April 2017

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The Wagon Magazine - April - 2017

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VOLUME: 2 - ISSUE: 1 - APRIL 15 - 2017

Columns: Sotto Voce-Indira Parthasarathy 06 The Wanderer -Andrew Fleck 12 Letter from London-John Looker 08 P&P - Yonason Goldson 19 Flash-Fiction: Jeff Coleman 17 Fiction: Dibyajyoti Sarma 24 Poetry: Anne Britting Oleson 34 Book Review: Sudeep Sen, EroText

by Christopher Barnes / Vyjayanthi Srinivasa 91 UKRAINIAN LITERATURE: 37 Book Excerpts: Displaced-Irena-Kowal

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My Evenness - Julia Leontovich 84 Poetry: Alexandra Omelchenko 38 Translations: by Oksana Rosenblum Mariana Savka /Serhiy Zhadan / Bohdan IhorAntonych 49 -53 Translations: by Ivan Petryshyn

Volodymyr Sosiura / Ivan Franko /

Ivan Kotliarevsky / Lesya Ukrainka 67- 70

Historic/Children folk songs/ Lullabies 78- 83 Flash-Fiction: Vadym Miroshnychenko 71 Book Review:

Mooreeffoc / Tetiana Aleksina and Tony Single

by Marta Pombo Sallés 74

THE WAGON MAGAZINE KGE TEAM

4/4, FIRST FLOOR, R.R.FLATS, FIRST STREET, VEDHACHALA NAGAR, KODAMBAKKAM, CHENNAI - 600 024 Phone: +91-9382708030 e-mail: thewagonmagazine@gmail.com www.thewagonmagazine.com The Wagon Magazine - April - 2017

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PRASAD'S POST Flying is fine for corporate Gods and general managers; but to peep into people, places, and their culture through the folios of literature is a literary traveller’s entreaty. A proverb, heard long back, came to my mind. “Your tongue will take you to Kiev.” This Ukrainian edition made me dig deeper and I found a legend.

In 999, a Kiev resident called Nikita Shchemyaka got lost in the far-away steppes and was caught by a militant nomadic tribe.

Nikita’s tales of Kiev’s wealth and splendour impressed the tribe’s chief so much, he hooked Nikita by the tongue to his horse’s tail and went to wage war against Kiev. That is how Nikita’s tongue took him home. Today, the proverb simply means you can always ask your way around. Well, I looked around and found Tetiana Aleksina and Tony Single. They designed and edited this Ukrainian Literature pages.

They introduce themselves as, “A ‘T’ on its own doesn’t seem too dangerous, but add another one and you’ll get an explosive chemical reaction. Yes, like TNT, Tetiana Aleksina and Tony Single make a noise, and that’s exactly the kind of thing they love to do! They are a strange international duo that doesn’t care much for good manners.

They much prefer their Ukrainian and Australian creative sensibilities to clash in a big way, to make big words and big bangs, and they love people to watch!”

I am proud to be associated with Tetiana Aleksina and Tony Single in bringing out this edition with special attention to Ukrainian Literature. I stand aside and give way to Tetiana Aleksina.

The Wagon Magazine - April - 2017

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T & T Wikipedia states, 'Ukrainian literature is literature written in the

Ukrainian language.'

So far so cool, yes? It makes my task easy. The introduction to Ukrainian literature is over. Class dismissed!

It's like describing a human being: 'Man is an upright, featherless biped.' **(with an apology to Plato!) When you classify things only by their exterior, you always risk getting a plucked rooster in return.

That's why I need to appeal to the interior of Ukrainian literature.

Ukrainian literature was dawning in the womb of Kievan Rus*, and its maturating was a reflection of the tough history of formation that the Ukrainian nation went through, with endless conquests and political games.

Ukrainian literature was absorbing cultures by Lithuania, Poland, The Wagon Magazine - April - 2017

5 Romania, Russia, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Turkey. It was outlasting the 'Executed Renaissance' in Stalin's totalitarian regime, and after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and declaration of independence, Ukrainian literature started on a long, hard road of looking for its place in the world. It was looking for its distinctive voice.

When I was preparing this editorial column, I stumbled upon an old interview with Solomiya Pavlychko, a well known Soviet and Ukrainian literary critic, philosopher and translator.

Almost 10 years ago, she said, 'What place do I give for Ukrainian literature among world literature? Unfortunately, a small one. It's little known, even in the Slavic countries, and still less in the Germanic, Romance countries. Of course, there are a lot of changes now, there are many people who are engaged with various aspects of Ukrainian studies. It encourages interest in Ukrainian literature. Yes, the process goes on, and the works of Ukrainian authors will be well-known in the future. But we can't hope that they'll become so influential as, for example, Leo Tolstoy or Marcel Proust or Thomas Mann. They're very significant figures and we don't have writers on this scale. But history has not ended. We still go ahead. Ukrainian literature is still very young.'

It sounds a bit pessimistic, is n't it? Was she right? Well, there are many well-known names of Ukrainian writers and poets within the world of literature. Everyone can recall Taras Shevchenko, Lesya Ukrainka, and Ivan Kotliarevsky. But, they belong to the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries mostly.

Has something changed in the 10 years since this interview? I won't lie to you. There The Wagon Magazine - April - 2017

6 are no new Ukrainian Shakespeares or Hugos appearing on the literary horizon. At least, I am not aware of this fact.

So, does this mean you should close the magazine and put it aside? Absolutely not! Ukrainian literature is still here. It is waxing in size and strength, learning from its own mistakes and celebrating small victories.

Right now, right here, under this very cover, the history of Ukrainian literature is being written.

Do not miss this historical moment, dear reader.

Tetiana Aleksina, Associate Editor.

Editor’s Notes:

** When Plato gave Socrates’s definition of man as “featherless bipeds” and was much praised for the definition, Diogenes plucked a chicken and brought it into Plato’s Academy, saying, “Behold! I’ve brought you a man.” After this incident, “with broad flat nails” was added to Plato’s definition.

*Kievan Rus: Kievan Rus – a powerful East Slavic state

dominated by the city of Kiev - Shaped in the 9th century, it went on to flourish for the next 300 years. The empire is traditionally seen as the beginning of Russia and the ancestor of Belarus and Ukraine.

The Wagon Magazine - April - 2017

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SOTTO VOCE

INDIRA PARTHASARATHY

Kamban brought alive!

‘Translation’, a word from its Lain root ‘indicates taking one to the

other side to help watch the beautiful sights there from the vantage side of one’s own dwelling’. It is a challenging task. That is what great translators have done the world over.

If the matrix and target languages belong to the same cultural group, like the translations among the Indian languages, it may not be all that difficult as translating from an Indian language to English, that has a totally different cultural background. And much more so, if the work to be translated belonged to a distant era in the past.

But that what has Dr.H.V.Hande precisely done by rendering Kamba Ramayanam (10th century CE) one of the crowning glories of classical Tamil literature into elegant modern English prose. He has achieved the impossible and hats off to him for this great endeavour.

There were many great men like V.V.S. Iyer, Rajaji, P.M.Sundaram and others, who have translated in prose or verse form (Rajaji and Sundaram tried the verse form) but to me The Wagon Magazine - April - 2017

8 it appears that Hande’s work is the most satisfying in the sense that he attempted translating in simple, fluent prose. Kamban said that his tran-screation was provoked by ‘love’ and it is obvious, Hande’s translation is also an intense labour of ‘love’, love for the Tamil masterpiece.

I gave the book one continuous reading as a book written in English trying hard not to remember Kamba Ramayana by way of comparison. I felt the book read like one what it should be in flowing style, the highest tribute to Kamban, in my reckoning. I recollected what Keats wrote on reading George Chapman’s translation of Homer’s I ‘Iliad’.

‘Yet did I never breathe its pure serene Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold’ A full-fledged thorough reading of Hande’s book brought, thereafter, Kamban’s inimitable poetic lines before my mind’s eye. This is what a good translation should do and for those, who have not read the original bring forth the substance of the original. As all those brilliant aspects of Kamban’s poetry and his sparkling genius have been faithfully conveyed by this translation.

I am not sure and I may be wrong in assuming that this book has not much been talked about as much as it deserves in the literary and academic corridors. I have not done a review of this book but just a tributary salutation to the multi-faceted Hande for his masterly literary contribution.

Indira Parthasarathy is the pen name of

R.Parthasarathy, a noted Tamil writer and playwright.

The Wagon Magazine - April - 2017

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Letter from London - 6 from John Looker

Music in the Hour Glass

Recently, I attended a clarinet recital in which a modernist compos-

er put his instrument through extreme survival training. A few days later, I was listening to a world-famous choir singing sacred music from the sixteenth century. What connected them?

To begin with, the two events had something contingent in common: they both took place in historic churches. Yet the churches were as unlike as the music. In one, daylight flooded an interior of white plaster and bright gold leaf, while in the other the singers stood by candlelight among deep shadows.

The first venue was a church in central London that has been a worldwide inspiration. Architecturally it was the model for a number of churches in North America and elsewhere, including one in Chennai (St Andrew's Church, Egmore). It is the parish church of the Royal Family when they are at Buckingham Palace and of the Prime Minister. It has a mission to support the destitute and homeless in London. It promotes concerts and recitals. And, it has become the church for London's Chinese, holding services in Cantonese and Mandarin and well as English.

I am talking about St Martin-in-the-Fields, a poetic and Arcadian name for a church that today is in the very centre of the conurbation, at Trafalgar Square.

The Wagon Magazine - April - 2017

10 I was there for a lunchtime recital.

First stop however was lunch as there is a much-loved cafe in the crypt. You would like this place with its mellow brick arches and low ceiling, its soft lighting and cosmopolitan clientele.

The cafe raises funds to support the work of the church and if you explore the basement, you find yourself among tombs and commemorative plaques, including a statue to London's original Pearly King.

This beautiful building is in the European neo-classical tradition: Corinthian columns, pediment, and spire –an exceptionally tall spire. The interior is 18th century baroque, unusual for England, and golden ornamentation glows against the creamy-white walls and plastered ceiling. All is very pleasing and uplifting.

The second venue? This was not in London but in Cambridge: King's College Chapel, founded in 1446 and completed over a century later in the time of Henry VIII. We should hardly be surprised that it took so long to construct. Apart from the fact that England was torn apart in the meantime by a civil war better known as the Wars of the Roses, the sheer scale of the building is impressive. This is no intimate chapel for divine worship by a few scholars. The building is bigger than many a cathedral.

Whereas St Martin-in-the-Fields was constructed in the then-newly exciting style of Palladian architecture, fresh in from Italy, King's College Chapel enshrines the high point of European medieval church building. It is Gothic, not the Gothic The Wagon Magazine - April - 2017

11 revival of the Houses of Parliament, in Queen Victoria's reign, but authentic medieval workmanship. It boasts the largest fan-vaulted ceiling in the world and some of the finest medieval stained glass. To sit there for evensong as darkness falls outside is to look up, and up, as fingers of light from hidden lamps just hint at small areas of fluted columns and the delicate fans of the high ceiling.

It is famously the venue for its Festival of Carols, broadcast to millions around the world each Christmas Eve. The College Choir comprises sixteen boy choristers, aged between nine and thirteen, and fourteen male undergraduates reading for degrees in a variety of subjects. It is a shock, in the 21st century, to be reminded that this is still an exclusively male choir.

The music was as different as the architecture. I had gone to St Martin-in-the-Fields to hear experimental clarinet music played by an Italian composer, Luca Luciano. He gave us a short piece by Messiaen and an arrangement from a melody by the Brazilian Villa-Lobos. Principally however he treated us to new works of his own.

If your taste were strictly for conventional music, you would have been perplexed. Much of the time, he gave us not melodies but sequences of sounds that explored the full range of musical effects that could be achieved on the clarinet. His notes soared in pitch, and then plunged again; he swung from notes that were whispered softly to an explosion of volume at full pelt, and back again. A few people left early. Most stayed – over a hundred – and at the end, he stood by the church door shaking hands with his audience as they left.

By contrast, the choir in King's College Chapel sang Elizabethan and Jacobean church music, including a psalm by William Byrd. They stood in the soft glow of many candles, their voices bringThe Wagon Magazine - April - 2017

12 ing together separate melodies in dignified harmonies, the European polyphonic arrangement. It was tranquil, timeless, and slightly ethereal. The singing, the candlelight, the choristers in their white ecclesiastical surplices all came to us here in the 21st century across half a millennium. Music flows on through the centuries.

In London, Luca Luciano had introduced his new composition, Sequenza number 2 in A minor, by quoting Gustav Mahler. He had been inspired, he said, by a declaration of the Austrian composer that "a symphony must be like the world, it must embrace everything".

These two events did not look beyond the western musical tradition. Nor did the architecture of the churches. There is far, far more in the world.

Together, however, they seemed to represent a perennial balancing act in the arts: one drew us back in time to deep roots of religion and culture; the other swung open a door to novelty and experimentation.

John Looker lives in southern England. He has

written poetry all his life and now, in retirement, draws on the experience of a long career in the British civil service, on family life and on international travel. In his book The Human Hive, available through Amazon, John Looker explores our common humanity, down the ages and round the globe, by looking through the lens of work and human activity.

The Wagon Magazine - April - 2017

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The Wanderer

Andrew Fleck The Wanderer on wanderers Over the ferry Along the cornfield path A wanderer goes As the moon In the clouds (Park MogWol, Translated...the Korean poem goes: Gangnaru Geonnaseo / Milbat Gileul / Gureume dal gadeushi / ganeunnageune) The title of Park MogWol’s early 20th century poem (Nageune) has been translated as ‘The Wanderer.’

These first five compact, suggestive lines (four lines, in the original Korean) start with a picture of the landscape and finish with the image of the wanderer. A word for word translation of the Korean would be something like ‘ferry passing-over / cornfield path / through clouds moon-like / going wanderer’. It brings to mind a ‘figure in a landscape’ kind of painting, the landscape being rural Korean, the The Wagon Magazine - April - 2017

14 figure an unnamed wanderer. The simile of the wanderer as being like the moon is an arresting one, suggesting a body at once separate from the earth and at the same time beholden to it, moving according to powers beyond its control. In the Korean, the two consonants of nageune, an ‘n’ and a hard ‘g’, are echoed throughout the poem, again suggesting an irrevocable connection between the man and the landscape.

I came across the poem some years ago in a short anthology of Korean poems translated for English speakers, and this poem jumped out at me, its imagery so extraordinarily vivid and fresh. My wife told me that Park’s poem was in fact a standby of Korean literature, a poem most Korean schoolchildren would be familiar with – analogous, indeed, at least a generation or two ago in England, with Wordsworth’s Daffodils, which strangely enough also starts with some lines about wandering: I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o’er vales and hills Wordsworth’s simile suggests a figure somewhat removed from the earth and its sustenance, and perhaps from its society, but his poem is actually about a moment where he finds an inspiring sight – those dancing daffodils – in nature that, he claims, sustains and soothes him in later moments: For oft when on my couch I lie In vacant or in pensive mood They flash upon my inward eye Which is the bliss of solitude The power of Wordsworth’s lines have perhaps been weakened by their very familiarity, but the idea his poem and that of other Romantics embodied, that is, the quest for transcendent beauty in nature, is one that we take for granted these days, one we unconsciously pay tribute to every time we post a picture of a breath-taking view on Facebook or Instagram.

As Bernard O’Donaghue* has pointed out, this idea would have been completely alien, and The Wagon Magazine - April - 2017

15 perhaps absurd, to the authors of the very first wanderer poems in English literature, the tenth century elegies, perhaps written by monks or scribes, later christened ‘The Seafarer’ and ‘The Wanderer’ by their 18th and 19th Century discoverers.

