The Lampeter Review - Issue 8

tlr The Lampeter Review

JOURNAL of the Lampeter Creative Writing Centre www.lampeter-review.com

issue 8/ NOVEMBER 2013

Jekwu Anyaegbuna Bonnie Bolling Iain Britton Stephen Harrod Buhner Freedom Chevalier Jim Conwell Elsie Dafis Frank Dullaghan Gillian Eaton Tristan Eaton Brenda Hillman Jane Hirshfield Carly Holmes Rosalind Hudis Mike Jenkins Fred Johnston John Lavin James Luchte Jane Martin G. D. McFetridge Michael McGlade Oliver Michell Kathy Miles Eslam Mosbah Jeri Onitskansky Bethany Rivers Nigel Rodenhurst David Rains Wallace Lew Welch

THE LAMPETER REVIEW The online magazine of the Lampeter Creative Writing Centre www.lampeter-review.com | info@lampeter-review.com

MANAGING EDITOR: Dic Edwards GUEST EDITOR: Tony Kendrew ASSOCIATE EDITOR: Rosalind Hudis ADVISORY EDITOR: John Lavin DESIGNED by: Constantinos Andronis (info@spectrum-design.gr) COVER PAGE IMAGE: Tristan Eaton (who also painted the mural, Liberty, New York City, 2013)

Š Respective authors. All rights reserved. None of the material published here may be used elsewhere without the written permission of the author. You may print one copy of any material on this website for your own personal, non-commercial use.

THE 2014 DYLAN THOMAS INTERNATIONAL SUMMER SCHOOL Internationally renowned poet Menna Elfyn will host a celebration of the centenary of Dylan Thomas with two weeks dedicated to his life and work. The Summer School will be held at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David’s Lampeter Campus and locations throughout West Wales from 25th May to 7th June 2014. Full programme and application is available at http://www.tsd.ac.uk/.

CREATIVE WRITING UNDERGRADUATE COURSES AT TSD Based on the Lampeter Campus, the Creative Writing BAs build on a fifteen year tradition of teaching Creative Writing at this location. The courses offer modules in all the creative genres and are underpinned by an element of English Literature.

MA CREATIVE WRITING & MA CREATIVE & SCRIPT WRITING The Creative Writing Degree offers two pathways. It can be taken as a one year taught course with a further writing-up year, or part-time over four years. Modules are offered in all creative genres.

BA and MA courses are taught by a staff of prominent, internationally renowned writers and lecturers, including poets Menna Elfyn and Samantha Wynne-Rydderch, poet and playwright Dic Edwards and poet, author and critic, Jeni Williams.

PhD IN CREATIVE WRITING Trinity St David’s Creative Writing PhD has built up a reputation as one of Wales’ doctoral programmes. The course supervisors are all published creative writers with expertise in most areas of prose, poetry, fiction, children’s fiction, narrative non-fiction and scriptwriting.

The PhD in Creative Writing combines a proposed manuscript (fiction, poems or playscript) with an element of supporting or contextualising research. The proposed manuscript will be volume length (the natural length of a book, whether poetry or story collection, novel, or playscript). The supporting research will be roughly 25% of the 100,000 word submission.

Applications to: d.edwards@tsd.ac.uk

Table of Contents

-8Editorial / Tony Kendrew -14A Tribute to Seamus Heaney / John Lavin -19Supernova / Freedom Chevalier -23Three Poems / Jane Hirshfield -25Dream Walkers / G. D. McFetridge -33Three Poems / Frank Dullaghan -36The Parable of Miniskirts / Jekwu Anyaegbuna -45Icarus of Trafalgar Square / James Luchte -47Two Poems / Fred Johnston

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-49Status: Emo / Eslam Mosbah -55Two Poems / Gillian Eaton -57Blackberries / Iain Britton -61Major Kovalyov / Oliver Michell -68Five Poems / Jeri Onitskansky -75Force Majeure: Paintings and Video Stills / Jane Martin -84Fourth Floor Walk-up / Michael McGlade -91On a Balcony with the Lunch Poems / Bonnie Bolling -94My Afternoon with Mr Kleeman / Nigel Rodenhurst -100Three Poems / Mike Jenkins -104A Trickster Tale / David Rains Wallace -117Four Poems / Lew Welch -121Two Poems / Brenda Hillman -123Growing Pains / Carly Holmes

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-127In Kilquire / Jim Conwell -129To See the Shimmer of Infinity in the Face of the Other / Stephen Harrod Buhner -145The Gift / Kathy Miles -146Reflection / Bethany Rivers -147He makes me eight foot tall / Elsie Dafis -149The Atomist in Exile / Rosalind Hudis -152Contributors

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Editorial

We open this issue of The Lampeter Review with a tribute by John Lavin to the poet Seamus Heaney, who died in August. It confirms through masterful story and quotation what we always knew but may not have articulated - that his unassuming warmth and honesty were the unchanging base notes beneath the music of his words.

By the time we go online the winner of the 2013 Man Booker Prize will be known. Some of the comments about its short list apply equally to the prose and poetry you will read here – striking because of its global range, showing the English language novel to be a form of world literature.

In September the prize announced that it was abandoning the constraints of geography and national boundaries to become a truly international prize. The most important effect of this decision is to include writers from the United States.

This issue of The Lampeter Review features a number of American writers. They join others from Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, New Zealand and Nigeria. We also reprint, in translation, a chapter of a novel from Egypt.

To be guest editor of The Lampeter Review was to be reminded of the spread of the English language and the great range of its expression – a diversity also reflected in the Creative Writing Department at Trinity Saint David, where there has been a planetwide coming and going for many years.

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The Man Booker decision may have been market driven, but its consequences are likely to be far broader. And even as small a selection of prose as we present here can give us a sense of what the globalization of English literature might begin to look like. One question: Will there be – are there - regional styles and differences?

The English-speaking countries of the New World were the first to free themselves from the straightjacket of the language of the mother country, exemplified by Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams. That breakaway spirit continued through the last century, especially in the United States, producing a freedom and expansiveness of style and subject matter that continues to define it.

And while a deep look at what distinguishes Old World writers from their transatlantic cousins takes volumes, the writing included here supports some generalisations. North America’s pioneering, exploring spirit has been commented on for centuries, its literature often characterised as an individual struggle against overwhelming odds. Old World literature is more often about resolving relationships and societal conflicts.

And one simple fact persists long after the New World pioneers reached the Pacific and ran out of land. In North America there are more people - more writers - living close to vast wilderness areas, which they can access in minutes. With one or two exceptions this is true of every city west of the Mississippi, and many on the more densely populated east coast. In the Old World, village and city life, and centrally-produced images from advertising and the media, dominate the culture, and it’s harder to dissociate from them.

Europeans, viewing the New World through the lens of Hollywood, may be reluctant to admit it, but their literature is even more media-driven.

A short drive from the suburbs of Seattle, Los Angeles, Denver or Vancouver, attention can as easily fall on events in the natural world as on products or personalities or downtown happenings – whether in main street or through the contemporary windows on the world. From attention arises writing.

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David Rains Wallace sets the tone. He is based in the San Francisco Bay Area and is the author of many books rooted in natural history and its conservation. The piece we are featuring is a meditation on the Beat poet Lew Welch, an exemplar of the American tradition of writing that marries the inner and outer worlds – letting images of the natural world reflect mood and meaning.

City Lights Books in San Francisco published a new and expanded edition of Lew Welch’s poems last year and have given us permission to reprint a selection of them. They reveal a quality not always associated with the beat generation – they are charming.

Another American deeply influenced by observations of the natural world is Stephen Harrod Buhner. He is best known for his books about plant life and medicine. We featured an influential piece by him in Issue 3 of The Lampeter Review and were delighted when he agreed to follow up with an edited extract from his upcoming book Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm. It’s a beautifully written and impassioned appeal to all of us to break free from the conventions that our culture allows us to speak of, or write about.

Of the many unsolicited submissions we received, we chose one poet to spotlight: Jeri Onitskansky. We were struck by the variety and consistency of her work and decided to include five of her poems.

They effortlessly draw us into their world, and reward repeated reading. Significantly she also reflects the transatlantic nature of this issue – born in the USA, living in London.

However, we start with a self-styled “pop culture themed fiction piece” from a Canadian writer and actress, Freedom Chevalier presenting the exception to prove the “natural world” argument just made. Titled Supernova it is light, fun and brilliantly written.

We stay in North America for the second short story: Dream Walkers by G. D. McFetridge. It’s a subtle, unassuming tale that meanders along against the backdrop of the Montana landscape.

Jekwu Anyaegbuna’s short story is a striking contrast to the two North American stories. The Parable of Miniskirts takes us into the [ 10 ]

world of colonial Nigeria through images and language that vividly evoke the time and place, and leaves us pondering where story ends and parable begins.

Eslam Mosbah is in his late twenties and lives in Egypt. We were immediately struck by the terrific energy of his novel Status: Emo. Written originally in Arabic, this translation was published in Egypt in February this year. With enormous zest and flair it takes us, via the buzz of social media, into the mind of the young Egypt, hinting at the revolution that dominated the headlines earlier this year. We are very pleased to be able to introduce you to the world of Emo in this one breathless chapter.

The two other fiction pieces in this issue come from closer to home, though Michael McGlade’s Fourth Floor Walk-Up takes its style from American crime fiction. Carly Holmes’ short story Growing Pains manages to combine a sensitive portrait of a boy’s sexual awakening and the cruelty of brutal honesty.

As a masterful example of the craft of screenwriting we feature the silent screenplay Major Kovalyov by Oliver Michell. There have been many interpretations and adaptations of Gogol’s The Nose over the last century and a half. Here we have a wonderfully light and witty version that jumps off the screen even before it has made it onto it.

Jane Martin’s images form the issue’s centerpiece. Many of them are paintings from her series titled Force Majeure. They are based on images of the tornado, whose devastating effects are a recurring North American experience and made headline news again in May this year. The selection combines these paintings with manipulated video stills, making a striking visual and verbal connection between the meteorological force majeure and the timeless power and influence of the female form.

For this issue we welcome to our pages no less than four women poets living in the United States. Two of them are based on the West Coast and their work has been admired by lovers of poetry for more than two decades: Jane Hirshfield and Brenda Hillman.

Bonnie Bolling’s first collection of poems won the Liam Rector [ 11 ]

Prize in 2011; Gillian Eaton is better known as an actress and director, and brings to her poetry the sensitivity of years engaged in communicating the spoken word. Readers curious about the choice of this issue’s cover photo will find a clue in her second poem.

Further contributing to the international scope of this issue we feature two poets who represent their expatriate communities in the UK. Iain Britton is from New Zealand. His beautifully constructed poem blackberries seduces us with its repeated rhythms and unexpected line breaks to read and reread, to follow where the juice flows. James Luchte has lived and taught in the UK for years. His Icarus of Trafalgar Square achieves compulsion with a rhythmic energy that carries us on to the final crash, and the hint of its aftermath.

The fourth of the non-fiction pieces we are featuring in this issue is Nigel Rodenhurst’s My Afternoon with Mr Kleeman. It is a fascinating account of how the author finally satisfies his long-held suspicion of what ails Holden Caulfield in J. D. Salinger’s classic The Catcher in the Rye – something that has not been explored in sixty years of literary criticism.

Ireland and its diaspora continues to be a rich source of good writing for The Lampeter Review. This is especially true of poetry. In this issue we have Irish poets Fred Johnston and Frank Dullaghan, and London-based Jim Conwell. Their contributions are examples of the continuing tradition of unselfconscious literacy and precocious intelligence in contemporary Irish writing.

Mike Jenkins has been living and working in the valleys of South Wales for more than three decades, documenting the changes in his home town of Merthyr Tydfil in prose and poetry. The three poems we print attest to his love affair with his place and his success in conveying dialect in poetry.

Even nearer home, we celebrate the remarkable achievements of local writers, some associated with the Creative Writing Programme at Trinity Saint David, some who have found success further afield, and some who have yet to do so. There are poems [ 12 ]

by Bethany Rivers and Kathy Miles, and the issue ends with Elsie Dafis’ concise and remarkable exploration of Picasso’s painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, He makes me eight foot tall – and a poem

by Rosalind Hudis, The Atomist in Exile. Rosalind Hudis’ seemingly effortless craft and ability to compost her poems with layers of meaning continue to be an inspiration to many of us, and is a fitting conclusion to Issue 8.

Many thanks to all our contributors and readers for making this issue possible.

Tony Kendrew, Guest Editor

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A Tribute to Seamus Heaney John Lavin

To know and not to speak.

In that way one forgets.

What is pronounced strengthens itself.

What is not pronounced tends to non-existence. ~ Czeslaw Milosz

It seems strange and even barely conceivable that, a mere few months on from writing in these pages about the death of Dennis O’Driscoll, I now find myself taking up a ‘squat pen’ to write about his friend and collaborator, Seamus Heaney. In the space of eight months we have been robbed of two of our greatest poets, and in Heaney, of course, an artist whose reach extended far beyond the parameters traditionally expected of the contemporary poet. In the month or so since his death we have heard everyone from Bono to Bill Clinton talk about the influence this gentle, farseeing man has had not just on the cultural life of the world but on its political life also. His non-combative, almost monk-like contemplation of words and actions and of their roots, somehow – hopestirringly - became both enormously popular across the world while at the same time acting as an agent for change in Northern Ireland.

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But it was this very contemplation of the word, this very dedication to his craft, which was at one time a cause of consternation among his fellow Catholics in Northern Ireland. When his poem ‘Requiem for the Croppies’, concerning the dead Irish rebels of 1798, was turned into a Nationalist folk song, he ceased to read it. This was not only because he feared his art would become pigeonholed but also because while he wrote that ‘his passport was green,’ he saw the wrong and futility on both sides of the conflict. He refused to look at things in the one dimensional even if, at that time, it must have been very hard not to. His was always an invocation to not behave in the heat of the moment. A plea, you might say, for everyone to behave like adults. On the one hand he knew the plea would fall on deaf ears, but on the other hand he rightly felt it was a seed sown that would manifest itself in later years.

There were also stirrings of discontent amongst his peers when he quit Belfast for Glanmore Cottage in Wicklow, where he wrote many of his greatest poems. It was this move which, as he had suspected, gave him the freedom and distance to fully trust in and find himself as a poet. And it was from here, with the benefit of that freedom and distance, that he wrote the poems of North, arguably his most famous work and the one which most directly addressed the Northern Ireland conflict. (As though to dramatise this benefit of distance, the work was a huge critical success more or less everywhere except Ulster.)

Heaney described his feeling when moving to Wicklow with his beloved wife, Marie, as being that of ‘let joy be abundant,’ and certainly the sense of creative engagement and promise can be fully felt in the ‘Glanmore Sonnets’ he wrote once ensconced in the small cottage, where he encountered: Sensings, mountings from the hiding places, Words entering almost the sense of touch, Ferreting themselves out of their dark hutch – ‘These things are not secrets but mysteries,’…

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And where, in a key phrase for Heaney, he desired to plough ‘vowels’: …into other, opened ground Each verse returning like a plough turned round.

Like Yeats and his Tower in Ballylee, Heaney seemed to need a symbol of the creative process - an actual physical manifestation of a threshold, of ‘opened ground’ – in order to commune directly with the untapped voices he wanted to give a platform to. (And unlike Yeats he actually lived there, for five full years from 197277 as a tenant, and then in 1988 buying it when it went up for sale, describing it as the locus amoenus and saying that ‘Nothing since we left Wicklow was more important in my writing life.’)

While, from this time onwards, Yeats bore an increasing influence on him – culminating in the crediting of ‘marvels’ that defined 1991’s Seeing Things – the great poet had appeared a grand and outlandish figure to the young Heaney, as far removed from a Roman Catholic farmer’s son as it was possible to be. It was only once Heaney felt that they were on a level playing field of sorts, that is, only once he genuinely believed himself to be a worthy poet that Heaney began to relate to the full force of the Yeatsian delivery. In truth, however, he always felt more kinship with that other genius of twentieth century poetry, Czeslaw Milosz.

Contrasting the great Polish poet with Yeats and his ‘need to make marks in the cultural landscape,’ Heaney says that, …when you think of Milosz you think of the mark made on him by event rather than any need on his part to make an event of himself. He undergoes things which turn into memories and then into origins.

It is difficult to read this without thinking of Heaney’s own approach to the work of a poet, and indeed, without thinking of his own legacy. During the conversations in Stepping Stones (the essential collection of interviews he gave to Dennis O’Driscoll), from which the above quote comes, Heaney describes Milosz’s remarks about being: [ 16 ]

stretched between contemplation of a motionless point and the command to participate actively in history as having been a ‘mantra’ to him. ‘They weren’t a solution,’ said Heaney, ‘but they described exactly the nature of the assignment.’

All of which puts me in mind of the way that Heaney began his early essay ‘Mossbawn’, in which he describes his childhood home: I would begin with the word omphalos, meaning the word navel, and hence the stone that marked the centre of the world, and repeat it, omphalos, omphalos, omphalos, until its blunt and falling music became the music of someone pumping water outside our front door. It is Co. Derry in the early 1940s.

Here we see his creative process in action, concentrating on that sound, that ‘music’ as he puts it, of water being pumped, until the reader is transported to that moment in time he seeks to evoke.

It is the spirit of Joyce, of course, that is never far away, with his invocation to ‘turn base matter into gold.’ (And let us not forget that it was Ulysses rather than The Tower or The Captive Mind that Heaney chose to take with him to his isolation on Desert Island Discs.) It is the same urge that had Joyce compare a Dublin advertising canvasser to Ulysses, and his wife to Penelope. When talking to Dennis O’Driscoll about the use of dialect that many of his readers would not be familiar with, Heaney said that: …for me the point about dialect or hearth language is its complete propriety to the speaker and his or her voice and place. What justifies it and gives it original juice and joy is intimacy and inevitability. I’ve always confined myself to words I myself could have spoken, words I’d be able to use with familiarity in certain companies. I’ve got this thick-witted obstinacy about doing otherwise. It’s the corollary of my readiness to set down the name of a townland like Broagh as if it were as familiar as the town of Troy.

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And it is, in part, this recognition of the democracy of the extraordinary that both made and will continue to make Heaney’s work so popular. He was a farmer’s son who met and was read and praised by the leaders of the world. But it was always on his own terms. He never compromised his art and always cherished empathy and self-knowledge. He was always at work to ‘set the darkness echoing.’

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Supernova Freedom Chevalier

I am a star. Really I am. I’m bona fide. Well, I’ve signed my name in cement. That counts for something, right? I stepped in it, too. It ruins your shoes. They don’t tell you that.

I saw myself on Entertainment Tonight, tonight. Mary Hart said I look good in green. I like blue. Never wear it. Mary Hart doesn’t like me in blue.

I’m in town for the Film Festival. You don’t believe me?

Check that paper on the table. Don’t spill the Starbucks. It cost more than my condo.

“Premiere of Utopia draws cast to Toronto International Film Festival”

That’s me on the left. Excuse me a moment.

“All my love, Sam” My biggest fan? Thank you.

Sorry. It happens all the time. You get used to it, in a way.

Let’s go inside, it’s getting too loud. I’m in there – the Four Seasons.

Along with everyone else.

Excuse me. Please. Let us through. They don’t like to move.

Afraid they’ll lose their position. I hate revolving doors. I always feel like I’m going to miss the space I should get out.

They all look like secret service, don’t they? See that guy?

He works for Jennifer Aniston. I think he’s former French foreign legion. At least that’s what Shirley MacLaine said.

No, I don’t know Shirley MacLaine. I saw it on Entertainment Tonight.

The elevator is around the corner. Careful. Reporters. They’re everywhere.

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3rd floor. I don’t like higher floors. In case I need to get out quickly. I can run down three floors. I tried running down 18 floors before. My legs cramped before I got to the lobby.

Excuse me again. Sure I’ll sign your book. “To my biggest fan.”

Another one. She was my biggest fan, too. They all say that.

Fan is short for fanatic.

I told you I was a star. Not impressed? Me, neither. It changes things. I can go into any store here on Yorkville and be famous. I can’t go into Wal-Mart anymore.

Sometimes I wonder what happens to all those little scraps of paper I sign. Do people really keep them? Some sell them on eBay. Sometimes I buy them back.

They want to have their picture taken with me, too. I wonder if it’s worth standing outside for hours to get the photo. I hate having my picture taken.

I guess I’m in a bunch of family photograph albums. Years from now they’ll wonder … who’s the blonde? I’ll be anonymous in two generations.

Sometimes they even hand me their babies to kiss. Like the pope. I don’t like babies, afraid I’ll break them. They know it.

Always cry when I pick them up.

Do you drive? I don’t drive in the city. They follow me. Some of the lenses are longer than a gun. Last year a guy with a camera drove me off the road. It was scary. He did stop though, he took my picture. He didn’t call an ambulance. I had to flag down a rig. My cell phone was wrecked. My car too. Insurance went through the roof. I need to keep making movies just to pay for the premiums.

It’s right here. Room 368.

I remember when rooms had keys not cards. Greater security, they say. I still prefer keys. I like how keys feel in your hand. They make you feel as if you belong here; like it’s really your room. I wonder how many other doors this card could open. They try my room at night. I don’t sleep much.

I’m hungry. You hungry? I’ve got a little table in there. It’s big enough for two trays. I’ve memorized the menu. The same dishes every day get dull. But it’s fresh.

Are you tired? I find it very tiring, to always have to be smiling. [ 20 ]

I’ll call room service then. You look healthy. Vegetarian? You should try it. It’s great for the skin. Grilled tofu. Again.

Actually, I’m not that hungry. I’ll order for you, though.

Not hungry either, huh?

Oh, can I show you a picture? Thanks.

My dog, Highway. She’s 5, maybe. A German Shepherd. She looks good, doesn’t she? Look how long her tongue is. It always hangs out like that, when she’s happy. I’ve only had her a few months. I found her on the interstate. She’d been hit by a car, or thrown from one. No one was stopping. I made the driver stop.

“Blood on the seats. Blood on the seats!” He just kept saying that over and over. Fidel wouldn’t have cared. He would have stopped.

He has three Jack Russells.

I got so mad – I never get that mad. I screamed at him.

I AM A BIG STAR!! STOP THE FUCKING LIMO!!!

He stopped.

I think I frightened him. I don’t like to frighten people.

He wouldn’t help. Fidel would have given me his coat.

She just looked at me. She didn’t trust me, so, I asked … Can I help you? She let me. She didn’t know I’m famous. She doesn’t watch many movies.

She gets confused if they show a clip from my films on the television. She sleeps by the TV when I’m not at home. When I’m home she sleeps in my bed. I had to upgrade to a king-sized. She likes to stretch out.

I hired a live-in housekeeper. Matilda loves animals but she doesn’t have a green card. I interviewed housekeepers who had green cards. They wanted to work for a big star. Matilda doesn’t watch much television, she works too hard. She doesn’t speak much English.

Matilda’s daughter Rosa lives with us. She’s seven. In grade three. Here’s her picture. Isn’t she pretty? And she’s very smart … smarter than me, sometimes.

