Xavier Review 41. 1 & 2

R XAVIEREVIEW 41.1-2, Spring-Fall 2021

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

Ralph Adamo Editor Katheryn Laborde Managing Editor Thomas Bonner, Jr. Editor Emeritus Jason Todd Associate Editor 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

So many losses in the past year among artists of every kind; it would

be impossible to try to document them all, and I would certainly wind up forgetting to include names that matter to all of us. I do want to express my personal grief at the death of actor-writer-teacher Henry Hoffman, a Xavier Review contributor several years ago (when we published the introduction to his book about the life of Tyrone Power). Henry was the most passionate educator I’ve ever encountered. In recent years, on the faculty of the Algiers Charter School network, he created theatrical works with middle-school students that were agonizingly beautiful, works that those students will carry with them forever. As a professional actor, he had often worked with the greats of his generation, but he saw the potential in the shyest kid, and knew how to bring every child’s innate talent to the fore. One of his last ambitions was to stage Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman somewhere in New Orleans, a staging he imagined so clearly that I can see it now in my own memory, as if he had lived to make it happen.

So many writers, actors, other artists gone (not all from COVID), I’d like to believe in a heaven where they continue their labors of love, but of course, their work does continue as we engage it ourselves, as future people find and fall for it like astonished lovers.

On a cheerier note, I’m happy to report that this issue of Xavier Review features a couple of very much alive octogenarian poets, Peter Cooley and John Stoss, both with recent books out and more in progress, as well as interviews with Cooley and poet-musician Lenard D. Moore.

Congratulations to our Xavier Review colleague Bill Lavender on the publication of his novella tryptic Three Letters (Spuyten Duyvil Publishing). And congratulations to Xavier Review’s managing editor Katheryn Laborde on the acceptance at Fordham University Press of her book, Flannery O’Connor’s Manhattan, due out in Spring 2023; readers of Katheryn’s book have highlighted the degree to which it adds significant

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new material to our understanding of O’Connor’s work. And finally, congratulation to contributing editor Biljana Obradovic on the acceptance

by Roof Books of her book of Language poetry translations into English, The Politics of Hope (After the War): Selected and New Poems by Serbian poet, Dubravka Djurić.

I won’t try to highlight everything we present in this issue, except to welcome back a couple of former contributors: British author Richard Godden and Rowena (Maxie) De Shields, a graduate of Xavier University currently serving in the Coast Guard. This issue is, as always, filled with a variety of reading pleasures, challenges and joys, and I am most grateful to all these contributors, many of whom have waited a long time to see their work in print. I will also take the occasion to acknowledge that this issue is coming out later than it should have, a result of my own existential dawdling, for which I express remorse and for which I have no excuse.

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Xavier Review 41.1-2, Spring-Fall 2021 Editor’s Note — iv Ryan Mayer Exploring Uncertainties and The One Certain Thing with Peter Cooley — 9 Gerald Snare On Peter Cooley’s The One Certain Thing — 15 Peter Cooley Two Poems — 24 Yuan Changming Two Poems — 26 Georgia Tiffany Gravity — 28 Maryanne Hannan Holy Host of Inquiries — 30 Thomas Bonner, Jr. Review of City of Hey Baby, Poems by Patrice Melnick — 31 David G. Lanoue Lenard D. Moore: An Interview and a Book Review — 34 Lenard D. Moore Two Poems — 45 Elizabeth Crowell Loehmann’s, Saturdays, Ridgewood, New Jersey, 1970’s — 47 Ajay Sawant A Family Clause — 49 Nidhi Agrawal Two Poems — 51

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Louis Maistros A Portfolio of Photos — 54 John Robinson The Lamps at Wilcoxen Funeral Home — 65 Daniel W.K. Lee Two Poems — 66 Bruce Robinson Fresco — 69 Cameron Lovejoy Manhood — 70 John Stoss From Nobody Loves Me — 71 Richard Weaver Two Poems — 80 Richard Godden Two Poems — 84 Rowena De Shields JUMP — 92 Contributors — 101

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8

Ryan Mayer

Exploring Uncertainties and The One Certain Thing with Peter Cooley

Peter Cooley served as Poet Laureate of Louisiana from 2015-2017

and is currently the Poetry Editor of Christianity and Literature, as well as Professor Emeritus at Tulane University, where he was the Director of Creative Writing from 1975-2018. He has authored eleven books, the most recent of these being The One Certain Thing—a collection of elegies dedicated to his late wife and first reader, Jacqueline Cooley.

Ryan Mayer received his BA in English from Loyola University New Orleans and is pursuing his MFA at The University of New Orleans. He is an emerging poet and writer.

On February 2nd, Peter Cooley kindly agreed to discuss The One Certain Thing with me; our conversation took place April 26th via email.

RM: The title poem of your previous book, World Without Finishing, reads, “That we live again is certain.” In what ways does The One Certain Thing uphold, or push against, this notion?

PC: A great question! The One Certain Thing upholds the notion “that we live again is certain.” Both my wife and I believe in the immortality of the soul, in some kind of afterlife, and I hope the whole book makes Jacki “live again” in art for the reader.

RM: “There really is no word for it.” This is the first line in the opening poem, “Widower.” You have previously spoken about poetry as a means of naming. How does naming inform “Widower” and other 9

poems in your new book?

PC: The whole book is an attempt to name the emotion of grief and all the concomitant emotions surrounding it.

RM: The speaker of The One Certain Thing exercises as a means of “muscling out” his emotions during his grieving process. How important is physical activity in your writing process?

PC: For me, the writing process is very physical! That’s why I start all my poems with pencil and paper or pen and paper, so I can make immediate corrections and keep the poem an extension of my fingers and my hand.

RM: Some people wait years before addressing a personal loss through art. At a few points in the book, you mention struggling to write about your wife and her passing, even throwing away poems. Did you need to foster distance from your traumatic loss to write these elegies? Or did some element of process help you treat this subject matter?

PC: I thought I could not write this book—or even a single poem on the subject matter. But resistance for me is always a part of the writing process, for every single poem and every book I write, so I knew I had to jump in the water and teach myself to swim once I got in the water, which was deep from the start.

RM: Numerous poems in this book possess a prayer-like quality, such as “Letter to God, Letter to Jackie, a Romance.” Do you see them more as poems or as prayers?

PC: I see poetry as a form of prayer.

RM: The spiritual overlaps with the concrete in The One Certain 10

Thing; you depict the afterlife as indelibly entwined with this life. To what degree does the poet have an obligation to capture the abstract when writing about the concrete?

PC: We can’t know the afterlife except by intuiting it through our present life, can we? I don’t feel the poet has an obligation to write about the abstract. It will occur inevitably with the concrete.

RM: You once said that the visual in your poetry has become less significant for you. The poems in your new book emphasize sound. For example, we have poems with music-related titles: “Epithalamium,” “Barcarolle,” as well as the Étude poems. What incited this focal shift from the visual to the auditory?

PC: I think this is because volume is more concerned with death and the afterlife and finding words for the presence of the lost one in present experience. These concerns are necessarily less visual, aren’t they?

RM: Of the book’s visual imagery, live oaks reign as one of the most common; they also frequently appear in your work outside of this book.

What draws you to them?

PC: Live oaks! They fascinate me! Legend says that some live oaks in City Park predate the birth of Christ! That aside, they are all so different in their configurations, each having its own individuality. Many of them, too, look like trees in fairy tales such as “Hansel and Gretel.”

RM: New Orleans has an intimate and dualistic relationship with death: it provides a reason to celebrate as much as it provides a reason to mourn.

How did this duality influence you while writing this collection of elegies?

PC: The intimate and dualistic relationship of death in New Orleans is 11

embodied in my book, yes. But once again, this was the result of intuitive apprehension. I have lived here since 1975, and this ambience has become a part of me. I did not choose to take on the dualism: it chose me.

RM: Étude, Visitation, Canonical Hour and Romance—these labels can be used to categorize many of the poems in The One Certain Thing, since they appear in over half of the titles within it. How did these categories come to form the collection’s structural backbone?

PC: These are not “labels,” exactly, but structural devices I used to give the book an armature. And like many if not most of my “choices,” these were intuitions. I sensed that the book would be better with some “backbone,” as you put it, and I started with the notion of visitation, since that was literally occurring with a sense of presence of my wife in my life. I am not Roman Catholic, but I have always been intrigued with the canonical hours, so they came next. Then came Romance, which can be configured in different ways throughout literary history. Finally, my grandson played me an étude on his baritone on Zoom, so I added that.

RM: You divide the book into five sections. Do they parallel KüblerRoss’s model for the stages of grief?

PC: I am familiar with Kubler-Ross and thought about the five stages a lot in the early stages of my grief. There may have been an unconscious influence here.

RM: A quote from Faulkner, C.S. Lewis, Roland Barthes, Joan Didion and Paul Éluard preface each section of the book, respectively. What made you use quotes from these authors as section epigraphs?

PC: Lewis, Barthes and Didion all lost a loved one and wrote a book about it, all books I read and love. I chose the Faulkner and Éluard quotes 12

because I loved them, too, and knew them already.

RM: You mention several other writers in this collection, from Keats to Louise Glück, and you subtly nod to Poe in two poems with the word tintinnabulation. Which poets did you read while composing this book?

PC: Of course, I stole that word from Poe. How can we not all love Poe from junior high on? I read so much poetry that I honestly cannot remember what poets I was reading while writing the book.

RM: When did you know that this book was “complete”—that it gave a name to those unnamable emotions?

PC: The answer is impossible to fully articulate. I knew by intuition.

RM: Although it is a collection of elegies, each poem contributes to an overarching narrative; we see the speaker’s life change, his attitude change and ultimately the speaker himself change. How much of this change was consciously implemented by Peter Cooley the poet and how much of it was the influence of Peter Cooley the person?

PC: The overarching narrative you mention was created by me both as a person and a writer. I was very much aware of writing it. The speaker in the book finds purgation of emotion and healing through articulation.

And I did, too, in “real life.”

RM: Do you have any final thoughts you would like to share about The One Certain Thing or about poetry in general?

PC: Because of its subject matter, I hope the book will reach a general audience, not simply a “poetry audience.” Everyone has suffered grief.

I feel poetry—all poetry—is more needed now than ever before, not 13

just because the world is in crisis, which is nothing new, but because electronic communication has fractured our attention spans and placed us in a peculiar relationship to intimacy in relationships.

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Gerald Snare

On Peter Cooley’s The One Certain Thing

When news of the death of Peter Cooley’s wife had reached me,

his twelfth collection of poems, The One Certain Thing, had already appeared. The volume is surprising, for rather than the usual, often miscellaneous, collection of poems published earlier, this is a coherent and progressive series about one of the signal events of the poet’s life.

At first, the reader cannot miss hearing the “lyric cry” in poems meant obviously as laments, where the speaker/lamenter appears without name, but surely in propria persona. There’s little escaping the force of Peter Cooley’s own appearance here.

An authentic lyric cry or expostulation cannot be just a simple, recorded ejaculation of grief-stricken emotion. The speaker here has a character throughout, and that character is a poet, and his craft is often the center of his poems. Moreover, the poet is perhaps known by his readers, or at least some of them. The person speaking the elegy appears; the object of elegiac lament appears as well; the mode is direct address. The overall effect of the volume is the sense of presentness and intimacy, but that effect is to me sometimes unsettling, as if one were to stumble onto an encounter not meant to be seen or heard. With this, comes a mild sense of embarrassment. Here, for example, is a passage from “The First Day of Advent” (p.36): Our Advent calendar… you sewed twenty-five years back….

