Suisun Valley Review #27

Suisun Valley Review

the literary magazine of solano community college, issue number twenty-seven, spring, two-thousand and ten.

Solano Community College Fairfield, California, USA

Editors: Allison Bartlett; Richard Barnhart; Lynne Conte; Meg Currier; Scott Demartini; Destinee Esberto; Brian Gaertner; Lisa Gurlin; Carmen Gutierrez; Kirk Jackson; Andrew Killmer; Lauren Lavin; Caleb Morris; Nichole Pann; Devin Pascal; Joseph Podwys; Carl Romero; Ryan Shaw; Ron Sierra Assistant to the Advisor: Julia Croft Advisor: Michael J. Wyly Cover Art: Wade Hammond Cover Concept/Design: Richard Barnhart & Lisa Gurlin Book Design & Typography: Lisa Gurlin Printing: Graphics Department, Solano Community College Binding: Inland Binding, Sacramento, CA ď‚?

Guidelines: Rights revert to author on publication. Submissions are accepted from November to March of each year. Simultaneous submissions should be noted as such. Successful submissions in fiction typically do not exceed 2,500 words.

Two complimentary copies of the magazine received upon publication. Authors are invited to release reading held at Solano College in May of each year. Visual art must be submitted electronically and be of sufficient file size for printing at 300 ppi. ď‚?

Second-place winner in the Pacific-Western Region by CCHA, 2009 Established in 1981.

Suisun Valley Review (ISSN 1945-7340) is published annually each spring by Solano Community College, Fairfield, CA. SVR is edited by the students of English 58, a course in the contemporary literary magazine including requesting and reviewing submissions, arranging contents and determining format. Please visit <www.solano.edu> for details on how to register.

Suisun Valley Review, English Department, Solano Community College, 4000 Suisun Valley Road, Fairfield, California 94535. Email: <twitter.com/ SVR_Editors> Also look for us on Facebook.

ISSN 1945-7340 Print run: 500

Contents Features: Bob Stanley ...............................................................................

Introduction and Biography .................................................. bedtime story ...................................................................

Invention — “Not by Brahms” ...............................................

SVR presents an interview with Bob Stanley ...............................

Stephen D. Gutierrez ................................................................

Introduction and Biography ..................................................

Allowance .......................................................................

SVR presents an interview with Stephen D. Gutierrez ...................

12-19 12 13 15-17 18-19 58-65 58 59-61 62-65

Fiction: tiger pit ......................................................... Evan Brengle The Two Fridas (QD Award, Honorable Mention) ......... Lauren Lavin The Cat Abortion .............................................J. A. Goolsby Allowance (SVR Featured Author) ................ Stephen D. Gutierrez

28-29 32-36 39-47 59-61

Poetry: carapace. ........................................................ Evan Brengle Encryption ..................................................... Josh Neely The Chariot ...................................................... Tim Kahl Western Solstice ....................................... Leonore Wilson A Proper Burial ........................................... Lloyd Aquino Rosemary for Remembrance ............................ Lloyd Aquino bedtime story (SVR Featured Author) .................... Bob Stanley Invention — “Not by Brahms” (SVR Featured Author) ................................... Bob Stanley Fishing Lessons at Brannan Island State Park................ Tim Kahl From a Rowboat on the Meking River .............. Catherine Fraga Flat World ..................................................Joe Montalbo The Yard ...................................................... Ray Hadley Girls with Cigarettes ................................ Red Shuttleworth Before Christ Homicide Was Human Sacrifice (QD Award, Prize Winner) ........................ Andrew Killmer Spectacle .................................................... Carrie Moniz Chloe Kept On ...............................................Neville Rex The End of Innuendo ..................................... Lloyd Aquino The Cattle ............................................... Leonore Wilson After his wife was raped he refused to kiss the body............................. Carrie Moniz Ornamental Horticulture ...................................Neville Rex Country & Western .......................................... Josh Neely

3 5 6-7 8 9 10 13 15-17 20 21 22-24 26 27 31 38 48 49-51 52-53 55 56 57

Visual Arts: The Gathering ............................................... Wade Hammond Rabbit in a Large Cage.....................................Anna Mae Reeser The Wait ....................................................Anna Mae Reeser Daphne Pursued by Edward Teller, Luminous Series ..... Marc Lancet Untitled ....................................................... Leonore Wilson One ........................................................... Wade Hammond Untitled ....................................................... Leonore Wilson

cover 4 11 14 25 37 54

The Quinton Duval Award in Creative Writing ...........

30-36

Introduction & Guest Judge, Indigo Moor ................................. 30 Before Christ Homicide Was Human Sacrifice (Prize Winner) ............................................ Andrew Killmer 31 The Two Fridas (Honorable Mention) ........................ Lauren Lavin 32-36

Contributorsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Notes ..........................................................

67



Editorial Statement



Suisun Valley Review, a product of English 58, the Literary Magazine, was established in 1981as a way for the students of Solano Community College to learn the art and craft of editing a literary journal while working together to create their own annual magazine. SVR is the product of English 58, The Literary Magazine. Now in its twenty-ninth year, student-editors collaborate carefully to select its contents from new and established writers/artists from SCC and across the country, even around the world. In cooperation with its instructor/advisor, the student-editors work to establish a de-centered classroom to enhance the literary experience while also empowering the students in the creation and design of every aspect of the magazine, including the selection of overall design aesthetic and the narrative development of each issue. The Spring 2010 students have captured this atmosphere each week at <suisunvalleyreview.blogspot.com> wherein the editors document the inner workings of their classroom to share with their peers and the community-at-large. SVR has also chosen to include the SCC Writers Series by inviting key authors as features. Each spring, all of the students’ hard work and endless creative energy is repaid with a bound collection of prose and poetry, sold and kept as a testament to sleepless nights.

Special Note Concerning Editor Submissions: The annual production of SVR is facilitated by the SCC course English 58. The course description states that any persons interested in submitting creative work to the magazine for consideration may submit, including student editors. To maintain fairness and impartiality, all submissions are considered anonymously.

—2010 Editorial Staff

This issue is dedicated to Quinton Duval, Professor Emeritus, Solano Community College.

carapace.

Evan Brengle all these knobby crusty creatures we are vagrant and alone like hermit crabs snap, the refuse of a life we crawl inside cola cans rusting in the sand, we pick the grit from our joints until we clog completely. to each a drafty shack, a dusty suit to hang within the void unless, to be inhabited, we wear the skin of another who wears our skin; if someday, like a peanut, we could come in pairs.

SVR 3

SVR 4

Anna Mae Reeser

Rabbit in a Large Cage

Encryption Josh Neely This ship to shore doesn’t work anymore, the dots and dashes down the line all stop and hang in absurd air outside your door.

Sleeping away (the anchor fouls the prop) we cannot hear the black chatter of code against the porthole. Run aground again in beachside bars, a repeat episode of salty guilt in gutters in the rain.

I tap and tap this rusted, brittle message, hoping in the dark that land and sky collide, and dream of worlds wherein a less audible buzz on the wire seems to cry: the sea swallows the sand – the push and pull of waves – the dispatch is lost in the lull.

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The Chariot Tim Kahl The victim was relaxing in his living room and reportedly heard creaking noises.

He sprang up and began to move across the room just as the floor opened up beneath him. “From what we understand it was instantaneous,” said an authority.

(Sacramento Bee, April 24, 2006)

Swing low, Sweet Chariot comin’ for to carry me home Swing low, sweet chariot comin’ for to carry me home I looked over Jordan, over the Jordan Valley where the fig trees mumble and wonder what it’s like to be covered by American soil.

Their roots hold firm in that valley; their leaves shade the footsteps of ancient travelers fleeing one life for another.

Does the trade of the past for the future always end up in happy forever?

This life fades believing, fades into those instants where you and I are cautioned by the present comin’ for to carry us home.

We build a solid home and call it remembrance.

We gird its sides with American soil, with mud from that valley where the fig trees mumble their opinions about the great will of being.

We are recruits to its cause, its orders to displace us one by one as we imagine another kind of home on foreign shore, imagine its dirt covering our wet feet.

Swing low, sweet chariot SVR 6

and take us there to visit, to remember, to walk among the ancient travelers with so many figs still left to eat.

I may walk along this floor today and feel the earth comin’ for to carry me home.

I may walk along this supportive floor as it collapses, the earth opening up and comin’ for to carry me home.

I may walk along this floor, and suddenly a band of angels comin’ after me comin’ for to carry me home.

I may imagine the great will of being singing on a distant shore, or am I simply remembering its heart drumming a beat in me?

SVR 7

Western Solstice Leonore Wilson Here the scrub oaks’ shadows veiled the propitiatory flowers, The meadow never seeing lean-tos or ramshackle chicken coops, Tangles of barbed wire; here one summer I rode a cutting horse out Where the acreage was free of cattle, and almost took a spill Because of a rattler like a prophetess that reproached me.

Now there is no calling of frogs or chipmunks or sparrows, No black glass chipped into the pure accuracy of arrows.

Someone is chopping wood non-stop with a trace of faint blood On his chin, tossing limbs here and there like unfinished sentences.

Someone’s mind is on fire to possess, uproot, subdue, While another riding a bulldozer, hums a little tune to himself, Leaving in his wake, gleaming trails of spit like pneumonia.

The days are becoming shorter, not simply because it’s winter.

Oh poor trapped earth, the sun grips the map of your death While the recoiling wolf at your core continues to howl and shiver.

SVR 8

A Proper Burial Lloyd Aquino The dirt stinks of other people’s palms. It sticks to your jaw, Where all the blood’s gone to ground. You stare straight at God Without blinking, your good ear gone deaf from the thunderclap, Tens and tens of tears.

Crack-and-crack-and-and-crack-crack They left you flowers and cursive anecdotes, half-remembered Pieces of holy verse. They sang you a song. It probably rhymed real pretty.

It’s possible they misjudged the tone. Maybe they fumbled the words.

They scratched your name across the biggest rock they could carry.

Every vowel looks a fright, but everything is in its proper place.

Mostly. The m’s and w’s look a little like identical.

They let you keep your clothes.

They said you kicked because that’s what Gee-damn-it does sometimes: Decides you’ll be born in a desert town to an alcoholic and a musician, Blesses you with metabolism, curses you with asymmetry and intuition, Puts you in a classroom where the teacher can’t keep swallowing contempt, Hires you to spend twilights putting other people’s things in paper or plastic, Introduces you to a woman who’ll quit on you at the first sign of content, Finds you another who’ll drive you to drink to drive her away, Leaves you alone with a bottle and a bed for a decade or three, Punches your ticket a week after you make the first of a dozen steps, And the rest is sirens, sirens, sirens.

They left you those footprints.

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Rosemary for Remembrance Lloyd Aquino We lost you in the endless rows of olive-skinned trees, naked and shameless, before finding your tea cups twirling in their lecherous fingers, spilling your ribbons to sting the dust rotten bowl. The crows taunted us as, slinking past the bones of a pickup truck, we strained to hear you speak.

We found you lying in the forgotten ravine, humming to your teddy bear, the nubs of your fingers and the flats of your palms caked in cracked earth as you filled your teapot with day-old groundwater. You were watching the storm clouds cascade past the faraway hills, flooding the fields and drowning the crows, and imagining you could hear the waves crashing.

We sat with you underneath the once-shadow of the naked olive trees, picking the overripe stars tangled in their tremulous fingers to squeeze and smear light on our shirts and dresses, and promised to toast to our reverence together as we blew puffs of smoke-like-cotton and pantomimed freshly fraught lies with every motion of our hands twisted so sinister against the darkness, every crooked one.