She doesn’t tell anyone I’m famous. She’s embarrassed. I painted her room pink, for her birthday. She likes pink. And Hello Kitty.

Highway and Rosa play in the backyard together. I put up a tall black fence around the place, you can’t see over it.

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Rosa has a play at school next weekend. I want to see it. If I went, no one would watch the children.

I guess I should let you go. Do you have other appointments?

No, I’m not surprised you’re busy. You’re very pretty. How much do I owe you?

Oh … But what about … you’ll get in trouble, won’t you?

You work for yourself? It’s hard to run a business.

Rosa would like you. She wants to be pretty when she grows up. She doesn’t like her dark colors. “But everyone in Hollywood is blonde.” I should dye my hair dark.

Can I give you money for dinner at least? I don’t remember someone not wanting something, before. Everybody always wants something. My name. My face. My likeness. Nothing? Wow.

I guess you do have to go. You could come back sometime, if you wanted. We could pretend, if you ever get to LA. Oh … Yeah, you’re right.

Goodbye, then and Thank you. I mean that.

Room service

Hey Jeff? … Nothing much. You busy with the festival crowd? Need any help? Oh … yeah.

What time do you get off? Great! I’ll have the chessboard set up. I should warn you. I’ve spent the morning reading up on opening moves. I might just win this time.

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Three Poems Jane Hirshfield

A Well Runs Out Of Thirst A well runs out of thirst the way time runs out of a week, the way a country runs out of its alphabet or a tree runs out of its height.

The way a brown pelican runs out of anchovy-glitter at darkfall.

A strange collusion, the way a year runs out of its days but turns into another, the way a cotton towel’s compact with pot and plate seems to run out of dryness but in a few minutes finds more.

A person comes into the kitchen to dry the hands, the face, to stand on the lip of a question.

Around the face, the hands, behind the shoulders, yeasts, mountains, mosses multiply answers.

There are questions that never run out of questions, answers that don’t exhaust answer.

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Take this question the person stands asking: a gate rusting open.

Yes stands on its left, no on its right, two big planets of unpainted silence.

A Well Runs Out of Thirst first appeared in Five Points.

Quartz Clock The ideas of a physicist can be turned into useful objects: a rocket, a quartz clock, a microwave oven for cooking.

The ideas of poets turn into only themselves, as the hands of the clock do, or the face of a person.

It changes, but only more into the person.

Mop Without Stick I am on my knees again, mop without stick, over old fir trees turned into flooring.

A thought stood once in the middle, near the cookstove, left heel and right heel.

Left hand and right hand, I wash around it.

Thought without handle, thought without hands, without lemons or Serengeti.

One breath, another, one corner of cotton in water wets the whole cloth.

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Dream Walkers G.D. McFetridge

I would prefer to believe that moment in the library was the instant when the distance between us began to diminish. Although we weren’t completely in love, I’d also like to believe that the months that followed were a honeymoon, in sort of an oblique conception.

Together we explored Montana’s Bitterroot Valley and Mountains and met new people, some of whom I still get postcards from to this day. We found a woman named Anna-Lee who sold freshly caught and smoked salmon in a little logging town called Darby, and a bearded mountain man who sold deer steaks from an ice chest in the back of his pick-up truck. Some evenings we’d walk the banks of the Bitterroot River or if it was earlier in the day, we might drive up Highway 12 to the Lolo Pass, where Lewis and Clark had traveled two centuries ago. We bought a throwaway camera with which to document our life together, and I took pictures of Julia posed in front of the sign that said: WELCOME TO IDAHO. She wanted to send them to her younger sister in New York City. Julia knew how to pose for a photograph.

Then we drove across the Bitterroot Valley towards the Sapphire Mountains with the rain getting a little worse, the flooded creeks rising and more intense, but it wasn’t that scary, not like when a bridge washes out and you find yourself driving and the next minute gasping for breath in roiling floodwaters. That was the great thing about taking off for three weeks, the way time reconfigured itself and that you couldn’t keep from comparing any given moment with what your life had been during the grind that preceded the three weeks.

We made our way down through another valley that was much smaller, whose name I don’t recall, and we saw how the creek was [ 25 ]

ripping against its banks and there were places where the water was washing up over the road and the reddish-brown mud looked like heavy maple syrup. Julia was afraid. I assured her that during my years in the Coast Guard I’d seen dangers that were much greater than flooding creeks. She smiled but remained quiet. Giving me tentative looks.

Somewhere in the midst of these days tumbling inertly into longer stretches, we found one of the most beautiful hiking trails. It had an Indian name, one that’s difficult to pronounce, and in the romance languages would probably sound ugly and hard, but in German or English sounded bold and guttural. And for some reason the sound of it got me to thinking about my younger years when I lived in San Francisco. Street hustlers and prostitutes and dealers were all attached to my old neighborhood. Most of them were acquainted, either by chance or the conspiracies of their work.

My upstairs neighbor, Louie, had hustlers sleeping in the doorway of his flat, some of them young, teenagers even who wore faded jeans and ragged shirts and had bling and piercings and whose purple and green hair likely had lice. But these kids — I’m calling them kids because that’s how they appeared to me — were hustling at the low end of the marketplace. They’d do whatever anyone wanted for the right price, and that price was of course very negotiable depending on how long it had been since they’d had whatever drug it was they were strung out on. In Louie’s view they were all just garbage, knuckleheads, crack heads, junkies, tweakers, call them whatever because really what they were, were ghosts inhabiting deteriorating bodies. Middle aged at twenty, broken, clogged, infected, entrapped and devoured by life. Louie deserted San Fran the same year that I did. We stayed in touch by phone and crossed paths occasionally. Louie always lived on the ragged edge.

Julia wore a blue-and-yellow-stripped skirt that hung well above her knees, expensive running shoes with pink laces, and a blouse that was faded blue with flower patterns in yellow and rose. Her fingernails were strawberry. She was of average height with delicate hands, nice skin that tanned well, but her waist was not narrow although her hips and butt were voluptuous. Her hair was wavy and shoulder length and parted to one side. She was wearing [ 26 ]

large sunglasses with a metallic-blue tint to them, and was carrying a nylon daypack that hung from her shoulder by a long strap with a water bottle poking out of it. She walked with womanly grace and a little swish to that wonderful butt. Watching her butt as she walked away from me was always a turn-on. Julia was a sexy woman and she liked having sex. Or at least she was very good at pretending she liked it. Sex always had overtones, political overtones in a manner of speaking. A method by which one person controls another. With most women I found it hard to tell the difference between fake and real, unless of course they got lost in the part and overplayed the role.

When Louie moved to Montana I’m sure he would have liked to have said he was clean from drugs. He would have liked to visit his father and mother in Chicago. He would have liked not to have a beat up car trailing a thin cloud of blue-gray smoke whenever he accelerated. He would have liked not to have his cat shit on the linoleum floor in the bathroom.

Yet after a while he didn’t even care whether or not he got clean. Because getting clean required an effort he no longer cared to engage. He was tired of losing the battle. Someone might say in an offhanded moment: Shit … my life is up a blind street and feels like it’s coming to an end almost, but if you want the truth then don’t fucking patronize me. Don’t keep my inventory. Eventually Louie’s resolve and subsequent lack of it went the way of most other hopeless resolutions. Failure is a matter of style and not merely bad luck. Not just being star-crossed and branded in the womb.

So he was at Julia’s apartment early one evening when I knocked on the door. He was with a Crow Indian girl — Crow mixed with Puerto Rican — whose name was Crystal and Crystal was a looker with a figure but not bright and not socially skilled except within the confines of her own closed world. She was also thin from too much speed. From her Puerto Rican mother she’d had a heavy dose of Catholicism thrown into the mix and she liked to wear colored beads. Crystal suffered complexities in a basic sort of way, and she probably had other men but it didn’t seem to bother Louie.

They’d taken a cab up from Somerset Street and I had the feeling Julia was buying coke from him although she wouldn’t have wanted me to know that and neither would he. Explaining the ins and outs [ 27 ]

of this particular rub is beyond simple words … so I’ll leave it at that.

So Louie and Crystal were sitting on the couch and she was giving him a look as if to say, what’s the matter with you? Because of course I was supposed to be somewhere else and where that somewhere was wouldn’t matter as long as I wasn’t actually there in the midst of the coke deal.

Then it was morning all over again and the scene kept playing itself in my mind — Louie stuttering and excusing himself to the bathroom, Crystal giving me unexpected looks, the wind outside punching against the eaves and siding. The evening before, after dining on marinara sauce with mushrooms and Cajun-style sausage over pasta, during the interval between dinner and what comes after dinner — the dishwasher churning in the background — we treated ourselves to another large glass of Merlot. Julia without exception became amorous after three glasses of wine.

By appearance, sex for her was closer in essence to a drug than emotional and physical intimacy between two people. In fact, I really don’t think she understood the basic elements of intimacy.

One time she said to me, “Let’s hump.” That was it. Maybe in certain ways Julia was more like a man than she was a woman — if such a proposition can have any validity. Although once the carnal act had begun, it was as if she went under a spell. Like a junkie taking a fix.

After our big argument about the coke deal, I spent the entire day at the movies. The first show was at noon and I paced around the parking lot at the mall until the movie complex opened.

Once inside I disappeared into the anonymous darkness of the room.

The screen lit up, like magic, and images began flashing. The sound system made the floor vibrate, and there was the smell of buttered popcorn and cheap perfume and aftershave. And the guy sitting next to me had obviously smoked some odiferous weed before buying his ticket.

After watching three movies I left. And that was when I felt the pressure in the center of my chest and a weird pulsing up and down my left arm. At first, I couldn’t believe it. Oh shit I’m having a heart attack — but I’m too young to have a heart attack. Nobody’s too young if you have bad genetics and bad luck. I was shaking my head, very slowly, as if I were ringing a bell, as if my eyes were [ 28 ]

clappers and my skull was the brass.

On the way out I opened my cell phone and called Julia to tell her I was dying and to let her know I loved her, but all I heard was the recorded voice and so I hung up without leaving a message.

Then I went looking for a bar where I could get drinks and bar snacks and have my heart attack in a place less anonymous. Dying couldn’t be all that hard. It’s just a brief passage between states.

Like having the flu compressed into five minutes. Do you think?

I don’t need tell you about the grimness of the next few weeks, the way tension built between Julia and myself, added to the whole mess the IRS wanted to know about my last three years.

I had words with Louie in a private meeting at a bar and he, of course, tried discreetly at first to navigate around my anger and accusations. Eventually he said drugs had gotten him out of the dregs of blue-collar poverty, economically speaking, and that for people such as him there were no futures in serving fast food and that something as abstract as getting into an Ivy League university was a matter made for psychotic dreaming. No one from the old neighborhood has ever graduated junior college.

In other words, he wasn’t apologizing for his livelihood. Although he didn’t mean to cross me in his dealings with Julia but instead suggested I should come to grips with what kind of person she was behind the carefully managed image. A polite way of saying that I didn’t know who she was and was living a lie in my own capacity.

Louie was smarter than most people thought, but he exercised a different brand of intelligence. Street smart and crafty. Not Ivy League, suffice to say. I bought him a drink and we left it at that.

The next morning Crystal had split and had stolen the only valuable things in his shabby apartment.

Somehow, without knowing it, I had turned my world into an exchange of confessions — those little ways Julia and I had hurt each other. But something happened when the apartment was dark.

We were able to talk to each other again.

One Sunday after supper we sat together on the couch, and once it was dark I began kissing Julia uneasily on her cheek and then her lips. She closed her eyes. I kept mine open. Later we tiptoed to the bedroom and made love with a strange desperation and [ 29 ]

passion, the sort of atmosphere we had both forgotten. She wept without tears and whispered my name and traced my lips with her fingertips in the dark. Lost in the afterglow, I wondered what we would say to each other in the morning, and would either of us mention Louie.

In my own interior world I had signed a non-confrontation contract — if you see my point — because needless-to-say bringing up the drug aspect of things would ruin not only any particular moment but also probably put the sex at risk. So, in a word, I was willing to compromise because Julia’s body meant more to me than whatever mercurial principles I believed I held. The very thought of losing her would make my heart begin to pound. I didn’t want to have to pretend to be happy anymore, I didn’t want words ruling my universe. But now it was Julia’s turn to speak. There was something she’d sworn she would never tell me until the time was right, and for many weeks she’d done her best to block it from her mind. Before the ultrasound she had asked the doctor not to tell her the gender of the child, and he had agreed. She wanted it to come as a surprise, along with everything else. Now she was ready to tell me.

And to put it bluntly, I was the father of an embryo growing in a womb periodically bombarded by cocaine and alcohol.

That’s when the safety net of my power of denial fell through the floor. My addiction to her body had allegedly created another life, a life that would no doubt be fraught with difficulties greater than any I had ever known. My conception was in a womb saturated with nicotine and caffeine. Cocaine was another step up the food chain of personal disaster.

That day, the day of the collapse — I guess I’d have to call it a collapse — I’d met Julia for a late lunch at a restaurant in town not far from the university. The sun was ducking in and out of big dark-bellied clouds, the light fading and then reigniting and then fading again. The restaurant was one of her favorites and she ordered a glass of wine as soon as the waiter arrived. It tried not to give her a look. When the waiter served our food, she ordered another glass of wine and after several minutes excused herself to the ladies room. She gave me an uncomplicated smile, a smile that brightened her eyes and seemed to acknowledge the day, the place, the sun fading in and out, and the gentle wind rustling the leaves [ 30 ]

of the maple trees. I watched her walk away swaying over her heels like a model making an entrance onto the runway at a New York fashion show. I loved watching Julia walk.

But what did we talk about later as she enjoyed a third glass of wine? Unimportant things I suppose. The new wristwatch she’d bought earlier in the week, the movie she’d seen on television.

We talked for a long time but somehow the conversation went everywhere except where I wanted it to go. We needed to talk about the life-changing fact, the disclosure. The big surprise. The odd part was a doctor had informed me a decade earlier that my little swimmers — as he called them—were not in good shape, and the chances of me ever being a father were less then remote. None of this would have ever come to light had it not been for a woman friend who wanted a child but not a husband, and being flattered by her invitation to donate, I had been tested. So much for donating, but it didn’t bother me because I didn’t see fatherhood in my future anyway. I was too Bohemian in my lifestyle to imagine settling into a life of procreation and domesticity.

Now the delicate aspect to all this — the awkward drama I didn’t want to engage — was of course informing Julia of those test results of a decade ago. Or I had to allow myself to believe that a minor miracle had taken place and my reproductive powers had somehow been restored by my great passion for her body.

Everything around me seemed to slow down until all worldly formations came into focus in a new way. She sipped the last of her wine and I could tell by her distant expression that she was high and probably wanted one more glass of wine. I looked into her jadecolored eyes and felt the sun lay its hands across my shoulders.

In a sudden twist of apprehension I glanced past her to the wood railings that enclosed the outdoor section of the restaurant, and on the top railing a robin had landed and I noticed the way the breeze moved its feathers and the bright sun lit its red breast, the way its little eyes darted and surveyed the scene. The robin watched us for a moment and then flew to a grassy area between the patio and street. Seeing the bird living in its own unconscious beauty and the freedom of the moment brought a strange underlying feeling to me — this delicate creature, this fellow expeditionary traveler in life, this warm collection of atoms here at the same time as I in what could only be a representation of remote cosmic chance, the [ 31 ]

astronomical unlikelihood of two sets of atoms meeting in the same place at the same time.

I wanted to share this feeling with Julia, the vision of the moment, the layers of the onion peeled back to reveal the center, revelatory, jubilant, but instead I reached into my pocket for my wallet and got out my credit card and placed it on the table.

“I think it’s going to rain,” I said, “so maybe we should go.”

[ 32 ]

Three Poems Frank Dullaghan

Naming the Stars Syria 2013

I must learn to forgive the sun its thirst for the dark: it drinks every night down.

I would stay beneath night’s cold blanket. Not to be safe but to be blind. Who wants to see the body of a young girl on the street, her eyes whitening; the wall ripped from a neighbour’s house the wind reading his books, spilling his memories onto the street; faces of soldiers, a thousand years old, who have stopped counting their killings, who breathe through their guns? Leave me the dark.

I will name the stars I can see through the smoke, escapees, souls who have been blown into the sky.

[ 33 ]

Leave me with all this death as if it were a kind of love. Do not let the sun see my face.

The Aran Jumper It was the same hard logic that held their men from learning to swim – that if the boat flung them, was snatched up by the sea, it would be better quick than the prolonged suffering of a useless swim.

So the women turned their skill to cable stitch and basket stitch, but made their patterns unique that they might read it again on a bloated body washed in and know it as their love, their own.

August in Dubai For Kit and Valerie

Old acquaintances on a stopover, the sky welded to the horizon, air melting, the oxygen burned away leaving the day hazed, breathless.

We duck into my car, ease out into brightness, the AC humming darkly – an old part of town, traffic slow. Shops crowd around us, stare into the car windows, clambering for the shade we are making off with. It’s my friends’ first time in Dubai. But it’s the wrong season. [ 34 ]

The windscreen is blazed by blue.

August streams through the streets.

I notice how our years have accumulated – double-stacked bookshelves.

So many chapters between us.

Stepping out of the car our glasses steam and we have to stop blinded for a moment by the heat.

[ 35 ]

The Parable of Miniskirts Jekwu Anyaegbuna

It wasn’t white people who spoilt our daughter; it was her miniskirt.

You sat here and watched it move up and up until it refused to come down, became her character. You said nothing, did nothing, Agu. Yes, the white men came and hung their wires to bring us electricity, but did they also ask our daughter to hang herself on their shoulders and follow them to their camp, like a cobweb? The day they brought their cutting machine to fell the trees, one of them sat on the boulder counting the hairs on our daughter’s thighs.

I saw him with the clear eyes of an adult, and I could smell that something was going to appear like a mature breadfruit tree on her soon afterwards. They asked silly questions, and she answered them: “How heavy is a stone that can kill a bird? Why does a he-goat smell? When is our next Udara Festival? What is the punishment for killing a tortoise?” They sent her to their camp, to bring them the tape they had forgotten there; she obliged them. O buzi gini?

What went wrong? Was she the only girl in the neighbourhood who could assist them? Agu, you disappointed me! It was clear to sheep and goats that I tried to bring up our daughter, to follow the good ways of our ancestors, to dig the ground and cover her menstruations with palm fronds, but you failed to contribute. You only sat down to eat roasted dog and bush meat, drinking palm wine all day, as if the palm trees would pick up guns and shoot you the next day if you did not drink too much. You borrowed eyes from cats and chickens to stare lazily at the white people.

Agu listened to all of this from his ranting wife, as he sat in front of his hut in the evening. The breeze from an okwe tree, with far-reaching branches covering the middle of the compound, cuddled his hair-strewn chest. The tree also sheltered his cocks at [ 36 ]

nights. And his goats also sat under the shade in the afternoons, during intense sunlight. His walking stick, which lay by his side, knew its normal duty: to bring her brain back into her head. A stroke or two of it across her back were enough to quieten her, and she was well aware of this fact, so she stood afar, her two hands on her wide waist. He regretted why he had rescued her from the well the day she had fallen into it and sustained blood-strewn cuts on her legs and arms. He should have allowed the water to soak and bite her eyes and push out her dead stomach, he thought. He had seen her and screamed that day on his palm tree, as she slipped into the old well covered by green climbers. It was not love that made him do that, he knew; it was fright. It was the fear of burial expenses that had forced him down the palm tree, to grab her out of the pit of death, with the help of some neighbours who had rushed out to the distress call. How could he have moved from one shed to another in the market, negotiating a coffin to bury an untimely death? Who would have agreed to carry the message to her people that Ugboaku had died inside an mgbo-mmiri? A grubby well for that matter! An abomination! He had circled his hand over his head, three times, and ended them with a sharp click that brought both his thumb and the middle finger together in sparkling friction. He knew she had lived up to her name, Ugboaku – the vehicle of wealth – because she traded in most markets in the neighbouring villages.

She never asked money from him. She paid her age-grade and village levies without sweating too much. At the beginning of every planting season, she paid labourers to clear her farmland and till it for her to sow her yams. But these things could only make sense to him if her mouth would just cease to be a vehicle of constant frustrations for him.

Now she stood in front of her hut (with slanting, low eaves) which was opposite Agu’s, but far enough from each other for the rain to drench you while coming from one and going into the other.

Agu’s cheeks were startled at this woman who would not sheathe her tongue under her teeth, her wrapper wound round her chest exposing her broad shoulders. This tall, plump woman with silky skin the colour of her eyelashes.

“I’m just back from the market. Where is our only daughter?

You don’t know!” she shouted, pointing at Agu, and later smacked her two large booties, to scorn him. She returned home with a [ 37 ]

new hairdo, Higher-Woman, each bunch of hair threaded to stand unbent like a leafless coconut tree. And across her head, dividing lines shone in greasy circles. He assumed she still remembered that evening, like this one, when it had been as though a zoo full of dolorous lions had broken loose, and he had walloped her to her father’s house, mandating her to return with an elegant Hausa he-goat as an apology, a goat with nostrils that could swallow two index fingers at once. Of course, she had taken the punishment as a trinket of little consequence. It did not change her character. She had bought the goat because she had had the money, although she felt the pains of losing so much money on nothing. She knew that such a big cut could make a large iroko tree moult its leaves, or even break off a whole branch. And she reasoned she could have used the money to buy a new gold-laced wrapper or a necklace which she would have worn to her friend’s daughter’s marriage, to outshine her equals and shame her rivals.

Agu sprang up with his walking stick, and she rushed back into her hut. He drew a straight line stretching from the okwe tree down to a spot where a broken earthen pot sat with many mosquito larvae inside it.

“Ugboaku, if you know you’re fearless, cross this line,” he shouted at her, went back to his hut and sat down, shaking his legs in furious rhythms. He would not chase her into her hut, to beat her there. It was a taboo to do that, to beat a woman inside her own hut, the place he would visit when he needed to stretch the cord dangling between his legs. Only wicked men did that, and faced the consequences from the gods. But then it was assumed wicked men were few in the village.

She had crossed that same line the day he had beaten an antelope out of her eyes, but today she did not. She simply pushed open a wooden window and stretched out her neck with her hands on her head. She shouted, “And what are you going to do if I cross the line? You can only ask me to buy you a goat. Only a he-goat, Agu. Just a he-goat. That’s all your tongue can comprehend. Your tongue is now shaped like a he-goat’s!”

He would not go further than this today, no matter the degree of provocations, because of the wound in his private part.

If they both should fight now, that spot would be his wife’s target.

She would grab it and not release her hand until he collapsed. [ 38 ]

And he was certain Ugboaku was vengeful. She accumulated, like interest, all wrongs done to her in years, only to shoot them at one unfortunate person in just a day. She had been searching for ways to retaliate for the he-goat she had bought before. Given just a slight opportunity, she would recoup the cost of the goat in her own way.

How Agu sustained the wound had been mysterious. Even his native doctor found it puzzling. He knew it was not Agu’s fault, though. Like most men in the village, Agu would go into the bush with his dog in order to kill a bird for his pet. But on that fateful day, as he bent down to pluck clean the feathers of the unfortunate bird, the dog lost his sense, ran up behind him and bit his scrotum.