Little pockets number days until Christ’s birth, each holding a hook. I have to stop crying.

I’ll loop a star on every one as the days come on.

I have to stop crying. That day together we hung this calendar where I will fix it soon

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by the front window. Until Christ’s birth.

You sewed these pieces, you complained.

“Why do it?” I shot back. I have to stop crying. We started quarreling after that.

The intimacies discomfort us hearers.

At the center of a good number of these poems you wiIl find a continuing trope, call it presence and absence, especially evident in the six “Visitation” poems. The term Peter Cooley uses, “visitation,” seems to me surely meant in a sacramental sense. It cannot refer to something banal like a Thanksgiving visit from an Aunt Maud, but to the special and singular event of THE Visitation, when The pregnant Virgin visits her cousin Elizabeth, likewise pregnant, with John the Baptist, a category of coming-together of especial significance. And so we’ll take the term here, though these are ghostly visitations, a beloved shade appearing, as if, after the dread event, Euridyce comes to speak with Orpheus from Hades. Not so much of an odd inference since the singer of these poems is likewise a poet. The poems have an archetypal pedigree and echo, but sounded in an intentionally idiomatic diction and syntax.

I think the most arresting of these is “This Living Hand….” There appear here two significant objects, two necklaces intertwined that the poet tries to disentangle when the two lives that wore them cannot be disentangled. And that relatively mild metaphor is introduced by another, almost shocking image, of the poet snatching the necklace around about his wife’s neck just before she is taken to the crematorium. In another of these poems, “Visitation: The Eighth Sacrament,” the trope becomes specifically Anglo-Catholic, and articulates an exchange of persons: “…

The unseen seen,/ leading me, winded back to our house./ You’re there, you’re there, you are this sacrament/ only the grieving know, together with the grieved.” And so the “unseen,” the shade, “seen” by the poet; “you’re there, you’re here,” as in a sacramental presence and, finally, “the grieving,” the poet, and “the grieved,” the shade: the repetitions of the 16

same roots almost elide subject and object.

The progress of the poems in the time sequence seems linear, often marked by the days or weeks since the time of the death that is the central subject of the collection. But there is as well a second temporal pattern evident, a liturgical one, in the poems named after the seven canonical hours or the Daily Offices. So thus the frame for the ruminations that constitute the subjects of each of them. These Hours appear at first glance randomly scattered through the five sections of the volume, appearing in this sequence: Compline, Vespers, Prime, Matins, None, “First Hour” (which I take to be Lauds). This would seem to be shy of the traditional number in Benedict’s scheme, which run like this: Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers, Compline. Now I take it as worth our attention that four of these Hours cluster in the final fifth section, as if the sacramental thrust of the poems were being intensified. Just before “None” (named here “The Ninth Hour,”—i.e. 3 o’clock) there appears the splendid “Visitation: The Eighth Sacrament.” The “eighth” sacrament bleeds into the “ninth” Hour that follows. But this ninth Hour is curiously a morning poem and its imagistic heart clearly is the Eucharist. So outside the synesthesia I noted earlier, opposites conjoin in the imagery of presence even in a kind of absence, as in the Body and the Blood: “you’re here, you’re there, you are the sacrament/only the grieving know, together with the grieved.” Then comes this tour de force, the union of the sacrament with the writing of the poem: Which one of us is writing this? Me? You? Why, both, of course, inspired by the light When dawn throws down its crowns, the blinding luminous, Shaping the fractured world into unbrokenness This constitutes a kind of poetic sacrament where the divine/departed/ muse inspires with the blinding “light” of dawn, an utterance that in its power, like the holy communion itself is supposed to, shapes into unity 17

and wholeness a broken world.

We will observe, furthermore, that the sequence of Hours seems intentionally reversed from the usual progress through the day. Rather than beginning at Lauds and ending with Compline, the collection begins with Compline (the office immediately before retiring), for “Compline: a Canonical hour” is the last poem in Section One (p. 20), and ends with “The First Hour” ( the office usually said at daybreak) (p.72). Does the death bring night and the grief and the darkness that begins the volume?

And does the progress through the Hours finally end in the coming of light and a promise of union at its conclusion? The “First Canonical Hour, Last Interrogation” is, after all, the penultimate poem in the whole collection.

And that “First” signals a “Last,” surely a coda.

At any reading, the sequence prepares us fully for the last poem, “The One Certain Thing,” the title of it all.

A day will come I’ll watch you reading this.

I’ll look up from these words I’m writing now— This line I’m standing on. I’ll be right here, alive again. I’ll breathe on you this breath.

Touch this word now, that one. Warm, isn’t it?

I will return to this poem for extended treatment a little later.

When we readers arrive at Section Three, it’s hardly inadvertent that its first poems are “Mythos: A Visitation” and “The First Day of Advent,” announcements for certain significant changes about to come.

And with these changes come as well a freeing-up of the syntax from the usual prescriptions, some bending of grammatical rules, certain leaps in connotations and semantic connections and, in short, a greater freedom in form and expression, even a kind of strangeness. And then, surprisingly, comes a return to the orderly bass-note of the pentameter in the poems that end the section. Days are passing in “Etude: Three-Part Variation on Loneliness” (p. 42), a year and a half have gone by in “Epidermal” 18

(p.43), memories accumulate, continuing into Four, and objects accrue significance.

One of the final poems (in Section Five), is “Just One of the Afterdeaths,” with a different, almost prophetic poetic voice, though couched in a modernist idiomatic diction, side-by-side with modernist elaborations, superb sonics, and the firmness of the accentual scheme.

All right, I’m putting in the call. Now, here the corners of the hours, call-and-response poured through the streets’ fissures when I look down, starting my prayers on their morning walk.

I think we can be assured there is a pun on “mourning” here; in “Monkeys,” a poem we’ll come back to shortly, we have “On the morning dresser, the mourning/dresser….” The whole pattern of the year and the Hours, beginning with “when they handed me her ashes” to the “eternal moment where we live,” (lines two and three), the poet has been narrating spring and winter and the return of spring.

From our false spring retuned to winter and snap, And then turned back to spring and blossoming.

Whatever vow I made yesterday’s gods Won’t get me through this morning’s lacerations…

There’s honey in the wind, my first god sings, A god hidden… until we call them in our desperations.

All right, I’m putting in that call. …

Starting my prayers on their morning walk.

So this “afterdeath” begins in a morning walk, but ends in a spiritual aubade.

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There is a poem in Section Three that will help me focus, finally, on what I take to be a special significance of the volume, something quite beyond the instances of griefs remembered and pondered. “The Monkeys, the Monkeys: An Anniversary Poem” (p. 39) contains what amounts to a paradigm of response to loss expressed by an insistent focus on poetry at large. The poem begins with all the accoutrements and satisfactions of formal order, an order that will almost immediately be abandoned.

Our days come so they may go away.

We have so many-few, and who can stop the count?

This sounds like the beginning of a villanelle! (p.39) Now comes the rejection of that order.

No, no, I want pentameter to stop!

There, I’ve stanched it.

The word is violent, as in stopping a bleeding wound. From this point, the two-line versicles run on without “pentameter” until the conclusion, just after the shocking and brutal image of the Beloved dead on the living-room sofa, “your tongue hung across your lower lip.” In the last three lines we come upon a restoration of formal order, an arresting and perhaps mysterious stasis.

I knew before I touch your cold forehead— Rhyme lets me say it. And pentameter.

I knew you were dead.

Cooley’s terms “rhyme” and “pentameter,” here and elsewhere, can be both literal but are more likely metaphoric of something like “poetic construction.” Here the odd freedom of formal order, two pentameter followed by a five-syllable line, permits a declarative, even definitive, 20

conclusion in the full realization of rhymed lines. The progress from the almost charming, domestic image of “two little monkeys” bought in “the eponymous coffee shop” to the stark and very real presence of a dead body has been made possible by insisting on the manipulations of the poetic art that finally enables the poet to talk directly: “Rhyme lets me say it.”

This will come to be an art that heals.

It may seem something of a leap now to bring my own reader to consider an issue these lines open on to. My guide here will be Seamus Heaney, especially his reading of some of the poems of Elizabeth Bishop in his The Redress of Poetry , the Oxford Lectures of 1995. Heaney’s preoccupation in these splendid addresses will bear directly upon what Peter Cooley has written in his collection, and especially on the poem that concludes the volume.

In his next-to-last address, “Counting to a Hundred: On Elizabeth Bishop” (dated 1992), he takes up as his own conclusion her poem, a villanelle, “One Art,” from her last volume, Geography III (1976). Here is her concluding stanza that most intrigues him.

Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident The art of losing’s not too hard to master Though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

The villanelle will articulate almost obsessively “the art of losing,” “master,” “disaster.” By losing she obviously means the death of a loved one. To Heaney, this poem “is wonderful lyric writing; it is impossible to separate the poem’s reality as a made thing from its effect as a personal cry.” He will go on in his analysis to observe that “the shocking traumatic reality of what happened [which he will insist was in fact a disaster] almost overbrims the containing form. The verb ‘master’ places itself in the scales opposite its twin noun ‘disaster’, and holds the balance. And the secret of the balance is given in the parenthesis ‘(Write it!)’.” There 21

is a compulsion to render the reality of a death with its attendant cries into an order that lets us deal with it.

And thus in Heaney’s reading, “’One Art’ tells us…with an acute pang of intimacy, that the act of writing is an act of survival….” (185). I want to stress that Heaney’s huge subject, the redress of poetry, is precisely defined throughout by poetry’s power to re-establish something that has been lost, which is to say, that desired balance in a mind now, alas, burdened and tilted by loss. That power comes to the poet, in short, by following the injunction, “Write it!” This is what I find especially enacted in “The Monkeys, the Monkeys,” as I explained above, and I believe it is most definitively articulated in the formal order of the final poem, “The One Certain Thing.” Earlier, the prospect of restoration is palpable as well in “The Eighth Sacrament” (p.67). There are canonically seven sacraments, of course. Sacrament signifies sacred presence and the power of that presence to make sacred. The Beloved constitutes the eighth: “you are this sacrament,” and thus sacramentally present to the poet, even now as simultaneous author of the poem: “which one of us is writing this? Me? You?/ Why, both, of course.” Both sacramental poets are ‘… inspired by the light/…the luminous, shaping the fractured world into unbrokenness.”

Both have become creators, shaping by their inspired art a world as yet to be whole, coherent, and unbroken. They now write the world into order by poetry, as both remain in the poetry they write.

Now if there is to be a resolution of these liturgical years of litany, we will see it in the cool control of this last poem. For it is here that Peter Cooley does indeed “Write it,” not in the intricacies of a villanelle (a form he outright scorned in “Monkeys”), but in having the figure of the Beloved come to inhabit the art of the poet. The usual trick of the elegiac trade—a metamorphosis—has no place here. There is no distant voice to declare Now Lycidas the shepherds weep no more, Hence forth thou art the Genius of the shore.

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The Beloved in all her immediacy becomes present in the very composition of her immortality.

A day will come I’ll watch you reading this. …I’ll breathe on you this breath.

Touch this word now, that one.

Watching you read, Eternity’s with us.