It was to the slow-twanging of the sunken carousel that we set our memories ablaze and painted our faces black, the ashes sticking to our eyelashes.

You were weeping when the ground collapsed beneath us, the ink scarring your cheeks and drowning your lips. We wiped the smudges dry with our sleeves and pretended not to hear the distant cries calling us in from the cold.

SVR 10

The Wait Anna Mae Reeser SVR 11

Suisun Valley Review presents the poetry of

Bob Stanley

Bob Stanley was featured on October 9, 2009 as a visiting author as part of the on-going Solano Community College Writers Series. He read poems from his chapbook, Walt Whitman Orders a Cheeseburger, after which he engaged the audience in a candid discussion of his craft, influences and the role of the poet in the contemporary landscape. Stanley was also guest lecturer for a section of English 2, Introduction to Literature in which he read from and discussed further his newest collection, engaging his audience with his accessible language, humor and refreshing approach to the poetic form.

2009-2011 poet laureate of Sacramento, Stanley has written poetry and volunteered in poetry organizations for over three decades. President of the Sacramento Poetry Center, Stanley has led workshops and readings all over Northern California. In 2009 he edited Sometimes in the Open, an anthology of poems by sixty-five poets laureate from around the state. Widely published in journals, his poetry has won numerous awards, including the California Focus on Writers prize in 2006. Bob earned a BA in English at UCLA and an MA in Creative Writing from Sacramento State University. A fourth generation Californian, Bob and his wife Joyce have raised their four children in Sacramento. Mr. Stanley teaches English at Sacramento State University and Sacramento City College, and he directs the Room to Write creative writing workshop in Sacramento. His first chapbook, Walt Whitman Orders a Cheeseburger, was released by Rattlesnake Press in 2009.

Two previously unpublished poems and an interview with the poet SVR 12

bedtime story because there are snakes and because snakes live quietly for long periods of time on mountainsides and (it is said) love to bask in the sun, and because there are people and because they gather in a valley of warm book-scented light in a circle and read to each other the way people in cabins used to read to each other in the kind of world most of us have never known, and because I imagine there are cats who pad softly around the house, proud but still needing a little attention though they might not admit it they move their head a certain way and you know, and because there are so many ways to share words to share ways ways we live ways we love ways we worry and fight for or against what we love or donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t, and because medusa came and camped in the backyard of the village and kept singing until all the villagers came to sing along and there was song, the animals are out tonight and through clouds they keep winking as if all those stories about them the ones she has them tell over and over again at bedtime made them shine brighter and itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s all true they really do.

SVR 13

Daphne Pursued by Edward Teller, Luminous Series Marc Lancet SVR 14

Invention – “Not by Brahms” B minor I thought, though I wasn’t sure why How is it music gets into places nothing else can?

When life enters song

one grows composed melody draws its bow across cello’s many strings and a soft call waves down to the belly larger than love warmer than worth more than mere words.

Tension, resolution, release: lessons you share with us in sound today, Johannes Brahms, master of counterpoint: a little conversation between viola and clarinet, perhaps?

Once I dreamed I could sing harmony with myself two notes at the same time – no, not a deep growl like those Tuval throat singers – but clear tones well-tuned thirds and fourths.

It seemed so real – SVR 15

my voice bowing both the A string and D string at the same time -that I slept right on through, the vision forgotten in the night.

The next afternoon when I got back in the car to drive home from work I suddenly recalled this amazing skill I had found, and with great anticipation, began to sing, right there on J Street looking for the harmony that wasn’t there.

One boy lost in the concert hall made a sound so sweet the story lasts a hundred years Music under everything, song beneath the song, when sound turns to color you’re not alone.

Close the eyes open everything, and ear sits in the middle of heart .

When they accused him of touches of Beethoven in his first symphony that soaring final theme, that C Minor struggling towards C Major Brahms told them “any ass can see that. “ Touched by scores of others we find our own voice in the work Take note: vibration is education.

And though his Clarinet Quintet SVR 16

that dark richness tinged with sweetness sings on â&#x20AC;&#x201C; only half-joking he once wrote to Strauss right there on the "Blue Danube" waltz, "Alas, not by Brahms!"

In the morning, the music will be gone, but the dream of invention lives on.

Listen â&#x20AC;&#x201C;

SVR 17

SuisunValley Review presents an interview with

Bob Stanley SVR: What was the event that made you realize you were/wanted to be a poet?

Stanley: Repetition of words – as in Whitman, or the Bible – is a big part of my poetry. Short lines or unusual line breaks draw attention to phrasing, Stanley: I had read e.e. cummings’ and can add power. So I’m always “anyone lived in a playing with sound. And pretty how town” I believe that there of course the best music when I was in high are poems for everyhas poetry in it – someschool, and I loved the one – but they have times I’ll hear a saxoway words went tophone solo and I can to read or hear more gether in unusual imagine what the subject ways. So I started than one poet to find might be – the feelings writing informal, out what they like. are implied even without playful journals of It’s like music. words. poetry and prose, just because I needed to write that way. In SVR: How has teaching changed your college I discovered Eliot, Yeats, Sylpoetry? Do you feel there is more to via Plath and more. It was a world I draw from in the academic world, or needed to explore. the world at large?

SVR: Who has had the biggest influence on your writing, poet or not?

Stanley: I was in a workshop with Galway Kinnell at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers in 1985. He told us to try not to compete with each other, but to focus on what each of us needed to say. He also exhorted us to support each other – “it’s not you against you,” he pointed at each writer in turn, “it’s all of us against the clock.” I won’t ever forget Kinnell’s insistence that writers should appreciate each other and work together for the common goal of self-expression.

SVR: What do you feel the connection between music and poetry to be?

SVR 18

Stanley: Teaching reminds me how many different ways there are to get into a poem. I learn by reading my students’ work, by listening to their issues and questions. And if I’m going to ask them to write, I need to be able to write as well. I think teaching, which has helped me find new subjects, and appreciate how much work good writing takes.

SVR: How do you blend so many influences – from Brahms and Tuval throat singers to Greek mythology and nature poetry – without coming off as forced or contrived?

Stanley: For years I struggled with poems that tried to blend influences, and I wrote a lot of what Roethke

called “Straw for the Fire” – fragments SVR: You are very involved in the that never quite went together. I took contemporary world of poetry – from a workshop at Tomales being Sacramento’s Bay this last year with Most Americans Laureate to running poet Dana Levin, and don’t explore poetry, the SPC. How do she talked about writthese roles/ so they think they ing “associative poems.” responsibilities infludon’t like it. Then She drew a circle on ence your daily life? the board with five they discover Mary What do you feel the lines emanating away Oliver or Billy Colrole of the poet is in from it, like a sunburst. lins, Jane Hirshfield the modern environShe told us that this or Allen Ginsberg ment? graphic represented a and they go – “Oh, different sort of poem this is cool.”

Stanley: I’m very that has one subject – lucky to be able to do the circle at the center. this kind of work – But each thread leads in a different planning and coordinating readings direction – and the fusion of all these and workshops, raising funds for literassociations is what makes the poem. I ary events, and networking with other think of Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of artists and arts organizations. This Looking at a Blackbird” as one associaspring alone, I’m working with the tive poem. This concept helped me Sacramento Library, the Crocker Muwrite “Invention – Not by Brahms,” seum, and California Stage to put on and has helped me mix influences – upcoming events. So my role is to hopefully without sounding forced. promote poetry – to help more people have a chance to find poetry that they like. I believe that there are poems for everyone – but they have to read or I think of Stevens’ hear more than one poet to find out “Thirteen Ways of what they like. It’s like music. You Looking at a Blackbird” don’t like every genre, but chances are as one associative poem. you like something. Most Americans This concept helped me don’t explore poetry, so they think they don’t like it. Then they discover write “Invention – Not Mary Oliver or Billy Collins, Jane

by Brahms.”

Hirshfield or Allen Ginsberg and they go – “Oh, this is cool.” My job – at SPC, and as County Laureate - is to pass all the books around the table.

The bigger the table, the better. 

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Fishing Lessons at Brannan Island State Park Tim Kahl The lot fills up with boat trailers and the one camper of the caretaker parked there all year. The roughhewn sign on the side says he lives there with his best catch, obviously proud of what he lured through the door.

A man at the dock urges my son to come see his fish — a sturgeon stunned by repeated blows, its eyes highlighted by the color of ice. The best part is showin’ it off, he confides. There is a natural exhibitionism in men who fish, yet they don’t wear bright clothes or even take much to speech. Ask one where, and he’ll point. He’d rather show you than tell.

This is how I learned the double slip knot from my dad, to hold my hook and bait. Just once through the slow demo then he advised me to soak my worm.

Next, I’d have to start thinking like an animal, an occupation that has served me well through many bedroom games. The fisherman’s solace is knowing with confidence the animal self . . . my son smashes in the holes of the rabbits’ warren.

I tell him to relax, but he’s already on to the next one — Domesticus horribilis. I swear I can see some prehistoric gills surfacing on him, a remnant from the pre-human past. I swear I see the sturgeon’s face appear . . . another one’s body spread across the bed of a guy’s pickup. I ask too many questions, and he slams the gate shut. I’m thinking he suspects I’m checking up on him, a nag about the rules, but he looks past me, smiles widely, and says: I gotta go home now and show my wife.

SVR 20

From a Rowboat on the Meking River Catherine Fraga -Late summer, 2008

Preecha, the tour guide, hears their disenchanted sighs, tourists nearly mourning, their bodies straining toward shore, so many sights to see in the ebony landscape of evening but nothing they desire only the fluorescent lights of hotels, restaurants, highway overpasses.

He wants what they want: the mesmerizing dance of fireflies a magical gathering of blinking lights thousands decorating banana trees lining the shore.

Preecha is reasonable. He knows the disappearance of fireflies does not match the tragedy of polar bears and Siberian tigers.

Yet he keeps rowing, sweat pooling beneath his eyes, the ache in his shoulders dull and determined until two miles farther he glimpses a shock of lightning bugs undulating, the rhythm of his childhood, of memory, and the passengers hushed in thanksgiving a temporary victory over progress.

SVR 21

Flat World Joe Montalbo Ă&#x2DC;; This is the melody of absence.

I held a door for a grown woman earlier.

It wasn't Nanako. The world doesn't turn.

I

Remember when the blankets in this crib rolled like grapevine hills hills of green stringy puke on lace, there are bubbles, shoulder in dire need of my wiping, then nothing done by the latex hands of God prevents the clock needles, and a sugary jolt of morning.

She would have stepped off the subway today a coalition of one and zero, following the merry around.

Solemn waking to a stucco field of posters.

Posters of Le Tigre, a phase that was not one.

I should have treasured her as she was but I wouldn't get it in my head even though she told me.

The room is cold.

Mirrored glass coated both by painted animals and greasy handprints that won't last beyond the winter.

Nanako is nowhere.

I'm sure I still enjoy ballet.

Flexing her leg high, her tights enjoyed by the teenage men, all still shunned. Today's kvetching from him will find a friend of a friend of a friend's father and then to me, to which I respond, no no no no no that wasn't my little girl,

SVR 22

II It shouldn't have obvious what had happened when I looked into her eyes.

Glassy eyed, like stuffed with fluff felt hearts, seemingly resting on her bed, and a hidden universe capsule hidden under her tongue, burning her as she burned down to each ovaryNeedles gather together each one still smelling of gin each one fading from bright green.

I know it's not because she's dead.

The birds, the birds, the birds pick at clippings for seeds or old fruit.

