a hidden camera. But none of these things occur. There is no escape, and the white-haired man tugs at my shirt.

I know that I wrench again and try to free myself. I know that my arm is expertly tucked behind my back so that rays of pain shoot to my shoulder if I try to move. I know that the remainder of my clothes and shoes are removed.

I know that I am ashamed of my nakedness, of the image of my body in Shirley’s limpid eyes. I know that I am intrigued that her eyes remain only on my upper body and seem unconcerned about the size or appearance of my genitals—and I know that I am pushed and pressed against her, that her cold breasts touch my skin, that I am forced down into the sand and Shirley is shoved on top of me.

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The tall man grabs a handful of Shirley’s hair and he is bending over, pushing Shirley’s face down into mine, screaming in her ear. “KISS IT!” he shouts, and a drop of his hot saliva lands on my forehead. “KISS IT!” he shouts again. And I know that I am crying. Hot stinging tears of humiliation run from the corners of my eyes down the side of my face.

Then Shirley is whispering. Her soft lips touch the side of my face and she is whispering. Her eyelashes flicker on my forehead and she is whispering, humming, singing to me. She caresses my shoulders and moves her hips against mine. From somewhere above, I hear a caustic chuckle. I don’t look up. I don’t turn my head. I stare straight up past Shirley’s blonde hair, which lies around my neck. I gaze into the crystal blue of the sky. Shirley’s breaths are faster now. She is moving against me. Her body gently undulates. She slides downward, centers her pelvis upon me, and I close my eyes. In the distance, the roar of surf plays like an ovation.

The laughter above me has stopped. I open one eye and see the two men climbing back aboard their craft. Against the brightness of the sky, their black uniforms are a blur. The men descend into the ship. They do not hesitate. They do not look back. They are creatures of the depths, and they are returning.

The hatch doors close. A droning electric noise comes from within the metal shell. Then the engine starts and the steel treads grind into the sand.

When the craft enters the water, there is a long hiss like a scalding red iron under a faucet, followed by bubbling noises as the frame submerges. Finally, there is only the sound of the waves and the ecstatic cry of a distant gull.

Out of my peripheral vision, I see Juice’s curled body lying fifteen feet away. But Shirley doesn’t remove herself from me. She continues her insistent motions, rising and falling like the waves. And soon I am conscious of her determination, her primeval urge. I am not sure how long it takes—five minutes, fifteen, fifty. I allow her to set her own pace, and watch her arch above me. When I do look into Shirley’s face, I see that although her eyelids are opened, her pupils have rolled up into her brows so that only the white sclera of the eyes is visible—opaque, with tiny red veins running through it.

A few moments later, with a series of tremors and a piercing grasp of 72

my shoulders, Shirley is finished, sated, and she collapses on top of me. In a gesture whose origin I am uncertain of, be it generosity or gratitude or fright, I have allowed Shirley to find her satisfaction, to fulfill her excitement with no thought of my own. So when she begins to remove herself from me, I gently clasp my hands over her hips and press her back down. But at that moment as I gaze into her face, her eyes swivel back into place and they stare at me without recognition. Her look is searching, perplexed, confused—and I release my grasp.

Shirley is up then. She gathers her slashed dress, ties it about her, and scampers over to Juice. I hear her talking to him. As I put on my clothes, I see Shirley rubbing Juice’s chest. When I am dressed, I walk over to them.

Juice has awakened. The left side of his jaw is swollen and purplish.

“Hi,” I say. “Are you all right?” But neither Shirley nor Juice looks at me. “Listen, are you okay?” I ask again.

But there is no response.

Out in the water, long strands of seaweed coat the surface of the ocean.

Gulls skim the swells, touch the water just barely, and return to the sky. I turn around and walk back toward the bluffs. The sun is hot now. It burns my face and forces my glance down to the sand as I walk. After a few paces, I pause and bend to pick up what was mine—one half of the broken Dolce Ducto drum stick. Its end is jagged and splintered.

I turn around for a final glance at the silvery ocean waves, the glimmering crests, the silhouette of Shirley bent over Juice. She is kissing him passionately—or perhaps providing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Near the waterline, the tread marks of the craft, wide striated indentations, have almost disappeared.

I head back toward the trail and my left foot contacts something in the sand. I bend and dig a few inches down—it is a shell, a big white seashell with a pinkish translucent interior. With two hands I work all the caked sand out of the shell and knock it gently against my knee to clear the rest. Then I place it against my ear. I am greeted by the rushing, flowing sounds of the sea—only air movement in the aural cavity I know, but authentic nonetheless.

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I press the shell close and listen again. There is a new sound now. It is high-pitched, but reedy. It is melodic and demure like a woman’s murmur, a mermaid’s laughter. The sound becomes louder, more nasal. I pull the shell back an inch, feel the indentations its sharp edges have made in the skin of my cheek and in the space below my earlobe. But the laughing continues. It is incessant. I pull the shell away from my head entirely. Arms outstretched, I hold the shell in front of me as I walk back through the sand. But still I hear the sound. Its vibrations ring in my ears. So I take my broken drum stick and strike it hard—quickly and rhythmically—against the spine of the shell. Tap, Tappa-Tap, Tappa-Tap. And the laughter stops.