Following the native doctor’s prescription, Agu killed the dog and roasted the meat because eating it every day would heal the wound as soon as the last bit of the dog was eaten. But the wound continued to fester. The blood-encrusted pus gushing out of it scared him, and he could smell the decay under him. He no longer wore his shorts, did not climb palm trees anymore. He now tied a wrapper over his waist, wincing all the time, the corners of his eyes shrinking, freckled. The scrotum was a distended, rotten pumpkin under him, and he walked open-legged like a crab.

His wife had gone inside, having been terrified that she could never cross the line. He was still sitting in front of the hut when his daughter, Enechi, returned wearing a miniskirt, scuttling straight into her mother’s hut. When she heard the harsh voice behind her, she shuddered, turned and started flicking her fingers, afraid.

“Enechi, where are you coming from?” he barked at her.

“From Nick’s house on the hill,” she murmured.

She wanted to say more, but her mother jumped out of the hut and grabbed the daughter’s earlobe, twisting and pulling it out.

“Tell us, who is Nick?” she yelled at her, clutched her waistband and drew her to her father. When they both crossed the line, Ugboaku felt a triumph inside her. She had crossed the line without any repercussions. Agu himself knew what was on her mind, but chose to ignore it. What mattered now was the daughter who was crossing the line of prostitution, he thought to himself.

“And who gave you this naked dress?” the mother asked, with narrowed eyes and a contorted face.

“Nick.” [ 39 ]

“So, of all dresses in the world, he chose to give you the one that announces your thighs, eh?” Ugboaku said. “Agu, look at your daughter’s buttocks being put up for sale!”

“Nick says this is the type of dress I will be wearing in London when we get married,” she sobbed. “He bought about five of them for me.”

Her words stung their ears, and Agu shook his head. “Chei, this world has really gone naked,” Agu shouted. “So he wants to marry you naked?”

“Yes.”

“You will never marry a white man,” he asserted. “So, you want to bring albino offspring into this lineage? It will never happen before my eyes! Albinos are abominable animals.”

“Yes!” Ugboaku shouted her support, stomping on the ground. “What happens to the fine boy to whom you’ve been betrothed since childhood? What happens to those dresses I bought for you during the Udara Festival?”

“Nick says those dresses are not fit for a London marriage, that they are too local.”

“Then ask him to go and eat London shit,” Agu boomed out.

“He knows only about electricity, not about African women and their dresses.”

“And, what about your fine boy from childhood?” Ugboaku asked, her head tilting sideways.

“He is uglier than a chimp,” Enechi replied.

Ugboaku raised her hand to slap her daughter, but the girl dodged. This was not enough, so the angry mother loped into her hut and emerged with a dress she deemed proper for her daughter and forced it on her. She wriggled into it, crying. After she had put on the local dress, the father pulled the miniskirt down through her legs. He shredded the skirt with the sharp knife he pulled out of his roof. He would have loved to storm the camp on the hill, to confront the white man, but for his wound. Nevertheless, Ugboaku volunteered to go, with hot water. She was going to peel off the white man’s skin, like the feathers of a cock, to make the pale skin look even paler.

The next day, she rushed up to the hill barefoot, sweating, and knocked fiercely on the wooden gate, several times, almost pushing down the gate and breaking the wood. [ 40 ]

“Where are these white aliens on this hill?” she shouted, a pot of hot water steaming up from her head. “Where is this stinking man who’s contaminating my daughter with immoral miniskirts?”

Enechi came out first, shocked. “Mother, this threat is getting too much,” she said.

“Shut up! Where is the man who’s turning you into a prostitute?” she yelled. “I want to show him that a foreigner does not kiss the groin of a freeborn and go scot-free.”

Nick came out just then, shivering. Enechi quickly asked him to prostrate for her mother so as to pacify her. He did, and Ugboaku brought down the hot water from her head, placed it on the ground.

She spat out. It was to pour out her accumulated rage to the earth.

Nick stood up, held her right hand and took her inside, Enechi following. They all sat indoors for some minutes before Ugboaku came out with a smiling face and poured the water away, already cold. She hugged Nick tight and waved him goodbye. Enechi was smiling, too. Agu would be violated, disappointed.

One month later, Nick visited their house wearing his English hat, a pair of black boots with white socks covering the areas of his legs left by his shorts. The mosquito bites on his cheeks, forehead and arms were like red polka dots. He was accompanied by his girl, Enechi, who wore another miniskirt, again, purposely bouncing her buttocks. Ugboaku led them to her husband who drew out a machete and hit it on the floor of his hut, to scare them away, huffing.

“Agu, calm down please,” Ugboaku pleaded. “The white man is not as harmful as you think.”

“Good afternoon, sir,” Nick said, enunciating every word, and bowed.

Agu did not respond.

“Father, he’s greeting you,” Enechi said. She would be their interpreter today. She attended a missionary secondary school three miles away from the village, so she found it easy to fall in love – scooping a chemical of jealousy from other village girls – with the white men who had been sent by government to install electrical facilities in the village.

“I don’t want his greeting,” Agu exclaimed. “Ask him to leave, right now!”

Ugboaku smiled. “See, Agu, you will miss this truck if you [ 41 ]

continue to behave this way,” she said.

“OK, what has he come here to do?” he asked, and squeezed his lips.

“All right, ask us to sit down first,” she begged, and Agu waved a hand at the mud pavement inside his hut. They all sat down.

Nick rummaged in his leather wallet and brought out fifty pounds, a crisp and clean note of the queen’s side portrait, and offered it to Agu, who hesitated for a moment.

“Agu, please collect the money,” his wife said. “Don’t behave like a kid.”

He collected it, with shaky hands, and Nick brought out another fifty pounds note and handed it to Ugboaku who collected the money as though she had been expecting it, grinning.

“This is not the bride price yet,” Enechi quipped, in Igbo, so Nick would not understand. “When you change it to our currency, ego aburu aturu taba, the money will multiply like sheep wool. I swear, the money will be plenty, higher than all the money under Mother’s mat and the one in Father’s goat-skin bag.”

“You don’t mean it!” Agu said, a startled smile hanging on his lips, his flat stomach full of gladness. “And you say it is not the bride price yet?”

“No, it’s not.”

“What is this one?” he asked.

“It is bride bribe, like the one Mother collected the day she visited the camp on the hill,” Enechi revealed.

“Ewoo!” Agu shouted, and scowled at his wife, wondering how much she must have collected that day. “When a cock and a hen are treated the same way, they both will be happy. I will visit the camp myself to collect more money from Ni!”

“Nick,” his daughter corrected him, the K accentuated, smacking her lips.

“Thank you. That’s why I’ve sent you to school, to learn and understand the white man’s throat.”

He did not hesitate to fix the palm-wine-dancing day when Nick would perform all the traditional marriage rites necessary to make Enechi become his wife.

“But he has a disease called asthma,” Enechi disclosed. “He coughs kor-hor, kor-hor, kor-hor, all the time, and a silent thunder [ 42 ]

always courses through his chest and lungs.”

“It does not matter since he has money aplenty,” Agu said.

“After the marriage ceremony, I will take him to my native doctor who will jab at his ashen chest and magically transfer the disease to a cat where it belongs.”

“And he will equally take you to a white hospital in the city, to cure the wound in your private part,” Enechi said, full of smiles.

Nick stood up to go. As he bent under the low eaves, a piercing fart escaped him. Ashamed, he turned around and apologised.

“Enechi, tell your parents that I am very sorry,” Nick said.

But Agu chose not to notice the embarrassment. “Enechi, tell my future son-in-law that I love his fart. It is scented with money, so he should fart some more. Does he not know that a white man’s fart is a blessing to a black man like me? The more he farts, the more I get pounds, the queen’s precious head. Is it not so?”

“It is so, my husband,” Ugboaku concurred, standing.

Enechi stood up, too, cleared her throat, stammering. “Em …

Father, Nick wants me to spend the night in his house on the hill.”

Agu’s forehead was draped in furrows now. “Why?”

“He says he wants to have a taste of me.”

“Has he not tasted you yet?”

“No. His colleagues are noisemakers every afternoon, so he wants it done this night, at the backyard.”

“What exactly is he going to do with you?”

“Em … Em … He wants to verify whether I will be able to carry his baby. He says every white man must taste his wife before the wedding day, to ensure that his pestle fits her mortar.”

“Chei, this is an abomination!” Agu shouted. “If a thief steals a fire, the smoke will expose his hideout and reveal his intentions.

So this man wants to fuck my daughter without paying the bride price?”

Incensed, he grabbed his machete, shoved his wife and daughter to the ground and ran after Nick. The suitor managed to escape through the thatched fence without being hurt. Agu was still panting and sweating when he returned to his hut, his scrotum bleeding like a stream, his veins thickening and congealing in pains.

Ugboaku rushed in to calm him down and lull him to sleep. He felt feverish all through the night. He started to dream, his temperature [ 43 ]

worsening, of Nick on top of Enechi at the backyard on the hill, her miniskirt crumpled beside the mat.

He murmured, asleep: “Can you imagine an over-bleached albino drinking the palm wine running under my daughter’s groin?”

Ugboaku spanked him. “You talk nonsense, Agu; you talk rubbish,” she said. “Who’s drinking your palm wine? Are you having a nightmare?”

He woke up from sleep.

The next day, Enechi and Nick came in his jalopy to take her father to the hospital. Agu refused to step into the car.

“I won’t enter that house of taboos,” he shouted.

“That’s not a house, father; it’s a car,” Enechi responded, aghast. “Ugbo ala!”

He was defiant. “Whatever you call it, I won’t go into it.”

“Look, father, if Nick does not marry me, I will either hang or stab myself to death,” Enechi threatened.

“Go ahead and kill yourself, bush animal,” Agu said. “What are you waiting for?”

Enechi searched around, grabbed a sharp knife and positioned it to her round bellybutton, ready to punch.

Ugboaku knelt before her daughter and started begging, staring up at her. “Don’t do it, Enechi,” she said, clutching her depreciating breasts, tight, with two hands. “Don’t destroy yourself.

Always remember that you sucked my sweet milk, that I love you.”

“No, my daughter!” Agu screamed. “Let me enter the car instead of having you waste your life, in vain.”

He grabbed his loincloth and wound it around his hips. Nick opened his car door and drove his future father-in-law to the hospital.

[ 44 ]

Icarus of Trafalgar Square James Luchte

The sublime sun beckons burning out the eyes of those who dare to gaze into its depths The abyss of light Yet, you were already blind to the light of Terra, of Earth, long gazed into this luminous event the mere distance of the gaze is no longer enough for your joy you seek to fly – seduced by the sun of your voluptuous desires you fly higher and higher climb the column of the sun [ 45 ]

you throw down the motes of light the ropes that tie even the gods You fly toward the scalding apex calling those below to grasp hold of the motes of light to pull it all down – back to the Earth the hordes upon the surface respond to the call, harvesting the motes that cling to the sun itself the ties that bind – the masses pull with the kinetic exertion of panic Prometheus smiles at the grand effort of his children toward the implosion of a world of light recurring upon the earth All at once shattering cracks, explosion the moaning phallus of marble lusts for the embrace of the Earth the depths of the abyss Icarus, already burns descends riding the phallus to the Earth Crash, exaltation – into the shadows of sleep wandering upon the banks of the Thames waiting for the return of the sun a different sun, one of joy, upon the Earth of a different world

[ 46 ]

Two Poems Fred Johnston

The Fall “I would wrestle with the dark angel until he dislocated my hip.”

- C.G. Jung : Letters

There is nothing to be done or said When he rants and wrangles in his head Cowering, blasting, blazing at the pictures in his head Or the orders, accusations and condemnings in his head Then the melancholy calm descends Conciliatory imprecations, tied-up loose ends Apology pours down like rain, the terror ends The hollow rage and fretting and child’s terror ends The ‘phone hysterical in the early hours Petitioning for peace with words like flowers Growing on a grave, abandoned, wilting flowers Cold and artificial as packaged plastic flowers The medication works or doesn’t work at all Sometimes he forgets it altogether and begins the fall Backwards, and in the black fester of his flailing fall He is unloosened, lurid, limp, unfettered as a waterfall.

[ 47 ]

Walk on the Beach “ . . . there dwells a race of beings para-human, . . . �

- John Heath-Stubbs : The Dwindling Ones

Because she fears for her children she fears also the man alone on the beach with a book

and the yapple excitement of his dog

it is as if they came out of the sea monstrous, mis-born, full of plagues ; or were omens shaped

from water and rock, salt and fire she fears the man alone with his book of demons, she calls her children in like small cattle

in from the water’s edge, but mainly away from the man, the dog, yet feels no better.

She who had longed for children is lonely, the sea and the sun descending makes her so : plundered sand-castles a grimace of gulls turning, settling on wavecaps an absence of God ; the man alone is not alone, he has a book and a dog, and is turning away lonely because of the children who are turning away also, fearless and strange as if born monstrous out of the water or were omens

shaped from water and rock, salt and fire

[ 48 ]

Status: EMO Eslam Mosbah

Translated from Arabic by Rafael Cohen

Chapter 19 A NATION OF THE LOST WHOSE ONLY TASK IS TO DESTROY, NOT TO BUILD.

EIGHTY MILLION COWARDS STAMPED MADE IN EGYPT.

You walk the darkened streets asking yourself the incessant question: WHAT’S THE POINT OF EXISTENCE WITHOUT MOVEMENT?

From the dark neighborhoods emerge other human shapes, strange and different kinds. Tens of millions of the oppressed, the deprived, the hopeless, the scattered, the dead.

Emmie’s words come to mind.

“If you’re born in a garbage dump, you’ll like the garbage dump.”

“Imagine, some guy who was always chatting with me on Facebook because he wants to have a good time with me at his house, or at my place, changes his opinion about this good time when he finds out I’m an atheist. Imagine, he wants to sleep with someone, but she has to be Muslim. I’m sure he wants her to be religious as well. Can you believe such bullshit?”

You throw up and calm down. The pressure of everything makes you throw up. The pressure of the world is crushing you. You [ 49 ]

have to extricate yourself now.

TO BE OR NOT TO BE . . .

No, that’s not the question. The question these days is how to believe. How to believe in anything?

How do you believe in yourself? How do you believe in your country? How do you believe in God?

How do you believe in God when the primary image of God is the father? A weak, ground-down, crushed, coward of a father whose biggest ambition is to wash his hands of you. Whose biggest ambition is to draw you into his circle of Hell. Whose biggest ambition is to make you anything other than yourself.

How do you believe in God when the second image of God is the regime? A regime whose sole mission is to hate you. Before you came to be born, it was calling for birth control. Before you graduated from university, it was suffering from unemployment.

How can you believe in God when the estate’s a patrimony, and you’re bought and sold like a chattel? How can you believe in God when the great leader comes and says that companies and institutions are suffering from surplus workers, useless workers?

Then the same official, one second later, comes and says that all trash is useful and can be recycled. So, you’re less than trash. All trash is useful and you’re useless. You come to an end and aren’t recycled. You come to an end and are thrown in the grave and no one remembers that you were once created.

How do you believe when the regime befriends the enemy and kills its children?

How do you believe when you can’t bring the dead of Iraq, of Palestine, or those who died on the trains to the south back to life?

How can you believe in a society governed by the corrupt, by bribe takers, by whores?

How can you believe in God when everything leads you in the opposite way to His way? You want to fight in a war, but there’s no battle. You want to fight corruption, but you’re taking on the Hydra. You want to fight the enemy, but you’re taking on mirages.

You want to fight yourself, but you take on your dreams.

HOW DO YOU BELIEVE WHEN THE ONLY ENEMY YOU CAN FIGHT IS A PUNCHING BAG?

Who’s left to fight? The only truth that could not possibly be a mirage: God. God. God. God. [ 50 ]

How do you believe?

WHEN MY KILLER ISN’T A LORD TO KILL ME AT HIS WILL.

How do you believe?

Something broke in my eyes

when time oppressed my rebellion, my stubbornness.

You have to convince yourself that you’re an exalted individual disdainful of existence. To say anything and believe it. To consider yourself above creation and above the will of death.

You roam the streets. Everything is frightening. The light is frightening. The dark is frightening. You roam with spittle dripping from your jaws. You’re in a liminal zone between being and madness, between the conscious and the unconscious, between normality and jamais vu.

You find the system’s guardians everywhere. Central Security with its men and weapons, its armored cars and shields, and its absolute stupidity. The sadistic pressure from above to turn everyone into meatballs. The crushing brainwashing that has turned everyone into:

outlaws

animals

molesters

queers

lesbians

narcissists

Devil worshipers

suicides

criminals

rapists

anarchists

hatemongers

atheists.

Like ants they dig tunnels inside souls and in society.

Suddenly the whole thing will collapse. Man will lose his faith and become an inherited chattel to be killed, to be put to death in the public squares. You deny everything except doubt and the search for cracks.

The sadistic pressure inside them has destroyed all the values of beauty, justice, goodness, equality, and hope. What’s left after [ 51 ]

crushing the values of love?

All of a sudden, their only duty became to destroy all these values in the world. They will pollute the white walls, upend the trash cans, cut open their veins, and long for a cruel death.

How do you believe in God when you’re in the herd? The leader of the herd doesn’t know where he’s going, and doesn’t allow you to go in the opposite direction.

You have to rebel against the herd, run away, commit suicide, disbelieve in God.

You hate yourself. After that everything is permitted.

How can Emmie believe in God when no one gives her the choice to believe or not? How can you believe in God when the whole image of faith derives from the films The Dawn of Islam and Rabia al Adawiya?

How can you believe when you’ve just seen the belly-dancer who’s been wallowing in every debauchery throughout the film, then believes in God and goes to heaven in the last fifteen minutes? Where’s the justice in that? Where’s the truth? How can you believe when religious leaders are corrupt, open to bribery, part of the system, and movie and TV superstars?

How can Emmie believe when rage at the universe and at life fill her soul? How can Emmie believe when she’s transferred her rage from the system to the world, and from the world to herself?

All of us are that monster without a veneer of civilization, capable of killing his neighbor at any time. But the law, religion, and morality protect us. May God defend us from devouring ourselves alive. In a world like this, how can we understand that? When there are no opportunities. When all seems lost. In the shadow of a new dynasty. When freedoms are suppressed. When the killing continues against you and those who share your religion, your nation, and your Arabness.

The regime wants to collect everything into a giant Dumpster, then compress.

Crush. Crush. Crush. Crush.

Have mercy on us. Have mercy on us. Have mercy on us.

It presses down so that you arrive at one conclusion. The world is really destructive, and if you don’t increase the destruction, someone else will.

[ 52 ]

How are you so brilliantly prevented from fighting against the system, or any absolute value?

Where’s the nuclear bomb now? Where’s the divine will to explode everything? Where’s Moses’ staff?

That’s the worst thing in life. At difficult times you never find someone next to you, someone to ask for advice.

Now you know everything you have no desire to know. The difference between a martini and scotch won’t be much use alive or dead.

Jamais vu.

The world’s complaint. Is what’s happening really happening?

Or is it smoke and mirrors?

You do drugs.

Jamais vu.

You have sex.

Jamais vu.

You practice atheism.

Jamais vu.

Your blood pressure drops.

Jamais vu.

You lose yourself.

Jamais vu.

You thrash in a swamp of doubts.

Jamais vu.

How do you believe? When what’s happening is really happening?

What’s happening in Iraq is really happening. What’s happening in Palestine is really happening. What’s happening in Egypt is really happening. How do you believe? You don’t care about anything, and nobody cares about you.

You need a battle. Everyone needs a battle.

We need war.

We need revolution.

We need Moses’ staff.

How can the limb be amputated? How can the world be saved from the deluge? How can you stop Sasso from committing suicide?

You stop in front of the beast, the security directorate. The regime with its men, its tyranny, its cruelty, its fanaticism. The ugliest part of the sadistic, murderous, fanatical, [ 53 ]

terrorist, demonic, servile, damned, weakling, barbaric, bestial, oppressive, arrogant, merciless, depraved, whoring, foul, motherfucking, pornographic, dictatorial, tyrannical, despotic, stupid, apathetic, spineless, black, impotent, foolish, immoral, useless, bastard, corrupt regime.

Fatin’s list of insults without a moment’s pause, and without a single repetition.

How long since you took a shower?

Your teeth are yellow from smoking. Your mind is vacant from hashish. Your smell is putrid. Your body is running with the poisons that enter with food, drink, and the air. Your resolve broken. Totally lost. Hopeless. Hating yourself and others.

The regime must come and kill you. You’re just a savage, rabid dog at rock bottom. There’s no thread for you to attach yourself to, so you must be killed.

The magic that has turned against the magician. The problem is who’s the magician. And how can we be saved from this magic?

The one who starts the fire should be the one to put it out.

Everything must be destroyed.

[ 54 ]

Two Poems Gillian Eaton

Some Days My Mood Is to sink words; plummet them beyond sounding, fathomless, letting one rise only after a grudging sulk EXIST, then a long sighing interval until a fugitive rises up to slide through teeth and taut lip PERTURBATION. Yet another might take all day SATURATE or all life EMBRACE. In amazement I find NOW will often join with THEN to form assemblies that serve nothing, where WHO COUNTS? is only shorter not less monstrous than WHAT IS IT ALL FOR? Certain words need chewing back unused, unwanted, PROPHESY for example, or DAMNATION or the spitefully sauced SUCCESS, the dried leather of DUTY or the steam-tunnel CHOOSE which arrives always begging for a new train of thought.

FLIRT’s pursed lips and scooped tongue must never be trusted, also beware the widowed words, the monosyllabic cave echoes, LOST NUMB MINE wrap them in concrete life jackets.

If kept down too long, some words pop to the surface like oil gobs EMERGENCY MIRACLE The rest take no notice of my humor and suddenly PERISTALSIS, an unstoppable ELATION. SPEAK SPEAK SPEAK

[ 55 ]

Tristan Paints a Mural at Third and Traction First, he said, make a shadow line a ghost note, a feint trace to teach the muscle, the arm, the hand a temporary stroke, a new move.

Engage the core and connect with the endless edge of the feather, the scale, the curl, the fin, the fang the bristle, the beam, the song.

Enjoy how feather echoes hair, fin echoes scale, wing echoes cloud.

Breathe. Then the swift, unalterable act.

Let color bake into the heart, the palm, let the music reach the fingertip, and further out, way out, add another line, another note.

Take a ladder, if you need, to the top.

Add more lines, more notes keep listening, keep watching the line as it moves, undulates away or toward.

Don’t let it out of your sight, until it converts into a symphony or a poem or a ballad or a mural or a life.

Then leave it, walk away, let it belong to another, it was never yours anyway.

That’s all you have to do, he said.