Provisions for their own private ice fields.

A white skirt falls down.

She strode across the land with nary a hiccup fever or cottonball. The ground should be beneath her; crisp stems, wild flowers.

Just enough blood trickled out of her lips, and she didn't look surprised. and I will never greet her at the subway entrance III I know nothing of. Instead, I'll be dragging her into a great black car, she is cold, feeling the glass of a car she will never know as anything but a luggage.

The only thing that keeps me driving is that antiquated way of thinking SVR 23

that way of thinking now uncurving.

uncurving, It The appropriate

is

appropriate. empty

does not bleak stretches and

space guard

from the self,

cartographer's artistry the places

she should be only lead back here.

What else can be done? Everyone says.

There's no such thing as monsters.

SVR 24

Untitled

Leonore Wilson

SVR 25

The Yard Ray Hadley It seems there's no mainline Between the two cities anymore, It's just one big switching yard with little wooden shacks every quarter mile or so, each one a universe unto itself with an old man drinking coffee over spread-out newspapers, perennial calendars pinned to the inside door of hanging cabinets, Schedules, diagrams, lots of square windows.

He could be an astronomer in a homemade tower, an alchemist in a laboratory of glass vessels, a poet standing at a steamed up garret window, in a Faustian beard in a railroad hat, and, yes, there a book of trigonometry and a candle burning its way into the top of a human skull.

There's an icon of a little white house with an "X" inside- "You are here." on an elaborate map of tracks which resemble the bifurcating charts of the plant kingdom that you see in a college biology class.

Trigonometry is the thinnest book of mathematics, tables of logarithms, sine's and cosines in the back that can be used to make beautiful graphs with colored pencils which, though they tell you nothing about where you are or what's going on are a great comfort when the locomotive coming straight toward you veering to one side at the very last minute safely passing you by.

SVR 26

Girls with Cigarettes Red Shuttleworth Someone says they're going to turn the Fairbury train station into a madhouse, one of those detox places where you can scream all night and no one thinks you're permanently crazy... and you can rip off your clothes and dance to Jim Morrison voices in our head... and you can write poems on the walls with food you've processed for over a dozen hours. + There's some sort of bickering and furniture breaking on the line behind Jimbo when he calls at midnight... and it's three a.m. where he says he's staying with some cigarette-smoking girls he met in a Vero Beach bar.

Jimbo wants to know if I still rope... and practice on Kate, the kids, the dogs and my neighbor's goats: whiskey glasses are the rolling realities of my life....

And Jimbo's ex phones me every time she slits her arms, but I don't mention this to him, because I can keep a secret, and, anyway, she just got tenure as an Education prof at a small state college in the Rockies, so she has permission to express herself in blood-crimson. = Some old guy with hideous, goopy blue eyes is mirroring my way... and it's noon with whiskey and Cherry Coke for breakfast with a side plate of hard, overcooked bacon... and the Wolfhound licks my plate clean as I look out the front window at a rumbling rig taking black angus bulls to my rich neighbor's cow-farming operation.

SVR 27

tiger pit Evan Brengle inspired by the painting “Tiger in a Tropical Storm (Surprised!)” by Henri Rousseau “When I go into the glass houses and I see the strange plants of exotic lands, it seems to me that I enter into a dream.” – Henri Rousseau Seven thirty eight. On my way to work. I love the huge metropolitan city, though at times, I can’t help but feel that I have been sorted away into a drawer of an immense file cabinet. But, at least it’s a pretty cabinet, I’d say. Filled with other interesting people. People as paper—folded, torn, fodder for flame, a forum for ink and paint, makeshift airplanes and boats, a package for butcher shop meat, literature. “I think I wrote my grocery list on you the other day. Excuse me.” There must be a million in this city. More. I’m horrible with numbers. If it’s more than two hundred, I can’t conceptualize it. It just becomes a lot. Glass and concrete and metal. Angular and geometric and mechanical. I think I saw this in a movie once . . . I was walking to work.

Hm, yes. This is odd. Again. I can see the sky. It’s circular shaped. Circular and much smaller than before. I am in a hole. I think they call this a tiger pit.

Or a tiger trap. Or some such thing. You know what I mean, right? In the jungle, they dig a huge pit in the ground and cover the opening with branches and leaves, and then a tiger walks over the top and falls in. Or maybe the tiger is inside the pit, and a person walks over the top and falls in and the tiger eats them.

I don’t know why anyone would want to catch a tiger, aside from capturing a man-eating menace, or training a large feline circus performer. But, if you wanted to kill an enemy, a human enemy I mean, this’d be a pretty brilliant way to do it. Cruel, but brilliant. The tiger would clutch the person’s neck in its jaws, tearing the throat out, throttling the body, perhaps severing the head altogether, and then begin consuming the lifeless mass, usually at the torso, ripping away the fragile housing of skin, digging past the ribcage to the heart and lungs, or perhaps starting lower with mouthfuls of abdomen. Beautiful creatures really. I admire such beauty. There is no tiger in my pit. Perhaps I am nobody’s enemy. Perhaps. I have heard that sometimes these pits have spikes on the bottom to impale the animal or human that falls in. My pit doesn’t have spikes. I’m glad my pit doesn’t have spikes. Or a tiger. The walls are vertical, that is to say, they are steep. I cannot climb out. That’s the point. I have to say, whoever built this pit to capture me, they did a good job. It’s wonderful craftsmanship actually. I’ve seen many of these pits. Every few days. Every few days, on my way to work in the city. I’ve only ever seen them from the bottom, but from the bottom, this pit SVR 28

is really quite perfect. A perfect pit. I admire such dedication. I admire such meticulousness. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s slippery. And deep. A very fine pit indeed.

There is a puddle from which I can slurp small mouthfuls of gritty water. I drink the water because I am thirsty. And leaves from unknown trees rain down upon me, large, thick, tropical leaves with skins like elephants. I eat the leaves. I eat them because I am hungry. I eat the leaves, and their bitter juice coats my tongue green, and my throat and my stomach and every other digestive organ in a bitter neon searing fury. I grab fistfuls of mud from the walls shoving them into my mouth, and they sit heavy in my stomach as a stone buddha persistently meditating on the secrets of the universe determined not to move until complete enlightenment has been achieved. For days and nights, one or the other. Mud or leaves. I admire such persistence. The worms are my meat. I swallow them whole, and I can feel them grabbing with their arm-leg-bodies the walls of my stomach attempting to scale the sides, and inevitably, repeatedly sliding back down. I wish my pit had spikes. Or a tiger.

Every few days.

It all recalls to me an inversion of this moment I had experienced, or dreamt I had experienced, once. If you laid one upon the other, it would form a circle.

A picnic. A picnic on a hill. A picnic on a hill on a sunny day in the grass. Perhaps a tree. Instead of puddle water and worms, acid leaves and mud; wine and cheese, strawberries and chocolate. Delightful. A perfect day. And then the clouds. Clouds like new asphalt, when poured, spreading thick and slow and black with a vaporous, noxious halo. There were hours to wait and watch and anticipate the arrival, but no, the arrival had occurred. It was coming and it was already there, and you knew it and you could only wait. One would pick up a shovel and desperately scoop at the sky if only one could reach. Frantic and alone. If only one could reach. Perhaps a rope to climb. --but, no, that would be absurd.

I am curled on the sidewalk. A man has tossed some coins at my feet. That was kind of him. I admire such kindness. It appears that I have been sleeping. I think I saw this in a movie once. My suit is muddy and there are leaves in my hair.

Skin like elephants. I have a beard down to my shoulders. I have a beard. I was walking to work. Seven thirty nine. I get up and walk to work. I am walking to work. ď&#x201A;&#x153;

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Suisun Valley Review is proud to present

The Quinton Duval Award in Creative Writing

with guest judge, Indigo Moor

Established in 2009 to honor Quinton Duval, Professor Emeritus of English and Creative Writing and long-time faculty advisor to Suisun Valley Review, the Quinton Duval Award in Creative Writing recognizes excellence in the creative work of current students at Solano Community College. Submissions are first juried by the creative writing faculty, and finalists are forwarded to a guest judge who determines the winner and any honorable mentions.

This year’s guest judge is Sacramento-based poet, Indigo Moor Moor’s Tap-Root was published in 2006 as part of Main Street Rag’s Editor’s Select Poetry Series. His second collection, Through the Stonecutter’s Window, was published in April 2010 by Northwestern UP. He is a 2003 recipient of Cave Canem’s Writing Fellowship, former VP of the Sacramento Poetry Center, and editor for the Tule Review. He is the winner of the 2005 Vesle Fenstermaker Poetry Prize for Emerging Writers, a 2009 Pushcart Prize nominee and 2009 Jack Kerouac Poetry contest winner. Moor is widely published in many literary magazines.

He is currently enrolled in the Stonecoast MFA program for the University of Southern Maine. Moor was the featured artist for the 2009 Suisun Valley Review.

 The winning author has his/her name added to a memorial plaque located in the Solano College Library. In addition, the winner is awarded a monetary sum and will see his/her winning piece published in that year’s issue of Suisun Valley Review. Any honorable mentions may also be be published. All submissions for the award are also considered independently for publication in the forthcoming issue of Suisun Valley Review by the current editorial staff.

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2010 Quinton Duval Award in Creative Writing

Prize Winner Before Christ Homicide Was Human Sacrifice Andrew Killmer In epic poems the hero often descends into the underworld, swimming through underwater caves to the feminine leg of his journey. In the Yucatan they found a skeleton ten-thousand years old at the bottom of the Mayan word Cenote.

In veins long decomposed once flowed the genes of the prophecy of the return of Quetzalcoatl, now his bones stirred by those his calendar possibly most affects. His remains found at the halocline, where what looks like air is not air but a different kind of water, a mirage.

The way light dances on surfaces when viewed from below is the way the less dense dances atop the dense, tricking panicked lungs into breathing by now unavoidable death.

Imagine drowning thinking youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re filling your lungs with air: seems like a cruel trick, a trap set by gods bent on testing mortals. This human calcium begs the question why was our hero even here? I see him with a weapon, a sword or a spear, diving down, down like Beowulf, nameless as the poet, on his way to some jungle Grendel. Perhaps his end was not so noble or stupid, but more sinister, humanly terrifying.

They have since found more bodies in the Cenotes of the Yucatan.

Now I think of our hero screaming, already wet, his body covered in the fluids of his fear. He is tied, carried on the shoulders of villagers who raised him, thrown into the bottomless waters where gods and monsters live and wait to feed

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2010 Second Annual Quinton Duval Award in Creative Writing

Honorable Mention The Two Fridas Lauren Lavin We had hair like renaissance angels when we were kids. By the afternoon, Jameson’s was usually so worn and whipped from his mania that it was more like an old lion’s mane. Our mother loved our hair, and she cooed over mine and cawed over his, her marble-smooth fingers delving and conducting while his eyes darted upward in fury and pain.

My hair never got that way. She liked to make this distinction clear to Jameson, but there was no spite or cruelty in her voice.

“Jamie, you have twigs in your hair. Johnny plays just as much as you, but he doesn’t get half as dirty.”

“Ow!” he yowled as she tugged a stubborn strand. “He’s just more scared of stuff than me. And he doesn’t want you to call him that anymore.”

I remember her eyes drifting purposefully away from Jameson’s and into mine, questioning gently. My head retreated into my shoulders like a sullen tortoise. I froze to the spot. I wanted to leave, but my mother’s eyes had trapped me there.

I was waiting for an awful, uncomfortable question, one that would force me to answer in some hurtful, personal way. But all she said was, “What would you like to be called instead, honey?”