The Wanderer, for example, laments how: he, sorry-hearted must for a long time row by hand along the waterways of the ice-cold sea, tread the paths of exile Likewise The Seafarer, in Ezra Pound’s translation, beautifully employing, by the way, the alliteration and compound words of Anglo-Saxon, complains: List how I, care-wretched, on ice-cold sea, Weathered the winter, wretched outcast Deprived of my Kinsmen Unlike Wordsworth, and even Park, these writers find little that is pleasurable, let alone transcendent in their journeys: it is settled agricultural land and the fellowship of man where there contentment lies.

There are echoes in these Old English poems of some older wanderers still – the earliest of all mankind, the Biblical figures of Adam and Eve cast out of Eden, or their son Cain damned to wander the earth after murdering his brother. For the Anglo-Saxons, as much as for the early Hebrews, wandering is synonymous with hardship. Whatever pagan habits the Old English had inherited from their Scandinavian forebears, their view of the world is a resolutely Christian one.

This view finds expression again in a much later lyric, a song rather than a poem, from 19th century America: I’m just a poor wayfaring stranger Travelling through this world of woe.

Yet there’s no sickness, toil nor danger In that fair land to which I go.

That is the opening verse of the cowboy ballad ‘The Wayfaring Stranger’. No mention of wandering here, but that ‘wayfaring’ holds The Wagon Magazine - April - 2017

16 an echo of the Old English word for travelling (faran), and the phrase ‘world of woe’ too has a nice Anglo-Saxon alliterative ring to it. This traveller may be travelling the badlands of 19th century America rather than the moors and marshes of Dark Ages England, but he has a similarly low expectation of getting anything good on his journey, that is, none at all. Instead he has his eyes set on a ‘fair land’ free of all worldly woe – heaven, in other words, the afterlife – as the song’s refrain makes clear: ‘I’m coming home, over Jordan.’ It’s a beautiful song with a rather austere religious sentiment behind it, that until the end of our journeying on earth, until our death, we are implicitly not at home in the world.

Ivor Gurney, a poet and composer of the early twentieth century knew exactly where in the world his destination was. Gurney’s wanderings were not religiously inspired, nor aimless, but necessitated by war. He traversed the killing fields of northern France during the First World war, and then, his fragile mental state upset by what he had witnessed, spent time in different sanatoriums and asylums in Britain.

His unnamed wanderer poem is my very favourite. It begins: Only the wanderer Knows England’s graces Or can anew see clear Familiar faces The first half of that assertion is a moot point, I guess, though nicely put, and could be read as a spin on Kipling’s old question ‘Who knows England that only England know?’

But Gurney wasn’t a traveller boasting of wisdom acquired on his travels, a nationalist boasting of England’s glories, or a pilgrim heading for a promised land (despite the hint of spiritual quest in the word ‘graces’), but a soldier hoping for the familiarity and comfort of home.

The Wagon Magazine - April - 2017

17 Credits *Bernard O’Donaghue, writes about Old English poetry in chapter one of The Cambridge History of English Poetry, Ed. Michael O’Neill, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge The Wanderer / Nageune, by Park MogWol, Transl. Go Chang Su, Korea’s Beautiful Poems,Hollym Publishing, Seoul, 2002 Translation of The Wanderer from anglo-saxons.net, slightly altered for clarity by the author The Seafarer from Selected Poetry of Ezra Pound, Selected by Thom Gunn, Faber and Faber, Lond0n, 2005 Other poems can be found online

Andrew Fleck writes on poetry and history at

www.sweettenorbull.com. He is also writing historical fiction set in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, a project that he hopes will come to fruition at some point in 2017.

He has been a secondary school teacher, proofreader and EFL teacher, among other things. Originally from the north east of England, he currently lives in South Korea with his wife and two small children.

The Wagon Magazine - April - 2017

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JEFF COLEMAN

FLASH FICTION

Selina

The old man hunched over an antique desk beneath the dim light of an incandescent lamp. An open notebook stared up at him, empty though he'd been sitting before it for hours.

Once, when he was young, he'd enjoyed a vibrant career. Back then, the words had flowed like wine. He'd brought stories into the world the likes of which nobody had heard before. But now in his old age, the well had run dry.

Of course, his books had never been his own. That was his dirty secret, the thing he kept from his fans whenever they asked him where he got his ideas. He'd always offer them the standard bullshit, that he'd been reclusive as a child, that he'd retreated into fiction and thereby discovered a different way of thinking about the world.

But the truth was that he was a fraud, for while the language had always been his own, the stories themselves had come from someone else.

When he was only a teenager, a visitor had come in the middle of the night. A woman, garbed in flowing silks that glowed in the dark.

The Wagon Magazine - April - 2017

19 "Wake up," she whispered.

He almost screamed when he saw her, but she placed a hand over his mouth and assured him she meant no harm. She said her name was Selina, that she'd wandered the world in search of someone to tell her story. She placed a finger to her lips to tell him he should be quiet. Then she covered his eyes.

What followed was a supernova of sights and sounds, some excerpt from a life outside of space and time, playing before his eyes like a cosmic newsreel.

When he came back to himself, she was gone.

A notebook and pen had been left beside him. An open invitation. He stayed up the rest of the night, trying to capture some small part of what he'd glimpsed in the mysterious vision.

She came to him the following night, and the night after that.

Each time, he would sit down after she'd left to search out words that might do justice to the otherworldly snapshots of her life.

The books that resulted propelled him to unheard of heights as an artist. Nobody had read anything like them. People fawned over his work. Even the sharpest critics seemed at a loss.

But five years ago, Selina had stopped visiting.

Now, he was flailing. Now, he was struggling to recall something, anything of her supernal sojourn through the stars, whatever scraps he could dredge up from memory so he'd have something new to write about.

But without those constant visions to guide his work, he was only a gloomy sailor lost at sea. His writing became derivative, stale and uninteresting. People stopped buying his books. Eventually, he locked himself in his house, where he chose to live the remainder of his life in seclusion.

Now, he gazed up at the lamp, still desiring to come up with something new and not knowing where to start.

He closed his eyes then, and he wondered if Selina would ever visit again.

Jeff Coleman, Modern Literary Fantasy Author https://blog.jeffcolemanwrites.com/ The Wagon Magazine - April - 2017

20 PROVERBS & PROVIDENCE

YONASON GOLDSON

It was a spectacular November morning, the high desert air clear and sharp, the sun ablaze in a cobalt sky. The future was mine for a song.

It was my first day on the road, the beginning of my grand adventure. It was my ultimate break with the past, my rejection of the familiar, and my repudiation of the predictable. There I was, on the cusp of metamorphosis, about to tear through the walls of my cocoon and take flight into a brave new world.

I was terrified.

It had seemed like a good idea, leaving everything and everyone behind to hitchhike across America. But that first morning The Wagon Magazine - April - 2017

21 out, standing on barren stretch of New Mexico highway 650 miles from where I’d started, all I could think of was getting back on the train to Southern California and slinking home to confess my reckless folly.

Getting a lift shouldn’t have been that difficult. I looked marginally respectable, standing there at the side of the road. My hair was short, my clothes clean, my backpack tidy. But none of that made any difference: one car after another hissed by, most of them containing solitary drivers. Was it so unthinkable to offer a ride to a fellow human being in his hour of need, to a migrant soul whose only desire was to travel the face of the earth by making himself dependent on the kindness of strangers?

Apparently so.

Time crept by, one interminable minute after another, until the long hand of my watch had described a full circuit around the surface of its world while I had hadn’t moved an inch. Then, as if by divine inspiration, I had my first real brainwave.

I pulled out the notebook I had brought for journal writing – which would remain otherwise unused – and studiously filled the back cover with six large capital letters: DENVER Within minutes, a car rolled up and the driver invited me in.

“I don’t usually stop for hitchhikers,” he said. “But I’m going to Denver, and I saw your sign, so I pulled over.”

In hindsight, it made perfect sense. A destination implies legitimacy. I wasn’t just some aimless wanderer looking to put miles behind me on the road to nowhere, or a freeloader expecting to take advantage of someone else’s good nature; I was a journeyman, momentarily deprived of transport and seeking assistance to get where I needed to go.

Moreover, as I learned from my current benefactor, shared destination established an instant bond of commonality that made it both easier for him to justify picking up a stranger and more difficult for him to leave me stranded by the roadside.

Four hundred miles disappeared behind us. No welcome mat The Wagon Magazine - April - 2017

22 ever looked so inviting as the sign marking the Denver city limits.

From that moment on, destination signs become my stock in trade, my go-to strategy for catching rides. It would be months before I had to wait over an hour again.

(The only exception was in bad weather, when signage was impractical. Indeed, no matter how forlorn a hitchhiker may appear, standing in the rain or the snow, the bottom line is that people don’t want to get their cars wet.)

There was, however, the faintest pang of conscience. It occurred to me that, from a philosophical point of view, my signs were at least partially misleading. I wasn’t really traveling to Denver; I was traveling through Denver.

My destinations were not truly destinations; they were way stations, stopovers on a journey to my next stopping point, each leading on to the stopping point after that. And this raised the question, whether I chose to ask it or not: where was my ultimate destination?

Truth be told, I wasn’t really going to anywhere; I was going away from somewhere. Or, more accurately, something.

Not that I was running away. Rather, for the first time in my life I was venturing out from safe harbor to hazard the open sea.

I really had grown up in a cocoon, coddled and cradled, if not overly spoiled. My life had been so sheltered, so thoroughly circumscribed that, upon finding myself in possession of a college diploma and no earthly idea what to do with it, I realized that my program had run out and that I had no clue what I was supposed to do next.

I found myself, quite literally, without destination or direction.

So where was I headed? Not toward a destination but in search of one. And that required me to first choose a direction, which in turn required me to first find the courage to start moving forward, to escape from the walls of security that had simultaneously protected and imprisoned me.

Which really meant that my destination was anywhere and The Wagon Magazine - April - 2017

23 nowhere. Shoot an arrow into the air: you may have no idea where it will land, but you can’t miss.

What you can do is waste a lot of time sailing in all directions.

But then again, is that time really wasted if the only place you’re sure you don’t belong is where you are?

One Saturday last December, Jody Tarbutton got in his truck to drive to Walmart. Visibility was poor from rain and mist, and the 89-year-old resident of Boothwyn, Pennsylvania, missed his turnoff. Sometime later, he wandered into a Galley Restaurant and approached three policemen to ask for directions. It was Monday morning, and he was in Hadley, Alabama, 897 miles from home.

The officers quickly discovered the missing persons report filed by Mr. Tarbutton’s daughter two days earlier. After having him checked out at the local hospital, the officers arranged for safe transport back north, and Mr. Tarbutton was back home for Christmas.

So here’s the point. The moment he walked up to those three Alabama policemen, Jody Tarbutton was closer to home than he was when he missed the turnoff to Walmart. It doesn’t help that you’re only two miles from your destination if you’re headed in the wrong direction. And it doesn’t matter that home is a thousand miles away if you know where you’re going and how you’re going to get there.

But knowing where we’re going can be complicated.

In 2009, a German scientist named Jan Souman concluded, after exhaustive research devoted to the study of walking, that human beings possess a natural inclination to travel in circles.

Dr. Souman took his subjects out to empty parking lots and open fields, blindfolded them, then instructed them to walk in a straight line. Some of them drifted right, and some drifted left.

Some managed to keep going straight for a dozen or two dozen meters. But in the end, all of them ended up circling back toward their points of origin.

Every single one of them.

"And they have no idea," said Dr. Souman. "They were thinkThe Wagon Magazine - April - 2017

24 ing that they were walking in a straight line all the time."

There were no discernible patterns, either. It didn’t matter whether the subjects were left-handed or right-handed, whether they were right- or left-brain dominant, whether one leg was longer than the other.

It wasn’t even specific to walking. Blindfolded people swim in circles and drive cars in circles, no matter how hard they try to go straight.

Dr. Souman concluded – rather obviously – that the only way we can be certain of staying on course is if we fix our sight on some promontory in the distance. Once we have a point of reference, going straight is easy.

Which means that if we don’t have a destination, the next best thing we can do is to go in search of one.

Rabbi Yonason Goldson, a talmudic scholar and former hitchhik-

er, circumnavigator, a keynote speaker with 3000 years’ experience and newspaper columnist, lives with his wife in St.Louis, Missourie, where he teaches, writes, and lectures.

His latest book, Proverbial Beauty: Secrets for success and happiness from the wisdom of the ages, is available on Amazon.

Visit him at http://proverbsandprovidence.com.

The Wagon Magazine - April - 2017

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FICTION

Dibyajyoti Sarma

Today was a good day, Luit decided. Today he turned 16. Today he became a man.

As soon as the sun came up from beneath the vast waters spanning the horizon like a giant yellow-red crab which he was told to avoid since his childhood because it was poisonous, Luit hobbled down windy pathway, filled on either side with dense foliage of unknown trees and undergrowth. It was forbidden to harm the plants, all plants, whether they were edible or not. The Elder Mothers were working on the usage of even the most dangerous of plants for years.

But not today, Luit decided. Today, they were planning something entirely different, a secret ceremony. Tonight, inside the temple of the Goddess, there will be a ceremony, and he would be given a bride. His heart skipped a beat and he missed a step. He grabbed hold The Wagon Magazine - April - 2017

26 of a branch before he slid down the slippery rocks to the vast waters below. These rocks were submerged until recently, and the ebbing water had turned the surface smooth, like the skin of a newborn.

Newborns were a source of joy for the community, more than anything else, more than the meagre harvest of corns every winter, more than receiving a rare piece of new fabric, more than seeing the telltale signs of the water receding. This was why today was a special day for the entire community. Luit was the eldest among the new generation of boys, and the Mothers and the Daughters had been waiting for more babies.

As he trotted towards the fishing port, a rudimentary ghat amidst the boulders of polished granite on the East side of the tiny, rocky island the community called home, Luit was excited too, and he was sad. He was not certain who among the Daughters would be his bride, but he knew it would not be Juman, his first and only love. When they were children, they were inseparable, and they had promised each other that they would remain so. It was before he was assigned the task of collecting fish with Juman’s father, it was before Juman’s father flung himself to the water and never came home. In the last few years, they talked only occasionally. Luit knew she still loved him, and knew one day Juman would be his, but not before he had impregnated several other Daughters, before Jesu turned 16.

Jesu, his partner, was waiting for him at the slop. He had a blanket of dry grass wrapped around his thin frame, to protect himself from the morning chill. On other days, Luit too would carry a blanket like this, but not today. Today, he was too excited to feel the chill.

“We have less work today,” Jesu said as Luit reached him, tugging the fishnet under the water. The net was heavy with the night’s catch. “I hope they are the good ones.”

It was the first lesson that they had to learn, identifying the good fish from the poisonous ones. It was all in the fin. If the fish had reddish bright fin, it was good. If it was dark, the fish was bad. They did not even bother about fishes without fin. They were junk, like so many other junks they hauled only to throw them back in the water.

“I know,” Luit said smugly, “Today is a good day.”

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27 “I know,” Jesu added with equal smugness, “Today is your ceremony. You will get to drink the drink.”

Luit smiled, and suddenly he was diffident and ashamed, emotions with which he had rare contact. Suddenly, he was aware of his glistening nudity under the morning sun; the black thread around his waist and the slight piece of dry banana bark around his genitalia was no longer enough. He wished he had the grass blanket with him, to cover his shame. Of course, tonight he will receive clothes, real clothes made of cotton threads, not banana barks or grass. It did not help that it was the very reason of his shame.

“Not just that,” He sat cross-legged on the boulder and said.

They could sort the fish later. First, he had something important to tell Jesu. “Today is the first day of the year, the first of January.”

“What first day? Today is just like other day. It cannot be the first day just because you are getting a bride.”

“No, the first day of the year.”

“You mean the beginning of the Cycle of Seasons, when Elder Mothers cook us a feast?” Asked Jesu, salivating. “I cannot wait for the ceremony tonight. I want to eat something else, other than the fish. What do you think they will cook tonight, dauks? I want to eat some meat cooked with salt.” Then he placed his right hand before Luit’s eyes. It had some berries on it. “You want one?” he asked. Luit did. Jesu took a large bite from his berry and added thoughtfully, “But Cycle of Seasons doesn’t happen until the days are warm.”