If there is to be a lyric cry of grief expressed in the whole sequence, as there has been, there will be as well an echo, the elaboration in the lyric that sounds it. And that at the end answers the profound disturbances in the poet who wrote it and in us who watched him cry. Heaney: “[Elizabeth Bishop] does continually manage to advance poetry beyond the point where it has been helping us to enjoy life to that even more profoundly verifying point where it helps us also to endure it. (185)

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Peter Cooley

Two Poems Gracelight etc Love me less, I asked the world.

But it insisted on another day I’d dance when I should walk, I’d sing my talking and I’d wake to hear the mockingbird, come back from Calvary open the morning to my wounded light.

And then the mockinbirdonmockingbird reminded me of the gracelight in my fist.

I had only to open all ten fingers very slowly, then I would find the corresponding suns I can break open in every face I meet.

I am not up to this, I tell the world.

That’s why I’m here, the first mockingbird sang back.

I was there, when Chaos came to Form.

I’ll cover for you if you drop a note.

I’ll fill in if you slip, dithyramb, box step, then our waltz.

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Quarantine Alba New Orleans, April 2020

Listen. These are my gods before light today, an orchestra of silence preceding the first birds.

The waiting dark I call it, the sure round eternity encircles before morning comes.

Hungry to be alive another day, while the pandemic rages, I crave appetite for that first music coming through the trees, green oratorios, singing of hidden wings awakening sweet-sour taste buds of my tongue.

If only I could pipe up corresponding melodies!

While I’m still writing this, new gods come and go.

How could I begin, even try, to count?

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Yuan Changming

Two Poems Homelanding Having nothing better to do, I kill Time by looking at a traditional Chinese painting on my iPad Much enlarged, it appears like A plain sheet of rice paper Smeared with ink. I view it In the presence of bonsai; I Drop several thick strokes to the floor Of history, leaving a few fine lines Behind the sofa, & failing To catch a colorless corner Between black and white It is a landscape newly relocated Into my heart’s backyard. Then I sit On my legs, meditating about there Being no light in the picture, no Shadow of anything, no perspective As in hell. Isn’t this the art of seeing?

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Closer to the Heart: a Bilinguacultural Poem

怒: anger results from slavery

Rising above heart 愁: worry occurs when autumn

Sits high on your heart 意: meaning is defined as

A sound over the heart

念: idea is what today holds

Upon the heart 忘: forgetting happens

When there’s death on heart

忍：to tolerate is to bear a knife

Right above your heart

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Georgia Tiffany

Gravity . . . try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.

John Cage If she props the lid open, draws her finger across the harp, leaves a trail through films of air settled there, and breathes as though the sounding board can rescue breath, surely someone will hear it, the pedal sustain it so much like a prayer she should be kneeling.

But she is not kneeling.

Anchored from the hip, stiff-backed, head tipped forward, she turns one page, then another, lips parted, hum of (could it be light?) purling through her veins.

What has ever felt so heavy as her hands floating above the ivory

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without touching, never touching that translucent whisper of keys below and hardly space enough between?

Is it for silence, or gravity, her arms ache with music?

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Maryanne Hannan

Holy Host of Inquiries Circles, sibilance, the line without end, open sound Clean floors, wide windows, loamy earth Stained glass, Gregorian chant, the elevated Monstrance Consolations, all; also, parables, mantras, the Jesus Prayer A true cross, I know, depends on two non-finites The upright piece, no bottom, no end to transcendence The transverse, for same-plane, same-time each other My friend is sick. Nobody is ready. He needs a miracle Yesterday, I noticed my town paved a section of sidewalk Pristine, unblemished. Where it starts and ends makes no sense

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Thomas Bonner, Jr.

Review of City of Hey Baby, Poems by Patrice Melnick (Finishing Line Press, 2020, 27pp)

“Dear Rock n Bowl,/ Your bowling lanes are uneven…” strikes a

quirky note about a quirky place and an equally quirky New Orleans. “Rock n Bowl,” brief and rhythmic, captures the intriguing nature of a place of dancing and bowling, a place like New Orleans, where the expected fails to occur and the unexpected sinks its treble hook into both its residents and visitors. City of Hey Baby is a celebration of its mind and heart. The poetry has a spontaneous quality, a musical cadence (“synchronized pounding”), and images that reflect the sources of its inspiration. Having come to New Orleans after time in Alaska and the Central African Republic, Patrice Melnick spent thirteen years living in shotgun styled houses along the Mississippi River and near Bayou St. John. Her years of teaching at Xavier University of Louisiana, an historically Black University, introduced her, a native of Dallas, Texas, to the dominant ethnic and racial community of the city.

Dance, a central element of her and the city’s lives, leaps forward in the first poem “Dancing at Tipitina’s After the Flood,” as “I sway in the blue/ arms of ‘God knows whom.’” Like so many references to the city, before-and-after the flood of 2005 is a dividing line here, and the poem revels in the spirit of a people pushing “past weary houses and yards of car corpses.” The damaged appliances stand street side in “Refrigerator Lesson”: “dented metal boxes/ bursting with despair.” As in Melnick’s memoir Po-boy Contraband: From Diagnosis Back to Life (based on her earlier book Turning Up the Volume), dance and music contribute to poems throughout this slim but rich volume. “Sunday gospel music” rises above damage in “Fifty Days After Hurricane Katrina on Dumaine Street.” In 31

“How I Came to Understand Boudin,” Melnick writes, “We zydeco dance and the morning swirls/ with color.” In “A Reporter Who Parties,” a “lost daughter” enters “the rhythm of any song/ a polka, a Texas 2-step” and locks “into the French Louisiana/ waltz.” Dancers in a second line “highstepped, crossing and uncrossing legs” as Mathew, the eponymous title character of the poem, leaps from a bar to join the mourners. A woman leaps aboard a bus in “Magnifique” with a dance-like style that brings the poet to write, “what a move!”

Melnick’s poems bring out her contact with a population that gets little attention literally and imaginatively in New Orleans. In “Dancing at Tipitinas after the Flood,” the narrator goes to dance with unknown men.

Andrea in “French Quarter Railings” drops her keys from the balcony to let the poet enter “this second floor flat/ of chaos and freedom.” In “Dead Woman in Winter,” a hardly known Button finds a corpse of a homeless woman. During bowling in “Tattoos and Birthmarks,” the narrator begins to know Joe through the iconography etched into his skin. We have already met Mathew, who suffers from an excess of alcohol, leaves the city, and dies in Galveston: “They threw your ashes into the ocean/ and dust danced in the rhythm of the winds/ in the musical rush of the waves.”

The title poem, which closes the volume, is a reflection on life in this old American city. The first line of each of the eight stanzas asserts a feature or characteristic of the city, most bleeding into the subsequent lines: “New Orleans is the city of ‘Hey Baby,’/ from the coffee shop waitress, the delivery/ man, the telephone operator….” Throughout the volume Melnick shows an awareness of language being part of local experience, both charming as in the previous passage and a warning as in “Dumaine Street”: “’Hello’ means/ too many things.” Food emerges as well in her title poem: “Port of Call burgers,” and in other poems: “a chocolate croissant,” “boudin,” and “lemon pound cake.” Melnick discovers, as so many have, that New Orleans and South Louisiana are places of the senses.

This collection of poems has the feeling of a farewell letter to a lover.

In the aftermath of the flood of 2005, Melnick left the city for the village of 32

Grand Coteau in Southwestern Louisiana, the heart of the Cajun (Acadian) country. Afterward, she writes of the city, “I am visiting a place where I once lived./ I am visiting the person I used to be.” In “Walking Through Palmetto Swamps,” she reveals her new self as she walks through the swamp with her husband Olan talking about mutual experience, “I turned the page and he has already/ whistled his way in.”

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David G. Lanoue

Lenard D. Moore: An Interview and a Book Review

The Interview The interview took place via the Internet during the first week of January 2021. David G. Lanoue (DGL) questioned acclaimed African American poet Lenard D. Moore (LDM) about his writing in general as well as how the current pandemic may have affected it.

DGL: 2020 was a hard, strange year, so many changes in lifestyle, in work, in how we relate to one another. How about your poetry? Did anything change about your poetry in 2020, what it means to you what you want it to mean to your readers?

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LDM: Yes, there were changes to my poetry in 2020, especially with the topics and delivery of readings. All of my readings were by way of Zoom. Maybe I should say I presented Zoom readings. I taught poetry workshops on Zoom. Zoom became the major platform for me. I have also participated in readings on Facebook Live. For example, here is the link to Part One of the major three-part virtual series, “Afrofuturism and the Black Speculative Arts” in which I participated: [YouTube https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=8U41wB4_E5U&feature=youtu.be]. I highly recommend listening to Part Two and Part Three, too. In fact, I think they will play as soon as Part One finishes playing. There are several well-known poets and writers who participated in the series, including Ishmael Reed, Eugene B. Redmond, Devorah Major, Jerry W. Ward, Jr, Ayodele Nzinga, Glenn Parris, C. Liegh McInnis, Tureeda Mikell, Len Lawson, Darrell Stover, Avotcja, Michael Warr, and Staajabu. Dr. Kim McMillon served as the moderator. Additionally, I have participated in a literary conversation with Dr. Glenn Paris and Dr. Lauri Scheyer on a program titled “Writers on Writing” on Facebook Live. A number of these events are on YouTube. After the lockdown in March of 2020, I taught my classes online. I became more involved with teaching with Moodle. I began to type comments on my students’ assignments online. I had long been downloading my students’ assignments to grade and entering their grades in Moodle. I had also long been uploading assignments in Moodle.

For several years, however, I have entered my students’ grades into Moodle and then their semester grades/final grades, too.

DGL: This week I’m preparing for my own classes in literary criticism for the upcoming semester. I plan to ask my students questions about Plato or Aristotle, so I’ll ask you the same question—actually there are two questions that I like to ask them to help reflect on what poetry means to them. Here’s the first one: Plato in The Republic expressed the idea that poetry can change people’s lives, that poetry has an ethical function, and this frankly worried Plato. Do you agree with Plato? As a poet do you feel 35

like you can affect the way people live and even change their lives? Or are you more on the side of Aristotle who in the Poetics argued that poetry is just a way to blow off steam, to elicit an emotional release? Which ancient Greek philosopher do you find yourself closer to you when thinking about your own poetry? Are you changing lives or are you inciting an emotional experience? Or is it a bit of both?

LDM: Yes, I certainly think that poetry can change people’s lives, but I do not know why one would worry about it. I feel that poetry changes people’s lives for good reasons, such as maybe evoking a greater emotional appeal and enabling people to glean multiple meanings for certain topics and situations. No, I am not certain anyone can affect the way people live, because people must want to change their lives. I do think, however, that poetry can reveal the beauty of the natural world and the richness of people’s lives. To that end, perhaps, people would not want to pollute the natural world. No, I do not think poetry is just a way to blow off steam.

I believe that poetry has its function in people’s lives. I hope my poetry changes people’s lives and triggers an emotional appeal in people’s lives.

DGL: To what degree do your feelings about poetry align with the Black Arts movement of the 60s —Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez and others? They seemed to be following Plato’s idea that poetry can change the world; that it can bring about social progress and awareness that would help the civil rights struggle. Are you aligned with poets who are using their work to bring justice to the world and especially to the USA? LDM: Yes, I believe that people change helps to change the world.

I also believe that it is the poet’s job to depict truths in his or her poetry.

Then, maybe poetry can also help to bring justice in the world. Whenever something happens, people usually turn to poetry. Thus, poetry possibly offers answers to questions that might haunt people. Additionally, poetry can bring healing to people. In short, poetry has its functions in society.