[ 56 ]

blackberries Iain Britton

i walk out you walk out fruitfulness is the soft belly of love’s pumped surge

i interpret this action as an admission of familiarity the time’s right to exploit the situation imagine the complex matter of raiding the forest for light-filled spaces ransacking the silence the stillness [ 57 ]

of skink spider the dew drops on the blue-eyed owl i watch you shift and bypass tapering slicks of mist

you’re good at detachment the sea echoes in / as if from a long way off it shovels at driftwood at shell banks i’ve been here / watching you / before / the likes of you / before i turn you over and appropriate the shadowy indentations of your sleeping / of your eyelids flicking verbs

crash with the waves

they roll you over face to earth face to sky a perpetual motion / i walk out / you walk out who lags behind is also in front [ 58 ]

for better or worse you get in the way / summer oils glisten poles of vegetation have taken root / threads of fragrance spiral worm-like from stems / sunlight shines down in slabs i know it’s you sitting beside the road / for better or worse there’s been this manifestation / before the pace of departure outstrips arrival you bury anything that’s dead you dig in compost grow vegetables haggle for old clothes drop messages of introduction

i know it’s you beside the road up close there’s this deja vu instant this snapshot we’re not the only ones sharing this planet’s edge newcomers traipse by /

fresh blood

for the pickers and choosers and that’s how it is

[ 59 ]

you reach forward delicately squeezing the throats of wild blackberries

[ 60 ]

Major Kovalyov Oliver Michell

A Silent Film With Piano Accompaniment INT. - KITCHEN - DAY In the corner of a chaotic and filthy kitchen, IVAN YAKOVLEVICH, 40s, a scoundrel, sleeps on a pile of soiled rags beneath litter and empty vodka bottles. Waking with a hangover, he pushes away two rats that are nibbling at the tasselled end of his nightcap and shambles towards the stove, scratching himself.

He opens and shuts cupboards, looking for breakfast. PRASKOVYA OSIPOVNA, 40s, a repulsive crone and Ivan Yakovlevich’s spouse, grudgingly hands him a raw onion. Snatching it from her, Ivan Yakovlevich begins to gnaw on it, until, sniffing the air, he catches a whiff of something from the oven. Shoving his wife aside, he opens the oven door. His eyes light up at the contents: a freshly baked loaf of bread.

Praskovya Osipovna pushes him away. They struggle until Ivan Yakovlevich is able to extricate the loaf. Ivan Yakovlevich and his wife wrestle over it before Ivan Yakovlevich manages to snatch it from her. He sinks his teeth into it and gnaws contentedly, cramming dough into his mouth.

A look of horror passes across the gnarled features of Praskovya Osipovna. She tries to stop her husband eating. He pushes her away.

At last he stops and looks down. His chin, neck and the front of [ 61 ]

his nightgown are covered with blood. Ivan Yakovlevich begins to retch. Searching inside the loaf of bread, Ivan Yakovlevich pulls out a severed nose.

He gapes at it in horror, before walking to a door leading off the kitchen. He opens the door and looks through it.

INT. – BEDCHAMBER OF MAJOR KOVALYOV - DAY Sleeping peacefully on a chaise longue upholstered in red velvet, wearing a bottle-green corduroy dressing gown, Ivan Yakovlevich’s employer, MAJOR KOVALYOV, his hair pomaded and his moustache in netting, lies on his back. His nose has been cut from his face with a razor blade.

Ivan Yakovlevich ponders how this strange sequence of events may have occurred...

FLASHBACK BEGINS: INT. – BEDCHAMBER OF MAJOR KOVALYOV - DAY Ivan Yakovlevich lathers Major Kovalyov’s face for a shave. While making cheerful conversation, Ivan Yakovlevich steals his master’s eau de cologne, splashing it on his own face. Ivan Yakovlevich reads the back of the cologne bottle and approves of the contents: “CONTAINS ALCOHOL.” Ivan Yakovlevich takes a long swig from the bottle of cologne behind his master’s head and pulls a face, before taking out a cutthroat razor and making a slap-dash attempt at giving his master a shave. As the blade flashes in front of Major Kovalyov’s face, his nose is lopped off.

INT. – THE FLOOR OF MAJOR KOVALYOV’S BEDCHAMBER DAY THE NOSE drops to the floor, dances to celebrate his freedom and runs away. [ 62 ]

INT. – KITCHEN - DAY The Nose climbs up onto the kitchen table. Praskovya Osipovna is kneading dough. The Nose winces as he watches Praskovya Osipovna’s nose drip into the dough. When she has set aside some dough, the Nose climbs into it, nestles down as if beneath an eiderdown and falls asleep, sucking his thumb.

FLASHBACK ENDS INT. – KITCHEN - DAY Ivan Yakovlevich shakes his fist at the Nose. The Nose sticks out his tongue. He puts on his ragged coat and opens a second door that leads to the street. Placing the Nose into his pocket and snatching up a bottle of vodka, Ivan Yakovlevich eyes the blood-sodden loaf of bread. He shrugs, tears off another mouthful with his teeth, then walks through the door, chewing and swigging vodka.

EXT. – BUSY STREET IN ST. PETERSBURG, 1880s – DAY Ivan Yakovlevich scuttles furtively through the crowds. Blood is soaking through the fabric of the pocket containing the Nose.

Passersby greet Ivan Yakovlevich; his face breaks into a parody of friendliness, before instantly reverting to hung-over malice.

Ivan Yakovlevich approaches the St Isaac Bridge over the River Neva and checks that the coast is clear. As he removes the Nose from his pocket, when a POLICEMAN blows his whistle and brandishes his truncheon. Ivan Yakovlevich hastily returns the Nose to his pocket and whistles innocently, pretending to admire the sunlight on the water. Ivan Yakovlevich tries to ingratiate himself with the Policeman, who seizes him by the collar and shakes his truncheon in his face.

After Ivan Yakovlevich has flattered the Policeman’s handlebar moustache, the Policeman is temporarily mollified and walks away, swinging his truncheon. Having made an obscene gesture behind the Policeman’s back, Ivan Yakovlevich takes the Nose from his [ 63 ]

pocket and flings it into the River Neva. The Policeman notices what Ivan Yakovlevich has done. Ivan Yakovlevich starts to run away through the crowds. The Policeman gives chase, blowing his whistle.

EXT. – IN THE RIVER NEVA - DAY The Nose flies through the air and lands in the River Neva. It tumbles through the water, struggling to swim to the surface. A kaleidoscope of strange objects pass by the Nose, including a PAIR OF EELS wearing top hats and monocles, a BULLFROG reading a newspaper and two SEAHORSES, smoking pipes and playing chess.

A RAINBOW TROUT appears and takes the nose in its mouth.

Swimming through the river, the trout eventually deposits the Nose on the bank.

EXT. – THE EMBANKMENT OF THE RIVER NEVA - DAY The Nose shakes itself dry, then sets off through the streets, asking passersby for directions.

EXT. – MAJOR KOVALYOV’S HOUSE - DAY On the pavement outside Kovalyov’s house, the Nose climbs onto an upturned flower pot and peers over the window sill into Major Kovalyov’s bedchamber.

INT. – BEDCHAMBER OF MAJOR KOVALYOV - DAY Major Kovalyov yawns, stretches and rises from his chaise longue.

Walking to the mirror, he admires his handsome features. He notices that something is wrong, but cannot see what it is. Peering closer, Major Kovalyov notices that his nose is missing.

Instantly furious, he screams for his servants. Their two repellent faces appear around the door, both wearing obsequious smiles.

Major Kovalyov demands an explanation. Ivan Yakovlevich and [ 64 ]

Praskovya Osipovna both begin to flatter their master and make excuses, before accusing one another and beginning to fight.

Major Kovalyov angrily pulls them apart. Pulling a coat over his nightgown, Major Kovalyov drags Ivan Yakovlevich into the kitchen, shaking his fist in his face, and flings his coat at him.

Pointing to his face, Major Kovalyov then ties a folded handkerchief over the bottom half of his face. He shoves Ivan Yakovlevich through the door.

EXT. – MAJOR KOVALYOV’S HOUSE - DAY On the pavement outside, the Nose jumps down off his flower pot and ponders for a moment. He hurries off through the streets.

INT. – GENTLEMEN’S OUTFITTERS - DAY The Nose enters a smart, expensive gentlemen’s outfitters. The PROPRIETOR is deferential and ushers him behind a curtain. The Nose re-emerges, fully kitted out in the uniform of a Gentleman of the Imperial Bedchamber, with plumed hat, sword and sash. The Proprietor applauds his elegance.

EXT. – GREAT BASILICA OF ST. GREGORY - DAY Major Kovalyov drags Ivan Yakovlevich behind him into the square outside the Great Basilica, in search of his missing nose. Major Kovalyov spots the Nose in his uniform, walking up the steps of the Basilica. Major Kovalyov and Ivan Yakovlevich set off in pursuit.

INT. – INSIDE THE BASILICA - DAY It is dark inside the church. Candles shine through the incense fumes. Major Kovalyov hunts for the Nose and spots him kneeling in one of the pews, at prayer. FASHIONABLE ACQUAINTANCES greet Major Kovalyov, who leers obsequiously and attempts to laugh off the handkerchief over his face.

Major Kovalyov and Ivan Yakovlevich kneel on either side of the Nose, who is praying. Major Kovalyov, who is deferential because of [ 65 ]

the Nose’s superior rank, pulls at the Nose’s sleeve. The Nose eyes Major Kovalyov with the utmost disdain.

Trying to be ingratiating, Major Kovalyov takes away the handkerchief and indicates to the Nose his belief that he ought to be once again planted in the bloodied holes in the middle of Major Kovalyov’s face. The Nose returns to prayer, eyes closed.

A middle-aged lady, MADAME CHEKHTARYEV, wearing an absurd quantity of silk flowers and make-up, waves at Major Kovalyov across the Basilica. Major Kovalyov hastily returns the handkerchief to his face and turns to make polite conversation. The Nose opens one eye, sees his opportunity and makes good his escape.

INT. – THE NOSE’S OFFICE AT THE MINISTRY OF MINISTERIAL AFFAIRS - DAY The Nose reclines in his chair behind a vast desk, smoking a cigar.

He rests his feet on the back of A SERF, who is on all fours on a rug in front of a roaring fire, holding between his teeth a toasting fork with a tea cake on the end of it. A FUNCTIONARY of the Ministry in dress uniform appears at the door. As the Functionary begins an explanation, Major Kovalyov and Ivan Yakovlevich tumble past him, forcing their way into the room.

The Nose leaps to his feet. In the commotion, the Serf checks no-one is looking and crams the tea cake into his mouth. Major Kovalyov and Ivan Yakovlevich have dressed in white tie for Madame Chekhtaryev’s bezique and jasmine tea party. Every aspect of their appearance is spick and span, right down to their buttonholes – except, that is, for Major Kovalyov’s missing nose. Ivan Yakovlevich wrestles with his outfit, tugging the collar and scratching himself.

Major Kovalyov implores the Nose, wringing his hands. Ivan Yakovlevich tries to pull the remainders of the tea cake from the serf’s jaws, who defends it in the manner of a dog protecting a bone. The Nose walks to the window and puts his right hand to his breast, searching his conscience. Major Kovalyov adopts his pitiable expression. [ 66 ]

The Nose relents and Major Kovalyov is overjoyed. In the point of view of the Nose, we get closer and closer to Major Kovalyov’s eager face. Major Kovalyov seizes the Nose with both hands and presses him to his face. Major Kovalyov is delighted to be restored to normal. He angrily remonstrates with Ivan Yakovlevich for fighting with the Serf. Ivan Yakovlevich stuffs a piece of tea cake into his own mouth as they exit.

INT. – HALLWAY, HOUSE OF MADAME CHEKHTARYEV NIGHT The hallway of Madame Chekhtaryev’s house sparkles with candles, chandeliers, flowers and every kind of luxury. A snooty FOOTMAN stands before huge double doors. The Footman eyes Ivan Yakovlevich suspiciously as he scratches himself and seizes champagne flutes from passing silver trays. Major Kovalyov laughs cheerfully and hits Ivan Yakovlevich as hard as he can across the back of the head. With a sneer, the Footman flings open the doors to reveal a splendid soiree.

INT. – SALON OF MADAME CHEKHTARYEV - NIGHT The sumptuous room is thronged with the great and good of St Petersburg, LADIES in ball gowns, GENTLEMEN in white tie. A chamber orchestra entertains the guests.

Major Kovalyov is in seventh heaven, until he notices that all the guests have had their noses cut off. The orchestra stops playing.

The entire room gawps at him in disbelief, then breaks into peals of mocking laughter. Major Kovalyov, his ambitions thwarted, is in the depths of despair.

Major Kovalyov sits cross-legged on the floor. The Footman presents him with a knife. With a look of resignation, Major Kovalyov begins to saw off his own nose.

[ 67 ]

Five Poems Jeri Onitskansky

Squeaks and Goose After the Rain The girl holds his hand maternally.

She is four years old and beyond puddle stamping but is with her brother so tenderly it breaks your heart.

I’m sure she is mismatched and floral though her dress is in shadow, fringed by the same glow that leaves a splotch on the boy’s shoulder, tangerine like the giant sun lost in the dark trees.

She has not yet woken to sibling rivalry.

Instead, wonderfully, the track curves as always in a silver blaze down to the farmhouse.

Early 90’s number plates hang muddied above bumpers, cows shift hungrily at their troughs.

It’s amazing how the dusk seems to glow from within before it will release its furious black birds.

Mud shines, juniper disperses a sky so full that sparks drop into puddles the boy trudges through gingerly — if you can in fact trudge gingerly — boot hesitating before the splash it issues,

[ 68 ]

a boy enthralled by all that can be fathomed forth as the man he has become is delighted, still.

How thoroughly helpless I am of the years — Darkness makes the little bridge the same bright smear as the creek it crosses but I remain ignorant, blinded, even — less by time than by the love that gnaws at time, like moths busy at their seasonal wools, leaving a hole behind that I may know as memory …

Unstuck from the wall, the photo curls a bit in the open air. The children are concentrating, forever mid-step in dreamy sunset — a world released of itself the moment I claim it under a sky that without longing or fear relinquishes its ochre and streaks of raspberry.

Sabina Spielrein, Rostov-on-Don, August 1942 ‘Spielrein is the person I wrote you about … She was, of course, systematically planning my seduction, which I considered inopportune. Now she’s seeking revenge … I need hardly say that I have made a clean break.’ Jung’s letter to Freud, 4 June 1909.

‘We are and remain Jews. The others will only exploit us and will never understand or appreciate us.’ Freud’s letter to Spielrein, 28 August 1913. ‘ … a joy in pain is, however, thoroughly incomprehensible if we can believe merely in an ego that only desires pleasure.’ From Spielrein’s psychoanalytic paper, ‘Destruction as the Cause of Coming into Being’, 1912.

[ 69 ]

She has found an onion deep inside the black earth.

Crouching in the brushwood, she was looking for twigs to burn

for their warmth.

She doesn’t notice that the sky is like tea with a

lemon moon rippling.

Nor is she aware that tomorrow she’ll be herded

into the synagogue where bullets will scatter her brilliance

along the remains of her daughters.

That her soul will wash across the steppe among the warbling quail.

She is so hungry, her memory aches trying to place her last meal …

Could it have been –

steaming gulasch in Vienna … sweet, stuffed pirozhki

in Moscow …?

Were there crumbs in the bed where she curled around what is left

of what she once called ‘Myself’?

The outside of the onion is brittle and comes apart in her fingers.

How easily an outer thing is discarded

on the way to an inner sweetness.

As she chews, clear juice runs down both sides of her mouth.

It tastes of beaten metals, bitter earth. Her nose is wet and burning.

The mineral charge forces open her eyes: Zurich …

the Bergholzi asylum …

the analysis … her doctor …

At once she feels, ‘My heart is a fish, caught by the thought of him.’

[ 70 ]

In her diaries, she’d called their lovemaking die Poesse,

later confounding her biographers: Had he loved the lyrics of her body or purely the intelligence

he worked into health — a waltz

made possible by four dancing shoes?

She has discovered an onion deep in the ground,

the same hands that strayed

into contradictory chords, the same darkness that bloomed such surprise, long ago.

The Einsatzgruppen are wearing the good boots

of the men they’ve stripped.

The delicate mouth of the city is stuffed full with barking and sobs.

Where is her Jung now?

Father of their fantasy child Siegfried — An improbable cross of Aryan and Jew, this night

the warm full flavour of onion cuts into her stomach deeply.

The Trail On the morning of my Bat Mitzvah, as we flounced down the catwalk of our vast American foyer, my grandmother observed, Hilary, you look wonderful; Madeleine, that is a gorgeous dress and Jeri, pick up your feet!

Shame was that familiar torment under whose flower

[ 71 ]

my body roasted as the rabbi blessed me and disco lights swam across a leaking marquee.

The hurts that held me together, then and for a long time — they sufficed until I could need them less, step by step, one foot at a time — and as I tired many years later, I walked back through the snow and glistening quiet, following my prints that blurred — each oval dragging at the rear.

Power lines tightened over some old craggy firs and while there were darts of rounding jays, bulrushes bowed to the frozen pond and sounds of breaking in a faraway pine were delicate.

I would say, now, that I will not pick up my feet. Grandma, I have left a trail of comets along the snowy hills.

Blush Years of use made the pink granules in her blush compact wear so thin that a tiny oval of herself became revealed in the metal. She wasn’t coherent at first, just dreamy flesh, just a peek into nostrils or the span of wrinkles anticipating either quiz or kiss. Each day [ 72 ]

that she brushes on her gaiety, the hole widens and deepens with her staring out.

It may seem that she’s using up her life but really she’s growing a revelation.

Wild Game Party If it’s not one massacre, it’s another.

Take two freshly skinned rabbits and their bewildered eyeballs.

Zeke holding them up like dripping wash.

Alma smiled, a crack in the face of a round fish bowl.

Where she could, she inserted a bon mot of her own into this 70’s squat where ideas warred amid the rabbit steam.

She addressed her lover after a sudden gulp of air, Hector, as if just learning the name, gathering the razor syllables into her voice, learning to love them.

The joint’s red teeth consumed its own body, spitting out the ash.

Smoke slinked up Hector’s fingers.

His mouth worked words of unparalleled brilliance from the large imaginary chewy sweet it couldn’t swallow.

The socks remained half-off his feet, as he scuttled about like a puffed-up Charlie Brown.

Richard arrived, walking straight off the pages of the same comic book. Picture sculpted, hysterical features and a pretend body.

The others settled into their outfits like sacks of sand.

Zeke chopped off the paws, the neck. He spiced the blood broth. He was older than the others.

His messed up face shone exquisitely as he sang Bellini’s Vega Luna, conducting with his pinkies.

[ 73 ]

The four hits of acid in Richard’s palm caught Hector’s eye.

Hector’s eye caught Alma’s eye. Alma tried to speak his name, struggling a little bit like a wife wanting to prepare dinner while all her sons break the plates and stab themselves with the silverware.

Richard denounced all vegetarians, taking a swig of the wine. Zeke quoted Nietzsche.

Hector quoted Dante. Alma walked to the stove, her feet loudly kissing the Rorschach spills of burgundy on the tile. She circled Zeke’s waist, their friendship seeming bigger than life.

Bigger, even, than the four of them, delighting in a pageant of foreign words and proper nouns, each phrase a deflowered debutante — while the steam, or something imagined, expressionless under the veil of its breath, slowly concealed them from each other.

At times, Hector’s sock poked out of the mist.

Alma’s smile floated like a kite behind a cloud.

Zeke slipped off to the opera and Richard dissolved.

[ 74 ]

Force Majeure Jane Martin

The majority of these images are paintings from my series entitled Force Majeure, the French phrase for unexpected or uncontrollable events, often referred to as acts of god.

The protagonist is the power of nature, in the form of a tornado, apropos of recent events and the planet’s eruption in many forms.

I have never actually seen a tornado, but have “channeled� these vortexes of energy onto the canvas for well over a decade.

The selection also includes two video stills, printed and coated with a clear and lustrous resin, which investigate the power and mystery of the female form. These parallel subjects have been a constant in my work as a multi-disciplinary artist, each medium informing and enriching the other.

[ 75 ]

Depth Sounding

Force Majeure VI

Force Majeure XIII

Force Majeure X

Force Majeure VII

Force Majeure XVIII

Force Majeure XII

Force Majeure III

Fourth Floor Walk-up Michael McGlade

The cloth hood came off her head and the jolt of afternoon light hurt. Her wrists were bound and crossed in front. She had the sharp stare of a game-hen and was stood toward the center of a large unfurnished room in a tenement. Elizabeth shivered in this unheated palace: “bare plaster walls; wet cardboard smell; conveniences; seen to be appreciated.” Clear plastic sheeting covered half the floor, the half she had been positioned on, and her stilettos heels had embroidered a pattern that looked like matching ants.

The two men studied her and while they did so were still as statues.

Elizabeth wondered if she threw them a quarter would they move.

— I apologize for the inconvenience, ma’am.

— Not at all, she said. I quite enjoyed being carried up four floors by …

She glanced at both men, first the shorter one, the one that had spoken, who had an unpleasant countenance and looked as if he could have sprouted faster than a fungus after rain, and then the bigger guy who had forgotten to shave his knuckles.

— I guess, she continued, King Kong here knows how to handle a lady.

The big man watched her, didn’t blink, didn’t even appear to be breathing.

— Won’t the neighbors think it strange to see a hooded woman carried up the stairs? she asked.

— No one is going to come to your rescue, Elizabeth.

— You’re assuming that I need to be rescued, Carter.

— You know who I am?

— And you know who I am, she said. Saves us a lot of pointless chitchat. [ 84 ]

Elizabeth studied Carter’s face. Colorless like melted paraffin.

Eyes the dull blue of gun metal. She had expected him to speak but he did not speak; instead, Carter glanced at his wristwatch.

He squared his fedora. He studied this woman. She was Katharine Hepburn beautiful.

Elizabeth reached inside her jacket and retrieved a packet of Lucky Strikes.

— Do you mind? she asked.

Carter gave an almost imperceptible nod of his head. She placed a cigarette in her mouth with some difficulty due to the bounds on her wrists, and fetched a gold lighter from her pocket and lit up. Her hands contained only the vaguest of tremors.

— Nasty habit you have there, Carter said.

— So I’ve been told, she said. Funny how people willingly choose to shorten their life expectancy. Makes you think life is overvalued.

— Is that what you really think?

She puffed on her cigarette and exhaled smoke in the direction of the two men who blocked the path to the only exit.

Another door led to the kitchen, and beyond the window, which had been sealed shut with too many coats of beige paint, was a fire escape. Both men wore matching suits the brown color of the tilled clay found in cemeteries.

— Undertakers buy those types of suits wholesale.

— We’ve decided that this is our look. We’re more recognizable this way. A brand, if you will.

— Recognizable is a nice way to put it. So, she glanced at plastic sheeting on the floor, this is what happened to Hernandez?

— And Martinez and Mitchell and Flores —

— You’ve made short work of them.

— This one’s got claws, Carter said to his large friend. Carter was five feet four inches and shorter than Elizabeth before she wore heels. The others were blubbering in tears by now, he continued.

But not you?

— No, not me.

— Why is that?

— Because I don’t think you’re going to kill me.

— Why is that?