I am the Drum Man.

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Matthew Duffus

Approaching the Sacramental: Male Friendship in the Short Fiction of Andre Dubus

In the essay “Broken Vessels,” Andre Dubus describes the bond that

develops between Marines — “the instinct to surrender oneself for another” — as “a sacrament, an action whose essence is love” (Broken Vessels 174).

In Dubus’s time, this connection, forged in combat, occurred exclusively between men, which points toward one of the lesser-explored traits of his writing. While scholarly attention to Dubus’s work has increased greatly in the last thirty years, little time has been devoted, in print, to the recurring theme of male friendship. Harriet Gilbert expresses the conventional attitude on this subject in a review of Separate Flights by stating, “[a]lmost alone among books by men, from any literary school, it’s questioning what being ‘male’ really means” (qtd in Miner 19). I believe his stories go deeper than this, however; they investigate the psychology of male friendship and what draws men and boys to each other and, inevitably, what pulls them apart. He accomplishes this in stories about brothers (“Delivering”), fathers and sons (“The Captain), soldiers and sailors (“Cadence” and “The Dark Men”), and baseball players (“The Pitcher” and “After the Game”)*.

In particular, I want to focus on two friendships that are not perpetuated by a blood connection or other duty, namely the relationship between Hank Allison and Jack Linhart and that of Ted Briggs and Nick Kakonis. Both pairs appear in multiple stories, and they serve as bookends in Dubus’s writing * See relevant discussions and moments in interviews with Andre Dubus on “Cadence” by Dev Hathaway (38), Thomas Kennedy (112-113), and David Yandell Todd (180); on “The Dark Men” by Patrick Samway (144) and on “Broken Vessels” by Jean Ross (87) and Lori Ambacher (232) in Ross Gresham’s Leap of the Heart: Andre Dubus Talking (Xavier Review Press, 2003). See also Neal Dolan’s “Two Goods: Individualism and Solidarity in the Fiction of Andre Dubus” in Xavier Review: Special Dubus Edition 30.2 (2010) for comments on “Cadence” (87-90) and “The Dark Men” (92-93).

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about male friendship, as “We Don’t Live Here Anymore” appeared in his first collection, Separate Flights, while “Falling in Love” was published in his final book, Dancing After Hours. Considering these pairs together shows the evolution of Dubus’s writing about men and the changing attitudes of society as a whole regarding male friendship. Most notably, the competitive edge of Hank and Jack’s relationship—manifested in both their adulteries and their running—is absent in Ted and Nick’s bond. The ending of “Falling in Love,” where Ted and Nick talk openly about their difficulties with women, culminating in Nick’s comforting his friend after another failed relationship, would have been unthinkable in the earlier, hyper-competitive story. This revision of the male-friendship model demonstrates Dubus’s growth as a writer and shows that the sacramental elements of the bond he wrote of in “Broken Vessels” are not limited to those in combat.

On the surface, the connection between Hank and Jack relies on their similarities: in their late-twenties to early-thirties, they both married young, as a result of unplanned pregnancies, and teach at the same college. But this bond runs deeper, as Hank’s wife Edith points out when she and Jack are discussing their affair, ironically enough. Of the friendship between the men, she says, “[o]f course it’s deep, he doesn’t live with you, and best of all you’re a man, you don’t have those needs he can’t be bothered with. He’d give you a kidney if you needed one” (Separate Flights 18). This emphasis on masculinity as a link recurs three pages later when Jack describes the importance of his male friendships: “[t]here are several men I love and who love me, all of us married, passive misogamists, and if we did not have each other to talk to we would probably in our various ways go mad” (21). These men are an outlet for each other, a safe haven from their difficult marriages, demanding children, and precarious economic situations. But the bond with Hank is different. Whereas the rest of his male friends use shoulder-punches and coarse language to mask their affection, “Hank only did that if it made you feel better” (21). Hank is more secure than the other men, with a wife who keeps a perfect house, a writing career that a literature professor like Jack might envy, and the physical prowess to beat Jack in a foot-race with little effort.

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This race provides the first hint of the darker elements beneath the surface of their friendship. As soon as they stop talking during their run, Jack notices that “right away my head was clear and serene” (23), as though the conversation about his having too much free time that summer and Hank’s wanting to quit smoking was keeping him from the peacefulness of pure physical activity, another common theme in Dubus’s work. As a result, Jack begins to lag behind, enjoying this state, but as soon as he catches up again, Hank sprints ahead to the imaginary finish line. “He didn’t smile at beating me,” Jack thinks, “but I felt a smile as though in his rushing breath” (23).

