Thomas Bonner, Jr., Biljana Obradovic, James Shade, Oliver Hennessey
Robin Vander, Mark Whitaker, Nicole Pepinster Greene, Jeremy Tuman, Bill Lavender
Contributing Editors
Bill Lavender
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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.
This double issue comes at a time of numerous anniversaries and memorials. Among them: the 100 th anniversary of the founding of the institution that publishes this magazine, Xavier University, and the 25th anniversary of Katherine Drexel’s (Xavier’s founder) canonization; the 20th year since the Federal Flood (aka Katrina) devastated the city and left it exposed and wounded; the 50th anniversary since the U.S. military left the field of battle in the long-fought Vietnam conflict. And, obviously, the 45th anniversary of Xavier Review itself. No doubt there are other causes to pause and remember. Here in the writing community of New Orleans, we have suffered the loss of three (that we know of) writers of distinction: poet, fiction writer, essayist and translator James (Jimmy) Nolan; poet and visual artist Manfred Pollard; and poet-professor Jerry Ward. We expect the latter two to be memorialized in a future issue, each having been contributors to this magazine. With Jimmy Nolan’s passing being so recent, one of his friends and fellow poets, Andy Young, has written a remembrance, also sharing one of Nolan’s later poems.
In this issue we present a memoir of his Vietnam experiences by attorney & writer Jerry Speir, as well as poems by Mason Joiner commemorating the self-immolation by passionate opponents of the war. (Pardon the over-simplification.) We have not sought Katrina memorials, as there have been many offered close to or on the dates of that disaster. However, you will find poems reacting to Katrina as well as 9/11; some events simply linger in the collective consciousness.
While writers from our city and area have been published in Xavier Review over the decades, I can’t think of an issue in recent years that has featured so many New Orleans and Louisiana-based poets. This is not the result of planning but of happy coincidence. Among them are two former students of mine—Mason Joiner, whom I had the good fortune of teaching when I began work in 2007 at ADVANCE Program for Young Scholars,
and Tom Andes, a frequent contributor to the magazine, and once, long ago, my student at Loyola. In this issue we are excited to publish the first chapter of Tom’s first novel, Wait There Till You Hear from Me (Crescent City Books), in place of a conventional review. You will want to turn the page and to do that, you’ll have to find the book. Among ‘local’ poets, we have new work from Ken Fontenot, Alison Pelegrin, Nikki Ummel, Ed Ruzicka, Justin Lacour, Jonathan Penton, Valentine Pierce, Sean Munro, and the late Gordon Robert Sabatier, as well as dynamic, innovative and sometimes strange work by many poets from out there somewhere. We are also happy to welcome as a new contributor a Xavier colleague, Gabrial Green, reviewing Malcolm X and the Arts: Ten Centennial Reflections. Xavier Review also congratulates another colleague, Skye Jackson, on the publication of her first book of poems, Libre (Regalo Press). Welcome to Xavier Review # 45.
Xavier Review 45 1&2, Fall 2025
Editor’s Note — iv
Andy Young
His Rambunctious Dream: Remembering my Friend Jimmy Nolan — 9
Elizabeth Burk
Five Poems — 14
Alison Pelegrin
Four Poems — 22
Ed Ruzicka
I’ve Started to Run Again — 27
Mason Joiner
Three Poems — 28
Michael Hoerman
Two Poems — 35
Jeff Mock
Small Birds in Large Cages Sometimes Don’t Know Which Way to Fly — 36
Barsa Ray
Three Poems — 37
G. R. Sabatier
Blood, Hammer for Continence — 41
Nikki Ummel
Two Poems — 42
Andrena Zawinski
Some Kind of Holy — 44
Tom Andes
Night School: Revisiting Raymond Carver’s first collection and thinking about his legacy. — 46
Philip Athans
Anxiety Never Made Anything Better — 52
Alan Altany
Awful Beauty of Growing Old — 53
Justin Lacour
Three Poems — 55
Joey Nicoletti
Two Poems — 58
Ken Fontenot
Three Poems — 60
Mason Joiner
A D&D Character Is Alive — 64
John Moessner
Three Poems — 70
Darren C. Demaree
Four Poems — 74
Sean F. Munro
A New Orleans Remoulade Aubade — 76
Gabriel Green
Review of Malcolm X and the Arts: Ten Centennial Reflections — 77
K.Lipschutz
Three Poems — 81
Tom Andes
Wait There Until You Hear From Me — 85
Valentine Pierce
Three Poems — 92
Jonathan Penton
Two Haibun — 99
George Guida
What To Do With Loneliness: A Conversation with Anders Carlson-Wee — 100
Jerry Speir
My Vietnam War — 112
Contributor Notes — 150
Andy Young
His Rambunctious Dream: Remembering my Friend Jimmy Nolan
That Quickly
on turning seventy-five
An antsy doodlebug of a boy is led to bed by his stern mother but can’t get to sleep, his feet twitching like a metronome: tomorrow is his birthday. What wonders await when he turns ten?
Finally he slides into the pool and is swimming inside sleep: what frolic, what a sting it brings as the doodle-boy molts into a butterfly. His flights flutter here and there, petal to petal: Paris, Amsterdam,
the Yucatan, Machu Picchu, Spain, India, China. He glides through a spot-lit fog, all eyes on him, his eyes on everywhere. He can’t keep track in this out-of-control truck: hairpin curves, peaks, valleys,
by James Nolan
together with her, with him, the din of musky romance in the background. Then abruptly he wakes, a truck slamming to a stop at its destination. One hesitant foot hangs from the bed, then another. Is he there yet?
He hobbles to the bathroom mirror to brush chipped yellow teeth framed by a filigree of wrinkles. Who is the old man staring back at him? He staggers, stumbles stiff as a stick, a paltry thing in a ragged bathrobe.
Why has he woken from his rambunctious dream to hold a morning coffee growing cold between the gnarled fingers of a ten-year old?
Jimmy wrote “That Quickly” a few years before dying in his Bourbon Street bathtub, a fate I must admit brings me some comfort. There are certainly worse. And Jimmy’s life was one of the consummate bohemian, a writer who lived life on his own terms, most of which were steeped in New Orleans’ particular flavors. One of his regular activities was to go to the “hammam” as he liked to reference it, at least to my Arabic-speaking husband Khaled, the steam room at the New Orleans Athletic Club, the only gym I’ve ever been to with a chandelier and a bar.
His funeral, just last week, already feels dream-like in its New Orleans romanticism: a heartfelt, traditional mass led by his dear friend Father Ulysses D’Aquila, who flew in from San Francisco and who told the congregants about how he and Jimmy, both centuries-back Louisianians,
met on Mardi Gras day on Bourbon Street and began a lifelong camaraderie. (It was Father Ulysses who shared this poem at Jimmy’s visitation and who gave permission to publish it). Jimmy had already arranged for Father Ulysses to lead his funeral services; the friend left in charge of the arrangements told me he was “Virgo-ing from the grave,” having left every detail of his exit, except for its timing which even he could not arrange, specified. His vision of homegoing to his final family tomb in Saint Louis #3 included a horse-drawn carriage for his cypress coffin from Saint Joseph Benedictine monastery in Covington and a second line leading us behind to sway-step under the blasting September sun.
Perhaps Jimmy imagined it from the window of the Luling Mansion where he lived for a few years. In addition to the isolation of that storied place, he said a motivating factor to move was the fact that he was staring out the window at his dead relatives that he would one day join. He moved back downtown soon after, creating a new reality, for which he had a remarkable talent.
Committed to never driving a car, Jimmy once told me it was easier to get to Barcelona than the Bywater, my neighborhood at the time, our place less than a mile and a half from his. After Katrina knocked out the power, we stayed in touch by land line. He knew the hurricane drill and, A/C-less heat notwithstanding, he sounded as though he were living his life as usual, sleeping through the heat of the day, his well-planned thawing meals eaten by silver-sticked candlelight. When the levees broke I called to warn him that he would soon be surrounded by water. His response? “Oh, Andy, stop watching the news!” We know the rest of that story, and if not, we can turn to his description of it in his memoir Flight Risk, where he sums up his flight out of the city on a stolen school bus: “As in the Battle of New Orleans, the pirates were better organized than the soldiers, and saved our day.”
Jimmy’s ability to create a world he preferred, to lose track, or willfully ignore, aspects of reality, demonstrated, to me, the classic poet’s dilemma of trying to reconcile the imaginary and the mundane world. In New
Orleans, it’s easier than most places to live in favor of the former. I will never think of a Halloween night without thinking of Jimmy sauntering up the street, his head hunched forward a bit as he drags from his cigarette, black cape floating behind him, two red drips drawn from the sides of his lips. He was a perfect vampire, the same one every year, and there was not a day I knew him to wake up before the workday for many of us was done. Jimmy was my oldest friend in the city, and it always felt in divine order that our birthdays were one day apart. We spent many midnights between our birthdays over the years, clinking our glasses as my day turned into his. We relished, mostly jokingly, with other close friends with nearby birthdays, in being Virgos, in our obsessions, our precision (in some things), our aesthetic demands. But Jimmy outdid us all.
Jimmy and I were different in ages and backgrounds, but that never seemed to matter. He hosted our wedding party at his Dumaine Street apartment and even gave our daughter an actual silver spoon when she was born, as if to put it in her mouth himself if we could not. Sometimes Jimmy, our friend John (one of the Virgo brethren), and Khaled and I would perform Lorca in three languages, John sculpting the atmosphere with his flamenco guitar. One August night we performed at the Gold Mine, a bar famed for creating the “Flaming Dr. Pepper” and which was a hub of weekly poetry readings and gatherings for many years. After an after-drink and a move to a smaller bar for another, John got a call to come home. They were having a baby. By the time we had slept a few hours, they would have a girl. Nine months later, Khaled and I would have ours, and they would grow together like trees with their roots intertwined. I don’t remember when Jimmy left that night, but he, too, quintessential bachelor, ended up entwined in our chosen family tree.
I am grateful for his description of a “party” we hosted soon after Hurricane Katrina. In the French Quarter, with no windows but electricity, we were among the privileged. We cooked a feast as the flooded violins I’d impractically gathered dried in the moonlight on the roof below us. The gathering was a magical reminder that we were still human, even as
our landscape had become alien. “Through the window opened over the moonlit pools of warped violins, I spot flames on the horizon. They are licking into a pitch-black sky from a part of the city where the streetlights are still out,” wrote Jimmy. He was always keeping track, always writing, and these and other of his words powerfully pin down the dizzying details of the world we sometimes shared.
Because I am a poet like Jimmy, the blankness of this page reminds me of the words Jimmy won’t write anymore, the breath he will no longer take. “Longevity has never been my first priority,” he once wrote. Luckily, we do have many words from Jimmy, whose wit, lyricism, and life experience are singular, as was he.
The trouble for poets like me and Jimmy is not in imagination, of course, but in reality, of which death is the most problematic aspect. Nothing we can do about time having its way with us: our faces, our bodies. “Who is the old man staring back at him?” Jimmy asks in his poem. “He staggers, stumbles, stiff as a stick/a paltry thing in a ragged bathrobe,” singing back to Yeats, and adding his inimitable dark-witted humor. I hope things are to Jimmy’s liking wherever he is, that the antsy doodlebug in him has free reign. I hope he sleeps, or maybe wakens, in his rambunctious dream.
Elizabeth Burk
Five Poems
Before and After the Fall
For years I’ve hidden behind my limber, flippant ways, lived in my mind, neglected my body— it screams now for attention, assailed by a maelstrom of mysterious malfunctions.
Balance-free, I trip, spill over the library’s stone steps, stop only when my body hits the next landing, splayed like a starfish on the sands of Gibraltar.
Are you okay? asks a stout woman huffing her way up the steps. I’m fine, I bark, wondering how this could possibly be. I struggle to rise, a flapping flounder launching itself back into the river. I‘m going to be late for work, I tell the medic trying to roll me into an ambulance.
Fractured pelvis, says the nurse in the ER where I lie sheet-covered in the corridor, offered a pan
when I need to pee. I fear I’ve become my mother—she too denied her body, reveled in helplessness, fell weekly in the streets, escorted to the ER by the kindness of others.
Where to start the repair?— medieval racks in the gym, pilates, zumba, tai-chi, yoga, herbal tea? My girlfriends lunch with a pile of pills by their plates— digestive enzymes, pro-biotics, osteo-biflex, B-12, Omega 3. They urge me to try. I used to smile and pocket the pills, the way in-patients on mental wards tongue their meds. Now I swallow them all.
My History with High Heels
At six, I slid my feet into mama’s shoes, peep-toed high heels I found in her closet— black suede, red satin, silver-sequined— she wore to nightclubs.
Trying to walk in those shoes was like skating on a sheet of glamour, the dark underworld of jazz, be-bop, sloe gin, gambling, taxi rides to Harlem and back only a wink away.
By twenty I inched my way up the high-wire act, toes squeezed into pointy stilettos, daggers to deter subway predators, their hands on our asses, up our skirts.
By forty, words were my weapons of choice. My high heels grew roots in my shoe rack, as I clomped through grad school in clogs, hoping to heal damaged tendons, bony bunions.
These days I slide my aging feet into pink day-glo sneakers, wear them to swing dances, blues jams, to travel to Cairo, Madrid. Gone that ruinous footwear worn to impress, yet
I confess to a lingering envy of women who glide through the day in four-inch pumps, who shimmy and salsa from dusk to dawn, sexy in their sling-back high-heels.
What Was Left
Every time he gambles on another marriage he comes back into your life bearing photos of his latest wife—each in turn staking their claim on territory that will never be yours.
You are usually married as well, whichever husband at the time conducting rounds, at board meetings, or pleading a case in court. Beaches and Bloody Marys will never greet you the morning after a night frolicking in a tropical casino, rolling dice, playing roulette, although you are both no strangers to the gambling life, prospectors panning for treasure you’d left behind.
Is Anyone Sitting Here, Honey?
I move my canvas tote bags— she plumps her body into the seat next to mine, talking non-stop into a tiny flip-phone.
The tumors are everywhere—in his lungs, blocking his heart—they’ve started him on chemo but the doctor could hardly find a place to put in the port.
Outside the relentless rain beats down. Loudspeakers announce delays, cancellations.
I look around for another place to sit, want to escape this unsought intimacy, but there’s nowhere else to go— passengers mill at gates, slump against walls drinking coffee, talk on phones or to each other.
I turn back to my book, Cultivating Compassion. Others within earshot stare at open books or into their empty laps, avoid each others’ eyes.
I’m on my way to Dallas to take care of the kids— his wife is at the hospital, please darlin,’ pray for my boy, he’s so very sick. A pause. They gave him a week yesterday, so anything beyond that’s a blessing.
Another pause, tears. She pulls a crumpled tissue from her pocketbook. Thanks, darlin’ love you too. She wipes her eyes, stands up, gathers her bags, looks down at me, manages a shaky smile. Did they call the plane to Dallas yet, honey?
Our eyes meet for a moment— I want to rise up, put my arms around her, tell her, Honey, I will pray for you too.
Instead I say, Yes, it’s boarding right now through gate three, both of us peering beyond glass windows at the sleek silver tunnels on the tarmac waiting in the rain to deliver us.
Mixed Messages to a Former Lover
After Heather Christle’s Letter to My Love—
Love, you’re a woman-munching snapdragon. I used to grovel at your toes, now I pinch myself to mind my manners. You, my butt-scratching lambchop, my limber nipple snipper, tunnel through middle-earth, a meat-eating festival snaking your way out of turtle-ridden trenches. I saw your barbecue pit built on the prairie, saw you flip you sauce-smothered ribs, toss your curly pig-tails in the high wind, drink bourbon straight from the bayou. I ran towards you, love, saw you brandish your knife. Who else had you beheaded before you took off? I am still recovering from you—even now, at the crossroads, I want to know.
Alison Pelegrin
Four Poems
Trenta Sei: Our Lady Devoted to Avoiding the Occult
I hide my jitters when touching tarot cards with questions from the soul behind my eyes. I hate the vague responses, how they uproot bad memories of Catholic school, the nuns naysayers listing wonders they forbade. In a nutshell: pray to Mary, close your legs.
I have questions for the old soul behind my eyes. I had my palm deciphered, but she was wrong or drunk or both. I lived past twenty-nine, but I was spooked, expecting the end to call like some Cassandra foretelling my own demise, nobody paying me any mind.
I hate vague responses. They uproot doubt and I freeze, unable to take a step. I’d rather fate shake me by surprise, or pay my quarter to the machine, listen for the whirring inside before Zoltar spits his answers out like prayer cards at Catholic school. The nuns were so quick with penalties when I confused my plastic rosary for Mardi Gras beads.
The sad part is, I was trying to be good. I believed in Veritas, I wanted to kneel in flowers and say the words.
The naysay nuns did nothing but forbid. I wasn’t allowed the sacrament, but they loved to march me to the altar with my arms crossed in shame. I prayed for wasps beneath each habit stinging, for them to take the Lord’s name in vain, in unison.
In a nutshell: pray to Mary, close your legs— that’s all I had to do to be redeemed.
Of course, no voodoo, no Marie Laveau, no Ouija board, no Scientology, no horoscope, no cemetery dirt— everything’s off limits, even tarot cards.
One house and three dogs later and nothing like an eternal traveler, I remember the hurricane purge fondly. Trees through the roof, and rain inside, and the light of the moon, and us living in hotels, every meal at McDonald’s. I wore flip flops in my exile, and upon return stepped into my house through a buckled brick wall while calling the names of the cats we left behind. Disorientation on replay, that feeling of standing in the kitchen, opening draws to tally expected spatulas and knives, but also finding rain water. Looking up to see not the popcorn ceiling, but the attic’s eruption of baby clothes I’d put away just in case. Lightweight life wiped clean of board books and unfolded clothes, azalea bushes spiced with insulation tufts. That Christmas we decorated the trash pile with twinkle lights and it almost felt like home.
Dream of the Afterlife at Lake Pontchartrain
From the levee things are mostly the same— the wind rips through my hair and I’m learning the hard way that it’s too hot to be barefoot. The scene comes in fragments— flowers that thrive in sidewalk cracks, shell parking lot, the earthy smell of rain. The restaurant I loved for their stuffed fish juts out over Lake Pontchartrain as though the hurricane never happened. Pelicans sleep with dignity on empty pilings. My father is here, bright in his life, and I shadow him the way I did as a child, when I would have tiptoed over shells such as these, careful of my patent leather shoes. Once more we gather stones of proper heft for skimming over these waters. There is much to tell—my boys he never met— but rather than speaking, we make offerings of silence and mismatched granite chips
Collect at the Prison Gate
Louisiana State Prison (Angola)
God of wind that passes through razor wire’s glinting thorns, everyone’s watching in this concrete cathedral, so where are you? The lookout tower? Roadside dip where a killdeer made its nest?
A half pencil shapes these words of redemption and its strange ways. Help me to deliver, though I arrive empty-handed, and possibly for no one’s sake, with a car key in my pocket and a pale stripe where my watch should sit.
Ed Ruzicka
I’ve Started to Run Again
These are slow legs, heavy things. Not at all like my brother’s, whose legs were competitive for long distances. Brought him finally into an urn on a high shelf in closet shade where my sister-in-law still keeps him.
My legs are good enough to carry me back under our satsuma tree whose fruit is sweet and tart as my days were sweet and tart
when women who were not quite yet women lifted me, took me in their palms, tasted me tart and sweet as they were tart and sweet when together we glutted ourselves on fruit from the tree of delight and danger. As I said, they were still girls. All night long laughter and giggles flew from their long, silk throats.
Now I am slow, toneless legs plod. No girl who lets laughter and giggles fly would lift me, hold me in her palm. My wife lifts me. I hold her in my palm.
Together we taste our tart, sweet skins and the languorous oblivion of days pregnant with rain, full-weighted clouds. Every sunset I open my eyes, drink in the tart, sweet sky.
Mason Joiner
Three Poems
Nhất Chi Mai
In May 1967, a young Buddhist nun, Nhất Chi Mai, self-immolated for peace in Vietnam. She was so finely dressed, her sister nuns thought she must be getting married.
It is a fragrant day.
The scent of banana cake clings in the oven
as I unhang my favorite áo dài1: irises embroidered with the golden feet of bees, opening to the nourishing sun.
My hair pinned and shaped like washed silk drapes,
I bring my sisters the banana cake this blessed May morning.
“What a beautiful bride, Mai!” they tease.
And it is a wedding day, a day of giving; a spirit, a body, a wish: the gifts.
A wedding is a spectacle of love on fire.
A communal ritual of sacrifice,
1 A Vietnamese formal garment meaning “long shirt”.
as the tea leaf and the jasmine flower are sacrificed to become the rain
which they already were.
A wedding is to be witnessed with loving eyes,
for at a wedding, everyone is married.
Each of our bodies, wisps of one smoke.
Yes, today, I am the bride of all.
Like the banana cake, my fragrance will cling.
And with this vow,
I do not surrender anything that is mine; what is burned at this altar belongs to us.
Dr. Homa Darabi
In February 1994, Iranian child psychiatrist Homa Darabi selfimmolated for women’s rights in Tehran. Dr. Darabi had completed residencies in the U.S. before becoming a professor of psychiatry at the University of Tehran medical school. Four years before her death, Dr. Darabi lost her job for refusing to wear a full-body veil called a chador.
I know why the American poets say they know why the caged bird sings2.
Putting our sufferings in terms of birds is fundamental psychology.
Stories of birds and mice help illustrate what is difficult for the minds of children,
or men with a childish incomprehension of us, their wives, our country, themselves
especially, to comprehend. For example, that I will not wear hijab.
The chador is like a heated cage under the Tehran sun:
“It burns the thing inside it. And that thing screams3.”
2 Paul Laurence Dunbar and Maya Angelou; Darabi told her sister she felt like a “caged bird”.
3 Amiri Baraka, “As Agony. As Now.”
Until the birdcage broils the bird.
Her feathers curl away, leaving only the quivering
black-smudged quills, only song. The singed bird sings her parable
naked, for the cage-keeper’s tender ears. Any caged bird knows why,
in a busy plaza of north Tehran, amid throngs of glaring men,
I unwrapped my smothered head and washed my hair in gas.