Jameson twisted out of her grasp and patted down his wild curls, then reached for two juice boxes from the refrigerator. I shifted sideways and slid into the nearest kitchen chair. I hated our chairs. Their backs weren’t solid, just wooden bars that pressed against your spine so you were forced to sit upright.

Jameson pushed a small plastic straw into the silver hole that crowned one of the juice boxes and placed it solidly before me. I sipped it slowly and he answered our mother.

“He likes his middle name better,” he explained casually, stabbing his own juice with its sharp little straw.

She took a seat beside me, turned sideways and facing me. I couldn’t look her in the eye. She gently combed my hair back with her cool hands, like I was a smooth stone among many in a riverbed with water washing over and all around.

“Is that so, Elia?”

I nodded, still not looking at her, still drinking my juice through a mouth so pursed that I couldn’t tell what flavor was in it. The box was covered in SVR 32

bright dancing apples, but my mouth didn’t taste bright or appley. Jameson had already finished his and was slurping loudly, watching the box crinkle up with the force of his breath.

“Elia sounds more like him,” he offered. “And Johnny sounds too much like me.”

My mother nodded. “That is true. You already have the same face, so it doesn’t make much sense to call you almost the same name.”

I ventured to look at her and she was smiling, so I smiled.

I collapsed onto my sheets and Andy fell after me, his arm slapping against my side and resting there. Every spot our bodies touched radiated heat and sweat. The cotton pillowcase was dry and soft against my face, was soaking up the liquid pooling off my hair. Andy’s breath was heavy and forcibly slowed. It buffeted against the back of my neck in waves of scorching heat that just as quickly sank into the beads of moisture there and became soothingly cool.

I wanted to lie there and be moody. My body was high but that left my head miles behind in the dust, and sometimes the only thing that felt right was to mourn the loss of my childhood, especially right after sex. Someone once tried to tell me I felt that way because I was guilty, because there was a part of me that recognized the inherent wrongness in fucking a fellow male. It was probably my sister who said it.

Nope. The fucking part was great, had been great since I’d first discovered it. It was always the after. It was the same the one time I slept with a girl. It was like my mind had to punish my body for feeling that good.

So there was Andy, beside me, trying to cuddle and making exclamations about how great it was, like he thought someone might have been filming.

He talked liked that, a lot, like he was on camera. Half the time he was talking he was merely dropping lines. I wondered if he rehearsed them. He was curled up against me saying things like, “I feel like there’s this string that goes from my heart to yours. Like that Frida Kahlo painting. I can feel this tugging between us.”

And all I felt was a wrenching in my stomach, all I could think about was being seven years old and catching frogs in the creek with Jameson, and the time I gripped one too hard when I tripped and fell down the hill into the creek and the water roaring all around me and just holding holding holding this thing so tight and by the time Jameson got me out and pried my hands open, the frog was crushed to death.

It was horrible, there’s my body all tingling and coming down from its spasmodic high, and me feeling like all I want to do is scream and throw up, and missing Sesame Street and Velcro sneakers, missing so much it made me hollow on the inside. And Andy in my ear, talking about how he wished his words could wrap me up like a blanket.

“In that painting,” I mumbled, my face buried in the pillow and eyes squeezed shut to block out the mental images of Lucky Charms and soccer practice, “The Two Fridas, she’s severing the veins between the two of her. She’s bleeding all over the place.”

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Andy’s mouth fluttered against my ear. “I’m just talking about this feeling. This bond.”

“She’s holding scissors. If we had a tangible bond someone could just cut us apart with scissors.”

“You are such a fucking bummer when you’re not coming,” he laughed, his words rounded in joke.

That was probably my third or fourth favorite thing about him, the way I could always tell he was smiling by the breadth and loping roundness of his words, when I couldn’t see his face. I liked to think I was the only one with that power, that acuteness of attention to his detail.

The Greek café was only a couple blocks away and usually empty. Awful ads that had to have been left over from the late eighties adorned every couple square feet of wall. Moderately attractive women with too much makeup and outrageous brillo pad perms smiled and held up gyro pitas like they were the sexiest things on earth. The pitas, not the women. I pointed out their garishness to Andy while we waited for Bren, Polly and my brother to join us.

“God, look at those earrings! They weigh more than those poor girls do.”

“Well, they’re eating gyros so they’re about to gain fifty pounds anyway,” he muttered, the smile still evident through his mouth’s muted tones.

“I bet you anything that one’s got a day-glo fannypack clipped around her acid-washed jeans, it’s just all out of frame.”

“Jesus, Elia. You just drove the estrogen level in here through the roof.”

I was distracted and tense that day. I don’t remember why. Andy was drinking cherry coke next to me, peaceful and seemingly pretty content, but I couldn’t relax. My hummus and dolmades just didn’t take the shape of food in my mind. The stuffed grape leaves sat on my plate like fat, wet grubs. I stared out the windows and let my eyes go out of focus so that all the cars were blurs. I imagined they were speeding along, but they weren’t. Everyone was just stuck at some traffic light.

Even after Bren and Polly arrived, and with them nothing but warmth and energy, I couldn’t anchor my consciousness to the table with the rest of them. I imagined my head as a balloon, bobbing up dangerously close to the single ceiling fan in the restaurant, and my friends’ conversations nothing more than radio static, turned down. Jameson never showed up. In secret, it devastated everyone, at least a little. Wherever my brother went, I swear, the sunlight was just a little brighter, leaves and grass somehow more vivid, more lush. If he’d been at the Greek place with us even the tacky pita women on the walls would’ve been unobtrusive, mildly pleasant, even.

It’s not that it surprised us, his flakiness. It was probably part of his allure, his goldenness. It made the times that he did decide to make an appearance that much better. Brighter.

“Where’s Jameson?” Polly chirped.

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I reeled in my head from its place beside the fan, focused on Polly’s sweet porcelain face so that it stopped blurredly speeding like the cars outside.

“Hm? How should I know?”

“He’s your twin, I thought you shared, what’s it called? Like, ESP or something.”

Bren snorted into his souvlaki and Polly slapped his knee.

“Maybe he went back to Sacramento to visit our parents. He’s been talking about it.” I shrugged and moved my eyes back to the window.

That night when we had sex I tried really hard to not be a downer afterward. My seven year old self decided to intrude anyway, though. It made me uncomfortable. I didn’t want the young me to see this window into his future. I wanted him to stay innocent. When that painful tug of childhood invaded my post -orgasm thoughts anyway, the best I could do was direct it toward vague sensations instead of those insistently specific brand names and cartoon characters.

While Andy kissed my ear and held onto me like I was saving him from drowning, I closed my eyes and went to the beach. I didn’t remember which beach.

Me and Jameson had been about ten or eleven. I didn’t have any memory of Lisa being there, either because she’d wanted to go to church camp instead or because I’d simply erased her. She wasn’t our triplet or anything, just the older sister that either felt left out or left herself out. I didn’t care which. I still don’t. I was too old for make believe but the masses of seaweed that had washed up on shore still reminded me of dead aliens and the water was bluer than anything else that ever got called “blue.” Jameson swam too far out, but came back each time more thrilled than when he’d left, and then tried to swim farther.

Sand clogged his hair and he got sunburned.

I went to sleep, more at peace than I was used to, hearing seagulls in my head and Andy’s breathing in real life.

This is why the phone’s screams at 2am sent a massive rush of adrenaline surging through me. The receiver was in my hand and at my ear before I even knew I was awake. I sat at the edge of the bed, struggling to make sense of the shifting darkness-shapes around me.

“Elia…Elia, honey are you there?”

“Mom? Yeah, uh…what…are you okay?”

Andy woke up behind me and started kissing the back of my neck. I shrugged him off and I felt his annoyance in the air.

“Elia, my baby…” A crash came through and then muffled sobs. She’d dropped the phone. I could hear her wailing and so could Andy. I looked at the phone in my hands. Then another voice, a calmer one, so I listened again.

“Elia, son. You need to come home.” The evenness of his tone brought me closer to unraveling. I could still hear my mother crying. “Are you at your apartment?”

“Yes,” I lied instantly. It was an old, familiar lie.

“You need to come home as soon as possible. It’s your brother. He exhaled slowly. “He’s dead. He drowned himself. They…well…a dog found his SVR 35

body at Point Reyes this morning.”

I hung up instantly, escaping my father as he began to say something about cinder blocks and when the phone started to ring and ring and ring, I unplugged it from the wall. I could feel Andy’s stare behind me, and his tension, and his waiting for an explanation.

I left Los Angeles an hour later. I didn’t go straight home. The time flew by, like the darkness was thinner than day, less resistant. Or I was just speeding. It should’ve taken me about seven hours to get to Point Reyes, but I made it through the Bay Area without traffic and stepped onto the sand before the sun did. It was overcast, though. It felt earlier than it really was, or, it felt like I was between times.

I leaned into a dune and watched the shore. I didn’t think this was the same beach we’d played at. There were no seagulls. Jameson was dead and I could already feel the stares upon me of people who’d known him, eyes that would look at me but see him. I would be half of a person, or I would be a complete person now, one whose image was not shared between two bodies. All I felt was muted, or maimed. Cut off. Something bit my hand when I burrowed it into the sand but I didn’t move. I was still wearing the same tshirt that I’d forgotten to take off when me and Andy fucked. It was cold. The beach, not my shirt.

I leaned, and watched. A dog was running along the water’s edge in my direction, tongue flapping in the wind. A yellow lab. Typical, boring. Friendly. It ran up to me and scattered sand everywhere. I scratched its ear absentmindedly and thought of what my dad had said, about Jameson’s body being found. The dog’s breath was warm on my skin, which made me realize how cold the beach was. Its fur was thick and probably a great color, like butter on toast, except it was so matted with sand and pieces of leaves, and even twigs. 

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One (oil on canvas)

Wade Hammond

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Spectacle Carrie Moniz A fat couple kisses in the frozen foods aisle, tongues glossed pink as ham hocks. A tan, augmented blonde rushes past with a cartful of broccoli, tofu dogs, flats of bottled water. She turns to the butcher— gawking through a glass tank of cuffed lobsters—and points an acrylic finger down her throat. The couple doesn't notice, keeps on kissing and slipping their own fingers beneath tremendous pleats of loose flesh. A stone-carved college boy ducks—beet red—behind a fogging freezer door. A mother of four devours the pair with tired eyes while she loads one child's arms with bags of peas and green beans, another's with boxes of microwave pizza. An old man in threadbare long johns complains loudly to the pierced cashier at check stand 5, who's been ringing the wrong prices on produce since the lovers began feeding each other fingered scoops of frozen yogurt. She snaps her gum and grabs the phone, cupping the receiver with one hand. I need a manager up front please. There's a wackjob here in his underwear.

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The Cat Abortion J.A. Goolsby Mormon Girls in Wichita Falls Slumberâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s mother gave up Ephedrine and moved to the big city of Wichita Falls to join up with the Jehovahâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Witness, and that's where I met Slumber after the first break of our sophomore year. I spent time as the backup catcher on the baseball team. Slumber, all lofty and leggy he was, threw pitches with his knuckles and the balls would flutter to home plate in great looping curls that matched well the lazy spring of his bleached-blond hair. Slum moved quickly to the top of the pitching rotation where he became a fan favorite for his funk-a-delic leg-kick and the foul mouth he used well to entertain the locals as they drank five-dollar beer and tossed spent cups along the outfield wall.

It was my job to warm the pitchers up between innings. I never swung a bat or caught a foul ball, which was fine by me. All I had to do was sit around and chew sunflower seeds until someone said go play catch, and I'd go play catch.