Hank’s satisfaction manifests itself not in a surface action like smiling but in his breath, from deep within his body. One can live without smiling, but breathing is essential, as competition seems to be for Hank.

Jack, too, partakes in this competition, especially in the way he constantly compares himself to Hank. When Terry, his wife, complains that he is never affectionate toward her at parties, he uses Hank’s example as his defense.

Later, when he thinks about all the sadness he sees in the marriages around him, he states, “I am surrounded by painful marriages that no one understands.

But Hank understands his, and I think for him it has never been painful” (13). Hank’s placid acceptance has two consequences for Jack. On the one hand, Edith is drawn to him for the emotional connection Hank withholds; in addition, however, Jack marvels at Hank’s satisfaction, especially during this summer of too little stimulation and too much free time to catalogue his complaints with Terry. If only I could be like Hank, he seems to be thinking, I would take pleasure in my affair without guilt, enjoy going home to my wife and children afterwards, and find something more meaningful to do with my time than just brooding. He confirms this later, when the affairs begin to pile-up between them: “Hank’s marriage wasn’t a grave because Hank wasn’t dead; he used his marriage as a center and he moved out from it on azimuths of madness and when he was tired he came back” (43).

Even Terry, once she begins sleeping with Hank, understands her husband’s use of his friend as a benchmark: “[i]f I kept on with Hank,” she explains, “you’d want a girl. You’d feel justified then. Maybe even with Edith, and wouldn’t that be a horror” (40). Terry assumes that her affair 77

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would encourage Jack to do the same when, in reality, it was Hank’s earlier affair with the French woman that set this chain of events in motion. Jack comforted Edith after she discovered the affair, but comforting does not have to lead to sex. Instead, seeing Hank parade around with his mistress drives Jack to respond, even if he cannot do so as publicly as his friend. And what better way to one-up his friend than to have an affair with the man’s wife?

Even though he cannot make this transgression public, his bond with Edith must feel like a victory over the man who captivates all three of the story’s other characters.

These comparisons subtly reveal Hank’s control over all of the characters’ lives. His long speech about love early in the story is brought on because “I didn’t like that look of awe in your face… I love you, man. You shouldn’t feel awe for anything I do” (27). Hank may believe this, but his narcissism dominates the story. Even the simple gesture of loaning Jack forty dollars gives him power over his friend. Before the loan, Jack sums up the day as, “[a] twenty-one-dollar day, only two on something I wanted: the beer with Hank” (28). Later that night, however, he describes his thoughts and actions while having sex with Terry as follows: “I shut [my eyes] and saw Edith this afternoon oh love; then I thought [Terry] is thinking of Hank, behind those closed eyes her skull is an adulterous room, and now he was here too and he had given me the forty dollars and it was Hank, not I, Hank who was juggling us all, who would save us all” (33). The “adulterous room” that he believes his wife dwells in is quickly replaced by the money that Hank, unwilling to acknowledge his friend’s pride, or shame, at having to accept the loan, presses on him. Jack is correct about Hank “juggling us all,” as is evident after Hank and Terry sleep together. When Terry returns from their first encounter, she is frustrated with Jack for not being angry enough: “way down in my blood I’m angry because you set this up in all kinds of ways” and “[y]ou ought to be knocking my teeth out now. But not you. You want to watch us. Is that it?” (36, 37). Part of his non-reaction comes from relief that he no longer has to feel guilty for his affair with Edith, but even at the beginning of the story, before these four have become so entwined, Terry warns Jack that “it’s not right to leave me with Hank, to put me in that position” (4). Jack knows the 78

reality of Hank’s reputation as well as anyone, yet he does nothing to stop his friend from going after his wife, as though Hank’s control over him makes his opposition futile.

The power dynamics of friendships are complicated, but Hank’s dominance over Jack goes beyond what is found in healthy relationships. At the end of this story, once the brokenness of these two marriages has been exposed, Hank makes the cavalier statement, “I ought to dedicate my novel to you… You helped get it done. It’s so much easier to live with a woman who feels loved” (70-1), as though Jack is the hired help, the person Hank assigns the fulfillment of all of “those needs he can’t be bothered with,” in Edith’s words. The revelation of this imbalance feels just as heartbreaking as the damage done to these marriages; for, like the marriages, the bond between these men will be altered by what Jack has learned about both himself and Hank.

Where Hank and Jack share numerous similarities, Ted and Nick, in “Falling in Love,” are linked mainly because they are both lawyers. In addition to this, however, Ted stands out for his service in Vietnam. He is also marked, physically, by an injury that forces him to use a cane and makes him wary of mixing with the bohemian crowd Nick’s sister is a part of. While Nick does not share this distinction, he works hard to bridge the gap and reassure Ted by saying, “[h]ey, we’re lawyers. They’ll hate both of us” (Dancing After Hours 28). In addition to being a lawyer, Nick is in his late-thirties, which sets him apart from the young group at the sister’s party and ties him to Ted. As he tells Ted, they will be outcasts together. But this does not happen, as each of them meets a woman with whom they go home after the party, though readers never learn any details about Nick’s encounter. Instead, Dubus presents us with a story that alternates between a close third-person narration from Ted’s point of view and one that follows Susan Dorsey, the woman with whom he begins a relationship after the party. Their relationship, and Dubus’s narration of her thoughts, is worthy of attention, but my interest is with what happens after they break up and Ted goes to Nick for solace.