I love my hair and my head. I love Iran and her men.
But if I don’t sing of myself, How will they know what is mine?
Kathy Change
In October 1996, lifelong activist Kathleen Chang, or Kathy Change, self-immolated at the Peace Symbol on the University of Pennsylvania campus. Change was partially inspired by Nhất Chi Mai, a Vietnamese nun who had self-immolated decades prior to protest the war in Vietnam.
At Penn, they know me.
Even though I’m 46 and don’t go there, I go there a lot.
At Penn, I am an increasingly ungainly presence4
I used to go to the hospital and dance outside for dialysis patients; bask in their smiles through the huge window.
At Penn, they cringe at me. Glancing from the library steps to the College Green, they find me dancing in ungainly heels with a warhead for my manly member.
At Penn, they know my handiwork: for this bikini, I got after Old Glory with a pair of fabric shears. Here, I painted in white on a black bra got milk?—get it?
4 A phrase Change used in her final letter, “A Note to Sympathetic Penn Students”.
Or instead of the bra, a pair of bumperstickers do nicely: If you can read these, you’re exactly as close as I want you. Students of Penn, do I have your attention?
You could say, at Penn, I’m a fixture, walked past, like a campus fowl in a mask and wings I feathered by hand dancing to cassettes and singing in a megaphone:
We could all wake up right now, if we wanted. I’ve been getting more frustrated lately. Singing less. Shrieking more. After last week, I’m not allowed my loudspeaker anymore. Penn is wishing I would leave.
That’s nothing new, I’m a disowned child from Ohio, born in academia to a rigid family syllabus with a rubric of reputation that wanted cleanly to be rid of me.
I added an “e” to my birth name “Chang” and my name changed to the name “Change” and those kids at Penn can take my name and make it. Without them, it’s nothing, just a nutty egocentrist, just me.
I remember the words of a girl called Mai who offered herself as a torch in the dark5 to light the way from Armageddon. I am not Mai. I am no nun
5 Nhất Chi Mai’s final words referenced in Change’s “Final Statement”.
or even remotely holy.
My motives are questionable: admittedly, this won’t be my first try. I was fourteen the first time. I tried again when me and Frank split. And last year, Anita found gasoline leaking from my backpack.
There may be a certain desire here. I fear the worst of myself. Mai was reckoning with a war in her home. What’s my rush?
The best I can muster is, “I hope this helps.”
So I spend an hour at Kinko’s (they know me here, too— the lady with the manifesto) I Xerox pamphlets, my last letter to the students at Penn.
I stack them under a rock by the peace symbol of American steel, —raised at Penn the same year Mai’s spirit rose in flames— where I, too, will transform.
Out of costume and on fire, I die dancing. The fire dances, too. Even after I die, the fire keeps on dancing. Even after it’s burned out, And it dances into you.
Michael Hoerman
Two Poems
The Minnow
The minnow dies
On a dangling hook Spinning in the sun and wind
Its flickering shadow Leaps wildly within the spray
Of a speedboat’s wake
A Soul
Is like a wardrobe That changes With each new season
Like fawns
In fields where fireflies hover Blinking as the moon rises
Jeff Mock
Small Birds in Large Cages Sometimes Don’t Know Which Way to Fly
I may have told you once, long Ago, that I saw my father driving The other way on 7th Avenue —This was in Marion, and I was seventeen, and I Hadn’t seen him in two years; He had run off—and when I saw him, I wheeled around and chased after him, But it was night, and raining, and there were Too many cars and horns And headlights and stoplights, So I never caught up with him, and I Didn’t find out for another Thirteen years that it wasn’t him —He was a thousand miles and more Away, in Florida—but all those years, I thought that I had missed him and, if Only I had known which way To go, I would certainly be there by now.
Three Poems
Revenge of the Fish Head
Once a delicacy—a fish head could be cooked five ways on one head by a Maharaj, the master-chef for a feast.
At weddings, each member of the groom’s party had one to themselves. The bride’s father had lived for this day; for his daughter,
he would put his head on their plates. The home guests ate the flesh, wagered whose turn next, whose daughter
was coming of age, eyed the coveted heads they knew they wouldn’t get. If every lay guest was served, it wouldn’t only be the father who would bleed dry, the rivers would empty. They licked the scarlet gravy off their fingers, sang praises of their host, gave thanks
if they had no girls or if theirs had been seen off. Heads not prized any more, cast aside in fish markets, where cats pounce, and only old men care.
Barsa Ray
I thawed a whole fish from the freezer, chopped its head off, looked into its eye grey with knowledge and death,
pondered how best to cook it, give respect. Mustard oil, lots of it, smoking hot: I laid the head gently, pressing to crispen
the bones. Sans body, it fought still, squirming and spitting but I helped it on to its destiny. Agitating the pungent
cooking fat, tears pooled in my eyes. When done I picked apart the too-hot head, crunched the bones,
cradled its cheek-flesh with my tongue. Its eye was next, an oyster shucked. I dove deep in its minute sea of humours
— same as mine, and it burst releasing the prize of its savoury-sweet flavour, its tiny teeth bared in a grin.
Three days later I still couldn’t chew on that side which the fish’s teeth had jarred.
Black Hole
Packed carriage, Central Line, bullets through tunnels, to the end of town. Enter three generations; grandma, mum, baby son.
A North Pole, he draws the magnetic needles
of women ten seats down, kicks out each time mum speaks to him, white socks with red toes and heels slip into the arches of his feet, resemble holy wounds.
Lord of all, he doesn’t select on age or looks, his tongue darts in-out, in-out, the lick of its tiny flame turning the women’s faces into smiley fries; he gobbles them quick.
The driver speaks: next station Holborn. Did I hear whole borne? Succumb, the fruit of the womb is your reward, a place in paradise, here and beyond.
Some get off, tingling from the vision, those inside, still mesmerized, sucked one by one, into the tiny, smiling, black hole.
One Country to Another
Today I got my new passport, an exchange at gates I wasn’t at. Was it over a handshake my blood changed
colour, red to blue? Did my old country say to the new: Take care of her, will you? Wrap her up in all your red tape,
blunt the axe of her brain in waiting rooms, for appeals and reviews. Tell her the world is hers, then stand back
to let her fight every day for the same inch of it. Pass the jokes around, she will swallow and laugh,
even if she doesn’t recognise the flour they’re made of. Send your good news bounding in: Jobs, Growth, GDP
How can she not like them? Everyone loves children, even if their own are dead.
G. R. Sabatier
Blood, Hammer for Continence
for Laurie Dennery, Thanksgiving Day, 1976
Blood, hammer for Continence, Forge the pretty words, the pain’s still there. We don’t usually mention it.
May I buy you a drink?
Yes, thanks. Sure.
(Some precious hops we take in flashing, whirling out from cramp, or short sight, or deaf ear, or any stillness of birth.)
How nice to be a real, born poet, with the rolling, roaring of the blood’s surf as one casts off in search of the Storm.
But for me, the ache to be truly myself, as cramp talks to cramp, seething in tidal bed.
“I wish I could work; but most of all I would be free, as man-fish, in my element,” said the balking fisherman, gored on his own hook, caught in his net.
Nikki Ummel
Two Poems peonies
in my neighbor’s yard, wild-maned jasmine creeps over the chain links, drips syrupy sweet. morning dew on upturned cheeks. i want to lick the moisture from each petal. for part of each day, i am happy. i watch the roses shout over each other near the yard’s edge. geraniums foam from flower boxes, dribble into corners. soon the grass will tilt & i will slide off the rim. the sky flips over to sun its other side. somewhere, someone else pinches the head of grief, twists the body, sucks it dry. no. what i want to write about is peonies. i have yet to make mine grow.
what is that song we sing for the dead?
a dreamsicle butterfly gulf wind in your hair the water misting your eyes is this real or fable? remember: my sister has a daughter the beauty that she brings meds roost in the old oak tree red string round beads
i love you so many words ran out of d’s so the bracelet reads d a n d y
come, hug this drink with me today i filled the tub with polaroids your last pack of parliaments overflowed till the smiles spilled
which way does the wind blow? the thought that drags its teeth through my mind: toward the salmon traps, silly
i don’t know where to begin sometimes i feel very sad i forgive you father
Andrena Zawinski
Some Kind of Holy
The shopkeep lets me run my hands along his father’s handcrafted weaving loom in his roadside shop and gallery. I tell him it makes me feel some kind of Holy. He tells me to go to El Santuario de Chimayó where there’s plenty of Holy to touch.
There I line up in a room off the church for a scoop of miracle dirt, feeling off kilter as I did as a kid entering the amusement park’s Noah’s Ark mouth of a blue whale and walking funhouse rattling floorboards, hands in pockets. Nothing Holy there.
I do touch things at the sanctuary: run my hands along adobe walls strung with discarded crutches and a small Infant of Prague, fingering the Holy Child’s gold lace frayed hem. No one stops me, unlike at the Church of Saint Nicholas in Prague where a woman stomped her booted foot to stop me from reading a fresco with my fingertips. As did a burly guard at the Hermitage in St Petersburg as I angled in above velvet ropes toward Leonardo’s grim and unfinished Benois Madonna. The only thing I got to touch there was a splintered sill where no one touches anything, like everything is some kind of Holy.
Just across from Santo Niño Chapel, every wall draped
in baby shoes and prayers for the longed for, for the lost, for the ailing children, all of it untouchable, I settle for the souvenir store where I handle pouches for holy dirt, bottles for blessed water, folk art crosses, purchase a chili pepper chocolate bar wrapped in an image of a Dia de los Muertos skeleton fashioned as Frida Calla.
On my way out, I light a votive under the Divine Gazebo. As a tour bus pilgrimage passes by, I search for salvation in their hazy shadows that I can glimpse but never grasp. Back in my motel room I reach for the pen, paper, poems I touched in early morning to save myself from myself, and like an angel Gabriel trumpets out: Holy, Holy, Holy.
Tom Andes
Night School : Revisiting Raymond Carver’s first collection and thinking about his legacy.
I discovered Raymond Carver not in a college classroom but through Robert Altman’s 1992 movie Short Cuts, which weaves together a bunch of Carver’s stories that aren’t actually linked in literary form into a single interconnected portrait of Los Angeles with an all-star cast including Huey Lewis, Tom Waits, and Lyle Lovett.
By the time I got to college, Carver was ubiquitous in the classroom, his stories held up as models of the form. Later, when I was in grad school, maybe because the program I was in valued a more “experimental” aesthetic, or maybe just because of the inevitable backlash that happens whenever things become ubiquitous or canonized, people dismissed Carver as “workshop fiction,” his stories the template for the “MFA story.” In the years since, I’ve heard people deride him as emblematic of a certain type of toxic white literary masculinity. It’s true: Carver was a drinker, and his stories reflect the world he lived in, which wasn’t always a pretty one.
As many times as I’ve read Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? Carver’s debut collection from 1976—three or four, I think—I’d never noticed until this last pass that the word please occurs twice in the title. That’s the way with a lot of Carver’s stories: as I’ve gone back to them, I’ve caught onto their underlying strangeness, detected things that went right over my head the first time (or several times) through.
“It is without my agreement.” How many times did I read “Fat” without reckoning with what those words mean when the narrator says them when her husband tries to initiate sex at the end of the story? Carver writes about marital rape as well as I imagine a male writer can. Crucially, nothing graphic occurs in the scene.
It’s easy to miss how powerfully strange Carver’s fiction is, the empathy he has for all his characters, some of whom, yes, are men who dig their own graves. I have a running argument with several friends about whether Carver was better once he escaped Gordon Lish’s influence. Conventional wisdom seems to hold that What We Talk About When We Talk About Love , which was heavily edited by Lish, is Carver’s great book. And yeah, the last time I taught “Why Don’t You Dance?” to high school students, no less, I was amazed at the economy and craftsmanship. Those kids were picking out symmetries, details of character I’d missed. It was like, via those stories, they’d experienced failed marriages, life’s inevitable disappointments and bitterness, too. Still, I like Carver when he has a bigger canvas, and he got to go deeper into his characters once he broke things off with Lish and wrote Cathedral.
That’s not an argument I’m going to take up here except to say that while I was rereading this collection recently, I decided Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? might be my favorite Carver collection. At least, it’s the one furthest outside the shadow of the institution that Carver became. In many respects, it’s the quietest and the strangest of his books.
My favorite on this pass was “Night School,” which could’ve ended up in an anthology of pulp or “grit-lit.” In the story, an unnamed male narrator goes alone to a bar. His wife has left him for reasons that are never entirely clear, or that are only hinted at in a piece of remembered dialogue played for comic effect near the end, when the narrator remembers relating a bad dream to his wife, and she replies: “‘Being betrayed by somebody in your own family, there’s a real nightmare for you.’” She’s taken the car. He’s living with his parents.
All the exposition is accomplished in a few brief paragraphs composed of the kind of short, declarative sentences that were Carver’s trademark. It’s tempting to read those sentences as tough or terse, but they’re not. They’re weary, resigned, and grim, laced with bitter, self-lacerating humor. They’re also clear. The precision, the economy of language is remarkable, as is the tone, the ways in which we understand without being told what
kind of situation the narrator is in, as well as his mindset. The opening paragraphs are filled with both quiet desperation and gallows humor.
Carver’s narrator meets two women at the bar. He tells them he’s enrolled in night school, and they tell him they know a professor who teaches at the same school. This professor is a highfalutin type, likes a glass of wine, a highball. The women imply they have something on him, possibly something sexual. The narrator continues talking to them because they’re buying him drinks. Eventually, he agrees to drive them to the professor’s house in his parents’ car.
But, once he and the women walk to his parents’ house, and he goes inside, partly because his father seems to frown on it, the narrator experiences a crisis of conscience and balks at driving the women. Here, we get a fuller, more detailed portrait of the narrator’s life. His father is on disability, his mother working to support them, and the narrator is sleeping on a cot in the hall, where he falls asleep every night after staying up late, reading. That’s the fundamental motion of the story: it begins in scene, not explaining much at all, then fills in details closer to the end.
The narrator stays inside. The women knock several times before cussing him out, giving up, and going away. Once they’re gone, the narrator goes to the restaurant where his mother works, knowing she can give him a sandwich.
The story has the blink and you’ll miss it quality of much of Carver’s work, especially his early work. But it has meaning, significance, and the character makes a choice—a moral decision—with consequence.
Most of the characters in the story don’t have access to a car. But the narrator’s parents have a car, and the two women he meets in the bar want him to drive them somewhere. The car is like the night school of the title, a means of self-improvement, conferring agency and status. A person in night school might be said to be “going somewhere.” And that sense of motion, of aspiration, is an important part of the story.
Maybe the title is ironic. The narrator turns away from the kind of knowledge the women and the debauched college professor could offer
him, instead choosing the safety of the cot in his parents’ hall. Maybe the story is about his refusal to grow up. And maybe, also, the title mocks that desire for self-improvement. This is where night school leads you, the title seems to suggest, sleeping on a cot in your parents’ hall, a loser. But we sense that the narrator makes the right choice in not going with the women. Perhaps there is something of the good woman-bad woman dichotomy here. The women he meets in the bar are lascivious, troublesome. The mother, by contrast, is fending for all the men in the story. Yet the women in the bar have the narrator’s number, too. They point out he might be a little too old to be living at home. And they’re right.
When Carver writes women, he writes them well. Besides “Fat,” in the same collection, “The Student’s Wife,” paints a sympathetic portrait of a different sort of female character. In that story, the graduate student husband’s academic and literary aspirations are slowly suffocating his wife. She ends the story on her knees, pleading with God to help them. For someone who gave his life to literature, Carver didn’t have the rosiest view of what it means to be an academic, much less to have literary aspirations.
Maybe Carver’s critics and his boosters both get him wrong. Yes, he chain-smoked something like four packs a day, according to accounts I’ve read, and lung cancer killed him. Yes, by the end of his life, he was a sober alcoholic. And yes, in what is probably his most famous author photo, he’s wearing a leather jacket and staring at the camera as if he has something very fucking serious to tell us.
But whatever Carver was as a person, in his fiction, he wasn’t macho, wasn’t a man’s man. He was a writer capable of sensitive, nuanced portrayals of women. He rarely wrote about the bender, the days-long drunk; instead, he wrote about the aftermath, the quiet times between storms when his characters were trying to sober up, and this, to me, is why he’s interesting. He also seems very much attuned to the wreckage his male characters cause. In “Night School,” and in many other stories, the women have far more emotional range and agency than the men do.
If critics are wrong to dismiss Carver as a paradigm of toxic masculinity,
so, too, are those boosters who read him through the lens of a tired, patriarchal white working-class masculinity that was current in the 1970s. Think dudes drinking domestic beer while they listen to Merle Haggard in dive bars. I have seen people talk about Carver as if he epitomized this type of world, this type of writer.
If Carver sometimes inhabited that world, it was because he was born into it, not because he was slumming it, and my guess is that he very much wanted to escape it. Like in “Night School,” a sense of upward mobility is a theme in Carver’s work, writing and storytelling offering characters a way out of the bleakness of their lives. The male character reading himself to sleep is a motif in Carver’s stories, not unlike the narrator of his later story, “Cathedral.” His male characters often live in books.
One of Carver’s virtues is that he makes it look easy, which is likely one reason he’s spawned so many imitators. Having written a fair few Carver knockoffs, I can tell you it isn’t easy. If by the end of his career, he was the consummate insider, he spent most of his career as an outsider. And that, at least, is how I first came to his stories, not as the epitome of “workshop fiction,” but as something that felt like it captured aspects of a life that was recognizable to me. My life was not like his. I was middle class, a doctor’s son. But the defeatist humor, the quiet desperation, and, finally, the sense of living on the margins of a professional field in which one has a certain amount of cultural attainment but very little earning power—those things still speak to me.
The funny thing about Short Cuts is how unlike Carver’s stories it seems. Carver lived mostly in Northern California, not Los Angeles. And the California he writes about is closer to Didion’s interior of the state than it is to the coastal cities, though Carver lived in San Francisco, too. The movie was a fine introduction to his work, even if the film exists in a fictional world of its own. A film adaptation really is a different genre, and it can be its own work of art.
At the end of “Fat,” the unnamed narrator expresses the certainty her life is going to change. One reading insists that she’s fooling herself, but I don’t think the story is that heavy-handed. Likewise, the narrator in
“Night School” might succeed at getting his life together, or this might be just another stop on his downward spiral. Either way, Carver taps into that space where we’re no longer certain who were are. Whether it happens or not, in that space, change is possible.
Alan Altany
Anxiety Never Made Anything Better
I still have to do the thing pay for the thing get through the thing manage the thing defuse the thing burn through or burn down the thing bury the thing withstand the thing erase or delete the thing love or hate the thing identify the thing beat the thing surrender to the thing learn to love the thing
No sense getting all nervous about the thing
Awful Beauty of Growing Old
A brutal beauty becoming old before your still-young eyes seeing a slightly familiar face in the mirror of imagination, a face full of love & dying on a deeply personal scale. An awful beauty growing old like a miraculous banyan tree with its roots in the heavens & branches seeking horizons giving shade from noon fire & relief from lonely deserts. A terrible beauty being old more invisible than ever like a near-naked beggar along the side of the road with his ancient poems stuffed into a tattered bag. Absurdly paradoxical beauty of such silent-souled old age with sore back & bruised skin along with mystical moments where death sprouts wings & eternity mingles simply among all the daily details. Such grotesque beauty & gutsy-fleshed wisdom among the very old ones
disappearing all the time into final godly memory.
Three Poems Snow
We shoplifted dinner from the bodega and went back to your place you showed me a film where the male gaze gets intimidated by something greater staring back and this is why i moved to the city to share a bath with you listen to free jazz in a too small apartment and hate where i was born its magnolias and funerals and fried everything i majored in snow so we could be together so i could make meaning out of the silence after a blizzard after films are over after your dark hair hits the pillow
Justin Lacour
“Jefferson
Highway Blues”
i’ve been checking out bars near the hospital and been disappointed by all save the Pourhouse the women there touch the mysterious bump on my forehead for luck to help conceive a child to ensure a bountiful harvest it’s hard to keep track the doctors could remove it but i reject western medicine in favor of bringing a dead cat to the graveyard at midnight ala Tom Sawyer which reminds me during a recent tryst at the Mark Twain Apartments my boon companion and i discussed whether the Wife of Bath is a proto-feminist figure and whether in prehistory women might have resisted the establishment of the patriarchy through guerilla warfare or by signs and behaviors that have trickled down to today speed dating has been my college the way Ishmael said the sea was his Harvard and Yale that’s why i know the men still complaining about JaMarcus Russell
are really disappointed by masculinity in general all its dead ends like i used to get that hollow feeling after work was over like i’d sold my soul to the devil just to play smooth jazz and poetry never saved my life but it gave me a code for the highway its lawyers and doctors and gas station casinos its churches and libraries and undercover cops the no tell motels and lube shops the whitewashed diners which like me are cheap and dirty and open all night
Lakeside Mall
So i passed through Fat City unscathed bowed my head for grace at the food court i’m not the first person whose parents got old though i am the first to eat muffins with a fork is it wrong to worry this will all be underwater someday when a man unwraps a block of bleu cheese and begins to eat it like an apple
Joey Nicoletti
Two Poems
Buddies
My throat explodes when I call for the bus to stop. The rest of my body is a map of scratches and bruises. No seats are open. I grab a pole and do my best not to feel dizzy. It doesn’t work. The Eddy Grant song “Electric Avenue” pulses out of a boombox in the back seat. Deep in my heart I am a warrior. I look out the window. My buddy Anthony, Tony Crab Legs, catches my stare and gives me the thumbs-up. Then I see Matty-Ass, my other buddy. He stares into the distance, expressionless. His slick-backed auburn hair and shades glint in sunlight as the bus pulls away from the cracked curb, Eddy Grant’s smoldering vocals fogging the windows.
The Antelopes
Near Clovis, New Mexico, I watch tumbleweeds leap like strange bullfrogs in an endless field.
A pair of windmills spin in sync. Then I see two antelopes grazing on the same patch of grass. Their joy is palpable, which reminds me of me and my love at our most simpatico— the thought of us going to bed later and touching each other is a dazzling night sky of aroused stars, the moon slipping out of its orange dress.