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DGL: The second question I like to ask my students regarding Plato and Aristotle concerns where poetry comes from, what poetry is. In another of his dialogues, The Ion, Plato describes poetry as a divine madness, an inspiration from the gods above. Aristotle, on the other hand, talks about poetry as a set of techniques and rhetorical structures skillfully applied.

Where do you find yourself on that continuum? Do you believe with Plato that poetry is inspired by something beyond your conscious self, or do you find yourself more in agreement with Aristotle—that poetry is about mastering techniques and structures?

LDM: When writing poetry, I definitely think the divine enables me to write poetry. I also think that mastering one’s craft enables the poet to write poetry. Additionally, I think reading widely helps the poet to write poetry, too. In short, I think more than one technique enables the poetry, particularly me, to write poetry. Furthermore, I think years of working at my craft enable me to write poetry.

DGL: Charles Fort once told me once that his poetry comes directly from the spirit world. He definitely seemed to agree with Plato’s divine madness theory. Is your poetry spiritual in origin or purpose?

LDM: I like Charles Fort’s poetry. I have known him for decades.

To that end, I am aware that he writes prose poetry. At times, perhaps, the ancestors speak to the poet. Moreover, I have written poetry, which I feel embodies the spiritual in some way. I prefer to let the literary critics analyze my poetry.

DGL: Your first collection in 1982, Poems of Love and Understanding, has a very provocative title. Do you feel like your poetry promotes love and understanding among people?

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LDM: I hope my poetry promotes love and understanding among people. My job as poet is to write the best poem as humanly possible and to write about truths.

DGL: When the great library at Alexandria burned a lot of the wisdom and art of the ancient world was lost. If you were to imagine a future great library were to burn, and you could save only one of your books for future readers, which one would it be? And why?

LDM: In the situation that you have described, I think I would try to save Geography of Jazz, because I think it embodies music. I think music has a way of calming people and speaking to people. I hope I was able to get the poems right in Geography of Jazz, because I spent twenty or more years working on it. I kept revising the manuscript and taking poems out of it and adding poems to it. If I had the opportunity to save one of the several anthologies, which I have edited or co-edited, I think I would save All the Songs We Sing, because I strongly believe in the collective voice.

The anthology celebrates the 25th Anniversary of the Carolina African American Writers’ Collective. Of course, I like all of my books. However, I think I should at least attempt to answer your question.

DGL: Living in New Orleans, I really enjoy The Geography of Jazz. Could you tell how this book came about and the role of music in it—and in your poetry in general?

LDM: I have listened to jazz for decades. I really like jazz. I have been performing my poetry with musicians and bands for more than two decades. I especially appreciate rhythm. To that end, I have tried to write poetry with rhythm. Decades ago, some of my jazz poetry appeared in literary journals. Additionally, some of my blues poetry also appeared in blues magazines long ago. Thus, I wanted to work with rhythm and music in my poetry. Yet, I began working on my jazz poetry manuscript 38

that became Geography of Jazz.

DGL: I first came across your poetry in the form of haiku. I remember reading and reviewing your collection, gathering at the crossroads: The Million Man March, in 2003 [Xavier Review 23.2 (Fall 2003): 60-63], and recently I taught your earlier haiku book, Desert Storm: A Brief History (1993). In these collections of one-breath poetry you seem to be chronicling the African American experience with certain echoes of Richard Wright.

Did Richard Wright inspire your haiku? If so, how?

LDM: No, I was unaware of Richard Wright’s haiku when I started writing haiku. At that time, I had not heard of Richard Wright. However, I wanted to chronicle the African American experience with my haiku writing. Of course, years later, I read Richard Wright’s haiku, though I had already had my idea of haiku through much experimentation and reading Raymond Roseliep.

DGL: How do you keep your haiku deeply reflective of authentic human experience and not overtly political? I’ll explain what I’m trying to ask: on the back cover of Desert Storm, Sonia Sanchez writes in her blurb that your book is “a searching and sensitive commentary on the desert storm fiasco.” I don’t find your book to be a “commentary” per se, and I certainly don’t feel like you pass judgment on the politics of Desert Storm in it. What was your aim in that book? How did you go about achieving it?

LDM: No, my aim is to always employ the haiku aesthetics when writing haiku, though I try to work my own way. I have long striven toward my own style and voice in my haiku writing. So, I just wanted to write the best haiku humanly possible without commentary. I hope that the reader brings his or her own experience to the reading of my haiku.

To that end, you are right; I did not try to pass judgment on the politics. I am honored and humble that Sonia Sanchez wrote a blurb for my Desert 39

Storm haiku book.

DGL: Of your many other collections of poetry, The Open Eye in 1985, Forever Home in 1992, A Temple looming in 2008–which one of these works reflects you trying something different, perhaps taking a new approach or taking risks?

LDM: I feel that a Temple Looming takes a new approach in the way that I wrote about old black and white photographs and the ordering of the poems in the book or the structure of the book. However, I like all of my books for different reasons. A book is like its author’s child. For that reason, I do not believe in choosing one of my books over my other books.

DGL: Final question: Who reads your poetry, Lenard? Who would you like to have reading your poetry? And, in general, should Americans be reading more poetry?

LDM: I hope everyone reads my poetry, especially because I try to capture the times, the moments, the places, and experiences that I might encounter. I think Americans should be reading more poetry to understand the world in which we live and to find meanings. For example, many poets are writing about the ongoing pandemic, including me.

Thank you very much for such great questions and such an engaging interview, David!

DGL: Thank you!

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The Book Review: The Geography of Jazz Lenard D. Moore, The Geography of Jazz: Poems. Rpt. Blair Press, 2020; originally published by Mountains & Rivers Press, 2018. $16.95. 67 pages. ISBN: 978-1-949467-30-7.

I was already working on my review of this collection when its author, Lenard D. Moore, confessed in an interview that, if he had to save just one of his books from a modern-day Library of Alexandria-like fire, this would be the one. I therefore proceed with the added confidence of the poet’s stamp of approval when I recommend this book of forty-five jazzrelated, jazz-infused poems as a “must-read” for those who have followed Moore’s career for some time as well as for those readers who can treat themselves to the pleasure of discovering him now.

As he also mentioned in the interview, Moore seeks to capture “times […] moments […] places, and experiences” in his poetry. He remains always ready to pull his little pad from a pocket to capture here-and-now inspiration (a deft act that I’ve witnessed more than once). The poems in this collection express the freshness of a participant observer who keeps pad and pen always at hand, and who casts a keen eye, listens with a trained ear, to “capture” experience with joyous immediacy.

The bassist hugs the bass, plunks it.

Ting, boom, ting boom — the drummer beats and booms. Saxophonist weaves notes, oscillates, blows and the pianist finger-dances on the keys… (“Swinging Cool” 3)

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This is poetry meant to be read aloud, poetry you can dance to. Moore’s playful and seemingly effortless marshalling of rhythm, alliteration, onomatopoeia, and sudden, off-the cuff metaphor invites the reader into an imaginative experience that is not coincidentally similar to live performances of the music that he so plainly loves.

The Geography of Jazz provides a personal map of jazz-turnedpoetic performance as filtered through Moore’s senses and imagination, beginning with the Raleigh Jazz Festival (1986) and proceeding with interesting stops in North Carolina (Duke University Chapel), Kansas City (The Blue Room), San Francisco, New York (2751 Broadway and Lenox Lounge in Harlem), and ending brilliantly in the place where the music began: New Orleans, Louisiana. Along the way, a procession of musicians and singers, living and dead, weaves through the pages: Duke Ellington, “King” Ray Charles, Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holiday, Carmen Lundy, Nnenna Freelon, and John Coltrane.

This collection of poems doesn’t attempt to provide a comprehensive or encyclopedic overview of jazz; readers shouldn’t expect Ken Burns-type coverage in The Geography of Jazz. Instead, Moore’s interactions with music and musicians in this book are achingly personal. As I mentioned, he is a participant observer. His journey through the Land of Jazz involves introspection of his own experiences in the moment that he is having them, in the moment of listening.

I’d rather hold my woman than this pen, buckle ourselves into long cantillating love serenades.

The tune arouses slow dance memory: 42

breath to breath hearts in sync like Miles’ ensemble… (“Eros and Jazz” 41) The seven-part “New Orleans Suite” with which he closes the book is a tiny masterpiece. In the first movement, “Evening,” he arrives at the Louis Armstrong International Airport eager to savor the music born in Congo Square but sadly disappointed. The only whiff of jazz in the air that night is the airport’s name. In the second movement, “Afternoon, The Next Day,” he enjoys a half-shrimp, half-oyster po’boy at Mandina’s on Canal Street: jazz for the taste buds, perhaps, but still not what he is searching for. In the third part (“At Maple Leaf Bar”), he finally experiences live music: a performance of Kermit Ruffins at the Maple Leaf Bar on Oak Street in the Carrollton neighborhood.

Kermit’s trumpet telling Cajun secrets in blissful night when we wish drums and horn to levitate us, spent phones receiving message in smoky midnight when ghosts tiptoe… (“New Orleans Suite” 60) Subsequent movements describe the poet waking up “in an iron frame bed” (61), eager for more explorations of New Orleans, including beignets at Café du Monde, and ending, with the seventh movement, “On Bourbon Street.” His visceral evocation of the music that he hears that night brings his book to a crashing crescendo, a long awaited “eruption.”

The sweet, metallic sound 43

we seek: trumpets flaring harmony.

We linger. Stars punctuate the indigo sky.

This is how jazz allures: a brilliant movement, voluptuous music, spreading, molten, fluent as a trail of smoke.

Blue birds blaze midnight air.

We take flight. (65) With his Geography of Jazz Lenard D. Moore invites us to a sound feast spicier than any po’boy, sweeter than any beignet. He invites us to join with him to hear the music, to connect to it, to love it… and to fly.

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Lenard D. Moore

Two Poems No Dreaming for Us Just when I think it’s safe to dream the news jolts us like some voltage George Floyd screams from sun-scorched asphalt as he lies straight as Grandma’s ‘lectric iron white knee weighted on his black neck, sparking marchers to global chants against live wires of evil ways

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Pandemic Blues If COVID comes, I’ll kick it out the door.

If COVID comes, I’ll kick it out the door.

Make it hurry, baby, right off my floor.

I only have room for you in this house.

Only have room for you in this house.

And I don’t even worry ‘bout a mouse.

Baby, don’t let the blues jump up on me.

Don’t let the blues jump up on me.

‘Cause I need to keep myself kinda free.

Oh, baby, stay with me, just settle here.

Baby, stay with me, just settle here.

I need you to whisper, “Yes,” in my ear.

I hear on the news that covid’s so bad.

Hear on the news that covid’s so bad.

Gotta keep us from being sad.

If you go away, then covid might knock.

You go away, then covid might knock.

But I’m glad, baby, you’re my mighty rock.

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Elizabeth Crowell

Loehmann’s, Saturdays, Ridgewood, New Jersey, 1970’s My mother approached the store from the back, through a bumpy, cracked drive, where the roots of the overgrown red oaks pushed the pavement up.

There weren’t a lot of stores like this then mixed with different brands in giant rooms, and something happened to my mother there that didn’t happen at B.Altman’s where she bought her wool suits, or the local store with bright sweaters and printed turtlenecks.

At Loehmann’s, she said she wanted a “little something,” and picked silk blouses, floppy dresses to try on.

In the dressing rooms, I pretended not to look at the tanned ladies with garters, hose with no panties, braless or those who slid on dress after dress then shed them down to their painted toes.