— You know who I am, know what I can do. I think you want [ 85 ]

to make a deal, so make it.

Carter didn’t answer, didn’t respond. He checked his wristwatch.

Elizabeth drew the cigarette down to the finish, dropped it on the floor and crushed it beneath a stiletto. Her low cut evening dress, the color of a vanilla milkshake, sparkled. Eyes sharp as knapped flint.

— What did you do with my merchandise? she asked.

— The shipment of drugs? Carter questioned. Well, I suppose it’s mine now. Forfeit for entering my territory.

— You know who I am, but do you know who owned the merchandise?

— I am acutely aware of the significance of taking those drugs.

She had expected him to continue the conversation, but he let the words hang in the air. He watched her. He checked his watch.

— We’re a smidgeon ahead of schedule, he said to his partner.

— How early? Elizabeth asked.

— Seven minutes.

Silence ensued. Carter studied this woman. He had expected her to speak, to beg for her life, but she waited in silence and appeared as if she had all the time in the world.

— Would you care for a cup of Joe? Carter asked.

— I guess I have the time, she said.

Neither man moved. Neither of them had blinked or glanced away from her.

— I bet you don’t know where the phrase comes from, she said.

— I don’t bet. You shouldn’t either.

— Risk is the only reason I get up in the mornings. Back in the early twentieth century a general called Joe Daniels banned all alcoholic beverages from US Navy ships, and the crew had no alternative but to move to the next best drink on the list, a steaming hot cup of Joe.

— I’m not sure if you want the coffee or not?

She nodded almost imperceptibly.

The large man went into the kitchen.

— Is he always this much fun?

— He is not usually so well behaved. He likes you. [ 86 ]

— Does he carry piano wire in his jacket pocket in case of a strangling emergency?

Carter did not answer. Elizabeth walked a few steps to stretch her legs.

— What happens in seven minutes?

Carter checked his wristwatch and removed a Beretta M9 pistol from his shoulder holster. He pointed the barrel downwards and crossed his hands in front of his midsection.

— You look like you belong on the wall of a medieval cathedral.

Carter ignored the remark. From the kitchen, the faucet ran and the kettle creaked as it boiled. A cupboard opened and three clinks followed as each cup was sat on the Formica counter. The kettle whistled and water was poured into each cup and a spoon rattled each cup.

— I’ve known men like you before, Elizabeth said.

— Men like me?

— Men who make catastrophic decisions. They do so under the misguided excuse that it’s only business but it’s not business.

They’re intimidated by what I do. They don’t like a woman being in charge. Men like that are dumber than a box of rocks.

— What would be the smart move? he asked.

— Expand.

His head tilted to the side, like a fox terrier sighting a problem.

— Expand? he questioned.

— You don’t want to be doing work that’s just short of good enough.

— No, we can’t have that, now, can we, he said. I have big plans but there’s always somebody looking to cut your throat. How exactly is it that I expand?

— Territories are like lampposts. Some dog spritzes on one and thinks it owns it, until, that is, a bigger dog comes along, cocks its leg and pisses. Now, the big dog owns it. There’s a lot of little dogs out there but not many big dogs. Mr Kurt, my employer, he’s a big dog, and all the big dogs really want is stability. A regular supply of merchandise … I’ve seen what you’ve done with Bed-Stuy, and you’re moving into Park Slope and the Upper East Side, and maybe other areas, too. [ 87 ]

— What are you offering?

— I know all the big dogs … well, enough of them to think I was safe enough to walk around without a body guard. But I guess I was mistaken with that. So, my proposal to you is that we work together.

She watched the muscles in his jaw flinch. Carter studied her face and checked his wristwatch. He walked to the window and watched the street and walked back to his original location.

Elizabeth took a few steps toward the window without turning away from Carter, and Carter matched the number of steps she had taken but did so in the opposite direction so that they had pivoted in equal and contrary directions, each matched to the other like a matador and bull, and after several move steps Elizabeth was near the window and only now did she give her back as she peered through the dusty pane.

— We’re in Inwood? she said.

— Nagle Avenue.

She watched her paleness in the void of the window. A slush of snow outside. Beyond was an elevated train track that ran alongside the building and across the street. Close enough to almost touch.

— Is that why you keep looking at your watch? Elizabeth said.

— Smart girl.

— When’s the next train due?

— One will pass by at precisely 10:43. It is loud enough that none of the neighbors will hear the gun shot. Carter sighed. You have four minutes left.

The other man entered the room. Elizabeth returned to her original location and she was given a cup of coffee and they drank in silence. Traffic hummed on the street four floors below.

— Inwood’s such a weird part of Manhattan, Elizabeth said.

Hills and rivers. Doesn’t feel like you’re in New York at all. You live around here?

— I come here more often than I like, these days. Business is business.

— Where’s good to eat?

Carter laughed.

— Toni’s Pizza on the corner of Broadway and Dychman [ 88 ]

makes a great margarita, he said.

— I prefer a calzone. I like things when they’re neatly folded.

— Maybe you just don’t like to see what you eat.

Carter checked his wristwatch. He set his cup on the floor and the other man set down his cup and Elizabeth did the same. The room trembled. A train whistled and wheezed and rumbled. Blood crashed in Elizabeth’s ears like tom-toms. Carter raised the gun and trained the sights on her. At its peak, the room shook and the train rattled the windows. Elizabeth resisted the urge to collapse, to look away, to trembled and weep and yell: she stared the two men down and waited. Everything became quiet apart from the constant hum of street traffic. The train had passed. Elizabeth took a deep breath and smiled and walked toward Carter.

— You made the right decision, she said. I knew you would.

She held out her bound wrists. Carter reached inside his jacket and took a knife from its sheath with a thin blade more appropriate to skewer than carve. He touched the blade on the cord around her wrists and released her. Elizabeth’s smile had teeth more perfect than fairytale pearls. They each watched the other in a communion of glances and Elizabeth walked toward the door and the two men followed alongside.

— It’d be stupid starting a war with my partner, Kurt. But together …

— Kurt’s your partner? Carter said.

— I’ll convince him this deal is in all our best interests.

Carter stopped. Elizabeth continued another step and stopped. Her neck tingled. Her head bobbed like she was sleepy, arms flopped like a puppet with cut strings. A warm liquid spilled down the front of her dress and she glanced at it and the blood from the wound on her neck was almost black. She slumped to the ground and choked and died. The thin blade in Carter’s hand had an edge rilled with blood. He studied the body, the cream evening dress and crimson smear on the plastic sheeting. The knife dropped from his hand and struck the wooden floor with a dull thunk.

The large man met Carter’s eyes.

— Why did you do that? he said.

— I didn’t want to be caught short.

— You said you were going to make a deal with her.

— There are no deals. It’s the business we’re in. [ 89 ]

Carter straightened his tie, glanced at the woman and the mess she had made on the floor, and exited the apartment. The other man watched Carter leave and then removed his own jacket, folded it and carried it like a load of bread to the corner of the room and set it on the bare wooden floorboards, and took hold of a corner of the clear plastic sheeting and folded it over the dead woman like a calzone.

[ 90 ]

On a Balcony with the Lunch Poems, Bahrain Bonnie Bolling

The sun kneels on the landscape.

The sky is chalked.

Helicopters —

nevertheless, it’s lunch time

so I’m here for some fish, some good bread and olives.

In the distance: the gold-domed Palace,

black prayer flags, colored rows of laundry, hanging.

They’re smiling

as they bring it all up.

There is wine.

A boy playing hooky

(is the school on fire again?) splashes in a fountain

[ 91 ]

and everyone laughs,

because god would’ve wanted us to.

They say someone’s dying —

right now and brutally, deep in the village.

They carry-up more wine.

Down in the courtyard

the Bangladeshi fertilizes something

with his good hand, clears away last nights Mut’ah marriage contracts.

This in the news today:

… a fatwa to burn every church, destroy all Buddha and saints.

and

Strictly no sale or usage of tampons at the airport.

Meanwhile … a woman lifts

her niqab and sips. Smoldering tires. Someone’s unloading yams.

I get up to find the toilet.

The azan pierces the afternoon, a lost nuthatch panics on the railing.

[ 92 ]

An apron of tear gas

(made in America) snowing, a man face-down, praying.

In southern California, my sons are _______!

I remember loving

the way their faces looked when I pushed

the red swing roped to the high limb

of the willow. Oh, the creaking creaking,

always the going, always the returning,

the four of them wearing Superman underwear.

[ 93 ]

My afternoon with Mr. Kleeman Nigel Rodenhurst

It was the summer of 2011, and I was doing research for my PhD in Jewish-American fiction in New York. High on the list of things that I hoped to achieve, was a meeting with and chance to interview Mr Werner Kleeman. I suspected that this was more of a dream than a possibility. Mr Kleeman was the interlocutor of the fabled meeting between J. D. Salinger and Ernest Hemingway at the Ritz hotel, Paris.

This did not interest me in the least. My angle on Salinger and his fiction was that each was deeply affected by his Jewish experience, particularly his connection to the Holocaust, through a Jewish family he was placed with in Austria, before the war. Mr Kleeman was Salinger’s comrade and ‘friend’, and was himself a Holocaust survivor. Having managed to escape Germany when the Nazis were still giving Jews the option to get out, Mr Kleeman lost several of his family members. He returned years later as an American G.I and arrested some of his persecutors. Understandably he continues to be proud of his Jewish heritage, and mistrustful of Germans. At one point he told me that ‘the Germans still have bastards’. What I was hoping for, was that Mr Kleeman would tell me about the extent of his connection to Salinger during and after the war, and then tell me that during this time he had no idea that Salinger was half-Jewish. This is what happened, more or less.

Before travelling to New York, I had managed to get contact details

[ 94 ]

for Mr Kleeman through a gentleman named Bob Babcock, who ran a veterans association for the 4th Infantry Division, Salinger’s old unit. He had advised me that Mr Kleeman was in his nineties, extremely hard of hearing, but nonetheless willing to talk to anybody about his experiences. I made several attempts to speak on the phone with Mr Kleeman, and sent a fax with my questions, but because of his hearing impairment and perhaps issues with technology, got nowhere.

On the day in question I called Mr Kleeman from my apartment in Harlem, and was quickly taken by surprise. I tried to explain that I was ‘in town’ for six weeks, and would like to meet him at some point. Shouting down the phone, in his still discernible German accent, Mr Kleeman asked ‘you want to come here today? What time?’. I suggested 2pm, and that was that. As Mr Kleeman lives on Long Island, and I was still finding my feet in the Big Apple, I ordered a taxi from Harlem Cabs.

The white Lincoln arrived outside the apartment on West 129th and Lenox, and the driver, Makmouth Diagne, asked me to put the zip code of Mr Kleeman’s house into his GPS device. I then sat back and admired the scenery for the best part of an hour in the sweltering heat and with no air conditioning before pulling up at a street that was certainly not the right one. The driver told me that I must have missed a digit when I entered the zip code, then drove around for another twenty minutes before dropping me off at the end of Mr Kleeman’s drive and charging me $100.

The world I was in now was a million miles from the one I had just settled into on West 129th and Lenox. Replacing the high tenement style buildings, the frantic traffic and the constant stream of people in vests (all African-Americans), was a tree lined street with well- spaced-out houses and long front lawns. There were no cars or people in sight. At the top of Mr Kleeman’s lawn I saw the man himself, in a deck chair, asleep with his mouth wide open and a broadsheet spread across his lap.

‘Mr Kleeman’ I said quietly, and then again a little louder. Mr Kleeman opened his eyes and looked at me. ‘The English guy?’, he [ 95 ]

asked. He took me into his house and I sat on the settee next to him.

Then he explained to me that these days he lives only on the ground floor of his huge house, because his mobility is impaired by arthritic knees. He asked me a bunch of questions about who I was and what it was that I was looking for. I realized that this interview was not going to be easy. I was sitting right next to him and actually shouting into his ear, and he was only hearing about half of what I was asking.

I spent a couple of hours there. Even indoors with a fan running the heat was overpowering and I went through several bottles of water. Most of the conversation was led by Mr Kleeman. The topics ranged from his friendship with Salinger, his business career, his own family who are busy people and his recollections of the war.

What stood out was that this was a man who had not lost the urge to make money. He had a prized collection of seven letters from Salinger which he hoped to make into book (a story connected to Salinger for each letter). He seemed obsessed with getting a good book deal, ‘not getting screwed up’ as he put it. When I told him about my earlier episode with the taxi driver he scoffed: ‘he took you’.

Of Salinger, Mr Kleeman recalled meeting him for the first time at an army training base in Tiverton, Devon. They made friends slowly and everything was ‘low-key’. They then remained in service alongside each other until D-Day, when nobody knew if they ‘would end up alive or at the bottom of the channel’. After this they stayed in touch through letters. Mr Kleeman said that Salinger was ‘a good fellow’, although the ‘reporters, newspapers and magazines didn’t like him’, but that he ‘didn’t give a shit’. He attributed the media’s negative attention to the fact that Salinger was a ‘clean fellow’, that he ‘wasn’t corrupt and he didn’t steal anything’. He said that he respected Salinger’s way of life because ‘anybody that has a brain can use his brain to live the way he wants to live’. He said that some of Salinger’s ideas were ‘crazy’ and that sometimes Salinger told him ‘more than I wanted to hear’. He disliked Salinger’s daughter Margaret for her negative portrayal of her father in her memoir Dream Catcher: ‘you don’t blame your father for everything’.

[ 96 ]

Somewhere in the middle of the interview, which I recorded on an Olympus digital device, Mr Kleeman gave up the prize that I was there for. He did not know Salinger as a Jew. He only assumed, retrospectively, that Salinger wore a ‘H’ (for Hebrew) on his dog tag.

Despite their ‘closeness’, and Mr Kleeman’s traumatic, historical Jewish experience, Mr Kleeman did not learn that Salinger had any kind of a Jewish background until he read Dream Catcher fifty years later: ‘We did not discuss religion. I did not know he was Jewish until I read his daughter’s book. He knew I was a refugee.

We had some Jewish boys who did not want to be Jewish. So I never discussed it. He would never advertise it. He would never go to a Jewish service or anything’.

At the end I sensed that Mr Kleeman was in no rush to let me go.

He even hinted that he might show me ‘the letters’ and said that I seemed ‘like a trusted person’. Finally I left after Mr Kleeman kindly ordered me a ‘good, Korean cab’. When I got back to Harlem the first thing that I did was upload the interview into my laptop and then email to myself, worried that it would somehow get lost.

So, where did this experience get me? Was the information that I sought and found really valuable? I think so. I managed to complete my PhD within the minimum three years and passed through the viva with very minor corrections. The external examiner said that one of the strengths of my thesis was that I was ‘very creative’ with the research materials that I had found in America. This included interviewing Paul Auster at his home in Brooklyn, interviewing hidden child survivors of the Holocaust, viewing Holocaust testimonies at the Fortunoff archive at Yale, and visiting the Library of Congress to view the Philip Roth Papers.

For me, the interview with Mr Kleeman was by far the most exciting piece of research that I did. I still recall, as a younger man in Peter Miles’ ‘Experimental Fiction’ class at Lampeter University, reading The Catcher in the Rye for the first time. The hairs stood up on the back of my neck, and I still do not fully understand why this happened. What is it about Holden Caulfield and Salinger? Why is it that I do not care much for either one of them, and yet I cannot entirely dismiss them from my mind? One explanation that keeps [ 97 ]

coming back to me is this: if something is ‘wrong’ with somebody, I instinctively want to know what it is and then find the ‘cause’ with a view to a ‘cure’.

Having read all of the criticism focussed on what ‘is wrong’ with Holden Caulfield, I felt that there was something missing. Rarely does any academic ask the questions that I find interesting (let alone provide an answer). Why does this young man, who has every reason to feel good about himself, feel so bad? Why does this ‘WASP preppy’, as one scathing critic described him, feel so alienated and conscious of insidious practices of discrimination and social exclusion.

For me the answer is simple: Holden Caulfield is Jewish, is hiding this fact, and is in a deeply anti-Semitic world. Having done the historical research, it seems that it would not have mattered in the least that Salinger was only Jewish on his father’s side (and therefore not Jewish at all in the faith). This would still have been grounds for discrimination in schools and colleges. As Salinger would have been aware during his war-time experience, the Nazis considered anyone with one Jewish grandparent to be a Jew. AntiSemitism was shocking in the US armed forces, even at the time when Salinger was enlisted, when they were fighting the Nazis. It seems highly probably from my research, that Salinger got into the habit of hiding and disguising his Jewish identity as a young man, before he eventually withdrew from public life.

To my mind, this historical context explains much better than any ‘psycho-sexual’ or ‘class’ based analysis what ‘ails’ Holden Caulfield. Something in the novel struck a chord with me and as far as I see it, clues to the Jewish element are there if one is inclined to see them. For instance, riding home on the train Holden gets into a conversation with the mother of one of his class-mates, Mrs Morrow (names ending ‘ow’ are often Anglicised versions of Jewish names). She is heading to Newark and ‘lousy with rocks’ (again, Jewish stereotypes). Holden switches identity, without thinking, calling himself ‘Rudolf Schmidt’. Why does he do this? What exactly is he trying to conceal? Is he really Holden Caulfield, or Holden Kornfeld (a Jewish name meaning field of grain or rye)? Few critics [ 98 ]

address the repeated tendency of Holden to conceal his identity as a factor of significance in his ‘conduct disorder’.

I saw my afternoon with Mr Kleeman as a rare opportunity to speak with someone who knew Salinger, and to put my theory to the test. Was Salinger one who would conceal or lie about his Jewish identity? I got the answer that I was looking for and more besides.

Whatever anybody might think of a person’s style or manners, an afternoon with a man who survived the Holocaust and ‘made good’ in America is always going to be interesting. Even though I will never be one hundred per cent certain that what ‘ails’ Holden Caulfield is anti-Semitism and a strongly felt need to dissimulate, I feel that this explanation is at least as good as any other that I have come across. A new biography, J.D. Salinger’s Private War by David Shields and Shane Salerno will be published in September 2013. I do not know whether or not the authors interviewed Mr Kleeman or what their arguments concerning the withdrawal and reclusive behaviour of the author will be, but I will await that book with baited breath.

[ 99 ]

Three Poems Mike Jenkins

Cyfarthfa Morning i.m. Leslie Norris These things I saw from a bench by the mock castle where the cannons were stopped and children clambered: flames rising up high from tall chimneys, the furnace mouths with giants’ tongues rolling out iron a lake shaped like a fish with ducks for scales and tree-island eyes; a truant boy swimming out, stones thrown by yelling pupils a rugby player, Beynon, arms muddied, strong-tackling, blackened by pitch’s dirt, no sense of what was coming: a landslide of bodies

[ 100 ]

a man with round owl face and hair like a whisper, thinking in memory-layers as leaf-fall recalls paper on paper, veins pulsing with metres.

At the Point of Turning For Herbert Williams

Herb, I know how hard it is just to get out, but I half-expected by the front at the end of the promenade, to see you and Dorothy again.

You always say – ‘I’ll try to make it!’

The Big C you write to laugh off.

This town which gave us so much: Aber Boyz erioed erioed (Parrys of the word not note).

Now it’s like different generations side by side, yet not communicating.

Young and lively grandchildren with their names yn Cymraeg, with a sense of just-born pride.

The middle-aged hinterland of trekking boots and retail parks and photocopy geography of familiar signs.

Blanked-out windows and scaffolding, joints swollen by the salt-damp and just a stick or metal frame.

Herb, I tell myself it’s all for summer, that paint will dry for another season when I’ll meet you there, at the point of turning.

[ 101 ]

Meeting Tripp’s Ghost I’d arranged to meet Tripp’s ghost in his home town of Bargoed.

He’d be on the Cardiff train, myself on the Merthyr bus; non-driving poets, both experts at cadging unlikely lifts.

He was looking rather haggard, as befits one 26 years gone.

Didn’t seem healthy enough for a few pints, so I suggested the new caff, the Bookworm.

‘Yew’re goin soft, boy!’ he growled, taking me from tavern to tavern: the Old Mill, Blast Furnace and the Nelson.

Told him he’d given me the worst advice from anyone, ‘Don’t be funny about the Valleys!’ he’d said.

He laughed, asking if they’d erected a plaque yet.

He couldn’t believe the state of the town ‘It’s like a bloody building-site, mun!’

He railed against supermarket plans ‘I knew it...Tescoville,Morrisonburg,Lidlston!’

Pissed up against the visual projection of roads, people, buildings in one direction.

From Mozart Cottages in Pontlottyn and Tennyson and Milton Terraces,

[ 102 ]

shoppers passed him by tut-tutting.

‘Hanbury Chapel’s a library now,’ I told him, ‘but the Emporium’s empty as a disused mine.’

‘I was always a visitor, you know,’ he explained.

‘You mean in Cardiff?...you couldn’t belong?’

‘No...in the end, the page was my home.’

[ 103 ]

A Trickster Tale David Rains Wallace

Cultures blossom around his head and fall to bits under his feet.

Indifferent to the discouragements of time, learning a little, but not much, from every rebuff, in an evolutionary way, turning everything to his advantage, or trying to, he is nothing really but an all-out commitment to salvaging life against the odds.”

Ted Hughes “Crow on the Beach”

I Pileated Woodpecker’s Cabin

Poets remind me of forest mushrooms. A new crop comes up every generation, all shapes and sizes, but then almost imperceptibly sinks back into the ooze wherefrom it came. This might seem a pejorative analogy but considering what forest fungi are, it isn’t. The underground mycelia of most species are mycorhizae: they live symbiotically on the roots of photosynthetic plants, providing water and mineral nutrients in return for food.

Without them, the forest dies. It seems to me that poetry has an analogous function toward the “forest” of language, pumping imagination into the light of everyday usage, keeping good language alive.

Still, the ranks of slender volumes in library poetry sections can be daunting. A few always stand out, but many are hard to [ 104 ]

find after they subside into the cultural leaf litter. It’s like trying to identify a mushroom species from its mycelial threads. One example of this is Lew Welch. He was a friend of Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen and other “beats,” and shared their interests, Buddhism in particular, but he remains little known. He disappeared at age forty-four in 1971, believed a suicide although his body was never found.

Welch had lyric genius, which, like that for music, physics or mathematics, is hard to understand. Lyric genius is even harder than the others because it depends less on technical disciplines.

Welch had complicated ideas about poetic practice which I admit don’t mean a lot to me although his dictum that poetry should spring from everyday spoken language makes sense. I recognize the results, anyway. His best poetry seems alive in a way that reminds me of Keats and T.S. Eliot (although he hated Eliot). In his preface to Welch’s Selected Poems, Gary Snyder writes:

“As for poetics, jazz musical phrasing of American speech is one of Lew Welch’s clearest contributions. First taught to write in natural speech and in terms of the musical phrase by Williams and Pound, he turns sometimes to street-talk, street-jive, blues, pop rhythms; and can score it on the page. This is done without cuteness or obscurity. Indeed, all these poems have music and clarity of language, and a compression such that the words stop, but the meaning keeps going on.”