Ken Fontenot
Three Poems
Prairie Cajuns
I never had a first cigarette. I only knew The glow of my parents’, often in dismay. Once my mother made me clean the ceiling Of its nicotine. To think she began to see That many of her friends, too, sunk from smoke. Before my father left for trips, he told Us kids to check the house for any burning. Once I did and found one smoldering.
Dad asked me to drive, leaving New Orleans. I got a speeding ticket outside Opelousas. We arrived very late at my grandparents’.
A brother, a sister asleep in the backseat. Mom woke them up as if from a hangover.
Morning and you could hear the hens In the barn. Grandma wrung one’s neck. She filled a pan with boiling water, The better to remove the feathers. For breakfast she made pancakes In an iron skillet. I dipped mine in Karo syrup. Grandpa brought in the milk, cow-fresh. Gone the old and their now ancient farm. What makes memory speak? My grandpa Pointed out my calf. The one I petted.
A Celebration of Graduates
I thought of a fencing match as I ate Supper. My dull knife against his. I identified myself. My name touched the air. Even my lungs filled the day with a new breath.
This happened at Kolb’s restaurant The year I graduated from Tulane With a BA in German. My spoken German was Not great then. Not until I studied later For a year in Freiburg did I feel competent.
On campus there were protests against The killing of other students at Kent State. Final exams were called off. 1970, Spring semester. Early grades the professors assigned.
At Kolb’s I ate Wiener Schnitzel, German Black bread and Kartoffelsalat; Apfelstrudel
For dessert. The president of the German Consulate in New Orleans had paid for our meal.
She seemed a lady of nobility, pleased With us who had chosen the language Of her country. I shook her hand and said “Nice to meet you” in German. “Freut mich.”
My professor, who fought in World War II, Arrived. He told me of his gratitude to Americans. He praised the Marshall Plan which turned out To be a life preserver. However, he said,
“We Germans needed potatoes, not the corn You sent us. Corn’s to feed the animals On a farm.” He had given me an A for his course. Gladly, I let him have his complaint.
Days When the Moon Is Egocentric
The spider has a star in its web. I think about once throwing Newspapers from my bicycle, a boy Who liked to play solitaire.
I want biscuits in every oven. I want geese
Flying across my supper plate.
These days might be in the memory Of whoever lives a long time. I live with a wallet in my back pocket. The sun is public. I have made it my god.
Other than a birth certificate, Only a photo with Mom and me In her arms proves I was born.
My foot likes its shoe. They are kin, like blood brothers.
And I have a great time cooking breakfast. Anyone can. Especially in dreams.
Let me never say the rain falls for the good. For then it will flood.
A D&D Character Is Alive
Y
es, for moments at a time, in a span of four to six hours once every two weeks or so, they breathe, they act and react, their story unfolds before them, and they live it. The player is their pilot, or maybe their passenger. Tabletop role-playing games, like their champion, Dungeons & Dragons, bring these often alien and fantastical but very human personalities to life in a way that novels and movies don’t, or can’t. Their lives are uniquely like ours who play them: out of their control, influenced by others, and changed for better or worse by great swings of luck. No one, no omniscient writer, not even the player who created them, controls their fate. Any moment of unplanned chance or impulse can alter the course of their lives. And as with us, the threat of death is ever-present to them.
Parker and I are nearing our one-year anniversary together. She sauntered into living on the first of October, a month when things are not what they appear to be. I had spent a few weeks developing the idea of her before that day.
The first thing I knew is that I wanted a secret. I had seen big secrets play out at the gaming table, their revelations like a narrative cymbal crash, reverberating backwards and forwards, recontextualizing everything before and informing everything after. I wanted to feel that explosion again, from the inside, so I needed a secret. I knew my character would tell any lie, and string any number of lies together, to protect that secret. And then, I knew I wanted my liar to be a shapeshifter (magic being one of the many gifts of high fantasy role-play). This provided the secret: her base form—her true self—no one would see. She would present a false form to the world as her reality. No one would even know she’s a shapeshifter. I was sure now of what I had suspected all along: the form she hides is a regretful, gluttonous man in late middle age who prefers to live as a petite, green elf girl.
I made a playlist, starting with a song from the musical Chess, sung by Idina Menzel, that would establish the fundamental attitudes by which she interacted with the world: “Everybody’s playing the game, but nobody’s rules are the same. Nobody’s on nobody’s side.” And suddenly, Parker revealed herself to be a woman who had made moral compromises for her own security. The most consequential of these moral compromises was a dark bargain with a cruel, libidinous fairy god called the Stag King. In exchange for his magical gifts, Parker is his willing concubine. Another point of distinct variance with her inventor: Parker is quite unsentimental about sex.
Gradually, her look began to crystalize. Soft, pale green skin like the inside of a lime. A thick mass of curly, curly dark green hair, like the outside of a lime. Her clothes, elements of grunge tempered with notes of refinement, began with a pair of chocolate brown cargo pants, many sizes too large, belted at her waist; a golden-orange, sleeveless silk croptop with gold filigree along the straps and bustline, which she mostly obscures under a reversible olive green/navy blue canvas jacket; black leather lace-up boots; and in her hair, a crown of marigolds matching her blouse. She avoids rings in case she has to shift into a larger form, but freights her pierced, pointed ears with rings and studs from lobe to helix.
Her name pretended to be “Edin Hellebore” for a while (derived certainly from “Idina”), but I knew immediately she could never possess a name as sweet and elegant as that. And for little or no reason at all, or maybe fresh off a typical home-viewing of Scream 3, I thought of the actress Parker Posey. It felt like tripping into a body-temperature pool: Posey herself like a coyote from a dark wood, quick, vital, unvarnished, full of earthy humor, digging for love. A con-artist is, after all, an actress. With her last name, I wanted to evoke the gray, fuzzy, blank-canvas look I imagined a shapeshifter to have in their native form—like a painted manikin after a rain—perhaps with a dose of the childhood melancholy that creates an untrusting, adult grifter.
And so, her name was Parker Bleary.
I was walking out the evergreen front door of my best friend’s house after our Sunday morning crossword ritual, off to my first session as Parker. Lifting a basket of freshly folded laundry, I said to him, “I think I’m gonna make her Irish.”
He skeptically wished me luck maintaining the accent for 4+ hours of play. And he’s not wrong—you embark on an accent hopefully, until you light on the odd word that sends it all to shit, and somehow you’re talking on three different continents at once. I practiced the whole drive there, reading billboards in the lilting brogue of Eire while doing my best to sound more like Fleabag’s Hot Priest than the Lucky Charms leprechaun. An hour later, when I was ensconced in the playtime sofa, Parker spoke aloud for the first time, and sure enough, she had the accent. I’m convinced that was her decision, not mine.
Parker would go on to surprise me many more times. That’s the paradox: I don’t tell her how to act or what to say; it’s she who reveals herself to me.
From the start, she was suddenly and unexpectedly many things that I am not: flirtatious, snide, combative; and while I was Parker, I got to swim around in that pool. I could be a confident flirt and a good liar. When she was called a thief by one companion, a disapproving old holy man, I found her asserting, as if for the umpteenth time, “I am not a thief, I’m a con-man”, and the distinction, or such as it existed in her mind, instantly fascinated me.
Once, she disclosed to me privately a tragedy of which I had no prior knowledge. We were ambushed by assassins while traveling on a flying ship. The last one alive attempted to avoid capture by making a dash to leap from the gunwale and plummet to his death. To my surprise, Parker, generally casual about the well-being of strangers, tackled the man and for the rest of the night, talked him down, untied his bonds, and even secured him a full-time position aboard the ship. I think this effort was Parker’s way of telling me about her brother—the one I didn’t know about—who leapt from a bridge when she was little.
Perhaps what surprised me more than anything about Parker was her maternal streak. Early in our adventure, Parker, along with Ronald, the holy man, and a pragmatic, carmine-skinned thief named Katara, begrudgingly became the sole caretakers of a small child, a prince who was being hunted for the ancient dark deeds of his bloodline. Surprising herself, I think, as much as me, Parker quickly found inside her a protective instinct for the child, which manifested into a kind of singular purpose: to liberate him from the political machiavels seeking his death. Months later (for me; just a couple weeks for Parker), her attachment to the kid shocked everyone: after Katara had a vision that the child was in danger, we returned to the safehouse where we had entrusted him to a powerful mage, only to find the child gone and his guardian slaughtered. Parker cracked: more afraid, angry, reckless, and destructive than I had ever seen her. When we ended that session, she was near-catatonic; my hands were shaking.
The truth is, we all know it, Parker is me. When I learn about her, I’m actually learning about myself. Mostly things I knew, I suppose, but less sharply before Parker.
Take my gender, for example. I am, by all outward appearances, a “guy” in most of the usual ways: I dream of a pick-up truck; I like jeans and work pants, steel-toed boots, plaids and tee-shirts, baseball caps. But I don’t much care for baseball, or any sports really; I have never been athletic; I have never liked hunting and fishing, or tools, or muscle cars, or muscles, for that matter; Home Depots and weight rooms are my personal hell; I’ve never been a stud or a playboy. Essentially, I mean to say that I’ve never felt much like a “man”, never felt like I had much in common with the macrogroup called “men”. I find this dissonance, in my daily life, somewhat stunting. I walk into a gym, or a bar, or a classroom, and I hear Emily Haines of Metric sing the first lyric of the first song on the Parker playlist: “I tremble—they’re gonna eat me alive.” Or I witness the incomprehensible mating rituals of homo sapiens in the wild, and I retire to my quiet apartment pondering Stephen Schwartz’s line from Wicked, also on the playlist, and also sung by Idina Menzel, “I wasn’t born for
the rose and pearl.” Though stunting, I do not find my gender qualms debilitating. I have a healthy social life with folks of all sorts. And none of this is to say that I feel like a woman either. Perhaps I’m somewhere in between. Suzy Eddie Izzard, when she used he/him pronouns, once described herself as “a lesbian trapped in a man’s body”. That may not describe me perfectly, but it’s getting warmer. And perhaps a lot of cismen might self-identify in this in-between space. Let me get to the point, and this is where Parker comes in: in tabletop role-play, I enjoy playing women (and if it isn’t clear yet, I do consider Parker a woman). But it isn’t an exercise in femininity; I don’t pretend to be any more feminine than I am. I enjoy playing in the space where gender tropes are a distant star barely casting any shadow at all; where separating Man’s behavior from Woman’s behavior is like trying to sift light from shadow at dusk with a large-tooth comb. I’ve always hated those 90s comedy routines that sought endlessly to delineate the psychological archetype of the man from that of the woman—the ten thousand and one “men are like this, and women are like this” bits you’ve heard, mainly from men. (Especially as those gender paradigms are often inverted for the most immediately convenient interpretation: sometimes women are too emotional, and men all reason; conversely, sometimes men are all id while women are the calculating, practical ones—all rubbish.)
In the interest of redeeming comedians, however, I hold with great reverence the portrayal of Christine Baskets by the late comedian Louie Anderson in the FX series Baskets. Anderson, a cisman like I, embodies with such delicacy, honesty, and dignity the character of Christine Baskets, a ciswoman even through Anderson’s most masculine mannerisms. This is what I’m getting at.
Parker allows me to shift in another skin for a while (as she does herself) with the proportion of masculinity and femininity that feels like me. I don’t mean to suggest that I am, or am considering the possibility of being, a trans person; I don’t wish to claim an experience that doesn’t belong to me. Is Parker trans? I don’t know. What is gender to a
shapeshifter? When, from moment to moment, you can change your body entirely, man, woman, and the spectrum between them are all transitory states of being. Ice, water, vapor: it’s the stuff of matter, not the state of matter, that makes an identity.
If you can find a few people to be weird with, who won’t snicker at your wonky accent, you too can walk in the grungy combat boots and silk crop-top of your fantasy character, getting to know yourself as you get to know them, even for just a few hours every few weeks. I cherish my time with Parker. While I’m driving the half-hour to the house where we play, I look forward to seeing her, in a sense. I look forward to stumbling over what she will do, what sardonic pearls she might drop, as the dice tumble out their providence upon her/our life. A part of me even fears (the good kind of fear) that it may be the last time we meet. Near the end of her playlist, there’s a Kurt Elling song that bears my message to Parker, if I could leave her one: “There is something within you. There is something in everything that is: it’s the rhythm of living. And I can see it in all things, all, but especially you.”
A special acknowledgement to Annie Dillard, whose work inspired the form of this essay.
John Moessner
Three Poems
Calving
We continued down the path, not blinded as we thought by the rough-planked blind we peeked from. She could have followed through if it came to that, but she waited us out, her patience honed on rough weather and the smoothed strop of instinct. We left her in the grass, a bud in spring, a translucent pink bulb breaking through the black. And coming back, white fur on four sturdy stems, licked clean by the muscle of the wind.
Fuzzy
Night is the fur on a blue plum.
—Maxine Kumin
The hair covering the peaks of her ears could use a trim, but I trust the design. Night smells of the faint spoil of spit milk and a broken diaper pail lid. Warmth catches up to me, weighs on me like a limp pelt. I crack the door just past the creak of its hinges. The small box fan floats the room. A cough burrows into the back of my throat. I try to stifle it in a stack of pillows and the dreams of this newborn.
Turning the Wheel
All it is is sunlight on granite. Robert Hass
I could feel the change happen as I braked down Dodson Lane, two ribbons of asphalt not two cars wide. The spring growth closed in the road and the blooms of redbuds and invasive pears disappeared into the streak of sunlight across the windshield.
I imagine again that morning in October ten years earlier, late to my classroom, busy with handouts and the broken stapler. Slight, like the delicate glass that separates laughing from crying, or the moment when a room is no longer carried by natural light, but filled with a florescent glow.
Let me pause to account for the many that have made it without incident, time streaming beneath, traction rubber-sure, the redbud being just a redbud in spring, the sunlight illuminating no washed-out gravel patch. Most of their names have left, their faces detached from each particular spelling, the timbre of each laugh.
I passed a break in the brush marked by a stone cross, the girl’s name chiseled down the upright post, the double Ts dissimilar enough to be carved by hand.
I parked on the sloped shoulder and shifted my weight up the gravel approach. My hazards were the only sound not made by the wind in the wild growth.
It was the same silence that entered my classroom when I looked up from a crowded desk and, amid the chatter and squeak of shoes on the wet tile floor, the clanging of books on the rungs beneath desk chairs, I asked, Is someone crying? I still remember how she spelled her name.
Darren C. Demaree
Four Poems
Emily as I Gaze at Her Arm
I don’t pray.
I don’t play the lottery. I stare, during most of my waking hours, at her hand just in case
I’m in it.
Emily as Going On
It’s a living breach to be so incredibly naked & silly, now, now, now.
Emily as a Daylily
A flower is a flame if the field-party can make it to dawn.
4/9/25
Intoxicated by luxury, they’ve stopped counting all the bodies & stopped feigning sermons. I was terrified when they did this under the guise of God & now, they just want an economy of the dead.
This is a technique. This is construction. This is a damn orange barrel put in a river because these fuckers finally found water.
Life will stop there. Every joy will be a leak from the unexpected.
Don’t look for an infinity of lists. Look at the color of the water we have left.
Sean F. Munro
A New Orleans Remoulade Aubade
for my New Orleans poets
Wake up, smell the chicory coffee brewing like the petrochemical gas released across the river.
Nibble on a Café du Monde beignet dusted in powdered sugar and touch of salt like the fentanyl cut cocaine.
Suck the spicy boiled crawfish head until the juice runs down your chin like blood after being pistol whipped in the Quarter.
Bob your head to the bucket boys on Bourbon like you’re agreeing a six-year-old should be on the street at 10pm.
Hear the brass bands popping off on Frenchmen street like the gunfire for the third shooting this weekend.
Join the scattered dancing and partying of a second line like the flowers of discarded fast food bags, cups, and bottles that decorate our streets.
Party at the festivals we have every weekend like the murders we have every weekend.
Glide through murky waters with alligators and cypress trees draped in Spanish moss like you’re looking for a public official you can trust not to steal.
Gaze at the colorful rows of shotgun houses with charming front porches like you would gaze at an apartment listed for rent under a thousand dollars a month.
This morning, New Orleans is so pretty I can barely stand it.
Gabriel Green
Review of Malcolm X and the Arts: Ten Centennial Reflections
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the birth (and, infamously, the 60th anniversary of the assassination) of Malcolm X. As such, one might reasonably assume that such an exigence would elicit a slew of commemorative projects highlighting the life and legacy of the civil rights activist. There were numerous events, gatherings, and tributes across the country. Those taking place at the Shabazz Center and the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture immediately come to mind. Additionally, over the last five years, there have been numerous new biographies, and even works of fiction which further speak to Malcolm’s life and legacy as a man, a husband and father, a leading voice for social justice, and a civil rights icon. Conspicuously absent, however, are deep inquiries concerning Malcolm’s impact on the arts. In Malcolm X and the Arts: Ten Centennial Reflections, editor Keith Gilyard attempts to address this gap in the literature.
Given Malcolm’s relationships with different artist-activists in life, as well as his relevance and inspiration for generations of artists in death, the exigence for such a project seems unquestionably clear. As Gilyard explains in the preface, “Malcolm felt that artists possessed potentially powerful voices to help advance the Black Freedom Movement.” 1 Furthermore, as outlined in the foundational documents of the Organization of AfroAmerican Unity (OAU), Malcolm clearly understood and appreciated the function of culture as “an indispensable weapon in the freedom struggle.”2
1 Gilyard, Keith (eds). Malcolm X and the Arts: Ten Centennial Reflections. Third World Press, 2025
2 X, Malcolm. “The Basic Statement and Aims of the Organization of Afro-American Unity.” New Black Voices: An Anthology of Contemporary Afro-American Literature. Edited by Abraham Chapman. Penguin, 1972.
As such, Malcolm X and the Arts represents an exemplary and collaborative attempt to explore the multifarious ways that Malcolm inspires or informs 20th and 21st-century artistic output. The edited collection includes ten thoughtful and insightful essays examining various creative works that evoke Malcom X. Areas of analysis in the collection range from essays highlighting the creative echoes of Malcolm’s politics within music and film, to fictious and semi-biographical portrayals of Malcolm in stage plays or the opera.
Of the ten centennial reflections, several essays are especially noteworthy. Sarah RudeWalker’s essay examining the anthology For Malcolm: Poems on the Life and Death of Malcolm X (1969) deftly illustrates how Malcolm’s life and legacy represent a central principle in the respective movements of Black Cultural Nationalists and Black Revolutionary Nationalists. RudeWalker asserts that the poets featured in the edited collection did more than merely celebrate and mourn the slain leader but also demonstrated how they as writers were “actively working to be like Malcolm in carrying forward the rhetorical activist work of radicalizing Black America in the direction of Black Nationalism.”3 Simiarly, Regina Jennings’ in-depth analysis of Haki Madhubuti’s poetry highlights the extent to which Malcolm’s life and legacy informed Madhubuti’s Afro-centric cultural aesthetics.
The respective essays of Howard Rambsy and Mudiwa Pettus explore how cinematic portrayals of Malcolm’s life and murder serve as incontrovertible evidence of Malcolm’s impact on culture as an instrument for social change and the criminal justice system. Pettus’ essay, a critical analysis of the 2020 film One Night in Miami – the Regina King directed cinematic depiction of a meeting between Malcolm, Sam Cooke, Jim Brown, and Cassius Clay (Muhammad Ali) – is particularly compelling not for its contribution to (or reclamation of) historiography concerning Malcolm’s humanity but rather for its depiction of Malcolm as “a pacer
3 Malcolm X and the Arts, 22.
for Black rhetorical leadership.” 4 Furthermore, Pettus’ adroit analysis (re)affirms Malcolm’s rhetorical genius and ingenuity. Rambsy’s essay exploring six decades worth of crime scene depictions is especially noteworthy for its analysis of Malcolm’s assassination as a rhetorical text in and of itself. Rambsy highlights how these depictions – particularly cinematic and documentarian efforts – have served as an invaluable resource in the eventual overturning of two wrongful convictions.
Turning to fiction, Keith Gilyard begins his essay by asserting that rather than attempting the often difficult and unreasonable request to portray Malcolm correctly, “the germane mission is to keep him richly considered.”5 Gilyard, then, proceeds to do just that by providing deep and thoughtful analyses of Malcolm’s portrayal within novels. Using Kevin Baker’s Striver’s Row, Ted Pelton’s Malcolm & Jack (And Other American Criminals), and Ilyasah Shabazz’ X: A Novel and The Awakening of Malcolm X as a case study, Gilyard illustrates how these novelistic portrayals could help paint a more complete picture of Malcolm’s life from childhood to his untimely assassination. Lindsay Burton’s essay takes a different – but equally intriguing – approach by analyzing the use of Malcolm as a symbolic figure within young adult literature. For Burton, analyzing Malcolm as a symbolic figure means attending to his “identity, image, and writings as representations of his ideas within texts.” Using this framework to analyze YA literature such as Angie Thomas’ The Hate You Give and Nnedi Okorafor’s Nsibidi Scripts, Burton skillfully situates Malcolm X’s identity, ideology, and philosophical development for teen protagonists living within the context of contemporary civil rights struggles.
At the end of his preface, Gilyard suggests that the volume “attests to the continuing relevance of Malcolm X, a figure who has probably been represented anew in some art form every single day for the past
4 Malcolm X and the Arts, 114.
5 Malcolm X and the Arts, 131.
sixty years.”6 And, upon reading, this reader has no choice but to agree with Gilyard’s assessment. In life and in death, the legacy of Malcolm X continues to be a rich and fertile source of artistic inspiration. Furthermore, this collection is a must have for scholars and students interested in art, history, literature, and/or Black cultural production.
6 Malcolm X and the Arts, x.
K.Lipschutz
Three Poems
Nocturnal Aubade
It’s funny how sometimes you wanted to be in a circle, and then you wanted out of it in a rush.