The men, jackets on, with soft leather loafers, slouched in the chairs, with Star Ledgers folded to the crossword, and waited with a patience my own father never had.

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When my mother said we weren’t Jewish, she did not yet know her paternal grandmother’s family fled Prague and tucked their religion inside the Holy Bible, where they wrote the births.

They kept the cream-cheese, endive, pickled herring, horseradish, which her heart-fragile father spread on rye bread with roast beef.

She did not know that dozens of her relatives died in the Holocaust exactly at the time her beloved brother was shot down by the Germans and spent over a year in a prison camp.

When I looked at those women with their bodies, the loves of their lives slumped outside, I had no idea I was gay, My mother and I lived for a long time, with what we did not know about ourselves.

On the way home, on the Garden State Parkway, in the long blue wagon, windows rolled down, my mother said it was a store worth going to, though many times, like now, she found nothing.

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Ajay Sawant

A Family Clause With the flock of her desolated hair, I have always loved June Her firm eyes, timely wrinkles frustration loneliness, a deficit childhood, early misfortune of father’s testaments, solitude & a Caucasian humour “My Taco Bell is too fiery!” speaks when mine is not Let me say it differently I have always loved tanned lips and accidentally escaped lab rats uncertain of their cause The alphabets on gravestones filled over the course of time vanished overlooked seldom flowered I stand there, the stag stuck in words, ‘Ivory’, they say— a stag nibbled ivory June remains— a still rock withered under mother’s absence, keeping with a blithesome

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Where do you find it, June? “a family clause” Or a resurrection temperament I say “a family clause” I say “a resurrection temperament” Under her eyes I whisper “a family clause”

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Nidhi Agrawal

Two Poems THE GODDESS INCARNATES Awakening Of the Mother Within Cow Dust Hour I dwell on the ferocious cremation grounds Yearning for my Mother Kali!

She carries waxing gibbous on her forehead, The Sun grows larger in her right pupil, The Moon drips from the two corners of her left eye, She burns the demons in the catacomb of her three eyes.

You cannot carry her consort in your palm, He keeps her love and fury in the ocean of his heart.

I am restless, this longing to meet my Mother will swallow me.

Oh, Mother! I have transposed to a ghoul Your disciples are my friends now.

They claim, Between the day and night – When twilight rises to the throat of the sky, The hours of Sun and darkness make love, There is no period of half – light, I will meet you at, The time of Union.

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Emancipation My eyes brim with the weight of dusk, Emotions conflagrate in my heart Burning the corpse without fuel.

This dawn I am returning to my house To constellate my belongings.

The entrance is clouded by the Scattered scars of my childhood, Every drawer is sealed with the secrets of My disappointments.

Today, I let go of my failures and rise From the floor, As soot rises from the throat.

With every effort to clean the house My spine travels to the nucleus of my brain Showing me the way to the bedroom.

At the bedroom’s door, I stand startled by the view.

The Mother Goddess is coming together With the God of Mountains, Consuming my form and liberating me From prison.

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Notes “Go to the temple to light candles before the altar of God. First remove the darkness of sin, pride, and ego, from your heart…” —Rabindra Nath Tagore To remove the darkness from my heart, I read, meditate on Mother Kali and Lord Shiva. This has nothing to do with spirituality; it is not even linked with religion. It’s Bhakti (devotion) that leans on the powerful forces of attraction and energy. For me, Bhakti starts with curiosity, travels forward to exploring spaces, and culminates in more questions about the divine. This practice helps uncover a true face, representing the wisdom that stimulates profound transformation and liberation. It reveals your fears, pain, and suffering, showing you that when you finally let these emotions arise and be, you begin to heal, overcome your fears, and attain love and happiness.

Shakta Bhakti: Shakta bhakti or devotional love is the worship of a single great goddess, Mahadevi or Mahakali or Parama Shakti, a goddess with many names. In Shakta bhakti, the Mother’s name denotes heavenly energy and omnipotence; the devotee is a child yearning for his mother and believes his mother to be capable of doing anything. In her book, Kali—The Black Goddess of Dakshineshwar, Elizabeth U Harding writes: “Mother is the sum total of energy in the universe, every manifestation of power in the universe is Mother. She is life, she is intelligent, and she is love.”

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Louis Maistros

A Portfolio of Photos

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Artist/actor/singer Alexis McQuarter. Publicity shot for her starring performance in Calisaya Blues, a play based on the novel, The Sound of Building Coffins, by Louis Maistros. October 26, 2017.

Artist/poet/alchemist Herbert Kearney in his studio on North Robertson Street, July 5, 2016.

Opposite: The last Mardi Gras parade before the COVID-19 lockdown. Krewe of St Anne, February 25, 2020.

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I was asked by Michael Martin to do some stage photography to promote his production of Driving Miss Daisy (with Michael cast as Daisy), directed by Christopher Bentivegna, costarring Adele Gautier as Hoke, and Mikka as Boolie. The shoot took place on March 8, 2020, and the play was scheduled to debut the following week. As the initial wave of COVID-19 began to spread out of control, Michael made the hard decision to postpone the production.

Sadly, both Michael and Adele passed away the following year, and all that remains of the production are the photos I took. Here are two of my favorites: Adele Gauthier (above) and Michael Martin (opposite).

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Peter Orr: musician, painter, author of Stay Out of New Orleans, October 8, 2018.

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Katarina Boudreaux and Indelethio Nebeker tango dancing at the Gold Mine Saloon, November 8, 2012.

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Krewe Delusion passes through Faubourg Marigny. January 19, 2013.

Mardi Gras Day, February 12, 2013.

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Drunken tourist sleeps it off at the French Market streetcar stop. He was using his shoes for a pillow. September 6, 2012.

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“Working Men,” street photography. November 8, 2012 in the French Quarter.

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Lower 9th Ward, six months after Katrina. March 15, 2006.

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Uptown New Orleans, February 6, 2017.

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John Robinson

The Lamps at Wilcoxen Funeral Home Between tall floor lamps those reposed figures of remembrance lie in dreamlike light.

Those hardened, heavy-set eyes of friends and relatives in the back room talk through quiet with callous hands, hold cigarettes, drink coffee in somber moods of grim reunion.

Hushed voices fall among peach-fluted glass, their unchanging dark, beveled creases, bulbs that bathe elder faces and tragic youth.

In the churchyard red dirt fell like rock across the cold encasement, deep in earth, fallen soil, heavy as dead thought.

Those lamps of mourning resemble soft shades of fate, the unforgettable scent of carnationsu among whispers that seem so much like prayer.

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Daniel W.K. Lee

Two Poems Vanity and Irony Back in freshman year Introduction to Oil Painting, our teacher instructed us to squint our eyes to uncover the colors contorting on surfaces like a weather map.

We blurred our vision on the white studio wall where she insisted a front of cinnabar glided diagonally just beyond a slant of sunbeam sneaking off of Stuyvesant Street; a warm area under her waving hand sat like a faint, running egg yolk; a hint of cobalt here, burnt sienna evidently there, her nomenclature as precise as a palette knife.

But how would it all look when painting skin, I thought, as I oscillated my head in search of a mirror in a room where there was none. Her Vanna White-cum-AccuWeather forecast act concluded, I excused myself to the bathroom to confront my face in the looking glass. Not bad, I probably thought during the first examination of blemishes, texture, symmetry, and proportions.

Slowly drawing down my eye lids, would I see a grotesquery of hues?

As vermillion, ochre, indigo, ultramarine, chartreuse, and periwinkle doffed their camouflage, I laughed at my vanity and the irony: how we half-blind ourselves to see the masterpiece.

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It Don’t Matter after Dean Young

Even if Dr. John or Professor Longhair chicken-scratched you a note if the note is a key and a will if the humidity is marshmallow in the lungs if Plum Street gives away butter rum snoballs with evaporated milk dripping and slicking a nipple no shirt no problem if pronounced bicep veins without flexing are your heroin if the clavicle collects no kisses if the gumbo gets cold daiquiris warm DMs dirty if the children come for your wig if the trade forgets Big Freedia’s bounce if your biscuit roller leaves you for the yeast man the daily bag of beignets his gris-gris maybe I want the yeast man too if the past is past your past if the pothole sprouting oleanders got your Toyota good if Friday’s floodwater is iridescent as a dragonfly’s back if feathered disco hair makes a comeback if Satchmo is risen

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red beans and rice-ly nicely ravenous as zombies are wont if the dead or bland can form a krewe if your social life needs seasoning if needing is a bayou by you, don’t return your library books overdue.

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Bruce Robinson

Fresco Even a man and a child who bury a book and plant a juniper above it: and after the juniper plant more: bodies of birds and squirrels and mice killed by the cat, old dolls, plush squirrels, mouse corpses the most painful, almost more than the girl can bear, painful as a change of seasons: flowers, arbor vitae, the great alembic mess begins to heat the flowers, arbor vitae and the dolls and books become pictures on the dank walls of the cellar, the girl draws pictures, she uses her fingers until with the pain they hurt all they touch, even a man and child who bury a book.

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Cameron Lovejoy

Manhood thank manhood for my grandfather who helped carve my first slingshot toss my first caber dress my first deer & when I painted my nails for the first time he said red looked best

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John Stoss

From Nobody Loves Me Ed note: Poet, novelist, painter, playwrighte, singer-songwriter and general genial genius John Stoss has just published a volume of collected poems—500 pages beginning with older work (most of it gathered in a 1977 Lost Roads volume called Finding the Broom) and including a 200 page narrative autobiographical poem. We are privileged to present a few brief excerpts from early in the poem.

Stoss was born and raised on a Kansas farm, and that is the landscape for these excerpts from the poem, which, like the book itself, bears the title Nobody Loves Me.

Nobody loves me that’s what I’ve learned in all these years since I was born It’s not that I feel sorry for myself it’s just that I moved to California 25 years ago It was a great mistake I should have been leaving it when I arrived Everything bad about California you’ve heard is true everything good you’ve heard is true I never adjusted all my life I thought eventually whatever was needed to help me find my way would happen that’s what they always say as I wandered around first Kansas then Arkansas then Louisiana