The very idea that Nick can provide solace shows one way this relationship differs from Hank and Jack’s. Most of the earlier pair’s conversations read 79

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more like speeches, with wise Hank presenting his philosophy on life to Jack, the novice. Their other exchanges are freighted by the tension and guilt of Jack’s affair with Edith or Hank’s open dalliance with Terry. By contrast, Nick is the sole person Ted can really talk to. Jack’s openness with Edith is nowhere to be found for Ted when he is with women: “[n]o girl could comfort him, because the source of his tears was not himself” (33). “The source” is the lost or injured lives he encountered as a corpsman in the Marines. But once Susan has left him to go to New York, and announced her intention to have an abortion, this changes. Sitting with Nick, “he saw Susan’s face, felt that if he opened [his eyes] quickly, but at the right moment out of all the night’s moments, her face would be in front of him” (41). Here, Susan replaces the images of war that used to haunt him.

But where women could never soothe the pain of war, Nick is able to get him through his latest loss. Nick listens while he describes the pain and while he quotes part of Chief Joseph’s 1877 surrender. At the end of this, once Nick has shown that he knows where the speech came from — that they share a bond through this common knowledge — Ted thinks, “and saying it loudly, released all the grief, as something he felt he could see, touch, in the air before his face, and now he felt only rage, and the strength and conviction it brings” (41). Susan had been unwilling to see his side when he’d urged her to have the baby and give it to him, but Nick sits silently, without judgment, allowing Ted to say his peace and purge himself of these feelings.

Once he has gotten everything out, he becomes embarrassed: “[h]e looked at Nick’s brown loafers, feeling only helpless now; and ashamed, knowing what a woman could do to him, knowing she could do it because he wanted her to” (42). He is not ashamed that Nick has seen such an emotional display — as either Hank or Jack would be if they ever broke through their bravado or stopped drinking long enough to have such an open conversation. Instead, he is embarrassed that Susan, not the dead he left behind in Vietnam, can elicit such a reaction. Regardless, Nick does not care: “[t]hen Nick’s hand was on the back of his neck, squeezing” (42). Since Ted is too shy to look at him, Nick offers this physical, tangible reminder of his support, the kind of movement one of Ted’s lovers might have offered when he talked about 80

what he saw in Vietnam.

Nick is both encouraging and a little confrontational in the conversation that ends the story. He urges Ted to start dating again, to find someone who is on birth control this time. “Wives are good,” he says. “I’d like a wife. I’m two baseball seasons from forty... Maybe a wife is what you need” (42).

Nick subtly links Ted’s emotional state, complicated by Vietnam, to his own increasing age, not in a narcissistic way that suggests they’re both in the same boat but in a way that makes it okay for Ted to continue to be vulnerable. The story’s concluding paragraphs, after Ted mentions his desire to go to Mexico, are significant enough to quote at length: Nick rubbed his neck and said: ‘Drink bottled water. Peel the fruit.

Don’t shit your brains out.’

‘If I did, all you’d see in the bowl is water.’

‘Stop that. It’s just something that happened. And leave the demon here. You’ve looked at it enough.’

‘No. I haven’t looked at it. I’ve fucked it. Now I’m going to look at it; talk to it.’

Holding Nick’s arm, he closed his eyes and pressed the back of his neck in Nick’s hand. (43)

It would be easy to read their comments as posturing if not for the open, emotional exchanges that preceded them. In addition, it is difficult to imagine men like Jack and Hank making jokes about Montezuma’s Revenge while one comforts the other in such a tender, physical way. Instead, Nick hears Ted’s concerns, lightens the mood a bit with his advice, and immediately returns to the seriousness of the situation when he feels that his friend has gone too far.

Nick’s silence after Ted’s final comment, which conflates “the demon” hounding him not to Vietnam but to liberated women like Susan, suggests that he, too, shares such concerns or, at the very least, is willing to allow Ted to express such feelings unimpeded. While such a conflation sounds misogynistic, it is reminiscent of Dubus’s friendship with Richard Yates, as recounted in Blake Bailey’s A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates: “[Yates] found a sympathetic ally in Andre Dubus, whose own marriage was breaking up around the same time: ‘Trouble with me and my friends,’

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he wrote to Yates, ‘is we’re married to women who’re making the transition between the old type woman and the new type and we’re getting the best of neither and the worst of both” (429-430). These lines, written in response to the deterioration of Yates’s marriage, reflect the same open, though dated, exchange of ideas and feelings that goes on between Ted and Nick, another pair of “sympathetic all[ies].”