That is a better description of Welch’s poetics than I’m capable of, except that one might assume from it that Welch was an essentially urban, or urbane, poet like Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. And much of Welch’s poetry is like that. As Snyder also observes of Selected Poems, however: “The heart of the book is the ‘Hermit Poems’ and ‘Way Back’ sections—poems evoking, covering, the time spent in retreat and practice at a cabin in the mountains of coast north California, deep up rivers, still Yurok land. In those works, Lew really achieved the meeting of an ancient Asian sage tradition, the ‘shack simple’ post-frontier back country, out-of-work workingman’s style, and the rebel modernism of art.”

Welch’s “Hermit” and “Way Back” poems have a mythic element that particularly interests me. They concern the KlamathSiskiyou region - the most bio-diverse chunk of coniferous ancient forest on the U.S. West Coast, perhaps in the world, (as [ 105 ]

determined by the World Wildlife Fund and International Union for the Conservation of Nature) as well as an important nexus of Native American cultures. The fact that Welch himself seemed dimly aware of these geographical facts, less widely known in his time, doesn’t dispel the poems’ mythic quality: on the contrary. As his letters during his time in the region show, he perceived it as a very special place, for him as well as in itself. He wrote to Snyder in October 1962:

“Supernatural events led me gradually to this place — a place of such beauty, dignity, and fine history I am humbled, finally right back into my total mind & will never again be bitter and complaining and afraid … ‘Here’ is on the Salmon River in Trinity Alps/Marble Mt. Area — the best river I’ve ever seen & I’ve seen lots of rivers. Each day I catch a fish (now salmon, later steelhead) abt. 7 to 10 lbs. & I eat him all day … Elevation 3200. trees around here are Doug fir & sugar pine & yew. Many small oaks and maples. Dogwood. Dogwood now lavender. Everything else fantastic unpaintable yellow and evergreen … Indians here are Hupa, powerful 5’5’’ types with very handsome faces, very dark, almost black, skin, smoke gray eyes when mixed (as most are) … ”

But what is the myth that the supernaturally located place evokes? Welch sometimes seemed to think that it was the myth of the pioneer, of escaping from civilization to find a new life of health and virtue in pristine nature. The trappers, miners, and loggers who “settled” the region did so without much health or virtue, however, and as Snyder observes, Welch’s Salmon River story is really a “post-frontier” one. By the time he got there, one of U.S. history’s great binges of natural resource exploitation had been underway for two decades as the Forest Service built hundreds of soil-eroding, stream-polluting logging roads to subsidize baby boom suburbia’s construction industries. Welch was aware of this, and his attitude to it implies a much older kind of myth.

When Welch arrived in the region in September 1962, he wrote his friend Kirby Doyle that one of the “supernatural events” that guided him was finding a “big steel bridge” over the Salmon River with nothing on the other side. “I was told it was put there, by inconceivable error, several years ago, when the Forestry engineers missed the proper site by about 3 miles.” Although deploring this waste of public funds, he found the bridge auspicious because an [ 106 ]

old trail on the other side led to an unoccupied cabin where he was able to squat. A year later, the woods near his cabin resounded with dynamite and chain saws as the Forest Service built the road that the mistaken bridge had been meant to serve. He wrote Snyder: “They are blasting the road across from where I live and today and I got 9 perfect, brand-new, powder boxes! The very best ones — with the dovetailed corners and the thick wood! Tomorrow I think I can get 6 more!”

Welch’s acquisitive glee as the Green Machine mangles the ecosystem that produces his free salmon diet is incongruous with his pious avowals of devotion to the place, and I think it shows what kind of myth his Salmon River story is. Given the time and place, it was an appropriate one — a trickster tale. Such myths are common in West Coast native cultures like the Klamath-Siskiyou’s.

They’re generally called Coyote stories, but since most of the north coast is heavily forested, not optimum coyote habitat, local trickster tales may feature forest birds like Blue Jay, Raven, or Pileated Woodpecker. Lew Welch was noisy and redheaded like a pileated woodpecker.

II Adventures in Hupa Land

As a poet, Welch was a highly cultivated genius. As a person, although kind, brave, honest, funny, and accomplished, he was a problem. An alcoholic for most of his adult life, he was vain and boastful, classic trickster qualities, and - the most classic quality he was constantly outsmarting himself with various harebrained schemes, thus propelling himself into continuous indignities and absurdities.

His Salmon River story starts like a typical trickster tale - he lands there abruptly out of chaos. Living in San Francisco, he had just undergone a spectacular nervous breakdown after a disastrous love affair. The chaos also involved doctors and the law, although Welch’s letters didn’t elaborate. He wrote: “I have reached what I hope is nearly the end of 5 months of a total withdrawal of all love, all spirit, all hope, all vision — my whole being drawn into a fist pounding bitterly against Everything, for it has seemed that [ 107 ]

Everything is dedicated to mocking MAWKING all that I know is good, and here. I cannot shut out the din anymore. I am afraid.”

Then, without explanation, he is on the Salmon River, four hundred miles north, and things are looking up. He wrote to Snyder: “Here I am sitting in the woods with my typewriter on top of my footlocker & my legs all cramped up monk style … The poor miserable fellow who used my name and body all last year finally went off to pout or mope somewhere else. I hope he never comes back, but he probably will — just when everything gets set to my liking.”

Welch’s procedures for getting everything set to his liking were always complicated, often hasty and ill considered. He schemed to get land, cabins, gold mining claims, jobs, equipment, but never with much success, and apparent successes tended to boomerang.

In September, 1962, he wrote: “No cabin yet, but spooky flukes. I keep just missing good deals by a few days, or because somebody sold some property & the buyer needs a place for the winter. I don’t know whether to interpret this as meaning I shouldn’t be here, or as a sign that something really great is in the offing & I am being (as they say) ‘brought along slow.’”

Misfortunes plagued him, some comic, some sad, many of his own invention. He immediately transgressed authority by forgetting to put out his campfire. “Very embarrassing. Citation etc. The green fuzz hunting me out, & me still paranoid from cities.

2 days ruined.” He talked his way out of getting fined, but soon suffered a further indignity. In October he wrote: “I lost my way, fell, and while trying to disentangle myself let my pack roll downhill and I couldn’t find it! Spent all day hunting for it & returned defeated, confused, ashamed. Imagine losing your pack!”

He located a beautiful cabin, and moving in, found it occupied: “Rats scampering over face, clawing at old shakes, nervously scuttling like mad things. No sleep at all for two nights. I went mad one night, leaped out of the sleeping bag and pounded the walls. My only light, a kerosene barn lantern, showed many little faces staring down at me from the rafters: not frightened, bemused at my antics.” In not very Buddhist fashion, he exterminated them, leading to more confusion. “Now all of them are dead, the last one trapped, all the rest poisoned. And I miss them!! They were mountain pack rats, gray with snow-white bellies and white feet. [ 108 ]

They collect everything. In the enormous nests I found after tearing out the canvas ceiling I found shaving brushes, toothbrushes, .22 cartridges, pencils, and a small calendar I am now using.”

The beautiful cabin was at the end of a long climb, was under six feet of snow in winter and had, as the local people amusedly told him, “the only bad water in the whole country.” So, a month later, he found a second, less beautiful but more accessible cabin built by the same deceased recluse as the first, and after negotiation with kindly locals, moved in. But, as though in retribution for his ultimately pointless pack rat holocaust, some wild animal (he suspected a squirrel) mangled his cat: “If you have a dearly beloved pet, or let’s say you give birth to a Mongolian idiot or any other of the natural tragedies that occur to all of us, you simply phone and make an appointment and get rid of it one way or another, don’t you? In the woods you have to shoot it or bury it or keep it. It sure makes a difference.”

Then it was hunting season for “big bucks with necks all swoll with rutting juice. (I had good shots at 2 of them today!) Wild hunting trip up to Rat Flat. I lost my pack again. Missed both bucks!

Lost my big Australian-issue Digger hat. Disgrace! Excitement!

Legs go all wobbly when looking at buck over the sights of a rifle.”

Meanwhile, he schemes as habitually and erratically for urban acquisitions as for rural ones — grants, girls, readings, publications: “Huge productions! New works! (Then my typewriter broke.) Maybe I come fix him about Xmas … ”

Everything finally seemed set to his liking, more or less, but tricksters are never satisfied. Despite vows to stop complaining, he was restive by January, 1963, when he wrote: “This letter is by hand because my typewriter broke TWICE & it’s 300 miles back and forth (75 miles each way taking & leaving & picking it up) and all my money spent on it & then it breaks again, which literally sends me to bed all day smashed my whole life ruined, the whole Universe trying to keep me from writing. I can’t THINK with a pen!”

“So new peace of mind easily DESTROYED”

“So it’s starting to uncramp — whole days of easy bliss, things seen, understood, it’s all right.”

“(And then my chain saw broke. And then my Coleman. It’s an epidemic of ‘thing trouble.’)”

The epidemic lasted through the spring as fauna and flora [ 109 ]

attacked him. Tricksters are always struggling with lesser beings.

“I got bit by a scorpeen, not even as bad as a bee. Then I rooted out poison oak and came on all puffy. No itch, just a swollen face & balls very red and burning like a sunburn & a fever. Lovely dreams. Puking. No blisters & today it’s almost gone away. I had a meditation & talked to my body telling it to stop the allergic bullshit.”

Nothing stopped the scheming, high hopes, second thoughts, and wandering attention. “Today I went gold mining for the first time. Panned up some big pyrite (‘Pirates’ on this river) but no gold … I’ll go gold hunting in a serious & systematic way. I have 2 good spots lined up … Very hypnotizing work. The next shovel full just might be! But 4 hours without a ‘color’ proved to be the limit of my patience. Also, the creeks are very pretty. A mink came down to drink. Sandwiches dunked in cold water etc./ I get very bugged with myself, this cabin, these mountains, & this river. But then I can’t think where else I’d rather be, even if I could afford it.”

Welch had been scheming to get a Forest Service fire or trail crew job since his arrival. In May 1963, he wrote: “Tomorrow I go give myself up to the Forestry. I don’t mind at all. I’m tired of thinking and writing and reading and studying my ballistic tables.

I don’t have single line of poetry in me & I’m glad … I want to work on a trail crew so I can learn something about handling stock, throwing the Diamond, and so I can see more of this country. I hope they don’t offer me a lookout job. I’m so tired of our friend Lewie …”

In July, he finally got on a crew. “Right now I’m working 7 days a week & can’t hardly do more than come home, eat, wash dishes, & go to sleep. But the winter grubstake looks almost certain.

I was in a real panic.”

A hard-working sober citizen’s career seemed underway. It lasted three months. Then, with pockets full of dollars, Welch had new schemes. He wrote to Kirby Doyle: “I am seriously considering making my Chevy into a modest rod. Sparkle-green, tough disks, smittys. It is, I now realize & have been droolingly told by car-wild Indians on this river, a cherry ’54!”

“I now have a pair of cruel boots for city wear. Also a black jacket with Swiss blue lining that will not quit.”

“You said that some L.A. dancing chick wanted to write to me. Why, didn’t, doesn’t she? Tell her to write me dirty letters. I [ 110 ]

will answer in kind. We can tell each other exactly what we’ll do to every square inch of each other when we meet.”

“I have this huge mountain load and lots of brand new money.”

“As near as I can see, this work will end about November 1st.

Then I’ll get my wood in, put in 3 new windows, lay new linoleum on the floor, pack my car, and come to San Francisco.”

Welch didn’t say whether he installed the cabin improvements. Given his penchant for proclaiming his successes, it seems unlikely that he did. Anyway, he didn’t live in the cabin again, and there’s no evidence that he returned to the Salmon River.

In a 1964 letter to a friend there he wrote: “I keep wondering why I don’t come back to the river. But then I have to admit that I don’t want to, right now.” Pileated Woodpecker had come and gone.

III Through the Bone Ring

So it goes with tricksters: they arrive, make messes, and depart. But at some point in the tale they often turn into something else, something so insignificant that it gets left behind. Then that becomes a story within a story. Welch does this in the last of his “Hermit Poems”: “I saw myself a ring of bone in the clear stream of all of it”

Readers who descend into the clear stream of Welch’s verse and look through the ring of bone see an amazing sight: a series of tiny worlds on the Salmon River, like candy Easter egg scenes except that they are alive, with smells, tastes, and sounds as well as sights. Such surprising changes of scale are another trickster feat: “all my lizards lost their tails, mating. six green snakes ate all my frogs. butterflies do very odd things with their tongues … ” [ 111 ]

Or: “The wood of the madrone burns with a flame at once lavender and mossy green, a color you sometimes see in a sari … ”

Then, another trick, the tiny pictures coalesce into an entirely new world wherein Welch is not just a scheming beatnik squatter but a towering figure of cosmic history. This transformation actually occurs in the first Hermit Poem, “PREFACE: THE BATH,” although it doesn’t become clear right away. Trickster stories tend to go backwards and forwards at once: “At last it is raining, the first sign of spring the Blue Jay gets all wet. frost-flowers, tiny bright and dry like inch high crystal trees or sparkling silver mold, acres of them, on heaps of placer boulders all around me, are finally washing away. They are beautiful.

And the big trees rising, dark, behind them.

This canyon so steep so we didn’t get sun since late November, my “CC” shack and I. Obsolete. The two of us.

He for his defunct agency.

I for useless Art?

“Oughta come by more often, Lewie, you get shack simple.”

big winter boom of the river

crunch of boots on the icy trail to it

kerosene lantern even in the daytime golden light

inside

[ 112 ]

I think I’ll bathe in Spring-rain tin-roof clatter of it all begins to melt away.

The bath a ritual here, the way it used to be.

Vat & Caldron

Kettle Pot & Tub Stoke the Stove till Cherry ______________________________

Naked, he clambers over boulders to his spring.

He dips two buckets full and scampers back.

Filling the many vessels on his stove, he starts

to rave. ________________________________

I hear Incantations!

I hear voices of the Wise Old Men and Songs of the Addled Girls!

Moss! Astonishing green!

All that time the rocks were, even.

Hopping on it, wet, that Crested Blue!

Robin bedraggled. Warm rain finally. Spring.”

A lot of raving ensues. Pileated Woodpecker stalks the riverside, Paul Bunyan, Dionysus, and Lao Tse rolled into one: “I know a man’s supposed to have his hair cut short, but I have beautiful hair.

I like to let it grow into a long bronze mane.

In my boots. In my blue wool shirt. with my rifle slung over my shoulder among the huge boulders in the dark ravine, I’m the ghost roan stallion. [ 113 ]

Leif Ericson.

The beautiful Golden Girl!”

Or: “The hermit locks his door against the blizzard.

He keeps the cabin warm.

All winter long he sorts out all he has.

What was well started shall be finished.

What was not, should be thrown away.

In spring he emerges with one garment And a single book … ”

But still another facet of the trickster is that, clever as his self-inflationary stratagems are, he can’t help showing his small, foolish self, crouching Wizard of Oz-like in the projection booth. In fact, he likes showing it as part of his cleverness. So Paul BunyanDionysus-Lao Tse keeps taking pratfalls.

“The Empress herself served tea to Su Tung-po and ordered him escorted home by Ladies of the Palace, with torches.

I forgot my flashlight.

Drunk, I’ll never get across this rickety bridge.

Even the Lady in the Sky abandons me.”

Or: “Not yet 40, my beard is already white.

Not yet awake, my eyes are puffy and red, like a child who has cried too much What is more disagreeable than last night’s wine ? [ 114 ]

I’ll shave.

I’ll stick my head in a cold spring and look around at the pebbles.

Maybe I can eat a can of peaches.”

Yet, as his turn with the bone ring and the Easter egg scenes shows, the trickster is more than a schemer, illusionist, and exhibitionist.

He really is part of cosmic history, albeit not in quite the grandiose way he imagines, as Welch ruefully acknowledges in “HE PREPARES TO TAKE LEAVE OF HIS HUT,” the first poem of the second Salmon River sequence, “The Way Back”: “And they, The Blessed Ones, said to him, “Beautiful trip, Avolakitshvara.

You never have to go back there again.”

And he said, “Thank you very much, but I think I will.

Those people need all the help they can get.”

Not that I’m on the Other side of the River, you understand,

except literally …

And even that is just a pretty imitation of a state of Mind I don’t possess or even seek, right now, or wait for anymore.”

The trickster is a creator, albeit one whose creativity consists of continually remaking the world in the process of ruining it.

He is fortunately not the only one. Sometimes he has a sensible, competent counterpart: sometimes an original precedes them. But he seems to me an essential figure, since that is what life is like, constantly ruined, constantly remade.

Lew Welch’s Salmon River poems are living worlds remade from ruined ones - his disastrous life and the eroded and polluted Klamath Siskiyous. I find them exhilarating. Like trickster stories, [ 115 ]

they evoke a cycle that - if never cause for complacency - is always cause for hope. Such stories are told at the darkest time of year when the winter storms that ruin and remake the world are due to arrive. Welch follows the mythic pattern right through to his final Salmon River poems. He leaves the Klamaths in late November, approaching the darkest time: “Driving out to Callahan, you get the setting for it all:

Cloud-shrouded gorges!

Foggy trees!

I can’t see the ridges anymore!

River?

Big Sung landscape scroll a mile high and

longer than I’ll ever know!”

Then in the final poem, “HE GREETS, AGAIN, THE OPEN ROAD,” it is suddenly and mysteriously Spring: “Shut the shack door, packed the car, and drove to San Francisco 400 miles through valleys of larks —

the hills that year so green a sheen of gold cast over them, as if they just couldn’t stand such green … ”

[ 116 ]

Three Poems Lew Welch

Copyright 2012 by The Estate of Lew Welch. Reprinted by permission of City Lights Books.

A SONG TO HIS SECRET FARM

For Robert Creeley

Grow, little plant!

Show those who waste my time and thee How good it is to be As any weed.

- Jungle Thing!

Fear not though deer shall Surely clip thy life, be Stoical, Like I It was for Love you came so far To germinate And die!

[ 117 ]

LINES TO AN URBAN DAWN the rising sun pries the pigeon from beneath his wing wakes in a doorway the old man who slept in his coat last night, and makes the water seem more cold spilling from a shallow bowl held high by four greek hands.

- there they meet timing it perfectly

pigeon setting wings and pushing from the roof’s edge just as the man got up. man and pigeon bathe in the fountain part pasture on the city and will meet again in public parks

TWO LIKE VILLANELLES They’re tearing down all the Victorian Mansions and building Freeways in Portland Oregon & everywhere

“and the rough places shall be plane”

In a landscape of ruined buildings, on a small rock wheeling about the heavens and

comin’ on green to crack sidewalks, [ 118 ]

you looked so beautiful picking blackberries all the long summer afternoon.

The berries!

Berries made fountains of fruit and thorn on

rubble, iron fence and gate, on basement steps to basement now just berry-pit.

And you!

You looked so beautiful picking blackberries,

long black hair in the summer sun, black eyes glancing up to where I stood In a landscape of ruined buildings, on a small green rock

wheeling about the heavens

For all the Wet Green Girls I found myself, green girls, in a month like May, in a green green garden at the break of day all around me gray rain beat and the cage that I am was an empty zoo as a garden, girls, at a break like May in the first wet light of the sun when, from a rock in the arbor leapt a sleeping cat, through gray green cages of deserted zoo where I found myself on a breaking day

[ 119 ]

as bright rain beat upon the garden stone where the lept cat left his belly print alone, young girls, when my head unbent in a green green garden at the break of day and I saw what came and I watched what went Green Girls

[ 120 ]

Two Poems Brenda Hillman

Stichomythia #1 You know, you’re not that flexible.

I thought I was. I thought I was flexible.

But you’re not. You’re just not that flexible.

I thought I was flexible. I thought I was like, like a creek. Like an ocean, like the Pacific Ocean.

But you’re not. You’re more like, like a rock. You’re more like a granite rock. You’re more, cracked — sort of, one of those cracked rocks with snow on it, with little rocks falling down around it & with one of those little pine trees trying to just stick up out of it up there.

[ 121 ]

Brief Walk at Salt Point Park

— seal pups ar-ar-ar- —

& the skin of the soul felt a chill,

especially the left side of the S, facing the Pacific (specific Pacific specific Pacific ar ar ar); sandstock burdock human s pines (does the s move toward pines or spines ?)

— buckwheat hardpan up a hill finding the rim of the miracle —

fear blue shade sense blind made what tense pigmy cypress trill or hill (knowledge did not wreck experience —) weather warped & nations fell over the edge of the miracle — — What thus doth keep love safe, brittle rhymer — Depends on what you mean by safe, little climber (To know without fear the mind of another)

[ 122 ]

Growing Pains Carly Holmes

The boy was sixteen when they met, and the woman was – however old the woman was. He didn’t care, not at first. It was enough that she was beautiful and she let him see her naked.

The first time she released her breasts from their silk and wire cage, it loosened the tendons behind his kneecaps. He couldn’t believe that he was actually allowed to touch. He stood and gaped, sagging before the sight of her. She laughed and held him by the wrists, tugged him closer until his palms were full of her and he had to rest his head on her shoulder and remember to breathe.

She called him her boy, or just boy, and sometimes she ran her fingers through his hair as if he were much younger than his years. But then there were times she’d bite the side of his neck and drag her nails down his shoulder blades, leaving trails of glistening red that smarted for days, and he felt so much older than his years.

She taught him to say Fuck me without giggling, without blushing, and she said that sex with him was the closest she came to having a spiritual conversion. He didn’t understand what she meant but he took it as a compliment.

The boy had thought all women smelt like his mother or like the girls at school. Paris or Tweed or White Musk. But this woman smelt of something heavy and exotic that came in a thick glass bottle the colour of honey left out in the sun. She dabbed her nectar blend into the hollow of her throat and between her thighs, and when he lay in bed at night, alone, he’d rub a fingertip around his almost-stubble and collect the scent that had gathered there, and he’d go to sleep with his finger suckled into the damp fold of his mouth.

They never went up to her bedroom. The boy was too shy [ 123 ]

to ask why not, too scared she’d get cross and send him home if he made an issue of it, but sometimes he fantasised about spreading her slowly across the bed she shared with her husband and using his rival’s pyjamas to tie her wrists, maybe scrubbing them between his legs after he’d come and then tucking them back beneath the pillows. He knew what her husband had looked like on their wedding day, the photographs crowded the top of the piano in the dining room, but the boy liked to think that the man had lost his good looks since then, that he was bald and his hipbones were buried below fistfuls of pale flesh. That he was impotent and could only get it up once or twice a year, Christmas and birthday.

When the boy walked through her front door after school he didn’t know whether she’d be waiting for him in the tiled chill of the hallway or on the scratchy carpeted stairs or in the sticky warmth of the kitchen. She liked to hide and he liked to search her out, knowing what his prize would be. But no matter how it started, whether he discovered her in the scullery and fucked her standing between the boxes of sweetly wrinkled stored apples or she tripped him in the dark of the upstairs corridor and straddled him where he fell, it always ended the same way. She would glance at her watch and stretch, covering her yawn with the tips of her fingers, staring past him at the evening un-spooling ahead of her. The dinner to be planned, the return of the husband, the reassertion of her domestic world. No matter how weary he was, how much he longed to just curl beside her and close his eyes, the boy had to find his clothes, chew the knots from his school tie, and then kiss her goodbye.