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then California throw in for a few months New York Minnesota where else for a few weeks days Mexico 3 times Kansas City a few weeks Phoenix Nobody loves me when I’m born my mother admits years later when she keeps having these moments of truth as she dies on her feet you weren’t supposed to come along 2 children was all we wanted and so I wasn’t wanted Couldn’t have an abortion or the Pope would drop the drumstick he’s about to put in his mouth my mother explains as the last moments of truth overwhelm her by the time I got married at 16 I was already tired of raising children, neighbor’s children, uncle and aunt’s children all I did was shuffle back and forth so much for parental love through the guidance of God so she married a man 7 years older than her a fanatic at work I’ll rest when I’m dead she said I am always amazed my mother’s 72

reality, all my life I listened to my mother every story she ever knew she tells me my sister before me when did my father stop listening maybe when she refused to have sex with him anymore when he sat in his rocker watching TV smoking his corncob pipe packed with Prince Albert tobacco and the day rocking in his drunken brain successful in forgetting what he needed to forget Everything I tell you that’s wrong my mother tells me and I tell you the truth eludes me too I read Bill Lavender’s book Memory Wing and see what I hide from myself but there’s more still waiting for discovery please help me what a nice child I was always running wildly about and singing always told to shut up why what was wrong with my singing didn’t I have a good voice we weren’t white trash peasants maybe my father was he couldn’t even add subtract divide multiply correctly when the taxes were done my mother 73

did them with him what did he do with his life when he didn’t have a pitchfork in his arms and stretched his muscles with all his strength I know when winter left him sitting on the ladder in the sun by the shed the heaps of snow trying to melt he talked to himself about the wrongs done to him by his brother’s wives If I caught him he went silent until I was gone he hardly ever played with me he was lost in his own world born the same year he died 67 years old he never learned a thing how did he expect me to grow up go to college get a job raise children like myself I should be a calf or a mule a chicken, a goose, a pig and then he’d really love me he loves his livestock so proud can’t even kill them when my brother goes to the army he hands me the rifle I hate it worse than he does my brother loves to kill things he loves to climb a tree among the other 74

trees down by the pond and shoot all the bird who appear the dogs eat them barking in approval my mother makes a weak remonstration why doesn’t she take that gun away from him doesn’t he know when you kill an animal that’s the end of it the billions and billions of years that come before it lives and the billions of years after it it’s consciousness is nonexistent nothingness oh I’m a wild kid but I find myself becoming an inhibited adult like I am now that’s how it happens everyone shakes their heads in shame I’m out of control when am I going to become an automaton the slave to endless days of work like everyone else Be like my brother learn from his uncle how to be a mechanic become one of those people who climbs underneath a machine the oil crud falling into your eyes your fingers gripping wrenches your knuckles hitting the sharp edges of steel and 75

blood running down your fingers and arm you cursing years before your age on the curse of finding what you were meant to do turn the steering wheel he yells to me goddamn it not that way …

Sunday was a day off except the cows had to be milked at the same time every day no matter what rising from our beds me upstairs in the old rock house my brother and me sleeping in the same bed and my sister in the same room by the lone window outside of which was a big sticker tree in her own bed the roof of a deep V shape like a wild goose through which in the fall we could hear them flying over making such a beautiful sound you thought it was a musical instrument sometimes a tiny dog sleeping between me and my brother he always let the little dog lick him on the lips the pup was a child of our dog Tipper who secretly took care of us I never got enough sleep something almost always got in the way of the eight or nine or ten hours I needed mostly it was imagination that overworked and sleep seemed 76

like a few moments before someone threatened me if I didn’t get up cows had to be milked at the same time or it would cause them to give less milk as soon as my brother could see over the steering wheel he was driving us to church he was in a hurry to grow up it seems like my father wore an old blue suit all his life we were dressed up like third generation Czech farmers my mother desperate that we looked acceptable she herself said proudly she had so much work getting her children ready for church she didn’t have time to doll up I don’t know if she was ever aware she was not a very beautiful woman fat from the first day she was born we parked a brand new 1940 Dodge in the ditch U-shaped so many cars already there in front around the side of the church how many times I’ve painted it on canvas everyone driving fairly new cars the advent of new prosperity … my brother is married and living in the rock house with his wife when he’s drafted 77

because of the Korean War the wretched ankle that got caught in the silage grinder and ended his football career won’t keep him out of the army he becomes a radio operator and because of his disability only serves half-time basic training but in our last dinner together as we’re eating my father’s love for Jimmy suddenly overcomes my father the fear of the war that brings on death he begins weeping with a ferocity that he’d reserved for his mother and brother John we’re at the kitchen table of the still new house and I remember when he wept for someone I can’t remember who and I stayed up half the nite mistaking the tied up dogs whining for my father weeping the worst or best part is when he goes off to Ft. Riley I do all the work he did and I really don’t like it when my father hands me the rifle and points on the head of the steer where I’m to shoot it he won’t do it he never does my brother who loves to kill is more than willing I should refuse but you have to do what your father tells you to do or else life has no meaning how can your father and mother be wrong and a life is snuffed out so we can eat I will go on to shoot a dog for no reason when I’m confused and uncertain in life the beautiful brownie for whom to this day I am moved to tears 78

because I can’t bear what I did I can never forgive myself nuns and priests lined up in my dreams telling me that the bible says man is the master over all the other animals without admitting we’re animals too well I can’t write about this anymore I want to talk about the visit to my brother I am a murderer I am a murderer who came back in a car from Junction City with his father driving it is raining fairly hard from a hurricane that came up through Texas and if you know how desperate in Kansas we get for rain how we live our lives in drought how the farmers do their work in a heat that makes a crop that should be a bright green a litter brighter everyday only the holiest don’t curse god and we seem to drive all nite and wake up to a world of little rivers all over the land I want to follow the running water from our pond I once saw a big fish I thought but i was gone but I keep looking the dogs bark and urge me on they run after a jackrabbit the only time they catch one is when the big black dog comes back with one that was already wounded Spooky was his name I can’t play I have to go check where the fences are most likely to be taken away by raging streams of nonexistent mountains

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Richard Weaver

Two Poems Lord of the Burning Sands I knew him as Jim. Others knew him as Michael. For years I listened to his deep baritone recording, trying to translate the syllables that diminished as he neared, his eyes averted, greased long dark hair cascading.

He never said more, but often said less should your eyes meet his. What I remember: SirCanYouSpareMeSomeMoneyForABiteToEat. Over and over he his mantra to the tourists walking the steaming sidewalks of the Quarter summer or fall & to those of us who worked the legal edges in-between. The declamatory “SIR” stirred the damp air. The first of 12 plosives delivered with hope, almost a prayer alone.

What followed more often ground slowly into silence. Swallowed as his voice ate itself. As if his will to impose, to beseech lost its flight, and the light in his eyes dimmed. Always dressed in billowing black pants and a black full-sleeved shirt, barefoot, he carried a cigar-sized box roped to his belly with a once white sash. Some said it was his hand-written bible. Others a bottle of MD 20/20. He shifted later

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to the CBB (Central Business District); its hard to imagine why. And later still to the lower Garden District where he became a regular visitor, warming the Presbyterian pews on the coldest nights. I can confirm this since I saw but did not hear him there.

Years later, his Michigan family came to claim him when he died. Took him back to a place, a space he had abandoned, self-exiled himself from centuries ago.

Measured him for a new space where his calloused feet and wandering soul would never rest, and would always seek the warm sidewalks of the Big Easy.

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Gypsy Lou “A good beer is more than reality” – Bukowski, in a letter to Lou

sold watercolors and whatever else gullible tourists would remember as a deal in the Quarter. Yellow cowboy boots and flaming red beret, cloud-billowing skirts that wrestled with the wind, Lou and Big Gypsy, her collie, were there every day, hustling in Pirates Alley to make rent, hustling to help her husband, Jon, publisher, failed jewel thief, and writer. Another story. Another song. Street sales were her playful sport, the challenge that kept her spry. Her hand-written list of those who owned her art from actors to Presidents, undressed the “normal people, stupid people” who wanted what could not be had. In her hands the world shifted like light in the eyes of a Seventh-day Adventist to the Great Disappointment and its corollary, the Greater Possibility. Her Jon, now only a picture facing her bed, his un-scattered ashes a dinner her body sometimes demanded, at least in public, the show you know, beckons without insisting that he pose with her. When his ashes were gone, when the show 82

disappeared what else was there to do? What remains is you. Alive.

Refusing to die, refusing to give yourself in any diminished way to the world that never knew you.

You live as I write this knowing someday it will prove false, to outlive the doubters of you and Jon, and Bukowski, and those critics of Noel Rockmore who knew their vision of art & their knowledge would be the expert-ofthe-month truth.

You remain, solid, unshadowed from the flames that eat relentlessly.

Not the ramblin’ woman Dylan turned into a refrain. One of the bohemian fugitives, an outsider who kept to the edges and danced with the lights.

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Richard Godden

Two Poems Quiff.

For Mr. Bones.

Quiff-myth: money > man (impossible equation) resolved as ‘monster.’

‘Let follicles be,’ and they were, improbably orange, Midas strands.

At the system’s edge dark monies, phish, mal-dump warp and woof rug’s skull-cap.

Gilded boy, gilded tower: let down your gilded hair. “Climb – to Rapture” Born of price on fact, Quiff-quakes anticipate fact’s further fall – The Dow. Miss Olini tongues; Quiff puckers; Comb-Moustache ‘o’s,’ kissing-in dark times.

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Unemployable viral nomads hunt the bush that burns with bird song.

Quiff heads for its base, rims the thing. Take it, take all.

Nylon takes no shit.

Quifflings, like the Fates, share an eye: pronominal, one-way, mirror glass.

If Quiff could speak, what would it say (lost for tele printers)? ‘Quiff, quiff, quack.’

By a bit of fence, the empire going, going: Quiff foiled, waits. Eclipse. **** Achilles’ tent, pegged to Ozymandian stumps, predicts Hell’s Toupee.

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Marginalia from a Neoliberal Plague Empty the center watch the edges fray: slut’s dust snared in tumble-weed.

No tomorrow; know today – the time of the times of childhood and plague.

“Till human voices wake us, or we drown,” our lungs fill with mermaid song.

App’d by moon-men; left in a shrinking corridor.

Phone a friend, breathe…breath.

Pangolin scale touched to skin – had we eyes to see – blossoms with the end of days.

Touch calls to touched, ‘Be.’ ‘Don’t…’ uncreates: dirt for skin, bleach for dirt. Purged prints.

“Wuhan’s wet-markets…” (pity the poor pangolin) “…sluice to China’s seas.”

“Pandemonium”:

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all the devils talk at once in Pandaemonic.

App-stats (serial mask-maps) over-state the state in number’s theatre.

Commons uncommon’d whose hedges and shadow banks yield mere moneyness.

“Go long on death, but hedge: deriving edge from breath, leverage the air.”

Air in the abstract (private as land), like water can be stocked, shaved, shared.

Breath’s underlier, or volatile viral bearer, risks shorting.

Viral logistics hand to mouth to shipping lane to hand to oh fuck.

Viral Investment (Eugenicist Option): cull the unproductive.

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Think as a stone: thought and thought on (which is which?), both petrified labor.

On the dots between words, at reason’s edge, whisper ‘Unemployable.’

NHS s N HS o NHS s.

Lysol wipe each key.

“Alone, alone, all, all….” They say we die alone: one aloneness each.

One pall per person, containerized, frozen, priced melancholia.

A paper graveyard in an emptied world whose screens read only number.

What does it mean? Less.

Less: less – hear with the mind’s ear viral endlessness.

Do you wake calling, ‘Christ, I can’t fucking stand it’ Assess: 1 to 10.

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Walking corridors in the dark, carefully, toe tip to the now gone.

“Excuse me, I’ve lost how the days go, forgotten my life. Is it this?”

A proposition + an exemplar = allegory: try.

Parables? You want parables? Suck a lemon, taste the parable.

Before we started to stop, tall letters were not ledges to jump from.

Post word, syllable; post syllable, phoneme; post phoneme, neme in flame.

Pentecost, oh pent at cost, when words’ first breakage seeps beyond seepage.

How many angels choose to dance seventeen steps onto a pinhead?

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Where more than two sounds meet at less than six feet, birds tweet The Magic Flute.

Crows murder; starlings murmurate; ravens, unkind, spear from emptiness.

Chernobyl outreach goats graze Llandudno High Street: we should have thought it.

Asymptomatic carriers: happy toddlers poke bubonic rats.

Oceanic fear: Pacific rim runners in surgical face masks.

Seraphic cirrus, light’s purest porosity above grass-grown roads.

Isolatoes all, sharing only a stolen sociality.

Forty days and nights crow-fed dried insect spit. Rage Jeremiah, rage.