The story ends, significantly, in silence, as Ted leans into Nick’s hand on the back of his neck and grips his friend’s arm, a beautifully understated and tender moment, particularly in comparison to our last glimpse of Hank and Jack, with the former making his arrogant comment about dedicating his novel to the latter. Based on these endings alone, we can see the change that occurred over the twenty-one years between the publication of the collections they came from. Hank and Jack, the hard-drinking, adultery-committing, “competitive bastard[s]” of “We Don’t Live Here Anymore” have given way to Ted and Nick, who are able to drink and pick-up women together but also unburden themselves to each other in their darkest hours. This does not make “Falling in Love” a more impressive story, but it does show one of the qualities that ensures that Dubus’s work will endure: his compassion.

In reading “Broken Vessels” readers are often struck by the relationships described in that essay. Of course, the moments Dubus shares with his young daughters are beautiful and poignant, but one can’t help noticing the number of other names he mentions. Jack Herlihy isn’t a renter, for instance; he is someone “who moved into my basement… to help me pay the mortgage; to help me” (162). In the same paragraph, “with my son Andre helping me, I had worked out” (162). Part of this must be the competing desires both to credit those—like David Novak, his ramp builder—who came to his aid after the accident and to show readers how helpless he felt at times. Beyond this is the need to name, to categorize, as in “my friend David Mix” (166). This is not to suggest that the role of friendship in his stories should only be read biographically. Instead, as Dubus’s work went on, friendships like Ted and Nick’s arose out of that same sacramental urge that is instilled in Marines or in the friends and loved ones who offer help selflessly after an accident. In this way we see a deepening of the bond that Hank, in particular, takes for 82

granted. Ted and Nick are no more perfect than their creator, or any of us, but in this one way, they achieve something extraordinary.

Works Cited Bailey, Blake. A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates. Picador, 2003.

Dubus, Andre. “Broken Vessels.” Broken Vessels. David R. Godine, 1991.

— “Falling in Love.” Dancing After Hours. Knopf, 1996.

—. “We Don’t Live Here Anymore.” Separate Flights. David R. Godine, 1975.

Miner, Madonne. “‘Jumping from One Heart to Another’: How Andre Dubus Writes About Women.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, vol. 39 no. 1, 1997, pp. 18-31.

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Xavier Review 38.1

Stephanie JT Russell

Preparations for a Catskill Winter She is never ready for the fact of the land in winter. Blanket, she thinks, and embers. But the lexis falls short, no reason to stop pinching weevils from the honeysuckle vine.

Still, she remains for the certainties— bantam old cat dragging a hare twice its size down the barn path, salting it away behind the kitchen between rain gear and mudboots, then turning sidewise to lick a bloodied paw.

Autumn hosanna draws her uphill to the chicken yard to praise the bundling shiver and stony corn-scrabble trapped in dust-wizened spurs.

Woodpile’s newly stacked by lee-port to the house, the pungent long ribbed vestibule listing ship-like amid fading myrtle and viscid pine.

The only place we’re sailing, she whispers, is into January.

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Every year, she awaits a diacritic point at which the velocity turns.

When poplar limbs tick upward to appease the ebbing sun. And night silences amplify, pierced only by hardy songbirds and ribbon snakes rustling through thornapple leaves wind-lashed down to the squash beds.

Then it’s here, and she’s whole again, standing naked in snow, brushing teeth under a maple braced in virgin ice, then spitting out, smiling to the midnight crackle of invisible coyote heaving through the birch line in the upper twenty-five.

85

Xavier Review 38.1

Joseph J. Capista

Two Poems I Only Like That Song on the Radio Art’s function is always one of selection and em —Joseph J. Capista, “I Only Like That Song on the Radio”

And I only like the reservoir when it smells remarkably like the seafood department.

I only like Charles James when he observes what’s taken-up by the market is destroyed by the market. I only like the merging car’s failure to yield to my BABY ON BOARD sticker when its plate reads PROBLEM, “first world” modifying “problem,” my sabot in your heart’s machinery, flowcharts when they make anticlimactic Sex Ed., and Sex Ed. as code for Health Class.

I only like “argument from silence” as poetry.

I only like Giotto di Bondone’s perfect circle.

I only like the ringworm’s perfect circle.

Forced to choose between “cult” and “ure,” I only like “ure” as it evokes “unrecoverable read error,” that harbinger of floppy doom which best articulates our cultural milieu, yet how fallacious to insist one must be always choosing between two. Aloha, Mr. Dualism.

I only like that emotions are mega-jejune

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because apparently everybody has them.

I only like Zen Buddhism when it permits the poet to utter profoundly stupid shit.

I only like fuku, which is my haiku.

I only like misplaced limiters in poems.