Through thick red smoke and thin daydreams
By the light of the moon through the scrim of a cloud
Over hill over dale underbid under siege
Out of Proud Mary and by Miracle Whip
I don’t keep regular hours
On the heels of the loaves in the gills of the fishes
No Lord before me no Satan behind
My zither in storage my gold bar in hock
Beneath the contempt of a small-boned big shot
I don’t keep regular hours
Time-stamping my doom in a midnight transaction
Gasping for breath on my lips a retraction
At zero dark-thirty a deluge of resolve
Exclamation points littering first light emails
—Eudora Welty
The Philosopher Stoned
Many’s the man lost much just because he missed a perfect opportunity to say nothing”
—The world is a poem said Wallace Stevens nonstop tra la la idée fixe
—A poem is a city per one Hank Chinaski
—The world is a ghetto crooned the King blasted War
—A song can be literature according to no less than a Swedish committee
Is there a hole in the center of this donut you might be asking yourself about now
Well is there punk Clint Eastwood in his prime probed rhetorically con acero en la voz y la mano
The insurance man with the blue guitar at his restricted club interrogated winter
—Claire
Keegan
The Secretary to the Spirits Requests a Leave of Absence from Ishmael Reed to Attend to Some Unfinished Business:
Asleep in the gutter, bewitched by the stars, the hair of the cur that bit him a temporary ocher from rolling in the dirt to scratch a wicked itch, one Everette Maddox, laggard, bard, barfly, late of New Orleans, and early too, dictates these skinny lines in Fluent Eyelid Flutter.
Forgive me, we’ve not met. Think of me as the street sweeper you can set your broken watch by, here to scramble dreams like eggs, to prod him with my broom, and intone an incantation to jump-start his hapless harm-worn heart.
For to taste of the quintessence, nay, the gumbo of his song, from antiques and bric-a-brac
I have fashioned this crude transliteration into Cocktail Napkin English.
Forgo ye olde chest paddles, send away the parish priest, this calls for a mint julep. Bend an elbow, raise a glass to Death, to Life, in sooth he can’t be reasoned with: the poor man is in love.
Tom Andes
Wait There Until You Hear From Me 7
Chapter 1
O n his lunch break, Charles was walking to the French Quarter to try and find a guy named Gerry Williams. New Orleans’ Central Business District baked in the sunlight. A block away, on Carondelet, the streetcar clattered past. Nothing had prepared Charles Prentiss for the heat or the inertia of summer in Louisiana. Three years here and he wasn’t used to the way everything slowed to a crawl, like swimming through melted butter.
“Marshall,” he said, “where are you?”
Charles had done the grunt work for a private eye in San Francisco for a few years, but one serious encounter with reality scared him from the trade. He’d gone back to school, collected a few degrees, moved halfway across the country. Ten years after packing it in as a PI, he was an office drone, working for a tutoring company as its Director of Education. His fiancée Gwendolyn had asked if he had any idea how to find her kid brother.
After a few blocks, the heat was suffocating, like breathing through a wet quilt. Charles leaned against a parking meter on the corner of Poydras. He was thirty-six, but he kept in shape. He’d spent a year and a half boxing Golden Gloves back in California, and if he hadn’t won much, he’d made his opponents work. He hoped it wouldn’t come to blows with Gerry, but the guy was a hothead, and last year, he’d threatened Marshall with a beatdown over a couple thousand bucks.
Charles crossed Canal, walking down Decatur to the Shannon Irish Pub, where Gerry did his day-drinking and trolling for customers. Located a few blocks off Bourbon, the place catered to a mix of tourists and locals, Quarter rats who never left the French Quarter, Tulane frat boys, and to
7 from his new novel (Crescent City Books, 2025)
the repeat visitors who came to the city for the music festivals, who were like those same frat boys all grown up, trying to relive their glory days. It had low ceilings, dark wood, and was decorated with rugby pennants and Irish flags. Charles wanted to see if Gerry was there. If he wasn’t, Charles was going to ask around, find out if anyone knew the guy, since it was his regular hangout. Charles ordered a soda water, downed it, ordered another one, and gulped that, too. Sunlight filled the doorway and the windows in front of the bar. “Brown Eyed Girl” played on the jukebox. Onstage, a man noodled on an acoustic guitar.
Behind Charles, three men in suits were talking over pints of beer— lawyers drinking lunch. “It’s the future,” one of them told his tablemates. “You can’t stand in the way of the future.”
At the other end of the bar, a heavyset woman in her mid-forties with circles under her eyes and gray roots nursed a large glass. She finished her drink, gathered her apron, and left, her black server’s uniform vanishing into the light.
No Gerry. And no one who looked like an obvious associate who might lead Charles to the guy.
Well, it wasn’t going to be as easy as walking in the bar and finding him, was it?
Charles shook the ice in his cup.
“Hit me again.”
The chubby, middle-aged bartender had a pink, babyish face that looked as though he’d just shaved. He aimed the gun at Charles’s cup and filled it with a slow jet of carbonated water, eyeing Charles as though anyone not drinking alcohol by noon aroused his suspicion. Charles didn’t drink, touch weed, or anything harder than that, either. Not anymore. After losing a decade to booze and crack cocaine, he’d been sober twelve years, but it didn’t bother him to sit in a place and talk to people while they drank. Not if he had business there like he did now.
“Gerry been in?”
He tried to come off casual, like he was a regular, maybe an old
friend, just asking.
The guy cocked his head.
“Who wants to know?”
“A pal.” He could feel the surge of adrenaline, the tightening in his gut that came from being challenged, when a situation might turn into a fight. Or maybe it was the buzz that meant his intuition was steering him correctly.
The bar was clean, but the guy was wiping it with a towel. His rasp was half an octave lower than Wolfman Jack’s, like he’d been gargling with broken glass and Clorox. “Gerry doesn’t have any friends here, not that I know of. Besides, you don’t look like any pal of his.”
Charles was wearing chinos and a blue button-down, his work clothes. But plenty of guys better dressed than he must buy product from Gerry. Cocaine was a white-collar drug. And the guy behind the bar had admitted to knowing Williams, hadn’t he?
“I was hoping to pick something up from him,” Charles said.
The guy laughed. “What do you think this is, the post office?”
Yeah, that was too direct, Charles coming off like a narc or a fiend.
“How long since you’ve seen him?” Charles said.
The bartender tossed a nasty-looking wedge of lime in Charles’s drink. It must have been fifty degrees in that bar. They could have strung up slabs of beef behind the top-shelf vodkas.
“Man,” the guy said, “how many times I got to tell you? I don’t know any Gerry Williams. Drink up and get out.”
The bartender topped Charles’s glass up, shoved it at him, and as Charles leaned down and sipped, bubbles tickled the end of his nose. He was on the verge of giving up, no joy finding Gerry, this whole trip a waste of time, but something about the place felt off, and he’d have bet anything the bartender was lying. If Charles was already working the bartender’s last nerve, it was worth pushing his luck and asking him about Marshall, too.
“You work here Saturday nights?” Charles said.
“Every weekend for six years,” the guy said, like Charles was hassling
him. The guy had moved down the bar and was polishing wine glasses.
Charles took his phone out. He’d always been good at legwork: following people, tracking guys down after they’d jumped bail. He wasn’t bad at background checks and paperwork, either.
He scrolled through his photos until he got to one of the family at Thanksgiving last year. Marshall stood off to the left, behind Gwendolyn, who looked stunning. Charles couldn’t believe she was marrying him. He kept waiting for her to come to her senses. Their date was coming up in two months, at the end of October.
Marshall looked like any other college kid. He was tall and ungainly, like he hadn’t grown into his body. There was an arrogant tilt to his chin, like he was compensating for something and hadn’t yet figured out what it was. But instead of making him look tough, it made him look vulnerable. Like if someone poked him, he might fall apart, folding up like an accordion file.
“What about this guy?” Charles pointed at Marshall. “I was wondering if he’d been in.”
The bartender leaned over and squinted at the phone, like Charles was playing a trick on him. The guy scrunched up his face and pulled back. It was a clear look of recognition, but he shrugged, downplaying it. The guy pouted, like one of the kids Charles tutored. “I might remember him coming in a couple times, yeah.”
“Recently?”
The guy lifted one shoulder. He looked around the room and scratched his chin, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything. If the guy were going to reveal that he was a liar, it would be with his words. That was the key: keep him talking.
“Like, in the last twenty-four hours?” Charles said. “I see a lot of faces.”
Charles decided to try a different tack. “I’m Charles.”
“Kenny.”
“Look, Kenny. This is my fiancée’s brother, and he’s pulled a
Houdini—a disappearing act. I want to find him, so his sister and his mom quit freaking out. I don’t care if it’s drugs, whatever, if he’s okay. I was hoping Gerry might know where he is.”
“And who the hell are you?” Kenny said. “How do I know you’re not trying to track him down for another reason, like he owes you money or something? I help you find him, you break his legs, and it’s my fault. No, I don’t think so.”
It was a fair point. Maybe Charles had that law enforcement look. The haircut didn’t help. When he started balding on his crown, he shaved his head with the number one guard on his Norelco clippers.
Charles said, “I used to work for a private eye, but I tutor kids for a living. I’m just doing this to help the family.”
He could as easily have said he was coming out of retirement.
Kenny seemed to take a minute to decide he could trust Charles. “I don’t know where he is. But you leave me your number. If your friend turns up. I’ll let you know if he wants to be found. How’s that?”
That was as good as Charles was going to get. He had to go, anyway. It was one-thirty, and he was going to be late getting back from break.
Charles wrote his number on a bar napkin, and Kenny laughed. “What’s this area code?”
“San Francisco,” Charles said. “Born and raised.”
He’d grown up on 28th and Lawton, a mile and a half from the Great Highway and Ocean Beach. When Charles was a kid, drug addicts, burnouts, surfers, ex-hippies, and the white trash losers he’d run with had lived in the Sunset District. Now, what with successive waves of gentrification, he couldn’t have afforded a room there, never mind an apartment.
“Couldn’t pay me to live in that shithole,” Kenny said.
Charles didn’t feel any need to defend his hometown. But he couldn’t let the guy get over on him that easily.
“Probably too rich for your blood,” he said, “anyway.”
“You think I wanted to do this with my life?” Kenny said. Now the
big man wanted to talk. Maybe he was lonely. Maybe he had more to say about Marshall. “I was a goddamn history major. Graduated with honors from UVA. Man, it’s getting bad in New Orleans. This used to be the kind of place you could have a low overhead and do whatever the hell you wanted. Not anymore.”
He pointed at Charles with an ink pen like he blamed him personally for the fact the city was changing. Charles was used to it. In San Francisco, he’d felt the way Kenny did about transplants. Now, he was one of the guys who’d moved in and changed the place, driving up the rents and pushing the locals out.
“You can call me if you see my friend,” Charles said. “Or if Gerry turns up.”
“Maybe,” Kenny said.
He didn’t sound too sure about it.
The three lawyers finished their drinks and left. The guitar player was cursing the video poker machine at the back of the bar. The skinny, overdressed guy sat by himself in the corner, an empty plastic cup in front of him. The jukebox had run out of songs. Even the street outside was quiet.
“Take it easy,” Kenny said, “brother.”
The guy almost sounded friendly.
Charles left him the change from a twenty and added a ten. Not that he’d learned much, but it couldn’t hurt to leave a good impression. Maybe the dude would cough up whatever he’d been holding back.
Charles walked down the bar, under those flags and pennants, the row of barstools with gouged red vinyl, the cigarette scarred wood, condensation from the air conditioning trailing down the windows, feeling their eyes on his back, following him out the door.
Water dripped from the potted plants on a balcony, and men in chef’s jackets loitered in front of Sylvain, the same place where Charles had proposed to Gwendolyn more than a year ago on an April evening that now felt very distant. On the corner, a Pie in the Sky franchise was opening. It was empty, but the street smelled of canned sauce, dried basil, and bread.
He’d gone to the bar hoping to find Gerry Williams, and that hadn’t panned out. But the bartender knew Marshall, and the kid had been in recently. That meant Marshall hadn’t straightened up but might be mixed up with Gerry, like Charles had guessed. And that was something.
He wanted to drive to Gerry’s place on the West Bank—but first he had to go back to work. His lunch break was over.
Charles walked back to the office as quickly as the heat allowed.
Valentine Pierce
Three Poems
24 Years
On the heels
Of the 2005 Federal Flood
Memorial comes
A memorial for the twin towers
New Yorkers thought It was a huge accident
A plane off track
A pilot losing control
We held our collected breath
Eyes locked on plumes
Of dust and smoke
Until the second plane
The towers melted into the ground
Like styrofoam plates in a bonfire
I was not there
I can only
speculate
Driving to work
Radio news broke
Into morning shows
Stories unclear
Convoluted
Incomplete
Erroneous
What, exactly, happened
Newscasters scrambled
At work tried to get a signal
From any station
Spent the day trying to distract myself
Then home where for a week
I spent my time on the sofa
In front of the television
Crying non-stop
Today I have a smart TV
That means I’ll never be able to find
Any news coverage unless I seek it out on my computer
I have only memories:
A man crying. His twin
Died in the collapse
A man falling to the ground
His wife and children
Were on that flight
A woman jumping from a window
Even though she knew
She would hit solid ground
Would not live through it
But wouldn’t be burned alive, either
At the Pentagon
Another plane
Slammed into a building
Pennsylvania
Another aircraft crashing in a field
The passengers unwilling To let it land anywhere there were people
Toxic dust inches deep Everywhere, even in the lungs
Of people running as fast as they could No reprieve
The world was hushed
All planes grounded
Are New Yorkers having PTSD attacks?
Are they stuck in the moment
As they look into the sky
Where the towers once stood?
Are they wishing it was T-rump’s Tower instead of the WTCs?
2,977 people died
The world seems hushed now
Memories come back In a rush bringing us to tears Again
August in Retrospect
“August comes with a weight,” she said.
And the poet in me rose up,
Said, “you should write that.”
Weeks later it will not leave me alone
Forces my hand, so I write it.
The humidity presses on our shoulders
Heat sears our skin
Sorrow fills our hands
Memories flood our mind
It’s not one of those “remember when” times
It’s oh, I remember that!
I remember “this, that, and the other thing”
Became more than a glib phrase 20 years ago
This reminds me of the unbearable grief
That floods my mind like water from broken levees
The other thing smells like death is entombed
In the very air we breathe
“You look like death warmed over,”
As we were wont to say,
Never expecting it to be a reality we can’t shake
A truth we will not outlive
Grief is etched in the very cells of our beings.
We put our hands over our faces in lamentation, Fold them in prayer, ask for forgiveness.
Of what shall we be forgiven?
We don’t know but ask anyway
As we reach out with open hands to friends,
Neighbors, people we don’t even know.
We grasp the rope of tomorrow,
Pull ourselves forward; rejoice in small things.
But come August that gleefulness is tempered by sorrow
Has us on edge, asking ourselves “What if …”
We hedge our bets on calendar days
Knowing those calendars could be washed away
As quickly today as they were — and let’s not shortcut it—
Let’s lay blame where it belongs;
It does not belong to “Katrina.”
We were struck by the Army Corps of Engineers,
When 80 percent of our city was flooded
During the Federal Flood of 2005
Struck by soldiers locked and loaded on citizens
Struck by F.E.M.A. not arriving for more than a week
Struck by a country that wanted to turned our living space
Into green space so other people could play,
So that other people could dance on the graves
Of the ones that we have yet to find.
Yes, August comes with a weight; we will carry it as long as we live.
—Thanks to Gina Ferrara for the first line, which forced my hand.
There is no now
Morning comes too soon the day begins with the caw of an alarm clock its green digital eyes blinking in disbelief.
Seconds later an analog relative down the hall ticks off the time with black hands: late, running late, late, running late— a mantra.
In the kitchen the red-eyed one on the coffee pot signals the cycle is complete but time for savoring is past.
Down the hall the black-handed relative repeats its mantra: late, running late, late, running late… it is the music of life the music we dance to in moments that are already passing
Inspired by Neil Degrasse Tyson’s comment that there is no now.
Jonathan Penton
Two Haibun
You told me that my memory was uneconomical, that my meanderings were worse than pointless. I sang your name, and at first you loved it, but I couldn’t stop switching musical milieus mid-syllable until you shut me down and shut the radio on. You found a station without improvisation, where even the ads were predictable odes to dentistry and debt relief. I kept be-bop time to every word you spoke. You told me that jazz helped you relax.
Sullen memories:
I pin your calves from below Church bells condemn me
* * *
Like an endless Russian novel, or maybe the movie Wit, we roll out bolts of dyspatterned fabric, hoping to make chiffon from a bookshelf full of tragedy. Our sincerity is its own sort of facetiousness—there can be no honest conversation about topics such as these. Still we continue with the darkest of word games. We look for solid answers in days of halfremembered disassociations; we tell ourselves that we are healing. Your pulse is erratic and black.
backwards through trauma memories like cremation silk covers my nose
George Guida
What To Do With Loneliness: A Conversation with Anders Carlson-Wee
GUIDA: How has your life changed since 2019, the year that The Low Passions, your debut collection, appeared?
CARLSON-WEE: I’m living in Los Angeles and rock climbing a lot. And I’m working on short stories. Over the years I’ve written poems that had too much content, too many characters, too much going on, and I couldn’t make them work as poems. I realized that a lot of these failed poems could work as stories.
GG: Would you be willing to share any details of the stories?
ACW: It’s too early. I’d like to keep them under wraps for now.
GG: I’m also wondering, since you’re in Los Angeles, do you plan to write a script or otherwise to shop your life story to studios?
ACW: I hope to shop the stories I’m writing, and I also hope to sell Disease of Kings to Hollywood. It’s a long shot, since it’s poetry, but I already have some creative content people interested in reading it. And I’m working on a screenplay, but that’s also in the early stages.
GG : You’ve been busy. How did the most difficult years of the pandemic affect you and your work?
ACW: This may sound strange, but the pandemic felt a bit ironic. My lifestyle remained similar to what it normally is. I spend a lot of time alone, with my thoughts, reading and writing, and I was pretty deep into this new collection, Disease of Kings, a project about loneliness, isolation, and groping for human connectivity. And the pandemic was so relevant to the project, and vice-versa, that it fueled my writing. The experience also made me realize that I might need to rethink my life.
GG: I know the rough timeline of your work on the two collections, but I’m wondering about the period in your life that The Low Passions reflects and the period that Disease of Kings reflects?
ACW: The Low Passions reflects my mental space in my early 20s, and Disease of Kings reflects my 30s. But I’d say in both cases the chronology wasn’t as important to me as sharing different sides of my personality. In The Low Passions the protagonist, who is basically me, is adventurous and outgoing. He really wants to face the world and be changed by it. He’s up for meeting strangers and having new experiences. The protagonist of Disease of Kings is lonely, self-conscious, and timid. He clings to what he has, and he’s afraid of new experiences. But there is a healthier side to his personality, which is the desire to recycle and reuse, whether that be physical things like food and clothing, or a friendship. Both of these sides to my personality—while seemingly contradictory—coexist.
GG: It seems that the protagonist of Disease has already gone through the phase of life that the protagonist of Low Passions experiences. He’s settled, for the time being, in Minneapolis, living with his friend North, who is constantly scheming, but who also supports his own vulnerable father. Meanwhile, our narrator suspects that he’s a fraud. He has chosen to dumpster dive for food and to salvage furniture for a house whose rent, in the poem “Snow,” his father helps him pay. He scrounges for a living by choice, so he can have more free time. In the poem “B&B,” his mother justifies the choice as “stewardship of the Earth.” In the poem “Good Money,” when North tells him that he’s taken a permanent job in Alaska, the protagonist tells him, “We don’t need money,” and North answers, “No...you don’t need money.” In the poem “Moving Sale,” he and North fake a move, to create drama, to draw shoppers to their yard sale, where they lie about where they’re moving. So, he’s ashamed of himself and unsure what to do next. That dilemma struck me as representative of your generation’s, the millennial, situation. He’s dealing with more aimlessness and manufactured drama than, for instance, my generation, the Gen Xers, might have dealt with. Is that fair?
ACW: I exist inside my generation, but I never think, “What can I say about my generation?” I’m not conscious of themes like that when I write. I do think the rest of what you’re saying is accurate. The protagonist
is definitely ashamed of himself. His whole lifestyle is based on scams and hustles and taking advantage of other people in insignificant ways that nonetheless make him feel guilty. He’s in turmoil. He wants to avoid working, but that choice leads to isolation and self-doubt. It’s a vicious cycle. You could describe him as black-pilled. He has a dark attitude toward the world, yet he’s not quite comfortable, maybe ashamed of that attitude. And there’s a contrast between the speaker and North, who’s playing the foil and has a different perspective on what they’re doing. North is more wonderfully alive, more in the moment, more pleased with each new scam. He’s higher energy and more exuberant, less questioning of himself, although he has larger responsibilities to assume. He’s facing an alcoholic father, who needs to be taken care of. The protagonist is more protected from responsibility, and more calculating, less able to celebrate. He is obsessed with wanting his chosen lifestyle to go on without change. North is much more reactive. Ultimately, as the collection goes on, North’s life changes, and he’s ready to move on and do new things. He’s ready to take responsibility for his life in a way that the speaker isn’t. Still, North’s changes force the speaker to change.
GG: North’s name is symbolic. He’s northbound, showing the way upward. You employ symbolism throughout the book, especially the symbolism of trash which plays a outsized role in the protagonist’s life. The poem “Trash” includes the lines, “I can’t help but wonder what / would have happened to me if / I’d been taken away with the trash.” Can you comment on the role of trash in his life, in your life, in American life in general?
ACW: My grandpa was a dumpster diver before dumpster diving was called that. He spent a lot of his life picking stuff out of the trash and bringing it home. One of my early memories was my grandpa fixing a fan he found in a dumpster and giving it to me, because he knew my bedroom was stuffy and hot. So, I grew up with an attitude like his, a tendency to be frugal. I never wanted to waste things. I was afraid of using things or overusing them, and I was afraid of money and of running out of it. When
I reached adulthood, I knew I wanted to go into the arts, and I knew that choice meant I probably wouldn’t have much money. I started to figure out how I could live on the cheap. Dumpster Diving became a huge part of that. I started diving for all my food, my clothes, my shoes, my furniture. I reduced my spending to almost nothing, and my rent was very cheap, because I was living with a group of friends throughout my twenties. It was all a way to buy myself time to write. And it worked. At the same time I was aware of the implications, culturally and metaphorically, of American waste, this crazy consumption. You can find anything in the trash. You can get the expensive stuff: organic butter, olive oil, organic vegetables, good cuts of salmon. I was embodying a critique of the culture by dumpster diving, and at the same time I always thought that that was slightly humorous, because I knew how selfish the whole act was.