It was an easy way to make my dad happy, make him think I was interested in things.

I didn't give much of a shit about baseball. I didn't like track either, but I found myself running laps on the weekends because Slumber wanted to keep his schedule full. He didn't like being at home. It was the Jehovah's, he said, always over at the house explaining some theory about how only 144,000 people are going to make it to heaven, and though you don't have much of a shot at this heaven of theirs, they want you to come by for a good meeting or two and drop off a payment or three. Slumber knew it was only a matter of time before he slugged a Jehovah in the jaw. He said he already spent time in the juvenile system and couldn't get caught with another hit on his record, and he was sure a Jehovah would call the law if he let his anger get the best of him again, even though the Jehovah's said they wouldn't do such a thing when Slumber brought the subject up over coffee and a spiritual thought, but they made sure to let Slumber know they had a good prayer in mind to help him find some peace in the Good Lord... err, make that the Good Jehovah.

So, in those early years, Slumber and I were oddly active for a couple of shits that hated pretty much everything high school seemed to represent to all the kids trudging dank hallways with backpacks filled with books and barbiturates.

We joined debate because the team took trips to Austin it seemed like every week or two. We stuck around class because Ms. Vollmer had a thing for miniskirts. We could never tell if her chest was real.

We even dated two Mormon girls. We overheard them talking about taking trips to Oklahoma for Mormon dancing night. Slumber moved in quick and said he loved to dance. He busted out a sorry hip and jive number. We got their digits and we'd call them in the early A.M. of a Friday night and most times get their affable fathers who told us how much they appreciated good boys like us SVR 39

before they passed the phone along to their sleepy daughters, and every now and then we'd even believe these two old cats, who seemed like Playskool father's with their otherworldly kindness, and who thought of us as sons even though they didn't know us well.

Every couple of weeks we'd tag along for the drive up north passing along the up and down curves of the Oklahoma plains. See, the Mormons aren't so bad. They don't really preach at you, they just give you a book and ask you to read it, and then they give you ice cream. They ask if you want another bowl when you're done and they get so sad when you say your full, so you take another helping and somehow out of a whirlwind of niceties you find yourself at one of their meetings with your hand covering the emotion that seems to jump right out of you when one of the old ladies gets up to the podium (because in the Mormons it's the congregation that speaks, and no damn preacher, which is nice, because they're not getting paid to say some bullshit, they're just speaking from whatever part of the heart they got going there) and she starts talking about how it was Joseph Smith that made her life okay when her husband passed, and I didn't believe what she believed, but I did consider that whatever it was that she believed was doing something right for her, which in its own way was kind of a peaceful thought, you know, just that maybe even I could find something peaceful for myself someday.

We got along good with those Mormon girls despite all the differences we had. Those girls were the best of friends and they stood united against giving us blowjobs, but we liked them anyway, because for some reason --deep down-it felt good to be around a couple of girls that showed some respect for themselves, but those were our better days, before California, before good drugs took a hold of us in a way that seemed so beautiful at the time.

Out California Way Out of high school, Slumber signed to play baseball for the San Francisco Giants. The big club sent Slum to play AA ball for the Rancho Cucamonga Quakes. I didn’t have much better to do, so I tagged along, and out California way we found a whole new process of finding ourselves.

It turned out that Slumber wasn’t any good at baseball, but he had a good run of it for about seven years, and they were good years, because the minor leagues aren’t so bad when you’re young and single. Slumber liked to tell stories about groupies on the road, and group sex, but those days are choppy memories anymore, back during that time when it was trendy to be from Seattle, when school-kids carried around scribbled notebooks and loaded shotguns in memory of Kurt Cobain.

After Slumber’s career ended we moved to Sherman Oaks. We took an art class at Los Angeles Valley. I met a girl named Patrice who lived with three uncles and a dying aunt who once grabbed my wrist and whispered that she loved daffodils. I never got around to bringing her a bouquet before she died, but thinking that I wanted to made some sort of difference in my own dying soul.

Patrice loved photography, so I took it up on the weekends. I'd take SVR 40

shots in the morning, climb trees for a better view. I'd scale fences and drain gutters to get a new take on an old shot. Slumber and I would head on over to the IHOP for French Toast, and we’d fiddle with film packages, paper napkin residue on our sticky fingers, perusing the packaging for clues on lighting.

It was one of those odd weekends when I spotted Cameron Diaz toggling a pair of Liz Taylor's on Venice Beach, smoking a joint with her tits bare and sun roasting just past noon on a Sunday. I caught her tiny breasts just before she turned for another sip of Diet Coke. The shot netted me an easy grand and a full pack of American Spirit cigarettes I found on the sidewalk two steps removed from my first paying gig. So, it was out California way where I became a photographer and spent my days chewing pills with my best friend, slipping needles into our skin, living that L.A. life that moves like the slow wave of a good wet dream on a California night.

Madeline’s Tuesday Sale After a couple of years in Sherman Oaks, Slumber and I moved downtown to the cross section of Olvera and Chavez, just down from Roberto's Club where we drank many a failed night away. Our new home was a smooth pad, and perfect for a couple of guys just like us. Once a strip mall that had seen a murder or two, the place was renovated, bedrooms were built. A kitchen was installed near a closet-turned-restroom where also we did our laundry, if ever. The landlord mentioned, off-hand, that the particular section we were to rent was once an abortion clinic, and possibly a graveyard for dismembered babies from the womb, which never bothered me much until later when my addictions got the better of me and I was in no position to say no when Slumber made the decision to bring the little girl home.

It's all Madeline's fault, really, but I love her still. Madeline was the shopping cart lady that lived on the Alameda-Chavez bus bench just around the corner from us about a block down and to the right. Madeline’s faded maroon overcoat was a downtown fixture, and her bus bench was a hub of commerce for the bum population that traveled the train tracks only a short walk away. The rumor was that Madeline never changed clothes, only added more layers as the years passed her by. Most people around town respected her as a priestess that held some sort of power over the lives of men, who spoke to God by his first name and sometimes his last. Slumber made a habit of picking up odd items from her, like pecans in a Folgers can, or a dime sack of pipe tobacco cluttered with leaves and bits of Styrofoam. Slumber once traded four buttons from his long sleeve shirt for a thick winter coat he’d use up in Sequoia during our winter treks to find natural herbs growing in the mountains there. "You want to know how to stay warm? Talk to a bum. They got all the science of that shit down, man," he said, checking the sleeves for length.

Slumber liked the odd deal here and there, but it was the grab bag special that brought him back every Tuesday morning. On Tuesdays, Madeline took the contents of her shopping cart and divided it all into a host of brown paper bags. She sold them for a dollar, sometimes two.

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Madeline’s Tuesday sale caused Slumber’s addiction to branch out. He spent seven days a week thinking about Tuesday. Some people are addicted to things merely for the addiction of it, some sort of purpose when you have no purpose, like property destruction in the name of animal rights, or folding origami during night sweats with the T.V. up too loud. Slumber became an addict of surprise, skipping like a club-kid for used bars of soap, or chattering over fancy nibbled chocolates nicely festooned with hair balls and lint. But it was the kitten that brought about the slow change of our unfledged lives.

"What is it, Slumber?" I asked, speaking loud over the corner traffic, anxious, looking for cops as I fiddled with the powders in my pocket.

"It moves, man. Whatever it is." Slumber reached into the brown paper sack and pulled out a curled ball of deformity. "It’s alive," he whispered.

"That one ain’t right," said Madeline, pointing to the kitten breathing slowly in Slumber’s palm.

"What is it?" I asked.

"It’s kitty," said Madeline.

"I think it’s a cat." Slumber scratched his head with his empty hand. He looked to me, and I looked away searching for a quiet death -- a trashcan, a sewer grate. "Maybe we could put it in the bed of that pickup over there," I said, pointing to an old Ford, the tires missing, the windows broken. Slumber looked to me. I shrugged my shoulders. Slumber hitched his foot to the bus bench and he whispered, "We need something alive in the house. We’ll call it Speck."  The Tabby moved like a hex, or a witch concocting a hex, either way she had this lump in her back, creepy, like a small head stretching from her spine leathered by her thin gray coat. She was oddly beautiful in her disfigurement, almost chic in lamplight as she catted around our living room searching for something, anything, to lessen the boredom of her day.

She had a personality this cat, singing along to Rush and Floyd, though I could never get a grasp on her mood. Is it possible for a feline to be Autistic?

Schizophrenic? Maybe the marijuana twisted her some. She lived in a cloud of roasted cannabis streaking across our furniture ninja-like, and mean, like how Down syndrome kids are mean during Arts and Crafts. She always had a grand entrance, feet skidding, head slamming into the nick of a corner.

I was never a fan of the feline. They reminded me of women. How they never come to your call. How they sniff your hand when you put yourself out there to make some kind of peace with other people’s pets you hate, and invariably they turn away, ass up in the air, disgust evident in the sad cowl of their lips -just like all the women in my life, but somehow in the wake of a near deadly binge I found myself sharing my pad with the strangest being not named Johnson Theodore Slumber. We fed her. We cleaned her litter. We should’ve had her spayed.

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 It was evening, the day after St. Pattie’s day and we were in the living room watching season five of MacGyver on DVD, drinking green beer from a warm keg, smoking hash with Grandpa, our photog friend from Pasadena who dropped by for an eighter after work. Grandpa was a paparazzi pioneer. He lost the use of his right arm in a fight with Bill Barry when old Gramps snapped shots of a woman who looked like Marilyn Monroe resting her hand softly on Bobby Kennedy's crotch at the Amassador Hotel in Hollywood, and subsequently missed the shot of a lifetime when Sirhan Sirhan slipped a slug through the back of Kennedy's skull.

Grandpa came by the house to inquire about some Black Tar before he went home for the night, to help him sleep better, maybe keep his feet warm in the night. It was the new weather’s fault, he said, all the climate change in the world, the rising temperatures.

I think it was Grandpa that put Speck in a frenzied mood. Grandpa had a gut on him and he laughed high and stupid with his gut, and he’d yell out Kittee! in a severe screech powered by a couple of good jolts of powder. Speck got to where she jumped in place for a good minute and Grandpa would egg her on yelling out in that voice of his that sounded eerily reminiscent of Oprah on her After-Show.

It was in the space-time of one of these events that Speck managed to cause another ruckus during the episode where MacGyver gets shot by an assassin, and that girl from Blossom, the one with the nose, helps him out, and MacGyver ends up giving her his Swiss Army knife towards the end of the show. I always kind of wished I was that little girl, that he gave me that Swiss Army Knife. Could I ever be that special? Could I ever be a girl in a floppy hat with a nose so large to be uninvitingly cute, who laid claim to a knife given to her by a prince that could cure melanoma with a tank of helium and a butane lighter? I guess not. But, the drama went something like this, Speck spun out of a giant leap and she knocked over my beer in route to slicing up the crooked end of Slumber’s pinky toe. "Shit!" Slumber yelped. "Need to cool that bitch down." Slumber took a long hit of the stick burning between his fingers. He held his breath back to keep the smoke at bay. He got up quick and snatched her around the belly as she leapt from couch to floor. "I got you, woman," he whispered. He cupped Speck’s head into his hands and let the smoke from his lungs curl to her ear, "Now calm your ass down," he said, as she scrambled from his arms. We clanked beers, Slumber smiling, stoned. "That’s MacGyver right there, son."  The problem began as a high wail in the middle of the night. We were quite familiar with self-medication, so we saw getting Speck stoned as treatment for her mental instabilities, but all it seemed to do was stimulate her sex. I heard a sound in the middle of the night, a harsh yowl, like an alarm signaling an end, soulful and horrifying. It was Speck dressed in an evening gown, garter cinched SVR 43

around her leg, singing a note of lust to the ceiling of our two-man bachelor pad fully equipped with porn mirrors and a disco ball.