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Where’s the dynamite?

Inside each cell our errors transubstantiate.

Afterwords: Cunning little fuck, more adaptive to us than we are to ourselves.

Roach to rat, lichen listening (the mutant’s new habitats), ‘That’s done.’

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Rowena De Shields

JUMP This is an excerpt from an unfinished semi-autobiographical novella titled “I Is, I Am, I Are.”

“What are you doing here?” Standing defiantly, tiny hands and skinny arms akimbo, perched above small hips and long, reedy freckled legs.

Whorls of red hair halo her pale face, bright eyes above a discontentedly puckered mouth.

“I’m here to help your mom move,” I say while edging around the small child, wary of her face twisting up. Thankfully, a familiar voice saves me from this sunshine child, whose frenzy radiates from her disheveled dress and curls.

“Mckenna! Get back in here!” Her mother peers out disapprovingly and familiar blue eyes rest on me with a smile. “Rowena! Please come in.

I see you’ve met Mckenna, my crazy daughter.” As she places her hand on the girl’s tousled head I inwardly wince, stupidly anticipating her to draw back with a burn. Instead, she lovingly smooths back the hair, encouraging the girl to give me a grudging “Hi, nice to meet you Miss Rowena,” before launching into the house, screeching and slapping a hand along the walls.

“She’s a little shy,” her mother says. She looks worn, with sweat just beginning to ring her collar and dampen the nape of her hair. Tiredness curling beneath her eyes. The hand that reaches to touch mine looks like it belongs to a much older woman, gnarled and spotted with freckles and small cuts. Her oversized shirt is stained and ripped, piling shapelessly around her. She, who has birthed a small, defiant fire, seems nearly extinguished herself.

Her visage belies the large and cheery yellow house behind her. Its porch is crowded with lawn ornaments, butting into a well-manicured lawn like outsized teeth. The house seems rounded at the corners, sloping

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into a graceful arch that complements the surrounding Crepe Myrtle trees, which sway and tap gracefully against the picture windows. Through a large bay window, I can see Mckenna perched upon a cluttered table.

She’s looking at me, hiding when she catches my eye.

“Please come in!” The mother, Kath, beckons while leading me inside.

“I’m embarrassed about the house. Tom hasn’t really helped and the kids -” She breaks off when there are a series of crashes from the other room.

We both watch Mckenna’s small foot dart out to kick myriad objects off of the table she’s sitting on. She’s determined and nothing is spared; a balsa wood replica of Davinci’s flying machine, several children’s books, and a small potted plant all go soaring, propelled by her feet and resentful stare.

“My bed’s been packed in the pod but I still have my Dream House!”

She cries and points.

And there it is. The Dream House. Resplendent in purple and pink, outfitted with a pool, garage, and grand staircase, complete with a tiny plastic chandelier detailed with hearts. Barbie and her privileged friends peer expectantly from the Dream House’s bedrooms and kitchens, through us and by us and beyond. They seemed perturbed somehow, gasping behind painted on pearly whites and impossibly blue eyes. How can anyone be anything but happy, I wonder, sheltered beneath pink shingles with curlicues and a heart-shaped chandelier? The Dream House has more furniture than the yellow house it lives in - most of the humansized furniture had already been packed away, except two chairs from a dinette set (“Tom’s taking the other two”), a beleaguered sofa (“I’m giving that to Tom.”) and a piano (“Tom plays.”). Wisps of dog hair line the floorboards and corners, with boxes and children’s toys strewn about chaotically. Despite the mess it is a nice house, full of natural light with large windows overlooking a lush backyard. I see a blue trampoline out the back window - a child’s dream.

“You have a beautiful home.” I say, feeling foolish afterward. Why compliment someone on a house that’s already been sold, a house that won’t be a home for much longer? Looking at the furred baseboards and 93

the towering Dream House, the boxes alternatively labeled “Tom” and “Kath”, I think it must not feel like home at all.

“Thanks. I didn’t get to enjoy it as much as I would’ve liked.” Kath comments, looking about. “But I guess it is pretty nice.” *** Kath gives me “adult apple juice” i.e. alcoholic ciders, to sip on as we wrap ceramics in moving paper and pack the kitchenware. Every piece seemingly has a story. The cracked Zoloft mug heralded the “tough times”and the mug shaped like an old hag’s face was a gag gift from Tom many years ago, brought all the way from Salem, Massachusetts (“Now I look like her,” she joked, swiping at an errant hair. She doesn’t - still attractive, especially when she smiles). And the well-seasoned skillet, warped and brownish with age? It represented the need for separation. “I realized I needed to divorce him when I started to wonder what sound it would make against his skull.”

Mckenna peers in intermittently, venturing closer and closer to me every time. She seems encouraged by our easy chatter, taking up residence in the corner where the cabinets meet. Her mother, seemingly unaffected by her presence, rambles on about everything from her dearly departed sex life to the “Lake House.”

I’d been hearing about the Lake House for months. Whenever she spoke of it Kath gleamed, chattering on about its gray color (“much better than yellow”), it’s rotting dock which crumbled into the water, the yard crowded with shining Holly trees (“easier to look after than Crepe Myrtles”). It was a fixer upper she’d bought for her and Mckenna to land, a place where they’d be free to reestablish.

“Will Daddy come visit the Lake House?” Kath’s eyes come to, glancing over the yellow walls, the chaos strewn about, and, finally, her daughter.

“No,” she says in a measured tone, carefully dosed. “Daddy won’t be coming. He doesn’t like the water, remember?”

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*** The dissolution of a thirteen year marriage. Admittedly, before meeting Kath I hadn’t given much thought to divorce. Marriage isn’t really something I’ve envisioned for myself, and I’m part of the happy few who have well-suited parents, still in love after thirty-seven years. Previously, I’d no real reason to wonder how two people dissolving a thirteen year marriage would act. Not until observing Tom and Kath.

Absurdly, the first thing that comes to mind seeing him is “he doesn’t look like a monster.” After a year of hearing Kath describe him - his moodiness, persistent inattention, stinking feet, the large and weeping hemorrhoids - I was expecting a split tongue, hooves, red skin and a tail.

Instead, there is Tom. Tom, with the pale, sad eyes (like his daughter’s, but flat), pleasant smile and perfect manners. Tom, who offered the good beer in the fridge Kath obviously didn’t want to share. Tom, who hugged his daughter and sniffed her hair. Tom, who lets his daughter go with a sigh before facing his (soon to be) ex wife.

They’re of a height, pale eye to pale eye, both strewn with colored tattoos. Hers are a Star Wars theme, and his pay homage to cult horror films. Right below his deltoid I can make out “Kath” written in amateurish and fading script.

“Tom. I think we will need more boxes.” Kath says, fiercely wrapping a chinked bowl.

“Okay. About how many? What size?”

“I don’t know. Can you walk through what’s left and try to figure it out?”

“I think you’re trying to put too much stuff in one box. You’re cramming it, that’s how stuff breaks.”

“That’s why I need more boxes.”

“If you put that bowl in there it will probably break -” “I need 10 boxes of each size.”

“Kath that bowl is gonna break -”

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Mckenna and I both jump when Kath slams the bowl into the box and roars “Good thing it’s my bowl to worry about then!” *** Somehow it grows hotter, darker, as the sun winds around us. The heat begins to rise through the floorboards, causing sweat and mugginess to seep unpleasantly. Mckenna winds around us as well, seemingly fascinated by me, the stranger who is allowed to touch all of Mommy’s ‘special things.’

She unleashes a barrage of questions, staring longingly as I pack away the clown-shaped whiskey decanter (family heirloom - astonishingly ugly) and the tin music box shaped like a church. Foreign things she could only dream of touching now, but longed to inherit one day. It makes me smile.

I remember how I wanted to touch the clutter in grown up spaces, clutter long since declared ‘junk’ in my adulthood.

“How do you know Mommy?” She asks, watching avidly as I teach her how to assemble a cardboard box.

“We work together.” I answer absentmindedly, trying to pick the end of the tape off the roll. “She’s always been very nice to me.”

“Do you work with Daddy too?”

“No,” I reply, still picking furiously. “I just met him today. He seems very nice too, just like your mom.” And it’s true. They both are nice.

Perfectly nice, to strangers even. Nice to strangers but seemingly incapable of civility towards each other. I can hear their voices floating from outside to where we are sitting straddle-legged in a valley between mountainous heaps of boxes. “That’s got it!” I exclaim, pulling tape noisily from the roll.

“You did it!” She shrieks, taking a strip from me and slapping it on her box. She does a happy dance and high kicks around the room, showing unladylike flashes of her graying underwear.

“Mmmhm. Are you excited to move to the Lake House Mckenna? With your own dock right there by the water?” Her leg slaps down to the floor.

“I don’t know because we’re moving to the Lake House and Daddy’s moving all by himself into an apartment because he can’t take care of us

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with Mommy anymore and I’ve never lived near a lake and I’ve never seen the house and what if there isn’t a place for my Dream House?” It all comes out in a rush and she breathes deeply before continuing, bunching her skirt over knobby knees. “I told Mommy we have to bring the trampoline.

Daddy always says he wants to jump on it with me but hasn’t yet. So if we bring it he will come jump with me at the Lake House.”

As I look into her pinched and hopeful face I can’t help but naively think - ‘can’t thirteen years be salvaged for her sake?’ I hadn’t witnessed the decay of their marriage, but she had lived it (perhaps, I thought darkly, even heralded it). She was old enough to comprehend the separation, yet not old enough to discern an ugly clown decanter as junk, or that the argument about boxes wasn’t really about boxes at all - but the latest in a series of small and not-so-small rejections: disappointments cemented beneath cruel and uncertain words. I wonder, with her childlike capacity for understanding, who is more sad right now? She, who is living in this reality? Or myself, who has the perspective and maturity to understand it as an adult?

Suddenly, Mckenna crawls over to the window to glimpse her parents, arguing in front of the big blue trampoline. *** Slowly but surely, the house disappears into a tumble of cardboard boxes, packed away. The graying dog hair is swept up alongside the toys, and both are discarded without a thought. Eventually, we come to the Dream House. Barbie and company stare up resentfully from the bottom of their box, piled head-to-toe and toe-to-head. Silently screaming as we dismantle their purple and pink mansion, breaking off the ionic columns, removing the curlicue roof, plucking off the garage. The pool snaps off with a click and its plastic water is static and dully shiny, scratched from hundreds of “pool parties.” Mckenna and I lower its pieces carefully into a large box on top of the screaming Barbies. I let her tape the box closed and she kisses the top when we finish, whispering “I’ll see you at the

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Lake House.” *** The real trouble comes when we have to pack up the trampoline.

Kath and I spend nearly an hour dismantling it with Mckenna clinging, swinging from post to post and crying.

“You’re killing it! You’re killing it! Daddy and I are going to jump!

You can’t kill it!” Childless and with no younger siblings, I don’t have the experience to reason with an enraged child. If I’m honest, I’m intimidated by this fierce fire girl - feeling strangely as if her sole attention would singe me, burn me. So I fake interest in one of the springs and let Kath deal with it.

“Sweetie, we’re not killing it,” she reasons amiably, simultaneously wrenching savagely at a leg that refused to pull apart from the frame. “we’re just packing it up for the Lake House.”