GG: The title of the collection implies both leisure and corruption. How did you settle on gout, of all diseases, as a controlling metaphor? Obviously, it’s a food-linked disease.
ACW: My friend North, the star of this book, really does suffer from gout. And it was perfect for this situation. Kings used to get it, because kings would sit around eating rich foods and drinking a lot of alcohol, basically overconsuming. It also strikes the feet, so it’s a metaphor for not being able to move. North overcomes this in the book, and leaves, while the protagonist does not.
GG: In the poem “Blizzard,” North literally walks out of their house and into a blizzard barefoot, which breaks a spell of domestic bliss that’s overcome the protagonist. The inability to move on is one major theme in Disease of Kings, and another, also present in The Low Passions, is the potential for human savagery in intimate relationships. In the poem “Moorcroft,” the speaker is addressing a man who’s been kind enough to give him a ride and take him home to show him his gun collection. The speaker says, “You told me / about doing five years for murder, / asked if I would’ve done anything / different, finding a grown man raping my six-year-old niece.”
ACW: That theme grows out of my sense of how dangerous close relationships are. They are inevitably the sources of greatest love and greatest pain. Tenderness and closeness and love can open the door to cruelty.
GG: A sense of loneliness pervades “Blizzard” and many other poems in this book. What attracts you to writing about loneliness?
ACW: I’m a lonely person, and I’m deeply invested in one-on-one relationships. When a relationship ends, it’s very painful for me. I don’t tend to keep an endless list of friends. I stay focused on the friends I value. At the same time, I have this drive to spend a lot of time by myself. I like being alone. I need a lot of alone time. That time is also lonely to me while it’s happening. I need it, but it’s hurting me, which makes my life difficult emotionally. On top of that, it feels like America, culturally, is an extremely lonely place. We’re suffering a plague of loneliness. So much is online. And so much of what is online is the attempt to generate a persona. There’s profound loneliness in that whole experience. People put a lot of energy into reaching out and connecting, and they have this vague sense that the effort is not going so well. You’re really making me rethink the whole project of writing poems.
GG: Yeah, you did just describe, to a great degree, the project of writing poetry.
ACW: So, loneliness is maybe inherent in me, and maybe inherent to the human condition. There’s a yearning to connect with others, and there’s the eerie feeling, even while you’re connecting, that you’re maybe not connecting, or that you’re being misunderstood, or that you’re failing to understand those around you.
GG : In grappling with loneliness, then, we might do damage to ourselves and do damage to others. Which leads me to the penultimate poem in Disease of Kings, called “Lay It Bare.” It’s both an apology and a confession. The protagonist speaks to North, who is absent now. He concludes, “I don’t wish you were poor. / I wish you were here.”
ACW: It’s one of four epistolary poems to North, which come at
the end of the book. In this one, the protagonist is yearning for their lost friendship and reflecting on what it all meant.
GG: The protagonist’s desire for family is clear in a number of these poems.
ACW: Family life is different for the two characters. North is from a broken home. His dad is an alcoholic and a drug addict, so North is dealing with extremely difficult family issues. As the collection progresses, he’s having to step up more into the role of caretaker and provider for his father. Meanwhile, the protagonist has stable, loving parents, who are able to swoop in and help out if he gets into trouble, as they do in the poem “Snow.” He and North share this unusual, unifying lifestyle, where they get everything for free, do these scams, and laugh about their scams with each other. It’s this endless private joke they have going. At the same time, their family dynamics are opposing. Ultimately, that’s what rips them apart. North grows up, while the speaker refuses to do that.
GG: Yet, in the end he’s on the cusp of a big change, which condition seems related to the brevity of this collection compared to your last. Low Passions was 86 pages long. Disease of Kings clocks in at 51. Does the brevity suggest that the speaker’s provisional lifestyle has run its course, that he’s finally done with it?
ACW: If Disease could have been even shorter, I’d have made it shorter. I wanted to write something about as tight as I could get it. For me that’s reflective of the lifestyle. Nothing’s wasted. North has exuberance in abundance and a lushness to his personality, but the protagonist is much more guarded. He has a sense of scarcity. He’s a minimalist. So I wanted the collection to be bare bones. I also wanted it to feel tightly focused on one relationship.
GG: So, in 2021, at the height of the pandemic, before there was a vaccine, when I thought I was otherwise extremely healthy, I found out I was going to need open heart surgery to correct a valve defect, which was disturbing news. While I waited for the surgery, I found it oddly comforting to watch graphic British detective shows populated by corrupt and vile
characters. Do you find comfort in writing about extreme human behavior?
ACW: I don’t think I would use the word “comfort,” but I would go with something like “catharsis.” It’s been a cathartic experience. There’s a cathartic energy in expressing your version of universal grievances, sources of pain we all end up experiencing. Writing about them gives you a chance to own them.
GG: At the end of Disease of Kings, the speaker suggests that he needs a new direction. Is he about to enter a more conventional domestic space? Is that a new phase of his life you see yourself exploring?
ACW : No. He remains committed to the lifestyle, even in his lonesomeness and grief. I’m interested in strange people, strange characters, in a kind of weirdness, so I write about fringe people, or people who end up in fringe scenarios, even if they are not necessarily super-fringe. I write about people taking things to extremes, either by choice or misadventure. The Low Passions and Disease of Kings overlap on that front.
GG: In both collections you’ve done interesting things with dramatic monologues. The monologues in Low Passions are almost all in the voice of Cousin Josh, a tragic, colorfully outspoken outsider who is part of the protagonist’s family. In Disease of Kings, you give voice to the colorful characters who stay at the narrator’s seedy B&B. I’m curious about your use of the dramatic monologue, the way you mix monologues with poems in the voice of a primary speaker. And about what you see as the art and craft of the dramatic monologue.
ACW: In Disease of Kings, the three dramatic monologues come in the second section, which is basically the “B&B” section, where North has left for seasonal work in Alaska, and the speaker is home alone, realizing how desperate he is for company. And so he starts renting out North’s bedroom as a kind of weird, twisted B&B. Part of the weirdness and humor here is derived from the fact that he’s serving these guests food that he’s dumpstering, and not telling them that they’re eating trash. In The Low Passions you get monologues from different hosts’ perspectives. They’re hosting the protagonist. In Disease of Kings that dynamic is subverted.
You get perspectives of these three travelers who are speaking to the protagonist as host of the B&B, which means they’re speaking to a total stranger, someone they’ll never have to see again. So, the speakers are willing to share anything, as though in a confessional. They share some strange narratives, confessing the sins and shortcomings of their lives. And one of them is a food inspector—a bit of a joke.
GG: The poem “Oscar,” in the voice of one of those B&B guests, begins “Fuck no she didn’t leave me over money. / She left me cause I have no ass. It’s true— / a belt holds up my ass about as good / as an oiled-up pole dancer.” He’s not protesting society’s ills, the way Josh does. He’s just lamenting, demeaning himself. He belongs to a segment of American society that, when given public voice, is usually sensationalized.
ACW: That’s just who Oscar is—the ultimate goofball. He’s sort of a linguistic dancer, where he’s telling you one joke, but he’s really playing chess, layering joke upon joke. For instance, he pretends that he’s invented strapless suspenders, which, of course, is an impossibility. So, I wanted to convey that personality in raw language, because that’s who Oscar is, how he speaks.
GG: You excel at creating voices.
ACW: I like to listen to people talk. I think I have a good ear, which goes back to having dyslexia. I grew up struggling to learn how to read. I had to take special classes and work with a dyslexia specialist. I wrote everything backwards, using mirror writing, where, if you hold it up to a mirror, the writing looks correct. Because of that I was wary of written language. But I did trust oral language because I could understand it. I’d memorize huge amounts of language when I was being read aloud to, and then I’d recite it from memory, pretending I was reading. I learned to listen closely to speech patterns. In these monologues I channel familiar voices and blend them together to create fresh characters.
GG: Your style complements that approach. I’d call it plainspoken. Not only in description, but also in reflection. In the poem “Listening to North in the Morning,” the speaker asks, “Isn’t that the secret indulgence
/ of friendship: being near what you / can never be?” That’s simple, straightforward language. I was only able to find a couple of places in your work where you indulge in elevated language, which most poets do more than occasionally. Could you talk about your approach to diction, to sentence structure, to line breaks, to manipulating language more broadly?
ACW: I would say, the more I’ve written, the more I’ve been interested in what I can do with the simplest materials, with the language that comes most naturally to me. Success in doing that depends on arrangement, the way you juxtapose and construct a speaker’s language. Not that I don’t like the occasional expensive word. Sometimes a writer can make great use of a word that might be unfamiliar to a general audience. But I’m interested in the basics, in clarity and storytelling. I want the poems to feel available. The trick is figuring out how to offer an experience that’s working on at least two levels—the topsoil of the poem and what lies beneath.
GG : Do you read many poets who deliberately use pyrotechnic language?
ACW : For sure. I read widely. I read a lot of translation. But sometimes I get tired of writers who demonstrate a large desire to tap dance linguistically, if it doesn’t feel like the tap dancing has paid off.
GG: Do you feel yourself in conversation with any particular kind of poetry when you write?
ACW: I think of myself as being part of an oral tradition of poetry, stuff that’s available to a wide audience. I write narrative poetry, in an American tradition that goes back to Robert Frost. It’s also linked to the Irish tradition of oral storytelling. My grandpa was a storyteller, and I think I picked up a lot from him, and of course my parents were both pastors, so I grew up in the church listening to oral storytelling every Sunday. And my parents both preach with a personal narrative style, where they’re interested in marrying daily life events with the holy.
GG: We’ve spoken before about your influences, which I know include Jack Gilbert and Dorianne Laux, to name a couple, but I’m wondering specifically about Robinson Jeffers. The poems of Disease of Kings are
largely about the tension between an individual’s freedom from society’s demands and the individual’s need for social interaction. Jeffers famously cast himself as a figure outside the mainstream. What are your thoughts on Jeffers and his work?
ACW: I like Jeffers’s work. I visited his Tor House a couple of months ago. His poetry is coming back into fashion, I gather, and will probably continue to be relevant. His mindset was too nihilistic and anti-human for his time. Now, younger people are interested in the idea that human beings aren’t the main thing, that there’s actually a lot else going on in the universe. Jeffers saw the world through a non-human-centric lens, which doesn’t necessarily mean the end of humanity. That whole perspective doesn’t sound as nihilistic today.
GG: So we owe a debt of gratitude to Jeffers. Can we talk about gratitude? It’s a major theme in your work. It shines through at the end of both collections: for example, in “Years Later, I Go Back to Thank You,” from The Low Passions, and in “Contact,” from Disease of Kings. The latter poem ends with the lines, “Thank you, / I wrote in the branches above / the monkeys. Thank you, I wrote in the ocean below the fins.” I love the playful use of “fins” as the final word of the poem and the book. But the relevant question is, I suppose, for what are you most grateful?
ACW: I’m most grateful to have a go at it. To be born is like winning the lottery a thousand times in a row. We all walk around as if it’s no big deal. Someone complains that they’re late for the train, or something like that, and I think, dude, that you have a chance at existing as a person is totally unbelievable and amazing. Next, I feel most grateful for human connection, relationships, chances to share with people. I also I have a special relationship with my body. I’m a very physical person. I love to rock climb, to run, to backpack. It’s a great source of joy to be in my body physically.
GG : The poet Maria Terrone has a collection called The Bodies We Were Loaned. As you get older, do you feel as though you actually own your body and your intelligence, or that it’s on loan? How do you
understand consciousness?
ACW: I don’t really know what the mind is doing when it’s thinking. From my experience, I’d say thinking is very physical. It’s hard for me to imagine thinking without having a body. The idea that you might be a spirit without a body is a little hard for me to wrap my head around. Most of my ideas for writing, for example, come to me when I’m moving my body, although my writing routine includes hours when I’ll sit at a desk and work. Without those hours at the desk, I don’t think my subconscious would generate any ideas while I’m moving my body.
GG: How do you record what comes to you? Do you just think about it as you move, like Wallace Stevens. Do you use your phone to record ideas? Do you keep a notebook?
ACW: I’m good at memorizing language. If I have an idea while I’m on a run, for example, I can work on it in my head as I’m exercising. And, yeah, I keep notebooks. I write from the front of the notebook with drafts of things, and I write from the back of the notebook with ideas for things, lists of things I might want to write about, or a character that I might want to create, or dialogue I overhear and might want to use. In most of my notebooks the backside of the notebook fills up faster than the front side.
GG : This book includes a poem called “Ambition.” What’s your ambition as a writer?
ACW: I don’t know. I don’t know what it would look like to know. But if I did know, I don’t think I’d be as enchanted by the experience of being a writer. The process of writing and the reason for writing feel mysterious to me.
GG: As you write, do you think about what other people might need from your writing?
ACW: I think about that need in terms of craft—what an audience needs so they can follow my writing and be carried along for the ride. I don’t think about that need in terms of content. I write from an intuitive place, about subjects that I’m obsessed with.
GG: As someone also interested in film, are you worried about writing
as a genre, about its viability and appeal? Do you think people will always write and read?
ACW : If writing were somehow extinguished from the Earth today, it would be reborn immediately tomorrow. People are obsessed with language. People love language—love reading, love writing, love interacting with language in all kinds of ways, whether or not they open books. Writing is a profound and inevitable expression of humanity. As long as we exist with consciousness that’s relatively close to who we are now, we’ll need it. —Guida previously published a conversation with Carlson-Wee in 2020, based on an interview conducted the year before the pandemic’s onset.
Jerry Speir
My Vietnam War
Part 1 is based on what I remember and the stories I have told. Part 2 is based on the letters I wrote home, which I only re-discovered after writing Part 1. Curiously, the two tell rather different stories. Funny thing, memory.
Part 1—What I Remember
The first question that puzzles most people is: why did you go? None of my friends did, neither old nor new.
Fate? Romanticism? First, I went to LSU: the “Old War Skule.” It’s a long story but, in the mid-60s at LSU, two years of ROTC were required of all males. All male freshmen were automatically in ROTC—and had their heads shaved as part of the freshman ritual. I just went to a barber the week before, I think, but I don’t really remember. So many things I don’t really remember. One thing I do remember is that women in those days were not allowed to wear pants on campus—much less shorts! We’re talking ancient history here.
So, once a week, as freshmen and sophomores, all of us males put on a khaki uniform and learned close-order drill, marching around the parade grounds. And once a week, we went to an ROTC class, where we studied—what, exactly? Military history, I think. Tactics? Survival strategies?
By the summer between my sophomore and junior years (1966), the war had sufficiently impressed itself on my adolescent brain that I recognized that (a) unless I “did something,” I would likely be drafted upon graduation, and (b) being a “grunt” in Vietnam could be deadly. We had started bombing the North in March 1965, and escalation was proceeding apace. In 1965, there were 184,000+ Americans in Vietnam;
by 1966, that number was 385,000+.
I had changed majors several times—math, pre-law/business, English. I had had Miller Williams (poet laureate under Bill Clinton) for a required English class that sophomore year and somehow had the idea that I could write—and that writing was a worthy thing. I’m sure I had a notion common among young men that war was where one becomes a man. I know I already thought that I could write The Great American Novel—and that I just needed material. (It’s not for nothing that sophomoric is an adjective meaning “pretentious, over-confident, immature.”)
So, a basic choice of that summer of ’66 was whether to go ahead with taking Advanced ROTC, through my junior and senior years—a decision that committed me to two years active duty (but as an officer) upon graduation—or not to do that and risk what seemed to me the virtual certainty of being drafted and winding up as a grunt in the jungles of Vietnam.
None of my friends made the Advanced ROTC decision. And I made no new friends among those who did. While in the program, I don’t know if I was actively looking for a way to drag out the process (that’s the story I’ve told myself) or if the opportunity just appeared. In any event, I learned about the possibility of flight school—that included “free” flying lessons at the Baton Rouge airport, working toward a private fixed-wing license while still in school. Flight school lasts nine months. The war could be over by then, right? That decision to start with the flying lessons, and to commit to flight school, also extended my overall commitment to three years on active duty after the completion of flight school, effectively four. And it changed my life.
Flying appealed to me. I’m not sure why. I’d never been in an airplane until that first lesson! And my first flight on a commercial plane of any kind was my flight from New York to Vietnam.
So, Maggie and I were married in the summer of 1967 and lived together my senior year as husband and wife—and pretty much ignored the war, I think. We did not have the 24-hour news cycle then. But Walter
Cronkite (the father-figure news man whom people really trusted) delivered his famous editorial declaring the war “unwinnable” on February 27, 1968 and, even though I didn’t see it, I know that changed fundamental perceptions.
1968! What a mess. The great Tet offensive by the North Vietnamese in February and March. Martin Luther King assassinated April 4. Bobby Kennedy assassinated June 6. I had just graduated in May, and Maggie and I were visiting in Swartz (my little north Louisiana hometown), on our way to Fort Wolters, Texas (west of Fort Worth) for me to sign-in— my first day of the real Army, on June 8. The cities were burning. There were 536,000+ Americans in Vietnam. And I’m not at all sure what I was thinking. I know we were stunned by both assassinations, but life went on. We were young.
After June 8, I was thinking mostly about helicopters. The guys who taught the basics were some of the more fearless people on the planet. The first thing you have to learn to do is hover, and lots can go wrong in a hurry when you’re teaching a total novice to hover.
At Fort Wolters, there were several huge fields with small concrete pads spaced every 50 yards or so—with a tiny Hughes (as in Howard) helicopter, instructor and student on each. Hovering requires coordinated, simultaneous movements with both hands and both feet. Your feet control the pedals, which control the pitch in the tail rotor blades, which move the nose of the helicopter left or right. The “cyclic” in your right hand, the stick between your legs, controls the tilt of the main rotor—and the direction in which the aircraft moves. With your left hand, you control the “collective,” basically a lever that does two things. Moving it up and down controls the pitch in the main rotor blades, the “lift.” At the end of the collective is a twist throttle, like on a motorcycle, that controls the engine’s RPM.
To hover, you begin to raise the collective to create lift. As you do this, the increased pitch in the blades is putting more strain on the engine, tending to slow it (and the rotor) down, so you have to roll the throttle on
just enough to maintain a constant RPM as you’re increasing the pitch. Also, as you are increasing the power to the main rotor, that is increasing the torque on the whole system. Basically, the body of the helicopter wants to rotate in the opposite direction of the blade, and you counter that with the tail rotor, controlled by the pedals. Finally, as the helicopter begins to come off the ground, it tends to slide left or right, fore or aft, depending on how it’s loaded.
So, to hover, you do the following, simultaneously:
1. Lift the collective with your left hand, while increasing the throttle to maintain a constant RPM,
2. Apply pressure on the left pedal to counter the increasing tendency of the nose to move to the right as power is applied,
3. Move the cyclic ever so slightly with your right hand, typically to the right and rear in those helicopters,
4. And maintain all those motions in some happy equilibrium. In a gusty wind (of which there is a lot in west Texas), that can be especially tricky.
What you learn, finally, is that the required movements are much subtler than at first appears necessary.
It takes about two weeks, an hour or two a day, to learn to hover. In that period, those training fields were a carnival of spinning, sliding, bouncing helicopters. The instructors had to sit there patiently, try to talk you through doing the right thing—and frequently say “I got it” and take over with their dual controls. One of hardest parts for them was keeping students from wrapping the throttle way up in a moment of panic—and blowing an engine. That happened several times.
Then you spend a lot of time just learning to fly the thing—takeoffs and landings, navigating, and landing in small LZs (landing zones) out in the countryside marked by colored tires (white, yellow and red, I think—easy, medium and hard). Finally, you solo—and do all those things on your own. Flying was about half of every day, as I recall. Part of the
other half was spent in the classroom, learning all about the functioning of the helicopter itself, about the details of flight-planning and navigation and such. But, in truth, there was a lot of free time. Maggie and I lived in a house trailer in a trailer park in that West Texas “desert”—and were relatively wealthy. I was drawing not only “base pay” but “temporary duty (TDY)” pay as well. Combined, I was making over $10,000 a year, more than my father had ever made in his life. According to rumor, the Corvette dealer in Mineral Wells, TX, the nearest town, sold more Corvettes than any other dealer in the country. One acquaintance bought a 12-cyclinder Jaguar, which he promptly flipped—and survived.
Danger—and death—were not subjects really talked about. I have only the vaguest recollection that two of my fellow trainees died in the course of training—running into each other while soloing around one of those practice LZs. I don’t recall a memorial service—or even much mention of it, really, except to say something like: “Let that be a lesson to you. Keep your head on a swivel and your eyes open.”
Actually, backing up the story here, I’m already mis-remembering things: Maggie and I were not on our way to Fort Wolters when RFK was shot on June 6. We were on our way to Fort Knox, KY—where I first had to go through an Armor Officer Basic course. There is no Aviation “branch” in the Army. Every officer has to be trained in the basics of some particular branch—Infantry, Armor, Artillery, etc. I don’t recall choosing Armor. I think that was a “choice” made for me.
I also don’t remember much about Armor School—except that I learned a lot about tanks. My lasting memory is that they are incredibly hot and LOUD when being fired. On the one hot July day that we actually fired them, I recall crawling out of the tank and throwing up from the nausea induced by the heat and the noise. I’m guessing you couldn’t do that in combat.
I did learn two things in that period. One was how to read a Racing Form, from one of my tiny colleagues from the Northeast who had hoped to be a jockey. Since it was not the season for Churchill Downs, I learned
at Miles Park which, as we say in New Orleans, “ain’t dere no more.”
The other memorable lesson from that period came from the same guy. He told me about a future world in which people would actually pay for television, that there would be this thing called “cable TV”—and he suggested that we should invest in it. Why would anyone pay for TV, I thought?