For a time, Speck grooved in her own little world. She existed in this up and down cycle, a bi-weekly spell of cat-dick fever. The screaming was a nightmare, electric. She sauntered around the house with her ass in the air, pink hole puckered, dripping cat juice, screaming out like a human child, panting, eyes crossed in a sexual madness I had never witnessed before.

Slumber, stumbling through a heroin come down, couldn’t take it anymore. He tossed her outside before he snapped her neck in a fit of I don’t give a fuck. It seemed like the right thing to do, but it hit us hard three days later when our last round of morphine dwindled to a low buzz. She left us silent in her absence, two medicated zombies milling through the house staring at white blots on the ceiling, scratching ourselves, shitting in the sink and cleaning it up later wondering why the hell we shit in the sink.

We weren’t prepared for the emotion of it all, the damn cat. We realized too late how much we loved Speck, how much our home needed her. Daily, we sat outside smoking cigarettes in lawn chairs watching strays go by hoping to see her, looking for deformities and counting stripes. Maybe she was relieved to be rid of us, saw a better life out there in the world and took hold of it with her tiny paws. Maybe she enjoyed the freedom from our addictions, the freedom we thought about when we gave ourselves time to think.

In Speck’s absence Slumber geared towards another stint in rehab, and I was going strong on a four-day acid binge when we heard her singing outside our door. She was back, a woman now, and satisfied. Slumber fell to his knees. Powder dusted his nose. His shoulders shook. He yelled out as if he found Jehovah for the first time. I remained in my corner huddled against a wall staring at the poltergeist on the television, struggling to remind myself that I was not a horse dying of lymphoma, and that the acid would wear off soon.

We had so much love to give. We wanted her to know that we needed her, that we wanted to be better owners, better people even, but we struggled with it because the drugs were just too much, and so we let her slink around the house searching for food until the next day when our high finally reached its peak.

We came down hard, but full of joy. We took turns holding her. Love.

League Night I went to the refrigerator to grab another beer, "You want another one, Slum?" I asked. Marsha, the hippie girl that sold mushrooms by the pound, came over for league night on Nintendo Wii. We used to bowl with our photog friends over at Holly Star Lanes near Santa Monica and the 101 Freeway exit, but the drugs got the best of us again, so we continued the tradition at home. The guys jawed in the living room, talking loud and mean, screaming out for distraction. I tossed a beer to Remi, a fucking waste of a man and beautiful.

"What about me, bitch?" asked Tugboat. I tossed him a beer.

"Stop your whining," said Grandpa as he took off on his five-step approach towards the flat screen. He looked like a professional in the living room, SVR 44

his arm dropping back, his plant foot solid, his slide foot perfectly lined up.

Grandpa flipped the controller in his hand, which gave the digitized ball on the flat screen a little loft and just the right amount of torque to make the sphere skid out towards the television gutter and then hook back to slam the pins in the sweet spot for his sixth strike in a row.

"Fuck you, Grandpa," said Tugboat. "I don’t see how the hell he does that, Slumber!"

"He went pro before you were born, Tug." Slumber said, scratching his nose after another line.

"How does that mean anything about anything?" said Tug. "It’s a fucking Nintendo, Slum! He’s fifty-some goddamn years old. He don’t need to be looking like he’s the god of Nintendo games! Jesus fucking Christ! I ain’t won a match in three weeks and you keep lining up all the coke while I’m rolling over here. Grandpa’s getting all his lines! I can’t even get a good huff on, and I’m rolling here, man! Everybody knows it ain’t right to roll without a good huff on. And Jesus Christ, Remi. You think you know everything and shit, but all you know is how to steal my fucking coke."

"Tug, you ain’t paid for a line in two years," said Slumber, his knees scrunched behind the coffee table that we stacked tight against the couch to make room for a proper bowling approach. "And you smart fucks were supposed to be done a half-hour ago. I walked past two cops to pick up season six at the WalMart. Does MacGyver mean anything to you sorry fucks anymore? Does Richard Dean Anderson mean a goddamn thing anymore? You’re some two timing sonsof-bitches for playing that damn Wii all the time. You know that’s a fucking travesty if there is such a thing as a travesty anymore in this fucked up world we're living in. All the fucking people and all the fucking, and the whatever else is out there." Slumber scratched at his nose and took another line into his system. He sent his tongue against the cigar skin he finished packing with California chronic.

He rolled the skin between his fingers and repositioned some of the weed inside to relieve a lump in the blunt. Slumber sparked the lighter and ran the flame up and down to bake the saliva dry, to seal the contents into its new container.

"Here," said Slumber, "smoke this, and shut your fucking trap. Jesus, Tug!" "It’s fucking league night, Slumber! Talking about Richard Dean Anderson on league night? You know I love the man as much as the next shit-fuck loser, but it’s fucking league night and you better’ve filled this one up with powder, motherfucker. That last blunt didn’t do a goddamn thing for me."

"That’s because you smoke too much weed, Tug," I said.

"He’s huffing too much coke," said Grandpa, popping his knuckles behind his head.

"That cat freaks me the fuck out," whispered Marsha sitting on the couch next to Slumber taking a line back as she lounged, her voice cool, her braids reeking of the drug culture we all so enjoyed.

Marsha laughed. Shook her head. She kicked an unshaven leg over the other and said, "That little bitch is pregnant."

"Now," Slumber said, "no reason to call her a bitch, she ain’t no damn SVR 45

dog."

"What?" I asked. "What do you mean?"

"First off, fuck you, Slumber," said Marsha. "Second, she was in heat?

She was gone a week. She came back all chill, right? She got laid, man. She’s knocked up."

"Seriously?" I asked.

"Count on it."

"Well, do cat's get abortions?" I asked. " I’m sure they’ve got a vacuum for that," said Slumber. It sounded like a reasonable question, or at least a proper path of exploration considering our new found hate for the feline libido.

The Cat Abortion The next morning we bought more coke to celebrate our newfound quest. We got comfortable in our recliners. We ripped lines and called clinics to get the good word on putting cats and abortion in the same sentence. A girl from the place out on Farmers Avenue threatened to call PETA. That sounded bad. I got visions of crazed parent-teacher soccer moms hopped up on diet pills storming our pad with a protest in their lungs. The cocaine kept us going so we made more calls, gibbering and jabbering with animal lovers, abortion haters, people that didn’t need coke to make phone calls. We found a place that would take the job for fifty-bucks cash on hand. It sounded like a deal, so we set an appointment for Friday of the coming week. We were assured that by Saturday morning our lives would go back to normal with no sense of guilt, or our money back.  Friday came without a thought as we found ourselves MacGyvered back to the status quo. That morning we caught Speck sunbathing in the window. We took turns holding her. I gave her that child-goes-to-the-hospital pep talk that my parents gave me when I was a kid. I stroked her head and told her everything would be okay, but we only made it two steps toward the door. Slumber looked to me. I gazed down at the Speck in my arms. She purred and sighed. She nuzzled my forearm. She seemed at peace with the world, her demons replaced by children in the womb. She reminded me of my mother. Certainly not the proper train of thought when filled with the bright lights of a good abortion.

"Is this the right thing, man?" I asked.

"What?" said Slumber.

"This abortion thing."

"I don’t know. What do you think?"

"She seems happy. My mother could’ve aborted me, you know?"

"That’s a big responsibility, man. We’re not so good with all that shit."

"We did right by Speck. And now we know what we’re doing, right?

We've got one under our belt."

"Speck is one cat. She’s going to have like twenty of them little fuckers.

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And that means we’re going to be cat people, and I'll be pretty fucking honest with you, I never thought of myself as a cat person."

"But Slum, it just don't feel right. I mean, abortion is cool and all, but when it’s your own? You know what I mean."

"Well," said Slumber, "I see what you’re saying. The whole you can kill your kid, but I won’t kill mine thing, right?"

"My mother could’ve pulled me out limb by limb, Slum."

We bought more coke and let the appointment pass without a call.

Over the next month we watched her cat-breasts drop and swell. She became tired and depressed. I fed her pickles, but she turned her nose. I gave her peanut butter and cottage cheese, but she clawed my wrist. She ate the sardines. Eventually, we just let her do her thing. We double checked her cat food and cleaned her litter twice a day. We stopped smoking pot in the living room to give the mother some air. We created a smoke space in the laundry room. We spent weeks in there huddled together watching MacGyver on the black and white, burnt roaches spilling from the ash tray, needles stranded on the floor. We even bought a sign from Madeline that said, "IT'S A BOY!"-- in Spanish. It took us two hours to hammer the thing into our cement lawn. I found a better reason to love her. We had a mother in the house.

But things have a way of becoming more than a thing. The kids didn‘t turn into kids at all. I went into my closet to hang wet clothes from hooks on the wall, and there I found a puddle with the consistency of V-8 from the can. Within the puddle I found three lifeless bodies the size of a man’s thumb. We found a fourth in the living room. Amazing how things happen so fast, how you’re heart can be torn from your chest going from one room to the next.

I cried that day, the day we found those little bodies that never had the heart to breathe. I went to the living room and fell back against the couch staring at nothing, exhausted, cocaine littered across the hardwood floor. MacGyver was on way too loud in the laundry room. I could see Slumber’s quivering lips in my peripheral. I could hear Grandpa in the bathroom flushing the bodies away. Speck sunbathed in the window like it was nothing, but I could feel it was something more for her, it was something more for all of us, something that made us feel again in a world where feelings don’t mean enough.

We cried together, John Slumber and I, two friends confused by the impossible complexity of life, struggling for an answer, for a reason to fight our addictions, to somehow move on and maybe find some women like those Mormon girls we knew when we were kids, but the idea of those kittens being born to the world was the only thing we had going in our lives, and all we could do was to sit back and wonder why. We never thought much about it all until that kitten came along and gave us the mind to think. And slowly we turned around.

There behind us, in the plethora, we found a whole new process of finding ourselves. 