Still, the fiery girl persists, wrapping herself in the tarpaulin and hugging a trampoline post desperately, screaming NO! in a register heretofore unknown to the childless. Sweat runs in rivulets down her tiny forehead and tears stripe her cheeks as she continues to howl, squinting her burning eyes. Despite this, Kath and I manage to dismantle the trampoline, all the while feeling Tom’s conspicuous absence. He was hiding away somewhere in the cheery Yellow House, oblivious to his child’s distress.

“Daddy wants to jump!” Mckenna screeches, rolling in the discarded tarpaulin and kicking her feet. *** The real real trouble comes when we find out the trampoline won’t fit into the shipping pod, no matter how desperately we jam or strategically we pack it. The pod is simply too full, and the trampoline simply too large.

“We’ll just have to leave it,” Kath whispers, stricken and pale, eyeing the little girl wrapped in tarp eyeing us hatefully.

“Maybe she won’t notice if you get an identical one as soon as we

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get down there?” I suggest.

“She’ll never leave until she sees us pack it up. Besides, I can’t afford a new one right now.” Bravely, Kath squats down to tell Mckenna, whose face reddens alarmingly, distorts, and then splinters. Fat wet tears stain her shirt collar, watering the embroidered flowers. I can see flies pinging off her soiled cheeks, her matted hair, crawling over the fingers clutched in blue tarp.

“Daddy!” she hollers. “Daddy come jump! It’s the last chance to come jump!” She screams and sobs while Kath looks on, looking through the girl to the big House behind. Big, cheery and yellow - large and yet too small for two people who have outgrown each other, shed one another like an old skin. Even a world apart would be too small.

Speechless, I go into the house to take refuge from Mckenna’s terrible screaming and her mother’s stare - only to run into Tom. He is busy separating his and Kath’s boxes, piling his neatly along one wall while leaving hers haphazard on the floor. *** Thirteen. Thirteen. Unlucky Thirteen. The number won’t leave my head during the ninety minute drive home and neither will that disappointed face, the memorabilia carefully packed away - treated with more care than a living and breathing being. I can’t help but think of the trampoline lying discarded for someone to find and take, crowded out of the pod by knickknacks and furniture deemed more necessary. ‘It’s possible the trampoline would not have fit in the Lake House yard anyway,’ I think, attempting to assuage my guilt. ‘She’ll be just fine without it.’ After all, the Lake House will probably be a child’s wonderland. Mckenna’s wonderland.

Surrounded by trees she can peer imperiously from, looking for visitors from far-off lands. She’ll have the water beneath that crumbling dock, host to all manner of interesting insects and maybe even fish, content to let her poke and prod and slap barefoot through the shallows. Best of all, she will have a bigger room for her Dream House - one with windows

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where the dolls can oversee the earth’s rotation and little fire girls playing below. It will all be fine.

Still, when I get home I find myself looking at trampolines online wondering how you affix a price to something that becomes immaterial, a dream.

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Contributors Nidhi Agrawal has a background in communication design in health, media and entertainment spaces. She strongly feels that poetry is a deal of joy, she is the author of the poetry collection, Confluence. Her work has been published in California State Poetry Society, University of Tennessee, Chronogram Media, Yale University, South Asian Today, Indian Periodical, Spill Words Press, Rising Phoenix Review, and Setu Journal, and elsewhere. She lives in Bihar, India.

Thomas Bonner, Jr. is writing the introduction and notes for the Indonesian translation of Kate Chopin’s novel The Awakening and is making revisions on his poetry manuscript “Bagatelles.” His most recent poetry appeared in War, Literature and the Arts. He also wrote the foreword to Mary Queen Donnelly’s A Banks Street Story. An emeritus professor at Xavier and former editor of Xavier Review and its press, he is teaching a research course on Toni Morrison’s fiction.

Yuan Changming edits Poetry Pacific with Allen Yuan at poetrypacific. blogspot.ca. Credits include eleven Pushcart nominations, nine chapbooks and poetry awards, as well as publications in Best of the Best Canadian Poetry: Tenth Anniversary Edition & BestNewPoemsOnline, among others.

Recently, Yuan served on the jury for Canada’s 44th National Magazine Awards.

A native of the Midwest and a graduate of Shimer College, the University of Chicago and the Writers’ Workshop at University of Iowa, where he received his Ph.D., Peter Cooley has lived over half his life in New Orleans; he was Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Tulane University from 1975-2018. He has published eleven books of poetry, ten of them with Carnegie Mellon. His work has appeared in The

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New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Nation, The New Republic and in over one hundred anthologies. His eleventh book of poetry The One Certain Thing appeared in 2021. Cooley was an Atlantic Younger Poet, the Robert Frost Fellow at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the recipient of an ATLAS grant from the state of Louisiana and of the Marble Faun Poetry Award from the Faulkner Society in New Orleans. He was Poetry Editor of North American Review from 1970-2000 and is currently Poetry Editor of Christianity And Literature, Professor Emeritus at Tulane University and former Louisiana Poet Laureate.

Elizabeth Crowell grew up in northern New Jersey, where she spent many a Saturday at Loehmann’s with her mother. She has a B.A. from Smith College in English Literature and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing/Poetry from Columbia University. Her work has been published widely, most recently in October Hill, Amethyst and Euonia Review. She has twice won The Bellevue Literary Review non-fiction prize. She taught college and high school English for many years. She lives and writes outside of Boston with her wife and teenage children.

Rowena De Shields is a Xavier University of Louisiana alumna who currently serves in the US Coast Guard. Her love of writing was nurtured

by Xavier English Department Faculty, and she writes today with their continued support. In her most recent work I Is, I Am, I Are, she hopes to bring awareness to the unique challenges that sea-faring service members face.

Richard Godden, until his recent retirement, taught in the English Department at UCI. A critical study, Punctuating Capital: A Narrative Poetics for the Financial Turn, is to appear from Oxford U.P. later in the year. The poems here are part of a planned collection (‘Bits and Long Contractions’).

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Maryanne Hannan has published poems in Spillway, Rattle, Slant, Cider Press Review, Oxford Poetry, and elsewhere. Her first book, Rocking Like It’s All Intermezzo, was published by Resource Publications (2019). A former Latin teacher, she lives in upstate New York.

David G. Lanoue is RosaMary Professor of English at Xavier University of Louisiana. He has published several books and dozens of essays on Japanese haiku; he maintains the “Haiku or Kobayashi Issa” website, for which he has translated and annotated over 11,000 haiku.

Daniel W.K. Lee is a third-generation refugee of Cantonese Chinese heritage. He is the author of Anatomy of Want (QueerMojo/Rebel Satori Press, 2019). His work has been included in numerous print and online publications, including The New York Times, the UK’s Agenda and Oxford Poetry, Germany’s Mein schwules Auge (My Gay Eye), among others. He makes his home in New Orleans with his whippet Camden. Find out more about him at danielwklee.com Cameron Lovejoy is the editor at Tilted House, a small press in New Orleans, LA. He hosts the Rubber Flower Poetry Hour, a reading series currently on virus hiatus. His work has appeared in Poets Reading the News, Barrelhouse, Trampoline, and elsewhere.

Louis Maistros is an author, photographer, artist, and musician. His photography has been published in The Times Picayune, Gambit Weekly, The Advocate and many others. His novel, The Sound of Building Coffins, has become an international cult favorite. He is currently hard at work preparing to open a bookstore/gallery, to be called The Old Arabi Lighthouse, located in the oldest building in St. Bernard Parish, which also functions as a happy home for himself, his wife Izzy, son Booker, three very strange cats, and several friendly ghosts. louismaistros.com

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Ryan Mayer is a graduate student in the MFA program at the University of New Orleans.

Recent work by Bruce Robinson appears or is forthcoming in Spoon River, Maintenant, Seventh Quarry, Pangyrus, Rattle, Main Street Rag, and Evening Street Review. He last appeared in Xavier Review vol 13, no. 2 (1993).

John Robinson is from the Kanawha Valley in Mason County, West Virginia. His work has appeared in journals throughout the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, India, Poland, Germany and China. He is also a published printmaker with 101 art images and photographs appearing in forty journals, electronic and print, in the United States, Italy, Ireland and the United kingdom. Recent work includes: “A Structuralist Poetics of James Dickey’s ‘Hunting Civil War Relics at Nimblewill Creek,’” published online at Revolution John December 13, 2020, and “Ground of a Theory: The Language Codes of Roland Barthes and American Critical Structuralism,” in Language and Semiotic Studies of Soochow University, Jiangsu Province, China, in early 2021.

Ajay Sawant is the assistant editor at the Southern Humanities Review and 2021 CPB Writing Fellowship recipient from The Bombay Review.

His poems and critical work appear in The London Magazine, Live Wire, Hawaii Pacific Review, Xavier Review, The Bombay Review, The Louisville Review, Lunch Ticket, Cold Mountain Review and Rattle, among many others. Ajay often tweets at @ajaycycles Gerald Snare is a professor emeritus and former chair of the department at Tulane University in New Orleans. He took his doctorate at UCLA in English and Continental Literature and Philosophy in 1968 and joined the faculty at what was then known as Newcomb College that same year.

Of his teaching some generations of students can attest. Of writing, he 104

has published widely on most of the major literary figures in Renaissance England and Europe. He retired in 2007 and now lives with his wife Pamela in Nashville, Tennessee where he is still active as a reviewer of both modrn poetry and theological studies, most recently of Amanda Gorman’s volume of poems, Call Us What We Carry (2021).

John Stoss’s first book, Finding the Broom, was the second book published under the legendary Lost Roads imprint. John’s other books include Machines Always Existed (Portals Press, 1984) and Whatever Passes for Love is Love (Lavender Ink, 2012). His definitive biography is a poem, “The History of John Stoss,” by Frank Stanford. Nobody Loves Me: Collected Poems of John Stoss, edited by Justin Chimka, appeared this year from Lavender Ink. Georgia Tiffany’s work can be found in various journals and anthologies including Chautauqua Literary Review, Threepenny Review, Expose, Midwest Review and Poets of the American West. Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. A native of Spokane, Washington, she now lives in Moscow, Idaho.

Richard Weaver lives in Baltimore City where he volunteers with the Maryland Book Bank, CityLit, the Baltimore Book Festival, and is the author of The Stars Undone (Duende Press). He is the writer-in-residence at the James Joyce Pub. Other publications include: Dead Mule, Slush Pile, Birmingham Arts Journal, NER, New Orleans Review, FRIGG, Vanderbilt Poetry Review, Black Warrior Review, Barrow Street, Deep South Magazine, Southern Quarterly, Poetry, & Magnolia Review. He also wrote the libretto for the Symphony Of Sea and Stars, performed four times to date.

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New from

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Freedom Knows My Name

by Kelly Harris-DeBerry 978-1-883275-297 • 2020 • $19.00 Freedom Knows My Name is electric. Kelly mixes brilliant poetics with the political. Read this book and don’t stop there. Scan the book and be transported to audio versions of some poems that truly capture the poet’s literary and oral magic. Experience this book.

Maurice Carlos Ruffin, author of We Cast a Shadow Kelly Harris pulls no punches in her superb debut collection. Her writing is brutally honest, and her poems dance with the spiritual ethos of the holy profane.

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LIebestraum: Prose and Poems from a Fortunate Life

by Randy Bates 978-1-883275-30-3 • 2021 • $20.00 Liebestraum is a new and chosen hybrid collection of nonfiction, poetry, and fiction spanning five decades and set largely in the American South.

Its primary elements are human and family relations that, even when fraught or laughable, are personal renderings of love.

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Go Home and Cry for Yourselves

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.

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—Gordon Macalpine, author of Woman with a Blue Pencil

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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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