“Yes, I know,” said Luit. He only told Jesu about the Cycle of Seasons. In the community, men were not supposed to bother about these things. Their duty was to impregnate women, and maintain the household and perform their assigned tasks, fishing, and farming, whatever was possible amidst the rocks, collect fruits and vegetable, and collect water. Although they lived in an island, until very recently the water around them proved to be poisonous. If someone had it, he would turn blue and die in a few days time. Now, Luit’s grandfather said, the poison was settling down beneath the water.

The old man said in the earlier days there used to be vast water bodies like this, made of salt water. Those days their tiny island used The Wagon Magazine - April - 2017

28 to be a hill and surrounding the hill, there was a huge city. On the other side, there was a mighty river. Luit was named after the river, which, the old man said, still flowed beneath the poison water. The old man said when his grandfather, not a day older than 25, found himself here, he discovered a source of the river’s water in a tiny creek in a crack of the hill. The community had been using water from this source since. It was an arduous task and those who performed it were the most respected in the community.

However, Luit’s grandfather was the most revered among the men. He was the Guardian of the Past. He was the only man who could read. He had an assorted collection of worn-out books, which he valued above all else. He lived alone inside the Goddess’s temple.

He was the only man who sat in the Council of the Elder Mothers.

He was the one who assigned tasks to the men. He was the one who taught children the basics, how to count, the names of the objects around them and their usage, and other assorted stuff.

And when he was in a good mood, he would regale them with stories from the past, the past before the water. The children enjoyed the stories, but they did not necessarily believe it. Who could believe in machines, objects that could fly, even to the moon, objects with which one could talk to someone who was not present there, objects that could speak like human?

“But, yes, it is similar to the Cycle of Seasons, but different,” Luit said. What he found out last night was so exciting that he had to share it with Jesu. “We started counting the Cycle of Seasons after the water. Before that there was another system of counting the days.”

“They are just children’s stories. There was nothing before the water. The water was always there. Then we came.”

“No. I told you about the world. It is like the moon, only bigger.

There was different countries, different people. There was water, but there was also vast dry land, where people created all kind of great things.”

“If it is truth, where are those people? What happened to them?

As far as I know, we are the only ones.”

“The water. It destroyed everything, but there are other people.

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29 You know about my father. He came from somewhere else. He left to find other people.”

“Your father was the spirit of the lost river. This is why you are so fair, unlike any of us.”

This was exactly what Luit was told all these years, until recently.

At first, he found it hard to trust the revelation. There was a snug comfort in holding onto a childhood fantasy. He was the part of the water that surrounded their tiny island. This is why he jumped at the idea of being a fisherman. As he grew up, he spent hours and hours gazing at the green-blue surface of the water, hoping to catch a glimpse of his lost father.

This did not happen, and a few days back, his grandfather, the Guardian of the Past, told him his father was a human, not a spirit, and perhaps he would never return. He was from another community, which too had survived the water, and he wanted to know if there were others in the vast wilderness that was the flotsam of junk, which no one had any use. Desperate to make sense of this floating wreckage, one day he built a raft from objects he found around him and set sail. By the time the Daughters found him, not far away from the fishing port, he was barely alive. Luit’s mother was the eldest of the virgin daughters. She took him home and nurtured him back to health. He then stood before the Elder Mothers and told his story: There was another community somewhere in the navigable distance. They too survived the water. This distant community had bigger land, more people, and it was ruled by a man who was the God’s Chosen One. The entire community worked for this man. The lost sailor spoke the language of the community, but it was not his language. He gave a name on behalf of himself. The name was not repeated again. The Elder Mothers and the Guardian of the Past took the decision immediately. The sailor would be allowed to stay in the community on the condition that he did not mention where he was from and what his name was. The Elder Mothers turned him into the spirit of the lost river. And he remained a spirit for two seasons, a massive, beautiful man, hardworking and courteous, and very much in love with his newly wedded wife. Then one year after Luit was The Wagon Magazine - April - 2017

30 born, he vanished. He was building another raft for some time, and once day he took leave from his wife and newborn son and left.

“Why?” frustrated and disappointed, Luit had asked.

“He said he was missing his home,” the old man said. “For the first few years we were worried. What if he had reached his home and told his king about this place? The king would surely build more rafts and come looking for us. Powerful men are likely to act this way. Therefore, we started the Army of the Daughters, to guard our boundary. The tradition remains. But your father must have perished in the vast nothingness out there. This is the most likely explanation.”

The story was incredible. However, what surprised Luit the most was the telling. Why would the Guardian of the Past reveal the secret to him now?

The answer led to the biggest revelation of all. He had been chosen to be the next Guardian of the Past. The training would take years to complete and he would start from the day he turned 16. It was a family tradition, started by the 25-year-old man who was the first survivor of the apocalypse, and it was handed over from grandfather to grandson. Tonight, at the secret ceremony, he will take a vow not to share this knowledge to another, other than the Elder Mothers, at the time of need.

There was still time for the oath, and he needed to tell Jesu at least about some of the things he had learned. He needed to share the secrets with someone.

“There are no spirits,” Luit said finally. “My father was a man from another place. There are people like us, beyond the horizon.

We are not the only one…”

“But…” Jesu wanted to say something. He stopped. Luit was not finished yet.

“We count our beginning with the Cycle of Seasons, right? How many Cycles have we completed?”

“120,” said Jesu. It was a basic question. Every child in the island knew it.

“And before that?”

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31 “Before that there was nothing. The Goddess, who is the Mother of the Sky and the Water created our ancestors, 17 people, nine women and eight men, eight couples and one Elder Mother, and offered us this place to live, next to her temple where she resides.”

“And her temple? It looks older than 120 seasons.”

“Of course, it is. You know the story. The Goddess built it herself, season after season. Then she felt lonely and she created our ancestors.”

“And you remember the stories the Guardian of the Past used to tell us?”

“Yes, but they are just stories. They are not true.”

“They are.”

“Its blasphemy,” Jesu said, and looked around to see if anyone heard them, even though the chance of anyone hearing them was remote. “Don’t say such things. If the Elder Mothers hear you, they would cancel your ceremony.”

Luit smiled. Of course, it was true. He remembered what the old man had told him, “The Elder Mothers, the first 17 ancestors, created this myth for a reason, to sustain the community. When it all started, when the water charged in, it was a disaster. The men could not handle it, except my grandfather. He was anyway a scholar, who did not have much to do with the world outside. The women, on the other hand, were tenacious. They were adaptable. They adapted and created this world. It is just 120 seasons old and it remembers the knowledge of seasons immeasurable.”

“I know. Let me say this once and then we will forget all about it,” Luit said finally.

“Okay. What you want to talk about?”

Yes, what? Then he remembered. He wanted to explain to Jesu about first of January.

“The world was not always like this. There was a time when there was no water. No, there was water, rivers, ponds, whatever that means, but there was solid ground too, vast, beyond the eyes could see, made of soil. Those days, there was a place called Kamrup just about there,” Luit pointed his finger towards the rising sun. Jesu The Wagon Magazine - April - 2017

32 gawked at the blue-green water swaying in the breeze. He was not sure what he was looking at, and Luit was not sure if the story made sense at all.

This was the story the Guardian of the Past told him. There was a river. There was a hill. There was a city. The old man explained what a city was; Luit hardly understood. For seasons immeasurable, before 120 seasons, it was the truth. Those days, this tiny little island, their home, was the top of a hill. There was a name for the hill, now forgotten. On the hill was the Goddess’s temple. She had another name, now forgotten. Below the hill, spreading the horizon, there was the city. Whatever it was, it was filled with people, men, women and children, more people than one could count. Everyone wore clothes and they had objects large and small to help them in their work, and they had endless varieties of food.

“Those days, they had different ways of counting the season.

They called it year. There were 365 days in a year and they divided these days into 12 parts, which they called months,” Luit droned on.

By now, he did not care whether Jesu was listening or not. He needed to say it aloud whatever he had learned, to make sense of it all, if he could.

“The world is very old and vast. And people have been here forever. But the year people used before the coming of water started with the birth of a boy, who was supposed to take people to heaven.”

“What is heaven?”

“I don’t know. But this boy, you know what his name was? Jesu.”

“That’s my name.”

“That’s what I am telling you. Where did the name come from?”

“My grandmother gave the name.”

“That’s because she remembers. She would not tell you, but she remembers the other Jesu who was born in a desert.”

“What is a desert?”

“I am not sure what it is, but it is a place without water. Anyway, when the baby was born, it was year one. And when the water come, it was year 2056, two thousand and fifty six years after the baby was born.”

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33 “What are you saying? You are not making any sense.”

“I know. I just want to share with you that this is a special day in many ways. It is not just the ceremony. It is also the beginning of a new year, which started with the birth of a baby you are named after.”

“Okay. Which year is it?”

Luit started to count. “If the water came in the year 2056 and if you add 120 more seasons to it, it would be 2176. Ah, today is 1 January 2176. Isn’t it something?”

Jesu did not react. “Let’s collect the fish and return. They may need us to help prepare the feast. Just don’t tell anyone else about this.”

“I know,” Luit said meekly and started to haul the net made haphazardly with different kind of ropes, not all of which came from trees. They collected the fish, most of which were thankfully good, in a grass basket. Now that he had shared the truth, at least the part of the truth, with someone, Luit was calm. This was all new to him.

Over time, he will learn to keep secrets, he decided.

After collecting the fish, they washed the net and set it again, at the same spot. They would come for the next haul tomorrow morning.

But Jesu wasn’t done yet. “Okay, one last question and then we will not talk about it, ever again. If there were people as you say there were, where did the water come from? What happened to the people?”

The people drowned. It was an easy answer. The first part of the question was difficult though. Luit himself posed this question to the old man and the old man just rambled on.

What Luit gleaned from the rambling was this. The world was a big place. There were different countries with different kind of people. A country was like their tiny island, only much, much bigger, with lots and lots of people. And these countries were fighting among each other. The memories of it still lingered. This is why the Elder Mothers were worried about the arrival of the people from the community Luit’s father belonged to. And these countries had terrible weapon which could completely destroy other countries.

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34 What exactly happened was uncertain. According to the old man’s grandfather, the 25-year-old scholar, the war went on for several years, with all countries in the world joining in. This country, where the 25-year-old scholar lived, was called Indi and it was fighting a country called Cina. There was a huge barrier between the countries, made of solid water. Somebody did something to the barrier and the solid water became liquid and covered everything, the entire world. This happened in the year 2056. There was evidence.

After his miraculous survival, the 25-year-old scholar made a note of it, on the back of an old book with a pencil, both of which he had retrieved from the flotsam of water after years of searching.

Luit took a deep breath. In his retelling, the story sounded more incredulous than ever. Jesu looked at him for a long time and then burst into laughter. “You are a good storyteller. They should make you the Guardian of the Past.”

Oh, they have, Luit wanted to say. Then he stopped. It was not his information to relay. The Elder Mothers would announce the next Guardian of the Past once the old man was dead and his remains were dedicated to the water. Until then, he had to hold onto the secret. This, and more.

“Never mind. Let’s go and see what they are cooking for the feast?”

“I hope it is the dauks, roasted dauks with banana salt.”

Dibyajyoti Sarma, who has published two volumes

of poetry and an academic book, besides numerous writing credits in edited volumes, journals and websites, was born in rural Assam, the homeland he abandoned for a promised land in Pune. Then, after 18 years of clinical depression, and being a borderline functional addict and a mediocre journalist, he has finally found a way to fight his demons through writing, in an alien language, in the City of Djinns.

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35

POEMS-Anne

Britting Oleson

In the Quiet House Night falls suddenly, a surprise at 4:30 on this, the end of daylight savings time.

Underfoot, the secret vibrations of hot air furnace do not disturb the faint slumber of children wrung out by time turned upside down.

In my hands, still after untold menial tasks about the weekend house, an open book, pages unread.

Ahead, another week of labor and lost time.

Here, now, I am quiet, listening to nothing: the sound of children sleeping.

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36

Worcester Afternoon Tea In the midst of crypts, cake. in the Chapter House at the Cathedral, lemon, or a walnut spice, wheels cut into spokes, served up on china by matronly women in aprons.

In the midst of death, life.

Still haunted by the stone guardians lining the walls of Arthur Tudor's chapel, their faces smashed by his brother's minions, we choose a round table under the echoing dome.

In the midst of darkness, light.

The high windows are streaked with late summer's rain, clouds threatening to drown the awkward lights feebly illuminating our tea cups, cream trailing the stirring spoons.

In the midst of strangers, friends.

In the midst of everything, laughter.

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37

Green Route 9: the curving dip has sprung to life, overnight, without warning: one morning, grey and black, the spindly arms of trees reaching skyward, supplicating.

Now, today, the morning after the first thunderstorm of the season, surprised into thousands of shades of green: filmy, pale, through to the brilliant vibrancy of maples lifting their new flat faces to the early morning air and I drive on and past, a bit more breathless than before

Anne Britting Oleson has been published widely on four continents. She earned her MFA at the Stonecoast program of USM. She has published a novel, The Book of the Mandolin Player (B Ink Publishing, 2016), and two poetry chapbooks,The Church of St. Materiana (2007) and The Beauty of It (2010). A third chapbook, Counting the Days, is forthcoming from Pink Girl Ink, and a second novel, Dovecote, will make its appearance from B Ink in September...

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38

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39

POEMS ALEXANDRA OMELCHENKO

Category F This morning, I thought: “I’ll get a tattoo, three symbols F32" On my neck or wrist anywhere above a pulse.

To remember that life beats even under F32. It’s there, even when you’d rather make it stop.

Even when smiles break crooked, when laughter freezes into sarcasm, when all the razor edges cannot set free the lost and useless soundless screams.

I’m done. I promise.

I’ve put the razors down.

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40

I’ll find a tattoo parlor for one last game of sharpness.

They ask why would I want to carry on my skin a code and summery of things best left on wards or in therapists’ chairs?

(Quiet! The first rule of the category F club Is not to mention the category F club.)

The strange part is, I’m not ashamed.

Do I even need a reason beyond “I want to”?

I still am fucked up in the head, remember?

Besides, a reminder that I promised myself to live, to give up the flight and the fight may actually be of use.

It’s decided: I pick the wrist.

To get through moments like this: breath in, breath out, make fists, open palms, touch air. Look at your wrist, breath in, breath out, go on.

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41

Chestnuts of K street The chestnuts of K street bloom every May. They remember nothing of ruins, all they ever knew were parades. They tell no stories of those returning from that War as they rustle in the spring breeze. The buildings of K street are silent, but they remember. Built by POWs they know a great deal about the sort of war you never see in movies. In those days, there were gallows standing in the Square near K street. Some were hanged, some built, some guarded. Pain and misery do not pick sides. It is a secret written in the eyes of the guards.

The pleas of “please not another war” that lodged in the walls became an echo, a barely heard whisper. The ghosts from the gallows were exorcised by boutiques and coffee shops. And it was right. Peace to the spirits, in the name of Hallmark and Benneton. Amen. That is how the Square got its Independence. The square thought it got away.

Until, nightmare or science fiction, the clock on the Square stopped and time looped. It happened one winter night amid fire and smoke. From the distance of seventy years and two hundred meters from the horror of gallows and guards the buildings of K street saw people run, saw people on their knees, saw their street under siege. The buildings could not help but conclude that seventy years is a shorter distance than two hundred meters.

And it now seemed that the coffee shops and boutiques were nothing but so much frippery. It looked like the Square’s truest The Wagon Magazine - April - 2017

42 destiny was revolutions, not cappuccinos. In October, November or February of your choice, spiced up with tear gas grenades. It became evident that K street belongs to war, not festively, not for parades, but with the very flesh of paving stones removed for throwing; with blood and barricades and vengeance in the air. In the city gone quiet in the cities filling with a watchful hush.