He’d stumble home with his shirt un-tucked and his calves trembling. He’d perch between his parents on the sofa, shovelling his dinner into his mouth with ravenous speed, and then he’d go up to his room and slide his magazines out from under his bed, study the women contorted across the pages and compare them to her, to his woman, and find them wanting.

The boy told his best friend about the woman and his best friend told him he was a fucking horse shit liar, so he told his best friend to follow him to her house one day. He told him to wait in the garden for half an hour and then look through the windows and he’d see them together. He’d see them fucking, he’d see his best friend fucking like a real man, and then he wouldn’t be able to call him a horse shit liar any more. [ 124 ]

When it was done and he emerged with his face reddened from bravado and embarrassment, his best friend slithered out from behind a tree and fell into step beside him. They walked down the driveway in silence. The boy glanced at his friend and saw jealousy and admiration in the pinched lips, the stiff march towards the road, and he smiled and said nothing.

They parted at the crossroads by the library and the boy lifted his hand in a goodbye salute. He still hadn’t spoken but he was grinning as loudly as he could. His best friend punched him quickly, hard, on the arm, and said Christ, she was older than my old mum.

She’s got to be at least forty. I didn’t know you were into screwing wrinklies. He turned and walked away.

The boy hadn’t cared how old the woman was, not at first.

It had been enough that she was beautiful and she let him touch her everywhere. But now he couldn’t stop thinking about what his friend had said. When he was crouched before her, kneeling in the shadow of her breasts, he squinted and was sure they had drifted downwards. When he gripped the taut flesh of her waist and arched over her, he licked the side of her neck lightly to gauge whether his tongue would stumble through wrinkles that could be felt rather than seen. He dreaded school and his best friend’s inevitable snort and prod, his suggestive leer, whenever the old cleaner shuffled past with her bucket and mop.

At home the boy watched his mother closely and tried to remember when the glossed girl who’d once held his baby self had roughened into this worn and collapsed creature who lifted his ankles every weekend so that she could hoover beneath and around him. Was she older than his woman? Surely much older. But now he couldn’t be sure and the thought of thrusting his nakedness, his virility, between the thighs of a woman the same age as his own mother made him queasy.

He still visited his lover but he preferred to find her now in the carefree darkness of the hallway, not the callous glow of the lounge. He shut his eyes when they had sex, and sometimes he concentrated on the women in his magazines. Trapped forever between the shiny, brittle pages, those women would never become old.

The last time he saw her, the boy fidgeted and winced in the vivid sunlight that poured into the kitchen. It was late summer. He [ 125 ]

stood by the table and rested his hand on its smooth lines as she knelt before him. He shut his eyes and opened them again, and tried to concentrate on the wet rhythm of her mouth, only on that. He looked down on the top of her head and saw in her hair’s parting a few strands of silver. Stray silver nestled amongst the blonde. She’d let it go too long between visits to the hairdresser. The boy’s heart pumped faster, flushing her out, diluting her into his blood stream, and then his heart was his own again.

After he’d come, with his hands hard against her cheekbones and his lips thinned to a snarl, he picked up a tea towel and wiped himself. He dropped the red cloth onto her thighs and grabbed his school bag. He didn’t wait for the glance at the watch, the yawn. I need to get home, grandma, he said. I’ve got an exam to study for. He walked away and told himself he wouldn’t look back, but when he got to the door he couldn’t help himself.

He thought she’d still be kneeling in the sunlight, made ugly by his words and easy to leave. Her arms would be wrapped around her breasts and she’d be crying without making a sound. But she was on her feet and she was smiling. She shook her head at him, at his youth and his cruelty, and she blew him a kiss and turned away.

He laughed as if he didn’t care, and he hefted his school bag higher on his shoulder, and then he left her.

He was thinking how best to tell his friend the next day, to achieve maximum comic effect, as the door banged shut behind him and he started to walk down the drive. He paused to pluck a long, fair hair from his blazer and let the breeze take it from his finger’s pinch, and then he pushed his hands into the pockets of his trousers and stood watching it dance across the garden, back to her.

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In Kilquire Jim Conwell

Absence sits serenely on this land and sets the birds screeching and wheeling in the air.

Down there beyond, the lower fields are flooded, the white ice there in the distance, calling something in the bright winter sun.

And here, on either side of this abandoned road, which runs into brambles and uncertainty just beyond this spot, two houses stand, one on either side, the one facing the road with the same confidence as when it was built But now proclaiming its hollowness.

Failing now.

And the other, a smaller house, turned in on itself, protected by the walls of a shed whose only occupant is the abandoned donkey cart within.

It is strange to see it standing there, which was once so familiar to me – 50 years in time, ago, when I rode in its hard, thumping bed And saw it upended, its shaft used to hang chickens.

In the house, a man’s jacket is carefully hung by the stairs.

Mildew gives it its unearthly green colour while its owner no longer walks this land.

[ 127 ]

Upstairs, the swifts have built their nests high on the wall and it is a comfort that they have found shelter here as I stand in the dusty ruin of a room once warm and sunny, where I slept and shared a bed with my cousin’s roving hands.

[ 128 ]

To See the Shimmer of Infinity in the Face of The Other Stephen Harrod Buhner

Adapted and condensed from the upcoming book: Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm.

There was once a woman who was so trapped inside Cartesian dualism that she could find no way out. Her life felt so meaningless and she was so unhappy that she went to and became one of his patients. Despite this, she knew, beyond doubt, that there was no reality other than the materialistic in which she was trapped. She continually responded to Jung’s discussions of the unconscious with disbelief. But one day she came to her session and related a dream she had had the night before . . .

She had dreamed that she had been given a golden scarab beetle, a powerful symbol of death and rebirth in ancient Egypt. For some reason she could not let go of the feelings of significance she had about the beetle and she asked Jung to tell her about its meaning. Just as Jung was about to respond, he heard a gentle, insistent tapping at the window behind him.

Jung, in his notes, comments that, “I turned round and saw a fairly large flying insect that was knocking against the windowpane from outside in an obvious attempt to get into the dark

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room. That seemed to me very strange. I opened the window immediately and caught the insect in the air as it flew in. It was a scarabaeid beetle, or common rose-chafer (Cetonia aurata), whose gold-green colour most nearly resembles that of a golden scarab. I handed the beetle to my patient with the words, ‘Here is your scarab.’�

C. G. Jung In the magical universe there are no coincidences and there are no accidents.

William Burroughs

There are experiences we have as children, each and every one of us, that find a place inside us where neither time nor wounds can reach or damage them. And those experiences? They light our way through the world for the rest of our lives. Many of us forget them as we grow older, yet still they remain, far inside, shaping who we are at a level too deep for words.

Some of those experiences are memories of moments when, for some reason, the day-to-day world alters itself. The very quality of reality shifts and the alteration is so striking, the feeling impact so strong, the effect on psyche so deep, that it is not possible for the depths of us to truly forget them.

As if it were happening now, I remember the first time. . .

My grandfather was sitting at his desk . . .

the very one where I now write these words

and I was walking along the hallway, going outside to play, when I caught a glimpse of him and stopped at the door of his room, hesitating tentatively on the threshold. Then, for some strange, never-to-be-known reason, my internal world quieted in a way I had never experienced. I became aware of a special quality to the sounds around me. Silence itself became a penetrating quiet-sound of its own, like a word filled with such deep meaning it touches the very foundations of the self. Every tiny noise emerging in that magical silence took on a special kind of sound, filled with meaning. It seemed that I could hear, truly hear, for the first time: the creak of the chair, the slight rustling of drapes, the movement

[ 130 ]

of my grandfather’s hands among his papers, his breathing – and the simple, quiet susurrus of my own inhale and exhale. Each sound seemed almost to shimmer and each and every one of them resonated deeply inside me. I felt some kind of communication coming into me from those sounds.

The light, filtering in from the windows, was changed as well.

It was charged with a quality I had never seen before; it seemed to glow with a special light of its own. A shimmering luminescence emerged from inside it, as if I were seeing a deeper form of light, quietly existing, normally invisible, inside the day-to-day sunlight I was used to. Sensuous, liquid, alive, luminous. Everything in the room was immersed, bathed, in it.

I remember seeing the dust motes as they slowly moved in the quiet air currents, each catching a piece of that golden light, then vanishing again as they turned in the slowly-drifting air – a gentle rain, golden sparks of light, appearing and disappearing to my wondering eye. And like the light itself, every object in the room seemed to gently shimmer, a soft luminescence emerging from inside them, bringing out colors in their surfaces I had never noticed before. They seemed almost like some kind of living stained glass.

My sense of time, too, had changed. It was as if time were suspended – like the dust motes in the air. There was so much time and it was so slow it seemed as if I had forever to sense each and every thing that was occurring. And what is more, I felt companioned. Companioned by everything in that room: the sunlight, the sounds, the smells, the desk, the lamp, the papers and pens, the curtains, the chairs, every physical object. Everything had taken on a kind of intelligent awareness and caring and each and every thing in that room was gently companioning me in that single, suspended, moment in time. I felt part of a living, breathing, aware, intelligent universe, and too . . . I felt wanted by that universe, as if I had come into the arms of my deepest and truest family. I felt at home.

I had entered some, heretofore unknown, magical world, a world that lies underneath and behind the one that most of us see everyday. And oddly enough, I could tell, even at that young age, that my grandfather was caught up in that world with me.

Somehow, we were held spellbound in a special time and place, [ 131 ]

where the usual rules of this world were, for a brief moment, suspended. Our breathing slowed, our very being paused a moment and calmed, and in some way that I had no words for, we were joined, in the deepest parts of our selves. I could feel a current of energy moving between us, and between us and the room and the light and the sounds and every physical object in that room.

Everything seemed to have somehow become more itself.

Everything seemed charged with some deep meaning I could feel but not grasp with my mind. A look of understanding passed between my grandfather and myself in that moment and we both felt a closeness I have never forgotten. For a brief moment, something from inside me flowed into him and something from inside him flowed into me. And our bodies and our eyes acknowledged the reality of it in that simple glance even though our minds had no words to describe it.

Then, in an instant, it passed, and we were left as we had been, but changed. A powerful wind of deep meaning from the heart of the world had passed through that room, and we, standing in its path, had felt it move through us, and, in that moment of touch, it opened our eyes and our ears and our hearts to something deeper in the world around us and in ourselves. Then it was gone, leaving us changed, different, in its wake.

It was much later in life that I came across these sentences by the poet William Stafford, a man I deeply admire . . .

I was as if in a shell that glowed. All the big, dim reading room became more itself and had more meaning because of what I was writing. The alcove at the east end where the literaturebrowsing books were (a favorite of mine) was darker and more velvety. My steps, walking back to the boarding house to work, were ritual steps, feet placed carefully on the storybook world.

(1) and began to understand that such moments happen for all of us.

My stumbling upon that magical world was not an isolated event, not something unique to myself. And as I began to look for them, I found the tracks of others that had passed this way before me.

Thoreau spoke of it like this . . .

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In the midst of a gentle rain . . . I was suddenly sensible of such a sweet and beneficent society in Nature, in the very patterning of the drops, and in every sound and sight around my house, an infinite and unaccountable friendliness all at once like an atmosphere sustaining me . . . Every little pine needle expanded and swelled with sympathy and befriended me. I was so distinctly made aware of the presence of something kindred to me, even in scenes which we are accustomed to call wild and dreary, and also that the nearest of blood to me and humanest was not a person or villager, that I thought no place could ever be strange to me again. (2) And Albert Hoffmann like this . . .

One enchantment of that kind, which I experienced in childhood, has remained remarkably vivid in my memory ever since. It happened on a May morning – I have forgotten the year – but I can still point to the exact spot where it occurred, on a forest path on Martinsberg, above Baden, Switzerland. As I strolled through the freshly greened woods filled with bird song and lit up by the morning sun, all at once everything appeared in an uncommonly clear light. Was this something I had simply failed to notice before? Was I suddenly discovering the spring forest as it actually looked? It shone with the most beautiful radiance, speaking to the heart, as though it wanted to encompass me in its majesty. I was filled with an indescribable sensation of joy, oneness, and blissful security. (3)

The human species is not a stranger to these experiences.

They have accompanied us through millennia. As children all of us experienced them in one form or another – even if we no longer consciously remember that we did. Such moments are an integral part of what it means to be human and someplace in all of us such memories are tucked away. But as we are schooled, as life has its way with us – and with our hearts – those memories come less and less to the conscious mind. We learn . . . not to follow our hearts, not to grow outward into the world . . . but to grow up, away from those kinds of memories and experiences, and away from the livingness of the world. In so doing, we grow away from something essential [ 133 ]

to our humanness. We can no longer see or feel what is within the surface sensory inputs that we receive; we can no longer experience the luminous with which we are surrounded. We have lost, as James Hillman once put it, the response of the heart to what is presented to the senses. The early twentieth century German writer and poet Gottfried Benn captured this state of being, our almost fanatical orientation toward surfaces, in his observation that, “[For many in the West] reality is simply raw material, but its metaphysical background remains forever obscured.” (4) What a beautiful phrase that is and so full of implications: “metaphysical background.”

There is a reason for our nonperception: if we should recapture the response of the heart to what is presented to the senses, go below the surface of sensory inputs to what is held inside them, touch again the “metaphysical background” that expresses them, we would begin to experience, once more, the world as it really is: Alive, aware, interactive, communicative, filled with soul, and very, very intelligent – and we, only one tiny part of that vast scenario. And that would endanger the foundations upon which Western culture, our technology – and all reductionist science – is based; for as James Hillman so eloquently put it, “It was only when science convinced us that nature was dead that it could begin its autopsy in earnest.” A living, aware, and soul-filled world does not respond well to autopsy.

Despite this, despite our cultural immersion in surfaces, our “growing up,” our schooling, somewhere inside each of us, those memories reside. Someplace deep inside, we remain children, those younger parts of ourselves (and their experiences) woven into our being just as the rings of trees – and their earlier stages of growth – are still within them. All of us have the capacity to free those parts – and their unique perceptual experiences of the world. All of us still have the capacity for a deeper kind of perception.

and from time to time it still breaks through our habituated notperceiving . . . despite what our culture wants

Sometimes, merely reading about it can again bring that perceptual experience alive once more. Robert Bly, speaking of Thoreau, talks about that this way . . . [ 134 ]

As we read Thoreau’s work, especially his prose, we slowly become aware of a light in and around the squirrel, the ant, the woodchuck, the hawk, that belongs to them and not to the eyes observing or the brain producing words. (5)

Throughout the years, I have met many people who have had moments of perceiving the light in and around the squirrel. Without exception, all of them have reported how difficult it has been to keep that perceptual experience alive. From every corner of life it seems, has come the demand to abandon it: from school, religion, culture, and family. The pressure to abandon the metaphysical background of the physical world is immense. There is not a one of us who feels the movement of the invisible inside us who does not experience that pressure, nor struggle with the demand to conform to surfaces as our orienting position. To discuss openly this deeper kind of experience, to conversationally mention that yesterday as I sat among the rock formations and trees of the Gila I felt a change come upon me. I could feel the soul of that place as a delicate feather touch upon all my senses and, in that moment, a light began to emanate from every stone, every plant and tree, even the soil itself. I dropped then, into a silence as deep and still as any I have known. And as I listened I began to hear, as Aldo Leopold said I would, the music that lies deep within these hills. is to break incredibly strong conventions of what is allowable to speak of in our culture. If, instead of talking about the weather, one were to say, as the poet Theodore Roethke once did, that Suddenly, in the early evening, the poem “The Dance” started, and finished itself in a very short time – say thirty minutes it was all done. I felt, I knew, I had hit it. I walked around and I wept; and I knelt down – I always do after I’ve written what I know is a good piece. But at the same time I had, as God is my witness, the actual sense of a Presence – as if Yeats himself were in that room. The house was charged with a psychic presence: the very walls seemed to shimmer. I wept for joy.(6)

[ 135 ]

is to suddenly find that conversation has ceased, that conversational companions are looking uncomfortable, that an awkward silence has fallen, that, if the companions are scientists, they have become twitchy and soon will begin to argue with what has been said – with the reality of what has been said, that if they are fundamentalist religionists of any sort (even of science or humanism), they have become afraid. How difficult it is to speak of these things, of this kind of experience. And how much have we lost in consequence.

Those of us who have experienced a light in and around the squirrel, those of us who have kept those memories, and experiences, alive inside us, find ourselves, in the West, in a strange country, strangers in a strange land.

The remarkable writer, Terry Castle, wrote of what this experience is like, not for us who experience the livingness of the world, but for women who one day discover they love women. The discovery that one is fundamentally different than the others with whom culture is shared is a difficult, sometimes insurmountable, experience. But for some, as Castle comments, there is the “potential for a certain radical mental freedom.”

It makes sense: to embrace one’s sapphic feelings – to come out to oneself – is necessarily to rethink the world. For not only is one made at once to confront one’s apparently permanent alienation from the “normal” or mainstream, one finds one has to adjudicate, in the most piercing and personal way, on a raft of ethical, religious, and scientific questions. Are one’s desires felonious or unnatural, as most traditional belief systems (distressingly) continue to insist? Or are they something rather more benign – simply a “variant” expression of human sexuality? If the latter is the case, couldn’t one view same-sex passion, in turn, as perhaps a useful evolutionary adaptation?

As an age-old demographic reality, possibly hardwired into the souls of some, that actually enriches and diversifies human civilization? Such questions are unavoidable and pressing; for no matter how timid and law abiding one is by nature, at the moment of self-recognition one suddenly finds oneself conspicuously in the wrong in the eyes of the world – caught out in a posture of stark and shocking defiance. By merely existing, one does fairly spectacular damage to entrenched presumptions

[ 136 ]

about sexuality and society.

For some women the challenge is too much. . . . Yet in others, the experience prompts an intellectual liberation . . . An entire edifice of socially imposed sexual myths, assumptions and taboos suddenly begins to look termite-ridden, carious, morally indefensible. The world itself is seen to be wanting; everything must be adjusted accordingly. (7)

Castle refers to this adjustment as adapting “to the cognitive challenges of self-acceptance.” That is, once we can deny our nature no longer, no longer force ourself into the paradigm of “normal” that the cultural and social world around us insists upon, we begin to accept that we are different, fundamentally so, from those around us. We encounter the cognitive challenges of self-acceptance and in so doing, begin to come to terms with what and who we really are.

Although Castle’s linguistic tour-de-force is about women loving women (in particular three women of note born in the 1890s) it is applicable to any person who finds their personal orientation to be outside social norms. And here, when talking about a light that is in and around the squirrel’s body, we are talking about perceptual sensing outside the norm. To rephrase: Are we engaging in a “variant” expression of human perceptual sensitivity? If so, couldn’t this be viewed, in turn, as perhaps a useful evolutionary adaptation? As an age-old demographic reality, possibly hardwired into the souls of some, that actually enriches and diversifies human civilization?

And is it not true that we, by merely existing, do fairly spectacular damage to entrenched presumptions about the nature of reality and society? Those of us who carry the seed of this perception within us, as something we cannot and do not particularly want to repress, by our mere presence upset the “normal” orientation of our Western society and culture. And once we begin to truly accept ourselves and our perceptual experience as normal

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An entire edifice of socially imposed reality myths, assumptions and taboos suddenly begins to look termite-ridden, carious, morally indefensible. The world itself is seen to be wanting; everything must be adjusted accordingly.

We, in accepting what we do and are, in accepting the reality of what we perceive, have come out to ourselves. We extend awareness farther than society wants it to go. And coming out of the closet, we loose something into the world. What we find through our perceptual sensing begins to seep into our art, the fabric of our lives, the edifice of our culture. We disturb the existing paradigm.

There is every reason to view this capacity as a crucial evolutionary adaptation, a capacity hardwired into all living organisms and which serves a specific purpose. Given the situation we find ourselves in, as individuals, as a culture, as a species, it is a capacity that is essential, for as Albert Einstein once said. . .

We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.

*****

There was an excitement in the air that could almost be tasted. Five thousand of us jammed together in Winterland for the music, for a journey that would last all night, a journey that began with Quicksilver Messenger Service, was soaring now with Jefferson Airplane, and would end with the Grateful Dead. A journey that would last a lifetime.

I was barely 18 and the man I saw moving through the crowd seemed so very old to me. He was dressed as we all were then . . . in bright colors and flowing clothes. His trousers were green and loose and comfortable over hand-cobbled leather shoes. His shirt was hidden beneath a coat of rainbow colors. And that coat . . . a textured felt, the body of it dark blue, the big pockets on the side red, the lapels an emerald green. There was bright embroidery, twinings of yellow, red, purple, green running along the front edges of the jacket, encircling the buttons and button holes. And [ 138 ]

underneath the twining embroidery, very hard to see, was hidden a small plastic tube.

Every so often, his hand, leathered and brown, would go to the bottom edge of the coat and press it in a certain way. Then, cupped, filled with secrets, the hand would rise again, and pass something to people in the crowd.

I watched him stop and stand a few feet in front of me, begin to speak with two young women in the crowd. I can still remember how hot it was, the August air of San Francisco even more humid from the dancing and sweating and breathing of so many people in one enclosed space. The women had long chestnut hair, bound up in back – wooden sticks protruding, holding it in place – to keep it off their necks. A few wisps of that dark chestnut straggled, flowed unbound, curled along their cheeks, draped the tops of their shoulders and along the shadows of their collarbones. Their shoulders were tanned, golden brown, gleaming softly from the light sheen of the sweat that covered them.

One wore a white camisole, the other’s was a more natural linen color. The camisoles were tight, sweat-glued against their young breasts, the nipples showing dark beneath the almost transparent cloth. I could almost smell the sweet scent of them, that astonishing mix of young woman and sweat and an elusive, faint hint of perfume.

They nodded to something the man said, then his hand moved down, came up again. The cupped palm placed something tiny, hidden, in their palms. And for some reason I will never know I spoke to him as the young women walked away.

“Could I have some, too?” I said and he turned toward me.

His eyes, gray and serious, came up to meet mine, and he stopped close in front of me. He stood still then, as still as the ancient memories locked into the stone of mountains. And he looked at me, he really looked.

I stood transfixed, caught by his gaze, and even in my youth I could sense his gaze going deep inside, touching places within me that I did not know I had. Time stopped and I was held in the embrace of moment, caught by his seeing. Our looking was so deep I can still remember the striations in his iris, the slight purple surrounding the pupil, and the wrinkles that lined out from the corners of his eyes. But mostly I remember the feeling of being seen, [ 139 ]

of someone really looking at me, into me.

I remember, too, Jefferson Airplane in the background, singing White Rabbit. . .

One pill makes you larger and one pill makes you small . . .

And I remember the dancing people, the noise of the crowd, the humidity of the air, surging around us like an ocean around an island in its midst. And us, caught in the still center, held motionless in a moment outside time.

Then, as it always must . . .

the stillness began to break.