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Chloe Kept On Neville Rex pirate pretty rocket ship baby all slip and sliver smile left alone a rebel latch key child rocks the devastating style that rips like a switch knife right yeah that's right so kick that hip slack desperation rag right off the shelf this chick is absolutely anything other than else

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The End of Innuendo Lloyd Aquino Left stranded at a two-way stop, the lukewarm stench of salvation rotting in a cardboard box, scented resentment hovering above trampled obituaries and stick figure drawings scratched into the inevitable ends, the drowsy glass, half-open, or half-shut, still snoring like the six-o’clock wind, Because the last one had halitosis like you wouldn’t believe, but, hey, she said she wanted it and, anyway, there wasn’t any place for me to be, at least not until the Resurrection, and did I tell you, she could moan like an out-of-work chanteuse, Some woman is crooning softly, a hallucination in static shackles, trapped in a layer of frost thick as a thumb, that holy-minded ghost keeping the broken bits of breath nailed down, a regular Jesus in July, like they say, And she was truly the Second Coming, if you know what I mean, two ripe, surplus-sized thighs, thank God we were both circumcised and itching for some tumbling, The seat belt’s been chewed through in a fit of ecstasy, apparently, or else someone starved, and the cigarette lighter’s been down for days, something about being burned by love one too many times, or how the heat of the moment is always waning, I mean, talk about getting me hot, Who are they to be judge and jury, SVR 49

just ‘cause a man likes some anonymous affection every now and then, suddenly that makes him dirty, It would take a forty day flood to bless this mess, but all that’s left in the glove’s a bible and a six-pack, always carry some spare rubber, in case of emergency, break, You know what they call it when that happens, a flesh wound, (ha, ha, ha), why just last week this one Mary-Be-Plain got a nose bleed bad and I couldn’t stop laughing, guess I must’ve nailed her pretty good, huh, A hollow cross is hung in awkward effigy on the rearview, and fingers drum the steering wheel, off-beat, a pair of left feet tapping the gas pedal while that poor paupered woman strums a song, who will save your soul, funny how art imitates life, isn’t it, ‘Cause I’ve never laughed so hard in my blessed life, though she did manage to ruin a damn good seat cover, so I dropped her like a nun’s habit and headed home to beat those demons out of me, Come to think of it, I never did see her again, And now the radio is going on and on about another young girl disappeared just outside her home, (always, always in the light of day), and the leather squeaks meekly, One time, this cripple walked on water after a night with me, she was ugly as sin SVR 50

but one hell of a spin, and girls like that, they always find their way back into the Light, Binary stars cut a path through the filthy haze, or is it headlights from a passing car, Do you see, The both of you suffocating in smoke while ashes stain, ashes scar and numb the sudden pain that has nothing to do with the scar-pocked hand pushing, It’s just a little Christian in you, if you know what I mean, The key slips into the ignition clumsily, scraping against the insides, And no, we can’t pull out now, you never who might be watching, Do you see, Then there’s nothing but two pieces of heathen misery, misbegotten hallelujahs and the stench of clay, a breathless savior tugs gently at a dress’s tender folds, begging the last of his disciples to stay.

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The Cattle Leonore Wilson “And what about all the rest of the animality that’s embedded so deeply in our lives? What about the cattle that live so close to humans? What about the herds of cows returning at dusk from their pastures, lifting their tails and shitting in the middle of the village? What about the cattle smell, which reminds us of where we really come from? When that disappears, when it vanishes from our everyday existence, there’ll be nothing left that is capable of assuaging our loneliness.” — Andrzej Stasiuk, FADO

To live among these bulwarks of silence with their fat-tongued Watery chorus, their constant piss and shit and aimless butting and shoving, Is to know what buoys the long January tedium, what caulks the fog from seeping Into the mind’s bowl of glutted doubt where questions climb like toying branches Asking what use is living after one’s children have departed, after one’s occupation Has folded like the wings of a bat-- dumb varmint blindly circling The living room as if it could find any modicum of bliss.

Without the pasture’s beasts I, a mother/wife would seep into a spell of a much crueler brooding, For they have always kept me company, although at times I shouted, brandishing a willow stick, driving them from the field Where they had lingered like big-eyed relatives at the picture window As the children lay napping, swaddled in their cradles; my herding necessary In my lactating days when my hair remained unbraided, my bathrobe stained With burped-up spittle, my brain rattled by the repetitive cries That pinned me, a mad Prometheus, twisting in her own barbed-wire.

Then every outside noise bugled in my head, Then every second a child slept was godly-quiet alchemy.

Then one day in glistening spring When the twins and the baby were three and two respectively, I walked out further, took the rutted half-mile trail to the neighbor’s glade.

I shaped my irregular feet to the muddied-bovine prints as if to slow my pace, To acquire fortitude and patience. Nearing the meadow’s weathered gate I saw the fresh-wet body of a bull calf shivering in streaks of blood, Eyes clouded and dimmed in mucous; legs curled like maidenhairs beneath it.

And I crouched down, shuttled my palm beneath the rakish fur, To feel its heart; oh I stayed there probably longer than I should, Believing if abandoned it would surely die; I stroked its gut, Rubbed its muzzle, but soon duty called and I hurried back SVR 52

To my dozing trinity, only to meet the foreman on his pony, Who when questioned told me how cows will often wander Upon giving birth, that they need about an hour after labor To harness their own strength, to nourish their own hunger; How this balm became my creed, my sleep-That I was more like them than I believed, my browsing sister-kin; Our flow-lines understood, a stalwart pushing through the hay.

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SVR 54

Leonore Wilson

Untitled

After his wife was raped he refused to kiss her body . . .

Carrie Moniz I read this article while I chop onions for a stew, peel carrots, potatoes, and with the blade end of my tool carve out the dark places, too bruised, too soft to eat.

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Ornamental Horticulture Neville Rex crushed sullen black powder girl grows branches on her back that breathe as she breathes slow heavy rasp to speak to me and I ask her if it hurt ask her how much she bled when those branches took root

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Country & Western Josh Neely Long lost, the beauty queen comes home broken, her mascara mask haunted billboards for years.

She was misprized young, crooked smile for all to see. Alone in back lot tents, then a ten minute ride to Memphis. Bakelite clocks blur in travel trailer bedrooms, a slow trial by apathy. Guitars prattled, high and thin, and her taxi missed the last turn again.

Framed photos show a young fiddle player turned groom, tall on the courthouse steps with her.

A mobile home in Flagstaff with whisper hollow walls recalls his whiskey fights, her sleepless nights, stale beer in the hall. Her record turns in the dark â&#x20AC;&#x201C; shush, shush, shush. The albumâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s last page enough for us.

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Suisun Valley Review presents the short fiction of

Stephen D. Gutierrez Steven D. Gutierrez was featured on April 21, 2010 as a visiting author as part of the on-going Solano Community College Writers Series. He read from his newest collection of stories, Live From Fresno Y Los, after which he engaged his audience in a Q & A. Gutierrez was also a guest lecturer in English 58, the Literary Magazine in which he gave a candid discussion of life, family, wounded souls, and, of course, the art of writing. Gutierrez exudes an air of confidence, distinct style, and professionalism that one can only, well, love.

Born and raised in Southern California, Gutierrez grew up in City of Commerce outside of Los Angeles. After completing his BA at Chico State University, he earned an MFA in Creative Writing at Cornell. Among the literary magazines and anthologies he has appeared in are Puerto del Sol, Santa Monica Review, Fiction, Third Coast, Fiction International, Fourteen Hills, ZYZZYVA, Latinos in Lotusland and the forthcoming Sudden Fiction Latino. In addition, he has published creative nonfiction and personal essays in River Teeth, Fourth Genre, San Francisco Chronicle and Los Angeles Times. He is the recipient of the Nilon Award for his first book, Elements, and his second collection of short stories, Live from Fresno y Los, has been published by Bear Star Press. He is a professor of English as well as the director of the Creative Writing Program at California State University, East Bay.

A previously unpublished story and an interview with the author SVR 58

Allowance

Those were the days I tromped into the house and saw nothing. Headed straight to my room and shut the door and listened to music with my earphones on. Made a couple of calls from the phone in the hall and dressed to go outside again. Avoided the misery inside, the smell clinging to the walls, the wheelchair folded in the kitchen and the short cries of pain coming from his room. “Ai, ai, ai!” Avoided it all, all by keeping on the move, always, always staying for short periods only, coming in late, leaving early, barely resting there, only sleeping there, really. “I got to get out, man. I got to get out.” Refusing the walls that pressed in on me, pressed in on me, crashing in my room, getting up and going out again, out, out, a phantom member of the household too tormented to participate in the hellish daily routine of taking care of my father and coping with the disease wracking the whole house in pain. Seen from outside, the house was bent over in affliction.

Checked in and popped out. Fled to the park to play ping-pong with my friends. Walk the streets. Smoke dope. Go to the library and flip through the magazines. Anything, anything to get out.

“Okay, Mom, I’m going out!” I shouted from my room.

My old man stopped me in the hall. It was a usual occurrence and it filled me with guilt. Because he had nothing better to do, he sat on the edge of his bed waiting for me to show up. “Estéban,” he uttered with what force he had.

I paused in my escape and turned towards him. He rose and met me at the door. In his robe, loosely belted and open at the chest, wearing the same white t-shirt that needed washing but that required force to get off him, he stood uneasily. He studied me, accounted for me with whatever mental process was left him. “’allo.” He seemed to recognize me. Did recognize me out of reservoirs of memory and blood. Blood. Reached a shrunken hand to me.

“Come here.” He beckoned me in, leaning on his cane that a neighbor had handed on to him, a curved gray beauty that reflected the surroundings like a circus mirror distorting the world, so that I could see myself, almost. I could see a slice of me standing before him in my regular teenage get-up, Converse high tops and Levi’s and a colored t-shirt with a sagging pocket. Could see myself warped and stretched out of shape.

I leaned forward with a hand out because I knew what was coming, I did, because already he had reached back into his pants pocket to extract the thin SVR 59

wallet he still carried out of habit, flipping it open often. “Look at me, look,” he’d say, pointing at a healthy man in a driver’s license photo smiling away, happy, the man, himself, “Me! There! Here! ¡Aquí!” proof of a better life.

“That’s me!” Probably going off to buy a burrito after the DMV photo session or rushing off to pull the swing shift at the Sante Fe Railroad, the famous Hobart Yard on Washington so dense with tracks you needed a map to navigate it, meeting up with his camaradas to bullshit in the locker room before going out on the job again.

He often had a couple of bucks in his wallet, his weekly allowance, replenished every Friday (or was it every two weeks? Yes, it was, Thursday of that second week being hard on the stomach, a teenage boy’s growls causing my mom fretful squeezes of the tissue she kept balled up and tucked away in her waistband. “I’ll call your grandmother! We’ll get some money! Ride over there on your bike!” “It’s too far, Mom.” “We don’t have any gas!”), every “payday,” then, my mom doling out the few dollars after cashing the Disability check, laying the money out on the bedspread in her room, a weak green fan we knew couldn’t cool down the heat of the bills, so needing help from outside. “Yes, Grandma will help us. Mercedes.” Her saintly friend with a big roll that was always hers to pick from rescued us many times.

Because Disability stunk. Paid nothing. It was only a stopgap measure until the real retirement benefits kicked in, but he had to be declared officially Sick, with a big S, no longer able to work ever again, and that took time. Forms had to be filled out and signed, appointments made, x-rays studied, blood tests pondered, new forms processed, and hopelessness prolonged.

It had to happen a certain way. She was left staring at our biweekly allowance, an amount so paltry a high school buddy gasped when he spied my financial aid application for college the next year. “You can’t live on that, man, it’s impossible!”

“We did.”

She was generous but tied down by bills. “Here, Alberto, so you have a few dollars in your pocket when you take a walk, eh?” She tried to keep his spirits up by reminding him that he could still do a few things on his own, like go to the store and buy a dozen tortillas (plopped down on the counter in an automatic rite the clerk understood) or hail the ice cream man after spending the afternoon squatting in the front yard pulling crab grass from the lawn.

“Hey!” A hand uplifted, and Francisco, the ex-butcher driving an ice cream truck now, his own, he and his wife seeming happier than most in their semi-retirement, claiming the best years are now, doing this, doing what they really want to do – serve soft style ice cream and keep people happy, ¡es todo! – played a cheerful ice cream tune alerting the whole neighborhood he was here.

The big white truck trimmed in red eased to the curb. My father greeted it.

Ambled up to the window, “Francisco, dame un nieve, por favor,” digging the money out of his wallet and standing back with amazement in the interval of production. Donning a big white laboratory coat stained with chocolate syrup, Frank swirled the ice cream into the cone and Dolores kept steady at the wheel SVR 60

checking the mirrors for traffic and planting her foot on the brake, holding the big ship still, saying over her shoulder, “Frank, you all right, hon?”