I only like this poem’s epigraph because I thought it was stated by someone else yet a cursory search yields no exact matches so while its sentiment remains passé at least its syntax appears uniquely my own.

I only like stained glass when I can’t see my image shrunk and bent in every jag of dalle.

I only like that you’re so vain you probably think this poem’s about you. Compatriot’s riot.

Art as the line between violence and culture.

Bonbons atop my bowl of razorblades.

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Xavier Review 38.1

Line Cook When I, pan a play over lilac flame, finishing my ticket’s fra diavlo, drop another deveined shrimp, the kitchen stops. I’ve been so warned. So told. Just plate it up. Sauté, transfer, repeat. Specifically, pair not the prawns head-to-tail to thus resemble small, devourable hearts the runner must amend. No one’s amused. Done is year one of college: microfiche, mixtapes, mosh pits.

I’m undeclared. Because my clay angel’s wings were upside down, I called it “Weltschmerz” and got a B. Friends are clusters of failed suicides. I Love You says the sole of one combat boot, the other so stop fucking the dude with the bifurcated tongue. Nights, I walk the pier till these words disappear, ghost surfers paddling beside me, beyond me, white boards silhouetting them in old moonlight. Now between my boots lies this week’s dozenth dropped shrimp, dozenth arc of broken heart. Ah, fate. I shrug, compose myself for termination. But it’s Sunday evening take-out mayhem at the Jersey Shore—reggae radio syncopates the order bell as Steve, back from his smoke, slides another ticket down, as Jimbo kitty-litters spilled linguine. Before we kill the fryer and make excuses to not change its oil, many hours must pass. My sous chef eyes the shrimp, the clock, then me, says three words: Don’t waste that.

Eighteen years later, I don’t.

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Bill Lavender

Foreign Poets Eat local, shop local, read local, travel local; it seems noble and right (“Breathes there a man with soul so dead…” etc.) at least when you don’t think about it too hard. When there are as many Starbucks in Madrid as in Seattle and as many McDonalds in Paris as in Houston, cities compete for the most disneyfied reinvention of their vanished past, for the most colorful culture, for the highest quotient of smiling well-dressed people frozen in front of old buildings on perfect blue sky days, basking in a localness denied them in their own localities.

I was never a fan.

Like Baudelaire I was homesick for places I had never been.

I wanted different weather, different food, different places, different language— Poetry was a promise of difference, poetry not in the sense of what was fed us at school, but the impolite unpolitic stuff we found after, more to do with bathroom walls than english class.

We farted during the pledge of allegiance and that was what the poems grew out of.

I loved everything unamerican, nonsensible, chaotic, incantatory. I liked stuff that had to be translated, books with hieroglyphs on one face and a stammering, inconclusive english on the opposite. En face even fucked with the sacred mechanism of the book, setting up a homosocial page order where rectos follow rectos and versos versos rather than the standard hetero verso recto.

Did it all spring from those poetic arguments, Spicer et al, mostly just Spicer, who listened for aliens from the local dive & lived an exile’s life within his itty bitty San Francisco scene, a lot like Maddox did in New Orleans, and they both drank themselves to death, for what is a city but a gathering of exiles, a water-hole for refugees, devoted locals come to escape their former locales where the small-minded provincialisms of small towns prevail, where everyone knows everyone and they all frown on cynicism, extreme literacy and alcoholism, and no one even knows what linguistics is and really no one has read Finnegan’s Wake?

Even the “born and raised” are refugees.

The city changes under the feet of those who plant themselves in it,

pristine neighborhoods turn ineluctably into grubby blocks of sagging shutters, and the austere ruins of urban slums get new coats of paint and swimming pools and are gradually taken over by white-collar migrants from another state with bumper-stickers that admonish us yet again to embrace the sainted local.

The signified, says Todorov, denotes a lack, a kind of nostalgia for the thing that announces itself only at its moment of disappearance.

Our sudden love for the local is occasion to mourn its passing.

And for the true refugees, those who leave their homes under plumes of smoke as they are erased by the advancing armies of modernity, two sides wanting nothing from a locality but its strategic location, to be a local—to belong somewhere, to live where people know and respect you and assist when natural or human brutality threatens to starve or to evict you—must seem an impossible dream, always and only, henceforth, for foreigners.

Contributors Ruy Belo, who died prematurely in 1978, published eleven collections of poetry, four collections of critical writings, and numerous translations of writers such as Jorge Luis Borges, Blaise Cendrars, Garcia Lorca, and SaintExupery. His work has appeared in over thirty anthologies in Portugal, as well as in collections published in France, Spain, Italy, Serbia, Germany, Sweden, Latvia, Bulgaria, Holland, Mexico, and, of course, Brazil. Recent translations

by Alexis Levitin have appeared in American Poetry Review, Catamaran, International Poetry Review, Lake Effect, Metamorphoses, Mid-American Review, New Letters, Per Contra, Rosebud, and Saranac Review.