So, from Fort Knox, after six weeks, we went to Fort Wolters—for 4½ months, which I think means that I graduated from Primary Helicopter School in early-to-mid December 1968. I know that Maggie and I went to Mexico City then, some time just before Christmas—the first time I had ever been out of the country. I don’t remember much about that trip—except that we went by train and that we visited the Pyramids of the Sun and Moon. In retrospect, I wonder how we planned that trip without Google and the internet!
Also over Christmas, we moved to Savannah, Georgia, for me to continue with the Advanced course at Hunter Army Airfield. We rented a large, old beach house, half a block from Savannah Beach—in the off season, a 30-40 minute commute.
At Hunter, I transitioned to “real” helicopters—to “Hueys,” the aircraft most commonly associated with the Vietnam war—and what else, I’m not sure. I know that living at the beach was delightful, even in the gray, chilly winter and spring. The only other relatively clear memory I have of that time was our one night of “survival training.” After some serious instruction, I’m sure (the Army is really good at teaching stuff), we were dropped off in pairs along a country road at dusk and told that we’d be picked up at another road, a mile or two away, at dawn. Swamps intervened. And there were regular-Army, post-Vietnam vets, we were told, out there in the swamp trying to capture and “torture” us.
We were given one compass per pair. I didn’t know the guy I was partnered with. He took charge of the compass—and we quickly managed to get separated. I don’t know what happened to him but, suddenly, he just wasn’t there anymore. There was at least enough moonlight that it wasn’t
totally dark, and I had spent enough time in the woods as a kid, though not at night, that I wasn’t totally frightened. Also, somebody (probably the Army) had taught me how to find the North Star, and the night was clear enough to see it occasionally through the trees and underbrush. I knew the road that was my destination was to the north, and I just headed that way, slowly, carefully, quietly, mostly trying to avoid the bogs and the frequent thickets. I made it to the road well before dawn and just lay down and waited to be picked up. I have no idea what happened to my “partner.”
The only part of advanced flight school I really remember was the instrument training. This was simulated by wearing a hood while flying, so that you (the student) could only see the instrument panel. On a particularly dreary day along that Georgia coast, when the sky and marshes all looked the same dull gray, I was flying along, doing fine according to what I was seeing (or thought I was seeing) on the instruments and, at least as importantly, according to my in-flight body sensations of up-and-down, etc. At one point, the instructor said, “I got it. Look up.” We were in a pretty steep banking dive to the left. Ever after, I avoided flying solely on instruments, except in the briefest moments of necessity, and have had great respect for airline pilots who take-off and, more importantly, land in the soup—though they certainly do it with a bit more electronic support than we had on helicopters in those days.
So, I graduated—in late May 1969, and Maggie and I were shortly on our way to New York, where neither of us had ever been, and where the plan was for her to work on her painting career while I was in Vietnam. We found a nice “garden apartment” on West 16th Street. I sold our ’65 Pontiac Tempest to a fast-talking used car dealer in Queens—for way too little, I’m sure. I remember seeing Midnight Cowboy there.
And on the proper morning, June 30, 1969 (I think), I put on my uniform, packed a duffel bag, and took a taxi to the airport. I can’t remember if the cab driver said anything to me at all. I have a vague recollection of feeling awkward wandering around in the uniform in those days, but I don’t think I attracted anything more than a few dirty looks.
I don’t remember the change of planes in San Francisco. It was a commercial charter that took us (a whole planeload of us) to Vietnam. We landed at Long Binh/Bien Hoa, by then one enormous, sprawling military complex, maybe 20 miles or so from Saigon. I have vague memories of worrying a bit about the runway being mortared as we landed, based on the stories I’d heard, but everything seemed perfectly peaceful.
Long Binh, the Army portion (Bien Hoa was the Air Force base), was a huge mess of low buildings and Quonset huts and I, like all newcomers, was assigned to the 90th Replacement Battalion, basically the administrative holding unit—awaiting further orders. My “job” was to check a bulletin board twice a day to see if my name and new unit were on it. I have no idea what I did while waiting. I knew that I could have been assigned anywhere in the country, and I knew that things in the northern part were seeing the most fighting at the time.
A couple of days later, my name appeared. On July 4, 1969, I was told to take all my stuff and to wait by a certain helipad just before sunset for my new unit to pick me up.
My recollection is that I was the only one there, sitting on sandbags, waiting. Around me, I could see lots of shirtless GIs lying out in chaise lounges on top of their bunkers, drinking beer. Suddenly, the whole perimeter exploded, much of it in color. They were “disposing” of outdated smoke grenades and artillery charges and such. Hey, it was the Fourth of July. Welcome to Vietnam!
My new unit was Charlie Troop of the 3/17th Air Cavalry Regiment of the 1st Aviation Brigade. That’s not the “First Cav,” who wore the big yellow shoulder patches with a horse’s head and a big black line across them—and who got into lots of fire fights.
My unit was stationed at Di An (pronounced something like “Zeon”), about 10-15 miles northeast of Saigon—about halfway between Saigon and Long Binh/Bien Hoa.
Our unit had three types of helicopters: light observation helicopters (called “loaches” or “scouts”), gunships (Cobras), and the Hueys that I
had been trained to fly. The Loaches and Cobras would go out in pairs, called “hunter-killer teams.” The Loaches would fly around at tree-top level “scouting” like in old cowboy movies, looking for evidence of the bad guys. The gunships would circle overhead, plotting what, if anything, they found on a map—and covering them if they were shot at. As with much of the war, their job, really, was to draw fire—so that the enemy’s position could be identified and more power (troops, artillery, jets) could be brought in to wipe them out.
We Huey drivers were nicknamed “The Baggers,” because our job was to wait around until they found something worth investigating further— at which point we would “insert” our own built-in infantry platoon as the initial on-the-ground force. In fact, by that time in 1969, in the area where we were working around Saigon, they did not often find anything requiring the services of our infantry, so we were often just lying around “bagging it.” One thing that any soldier, sailor, marine, or airman will tell you, I’m sure, is that the military teaches you to “hurry up and wait.”
Early on, our troop commander tried to persuade me to be a scout, a Loach driver. I was relatively small, a primary prerequisite. I declined—and no pressure was applied. They really wanted those guys to be volunteers, guys who “got off” on the “excitement.” I knew that wasn’t me.
We called our commander Sugar Bear—a roundish little guy, a Major, who probably wasn’t much more than 30. He was not the “gung-ho” type—and that was a good thing.
One of the early happenings in my tenure was that President Nixon made a “surprise visit” (July 30,1969). He was at some other meeting in Southeast Asia and made an un-announced stop in Vietnam. The one place he set down outside Saigon was my little base at Di An. I can only assume it was considered the safest place in the country at the time. To the extent that we even had bunkers, they were caving in. The place had not felt threatened in a while. Our job, the day of his visit, was to “bore holes in the sky” while he was in the area, and to be on-call to pick him up if he were shot down or had aircraft problems. Nothing happened, of
course. But we were out there, just in case, making big, lazy circles and listening to Bob Dylan—or whatever was playing on Armed Forces Radio (AFR). One of the pleasures of flying a helicopter is that it has multiple radios—for both communication and navigation—and it was simple enough to tune one of them to AFR.
I don’t really remember the initial “settling in” at Di An, but it was a pretty basic routine, and the welcome was warm. I was assigned a “hootch,” in this case a two-person room in a little building of maybe eight such rooms, built on a slab, with cinder-block walls up three or four feet—then screen above that with baffled boards over the screen so that you couldn’t see in, but air could circulate.
For most of my time there, I shared a room with Scott from Nebraska. He had his parents ship us a small air-conditioner from the U.S., which arrived without a hitch. We covered the inside of the screen with plastic, to keep the air in—and voila. We also had a small refrigerator, acquired from some guy who had rotated out. And the PX on post sold the latest reel-to-reel stereo and camera equipment. Mostly we were into music on tape. And posters. One of the most popular of the time was Raquel Welsh in a skimpy cave-woman costume from Planet of the Apes. And Playboy, of course.
So, life was not that bad. Well, there were hardships. Toilets were not of the flush variety. They were outhouses, but without pits. “Things” fell into a shallow tank (a piece of a 55-gallon drum) filled with JP-4—jet fuel; our helicopters had turbine (i.e., jet) engines. No smoking in the toilet! Periodically, these tanks were drug out the back of the outhouses and set afire by little old Vietnamese women—the “shit burners.” The black smoke could be seen for miles.
Showers were outdoor affairs with immersion heaters inside 55-gallon drums on top of an enclosed wooden structure. These, too, burned JP-4, in a coil at the bottom of the water-filled drum, with a stack sticking out the top. Somebody had to climb atop the structure and light the thing an hour or so before hot water was available, but they worked.
We also paid other Vietnamese women to clean our “hootch.” So—air conditioning, cold beer, hot showers, high-quality stereo, housekeepers— what more could a young male want? Well, women, of course, but that was a problem. Women were in very short supply. There were a handful of mysterious American women who lived on our little post. I’m not sure what they did. I think they were in the Air Force. They may have been nurses, but there was no hospital on our post. They had their own dining facilities. Their housing was surrounded by a high, razor-wire fence and 24/7 armed guards. And I don’t think they were being protected from the VC!
Then there was the officer’s club, a bit of a ramshackle building, but with a pretty good Korean cook when I got there, a pool table, live music many weekends (there were tons of touring, mostly Filipino, bands doing covers of all the popular songs—with some pretty funny English accents), and the occasional stripper. I have no idea how or where the bands lived and traveled.
Perhaps this is the point to insert one of my favorite Henry Miller quotes: “If wars weren’t fun, there wouldn’t be wars.” The greatest fun of all, of course, was simply flying. There is no greater toy for an adolescent male than a half-million-dollar helicopter.
But, back to being a “bagger.” Since we had so little to do, most of the time, in terms of our assigned role to support the hunter-killer teams, we were frequently pulled off on various side jobs—which we referred to as “ash and trash” missions. These could take any number of forms, most often just a glorified taxi service, getting somebody (or somebodies) from point A to point B.
We could be sent off on single-aircraft missions or in groups of two or three. Sometimes we delivered the mail to the troops in the field. Sometimes we hauled water; occasionally, beer. A few times we transported “Donut Dollies”—women who had volunteered, via the Red Cross, for duty in Vietnam, basically to “cheer up the troops.” I never saw them “do their thing,” but any sighting of an American woman was always a big deal,
and we were happy to fly them wherever they wanted to go.
A few times, after I became an IP (instructor pilot), about which more later, I flew with Colonels and Generals who were pilots but rarely had time to fly. They were just “keeping their hand in,” so to speak. Suffice it to say, when flying with a General, we flew high and nowhere near trouble. A few times I flew battalion or regimental commanders in the “Command and Control” ship (or “C&C,” or “Charlie Charlie”) as they were directing (or trying to direct) their troops on the ground. On these occasions, the helicopter would be tricked out with quite an array of extra radios in the back for the commander. He could actually see little or nothing of his troops on the ground, of course. They’re in the jungle—somewhere. Occasionally, he’d have units “pop smoke” (smoke grenades), from which he could get a general sense of their position, but frequently he’d just wind up yelling and screaming in the back of the aircraft—while we’re listening to Dylan or the Rolling Stones in the front.
Once, I flew a commander over an area where two of his units had reported “contact” with the enemy. When he had them pop smoke, it was pretty clear they were shooting at each other. OK, guys, cut it out!
On a few occasions, our small Bagger group (5 or 6 helicopters) would be “attached” for the day to a larger Assault Helicopter Company (AHC) to participate in a large “insertion” of troops into an LZ. It was not our favorite activity—though the flying itself was a thrill: a dozen or more helicopters in tight formation, often doing evasive maneuvers on the way in, landing simultaneously in the middle of a very possibly dangerous nowhere—sometimes with our door gunners firing away with their machine guns. Obviously, that’s one of the situations in which you’re most likely to be shot at. That’s what AHCs did for a living, of course, and my hat’s off to them, but I was happy that wasn’t my regular job. Fortunately (and much of my experience in Vietnam, in life really, could be prefaced with “fortunately”), I was never shot at in the few times that I was involved in putting troops on the ground. That’s also true for the similarly small number of times that I was involved in “extracting” troops—picking them up after
days or weeks in the field. But the extractions were always more fun. Those guys were always happy to see us. We were their heroes for a day.
ASIDE: Thinking about doing what we could to limit the risks we were taking makes me think to insert this comment on the war generally and the way it was run. Everybody served 12 months—to the day—except Marines, who served 13. You knew the day you arrived what day you were scheduled to leave, your DEROS date (Date of Expected Rotation from Overseas). Most people kept a calendar, marking off the days. Everyone with under 100 days remaining could tell you exactly how many days they had left. In retrospect, that was just odd—and they don’t do that anymore. These days, entire units, people who know each other and have trained together, are sent overseas together. And they serve together until some higher power decides to send them home together. Rotating people individually magnifies one’s already heightened sense of self-preservation. It means that it takes a while for every FNG (“fucking new guy”) to be assimilated, acclimated, accepted—and by the time you’ve figured out what to do and how to act, you’re already counting the days until you leave, and keeping your head down. It is not a system that promotes efficiency. At least the military seems to have learned that. But I digress.
Shortly after I got to Vietnam (after a month or so), I got sick. I had a cold that turned into a terrible, hacking cough that kept me up at night. I guess they did an X-ray; I don’t really remember. In any event, I was diagnosed with pneumonia and “grounded” by the flight surgeon. After a few days of rest and drugs, I was considerably better, but still officially grounded, i.e. not able to fly. So Sugar Bear, maybe, or maybe Jumpin’ Jack Flash (our considerably more gung-ho Executive Officer, the #2 guy) figured out that I had majored in English in college. Therefore, I could “write.” As it turned out, the troop had a footlocker full of back-logged paperwork for medals. Medals are a Very Big Deal in the Army—especially for anybody planning to make a career of it, but even average guys like to be recognized if they’ve done something even vaguely heroic. And more
medals make the troop—and the CO—look good.
In short, I was designated the Awards and Decorations Officer of the Troop for the period I was “grounded” and, in fact, for much of the time I was there—though I managed to clear the backlog while grounded, and it was less of a burden after that. Heroic activities did not happen all that often in our troop in that period. More evidence of my great good fortune. I was there during something of a lull in the war. Tet ’68 and its aftermath were still the “war stories” I was hearing. But shortly after I left, my entire unit was re-located to Quang Tri, near the DMZ, and began to lose both helicopters and pilots. Still more evidence that my timing was golden.
As you may imagine, the awards process was a paperwork mess. It required not only creating a narrative, in as much detail as possible, but also recording eyewitness testimony, filling out forms in multiple copies—with carbon paper on a manual typewriter—and drafting the citation. This last part was the most fun and entertained both me and a couple of like-minded souls in lengthy, drunken sessions of thesaurus perusing in search of the flower-iest language possible.
Perhaps my own, single hero medal—and single “war story”—is most illustrative. We were working out of Xuan Loc (“Swan Lock,” more or less), a small town maybe 50 miles or so east of Saigon. The routine was: rise early, take off around dawn, fly out to Xuan Loc, shut down, and wait for our services to be needed. Often, they never were. We worked out of a small, barely fortified heliport that was operated by the South Vietnamese Army. A middle-of-nowhere kind of place—though there were interesting things in the area. There were still operating French rubber plantations, in fact, with big houses and swimming pools (well, there was at least one)—with girls lying around the pool. I swear, I am not making this up. Rumor was that they simply paid “protection” money to both sides. Always fun to buzz the pool and be waved at by the girls.
We were all just kids, of course. I turned 23 “in country” and was referred to as “The Old Man” by many of my colleagues. Most pilots, in fact, were Warrant Officers who went to flight school directly out of
high school. And most of our infantry types were high school dropouts.
So, anyway, one day at Xuan Loc, late in the afternoon (August 26, 1969), we were all preparing to pack up and head home when we got a call that one of our Loaches had been shot down. Now, you might think that there would be a Standard Operating Procedure for such events—but you would be wrong. And because it happened so infrequently in our unit at that time, there was little or no relevant experience.
I was flying with our Operations Officer that day, a Captain near the end of his tour who was one of the more gung-ho among us—a guy who was planning on a career in the Army and who recognized the importance of medals to his future, I’m sure. I was simply his Peter Pilot (co-pilot), not yet having enough flight time to be an Aircraft Commander. I was just along for the ride.
So, we and everybody else headed out to the site. A bit of background: that was the season of afternoon monsoon rains, and we typically tried to be home before the rains started, like clockwork, around 4. The area around Xuan Loc was mostly flat, but there was one area of hills that included a cliff that was maybe 100 feet high.
When the Loach was shot down, the Cobra took up his protective role, shot at where he thought the bad guys were and put out a call “on guard” asking for assistance. Guard is an emergency channel that all aircraft listen to—or are supposed to. I mean all aircraft: Army, Air Force, Navy, whatever. So, aircraft started showing up from everywhere—jets, helicopters from other units, you name it. And nobody was in charge. The chatter on Guard was cacophonous. Planes were flying at all levels and making circles in both directions around the site. And it started to rain. I mean rain, a blinding rain. Another helicopter went by us way too close for comfort.
My pilot got on Guard and ordered everybody away except our guys. Then he announced that “we are going in” to pick-up our downed crew. We are?! Us?
We turned off enough radios so that we were only talking to our gunship
that had been on the scene with the scout the whole time. He pointed out a spot that he thought was big enough for us to land and near enough to the downed crew. As we tried to pick it out in the rain and turned around to line up for a landing, I saw the cliff go by—way too close. But we got lined up and were coming down—when the Cobra pilot started yelling over the radio “You’re taking fire! You’re taking fire! Get out of there!” And he rolled in and fired a couple of rockets that exploded so close to us that I was totally startled and not at all sure what had just happened. It seemed that the earth had exploded. But by shooting at us, and missing, thankfully, the bad guys had revealed their exact position to the gunship, which then unloaded rockets on them. The gunship also directed us around for a second attempt. This time, there was no “you’re taking fire” call and we got down to the tiny LZ. But as we got close to the ground, the blade started clipping the tree limbs, like a giant lawnmower. Helicopter blades have a hardened steel leading-edge, but they are otherwise a honeycomb of aluminum with a steel skin over it. So, fearful of causing damage to our own helicopter, we never actually touched down. We sat there hovering, sort of dancing, buffeted by the wind and the rain, a foot or two off the ground.
Suddenly, I saw our guys, the downed crew, three of them—pilot, copilot, and gunner/crew chief—coming out of the jungle toward us. The last of the three, the pilot, was limping. The only thing that’s armored on a helicopter is the pilot’s seat, but there’s a crack between the back and the seat bottom, and a bullet had found its way through that crack and hit him in the hip. (OK, we would have said it hit him in the ass.) So, they were all hurrying toward us best they could in the mud and clamoring up onto the skids of the dancing helicopter and then inside. The pilot, limping, was the last to reach us. He had a .45 in his hand. I was just sitting there watching as he tried to climb up. Then his muddy boot slipped on the skid and, as he fell, his elbow hit the floor of the helicopter and the .45 went off—right behind my head. That’s as close as I came to getting killed in Vietnam—and that “you’re taking fire” moment was the only time I was
knowingly shot at in a year of flying.
But we got them all on board and got out of there. The rain stopped and we were back up at a safe altitude, flying peacefully along, back to the Long Binh hospital. Once there, we shut down and waited to see if our guys would be released. They kept the pilot with the gunshot wound, and the rest of us went back to the helicopter. It wouldn’t start. Weird. We got a maintenance crew out. It turned out that that .45 round had lodged in the starter generator, disabling it. An inch or so either way and it could have hit any number of things that could have put us on the ground out there in the rain and the mud and the jungle, with night coming on—and it was only then that I got a little weak in the knees thinking about what might have been. Let us just say that considerable alcohol was consumed that evening at the officers’ club, for medicinal purposes, I assure you.
All such activities merit medals, of course, for all involved—which meant more work for the Awards and Decorations Officer, namely me.
My self-created citation reads:
AWARD OF THE AIR MEDAL FOR HEROISM
Reason: For heroism while engaged in aerial flight in connection with military operations against a hostile force: First Lieutenant Speir distinguished himself by exceptionally valorous actions while serving as pilot of a helicopter involved in the extraction of a light observation helicopter crew shot down in Long Khanh Province. An intense thunderstorm hung over the site and enemy ground fire was constantly increasing. While his aircraft commander directed his attentions toward organizing the operation on the radios, he skillfully maneuvered his aircraft through the near zero visibility and hail of enemy fire to be set up for the extraction as soon as all elements were prepared. Due to increased enemy fire which restricted the downed crew’s movement, three approaches in poor visibility to extremely small landing zones were necessary before the crew could make their way to the aircraft. Throughout the action, his assistance, alternately with the mass of radio traffic and in maneuvering the aircraft, was of
immeasurable aid in the expeditious accomplishment of the mission. His professionalism and calm, personal courage under fire were exemplary. His actions were in keeping with the highest traditions of the military service and reflect great credit upon himself, his unit, and the United States Army.
That basically exaggerates a little and says that I was there and didn’t do much. I think we got my pilot, the Aircraft Commander, a Silver Star. I can’t remember the others. Lots of paper. Not all units in all areas operated the same, I’m sure. For some people, picking up people while being shot at was fairly routine.
In addition to Xuan Loc (one of the last places to fall in ’75, by the way) the other place that we did a lot of work during my tenure was Tay Ninh, about 75 miles northwest of Saigon, near the Cambodian border. Things were pretty boring there, too, from a Bagger perspective. That was one of the places I flew a screaming commander who was trying to “see” and direct his troops on the ground—in some pretty dense jungle. And it may well have been part of the infamous Cambodian “incursion” of 1970, which I only learned about later. Who knows where the border is in a jungle?