Four o'clock on a December Like a heroine out of a novel I step out of the fog at four o’clock on a December morning.

The sun refuses to rise.

My sunshine sleeps in.

The night’s remains still run through my veins, as I whisper for time to stay still.

I’m a heroine out of lie.

All that happened – not much more than a game.

It’s not that great of a shame for the lie to fall apart oncerealitywakesup around ten the same day.

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43

Goodbye to Galahad and Gandalf 1 In a galaxy far far away not all that long ago was where the bookish children dwelt knowing nothing much at all.

They thought themselves brave calling evil by its given name with no titles and very little fear.

Evil does not care.

Sooner or later softer or all the way to loosing skin life happens to all the bookish children.

And in life there is no Grail and no powerful Ring no Merlin and no Mordor.

Orcs look like people, or worse: are people.

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44

2.

What if the ring existed?

(Imagine it.)

The bookish children would take it to the defenders of the City.

The defenders need it desperately.

To win the war and have all this be over (does all this fear its name?).

Or maybe they would destroy the ring and grow to regret it.

Or maybe not.

Or maybe there will be no place for them on the last ship.

Or maybe they will forget to beg Gandalf 's pardon.

Or maybe they will learn to live with that.

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45

3 Maybe even the erstwhile bookish children will wish for there to be an author, the kind that knows the ending and the final word.

Maybe they will wish, when they feel empty and all the pretty words just make white noise to rewind, rewrite, do better, try again.

The author must have been mistaken.

Or maybe when the noise dies down they'll learn to write themselves, to write their story and keepthe drafts.

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46

Gravity and edges. bless the shaking of the hands when we touch. bless the stutstu stutter of the heart when you smile.

I have a problem with faith but i swear you were sent by some heaven for lost causes. we are like nature like snow falling or rocks and water: gravity and rounder edges. this world might sometimes seem like a desert butyouandme wemakeitbeautiful

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47

War is ...

War is a whirlpool that will suck you in, nowhere to hide, pick a side War means survive.

War is phone calls to the wife for the soldier.

War is a one-way ticket for the refugee War means sleeping listening to shells War is fatigue. Means spending nights under a table hiding.

War is red pencil scribbles obliterating the lovingly drawn house and apple tree of a peaceful childhood.

War means invasion.

Of troops across borders, but also of uniforms into city streets of checkpoints on roads, of keeping papers and absence of gun calluses ready for inspection into travelling, The Wagon Magazine - April - 2017

48 of knowing the potential places for gun calluses and sounds of various calibers into a thoroughly civilian brain.

War is courage, war means who else but me?

War means a timid school teacher volunteer.

War is wound, is city street turned frontline in ten seconds.

Doctors call it flashback, there ought to be better name.

War is a new page with burned edges War becomes a habit, War means refugees stop saying “back home” War means frontline wage, Means renew your contract because “Civilian street” doesn’t pay as well War means prisoner, means boot to kidney for good measure, means conventions can go to hell, means “shut the fuck up, or we’ll take you outside” Means knowing exactly what that means.

War is fear.

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49

War means curse.

Curse the enemy, the general, the civilians who have no clue curse the soldiers drunk and belligerent on leave.

Curse those who don’t want to know.

War can mean clarity. War means mess.

War is...

ALEXANDRA OMELCHENKO is a lover of words who collects experiences, gets bored by borders and often thinks in three languages at once. She lives in Kiyv with a dog and pretends to be a psychologist.

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50

POEMS Translated by Oksana Rosenblum

Marjana Savka

Lord of moths dies at night, right before the dawn, While shielding your eye with his silver shadow of a wing.

He sprinkles poisonous dust on the window leaf surface; A cold oil lamp is left burning on a whim.

Lord of moths has multitude of names and apparitions, He kisses your temple and immediately leaves.

And you have insomnia, imagining angles and conditions; It dawns on you that he gave you that kiss.

Lord of moths leaves traces of weightless kisses – Spots of light, butterflies stuck to your palm.

You must go, dragging half-empty valises, Piling up cigarette stubs in the pocket and staying calm.

Turn around real slow, it is inappropriate to hurry‌ Gaze at the world, so hopelessly shallow and small.

And off you go, having stylishly disposed of cold ashes.

In order to come back. As a Lord, Lord of moths.

Dedicated to Ihor Rymaruk / From the collection Poraplodivikvitiv The Wagon Magazine - April - 2017

51

2.

Drawings on stones. First autumn leaves.

We walk in a city, unknown to guides.

Just the two of us in this world. The tram’s singing wheels.

Light-brown and blue, our squinting and curious eyes.

Drawings on stones. Chameleon’s silver spine.

I love you so softly, beyond the idea of time and space.

The hair flies in the wind. The photo fixates on your Profile…leaves are falling down, divine.

Drawings on stones. The warmth of sun in my palm.

This city is covered by petals of lost hours.

Just the two of us. My fingers searchingly touch The cold and resistant stems of dalia flowers.

From the collection Maliunkynakameni

Mariana Savka (b. 1973) is a Ukrainian poet, children's writer,

literary critic, essayist, editor and co-founder of "Old Lion Publishing House", translator, public figure, member of the Center for the Study of Literature for children and youth, Vice President literary award "Big Hedgehog." A member of the Association of Ukrainian Writers and the National Union of Writers of Ukraine.

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52

Serhiy Zhadan - Where are you from, flock of crows?

- Chaplain, we hail from the city that has ceasedto exist.

We came here dragging our meekness and sorrow.

Tell your people there is no one left to be killed.

Our city wasall iron and stone.

Now each of us carries an empty suitcase, wondering alone.

It is filled with ashes gathered under fire.

Even our dreams are filled with burnt things and lack of desire.

Women in our city were sonorous and light-hearted.

Their fingers would reach an abyss at night, a deep crater.

Our wells ran deep too, like the roots of a tree.

The churches were spacious. We burned them ourselves, you see?

You’ll learn most about us from the burial grounds.

Can you talk to us just like that, no questions or doubts?

Give us your gift of love, clasp the pliers.

Were you not taught to absolve sins and say prayers?

Tell us why our city was reduced to ashes.

Tell us atleast, it was an unintentional result of clashes.

Tell that at last the guilty will pay the price.

Tell us something we won’t hear in the news otherwise.

-Let me teach you the meaning of loss.

The guilty ones will be brought to reckoning first.

And the not guilty will have to pay as well Even the totally innocent won’t escape this hell.

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53 How did you end up in these dark, murky torrents?

You should have read, attentively, biblical prophets.

You should have avoided the black holes of your passion.

Credo is not something laymen should seek in the action.

Remember what prophets taught of suffering and endurance?

The birds descend on cities like stones, a scary view.

Then losses start to pile up, an endless row of revelations.

I won’t tell you the end, it’s too awful to even imagine.

What is the difference between us?

The difference between consonants and vowels.

Everyone’s ready for death if it passes their house.

Nobody in this life will escape the payoff.

I always say that when I am out of words.

I don’t know the meaning of inevitable redemption.

I don’t know where you should live and if you’ll reach your destination.

What I say applies to everyone without exception.

If you only knew just how unlucky we are.

- From the collection ZhyttiaMarii

Serhiy Zhadan (b. 1974) is a Ukrainian poet, novelist, essayist, and translator.

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Bohdan-IhorAntonych Winged violin hangs on the wall, Red jar and flowery chest stand near.

The violin hosts creative lights, Musical dew, blue and crystal clear.

Inside the chest – a melodious root, Intoxicating herbs, wax and magic seeds.

Three stars hide at the very bottom, The sparkling stone of three rings.

Inside the jar –a minty liquor, Green drops of maple nectar, sprinkled with awe.

A string that resonates with inspiration, Abundant spring and mad love!

The roof heads up, straight into the sky, The jar is whirling, the chest is singing…

The sun is a fiery bird, ready to fly, And morning is only just beginning.

- From the collection Trypersteni

Bohdan IhorAntonych (1909-1937) was a

20th-century Ukrainian poet. In 1934 Antonych received third prize honours from the Ivan Franko Society of Writers and Journalists for his work Three Signet Rings.

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TRANSLATOR:

Oksana Rosenblum Born and raised in Ukraine, Oksana Rosenblum grew up reading Ukrainian poetry. She often wondered if the beauty of the original could be rendered in another language. One thing led to another, and after graduating from Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in 2002, she moved to the US to study Jewish Visual Art and Culture. Since 2005, Oksana has been free-lancing as a visual researcher in the field of Jewish art and history, working among others for the newly created museums of Jewish History in Warsaw and Moscow. Her field of expertise and interest is the history of Jews in the Russian Empire, Soviet Union and contemporary Ukraine. Oksana studies Persian and Indian music, and sings with Ukrainian Village Voices, a vocal group that focuses on authentic Ukrainian village-style repertoire. She lives in Manhattan, NYC and can be contacted at oksana.rosenblum@gmail.com The Wagon Magazine - April - 2017

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BOOK EXCERPT

DISPLACED

An Autobiographical novel

by Irena Kowal From Chapter -1 The Search–Customs, Sheremetyevo Airport, Moscow, August, 1969 Stubby fingers began playing havoc in the girl's suitcase. Lace panties, skirts, scarves spun in pink, green, and yellow circles. No bibles, crosses, no foreign magazines or books. The girl froze as she looked at the rumpled mess, then up at the custom official's beetroot face. Suddenly she dove into her handbag and produced a stainless steel ballpoint pen. She put it on the table next to the suitcase. The fingers stopped at a white silk suit. The official muttered something under her breath and waved her elephantine hand. The girl closed her eyes, then her suitcase and lugged it to the exit.

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57 As she walked out into a large hall, the girl saw only a blur of faces behind a cordoned off area. Noses, lips, chins were running after one another. Her eyes raced after an image of a bare foot boy in short pants, about nine or ten, with a shaved head, holding a flower in his hand. He was nowhere to be found. She looked for a teenager with a mass of wavy hair, no match, a Soviet soldier smoking a cigarette, no match, no match. Nothing in front of her corresponded to the photographs etched in her memory. Then the whirlwind slowed down and came into focus. The girl spotted his face behind a bouquet of flowers.

Meanwhile, a youngman, age twenty-seven, was watching the door through which the passengers were coming out. He shifted his weight and looked for a chubby child in an embroidered blouse sitting beside a dark-haired older girl. Then everything seemed to happen at once. He saw a young woman in a procession of moving, flowered-print dresses coming towards him. His lips widened, the skin around his eyes wrinkled, his fingers clasped the flowers he held more tightly. “She’s not at all chubby,� he said to himself. The young woman was suddenly in front of him, at all blonde with azure eyes, and he was thrusting vermilion gladioli into her hands.

No one had ever given the girl flowers before. Her eyes roamed around his face like a hungry feline, searching out his long, perfectly shaped nose, his almond eyes. She was not prepared for the closely cropped dark hairs hot through with grey. In that instant she felt nothing was right with her. She had a pimple on her chin, her skirt was too short and she was, undoubtedly, the most unbeautiful girl in all the world.

Two strangers from opposite ends of the globe stood staring at one another, separated by a bunch of gladioli. From their silence, everything would follow: the buried fragments of their lives unearthed, pieced together, spliced out of order and thrown into oblivion.

From Chapter - 4 Milk Chocolate The Wagon Magazine - April - 2017

58 Landshut, Germany-1946 The word is out. Molten chocolate is flowing down Blumchenstrasse. Americans are handing out bars of cocoa goodness to every one in the street. And packs of Camels and Lucky Strikes cigarettes.

And something called ‘gooma’ that makes your jaw ache from chewing it.

Six-yearold Halia, Marusia and Josef watch the tanks roll into Landshut. Soldiers in helmets jump out of steelholes, light up cigarettes, laugh and joke with one another. Among them are soldiers with thick lips and teeth like pearls. Halia hides behind Josef.

One of the soldiers offers Josef a pack of cigarettes. Josef says, “Danke shon.” The American smiles and enunciates “you’re very welcome.” Josef repeats: “You’re very welcome.” Another soldier takes a bag of Hershey’s Kisses out of his bag. He holds it out to Halia. “For you, sweetheart,” he says. Then he looks at Marusia, heavy with child, and offers her peppermint candy. She smiles, notices his palms are a deep pink against his dark skin and finds the contrast startlingly beautiful. “Danke,” she mutters shyly.

Halia calls the black soldiers ‘chocolate men.’ Soon Josef and Marusia become used to the green helmeted giants. The Americans’ smiles are wide and generous. But the talk in the displaced persons’ camp is that these men with broad grins will put them on the next train back to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. These very men who smile at you from ear to ear and present you with candy and chewing gum.

Miles and miles of jeeps and trucks roll into Landshut bringing crates and boxes of food and clothing. The German girls walk by in groups, walk past the Americans. The GIs grin broadly at the frauleins, sometimes offering a pair of stockings to open a conversation.

Marusia watches Halia and other children from the camp play with German helmets scattered on the ground, relics from the bestequipped army in the world, now without planes, helmets or bombs.

She sees Josef ’s cousin Myron coming towards her.

He takes out a slab of salt pork out of a paper bag and puts in under her nose.

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59 “We’ll celebrate tonight,” he tells her, “American cigarettes are keeping us alive.”

Right now Marusia would give anything for a bar of soap. She’s tired of feeling sticky and dirty. She wants to have a luxurious, long bath and a cup of steaming tea with honey. She wants to go home, even though home is an impossible dream. And a barrack is an impossible place for a baby.

Not too far from the American camp is a Soviet army base displaying a larger banner with a hammer and sickle and sign that reads “Death to the fascists.” In the evening a soldier plays an accordion while other soldiers sing a popular Russian song “Kalinka” and drink vodka.

At the barrack the refugees talk about the Yalta conference.

Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin agreed that all Soviet citizens are to be repatriated to the U.S.S.R. Over two million people in the zone under Soviet occupation are being sent back, many against their will.

In the zone occupied by Western Allies, the fear is that they will be next.

The safety net for Josef and Marusia disappears and terror returns.

Marusia’s nerves are fragile. “We have runaway from the beasts and everyday I’m afraid that tomorrow they will take us back to certain death.” She cries,“There is no protection, no comfort anywhere on this God-forsaken planet.”

She takes out her icon and prays: “Madonna of the Wheatfields, we have been under your protection on the road from Ukraine to Germany, please don’t desert us now, please, not now that I am about to bring a human being into the world. Whoelse can I turn to calm my spirit, replenish my strength? Please ask your son to deliver us from evil and watch over our darling Orest. Amen.”

Soon two American sergeants and three Soviet soldiers appear at their barrack and ask for volunteers to go home. “You are free to go back to your motherland,” they say.

“We will help you with transportation, documents. Go, pack your bags. Do you understand? Go home to your families, your own land.”

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60 A quarter of a million Ukrainian displaced persons stand motionless, staring ahead. They are known as “the un-repatriable” DPs. Their nerves are in shreds as they talk among themselves: “These Americans have a bizarre sense of humor. We’ve trekked across Ukraine, Czechoslovakia, Germany with bombs falling all around us, and you offer us a first class ticket “home”? Are we unwanted people, a bag of trouble for you American soldiers, you want to see us disappear into the earth? You want us to go home, you mean home to Siberia? Home to a shot in the head? We want to go home with you, chocolatemen.”

The DPs mutter under their breath: “Let the Kalinka boys go home to the U.S.S.R.” The Soviets insist the DPs will go back. One day an American and two Soviet soldiers return to Marusia and Josef ’s barrack with a list of names. Many are repatriated by force. Many will be sent to the gulag or shot. A number of them take their own lives in this game of Russian roulette. Josef, Marusia are not on the list.