R. Sebastian Bennett’s writing has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and appeared in Columbia Journal, Connecticut Review, Fiction International, George Washington Review, Indiana Review, Los Angeles Review, Mississippi Review, Oxford Magazine, Texas Review, Wisconsin Review, and upcoming in The Tulane Review, among other publications.

He taught Creative Writing at U.C.L.A, the University of Louisiana - Lafayette, and directed the Creative Writing program at Muskingum University in Ohio.

He was the founding editor of The Southern Anthology.

Joseph J. Capista’s poems have appeared in AGNI, Ploughshares, The Hudson Review, and The Georgia Review. Too, his work has been featured in Poetry Daily and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College, lives with his family in Baltimore, and teaches writing at Towson University.

Paul Martin Clark, a 1978 graduate of Xavier University, writes: In my 500 word essay of why I wanted to be accepted to attend Xavier University written in December of 1973, I wrote about the rain at my grandmother’s home on Lowerline Street one block from Xavier. She had one Fig tree to make her remember each day of her life on Cane River. It looked like rain then to a child, it looked like grain falling from the hopper

at the Godchaux Henderson Sugar Refinery on River Road….My family members and friends each contributed to a fund so that I could attend the Canonization of Katherine Drexel and represent all of them who touched the hand of Katherine Drexel at Xavier and Xavier Prep. It rained so hard that the blue dye ran from my suit to the ground. The pope said her name at Saint Peter’s square in Rome-Katherine Drexel and the rain stopped in an instant. I looked at President Dr. Norman Francis in the same instant. A woman who was the great granddaughter of Katherine Drexel hugged me at the ceremony. She was from Michigan. So, it’s really complicated. My father would say.....he was shot and stabbed by the enemy on the Island of Okinawa during World War Two. He looked up and it was raining and his red blood washed into the ground as life was leaving him. Katherine Drexel appeared to him and saved his life. No one saw his tears of pain on that battle field. The rain covered the tears that were falling. The complex chemicals in the hair pomade by Wylon and a Xavier-trained chemist named Whitney Michael Haydel Sr. stopped his bleeding. When he returned, he wrote two books that were published by the Xavier University Press.

One was named, Arrows of Gold. The other book was Delta Shadows.

My father was Peter Wellington Clark Sr. had both BA (1938) and MA in English (1941) from Xavier. My mother, Mary Katherine Martin Clark also graduated from Xavier with a BA in English 1942). Both of my parents taught English for the New Orleans Public Schools for a combined 81 years. I am retired in advertising from: The Department of the Army, World, Headquarters Army and Air Force Exchange Service, the PX/BX. Jeanne Emmons has published four collections of poetry: The Red Canoe (Finishing Line Press);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, North American Review, South

Carolina Review, Prairie Schooner, The River Styx, South Dakota Review, Xavier Review, and many other journals. She is poetry editor of The Briar Cliff Review.

Henry Goldkamp has lived with the Mississippi River his entire life.

He is currently a junior at University of New Orleans. Recent work appears in Cutbank, SLANT, Bridge Eight, Blood Orange Review, mojo, and Permafrost. His work was recently nominated for a Pushcart and two Best of the Nets. His public art projects have been covered by Time and NPR. Sabine Hilding grew up in the Southwest and lived in New Orleans in the 1970’s. She enjoys collaborating with visual artists—as in her text and artists’ images. Books are: Gorl with Beth Secor and David Hurley; Recurring Dreams with James Bettison; Vacation with Marie-lou Wilhelm. She currently lives in the Pacific Northwest and writes stories.

Doris (Dar) Kamenetz was born in New Jersey in the 50’s and studied literature at Hamilton College. She later received a Juris Doctor degree at University of Maryland School of Law and spent most of her adult life as an attorney in Maryland.

Upon retirement, Dar and her husband moved to the city of Baltimore and Dar started writing poems and stories. She currently is enrolled at the University of Baltimore in the Masters of Creative Writing and Publishing Arts program.

She also is an avid downhill skier and spends as much time as possible in the mountains of Utah.

Bill Lavender is a local poet originally from Arkansas. He is the author of several books of poetry, a novel published and two un-, and oddments of all kinds, including La Police, a chapbook examining the history of policing from Locofo Chaps. He is the proprietor of the New Orleans press Lavender Ink/Diálogos and co-founder, with Megan Burns, of the New Orleans Poetry Festival, which happens every April. Check out lavenderink.org and nolapoetry.com.

Alexis Levitin’s translations have appeared in well over two hundred literary magazines, including American Poetry Review, Atlanta Review,

Bitter Oleander, Grand Street, Kenyon Review, Massachusetts Review, New Letters, New Orleans Review, Partisan Review, and Prairie Schooner. His forty books include Clarice Lispector’s Soulstorm and Eugenio de Andrade’s Forbidden Words (both from New Directions). More recent books include Ana Minga’s Tobacco Dogs (Bitter Oleander Press, 2013), Salgado Maranhao’s Tiger Fur (White Pine Press, 2015), Santiago Vizcaino’s Destruction in the Afternoon (Dialogos Books, 2015), Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen’s Exemplary Tales (Tagus Press, 2015), and Rosa Alice Branco’s Cattle of the Lord (Milkweed Editions, 2016).