Two things about Tay Ninh made me want to go back when Barbara (my wife of 40-plus years) and I visited Vietnam in 2011. One was Nui Ba Den, roughly translated: Black Virgin Mountain, a perfect volcanic cone that juts up more than 3000 feet out of the flat rice fields. During the war, there was an important communications outpost at its peak that could only be re-supplied by helicopters landing at a small and reportedly precarious landing spot. I never got that job, but I would have liked to. The other was the Cao Dai temple, an obviously interesting building, even from the air in those days. When Barbara and I went back, the temple had been greatly enlarged. It was no longer isolated on a dirt road but sat in a sea of asphalt parking. It is easily the most bizarre building I have ever encountered. Only Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia Basilica in Barcelona even
holds a candle. Cao Dai is a peculiarly Vietnamese religion, founded only in 1926, with the mission of reconciling all world religions. It numbers Victor Hugo among its saints. And Tay Ninh is its Holy See.
The building is quite literally a riot of color and form: lots of pink and bright green; dragon columns everywhere, and orbs and eyes (like the one on the back of the dollar bill); tile work in all manner of patterns—and a gallery for the tourists. During the services, the devoted (in robes colorcoded to denote their relative rank) march in with great precision to a chorus of chants and gales of incense. It was one of the most memorable stops on the trip, on any trip.
Nui Ba Den, the mountain, was also “a trip.” There’s now an amusement park at its base and cable cars that take you up the mountain to a couple of remarkable temples—that have been there all along, I suppose—and to some quite remarkable views over the surrounding, flat, pacific landscape. My, how times have changed.
But, back to my story. Somewhere in the middle of my tour (interesting that we call it a “tour”), I went on a week’s R&R (rest and recuperation, of course) to Hawaii, to meet Maggie and visit Maui. It’s an astonishingly beautiful place, of course, stunningly different from even my relatively benign experience of the war. This was another rather bizarre aspect of it all. Every service member was entitled to a 7-day R&R during his tour: free transportation to the destination of your choice. Options included Hawaii, Sydney, Tokyo, and Bangkok, among others. It was wrenching enough for me to be whip-sawed between the war and Maui and back. I can only imagine—and probably can’t really—what it was like for guys who were actually “humping” through the jungle, living in the mud in fire support bases, making helicopter assaults on a daily basis—to go from the absurd (and deadly) to the ridiculously sublime—and back—in the course of a week.
Also, somewhere in the middle of my tour, I became an instructor pilot (IP). I no longer remember exactly how that happened. I was, if I say so myself, a pretty darned good Huey driver, but I don’t know
whether some higher authority recognized that and recommended me or I somehow applied.
The “in-country IP school” was at Long Binh and lasted two weeks. While there, I noticed that there was a group of large, American-style, suburban, brick ranch houses on a loop at one of the higher points on the base—where the generals lived. I just thought: Wow!
IP school was almost exclusively hands-on practice of emergency procedures—all the way to the ground. In the States, we never did them “to a touchdown.” Lots more can go wrong if you’re doing them all the way to the ground, trust me. The essential emergency procedure is the simulation of engine failure—called an “auto-rotation.” If the engine fails (and there was only one on Hueys in those days; modern ones have two) the rotor, with its blades pitched, tends to slow down, being no longer driven by the engine. This is very bad. If the engine stops, the first thing you must do—instantly—is to drop the “collective,” that thing in your left hand, all the way to the bottom to take the pitch out of the blades. Now the rotor will “free-wheel” or “auto-rotate” above you, but there is no lift, or very little. It’s coming down. Helicopters do not glide. If the engine quits, your possible landing sites are pretty much within the area you can see between your feet, out the bottom part of the bubble—and you need to be headed into the wind at touchdown to help stop the thing. So, for starters, you need to be aware of which way the wind is blowing at all times when you’re flying.
Auto-rotations are practiced from 500 feet at a landing strip, starting downwind. In practice, the instructor simply wraps the throttle back to idle. From that altitude, you have just enough time to bottom the collective, make a 180-degree turn into the wind, and begin the final part of the procedure—“flaring,” bringing the nose up sharply to slow the forward motion, then, at just the right moment, leveling the nose enough not to bang the tail, and lifting the collective sharply to bring the pitch back into the blades abruptly, cushioning the last few feet of descent. If you pull the pitch into the blades too soon, you run out of “cushion;” too late
and you never get the descent stopped. Either way, at a minimum, you hit the ground very hard and bend up the skids. Fail to get the forward motion stopped by pulling the nose up at the right moment, and you slide upon landing. On a runway, that’s not so bad; on uneven ground, that may not turn out well. Pull the nose up too early, stopping the forward motion too high in the air, and you don’t have enough pitch to stop the vertical descent—again, a hard landing at a minimum. Done perfectly, the helicopter touches down like a feather with zero forward motion. In doing hundreds of those over the next several months after IP school, I remember doing one perfectly exactly once. I could do them very close to perfect consistently, but I guess that’s why they call it perfection. But I loved doing those. It’s a carnival ride, and you’re in control. The biggest thrill, really, is “contour flying,” flying the contours of the earth, right down “on the deck,” jumping fences and hedgerows, dragging the skids through the treetops, following rivers….
The other essential emergency procedure is practicing hydraulics failure. All the controls have hydraulic assist, like power-steering. Without it, the controls become very hard to move. There’s a switch for turning the hydraulics off to simulate the problem. There’s no way you could hover a helicopter without the hydraulics so, in an emergency, you fly it onto the ground, using the skids like wheels. This works on a runway. I would never try it on unpaved ground except in an absolute emergency. But, hey, the engine is still running. You can keep flying for as long as you’ve got fuel, looking for a hard surface to land on. The crucial thing is to keep the nose straight as you touch down and begin to slide. Once you touch down, you roll the throttle to idle to kill the lift and drop the collective all the way down to act as a brake. If you can slow the speed enough before it touches down, it won’t even slide very far, though it does become more difficult to control at slower speeds. But, on the whole, simple enough; just keep the nose straight and drive it onto the runway. Piece o’ cake, except see below.
After IP school, giving “check rides” became my primary occupation.
My buddy Scott and I were the two IPs. We had an actual office—well, a couple of desks, and a certain autonomy. And every pilot in the squadron was required to have a check ride every 90 days—going through all the emergency procedures.
Life was good. We seldom went out on regular missions with the rest of the unit after that. We hung around the office, gave check rides—and bitched, about the state of the war and the world. I’m thinking it had to be after the shootings at Kent State (May 4, 1970), when we drafted a letter to President Nixon, explaining why the war sucked, questioning his leadership, and threatening to resign, I think. We never sent it, of course. I suppose it got trashed.
Because we had an “office,” we occasionally saw bits of interesting paperwork that we would not have otherwise seen. One day I saw an announcement about a need for an R&R Officer in Tokyo. They needed someone to begin July 1, exactly the date my Vietnam tenure was to end. I had no real idea what an R&R Officer did, but it sounded intriguing, so I applied. I was called for an interview—back in Long Binh. On the day of the interview, I slicked myself up a bit and hopped a helicopter to Long Binh, like catching a taxi. “Anybody going to Long Binh?”
On that same day, I was scheduled to give a check ride to one of our guys who had a reputation as something of a goofball and as one of the poorer pilots in our cohort. Because I was at Long Binh, Scott wound up giving him the check-ride. As they were practicing the hydraulics failure procedure, the guy got the helicopter sideways as they were getting close to touchdown. Scott said, “I got it” and, doing what you’re supposed to do, began to apply great pressure to get it straightened out and back up in the air. The idea is: you get it straight and flying again, relax the pressure on the controls, and then turn the hydraulics back on. The co-pilot, stupidly, thinking he was helping, reached over and flipped the hydraulics switch back on—while they were sideways, close to the ground, and Scott was applying serious pressure to the controls. Suddenly, the controls were free, the helicopter rolled hard to the right, the blades hit the ground and broke
off, and the helicopter rolled down the runway. Fortunately, there was no fire and they both survived—though Scott had his mouth wired together for a few weeks and was not a happy camper. And there we have more evidence of my great good fortune in being away that day.
Perhaps this is as good a place as any to insert my favorite comment about helicopters and their pilots. This is from Harry Reasoner, a person we older people will remember as one of the great CBS news anchors and commentators from the past. This particular commentary was delivered on February 16, 1971.
Helicopters Are Different from Planes
The thing is, helicopters are different from planes. An airplane by its nature wants to fly, and if not interfered with too strongly by unusual events or by a deliberately incompetent pilot, it will fly. A helicopter does not want to fly. It is maintained in the air by a variety of forces and controls working in opposition to each other, and if there is any disturbance in this delicate balance the helicopter stops flying, immediately and disastrously. There is no such thing as a gliding helicopter.
This is why being a helicopter pilot is so different from being an airplane pilot, and why, in generality, airplane pilots are open, clear-eyed, buoyant extroverts and helicopter pilots are brooders, introspective anticipators of trouble. They know if something bad has not happened it is about to.
So, I got the job—as R&R Officer in Tokyo and began to seriously count days.
As I was traveling to Tokyo, it occurred to me that, in 1970, we were only 25 years after the end of WWII! I had no idea what to expect. What I found was a bustling, modern country where, at least to my eyes, you’d never know that there had been a war. And, to my amazement, there was no obvious animosity toward Americans. Of course, I also recognized
that for me, starting high school in 1960, only 15 years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, WWII itself was already ancient history.
I was stationed at Camp Zama, in the far outer reaches of Tokyo. I was promoted to captain right before I got there, in the speedy way that promotions happened in those days. And I learned my duties from the young captain who had preceded me. Believe me, this job was so cushy that they’d only allow a person to hold it for 3 months—but the idea was that they wanted a recent vet greeting the R&R guys and helping them on their way.
My “job,” all set up by my predecessors, was to meet an airplane full of guys on R&R from the war (160-180 of them, depending on the plane)—three times a week, at some ungodly hour like 4 a.m., get them off the plane onto buses, and accompany them back to Camp Zama where I made a presentation to them—at now 5:30 or 6 in the morning—about where they were, what they could do, where they could go, how to get there, how the local money worked, what to watch out for—and when they had to be back.
Aside from meeting that airplane and going through that rigmarole three times a week—which was completed by 8 a.m.—my only other very occasional task was to be a “personal shopper” for the occasional colonel or general. Seriously. The primary request was for pearls, which were dirt cheap at the time—and I should kick myself for not buying my own.
Other than that, my “job” was to travel and explore, to check out places for “my guys” so that I could better advise them—and that was it. There was a World’s Fair in Osaka that summer, and I went several times. I rented an apartment and bought a really cheap, tiny, worn-out convertible—for $150, as I recall. I explored Tokyo, which was virtually unrecognizable when Barbara and I went back a few years ago. I saw the Woodstock movie that summer of ’70 in Tokyo, with Japanese sub-titles. I loved Kamakura, with its huge Buddha near the beach. I visited Kyoto and Nara. And I experienced a fireworks festival in Atami that forever altered my view of fireworks. It was BIG. It went on for two hours. I had
a seat on a hotel rooftop, and it was the sort of thing from which you take the occasional break to get a drink or go to the bathroom.
The only negative from my R&R Officer experience was that two of “my guys” died during those three months. One simply drank himself to death and drowned in his own vomit. One got drunk and somehow fell off a hotel roof. These were just kids—and kids who had spent the previous six months or more of their lives in some pretty dreadful circumstances. I was glad I was not the one who had to explain the circumstances of their deaths to their mothers.
When my Tokyo time was up, I had also finished my time in Vietnam but, technically, I had been on “temporary duty” in Tokyo, away from my Vietnam unit. So, by the book, I had to go back to Vietnam to “sign out” of my unit. I caught a flight back to Saigon and managed to get a helicopter to Di An. I spent one night there, had dinner at the officers’ club one last time, and said a second goodbye to the guys I knew who were still there. Clearly, the primary emotion was envy. That night, my friend the flight surgeon gave me two Darvon (I think) for the flight home. Next day, I got a helicopter back to Saigon, got on a plane and bid farewell to Vietnam. Shortly after departure, I took the two pills—and I woke up landing in San Francisco. Thank you, doc.
I know we landed at Travis Air Force Base. I must have transitioned somehow to the San Francisco airport, but I don’t remember that. I knew by this point that guys in uniform were not particularly popular in the States, so I changed to civilian clothes for the flight to New York. Thus, I blended back into the population—and was home. And thus ended my Southeast Asian experience.
Part 2—What I Wrote
So, that’s what I remember and the stories I’ve told. But, after writing that, I re-discovered all the letters I wrote home (which had been saved by my then-wife). I must say, my primary reaction was: What an idiot!! But we will get to that.
First, the letters lead me to think more about what was going on that year “back in the World.” For the period I was in Vietnam, mid-‘69 to mid-‘70, the important news was happening in the States. I was getting news mostly from Time and Newsweek, in that ancient era when a weekly news magazine seemed sufficient to keep you “current.” I was half-aworld away, but not totally out-of-the-loop.
I arrived in-country on July 1, 1969. Teddy Kennedy’s unfortunate incident at Chappaquiddick happened on July 18. Men were walking on the moon on July 20. Woodstock was August 15-18. (Ho Chi Minh died September 2—and Everett Dirksen on September 7.) The Miracle Mets won the World Series. The first great Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam was October 15. Samuel Becket was awarded the Nobel Prize that October. In November, the first news of the My Lai Massacre (of March ’68) began to be reported. On May 4, 1970, two months before I was to depart Vietnam, the Kent State Massacre happened. Not much of note was going on in Vietnam itself—except for the “Cambodian incursion” in early May of ‘70, which prompted even more massive anti-war marches back home as spring turned to summer.
Kent State was hard to stomach—and did engender the “resignation letter,” which I did find among my letters home, by the way, and it is as pompous and predictable as one might imagine—but heart-felt… and sad.
I hadn’t really forgotten any of those things, but I couldn’t have told you that they all happened during my “tour.”
The letters demonstrate that I did simply forget a lot of things, though. A brief list:
—the ice cream truck. Seriously. Just like home, but with a lot of miles on it, and blaring the same stupid, annoying, unmistakable song. How could I forget that?
—that all pilots were issued .38 revolvers (a few had .45s). We had Western-style belts and holsters (passed down as guys rotated home) and put the holstered pistols between our legs while flying—to protect “the family jewels.” We never fired them—or cleaned them, as I recall. We were “the Cav,” after all, or some faint glimmer of it, and some of us wore black, Western hats in the style of the old horse-mounted cavalry (definitely not official headgear).
—that I was not the only one picked up by my new unit that afternoon of July 4 just after the “fireworks” display. There were three of us, and we were treated to free steaks and a strip show at the Officers’ Club that very first night. Again, it was the Fourth of July.
—we had TV! Or my roommate of a couple of months did—and there was one at the Officers’ Club. My letters report actually seeing the TV coverage of our guys walking on the moon. And one of the things I reported watching with my roommate was “The American Junior Miss Pageant, Live from Mobile.” Saigon was only 10 or so miles away, so a signal would not have had to travel far. I don’t recall that we got much of the war news, though.
—there was also a slot machine at the O Club, though that was not my kind of gambling. I had not completely forgotten playing poker, but I had forgotten how often. I was generally winning, small amounts. I do remember giving the game up after losing a fairly large amount one night—to another guy from north Louisiana. At least I had that much sense.
—the “sniffer missions” that we flew a few times when I was first there—just flying on the treetops with a machine that was supposed to smell humans. I assume it was supposed to detect the ammonia-like smell of urine or some such. I don’t remember that we ever found anything with it, but any excuse for flying low-level was always fun.
—that it was possible to phone home, though not easy. One option
was a late-night hook-up via ham radio operators—with garbled radio voices and “Over” at the end of each comment. The other was to get to the USO in Saigon and wait in line for a call on an actual telephone, which I presume was connected to some trans-Pacific cable. Communication generally was more difficult than I remembered. Letters could take a week each way in transit, which meant that an answer to a query could be two weeks in coming, by which time other letters had intervened and changed the conversation. On top of that, there was a mail strike at one point that disrupted things even further—which happened to come at a particularly bad time in my correspondence with Maggie.
—MPC conversion day. MPC were the Military Payment Certificates, or “scrip,” that we used instead of U.S. dollars (or Vietnamese currency). Occasionally, for reasons I never fully understood, it would be announced, on VERY short notice, that we’re “converting” all current MPC to “new”— new colors, etc. Something to do with “the black market.” Each unit then had to collect all the old MPC from its members, handle the conversion with the folks next up the chain of command, then re-distribute all the new currency back to its members. As you can imagine, people want this done quickly. As a junior officer, I was tasked to be one of the principal organizers of the conversion for our troop of perhaps 100 guys. Even portable calculators of the Texas Instruments type were still rare—and expensive. But one of my fellow pilots had an abacus, for some reason, and we used that! (He knew how to use it.)
—And there were pink elephants!
We chased a herd of elephants today. The second time in 3 or 4 days. Same elephants. First ones I’ve seen here. One papa elephant with humungous tusks, 3 or 4 mama elephants, and a whole flock of baby elephants. Elephants, I suppose, are polygamous. And they’re pink! No shit. They roll around in the red mud and dust that is quite prevalent here until they’re caked with it, then it dries on them, and they’re pink. (13 NOV)
—And I had completely forgotten that I “hauled 3 bodies out of a
hole in the woods today” (8 AUG). Prompted by that letter, I can resurrect the faintest recollection of having body bags on my helicopter once, and only once, during the year.
But, most importantly, I forgot how depressed I was—and how angry—and what an attitude problem I was:
I’ve really been having a great time of late seeing how much I can get away with. How late I can come in, how early I can leave, & how little I can do in the day. The best so far is in at 11:00, out at 5:00, with a couple of hours of ping-pong in between. (19 SEP)
Today was not a great day—but it could have been worse. I am becoming a fantastic attitude problem. I got up about 9:00 today. Made it to work about 10:00. Got in two hours of ping-pong before lunch. A little catch and more ping-pong after lunch and coupled with some genuine screwing-off—I made it through the whole day without doing a thing. But even that is boring. (12 OCT)
Hello. I am happily losing my mind. It is a necessity to hide one’s sanity under a shell here to maintain any of it at all.… [I]t has been a normal day. And many more normal days and I’ll be tearing things apart, jumping up & down, & pulling my hair out. (22 OCT)
Perhaps most succinctly, as early as August 2, when I’d been there a month, I was wearing a new hat pin with an image of Snoopy as the World War I Flying Ace, saying: “Fuck it! Just fuck it!”
Who was that guy?!
My greatest mis-remembering was about the Awards and Decorations (A&D) stuff. I have pleasantly re-cast that experience as a couple of weeks of frustration and just a continuing, occasional annoyance. But it started July 15 (eleven days after I got to the unit) and continued until early April, when I got transferred to Headquarters Troop to be Squadron IP (Instructor Pilot). That’s almost 9 months of the 12 I was there. And the A&D thing was the most tangible root of my anger. Early on, I met Scott and Bob, two warrant officers whom I came to like very much and who
shared both my amusement with and my contempt for A&D, generally. But, specifically, they had been present at one of the actions for which I was processing medals and knew that some of the claims being made were a bit over-blown.
Then,
Straight from Catch-22. Our major (commander) is leaving in about 5 weeks and we got a call from the colonel (squadron CO) that he wanted us to have a DFC (distinguished flying cross) ready to present to him at the change of command ceremony whether he deserves it or not. What a blow job…. (3 SEP)
DFCs are sacred to pilots—not “service medals.” I no longer remember how much that particular medal request contributed to my general disgust, but some, and the whole A&D process helped contribute to my blossoming dislike of the personage of our XO, my direct superior.
One letter reports that I’d been chewed out for the slow pace at which the A&D work was being accomplished and because some stuff I’d submitted up the chain had come back because of typos and such. “The beautiful thing is that I sent it in knowing the errors were there and expecting it back to see how slow I can make things run. It’s the little things that count” (24 AUG).
On days that I was not flying, I was supposed to be working—on A&D. In part, that meant fairly long stretches with no days off, though the “regular pilots” had frequent days off. So, I created days off—by simply doing nothing. And I was pissed, in part by the drudgery and monotony of it and in part by the XO himself: “With pleasure I would put him out of my misery” (AUG, no date).
I have been fucked again…. I flew for two days, then the XO decided I shouldn’t be flying until A&D was all nice and caught up. I could kill him…. Sorry I haven’t written in a couple of days. Been tired and pissed off. (11 OCT)
A week later:
The last two days I have been fucking off again. I must get back to A&D—hopefully to get through and back flying regularly. It is rather sickening if one sits down and thinks about it. So, I don’t sit down and think about it.
This whole thing seems like one long boring day that never ends.
Which all sounds like I am very depressed and I’m not really. Rather like Lee Marvin in the flick last night [Hell in the Pacific]. Exhausted and reduced to the simplest actions and mental processes for survival. This is a survival situation. I will survive—but it may require becoming numb to the world. (18 OCT)
A month later:
I’ve been quite busy of late. Flying almost every day, which lately has meant 5 am til 8 pm and falling into the sack when I get in.… sneaking up on catching up on this tremendous pile of bullshit in A&D and hopefully will have a little time off some day…. pissed that I never seem to be able to swing a day off… Enough of my boiling wrath. (15 NOV)
Then:
Happy Thanksgiving! Or at least it was supposed to be. Today was one of the most fucked up days I’ve seen since I’ve been here. And I am in a horrible mood. Coupled with the fact I haven’t had a day off in 3 weeks. I could probably burn this whole fucking place down. I will not try to explain it; it would only serve to enrage me further. (27 NOV)
Then, just after Christmas:
Am very tired. Am flying days and writing A&D at nights trying to catch A&D up, get out of A&D & Operations & get back to flying with a few days off now and then. (28 DEC)
Just before I got transferred to Headquarters to be an Instructor Pilot:
Things are becoming very dull here. Even more so than usual. Time drags on. But I shall not let it bother me…. My attitude is nil…. I am not depressed so much as bored. (18 MAR)
And less than a month before I left:
This whole place is turning into a very bad movie and leaves me only with the feeling of being very tired and alternating somewhere between disgust and apathy as the weather changes. And it is changing. The rain is beginning. Very cold and vicious. Usually late in the afternoon. And the whole world goes under water for a while, then drains for the next baptism. (4 JUN)
So, a lot of the attitude problem, the anger, the depression related to “the A&D thing,” but that was certainly not all of it. On October 3rd, I wrote:
The most depressing thing about this whole place is that there is so very little of beauty here. The Army’s fault. There are gray buildings in mediocre condition surrounded by sandbags; there are olive drab trucks on muddy roads. There was a brilliant red sunset a few days ago and I caught myself, after I don’t really know how long, leaning against a wall, staring. Staring, at something beautiful. A bit of relief. The Army is simply a very drab, depressing place. To wear the same green clothes, to the same green job, in the same green building, via the same green truck is not depressing, but hypnotizing. I am not depressed, I am numb.