From Chapter 5 Dance of the angels The air became fragrant and fresh after the downpour. On the way out of Shevchenko Park the inseparable angels Tkachenko and Tomenko began hovering over Orest and Irena. Disguised in illfitt ing trenchcoats, the pair completed one another. The stocky, double-chinned Tkachenko carried a significant paunch in front of him while Tomenko was all protruding ears and spiky appendages. Tkachenko teased Tomenko for his bourgeois tendency to wear a bowtie, for his obsession with cooking elaborate dinners. Tomenko defended his bowtie as a camouflage of sorts to hide his professional persona and chided his cohort for his provincial ways, his steady snacking on salted pork, bread and garlic.

The benevolent guardians of the people, whose job it was to report on human life below, to see and hear everything in their domain, spent time taking Irena apart and putting her pieces back together.

Observing Irena,Tkachenko said,“We can use this young lady.”

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61 Tomenko agreed,“The tenderness between brother and sister can be put to excellent use.”

Tkachenko and Tomenko continued to circle around Orest and Irena in the park, on the street, in the hotel restaurant. They zoomed down closer to the pair, scrutinizing their every movement. A recorder hidden in Tkachenko’s harp, made out of barbed wire, was ready to tape their voices caught offguard. To the angel’s horror, it produced nothing but an occasional crackling buzz. Once he determined the machine was not defective, it became clear that Orest and Irena were not making any sounds.

“It’s odd,” Tomenko said,“they’ve never laid eyes on each other before now.They have a life time to catch upon, a thousand questions to ask.They must be on their guard, suspicious that they’re being trailed.”

In short, there were no conversations to record. The brother and sister did little more than stare at one another, smile and hold hands.

They spoke a language without words, learning about each other with their eyes. Their instinctive stillness separated them from the pointless talk that littered the air.

Tomenko and Tkachenko agreed that their job did not always yield the expected results but this silence most decidedly would not do. The angels floated in the air for sometime wondering what to do.

What were they to report to the higher, celestial powers?

“She may very well be an American spy,” Tomenko said. “With her innocent smile. Coming with a tour group to see her brother for the first time. A brilliant way of slipping in, masking her purpose. We need to find incriminating information, we need to make use of the little darling.”

“Our most important commodity is information,” Tkachenko replied. “Come to think of it, it’s our reason for existing.”

“Atmost, we need a suitcase of top secrets and, at the very least, a few dissident articles,” Tomenko said.

“Even a blue and yellow ribbon would do in a pinch,” Tkachenko surmised.

Although they were members of the lowest angelic order, ToThe Wagon Magazine - April - 2017

62 menko and Tkachenko were proud of their profession. Their job of finding infiltrators, conspirators plotting against the state, went back centuries before the Russian Revolution, to Ivan the Terrible, further back even, to the Mongolian vassals of Muscovy and the Golden Hordes. A tradition carefully passed on, of searching out enemies to keep the reels of fear turning and the peasants infantile and loyal.

What’s more, enemies could always be manufactured if they didn’t exist.

What marred Tomenko and Tkachenko’s spontaneous Slavic nature was their lack of imagination. They couldn’t conceive of any other way of seeing the world. And this weakness fuelled their obsession to make Soviet citizens afraid and submissive. To make certain they were kept in harness, the angels’ job was to follow the trajectory of ordinary lives, eavesdrop on who said what to whom, record what they believed and hoped and dreamed. What they lacked in improvisational skills, Tomenko and Tkachenko made up in amassing mounds of reports prying into individual lives, however inane, to keep the gears of bureaucracy moving smoothly.

To generate their line of business and create the necessary outcome, Tomenko and Tkachenko had an assortment of methods at their disposal. They were optimistic and ambitious. Yes, they knew how to get the golden haired girl to sing. An entire cantata.

From Chapter 6 The Boy with Red Cheeks At the end of October the wind has trashed most of the leaves from the old oaks and young birches. After the death of his great-grandfather, Orest wanders around the village barefoot, in a coat full of holes. He knocks on doors. He asks for a piece of bread. No one opens. Silence hangs in the air; it stalks the boy like a marauder.

Orest is nobody's child. Let the earth take him and swallow him whole. Orest’s cheeks are chafed and red from the cold. There’s nobody to tend to them.

“We don't know the boy.”

“You don't know Josef and Marusia's child?”

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63 The phantoms shake their heads, their fists in the air. “What can we do? We can't take him in. We hardly have enough to eat ourselves.

We have families. We have our own children. For helping the son of traitors, it’s Siberia. Or a bullet to the head. We’re powerless, a great injustice has been done to us.”

Winter comes, the snow is knee high. The boy with red cheeks blows on his hands to keep warm. During bright sleepless nights he looks at the stars. They’re full of light and promise.

The villagers do not see Orest.

“Am I made of glass?” he asks.

Pidkamin is frozen under ice. The households have a collective hardening of the arteries. Big eyes peer at Orest behind net curtains.

The citizens glare with venom and a curse forms on their lips: “Scum like you deserves your lot! Your parents are deserters. You are no one, no good to anyone. You have no name, no parents, no country.

Go away.”

If only the boy would evaporate into thin air. They try to inflict shame on the boy with red cheeks. But the boy does not know shame.

Smoke rises from the chimneys, a fury rages above the thatched roofs. The village houses rattle with fear. They whisper in the night: “We are innocent, they are the murderers! We keep our mouths shut.

We know nothing, we see nothing.”

High snow drifts line the wooden fences. Saliva dribbles down Orest’s chin when he sees a child eating a piece of bread. His cheeks are chafed and red. There’s nobody to tend to them.

When the boy thinks he’s about to disappear, spring comes. The cuckoo sings. Orest is full of wonder. He jumps, touches his toes, laughs at the new green shoots, breathes in the lilacs.

“I have a pair of eyes, ears and a heart,” he says, “And I can sing to the trees.”

Orest, the faceless pariah, has no sense of remorse.

“What have I done to incur the wrath of the village?” he asked.

From Chapter 7 In the long corridor with floor to ceiling mirrors along both The Wagon Magazine - April - 2017

64 sides, Irena and Orest trailed the group that had gone ahead. When Irena quickened her pace, Orest watched the stream of light hitting the back of her long, shapely legs.

He came up behind her and touched her shoulder. She recoiled and stopped.

“Look how the mirrors stretch, further and further away,” he said. He nodded towards the mirror. “Now look at yourself. From all sides,” he said.

Without thinking she put her hands in front of her face.

Orest brought them away and smiled. “Why don’t you want to look? You want to erase your reflection?” he asked softly.

She looked down to avoid his gaze.

“It’s as if your face, arms, legs don’t belong to you,” he said to her.

Orest took Irena’s face in his hands and gently pushed her nose into the mirror.

“Why not distort yourself a little? Perhaps it will free you,” he said smiling.

He lifted her head and gently mussed her hair. “It’s a great gift, your beauty,” he said. He looked at her large, apprehensive eyes and added “Why are you afraid of it?”

Irena didn’t answer. In the looking glass Irena didn’t see the bloom.

She didn’t see what Orest was talking about. She saw only a prison. The mirror measured the distance between her and the darkness within her.

Orest took Irena’s hand in his. “Trust me?” he said.

Irena’s eyes would not meet his. No one had ever spoken to her like this. No one had ever addressed her unhappiness. In the mirror she saw a bookish prude, twenty-two going on forty, with few prospects for a relation with a man due to her inclination to be stiff and acerbic. Orest was confusing her, making her aware of what she did not dare admit to herself. Around her mirrors cracked, shattered, the shards of glass flew in all directions. She wanted to vanish into nothingness, like a Giacometti stick figure.

“This Irena is dangerous,” Orest thought. “She’s not aware of her power to arouse a man. Something has made her afraid of being The Wagon Magazine - April - 2017

65 a woman. Yet she has so much inside of her bursting to come out.

What do I do with a sister who is in the habit of obliterating herself?”

From Chapter 8 On the pavement – NewYork City, 1952 For the displaced, NewYork might as well be a strip of characters with captions. It may be a Tom & Jerry cartoon. Or a Bugs Bunny bacchanalia.

This evening snow is falling and Josef takes his two daughters, eleven-year-old Halia and five-year-old Irena, by the hand. Every Thursday they walk nine blocks to Bernie’s Appliance Store on Fourteenth Street, stand on the street and watch television through a glass pane. Their eyes widen at the image in a black mask. They can barely hear the William Tell Overture as The Lone Ranger, protector of the undefended, with his side kick Tonto, battle the baddies of the old West. The cold bites their cheeks and feet but they continue to stare at the black-and-white adventure across the screen.

The masked hero rides away on his white horse and Josef, Halia and Irena walk home. Irena looks at the towers around her and thinks about her mama uptown in Rockefeller Center.

From Chapter - 9 Hopak Warfare-Sunflower Kitsch Mr.Holovaty’s foot involuntarily beat out the rhythm under the table.

“May I have the pleasure?” Mr.Holovaty blurted to Mrs.Kacross from him.

At first Mrs.K’s eyebrows shot up and then she nodded. They met on the dance floor and Mr.Holovaty took Mrs.K’s hand in his and kissed it.

The pair began reeling to the throbbing dance rhythms as the musicians sang “Let the old people go home and the young ones sleep over.” The accordion filled in between the voices, and the couple spun around the room, hopping, hopping, until the bowls and platters shook.

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66 Usually, Mr.Holovaty’s long, bony trunk seemed precariously balanced on his small feet. Yet on the floor he was turning the leviathan this way and that as if he had been born to dance. He was bursting with the fullness in him, pressing his thigh into hers.

One, two, three, one, two, three. He raced Mrs.K around the perimeter of the dance floor until she saw only a whirl of faces. Her breasts wobbled like gelatin as the fiddler ran his bow wild across the strings.Carried by the music, the couple suddenly broke away from one another. Mrs.K, queen of the NewYork Diaspora, put her hands on her hips and circled round and round. Mr.Holowaty bobbed up and down, hands on hips, then squatted and flung his feet in front of him in makeshift lunges, a bumbling imitation of Cossack dance steps. All the while, the rest of the group ate their borscht and stared at the dancing couple’s amazing display.

From Chapter 20 Orest entered a delirious state, a valley of despair. As he walked, bursts of light detonated around him. He reached the edge of a precipice and fell into an abyss, a wilderness of limbs and skulls. Around him the earth was covered with corpses and among the dead were the living, half-crazed, stumbling and howling.

Red commissars with hammers and sickles emblazoned on their caps, walked on stilts among them. The strawmen shouted: “We are the guarantors of your magnificent future” and whipped up the living to hysterical heights. All the while, they were signatories to lists, ordering their murders, committing them to psychiatric institutions and the gulag. Then the red commissars, boiling with vengeance, climbed into vats of steaming blood and soaked themselves in the whirlpools....

The red boots trampled on Orest.

His body lay mangled, covered in a pool of blood.

Paperback: 220 pages.

Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform (May 23, 2016) Language: English. https://www.amazon.com/ Displaced-Irena-Kowal/dp/1530953952 The Wagon Magazine - April - 2017

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Irena Kowal

Professional Biography of Irene Kowal Master of Arts in English and American Literature from The University of Connecticut. 1995-1998, freelance journalist for BBC Ukraine in Kyiv. 1999-2000, participation in drama workshop at Chelsea Theatre, London, resulting in draft of THE MARINATED ARISTOCRAT. October, 2002, organized and partially funded conference in Kyiv entitled “The Modernization of Ukrainian Dramaturgy” with the participation of four British dramatists and Ukrainian playwrights and directors and with the support of Kyiv Mohyla Academy and the British Council.

Books published: Bi-lingual Ukrainian/English edition of THE LION AND THE LIONESS and THE MARINATED ARISTOCRAT (FAKT press), with a grant from the American Embassy in Kiev.

A novella entitled THE BAREFOOT BALLERINA in an illustrated Ukrainian translation (Baleryna bez Puantiv, Duliby press), with a grant from the American Embassy in Kiev.

Autobiographical novel DISPLACED translated into Ukrainian and published in Kiev in 2016 Published - kindle version and printed version of DISPLACED 2017-Movie of Kyiv’s National Theatre’s production of THE LION AND THE LIONESS made by Zoloti Vorota Company will be shown in the small theatre of Franko’s National Theatre as a regular entertain ment feature.

Works in progress: a drama entitled WOMAN IN TWO, Screenplay THE PERFECT LOAF e-mail address: irenakowal@hotmail.com The Wagon Magazine - April - 2017

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POEMS

Translated by Ivan Petryshyn

Volodymyr Sosyura No one ever has loved so much deeply No one ever has loved so much deeply, a lot.

After myriads of years, there’ll come back the affection of rose.

On the earth, there’d be blooming the spring, And the land, on that day, at the dawn, would be clothed…

And the earth will be breathing so calmly and freely in the blue of the morning that rings, holding out its hands to the stars’ shining rain…

On such day, on the earth, there blooms the green spring Slightly trembling from a sweet, living pain....

Volodymyr Sosiura (1898-1965) was a Ukrainian lyric poet, writer, veteran of the Russian Civil War.

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Ivan Franko

In the Smithy In the valley, there’s a country side, above the village, the mist’s spreading wide, by the village, on an elevation, there is a big smithy station.

In that smithy, a blacksmith is striking, and his heart is deeply a-liking, and he’s smithing singing in grace calling up the people to his place.

‘Come out, people, from the huts, from the fields! here’s the place, where a better luck yields. come out, people, till it’s not late, get out from the fog, do not wait!’

But the fogs are a-rocking, at the village, they are mocking, over the fields, they are spreading, blocking with darkness the people’s treadding, Every path for them to block, not to let them upwards from the fog, to the smithy, where they forge the weapons, bright, instead of clogs, fetters and ties.

Ivan Franko (1856-1916) was a Ukrainian poet, writer, social and literary critic,

journalist, interpreter, economist, political activist, doctor of philosophy, ethnographer, the author of the first detective novels and modern poetry in the Ukrainian language.

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Ivan Kotliarevsky

Why is the water so much roily?

Why is the water so much roily? Hasn’t it been shook up by the wave?

Why am I sad and not jolly, Hasn’t my mother chastised me to save?

Yet, my mother didn’t trouce me From my eyes, there pour th’ tears of bad, No matchmakers come from my sweetheart, But are sent from the unloved lad.

Where’re you, dear? Take a look, See my anguish stand; Oh, fly over, my truelove, They’re taking, now, my hand.

Faster, darling, bring me off From the fierce misfortune: If I am to live with an unloved, I’d rather perish in a torture.

Ivan Kotliarevsky (1769-1838) was a Ukrainian writer, poet and

playwright, social activist, regarded as the pioneer of modern Ukrainian literature, veteran of the Russo-Turkish War. The Wagon Magazine - April - 2017

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Lesya Ukrayinka

Word, Why Aren’t You As Firm As a Sword? ‘word, why aren’t you as firm as a sword, that is so glittering at a fair war? why aren’t you a sharp, ruthless blade in the hand, a hewing foes’ heads merciless brand?’

Lesya Ukrainka (born Larysa Petrivna Kosach-Kvitka) (1871-1913) is

one of Ukrainian literature's foremost writers, best known for her poems and plays, active political, civil, and feminist activist. Among her most wellknown works are the collections of poems On the wings of songs (1893), Thoughts and Dreams (1899), Echos (1902), the epic poem Ancient fairy tale (1893), One word (1903), plays Princess (1913), Cassandra (19031907), In the Catacombs (1905), and Forest song (1911).

Translator: Ivan Petryshyn Ivan Petryshyn has contributed his poetry in English, Italian, Ukrainian, Polish, Russian, Latin, and German. He has taken part in various poetry slams (www.chicagopoetry.com). In 2015, he published his book of poetry "Poliversologue", where one can find both translations and his original poetry. Now, he is translating Shakespeare's Sonnets, Slavic Folklore (into English and, partially, into Italian and Polish), Italian poets, ancient poetry of different cultures.

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72

FLASH FICTION

Vadym Miroshnychenko

Georges Georges Perec taught me how not to rot in loneliness and how to arrange books on shelves.