A New Yorker by birth (and likely by death), James McKee enjoys failing in his dogged attempts to keep pace with the unrelenting cultural onslaught of late-imperial Gotham. He held a number of ludicrously unsuitable jobs before spending over a decade as a teacher and administrator at a small specialneeds high school. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Acumen, The Raintown Review, Saranac Review, The South Carolina Review, THINK, The Worcester Review, The Rotary Dial, and elsewhere. He currently works as a private tutor and spends his free time, when not writing or reading, traveling less than he would like and brooding more than he can help.

Eric Paul, aka Eric Joseph, says: “I’ve been writing now for the last three years consistently. The book review marks my first piece of nonfiction in twenty years. I was a member of the writer’s workshop that Tom Dent headed at the age of 17. It was a grand time in my life. The therapeutic benefits of writing have increased with age. Looking back, I find it hard to believe I strayed so far from the craft.” He has worked for the past twenty-one years as a research archivist in Xavier University’s library.

Simon Perchik is an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, Forge, Poetry, Osiris, The New Yorker and elsewhere. His most recent collection is The Osiris Poems published by box of chalk, 2017. For more information, including free e-books, his essay titled “Magic, Illusion and Other Realities,” visit his website at www.simonperchik.com.

FIorangel Reyes is a few credits short of an MFA from City College of the City University of New York and has a BA in English Literature from Lehman College. An early draft of this story received honorable mention in the Adria Schwartz Award in Women’s Fiction at City College. Once upon a time, she performed stand-up comedy and was an amateur actress. She’s returning to that life in 2018 and hopes to emerge as the Susan Boyle of stand-up and screenwriting. You should follow Florangel @FlowerReyez.

Stephanie JT Russell is an interdisciplinary artist, published author, editor, essayist, and cultural worker. The most recent of her nine published books is One Flash of Lightning: A Samurai Path for Living the Moment (Andrews McMeel Publishing). Her poetry has been anthologized in Words Upon the Water and Oakland Out Loud, and has appeared in MR/Metropolitan Review, Friends Journal, Rabbit & Rose, poetz.com, Nature Writing, International Rat, and 11/9: The Fall of American Democracy (2017, ed., Casey Lawrence), an anthology to benefit the ACLU and RAINN. She lives in the Hudson Valley.

Trevor Tingle dropped out of high school, hitch hiked, hopped trains, and learned to sail, eventually becoming a professional mariner. He lives in Richmond, Va with his wife and two children. A finalist in the Tennessee Williams poetry contest and nominated for a Pushcart, his poems have been published by Slipstream, Phantom Drift, and Driftwood Press, among others.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr., a retired Professor of English (Tougaloo College and Dillard University) lives and writes in New Orleans. His most recent publications include The China Lectures (2014) and Fractal Song: Poems (2016).

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XAVIER REVIEW Parterre: New and Collected Poetry and Prose

by Thomas Bonner, Jr. 978-1-883275-218-0 • 2018 • $20.00 Parterre celebrates the career of a remarkable scholar and teacher. Tom Bonner’s short stories and poems are intimate and affectionate portraits of Southern people and places. His insightful articles… supplement his pioneering work on the fiction of Kate Chopin.

Bernard Koloski, editor of Awakenings: The Story of the Kate Chopin Revival.

In a collection brimming with erudition… Tom Bonner also gives us serene poetry and narrative thrill rides such as “Front Lines”— an altogether original story form that can best be identified as postmodern.

Ralph Adamo, author of Ever: Poems 2000-2014.

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by Tim Fitts 978-1-883275-27-3 • 2017 • $13.00 Quirky, surprising and darkly humorous, Tim Fitts’ characters will get under your skin. These memorable stories unsettle, as strong fiction should.

—Claire Messud, author of The Burning Girl Powerful in its portrayal of Americans living on the margin between “just getting-by” and catastrophe—financially, morally, existentially—this is a riveting collection of short fiction that captures the voices, attitudes, and crippled/crippling days of its masterfully drawn characters.

—Gordon Macalpine, author of Woman with a Blue Pencil

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XAVIER REVIEW The Shy Mirror

by Gordon Robert Sabatier 978-1-883275-26-6 • 2016 • $15.00 There is no singular delight in coming into the world of Gordon Robert Sabatier who is both a natural poet and a learned one too…. Here is a poet who does what all art asks us to do: to blur the lines between what is human and not human, the lines between pain and ecstasy, between being fully immersed in the physical and the spiritual in the moment of the poem. Here is a poet who uses formalisms we use to harness the fierce and wild.

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

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