“Yeah, sure, babe, just fixing Alberto here an ice cream cone.”

My dad, standing aside in the shallow gutter, the space reserved for waiting-for-ice cream, with me attending him after pulling a few weeds out of guilt, “Here, Dad, let me help you,” looking around furtively out of shame, smiled. “¿Por qué? I’m all right.” He smiled beatifically.

Standing there in the roar of the ice-cream truck, catching the hot wind from the motor fan whirring behind the crusty shell of the truck, he shifted his weight. He relieved the pressure on his leg, his bad leg. But he smiled. He still smiled.

“Vainilla, Francisco.” He told him what he already knew.

He must have considered those few moments a gift, as, receiving the cone from Frank through the window, he could forget himself just a second more in the miracle taking place between him and Frank that he knew, sadly, would end soon. He knew what it meant. He could still talk to people.

“There you go, Alberto. Thank you. Gracias.”

“De nada.” He bit into the cone, cupping the tip to catch the slurp, and the truck jingled away up the street.

He could still do that, but less and less. It was coming to an end.

He had reached the point where he’d get lost on the way to the store, frustrated and scared, and tire after five minutes in the yard. He couldn’t do much anymore, anything, really.

“Take it, I want you to have it.” He pushed the two dollars on me, urging the bills forward in his big, calloused hand beat up and bent from a lifetime of work. “Take it, aquí está, take it.”

“Thanks, Dad,” I wanted to say, but couldn’t. I was so dumb. 

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Suisun Valley Review presents an interview with

Stephen D. Gutierrez SVR: Do you draft by hand or by computer? What time of day does most of your writing occur? How important are these details to your process?

characters or do something else I see an expression on a face and that makes me wonder about that person, which in turn triggers my imagination. I come up with a character then. I am Gutierrez: When I started, it was charmed by the world, appalled, handwriting that did it for me, with an frightened. Of course, those people occasional flurry on a typewriter that who fascinate me and inspire characdid produce a different kind of senters are somehow related to my own tence, I noticed. Over time, Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve character, but itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s hard sometimes to evolved with the age into a reliance on know for sure. The trick is recogniztechnology. Word processing is spec- ing who the real you is, deep down tacular -- feels right at this point. inside, and what your real material and When I was raising a child, caught in themes are as opposed to what merely the middle of family life with my wife sounds interesting or tantalizing. Seek and son, it was often at out your shadow brothnight that I ers and sisters in the wrote. Now that he's byways of Ameriout of the house, it's Be in love with the ca. Write about lonemore often in the world, with peoly, forgotten peomorning or after- ple, even those you ple. A way to access noon. But the time of hate. Capture them them is to bring up day is not nearly so in all their grothose parts of yourself important as that sense that are lonely and of having done every- tesqueness, and forgotten or that have thing else I need to do love them for it. been dismissed as into stay functional in consequential or too society -- of having embarrassing or shamecleared that space for writing and writ- ful to explore. ing only after doing the junk work of my life.

SVR: What, if anything, do you feel is wrong with contemporary short ficSVR: You obviously love your charaction? What do you think good story ters. Where do they come from? How writers should be doing? do they develop? How would you advise writers to develop an ear for Gutierrez: I think the short story has situation inspiration? edged perilously close to the personal essay. I read more and more that Gutierrez: I do love my characters. I sound like disguised experience rather think every writer should love his than imagined experience, which has SVR 62

the greater odds of possessing magic.

Good writers should be asking themselves what a short story is, and the answer is “textual alchemy.” Absent this quality of engagement with language first and foremost which comes, in my opinion, from an abeyance of the self and a turning over the material to a bigger Self, a Storyteller if you will, we will continue to see small, dry, boring pieces that are highly regarded examples of "fine" writing. The word almost makes me shudder because while on the one hand it may denote truly exceptional, stirring writing that is well done and polished, it too often means death on the page for me. And this death comes from a basic misunderstanding of the form.

Unless the imagination intrudes at some basic level on the stuff of life and demands its place in the game, the wor k will be lacking something. Nobody gives a shit what happened to you unless it's presented right. That presentation is the form (or story) itself, and it is (should be) deeply charged from the imagination, the unconscious, the mad and terrifying spaces inside you that constitute your deepest self.

SVR: Who has had the largest influence on your writing?

Gutierrez: I read Faulkner as a senior in high school and that changed my life; determined my future. I wanted to be a writer ever after. But I should qualify that and say I "heard" him in the incantatory section of the novella, "The Bear." I didn't know what the hell he was saying; too young and dumb. But I heard him all right and responded. He's in my bones. Shortly

thereafter, in my 18th year, my first year of college, I read the Nick Adams stories by Hemingway and all the other great stories from his major years. So the two biggies of my generation are there at the top, Faulkner and Hemingway. How boring, you might say, how sad, but there it is. Even though post-modernism had flourished with a lot of noted writers in between -Barth, Barthelme, Coover, Pynchon -the two American giants of modernism were still the pre-eminent influences, it seemed, for my generation or those people I talked to who were interested in writing.

After that came the beats. I got their rhythms in me as well, I think, no matter how critical I can be of them now. Going back again, twain, of course, and Sherwood Anderson. I love them both.

But shoot, all these single pieces that have lodged in me. Returning to the postmoderns: Coover’s “The Babysitter.” Wow. A splendid few by Barthelme. A wonderful, deeply moving, truly great late-modernist story by Mark Costello, “Murphy’s Xmas.”

Perfect, that one.

Influences come early and probably do no more than validate a certain disposition and rhythm already in place, ready to be unleashed and tamed.

Twain: Twain Twain Twain Twain Twain. Pops up now. Again. The transmogrification of beat syntax and rhythm achieved in Tillie Olsen, at least as I read her then: Olsen. Olsen Olsen Olsen.

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end up there. Un hombre y una mujer.

El Mark y la Tillie. Por vida.

What was the kernel of the story? Was there an event or person that specifically sparked the penning of the piece?

Chicano speech and slang. Not Spanish, but Spanglish. Redneck talk.

(Twain: Twain Twain Twain Shakespeare. He Twain Twain.)

Black spoke to me as a talk. Shit, talk! Working child, cooed into class talk. my ear, the Eng-

Gutierrez: Gladly. My father stuffed a dollar bill into my hand a few times when he was declining with early-onset Alzheimer's. Very tragvery pathetic was the lish bastard. "To ic, Seriously, strong utterscene for me. Very sad. ance where I heard it. be or not to be . . H e a r t b r e a k i n g , o f Where I read it. Whit- .." He wore a course, my old man in man. Rude, crude. The bandana. I his robe, exhausted by best of Ginsberg. José heard him. his condition, accosting Montoya’s “El Louic.” me in the hall and urging on me this last sign of I’ll never end if I don’t say STOP. paternal love. Very sad. I've got a And I won’t even get into personal lump in my throat right now. influences.

That is the basic origin of it -- that SVR: Do you feel that your process image, that moment of him leaning depends on the story, or do you feel forward in his blue robe with his hand the process is the same every time? In outstretched demanding I take this other words, does the story lend to the money, his teenage son (me) ashamed process or the process to the story? and abashed but moved beyond his capacity of resistance. Fleeing the Gutierrez: One has certain habits that house in shame and anger, shame at won't go away. Mine generally entail the situation and anger at the compulsiveness and respect for what is same. Outside of that moment, the alive on the page, trying to maintain rest is embellishment, the imagination that energy while cultivating a certain kicking in, as I said, different parts of degree of polish, of professionalmy life as I knew it coalescing in this ism. Sometimes, though, a gift can particular narrative. Art-making. happen and you just say, "Hallelujah! God, thank you! Gracias, "Allowance" never happened like my muse, gracias!" Then you go out that. "Allowance" happened exactly and get drunk, if you're young. If like that. you're older, middle-aged, like me, you take a sedative approved by the Memory and imagination collide to FDA. produce something bigger than both, I hope. Collude, is probably a better SVR: Would you speak to the devel- word. Consort. Contribute. opment of the story, “Allowance”?

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Cooperate. Ah, there it is! The word we wanted all along!

Always, the hunt for the word. "Allowance," at any rate, is the fruitful offspring of this mental cohabitation (all these "c" words!) With plenty of coitus between them.

I hope the reader sees, experiences the event as real. That's all I care about.

Because it is. ď&#x201A;&#x153;

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 Contributors’ Notes   Lloyd Aquino has been writing poetry for eleven years, pursuing his interest in experimenting with language, rhythm, and form. He is an instructor of English at Mount San Antonio College and lives in Ontario, CA.  Richard Barnhart kicks it hopelessly hapless, all poser kid-set space cadet sparkle sparkle and subtle euphoria.  Evan Brengle is from Sacramento, California. He currently works as a Peace Corps volunteer helping to teach English at the high school in Kicevo, Macedonia.  Catherine Fraga has been published in many literary journals and magazines, including Sonoma Mandala, South Coast Poetry Journal, and Ploughshares. In 2005, Poet’s Corner Press published a collection of her poetry, Running Away with Gary the Mattress Salesman. In 2001, she was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by the New Hampshire Arts Commission’s Literary Review.  J.A. Goolsby is a writer from Texas. His work has appeared previously in issues 25 and 26 of the Suisun Valley Review. He is also a regular contributor to tomsvoicemagazine.com.

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 Ray Hadley has been published in Ledge, Poetry Now, Manzanita Review, Illuminations, Parting Gifts, Thistle Creek Review, Avocet, and Pearl. His broadside, Children’s Games, was published

by Rattle Snake Review, and his chapbook, Smoking Mt. Shasta, by Blackberry Press.  Wade Hammond paints and works in Long Beach, CA and toys with the idea of opening a restaurant.  Tim Kahl is the author of Possessing Yourself (Word Tech Press, 2009) and has published in Prairie Schooner, American Letters & Commentary, Berkeley Poetry Review, Fourteen Hills, George Washington Review, Illuminations, Indiana Review, Limestone, Nimrod, Ninth Letter, Notre Dame Review, South Dakota Quarterly, The Journal, Parthenon West Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, The Texas Review, among others. He is also the editor for Bald Trickster Press.  Lauren Lavin was born in 1990 and currently attends Solano Community College. She has always told stories through art, story, and writing.

She currently lives in Vacaville and was made in Mexico.  Joe Mantalbo is currently studying poetry in the Graduate Creative Writing program at CSU Sacramento.

His poems have been published in Yes, Poetry and Calaveras Station. He enjoys mint ice cream and poems by Sharon Olds.

 Carrie Moniz was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. She currently resides in San Diego, California.

Her poems have appeared in Transform This and Yellow Medicine Review.  Joshua Neely lives and works in San Francisco. He is an assistant editor for Flatmancrooked Publishing and Narrative Magazine. His writing has appeared in Suisun Valley Review, Eclipse Literary Journal, Poetry Now, and online at tarpaulinsky.com.  Red Shuttleworth’s poems have recently appeared in The Cape Rock, Clare, Concho River Review, Karamu, Minnetonka Review, Plains Song Review, Rattle, Weber: The Contemporary West, and other journals. His collection of poetry, Western Settings, was published in 2000 by the University of Nevada Press. He is currently working on a commissioned play for State University of New York, Fredonia to be produced in November 2011.  Leonore Wilson’s work has been published in such magazines as Pedestal, Third Coast, Pif, 2RiverReview, Madison Review, Quarterly West, and Nimble Spirit.

She has been nominated for four Pushcart awards for poetry and lives in the wilds of Northern California where she maintains her family ranch.  Mollie Weaver is a photography student at Solano Community College.

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