I remember we were sitting in a summer café. Autumn was right at its heels and the pigeons were dropping on my head. Actually, autumn was creeping carefully and the pigeons were dropping gently.

Therefore, my meeting with Perec was logical. Two coffees, one table, two chairs and two men. In all, there were seven.

Was it cold? It was rather chilly, I would say. The coffee was very well-timed. We mainly drank in silence. I offered to add a few drops of brandy. Georges refused politely. He was gloomy, and drank very little. You could say he was excluding alcohol from his diet. I wasn’t sure if this was permanent. As a rule, he’d ignore alcohol for six months and then every second half of the year he’d once again enlist it into his daily menu.

I don’t know what happened. Was it because of autumn, pigeons, chillness or alcohol that Perec did not take? The conversation had fallen apart before it started. Apparently, there was no need to talk. And about what? I had read his texts, and he’d read mine. Discussing what was discussed was not in our plans, and making plans was not our task. Just to sit and drink. Two adults have all the rights The Wagon Magazine - April - 2017

73 in the world to sit through a chilly autumn morning in a cafe to drink coffee, and to keep silent.

I didn’t forget to recoil from the brandy, so as not to disturb the balance. Our place could hardly be called one of seclusion, so we didn’t try to find any. We were sitting, keeping silence. The nearby tables were empty. Free, if you like. The chillness had herded the visitors into the bar, inside where it was cheaper. We could afford a table in the street. Georges in particular. He was more famous, more experienced, and he surpassed me in loneliness and was generally successful at it. And it was in this regard that I strongly didn’t want to catch up with him, let alone surpass him!

But I learned to arrange books in the right places. Georges was my friend and I trusted him, even if I didn’t like arranging books in the right places. Sure, I had the common sense to sort them by author, by red spines, and by size, but Georges in this case was a true master. I was far from perfect. It’s useless to speak about it, read for yourself at my French friend. Georges reminds me of a great dry tree, the branches of which stick out in different directions – mostly in two. Starting from the middle of the trunk, the branches reach for the sky, which is absurd since the wooden body appears as though dried in horror.

It was getting dark. Georges and I were finishing our umpteenth cup of coffee. And although it was getting dark, it was bright. The world could still be seen – just passably – even down to its details, cracks, and abrasions. Georges leaned on the table, feeling by hand its surface. I took the cup to my lips, then put it back. I could not take a sip. I realized what cupping was and what georgesing of Georges was. And this is what I understood. Not my friend’s humanity, but his georgesing. Madeleine –madeleining. Marie – maringon a bike.

Biking. Not an ordinary quality, but an exact, growing entity that holds a secret.

Did I feel it because of the cup? Because of the coffee? Because of the cup of coffee? Or Georges’s light maneuvers on the surface of the table? Did his focused gullibility evoke it in me? Or his figure itself? Tousled hair, beard, noble carelessness, and something high The Wagon Magazine - April - 2017

74 and simple in him... Something in him. Something in the table. In the umpteenth cup of coffee having been drunk – not having been sipped – along towards evening when it was getting dark with not quite a breeze. Not quite an outdoor cafe in autumn, spring or winter.

Not quite.

It appeared as if we would stay here forever. It appeared that in all the time we ordered and drank no coffee but cappuccino, that this was why my cup had been left untouched, presenting coffee’s Otherness. Or it was Georges touching the table to point out such a regrettable fact as his own Georgesing. An error in the original formulation of the problem had resulted in a chain of defective un-modifying, and only Something could cheer me, overturn me. It cried in my ear: "Abandonment!"

And Georges’s wrist clearly demonstrated the futility of determinism. Georges? Or still Georgesing? His freedom came as a model of our gatherings – foam and only then liquid. And on the foam, a caring barista, a painted heart, all to put a smile on someone's face in this day's nice summer, autumn, winter, spring. This nice, in my ears, in its unpretentious mazes without dead ends.

The abandonment is drinking cappuccino or playing Nietzsche’s Meditation on the piano. My friend and I, we increased our number – my friend’s otherness and my selfness. Georges, of course, was shrewder. I was sure he’d come with the strong intention of enlightening me. I was wrong. He knew nothing, and hadn’t even guessed.

He had come to shoot another movie about the disappearance of two persons from a cafe.

What about Martin?

Vadym Miroshnychenko is a Existentialist poet, cultural studies expert, and instructor at the Kharkiv State Academy of Culture.

Sphere of professional interests: • Theory and practice of non-normative writing; • Linguistic, culturalogical, philosophical aspects of interpellation; • Poststructuralist critique http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/blog/alexander-j-motyl/interview-young-ukrainian-poet The Wagon Magazine - April - 2017

75

BOOK REVIEW

Review by Marta Pombo Sallés

Tetiana Aleksina and Tony Single

I like this little book for its originality, complexity, elaborate language and openness to multiple interpretations and levels of reading comprehension according to each type of reader. At times it even becomes so shockingly absurd that you inevitably laugh.

I see it as a wonderful intent to tell a story from different perspectives, trying to avoid common cliches. In this respect I think the narrative matches its title, Mooreeffoc, a word used by Charles Dickens, which means “coffee-room” if you read it once you are inside that place, that is, “viewed from the inside through a glass door.” (http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term =mooreeffoc)

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76 Interestingly enough, it turns out that when a Catalan speaker like me hears this word in English the following association becomes inevitable: mooree with morir (to die) and ffoc with foc (fire), that is, to die with fire. But another and, in this case, better word association comes to my mind: moor with mur (wall, a word that comes from Latin murus, which originates the word moor in English), ee with i (and) plus ffoc with foc (fire), which would be: wall and fire or also moor and fire.

I believe the second word association would somehow connect with Mooreeffoc. This little book tells us a story of how two characters in a coffee-room are to finally get together. We could envision a symbolic wall (hurdle or barrier) or a moor (unstable ground) to be surpassed by the two characters, and also fire, the risk to take this chance. However, this is just my personal association. Mooreeffoc essentially means looking at something from a different angle, which is what this original story offers to the reader.

The two characters, Bastet and Sekhmet carry the names of two Egyptian goddesses. While Bastet is the goddess of the home, once a fierce lioness and now depicted as a cat (http://www.ancient.eu/ Bastet/), Sekhmet is a warrior goddess as well as goddess of healing, protector of the pharaohs, depicted as a lioness (https://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Sekhmet) These names intentionally confuse the reader of Mooreeffoc because when you start reading the book (part 1, Bastet's perspective) it seems the two characters would be a man and a woman, wanting to flirt or start a love relationship in a coffee-room. As the story evolves and we read Sekhmet's account (part 2) the confusion and uncertainty grows. Two characters carrying names of Egyptian goddesses?

Are we dealing with ambivalence here meaning that this relationship would be man-woman but also extended to lesbian love? The cat and The Wagon Magazine - April - 2017

77 the fierce lioness? Is this the authors' intention in the book? And who is the third character, the he with the black panther tatoo? According to Calibrator's account (part 3 of the book) this he is “pliable” and functions as a “trap that Bastet and Sekhmet must inevitably fall prey to.” I wonder with so much Egyptian mythology used in this narrative, could this he be the Egyptian god Ra? As we have seen Mooreeffoc is a three-part story told from three different perspectives: Bastet's, Sekhmet's and Calibrator's. The latter appears as a kind of god or entity above the other two, a puppeteer above the puppets, apparently someone in the process of making Bastet and Sekhmet get together. If so, we are dealing with a distant mediator among the puppeteers, more powerful gods over traditional gods? That look more like scientists in a lab experimenting with rats like their puppets Bastet and Sekhmet. I also wonder at the possibility of being this whole book an allegory of how the human race might evolve, where Bastet and Sekhmet would be common human beings behaving like gods but showing their animal instincts. Calibrator and the other puppeteers would be scientists servicing factic powers that manipulate common citizens?

But why is the puppeteer of the third part of Mooreeffoc called Calibrator? Calibrators are equipment used to adjust an instrument accuracy, in this case, adjusting Bastet and Sekhmet's relationship.

And the adjustment methods are indeed quite original in this story.

Could this be a metaphor of what science might do to humans?

According to Calibrator's account, a button is pushed to create a cloud of cinnamon and anise, which seems to be the best combination to make Bastet and Sekhmet act and react the way their puppeteersCalibrator among them - want them to. Then there is the use of the “pliable he”, the Wadjet symbol (again, another Egyptian goddess, the Eye of Ra) flickering on the coffee's surface, the froth of Amenti (again Egyptian mythology) and the Raudive box.

In the end, Calibrator says: “How they [Bastet, Sekhmet and possibly others in a similar situation] use this reinstated freedom is not our business. We do not care about mortals [those Egyptian gods are now being called mortals].

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78 We care about something else. We look at the two caged beasts and smile.”

Here I wonder: why are they caged beasts? Is this again a metaphor of what science could do to human beings, promising a higher degree of our always limited freedom?

As I said before, I personally think the whole book and also its end, getting Bastet and Sekhmet together, is open to many possible interpretations, points of view and levels of reading comprehension.

That is why I have enjoyed reading it. Its plot is full of imagination and I love its great sense of humor through rather shocking and absurd situations when reading things like: “Well, first I need assurances. Is your pussy willing to sign a non-disclosure agreement?” “Perhaps I could flee and join the Witness Protection Program.”

Finally, I have just interpreted this book that comes to me as a riddle, that is, not being sure of having really understood the authors' message.

Marta Pombo Sallés is an English and German high school

teacher from Barcelona, Catalonia. She studied English and German Language and Literature at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. She got her degree in 1992. She has always loved arts, literature and languages. In her free time, she writes poems and short stories mainly in English and also in Catalan (her first language), German and Spanish. She also loves dancing.

She blogs at: https://momentsbloc.wordpress.com The Wagon Magazine - April - 2017

79

Ukrainian historic folk song

The Escape from the Turkish Slavery

There broke into the Tartar sprites, And they captured my daughter, nice, Marusyna, my daughter, dear, I remained with one son in fear.

And there came others - my son was enslaved, And a widow, a poor orphan, I remained.

The third time, they took me too, an old soul... ...a Turk took me to the service, I began to toil and slave Serving the foe every day.

The daughter didn’t recognize her nurse Having given her the works, the worst: With the hands- to spin the yarn, fine, With the little feet- to lull the child, To watch the flock- with the eyes‌ They found themselves in one place The Wagon Magazine - April - 2017

80 All three meeting face to face.

When the daughter was recognized by the mother And, when also confessed the brother…

They were united with one another.

Then the daughter began to tell the Turk, That’s my brother, this is my mother, Then, the Turk began to trust them.

He entrusted them with all his goods.

They did everything, not to delude Thinking, dreaming of their home.

When the Turk and daughter were going to the ball, They handed the keys from the houses, all; The son and the mother were taking the golden keys, The souls of the slaves from the cellars to release, Saddling the horses to start their way To travel back home again.

Oh they were crossing the Danube, Dunahj, The Turks, low-natured, were on a catch-ride.

On the other bank, they shouted: ‘Oh Ivan, Ivan!

You know and you know, And take the infusion of wormwood, And, you will know even better for good!’

Chieftain Ivan Korsun began to narrate: ‘I crossed the Danube River Denied the enemy forever!’

Translated by Ivan Petryshyn The Wagon Magazine - April - 2017

81

‘The Saga On The Cavalry Of Igor, The Son Of Sviatoslav, The Grandson Of Olga’ …Wouldn’t we like, wouldn’t we enjoy, oh brethren, To start recounting in old vocables the hard-time narratives About Igor’s cavalry, That one of Igor, the Son of Sviatoslav (the Glorifier-of-the Feast)?

And let that song begin by the true stories of that time, Not by the impressions of Boyan, the bard, As Boyan the Oracle, When he would like to compose a song to any man, He would be ornamenting the thought on the wood Crawling by a gray wolf on the ground, Gliding by the silver eagle under the clouds, Keep remembrance, he says, of the first times of the inter-tribal strife That time, one would be sending ten falcons against a brood of swans, That would have seized them, Before he would begin to sing a song To the Old Yaroslav (the Sun-Glorifier), To the Brave Mstyslav (the Revenger), Who had slaughtered Rediedya before the Kasozhian cavalries, For the red and handsome Roman, the Son of Sviatoslav’.

And, Boyan, oh brethren, Would not be sending ten falcons against the swans, He is putting his prophetic fingers onto the living strings,And they themselves will be booming the glory to the Princes.

Translated by Ivan Petryshyn The Wagon Magazine - April - 2017

82

Ukrainian folk song

Ivan Bohuslavets In the town of Kozliv, there was a stony prison, Dug into the ground seven fathoms; In that dungeon, there were seven hundred kozaks, Poor slaves, honest men and brave.

They couldn’t be without a chieftain, There was one man who was mainIvan of Bohuslav, a Hetmann, a Zaporizhya heir, They have been in the captivity for ten years.

So, Ivan of Bohuslav sat thinking and meditating To the kozaks, thus, narrating: ‘Kozaks, my sirs, my compatriots, The Holy Saturday is celebrated today, Tomorrow, there will be the Holy Easter Day, Very early, our Priests will be awaked Approaching the Home of God, Listening to the Lord’s Word, Remembering us, the poor slaves, to the honest world”.

That was heard by all the slaves, They began to wash themselves with abundant tears Reproaching and cursing Ivan of Bohuslav without fear: ‘Let you never have happiness and lucky fate, Ivan of Bohuslav, as you made Us recollect that Holiday on our misfortune’s day’ Translated by Ivan Petryshyn The Wagon Magazine - April - 2017

83

Ukrainian Lullabies 1.

Oh, by the windows, the Sleep’s plodding, By the fence, the Doze is trotting.

The Sleep asks the Doze: - Where will we doss?

- In the house, that warmly greets, Where there’s a baby, sweet, There, we’ll hit the hay Lulling the baby till th’ early day.

Oh, let the cat the purr be assigned, Let the baby nap, sweet and kind, Let the kitten purr, soft and nice, Let the small baby sleep all night.

2.

Lull, kittie, in the cradle, The kittie took a ladle To get water from the well, And, into it, she fell.

A little cat went to pull her out, bold, He didn’t know, by what to hold, He took the kittie by her tail, long, He hit her against a pillar- wrong!

This is a lesson for you, kittie- lo!

Into the well, do not go!

But be, kittie, wittyWe’ll go to the cities To buy bread- salt, food That, for small kids, are good.

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84 3.

Lullaby, Two kittens of mine, Both gray-brown, Lively, sound, One went to chase mice, Another’s lulling Georgie, the nice, What actions have you taken That Georgie’s awaken?

Fairies, fairies, fairies, The kids went to pick raspberries, Raspberries failed: no berries- we regret, Our kids got lost in the arboret.

Ukrainian folk children’s song

Come Out, Come Out, Dear Sun! Come out, come out, dear sun, Onto the grandpa’s field to have fun, Onto the granny’s herbs and roses, Onto our enclosure, Onto the spring flowers we like, Onto the little tikes.

There, they are playing, For you, they are waiting.

There, they are recreating, For you, they are waiting.

Translated by Ivan Petryshyn The Wagon Magazine - April - 2017

85

BOOK EXCERPT

My Evenness

(The My Evenness Saga, book 1)

by Julia A. Leontovich

“Some call London – Albion – the other, the City of Rains.

But as for me, it has become the Great City of Eternal Love and Endless Rivalry.” So begins the story of seventeen year old Mia. When she became casually acquainted with the charming stranger at Heathrow Airport, Mia couldn’t have imagined that this would open a door to another world.

For centuries, London has skillfully hidden from its inhabitants its murky secrets within a misty haze of uncertainty. So typical of the capital!

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86 Prologue When I was a child, I had no questions that I couldn’t find the answers to. Everything seemed simple and unpretentious – perhaps even good-natured. I lived in a world of fairy tales and imagination, magic and light–heartedness. This world was called “Childhood”.

