Poetic Hill by Karen Lyon

in “Waterfalls, The Moon and Sensible Shoes: One Lesbian Life,” while not necessarily chronological, add up to as complete and compelling a picture of a life as you’re likely to find.

Strachan’s father was a diplomat, so she grew up all over the world—Greece, Pakistan, Egypt, Sri Lanka—with several sojourns home to attend boarding school in Virginia. Bolstering her memory with a trove of diaries and letters, she evokes a palette of vivid experiences: riding a hot bus in Cairo that often got stuck in traffic near piles of rotten onions; being surrounded by “lone men with guns slung on their shoulders” while crossing the Khyber Pass with her family; and, at St. Agnes School, avoiding a formidable housemother by peeing in a trash can rather than visiting the communal bathroom in the middle of the night.

She is equally eloquent when describing the people in her life, including the gay man she fell in love with in the 70s and the younger woman who became her first lesbian relationship. But she is most perceptive in the chapters devoted to her mother and father. It took her years to come out to her parents—and the result was not good. As she writes, “we had no common tools with which to engage in a discussion of this importance.” Her mother wanted to “fix” her through therapy, and her farther became so infuriated that he ordered her out of the house.

She nevertheless writes a heartfelt and forgiving appreciation of her mother, in which she also forgives herself. “I did not honor her for who she was,” she admits. And she is able to rise above her father’s ire to recognize not only his “irresistible” charm but also the obstacles he overcame to become the “successful, self-made man” she idolized as a child. “He had not always been the angry man sitting on the couch yelling at me to ‘Get out!’,” she writes.

Told with intimate honesty, “Waterfalls, The Moon and Sensible Shoes” is a powerful account of one woman’s ongoing struggle to find her place in the world and to understand the people with whom she has shared her life.

A Hill resident since 1977, Jill Strachan was the executive director of the Capitol Hill Arts Workshop, a singer and general manager for the Lesbian & Gay Chorus of Washington, DC, and is currently a singer in the a cappella group Not What You Think. She is also a poet whose haiku has appeared in the Poetic Hill. u

THE POETIC HILL

by Karen Lyon

David Camero is an artist, educator, mixed media painter, comedian, and poet originally from Caracas, Venezuela. A DC resident since 2004, he has taught cultural workshops in a number of schools and development centers and participated in both solo and collective art exhibitions. He founded the ALACP/Art Latin American Collective Project to help promising artists from Latin America promote their work together and share their creativity and cultural backgrounds with other groups. His poems below were translated by José Ballesteros.

SEARCHING

Searching in the infinite cruelty of the blank page Between tongues, just one word that may define The fluids of that adolescent love Before voluptuous deities Midnight Searching for the text amid settled reason The repeated memory of your face Among the ‘four hundred youths’ On the shore of the river Long before I became a bearded elder Forgetting all indifference I write you Searching to remember the hours When we shared graces

OF THE EARTH

We are the tree of life The tree of death we are Who displaces us? Each one of the successive breaths A leaf that is born and grows the pore Each hair, roots to the sky Curious eyes of aloe, full Mouth, ears, nose... Orifices all to the wind Open to breath Neck, stem, trunk, arms, branches Feet, fingers, delicate hairs, Adorn the epidermis of time Becoming coarse and dry Fighting against the gravity Of the earth...

If you would like to have your poem considered for publication, please send it to klyon@literaryhillbookfest. org. (There is no remuneration.) u