The word numb appears in several letters.
And there’s the basic context, of course, of living in a war zone with all the uncertainties thereunto appertaining (even in a relatively safe, dull and boring piece of it), while “fighting” a war that made no sense (a fact that was especially clear close-up), for a government in which one had no faith. And without sex.
That last part was not secondary. Hormones are powerful things. And living like that, for a 23-year-old male, is hard. Let’s just leave it at that.
Part of what angered me, surely, was having my freshly-minted college
degree and freshly-minted helicopter credentials and winding up playing secretary to a guy I despised, turning out multiple copies of possibly fraudulent paperwork, on manual typewriters, with carbon paper—in a war zone that was part of a war that made less and less sense every day. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that what we were doing was just stupid.
We weren’t taking and holding ground. We didn’t even know where the bad guys were—neither the Viet Cong guerillas (who lived among the people like part of the furniture) nor the North Vietnamese Army regulars who infiltrated down the Ho Chi Minh trail. And we certainly weren’t “winning hearts and minds.” Our primary tactic, whether with our scout helicopters or infantry units was to put people out as bait, wait for them to be shot at—so that the enemy positions could be pin-pointed—and then to retaliate. “Body counts” and “kill ratios” drove everything—from dayto-day mission decisions to the reporting back home and the decisions by Congress and the President. Body counts became something akin to medals—or notches on a gunslinger’s pistol. Higher numbers brought credit—and promotions—to commanders. And the numbers were easily exaggerated. In the context of our own small-unit operations, if one of our hunter-killer teams saw and shot at what they estimated to be 10 guys in the jungle, they might report killing three of them—or five—or seven. No bodies were actually counted, not in our unit anyway.
JOIN THE ARMY. TRAVEL TO DISTANT LANDS. MEET INTERESTING PEOPLE. AND KILL THEM.
Humor of the time. Someone should make T-shirts—and probably has. And you’re horny. And unhappy. And angry. So, you drink. And eat (I gained a good 20 pounds, I’m sure). And play poker. And sleep. And complain. And repeat.
In retrospect, in my case, an obvious question is: why not just do the A&D paperwork crap and be done with it, rather than drag it out and (also obviously, in retrospect) make myself miserable? Couldn’t I see that the “no days off” were “punishment” for my lackadaisical-ness?
But whatever the little annoyances that drove my personal anger, there were also the much larger, general annoyances that made the whole place angry. That’s not to say that everybody was against the war. There were still lots of “my country, right or wrong” types and no small number of cowboys, like most of our Loach and Cobra drivers, who were genuinely having fun—right out there on the edge of getting killed, or always with that risk, at least. And they were mostly “proud Americans” who wanted badly to see themselves as doing God’s work. I avoid reunions because they tend to be God-country-flag-and-guns, gung-ho affairs. I would put my patriotism up against anybody’s, but I can’t be a part of that team. And I certainly wouldn’t be the first to suggest that the roots of the country’s current political divisiveness can be found in the Vietnam War.
But for a goodly portion of those of us who served, it became pretty quickly (and increasingly) evident that the whole enterprise was just idiotic.
And, for what, exactly? I remember knowing quite clearly—while I was there—that the 1954 Geneva Accords (which the U.S. didn’t sign) required a national election in ’56 and that, if it had been held, Ho Chi Minh would have certainly won. So, we’re fighting against what a majority of the country support? We’re getting into the middle of a civil war? Why, exactly? The falling dominoes thing? We always assumed it was about more than that. Was there offshore oil to be exploited?
So, maybe it’s not so hard to see why I was angry. As to why I forgot the anger, that’s a different story. People have written books about memory, of course. But I’ve always been fond of a quote attributed to Robert Frost: “I have a great forgetter.” In a lot of situations, I think that’s a healthy thing, but my own abilities in that regard seem to be exceptional. Imagine, though, what the guys involved in the actual mud and blood and anxiety on a daily basis have repressed.
And why couldn’t I write? See above, I guess. Anger, for me at least, is not a space for writing. Nor is “numbness.”
In one of the first letters, I wrote: “Someday I will write you what’s really going on in this war—right now I don’t think I can stop laughing
long enough to hold the pen steady” (17 JUL). In one of the last: “I could write for 3 days about all the insane, petty bullshit I have witnessed in the last hour—but I would throw up” (16 JUN).
What happened? Well, a year of living in the war happened. A lot of disappointed idealism happened. One of the guys in Ken Burns’ Vietnam documentary says: “We were the last generation to believe our government would never lie to us.” Sadly, the very idea of such belief now seems laughable.
In any event, I went to Vietnam with an explicit, sophomoric intent to write the Great American Novel—to write something, at least. And I wrote: nothing. Nada. Except the letters, and they are mostly an embarrassment— written mostly late at night in a drunken stupor—which say relatively little about the details of my life there.
I had endless writing fantasies and excuses, though:
I would write something creative-like, but my mind doesn’t track on one thing long enough to see it finished. My inspirations are in blinding spurts and gone before the shock wears off. (18 AUG)
Give me a month and I will be caught up in A&D, back to flying, with a few days off and will write you some really creative things. (16 SEP)
Some day soon I will probably waken to newfound strength and write you a decent letter—probably. (13 NOV)
I love you. And dream. And each dream is of you…. And the dreams are constant. I don’t know how easy or hard that is to believe, but it is the greatest single deterrent to any creativity—outside simply being tired. I can’t get my mind off it. But it will end in time. And besides, they’re rather nice dreams. I love you. (9 DEC)
Lovable letter follows later. After I have rested. (18 DEC)
Tonight, I sat out watching the stars and my mind was bubbling, shall we say, with things I wanted to tell you, with thoughts to share. But they do not flow freely from that point in my mind where they are captured. They are almost sky. They want you nearer before they escape. (16 MAR)
Pitiful.
So, I began by saying that my initial reaction to the letters was: What an idiot!
Exhibit 1: a guy who was so lost, so quickly, in such anger.
Exhibit 2: a guy who thought he was “a writer” who didn’t even have the discipline to keep a decent journal, much less write anything creative, and
Exhibit 3: a guy who couldn’t see that his marriage was falling apart and who wasn’t exactly helping the situation with what he was writing home.
What can I say? I was a little clueless.
A bit of context: While on my 30-day leave between flight school and Vietnam, I moved Maggie, a small-town, Southern girl, to New York and left her there (her idea) —to “become an artist.” For the first few months, she was depressed, and I was writing letters bucking her up (or trying to, probably pissing her off, in fact). Then she got into school, met a few people, was discovering New York—and I’m sure she was having to explain: Yes, I’m married… Oh, my husband is in the army… flying helicopters… in Vietnam.
That was probably not the greatest conversation starter in starvingartists’ circles in Manhattan in 1969. It’s a little hard to piece things back together because, again, I (stupidly) failed to save her letters and have only my side of the conversation to work from. But by August 20, when I’d been in Vietnam about six weeks, she’s writing me about meeting a guy, a photographer, in a bookstore—and commenting that she’s not sure what she knows about me. In December, I’m responding to some comment she’s made about our developing “separate memories.” In April:
Received two letters from you today… news of your work & possibilities of a loft and a slight question raised perhaps by what you mean about staying in NY if you got a loft. And a lot of “I’s” and very few “we’s.” (9 APR)
By mid-May, I’m saying: “I realize we have grown hopelessly apart”— though I continued to hold out hope that we could keep the relationship together, and we did, for five more years after I returned. But there’s no question that that year in Vietnam killed it.
Near the end of my tour, I was also recognizing that I’d have two more years to serve after Vietnam and imagining “exotic” places I might request for my next assignment: Germany? Thailand? She, of course, was establishing a life in New York and had, in fact, started renovating one of the very first lofts in what would become SoHo. She had zero interest in leaving New York. I hadn’t really appreciated how attached she had become to the art scene—or how much she abhorred the idea of going anywhere as an Army wife.
So, I can’t blame the Army for everything, but I do blame the Army— and the war—for interrupting my career path in relation to my peers. And, despite my own contributions, I blame the war for breaking up my marriage. In the fifty-plus years since, I’ve met exactly ONE couple who were together before the war and stayed together afterwards. Beyond that, would I have waited until I was 41 to start law school (or some other reputable profession) if I hadn’t gone to Vietnam? Probably not.
Who knows what I might have done. On the other hand, I can hardly complain about the way my life has turned out—happily married for over 40 years, retired, still healthy, and comfortable enough to be able to travel and not to worry about the basics. Still, re-considering that period and my role in it, it’s not hard to scratch those old angers and be angered anew—or to be saddened by the current political madness that has at least some of its roots in that era.
So, that’s my story. But it’s only one. Roughly 3 million Americans served in what the Vietnamese call the American War. Over 58,000 Americans—and over a million Vietnamese—died there.
There are, in fact, 58,281 names on the Vietnam Memorial—The Wall. I actually met the guy who is the last name on The Wall, the last death attributed to the war. A friend of a friend. Nice guy. A fellow helicopter pilot. Just doing his job.
He got caught up in a thing called the Mayaguez Incident. The Mayaguez was a U.S.-flagged container ship. About the same time that Saigon fell (April 30, 1975), the Khmer Rouge rebels seized power in neighboring Cambodia. When the Mayaguez violated their territorial waters, the Khmer Rouge stopped the ship and took its crew hostage.
In Washington, Henry Kissinger, Nelson Rockefeller, and others were encouraging Gerald Ford to be “tough.” Washington had no diplomatic relations—or communication lines—with the Khmer Rouge. An overly hasty rescue plan was hatched—to assault Koh Tang Island, where the crew were believed to be held and which was believed to be lightly defended. Neither was true. In the early stages of the assault, the crew were released unharmed—from a different island. The Khmer Rouge had been trying to deliver the message that they were releasing the crew, but it never got through. Eight Air Force “Jolly Green Giant” helicopters, loaded with Marines, attacked Koh Tang. Three were destroyed and four were seriously damaged. Eighteen Americans and an unknown number of Cambodians were killed.
The Incident is considered a total disaster or a heroic rescue, depending on whom you read. It was a lot of both, in fact: a disaster that it happened at all; heroic in the extraction of the Marines who shouldn’t have been there in the first place.
Because his name starts with a V, Richard Vandegeer was the last of those killed that day to be listed on The Wall. May 15, 1975.
Fifty years ago.
Lest we forget.
Contributor Notes
Alan Altany has B.A. and M.A. degrees in Catholic theology, a Ph.D. in religious studies (University of Pittsburgh) and is a semi-retired, octogenarian professor of Comparative Religions at a small college in Florida. He was the founder & editor of a small magazine of poetry (The Beggar’s Bowl) and has published four books of poetry for a series, “Christian Poetry of the Sacred”: A Beautiful Absurdity (2022), The Greatest Longing (2023), Intimations (2024), and Poems to God (2025). Website: https://www.alanaltany.com/
Shamus Award-winning writer Tom Andes is the author of the detective novel Wait There Till You Hear from Me (Crescent City Books 2025). His stories have appeared in Best American Mystery and Suspense Stories 2025, The Best Private Eye Stories of the Year 2025, and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. He lives in Albuquerque, where he is a working musician. His latest release is The Ones That Brought You Home (Southern Crescent Recording Co. 2025). He can be found at tomandes.com.
Editor and author Philip Athans has been a driving force behind varied media including Alternative fiction & poetry magazine and Wizards of the Coast. He lives and works in the Pacific Northwest.
Elizabeth Burk is a semi-retired psychologist, a native New Yorker who divides her time between New York and a home and husband in southwest Louisiana. She is the author of Unmoored (Texas Review Press 2024) and three previous collections: Learning to Love Louisiana, Louisiana Purchase , and Duet—Poet & Photographer , a collaboration with her photographer husband. Her poems, prose pieces, and reviews have been published in numerous journals and anthologies, including Atlanta Review, Rattle, Southern Poetry Anthology, Louisiana Literature, Pithead Chapel, PANK, MER and elsewhere.
Darren C. Demaree is the author of twenty-four poetry collections, most recently Now Flourish Northern Cardinal , (Small Harbor Publishing, November 2025). He is the recipient of a Greater Columbus Arts Council Grant, an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, the Louise Bogan Award from Trio House Press, and the Nancy Dew Taylor Award from Emrys Journal. He is currently working in the Columbus Metropolitan Library system.
Ken Fontenot is a retired civil servant for the Texas Department of Transportation in Austin. In 2012 his book of poems In a Kingdom of Birds won the award for the best book of poetry, given by the Texas Institute of Letters. His recent book is The Forests of Autumn (Alamo Bay Press, 2025).
Dr. Gabriel I. Green is an Assistant Professor of African American Literature. His research interest include: African American Rhetoric, African American literature, and Rhetorical Studies. His prize-winning poetry chapbook, The Magical Negro Reveals His Secret, was published by C&R Press in 2019.
George Guida is the author of twelve books, including the memoir The Walking Amoeba (Bordighera Press, 2026), the novels The Uniform (Guernica Editions, 2024) and Posts from Suburbia (Encircle Publications, 2022); The Pope Stories and Other Tales of Troubled Times (Bordighera, 2012), and the poetry collections The Fulfillment Center (Foothills Publishing, 2026), Zen of Pop (Long Sky Media, 2020), New York and Other Lovers (Encircle Publications, 2020), Pugilistic (WordTech Editions, 2015) and The Sleeping Gulf (Bordighera, 2015). He curates the Finger Lakes Arts Series in Dansville, New York, and teaches writing and literature at New York City College of Technology.
Michael Hoerman is a poet, activist, and community arts organizer known for his vivid, often surreal depictions of rural life and his commitment to grassroots poetry movements. He has developed community-based
poetry happenings in the Ozarks, New England, and Gulf Coast regions since 1994, his poetry being deeply rooted in the landscapes and cultures of those locales.
Mason Joiner is originally from Alexandria, Louisiana. He is currently an Assistant Professor of English at Delgado Community College in New Orleans. He recently had a poem appear in the Arkansas Review. In addition to writing poetry, Mason is an avid Dungeons and Dragons player and writes voraciously for his D&D campaigns.
Justin Lacour lives in New Orleans with his wife and three children and edits Trampoline: A Journal of Poetry. His latest book is A Reading from the Book of Panic (Lavender Ink, 2025).
K. Lipschutz (formerly klipschutz) is the author of Mr. Congeniality (2021) and seven other collections, starting with The Erection of Scaffolding for the Re-Painting of Heaven by the Lowest Bidder (1985). An autodidact, he has also co-written over a hundred songs released by international recording artist Chuck Prophet. Long Engagement: New & Selected Poems (1985–2023), assembled in conjunction with long-time supporter Brenda Hillman, is looking for a home. He is particularly proud to have received a back cover quote from Barry Hannah. He lives in downtown San Francisco with Colette Jappy and two cats.
Jeff Mock is the author of Ruthless . His poems appear in American Poetry Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The Georgia Review, New England Review, The North American Review, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. He directs the MFA program at Southern Connecticut State University and lives in New Haven, Connecticut, with his wife, Margot Schilpp, and their daughters, Paula and Leah.
John Moessner is the author of Harmonia (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2023), winner of the 2024 Thorpe Menn Literary Excellence Award. He received his MFA from the University of Missouri-
Kansas City. His work has appeared in Commonweal, New Letters, New Ohio Review, North American Review, and Poet Lore . Having taught English and writing for several years, he is now a medical editor in Kansas City. www.johnmoessnerpoetry.com
Sean F. Munro is a poet, professor of English, associate editor for Lavender Ink / Diálogos, & executive director of the New Orleans Poetry Festival. Sean also co-curates The Splice Poetry Series and founded LitWire, the literary events calendar of New Orleans. Recent or forthcoming poetry, criticism, and translation can be found in Annulet , The Texas Review, Jacket2, Some, Peel Lit, and mercury firs. More at seanfmunro.com
Joey Nicoletti is the author of 6 poetry collections, most recently Fan Mail (Broadstone Books, 2021), Breakaway (Broadstone Books, 2023), and Extinction Wednesday: A Memoir (Bordighera Press, 2024). Joey is also the Reviews Editor of Voices In Italian Americana (VIA) and teaches at Buffalo State University.
Alison Pelegrin is the recipient of fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Louisiana Board of Regents, the Foundation for Louisiana, and the Academy of American Poets, who awarded her a Poets Laureate Fellowship to support the Lifelines Poetry Project, which supports her work offering poetry workshops in Louisiana Prisons. Alison’s two most recent poetry collections are Our Lady of Bewilderment (2022) and Waterlines (2016), both with LSU Press. Alison is Writer-in-Residence at Southeastern Louisiana University, and served as Louisiana Poet Laureate from 2023-2025.
Jonathan Penton founded the online journal Unlikely Stories in 1998. He has served in editorial, management, and technical roles for numerous arts organizations, including the New Orleans Poetry Festival, Rigorous: a journal by BIPOC, MadHat, Inc., and Big Bridge. His books of poetry include A Limited Number of Miracles: A Walk through the New Orleans
sculpture garden (Lavender Ink, 2025), BACKSTORIES (Argotist Ebooks, 2017), Standards of Sadiddy (Lit Fest Press, 2016), Prosthetic Gods (New Sins Press/Winged City Chapbooks, 2008), Painting Rust and Blood and Salsa (Unlikely Books, 2005), and Last Chap (Vergin’ Press, 2004). He lives in New Orleans with his family.
Valentine Pierce is a spoken word artist, writer and amateur photographer. Recent publications include the New Orleans Poetry Journal and Rigorous. Recent performances include featured performer at the New Orleans Words & Music showcase, which she will participate in again this year, Nasty Women Poets group reading at the 2025 NOPF, and feature reader for People of the Poem (Jefferson Parish Library). Pierce was the Writer-inResidence at a Studio in the Woods, 2006. Her book Up Decatur: Second Edition , was published in 2023 and her debut book, Geometry of the Heart, in 2007. Pierce was also the host for the WRBH Writer’s Forum. She is a former host of WRBH’s Writer’s Forum and former co-host of Rhythm and Muse open mic at Berkeley Museum. Upcoming publications include Counting Our Blessings, Hurricanes Katrina and Rita at 20, a collection of ecology-themed poems from Portals Press, and Hands of Heritage Anthology
Barsa Ray ’s poetry has been published in Theleme (University of Lisbon), Magma, Filigree (Peepal Tree Press), Covert Literary, and Indian Literature among others. She was highly commended in the Smeaton 300 Poetry Competition, National Poetry Centre, Leeds. Her prose credits include Wasafiri (forthcoming), Sans Press, Mslexia, Peepal Tree, Dahlia Press, and Fly on the Wall Press. She has read her poems at numerous festivals in the UK and India. Her poem was filmed for the Yorkshire Arts Festival, and flash fiction broadcast by East Leeds FM radio. She has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Leeds.
Ed Ruzicka has published three full-length books of poetry, most recently, Squalls (Kelsey Press, 2024). Ed’s poems have appeared in the Atlanta
Review, the Chicago Literary Review, Rattle, Canary and have received Pushcart nominations. Ed, who is also the president of the Poetry Society of Louisiana, lives with his wife, Renee, in Baton Rouge.
Gordon Robert Sabatier (1944-2010) was a Louisiana poet and my brother. I know of nowhere better to read about his life and read more of his poems than in Xavier Review, Vol. 31, issue 2, fall / winter 2011. His
1980 collection of poems The Shy Mirror he had 15 copies of printed and bound by Kinko’s, a Christmas present to friends and family. Happily, it was published as a real book by Xavier Review Press in 2016. Deemed to be gifted with a very superior mind, his schoolteachers in Baton Rouge urged our parents to nurture those gifts. Although he enrolled in Tulane in Pre-Med in 1961, a few years later he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Coincidentally or consequently, two great good passions emerged from his tormented psyche: the love of poetry and the love of God. Tragically, he died in a group home in Baton Rouge from complications of unnoticed side effects of an antipsychotic medication he had been prescribed. May his poems live on and on!—William Sabatier
Jerry Speir is a retired environmental lawyer living in New Orleans. He has written monographs on detective novelists Ross Macdonald and Raymond Chandler, and a long-forgotten novel, Help! Murder! Police! (with Wade Schindler).
Nikki Ummel is a queer artist, editor, and educator in New Orleans. Nikki has been published or has work forthcoming with Gulf Coast, The Georgia Review, Black Lawrence Press, and others. She is the 2022 recipient of the Leslie McGrath Poetry Prize and 2023 recipient of the Juxtaprose Poetry Award for her manuscript, Bloom. Nikki is the co-founder of LMNL, an arts organization focused on readings, workshops, and residencies. She has two poetry chapbooks, Hush (Belle Point Press, 2022) and Bayou Sonata (NOLA DNA, 2023), funded by the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Foundation. You can find her on the web at www.nikkiummel.com
Andy Young ’s second full-length collection, Museum of the Soon to Depart, was released in October by Carnegie Mellon University Press. She is also the author of All Night It Is Morning (Diálogos, 2014) and four chapbooks. She grew up in southern West Virginia and has lived most of her adult life in New Orleans, where she teaches at New Orleans Center for Creative Arts. Her work has recently appeared in The Greensboro Review, Drunken Boat, and Michigan Quarterly Review. A graduate of Warren Wilson’s Program for Writers, her work has been translated into several languages. Website: andyyoung.org, Insta: @andyyoungpoet
Andrena Zawinski is an award winning poet with accolades for free verse, lyricism, form, and social concern. A veteran teacher of writing, she has authored four full-length poetry books, the latest Born Under the Influence She has compiled and edited Turning a Train of Thought Upside Down Anthology of Women’s Poetry, and released her debut collection of flash fiction, Plumes & Other Flights of Fancy. Born and raised landlocked in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, she has made her home at water’s edge on the city island of Alameda, California.