One can speak about the past at great length, but for now I am offering the present that I live.

My name is Mia Waits, I’m seventeen years old, I live in the UK, and I want to tell you the story of my life.

Part I Chapter I

Mia

London, Winter 2008 The first roll of thunder followed lightning. The sky was dark and it looked ominous. I tried to concentrate, to understand where I was, but the enveloping gloom didn’t allow me to see my surroundings. And what I couldn’t talk about was my feelings, though I was engulfed by the cold and penetrating wind. The darkness came upon me like water. It soaked into my skin, wanting to connect with me in one piece.

Suddenly, I heard a dreadful sound that was similar to gnashing, and a few seconds later I realized that it belonged to a crow. The sound took my breath away, and my blood ran cold. Then darkness slowly faded away and I saw it in the night sky – a raven. But I still couldn’t understand where I was.

“Maybe it’s a street?” I asked myself, but no, the place was desolate and deserted. And once I had convinced myself of this, I saw in the distance a guy with clear features that couldn’t be distinguished in the dark. And for some reason, I then felt calmer. But my calmness blew away with the wind when I heard the black raven’s voice a second time. Rebellious, it continued to circle above me, not letting me rest. I was almost sure that the crow was restrained by someone or something, otherwise it would have attacked me.

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87 “How do I get home... Where am I? How did I get here?”

“Can you help me?” I screamed, turning to the guy standing a little away from me. But he remained silent and I couldn’t quite discern his features. Meanwhile, the crow continued to rush at me from overhead, and its rattling caused me much inner trembling.

“You know how to get out of here?” I shouted again, and finally realized why I could not see this guy up close. We were separated by an abyss, and he was standing on the opposite side.

“Why won’t you answer me?”

At that moment I jumped up, and because of the fear I almost upended the alarm clock sitting beside me on the bedside table. Exactly. It had woken me up.

“Phew! It was a dream ...” I thought, trying to regain consciousness and barely awake.

Usually, my mornings began quite similarly. I was almost always in a hurry – yes, late. I would describe myself as an unbearable dreamer and a lost romantic that people usually wouldn’t understand or accept. A dreamer that lived in London, but I also spent my childhood in Ottawa. Also, I was just an ordinary girl, and my name is Mia Waits.

I think now was the time to stop, because I was late for college.

That wasn’t funny as I was still in bed! I couldn’t delay more than a second, so I jumped out of my warm bed and started looking for clothes. The main thing was to find something cushy within a few seconds and quickly put it on. Then I could leave while I still had some heat dwelling in me.

Hastily, I ran into the bathroom, and my eyes focused on the reflection in the mirror. It was as if another side of me was looking at this strange, young girl of seventeen. She had long, dark, brown hair and deep-set gray–green eyes that said more about her than she would have liked.

Low and thin, she stood in her underwear; still, just staring at me. Her tender body talked of grace and unwittingly captivated me, making me a prisoner and forcing me to hold eye contact for a few moments longer.

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88 “Enough! You're going to be late!” When I realized that I was seeing myself in the mirror, I felt very uncomfortable and tore my eyes away.

Anyhow, I didn’t consider myself a beautiful girl and preferred to avoid lengthy periods of time in front of the mirror. So, I put on the first thing that fitted on my way out into one of London’s frostier mornings. I ran for the door, looking for the keys to the apartment.

When I finally ran out into the street, I was nearly blown away by icy wind. “It is still winter...” I thought with sadness. Wasting no time, I went to the bus stop – Kensington Park. Of course, I could have taken the subway but I prefer to look upon cityscapes.

I lived in North London – Notting Hill – in a rented apartment.

Alone. From the street, the house looked like quite a long, three-storey, brick building divided into multiple sections, each of which was allocated pronounced colors and large, beautiful, slightly protruding windows. My flat was on the third floor.

Every morning was like another little trip, and it ended in the Camberwell area. An art college was located there, and this is where I studied. It was one of six internationally renowned colleges. I was a member of the University of the Arts of London, and my specialty was “Photo”. I liked working with photography. In particular, I loved the black and white pictures, and could talk about them for hours because I really was keen on them.

Like sands through an hourglass, the time passed quickly and soon it was the end of my first year of study in London. But it seemed as if I had arrived only yesterday. In part, I was glad of it because I had pretty tiring subjects in my first year of study. Among other things: “The camera and its setup”, “Photo Optics”, “Laws of the light”, “Basics of photography and photographic art”, and “Photocomposition” as well as many others.

I thought the next year would finally offer something interesting, with perhaps more extensive and open information that would in effect start me off on new and still unexplored subjects. Instead I was faced with concentrating on more technical information in manuals, as well as a lecture entitled “Philosophy and photo’s ideology” where The Wagon Magazine - April - 2017

89 I was required to be “a grateful listener”. It was taught by Professor Ollford.

In general, I liked to live in London, but when I came to the capital of Albion, my knowledge of the city was scarce. It all alarmed me a little, but I had needed this change very much.

I thought studying in England was definitely worth it, and I would come to regret it not one bit. But I will confess that when I arrived, I couldn’t even imagine what I would have to face here, and what that would mean for me.

The journey normally takes about an hour, but if you happen to get stuck in a traffic jam then it could be delayed by up to two hours...

And what about me? The bus got stuck in a traffic jam on the Vauxhall Bridge, and I was late to college.

But what could I say about London? It was an amazing and stunning city. Each of its areas, when seen from a height, looked like part of a patchwork quilt. Variety and pretentiousness, stigma and tradition, dissimilarity and individuality – each district, in its own peculiar way, reflected the London life with all of its advantages and disadvantages.

“I’m late for class! I’m late for college!” The thought of being late was not a happy one because tardiness isn’t encouraged. “In a big city, big rules, you know.”

I almost jumped off the bus and ran along Peckham Road. By the way, the Camberwell district often has organizations putting on poetry readings and performances by local DJs. Art and design are an indispensable part of this area, and there is a South London Gallery located nearby.

I quickly ran into the building and through a spacious corridor.

Lectures were held in practical laboratories, but also ordinary classrooms when theory was the thing being talked about. I was lucky that today was a lecture. Regarding the age limit in Camberwell: this was distinguished by age and nationality, and was true of my group. In college, there were restrictions applied to admitted students over the age of seventeen.

“Today, the road before me is pretty tired. And I still have to sit in class!” I thought – faster than I realized.

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90 A few minutes later, I went into the audience of students and sat down at my desk. I looked around and began to search for a “firefly”, but she was absent. So I called my best friend Annie Alexandra Light.

She was a kind and caring girl with hair the color of a juicy and ripe pomegranate that she usually gathered in a small ponytail.

Moreover, Annie was an optimistic, good–natured, sympathetic and funny girl, always ready to come to your aid. That is why, over time, I began to call her “firefly”.

The next few minutes waiting for the beginning of the lecture, and for the arrival of Annie, seemed to me endless. I would be lying if I said in that last minute I'd not been waiting with great desire and impatience. The lecture hadn’t yet begun, and it was a wonderful occasion to continue thinking about anything and dreaming about something. My eyes flew through the window, as if waiting for something, but nothing happened...

Then my thoughts were suddenly overtaken by a wave of noise, and I shivered. Before me stood Lucy. I was momentarily distracted and didn’t notice that she had come up to me. I wondered how long she had been calling me – or had I immediately responded to her call? How long had I been detached from the world? This is not to say that the current situation had disturbed me greatly. Well, certainly not as much as before.

I remember once upon a time I would be worried about absolutely every intake of breath and exhale, every spoken word and slightest potential view aimed in my direction. I can now say that I no longer worry about people’s opinions. I don’t know why, but in a split second I became indifferent to what was being thought about me – and said. I guess I grew up.

"Scroll on, these and many other thoughts," I smiled to myself.

“What’s so funny Mia? You hear me at all?” said my classmate Lucy angrily. If I’m not mistaken, she was twenty–seven years old and she was French. And yet she was a very ordinary girl, although she certainly didn't think so. I think she liked to think she was more significant than anyone in this group.

“I’ve been trying to get your attention for the last several minutes!

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91 Maybe you can still give me the time of day?!”

And here is the answer that distracted me for the next few minutes. Her tone was already on the verge of extreme dissatisfaction.

Let’s just say, Lucy wasn’t one of those girls who liked to be told twice.

“I’m sorry, Lucy. I’m a little lost in thought," I murmured out of politeness. "What was it you asked?” In fact, politeness is not alien to me. It's one of my natural qualities – although lately I was no longer recognizing myself. I wanted to ask the question, “What is happening, Mia?” but the answer was nowhere.

“Actually, I was interested in these sketches. So, which do you like?”

In her hands she held a few sketches on small sheets of paper.

She would soon be giving these to the professor as part of her homework. And, apparently, she hadn’t had a lot of time to do them. She awaited my answer with genuine interest but I, in turn, looked at them and... to my dismay, simply couldn’t see them. Maybe there was nothing remarkable about them? Or perhaps I wasn’t capable of seeing lately? In the end, I randomly pointed at one of the sketches – and it didn’t bother me.

In time, I had to ask myself, “What’s the matter, Mia?!”

“Lucy, I think this collage of the town is much more interesting than the rest, but it's only my opinion.”

It was hard for me to communicate with Lucy, even during those few occasions she'd speak to me for this kind of advice. Her reactions could be quite unpredictable, and could only be guessed at.

Julia Leontovich, a Ukrainian writer, was born in

the winter of 1986, and lives in Kiev. She graduated NTUU “KPI” and has a Diploma specialising in social work/sociology. Julia writes in the genre of romantic fantasy. Her first novel “My Evenness” was written for a young adult audience. She has also written short stories that deal with issues of morality, faith, and the spiritual development of the individual, as well as articles on the subject of personality psychology that have been published in a popular women’s magazine The Wagon Magazine - April - 2017

92

BOOK REVIEW

Sudeep Sen

The Body is ‘The Text’ Reviewed by Christopher Barnes EroText is an ambitious, long sequence in a high modernist style, in

the form of micro-fiction or prose-poetry, segments approximating the length of a breath. From the start, we are aware of the process of art as inherent as any other meanings we may glean from the text. It is art that refers to its own making. Popular and high culture made by other artists in music, film, literature and photography seep though some verses to remind us that the world, creation of culture within it, is to be appreciated. Art is energy that has already been spent.

In the first sequence, the persona, ill in a Delhi hospital bed, drifts in and out of consciousness; lucidity is always temporary. The words that Sen has given the persona are in autobiographical style, The Wagon Magazine - April - 2017

93 fiction with self-conscious technical devices shaping the text. This is literature, not life. This is not literature that shouts. It is a type of writing that weaves and diffuses, folding in on its main themes again and again. The writing is delicate and crisp.

The first sequence is about being trapped in a sickbed in one room. However, this does not give the reader the feeling of going ‘deep’ into consciousness, or the persona’s self. The bouncing around of details are necessary escapes from pure nothingness, something to hold onto at the edge of oblivion.

I am surrounded by tropical green neon — multi-sized screens populated by cursors and graphs whose night jive is determined by every move I make — every cough that escapes my parched throat alters their crest and trough.

It is cold here, very cold. I lie reluctantly on this crisp snow-white sheet, laundered impeccably to create a lasting impression as if it were my last day. Starch has its own curious effect, not just on your so-called gait, but also on the sleep-cells.

The colour of this room is blue, endless blue that seems almost black. Against this, the radiated glow of green and its tiny electronic letters and numbers, the nurse-white linen, the stale starch scent — all trying their best to induce a lullaby.

However, this languorous soporific lyric is making me feel colder, rather than the warmth it is supposed to inject in me.

We begin with an image of “magnetizing dead bones,” within which is the suggestion that they will attract or part. This nicely sets up the way the rest of the sequence flows. Things come together, recede, and come together again in a somewhat Proustian manner.

The line ends with — “tropical green neon”. The dangling of the “green”, even though the form is prose-poetry not free verse tricks us into thinking of healthy renewal. After decay, the “neon” undercuts this expectation bringing us into the contemporary unnatural world of the hospital and its monitors. Objects coming in and out of focus are part of the text’s shape.

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94 Emotions evoked beyond the obvious - “Snow-white sheet, laundered impeccably to create a lasting impression” suggest the vortex of time but also subtly hint at guilt; that the sheet will not be impeccable forever. Illness and eroticism play out “as if it were my last day,” opposites that exhaust as their energies insist on attention. Between life and death is sex. The “nurse-white linen tries to induce a lullaby.”

A childhood of Eros’s innocent early days is remembered. The act of writing, it has a counter-effect in “making me feel colder”. The erotic tide flows backwards. The free feelings of childhood have gone. Putting it down on paper sends it away, making it something else altogether.

“A figure enters the room” -the pain-relief drugs fuse reality with dream. He ghosts into a “post-war burial site”, between life and death.

Sen occasionally stumbles with sentences clumped with too many adverbs but every now and again, the odd, visceral simile feels just right as in, “Breathing (…) clear as coarse air in a tunnel”.

In Sen’s writing, connections and alienations crop up regularly, “The person in the room can sense the electricity, the invisible photons lighting up this intimately controlled space.” But the flux will change no matter how temporary.

The “mind is buzzing” not in the slang use of the term but quite literally - it is overactive, the only energy that does not diminish.

Only the brain has the power to move freely without strain.

Illness and discomfort bring frustration and cynicism - “They say imagination can conquer anything, even the body. It isn’t true”.

The body can be an enemy; it “has a hollow feeling running through it as if all the bone shave been stripped out”. Dissolution is a real threat.

Identity is in crisis — the skin, which holds the body, cannot be relied upon: “the shape will be retained artificially to deceive the onlooker”.

“There is enough left in my bones that every morning is an undesired struggle”- this brilliantly expresses the contradiction of Eros’ will to engage and the body’s weakness in following through. There is romance towards the illness, and awareness of ego, in its condition The Wagon Magazine - April - 2017

95 as heroically under fire, “there is beauty in that”.

“I write my coded pieces, but no one takes any notice of the hints” is psychologically challenging. The codes may be erotic but their subtlety might prevent them from being understood. This could also refer to the other artworks invoked as influences that give the text depth. The alienated self is shut off from being able to perform for others. This drama, where operatics are silent, only exists in the written text with the body unable to act or move from the bed.

In the first sequence, dreams are not expressed as vivid, for even they can’t be held onto for long - “Barely lit by the colour of molten green.” The mind also dissolves. The concrete world that others inhabit doesn’t impinge much; it is “redundant”. Withdrawal into the hospital room is total but for memory. Memory or dream states regress. “I find myself in a toyshop,” hints at helplessness. Memories or dreams create identity so must be invoked; the alternative is loss of them and the self. The persona abstracts the body to understand it, to know it in its parts. The whole is ungraspable.

The persona insists he has “shyness and honesty,” which the reader might find difficult to believe. There are moments of petulance- “what is the point of constructing the text?” Ego is also a burden. Its demands may cause guilt. “Real lies swim deviously in shallow waters” show he is searching for the truth in a dangerous place, the mind can sink us, and so can the body.

“The poison may finally allow me to see the possible worth of the next twenty hours.” Each day is a different but similar struggle to find something to engage with, against the forces of the illness. This emerges as text. Consciousness floats in and out of reality and the present - “there I travel variously”.

“The mercury in the thermometer rises, gradually and numerically, to a height where human equilibrium can just about balance itself ”.

Like other scientific lines, this suggests sex but I feel the image is too comic to work with the rest of the sequence. Writing the erotic is always difficult. Only a few do it entirely convincingly as Sen does.

Again, in the first section, we move towards the erotic, in thought, but can’t quite stay with it. Delirium and its fluxes are too The Wagon Magazine - April - 2017

96 ethereal - “these wet dreams are dreams that will have to remain unsoaked”. Erotic language is always stronger when it is hidden beneath an image- “there are electrical impulses that are waiting, poised to spark”. The wait is a long one, the journey tiring. There are phrases and ideas that seem pretentious to my taste - “it is at such interstices that art and passion find their true shape”. Other words are perfect within the context, “marry” in the following lines being one -“alterations that marry physics, chemistry, biology and mathematics”.