His hand, as if it were moving through a substance more viscous than air, moved down – his eyes never leaving mine – and his fingers pressed against the threads of his jacket. Slowly, oh so slowly, they came up again. He held his hand out to me then, palm up, our eyes still locked together, and on it there lay a tiny, orange cylinder. I reached and took it, my eyes still captured, and slowly brought it to my mouth. Then he nodded, sharply, as if some question had been answered, broke the spell completely, turned and moved off into the crowd.

The movement of the crowd caught me up, took me in its currents, swept me away into that huge space, among all those dancing people. And the band . . . they played on.

In 1970, in San Francisco, LSD was everywhere and everyone I knew, myself included, had taken it many times. It brought us laughter, and close companionship, and a slower and deeper sense of the world around us. It brought us the belief in life after birth. But that day, something different happened, as it always does for those who continue to knock on the doors of perception. The doors opened.

And the thing about doors is, there’s always something on the other side.

[ 140 ]

I fell headlong then into a world I had barely tasted before. I tripped and fell into the metaphysical background of the world.

There have been many stories told about that deeper world but the truth is that each of us finds the particular part of the metaphysical landscape that we are meant to find. It is not a place but rather, just another part of the scenario we call life. We trip and fall into it – irrespective of the mechanism that facilitates it – at a certain moment in our lives and it shapes all of our life thereafter.

I remember how the light changed, how it became more luminous and alive. And I remember the sudden shift that shook me out of this world, fully into the embrace of a deeper world. I remember being touched, touched by the living intelligence that is underneath and behind all things. I remember its voice speaking, telling me to look, to really look. And I remember what I saw that day, just as if it were happening now. I remember seeing . . . seeing the living complexity that underlies all form. And I remember my vision traveling far outside that place, seeing the Earth, the plants, trees, rivers, each in the midst of its own life. Each filled with intelligence and soul and each and every one of them communicating, always communicating to everything around them.

In thousands upon thousands of voices, they greeted me, welcoming me into their world. And I remember the golden threads of connection that wove them all together into a continuous seamless fabric.

I caught glimpses then of the work that lay before me and the path that I would travel. And I remember all the years I have followed it and the joys that it has brought me . . . and the grief.

And still more do I remember, more than I can possibly say. I hear the voice of Black Elk, as if it were my voice, speaking, saying something that is and always be true for those of use who trip and fall into the metaphysical background of the world. . .

I am sure now that I was then too young to understand it all, and that I only felt it. It was the pictures I remembered and the words that went with them; for nothing I have ever seen with my eyes was so clear and bright as what my vision showed me; and no words that I have ever heard with my ears were like the words that I heard. I did not have to remember these things; they have remembered themselves all these years. It was as I

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grew older that the meanings came clearer and clearer out of the pictures and the words; and even now I know that more was shown to me than I can tell. (8) And I remember, in the midst of it all, the music. The music coming from Earth and stone and plant and animal. The music that is inside everything that is, the music without which this world would not exist. The music that passes through us, that we think is our music but that is in reality the Earth’s music.

I remember the music and the piece of it that the Dead had captured, that they had brought into human form and sensibility, the living expression of the Earth’s touch upon them.

Much later, in the early morning, when the concert was done, I remember the doors opening and us in our thousands and our colors spreading outward like butterflies into the night.

I remember how fresh and clean everything seemed, how bright the colors were. It seemed as if a filter had been taken off my eyes, as if for the first time I could really see. And I remember how keenly I felt the touch of the world upon me, a touch I still feel even as I write these words at my grandfather’s desk.

And I remember what was asked of me that night, to speak for the Earth, for the plants, for all living things. That people might know they live and love, too. Know that they have intelligence and purpose. Know that they have a life of their own, filled with hopes and dreams, just as we do. Know that they are our kin.

For, it was said in the timeless moment that still echoes within me, that there are those among us who remember deep in some part of themselves – a part that will not let them rest – the forest and the livingness of green things. It was said that it’s time for them to come home. Time for them to journey deep into the forest which birthed them. Time for them to take up their work – the work that resides in the deepest parts of them. Time for them to speak for the green things, to teach their children the way of Earth.

Time for humans to think in new ways, for in no other way can we address the problems of our times.

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There is memory of ocean, the swelling of waves, the movement of great things, just beneath the surface.

My conscious mind staggers, a part sleeping begins to waken.

What is this great thing?

That has caught us up?

Beloved. . .

Shall we find out together?

Shall we travel to a land where two-dimensionality does not rule?

Where all that we encounter gazes back at us?

Where directions for the journey are written in the shape and textures of the land?

Where we see, as far as the eye can touch, the soul of us opening outward?

Shall we take that step together?

Leave the comfort of the porch, and strike cross country, to find the place where the Teacher lives, the place where the big and the little become one, the place from which we came long ago, the place we have heard calling since before we were born?

Shall we go out Beloved and take the path before us?

Shall we let the perfume of our love fill our three bodies?

Come, take my hand, it has awaited the deep you to fill it, a length of time too long for remembering.

Come Beloved, let us take this journey together.

My feet are hungry for the first step.

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References: 1. William Stafford. You Must Revise Your Life, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1986, 9-10.

2. Henry David Thoreau, from Walden, quoted in Robert Bly, The Winged Life: The Poetic Voice of Henry David Thoreau, San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club Books, 1986., 120.

3. Albert Hoffmann. LSD, My Problem Child, NY: McGraw-Hill, 1980, ix-x.

4. Hoffmann,199.

5. Robert Bly, The Winged Life, 108-110.

6. Sophy Burnham. For Writers Only, NY: Ballantine, 1994, 12.

7. Terry Castle, “You better not tell me you forgot,” London Review of Books 34, no 18 (2012): 3-11, 6.

8. John Neihardt. Black Elk Speaks, NY: William Morrow, 1932, 49.

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The Gift Kathy Miles

She took it in both hands.

Examined it to see its colour, the quality, what she might expect of it.

A surprise, she said but still she smiled pale against the whiteness of the bed, the wrappings from her present scattered on the floor like a spilt phial of pills. There was ribbon, of course, a yellow bow, a card.

The air smelt of red carnations and something else, something sweeter.

Her breath was a pearl in the hot room, a slipstream too slight to stir a bee’s wing.

And the flowers were difficult, competed with her for the sliver of air.

Her hands fussed over the covers astonished fingers slid over silk.

And my gift, that small bequest I took back home was the moment our fingertips touched and the air was brimming.

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Reflections Bethany Rivers

Silence expands into a night where the shore has forgotten its sea.

The gulls have gone inland to survive.

Crab shells lie empty; rocks inscribed with fish bones. The aching womb tells her another egg is released, tomorrow will see red streaks between her legs. Another life unformed. Where is her marriage; the raising of new suns and bright moons? Laugh lines crinkle louder at the eyes, and tear stains are absorbed by a washing line of white shirts; a mirrorful of white sky. Where is her pen, her lipstick, her laptop? The alphabet deserted her, the pen is lost, her lipstick is done.

The screen is estranged from the keyboard.

Sentences can’t form without words and children can’t form without sperm. She peers deeper into the endless well of the mirror, there is nothing but sea-blue sky, crossed through by a vapour trail with no destination.

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He makes me eight foot tall: inside Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), originally entitled The Brothel of Avignon Elsie Dafis

The painting can be viewed at: www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=79766.

I pull open the ice-cube blue curtains and lean my angular body forward into the frame. I’m propelled onto the flat surface.

Sitting beside me is the whore, Juanita. She’s holding a demure pose, her knees held firmly together, but at the very same time, her thighs are akimbo, advertising her wares to the onlookers on the other-side of our two-dimensional world.

We have grown used to the short-sighted peers, the stupid leers, the hypocritical ‘you brazen whores, avert your eyes from us, your betters’, and the arty-farty we-know-it-allers. These are only a few of the voyeuristic sorts that walk into the rarefied world of art, and think it sets them apart from us. But we can see them for who they are. And know them in their artistic aspirations to be like us. Except we, who traded in the musty scent of the carnal desires of strangers, are now encapsulated by a whiff of turpentine and the sweet fragrance of linseed oil.

And here’s poor Angélica, her of the beautiful hands, who tried to be so particular about the tricks she turned, until one night the madam made a lucrative deal with a pox-ridden pervert and

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he made a hole in her head where her delicate sensibility used to be and through which all her beautiful black hair fell out. You see, her finesse was her undoing. He wanted a pure girl to make himself feel clean, for once, and the bastard could only do so by sullying the beautiful Angélica. But she’s here now with her silk black hair forever flowing.

Next to her is Nadya, looking as if she’s about to drape her naked body in a clean white cotton sheet, or wipe the final dribble of commercial activity from her paint-stroked thigh.

In the middle of the composition is Carmen, perpetually prepared to move at the click of a castanet. But the traditional subjects of a still-life, the fruit placed on their sheet, remind us that we too are motionless, suspended by Picasso’s imagination in a twodimensional universe of his making.

Then there’s me. Some art critic said I was all cubes and that I wore a mask in place of pubic hair. But I, Isabella, once visited a church in Toledo, and saw a painting by El Greco; it was St John, surrounded by naked bodies. The strength of El Greco’s brush strokes moved inside me. When I returned to the bar in Barcelona, the men all looked small. From then, I knew I could stand tall, and look anybody straight in the eye. What an artist Picasso is, to see this power, and make me eight foot tall.

Why am I looking sideways?

There are no sides on a flat surface.

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The Atomist in Exile Rosalind Hudis

That crash wakes him: heart bullying his ears, but night flaps only waste bags in the yard. Somewhere a fox cry ghosts the slip-road off his mind. Later, their diagnosis: a syndrome – exploding head heard only in the head. Benign and untrackable and what were you on? his wife says. Just the usual suspects, and often now the sense of not quite getting it, or a name crossing the junction ahead, then slurred through a riddle of headlamps.

He’s guessed his obits, his precision lauded, ‘patience’ – no glamorous stunts.

Knows he should calibrate himself to himself, to the void, find himself out, his flicker along the decay path, or blend himself into the weave of his own effort, work out in thin sample light of dawn, (his muscles packed so long into the microscope’s pin-hole dwelling among atoms).

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Jews do tight places, he’d joked – those years he’d pitched a lamp into the belly of a coal mine, needing oppressive air to breathe.

Einstein, he’d say, had wanted that, a tight answer, a lit particle like a nail to hang reason from.

But often now the ratios slip his reach and so much easier to sit dumb and loose on wicker chairs by his North ocean, the vellum churn of it, there, in his wife’s eyes.

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Contributors

Jekwu Anyaegbuna won the 2012 Commonwealth Short Story Prize for Africa. His work has been published in many reputable journals in the US and the UK, such as Granta, The Guardian, The Massachusetts Review, among others. An alumnus of the Farafina Trust International Creative Writers’ Programme, taught by novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, he graduated from the University of Ilorin. Jekwu lives and writes in Lagos, Nigeria.

Bonnie Bolling is an American poet. Her collection of poems, In the Kingdom of the Sons, was chosen by Tom Sleigh to win the 2011 Liam Rector First Book Prize for Poetry. Bonnie is the editor-inchief of Verdad, and lives in southern California, and the Persian Gulf.

Iain Britton was born and educated in Palmerston North, New Zealand, but spent many years living and teaching in London followed by a spell as an EFL teacher in Bournemouth, Dorset. Since 2008, he has had five collections of poems published: Hauled Head First into a Leviathan, (Cinnamon Press), Liquefaction, (Interactive Press, 2009), Cravings, (Oystercatcher Press, 2009), Punctured Experimental, (Kilmog Press, 2010 ) Druidic Approaches, (Lapwing Publications, 2011), plus two pamphlets - The Psychology of a River, (Greendoor Publishing, 2012) and Tusitala of White Lies, (Like This Press, 2012). Also, his work was included in the Shearcatcher Poetry Anthology published by Shearsman Books, 2012. A new collection of poems will be published by Kilmog Press later in 2013.

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Stephen Harrod Buhner is the award-winning author of 18 works of nonfiction and one of poetry, including Ensouling Language: On the Art of Nonfiction and The Writer’s Life (Inner Traditions, 2010).

He lives in Silver City, New Mexico.

Freedom Chevalier has enjoyed over twenty years success as an actress and performer – growing up as part of a regional touring theatre company; and as a singer – a pop vocalist until the midnineties, when she stopped performing. She has worked continually in various written mediums (songwriting, lyric, poetry, dramas, fiction, flash, etc.). She has had plays, articles, poems and short stories published/produced internationally including KoreAm Magazine (US), The Hockey News (Canada); CrossTalk (UK), Breakwater Productions (US), Falling Star Magazine (US). Her first upcoming novel is entitled Pundit. She is a member of the Alliance of Los Angeles Playwrights, Dramatists Guild, Irish Writers Union and the Horror Writers Association. On a personal note, she currently lives in Ontario (Canada) with her cat, Eiffel and her dog, Tallulah. She is very proud to be of European (French and Northern Irish) and Asian (Korean) heritage...and she’s heard every joke possible about her name.

Jim Conwell lives and works in London. With an original background in Fine Art, he has worked for nearly 30 years in the mental health field. He has had poems published in various poetry magazines.

Elsie Dafis is an MA Creative and Screenwriting student at Trinity St David, Lampeter. She’s currently planning a programme of events to celebrate the creative life of the Lampeter area (as part of the Dylan Thomas 2014 Centenary Festival), alongside devising, on a daily basis, ways of putting words together that make sense to her and hopefully to others too.

Frank Dullaghan is an Irish writer living in Dubai, UAE. Two collections of his poems have been published by Cinnamon Press in the UK: On the Back of the Wind, 2008, and Enough Light to See the Dark. His third collection, provisionally called A Slow Implosion of the Heart should be published by them in September 2014. [ 153 ]

Gillian Eaton is a poet, theatre director and educator. She was born and raised in Wales and now teaches in the School of Music, Theatre & Dance at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Recently, she won the Hungry Hill Writers Poetry meets Politics competition and was a winner in the PEN Rattling Wall Poetry Competition in 2012. Her poetry has appeared in the Poetry on Climate Change anthology, (Awel Aman Tawe, Roynetree Press 2012), The Silver Birch Poetry Journal (California 2013) and is featured in REVOK, an artists journey, a new book about an American Graffiti artist, release date December 2013.

Tristan Eaton is one of America’s foremost Urban Pop Artists.

Crossing many genres including murals, fine art, toy design, illustration and illegal street art, he constantly pushes the boundaries of how modern art is defined.

Born in Los Angeles in 1978, Tristan began pursuing street art as a teenager, painting everything from billboards to dumpsters in the urban landscape wherever he lived, including London, Detroit and New York. He designed his first toy for Fisher Price at 18 years old and has since become a driving force in the world of ‘Designer Toys’.

His design work for Kidrobot, including the infamous Dunny and Munny toys, led him to international fame and an ever growing fan base. As a leader in the world of commercial art, Tristan is regularly commissioned as a creative director and consultant for clients such as Nike, RedBull and Barack Obama on projects that span the globe across all mediums. These days he focuses mostly on his ambitious painting and mural projects in Los Angeles.

Tristan’s work can be seen in galleries around the world and in the permanent collection of the New York Museum of Modern Art. www.thunderdognyc.com.

Brenda Hillman has published chapbooks with Penumbra Press, a+bend press, and EmPress; she is the author of nine full-length collections from Wesleyan University Press, the most recent of which are Practical Water (2009) and Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire (2013). With Patricia Dienstfrey, she edited The Grand Permission: New Writings on Poetics and Motherhood (Wesleyan, [ 154 ]

2003). Hillman teaches at St. Mary’s College of California where she is the Olivia C. Filippi Professor of Poetry; she is an activist for social and environmental justice and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. www.blueflowerarts.com/brenda-hillman.

Jane Hirshfield, a current Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, is the author of seven books of poems, most recently Come, Thief (US: Knopf, 2011; UK: Bloodaxe, 2012).

Her honors include the California Book Award, fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Rockefeller and Guggenheim foundations, and shortlist/finalist status for the T.S. Eliot Prize (UK) and the National Book Critics Circle Award (US). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, TLS, The Guardian, The New York Times, Poetry, Poetry London, and seven selections for The Best American Poetry. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. www.barclayagency.com/hirshfield.html, www. poetryfoundation.org/bio/jane-hirshfield Carly Holmes is in the final year of a Creative Writing PhD at Trinity St David, Lampeter, and has written a novel as part of her dissertation, which will be published by Parthian Books in 2014. Her short fiction has been published in a number of journals and placed in various competitions. Carly organises and hosts The Cellar Bards, a group of writers who meet monthly in Cardigan for an evening of live literature, and she also acts as secretary for the PENfro Book Festival committee. When she’s not writing, worrying about writing, or worrying about not writing, Carly likes to murder slugs and dance in a crazed fashion to glam rock. But not both at the same time.

Rosalind Hudis is a Wales based poet, currently completing an MA in Creative and Script Writing at the University of Wales, Trinity St David, Lampeter. Widely published in journals, she is a 2013 recipient of a New Writer bursary from LiteratureWales Academi.

She has won several awards, including a commendation in the 2011 National Poetry Competition, and third prize in the 2012 Magma Poetry Competition. Her debut pamphlet, Terra Ignota is available from Rack Press at rackpress.blogspot.com.

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Mike Jenkins lives in Merthyr Tudful. Latest book is Barkin!

(Carreg Gwalch), poems and stories in Merthyr dialect. Question Island (Alun Books), a novel for teenagers, is due out this autumn.

Co-founder and co-editor of Red Poets magazine. Regular blogger on website www.mikejenkins.net.

Fred Johnston was born in Belfast in 1951 and educated there and in Toronto, Canada. A journalist for some years, he has published prose and poetry. A new collection of poems, Alligator Days, is due out this year and a second collection of short stories, Dancing In The Asylum, was published by Parthian Books (UK) at the end of last year. He received bursaries this year from the Irish Arts Council and the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. He lives in Galway.

John Lavin has a doctorate in Creative Writing from the University of Wales, Trinity Saint David, as well as an MA in Creative Writing from Cardiff University. He is the Deputy Editor of walesartsreview.org and edited their recent short story issue.

James Luchte is Senior Lecturer of Philosophy and Programme Co-ordinator of the MA in European Philosophy at the University of Wales, Trinity Saint David. His publications include Early Greek Thought: Before the Dawn, The Peacock and the Buffalo: The Poetry of Nietzsche (translator), Pythagoras and the Doctrine of Transmigration, Heidegger’s Early Philosophy: The Phenomenology of Ecstatic Temporality, Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra: Before Sunrise (editor), Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and a novel Of the Feral Children. He has also published numerous articles on various topics in Continental philosophy. His poetry has been published by various journals, such as Panic! Poetry and Arts, The Lampeter Review and Living Poets, and has been published in translation in China.

Jane Martin is an award-winning multi-disciplinary artist working in painting, photography video stills, and video installation.

She is represented in corporate, private and museum collections worldwide, with solo exhibitions at Guild Hall Museum in East Hampton, New York and Islip Art Museum in East Islip, New York. [ 156 ]

A catalogue of her work, Closer Far Away was published at the occasion of the Islip Art Museum exhibition.

Born in Brooklyn, Martin studied filmmaking at New York University, and Fine Arts at SUNY and the Institut de Touraine in France, under the direction of Erik Koch, former student of and assistant to abstract expressionist Hans Hofmann. After thirteen years in Europe, she returned to New York City where she established an art studio, returning to painting as a means of creative expression. She moved her home and studio to East Hampton, New York in 2004, where her work embraces many disciplines and focuses on the primal forces of nature. Her website is www.janemartinart.com.

Michael McGlade grew up in an Irish farmhouse where the leaky roof didn’t bother him as much as the fear of electrocution from the nightly scramble for prime position beneath the chicken lamp, the only source of heating in the house – a large infrared heat lamp more commonly used for poultry. His seminal influences were Darwin’s Survival Of The Fattest and a morbid belief that “undying love” meant you had a soft-spot for zombies. Never allowing these misapprehensions to hold him back from success, he understood that nothing is as clear as the illegible comprehensibility of the modern world.

His short fiction has been published in Green Door, Calliope, Grain, OMDB Mystery, Structo, and other journals. He holds a master’s degree in English from Queen’s University, Belfast. Michael is editor-in-chief of live music publication GigApe.com. You can find out the latest news and views from him on McGladeWriting.com.

G.D. McFetridge, former resident of London and walker of Hadrian’s Wall, writes from his wilderness home in Montana’s Sapphire Mountains. His short fiction and essays are published across America, in Canada, Russia, Ireland and the UK. His story Little Man is forthcoming in The Long Story in March 2014.

Oliver Michell graduated with Distinction from the University of East Anglia’s MA in Creative Writing in September 2012. His play [ 157 ]

Philoctetes was shortlisted for the 2012 King’s Cross Award and his play The Tulip Tree was the winner of the Oxford University New Writing Festival 2012, judged by Meera Syal. Oliver’s theatre company, the Oriel Theatre Company, performed his work at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe. He lives in Berlin.

Kathy Miles was born in Liverpool and now works as Outreach Services Librarian at the University of Wales, Trinity Saint David.

Her work has appeared widely in magazines and anthologies and her latest collection, The Shadow House, was published by Cinnamon Press in 2009. In the current year her work has been placed in the Second Light and Kent and Sussex Open Poetry competitions.

Eslam Mosbah was born in Egypt’s Nile Delta in 1984. He is the author of two novels, and has received the Egyptian Prize for Science Fiction. He works as a creative producer on documentary films and as a freelance journalist for several online magazines.

Jeri Onitskansky is an American-born Jungian analyst based in High Barnet, UK. She won first prize in the 2012 Ledbury competition and second prize in the 2012 Barnet Open Poetry Competition. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Review, Ambit and Ink Sweat and Tears, with work forthcoming in PN Review.

Bethany Rivers has an MA in Creative Writing from Cardiff.

She was shortlisted in the Cinnamon Press Poetry Anthology Competition, and had several poems published by Cinnamon in 2012. She teaches Creative Writing on Adult Learning Courses in Shropshire and Worcestershire.

Nigel Rodenhurst did his undergraduate study at Trinity St David, Lampeter, and also did an MPhil with the English department. He went on to complete a PhD on Jewish-American fiction at Aberystwyth University. Nigel has taught at every level from summer university to master’s and has written reviews and articles for publications that include Times Higher Education and Times Literary supplements.

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David Rains Wallace has published many books and articles on natural history and conservation. His The Klamath Knot: Explorations of Myth and Evolution won the John Burroughs Medal for Nature Writing in 1984, and in 1999 was included in the San Francisco Chronicle’s list of the twentieth century’s 100 best non-fiction books west of the Rocky Mountains. Wallace’s latest book, Chuckwalla Land: The Riddle of California’s Desert, won a Commonwealth Club of California Gold Medal for Literature in 2012.

Lew Welch was born in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1926 and moved with his mother and sister to California in 1929. He enlisted in the Army Air Corps in 1944 and moved to Portland, Oregon, after the war to attend Reed College. He was associated with the Beat generation of poets, artists, and iconoclasts, published and performed widely during the 1960s and taught a poetry workshop in San Francisco for five years. He disappeared in 1971, leaving a suicide note. His body was never found.

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