At the beginning of the next sequence, entitled “Heather”, there is a marked change in mood. The language loses its paleness becoming altogether more colourful. “There is no moonlight” - is interesting for what it isn’t. “Moonlight” would be a traditional symbol of romance or Eros, but in this text, its lack is what is poignant and unexpected, over-turning what might have been a cliché. “You kiss me everywhere,” heralds language that is more direct than in the previous section. Even memories have become brighter, more concrete, “Every grain remembers every wave”. Both memory and nature imprint in a way that is absolute.“The sea is getting restless. But I am dead” - this intrigues me. Time is non-linear. Life contains its own destruction. Sen’s lines destabilize the reader while mythicizing the persona.

The male persona fantasizes “about Sappho, Carson, Winterson”.

But it is unclear whether he identifies with them or is a voyeur. They too use texts to show a relationship between the act of writing and lovemaking.

Hyper-awareness of touch is well expressed in - “words that paint filigree screens on camisoles that aren’t transparent or opaque, visible only to those who read Braille”. The fusion of the text with the body is complete. The muse is a real lover that feeds the writing.

“Two beautiful female forms. I was taking photographs of …” is fascinating. The attempt to objectify the women fails and the photograph doesn’t develop, coming out white. Both the attempt and its failure unpeople the women of themselves. The mind and its processes are not a given and the camera is an agent of alienation.

The past is a honourable place “full of well-worn elegance”. Time The Wagon Magazine - April - 2017

97 has a dignity; he is able to read on a ‘sari’ its indelible past. The importance of clothes and their details is a theme Sen returns to.

Clothes can be used as architecture for experience as well as pointers to memory. The importance of objects like - “a white-cushioned canes of a” brings moments into focus and when they recede makes them re-usable symbols of their associations. Time is never lived as expected - “The clock hands appear to move fast or not at all”.

Colours are surprisingly utilized to show changes of mood “ordinary black linen, a colour I have dreaded facing”. Recurrently, colour or lack of it, gives or reduces energy.

I don’t at all hesitate in recommending this book, EroText- the initiative to take on such a challenge should be rewarded. The best pieces are super band the sense of overall structure of patterns creating shapes is effective and leaves a lasting impression.

HEATHER

I lie next to the sea. It is dead still, except for the invisible rippling soundless undulations the water makes as it breathes. There is no moonlight, but it is not pitch dark.

You kiss me everywhere - everywhere, for hours and hours and hours. My lips are dry, my body salt-encrusted. You have eaten every bit of pleasure, yours and mine.

I feel parched, dry, in spite of all the plenitude of water and our sweat.

The sand too is sweating beneath us. Every grain remembers every wave, every caress, leaving behind just salt, a silver layer of salt as a gift - a talisman of love, of their inconsistent meetings.

I feel parched like the sea-salt gauze. My tongue is parched in spite of your lavender saliva, saliva which has changed from that bouquet to the taste of heather, wild weather-ravaged heather.

I look around for light, but I can only see reflection. There is more beauty in second-hand glaze - the sky’s dark light radiating off your lashes, the water’s blue light hiding in your navel, the beach’s grainy light lying unwiped on your nipples, and the light’s invisible inner light stored in your pupils.

The sea is getting restless. But I am dead still, except for the inaudible swishing that I can hear when you press yourself against my heart.

I need to taste the grainy light that you wrap your skin in, each and every grain that maps the slow deliberate contours of your body.

The Wagon Magazine - April - 2017

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‘Eros’ + ‘Text’ & the Five ‘D’s EroText

Reviewed by Vyjayanthi Srinivasa 1.

Can we judge a book by its cover? Especially if the cover is carrying comments by the “who is who” from various professional walks of life.

Being a psychiatrist and a poet, I was enticed to read the book as the title refers to Eros as an overarching theme that takes within its fold the subthemes of desire, disease, delusion, dream and downpour. The five ‘D’s intrigued me and I kept returning to them as if they were the epicenter of an earthquake.

And then there were the twin chairs of the cover photograph - perhaps a symbol of duality, of ‘Eros’ + ‘Text’? Truly, if life could write itself, this is how it may read, not bound by a specific structure, word count or rhyme or reason.

Insights are graded along six parameters while we study psycho pathology, although Eros is where life originates and Thanatos is The Wagon Magazine - April - 2017

99 force of death. Opposites contain each other and there are flashes of dying in the section of disease of the body, explored in skeleton, joints, temperature, fluids, breaths, and blood.

2.

In ‘Magnetizing Dead Bones’, a disturbing portrayal of the Intensive Care Unit and the experience of what may remain even after death, just the clean bones? Interestingly it seems to refer to Magnetic Resonance Imaging, a sort of literal meaning ascribed to scientific jargon. Electrocardiography- “A person in the room can sense electricity, invisible photons”, again ‘ultra-sonography’ is mystified in fleeting allusions to sound waves. There is whispering vulnerability, “What can I create despite this urgency…Nothing really, certainly nothing that is worth any effort….” The body is minimized and life is trivialized: “They say imagination can conquer anything even the body. It isn’t true.” There is a relentless search for meaning even as the body suffers: “The lyrics, if they are meant to, will emerge at the vanishing point”.

Humanizing the near death experience is a strong effort in this flash fiction. The words are profound as they equate creativity to something that lives after death. I was reminded of Bessel Vander Kolk’s book Body Keeps Its Own Scores in the reference to ash, bone ash and the abrupt escape into bone-drafts of metered text. Starch and the nurse trying to induce a lullaby, the power of breathing, and virility of ash are images foretelling life amidst death. The ecosystem of the hospital dominates the disease in this fiction, a hesitation to explore the disease or a story of hope- open ended, it lends itself to interpretations like a poem or a dream.

3.

‘Wishbones, Arias, Memories’—This piece is not the typical flash fiction that starts in the middle. It takes up where the last one left off.

A sense of continuity exists. There is a struggle to construct a narrative about the body -“Order is sanity”, but insanity also has an order that is a systematic deconstruction. Method in the madness is more The Wagon Magazine - April - 2017

100 glaring than the madness. Wishbone is a morbid wish for death but as the author reveals, his mind is annoyingly alert - a predicament when one wishes for swift death with grace. It is difficult to portray a cognitive experience of death as a territory of the body alone and I like the ease with which this effort to search for death unfolds, in work without ambition, TV without colour and skin that belies his own health. I am reminded of reverse alexithymia or a cognitive dissonance of mind and body, as outlined by Pilowsky.

4.

‘Fever Pitch’ is an allusion in the same genre, a scholarly expertise.

The hollowness of these experiences that is abrupt and disappointing like empty rooms full of frantic efforts resulting in images devoid of meanings. Science is repetitively resorted to make sense of sensations in the midst of the vulnerability of the experience. A single line about “aria” as Buddha humanizes the narrative even at the peak of the intellectual discourse. Even as it humanizes the narration, the imagery remains exquisite. The science of survival battles against intentions of the author and someone, an unformed Buddha (perhaps a generous description of a friend or a family member who is not yet stoic enough to deal with illness) is hoarding all the truths.

5.

‘Heavy Water’is another evocative piece- meditations on water, incessant rain, body fluids, tears, intimacy and the ephemeral nature of love. I liked the logical connections of outer reality to the inner reality of emotions, the paradox of water that does not recognize boundaries versus the really close family who seem to be furthest in their understanding or the inability to draw strict boundaries. It is a beautiful water meditation ending up in a heavy heart. And there is intellectualization, a repetitive refuge in the intellect to protect oneself from feeling albeit in the guise of describing the feeling.

6.

The spray of scented chill pierces my lungs first, then comes the The Wagon Magazine - April - 2017

101 slow desperate heaving, the grinding spasm splaying, trying to centrifuge stubborn coves of mucous - whose greenish-yellow viscosity remains more deceptive than quicksand’s subtle death trap.

My face - confined in the transparency of plastic, frosted glass and thin air - regains for a moment the normalcy of breathing.

It is a brief magical world. The oxygen in my blood is in short supply. I feel each and every electron’s charge, spurring my senses.

Dizzy in aerosol hope, I try to free myself of the medicated mask, but the frozen rain that batters my face reminds me of the tentativeness of living. As I survive on borrowed air, I’m grateful to the equation of science, its man-made safety, its curious balance that adds that precious molecule to create the sanctity of ‘O3’ - the holy Brahmanical triad - and the triumph of its peculiar numeric subscript.

My breathing is temporarily back now - electrolysed, perfectly pitched and nebulized- as narrow transparent tubes feed dreams into my wide opaque palate.

The sun’s edges are dark, so are my heart’s. No amount of air will light them up.

‘O’Zone’, as seen above, is a brisk gasp of creativity and that obsession with the magical three and Brahminical superstition folding hands before the equation of Science.

‘Night Ward’, ‘Icicles’ and ‘Photons Graphite, Blood’ move in the predictable grounds of accuracy, colour, latent emotion. Darkness has been shown in a wonderful light of warmth and freedom to be vulnerable. And prose poem as the screaming calm.

7.

‘Wo|Man’- as elaborated in ‘Heather’, ‘Carole’, ‘Feminine Musk’, ‘White’, ‘Gold Squares On Muslin’ and ‘Odissi’, has the scent of a man, the contours of a woman, the eternal fascination of the male with the sensual atlas of feminine hair, clothes, jewels, kohl and the essence of libido as a natural force of nature like salt of the ocean and the grain of sand on the shores. As Tolstoy remarked all happy famiThe Wagon Magazine - April - 2017

102 lies are alike, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way and all healthy desire is alike. Lack of desire or thwarted desire has varied explanations. To me there were flashes of cold reason that were still a screen between the writer and pleasure: The sea smell tries to induce a misplaced sense of romanticism in me. Selfishly, I try to grab on to any illusion of love that comes my way, but my heart can only gather the heavy weight of gloom.

(-‘Gold Squares on Muslin’) In ‘Odissi’ the mood gets philosophical as stone and flesh become one, man and woman become one, heart and head as one, and one is one and one is she — a melting of boundaries, the ecstasy of union.

8.

‘Lines of Desire’ begins by saying it all begins in the mind, a demystifying of male eroticism. It starts with the imagination. The progressing texts get shorter like the breath itself. A delight to the senses encompassing the foreplay, love making as longing, wanting, silence, mingling, hunger and satiation. Here is the piece, ‘Longing’: The very last drop of rain perched on the edge of her navel -the last bead of sweat balanced on the feather of her eyelash - the last long-wet of my kiss on her skin - all these demand more, more, more more wet, more wet - yearning for more rain, fire, desire, moisture - and the cool chill of crystal-water, thirst, saliva, longing, rain.

9.

Gayikaa’r Chithi: Notes from a Singer’s Scoresheet’ is a long cry of nostalgia. The longing for Dhaka is more palpable, translating Bangla to English syllable by syllable. The recipe for poetry as cups of tea, songs, stories, human interactions and endless hints of a muse wearing “shiuli” flowers, looking askance, not aware of herself as a poem to be written. These are themes familiar to the Indian psyche.

Your body scent and strands of long night-kissed hair left on my pillow - broken blouse-buttons on my bed sheet A disengaged lone eyelash, curved, left behind as a question mark The Wagon Magazine - April - 2017

103 What happened? My answers live in your punctuations I particularly liked the above piece ‘Question’-a sort of incompletion or misunderstood intimacy or even forced intimacy? “Broken blouse buttons” can be consensual urgency or “a disengaged lone eyelash” could be a last minute misgiving, a time when it was possible to stop, if answer was found in words. It is thought provoking to know that the morning after is not always a good sleep, with the face turned to a wall, eyes closed like the desire to know her more than what was known by the scent of her hair. But when “Tagore is a witness” to the nights, every night - it is bound to be sensitive. Here is the ‘Shiuli’ piece in its entirety: Shiuli flowers, slow-warmed in your clenched fists, drenched in morning dew, greet me with the scent of your soft palm, fingers and heartstrings.

I weave these tiny flowers, petal by petal, threading their stamen filament by filament, into a delicate garland - inking a love song’s score in handwritten script.

Unknown to me, you wear these florets in your silk-raven hair, and around your slender wrists; singing my new song -Tagore as your witness - tonight, and every night.

10.

‘Delusions’ reflects on immigrant status as a precursor to paranoia. Such an astute observation as it is one of the etiological factors outlined for paranoid psychosis. Permanent resident, resident alien or the other and the marginality is poignantly being explained to the “postcards” that are unanswered and all that remains is philately, another legitimized hobby. The enforced poverty of seized bank accounts, metaphoric dismembering of upper limbs by the executioner Smirnoff defining the spirit of Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, and Seamus Heaney, distils the homelessness. This particular fiction lends voice to the faith lost in a church or a temple or Durga —delusion, a false fixed belief, not culturally shared perhaps is a reaction to an alien culture or by product of culture shock.

It is morning again - time to retire. I put my night gods to sleep.

The Wagon Magazine - April - 2017

104 Another postcard threatens to arrive through the door’s letter-vent.

I am grateful for such meagre company.

But all of a sudden - I am apyretic, apyrous and aqua-cool - I am not at all my own self. It is merely the beginning. I can scent a bloodstained epistle on its way.

(-‘Postcards’) This loneliness flows touching the reader intimately.

11.

‘Downpour’ begins as an inspiration to cover, the weaving of quilt, every square inch of earth denuded. The author is inspired to weave a little piece to protect him from the mood swings of the wind.

Affirmations of self: “I like the unknown”, “I like the mystery the sense of encountering a virgin even though the path may be traversed before.”

A very typical male excitement when feeling the fresh smell of wet earth. “Visual, spontaneous and sure.” The love of illusions haunts the imagery of rain as it provides more space than the exact space for imagination. And, the abiding insight “Strength and dignity comes from the elegance of a trained spine….” All the nuances of rain are captured at several levels of experience and several aspects of geography.

It is bone-dry - I pray for any moisture that might fall from the emaciated skies There is a cloud, just a solitary cloud wafting perilously But it is too far in the distance for any real hope - for rain.

(-‘Drought, Cloud’) The book ends with the piece, ‘Knowledge, Need’. It is a thirst for more, because it is not about knowledge, it is about the interpretations of a sensitive mind, of the very essence of human existence: “The more you know, the less you need’ but that is not true at all for thirst, water, or rain.”

Sudeep Sen, EroText

Vintage: Penguin Random House.2016.

240pp.

Rs.399 (hb).

The Wagon Magazine - April - 2017

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REVIWERS:

Christopher Barnes

A Northern Arts writers’ award winner in the year 1998, Poet Christopher Barnes reads for Proudwords lesbian and gay writing festival and partake in workshops. His collections LOVEBITES got published in the year 2005. He made a digital film with artists Kate Sweeney and Julie Ballands at a film making workshop called ‘Out Of The Picture’ which was shown at the festival party for Proudwords. He worked on a collaborative art and literature project called ‘How Gay Are Your Genes’, facilitated by Lisa Mathews (poet) which was exhibited at The Hatton Gallery, Newcastle University, including a film piece by the artist Predrag Pajdic.

Vyjayanthi Srinivasa Dr Vyjayanthi Srinivasa, M.B.B.S., M.D.

Psychiatry has published poetry in anthologies “Peacock’s cry” Unison publishers -2006, “I, me and my self ” Unison Publishers -2009, “Silent Flute” Kendra Sahitya Akademi - 2013, and The Wagon magazine -2016. She had participated in South and north Eastern poetry festival held by the Sahitya Akedmi in Coimbatore -2012

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Published by Vel.Kathiravan, K G E TEAM, Chennai, India - 600024 Printed by Print Process, Chennai- 600014 / Phone: +949176991885 The Wagon Magazine - April - 2017