Suisun Valley Review #31

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SUISUN VALLEY REVIEW

Editors: Dana Ateyyat, Jennifer Bougher, Elizabeth Campbell, Luningning de Jesus, Ed Enwright, Steven Fordyce, Joshua Gray, Kelsey Hunkins, Rory Ibarra, Arthur Jackson V, Katie Naquin, Anita Nygren, Richard Owen, Alec Wiley, and Dylan Youngers Advisor: Michael J. Wyly Assistants to the Advisor: Jennifer Bougher, Steven Fordyce and Katie Naquin Cover Art: Rachel McPherson, “You Can’t Have It”

Cover Concept: Dana Ateyyat and Lisa Gurlin Book Design & Layout: Lisa Gurlin Printing: Graphics Department, Solano Community College Binding: Inland Binding, Sacramento, CA 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 3,500 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.

Established in 1981.

Suisun Valley Review (ISSN 1945-7340) is published annually every spring by Solano Community College, Fairfield, CA. SVR is edited by the students of English 058 and

059, courses in the contemporary literary magazine. Please visit www.solano.edu for details on how to register.

Suisun Valley Review, English Department, Solano Community College, 4000 Suisun Valley Road, Fairfield, CA 94534.

Email: suisunvalleyreview@gmail.com.

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Print run: 400

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TABLE OF CONTENTS Poetry Jeffrey C. Alfier Tobi Cogswell Jeffrey C. Alfier Armando Quiros Dylan de Wit Philip O’Neil Taylor Graham Taylor Graham Dylan Youngers Jeffrey C. Alfier Kevin Ridgeway Jared Duran Robert Gibbons Dylan de Wit Jessica Dawson Erin Renee Wahl Elizabeth Beck Jim Davis Tobi Cogswell Kali Pollard Cynthia Linville Robert W. King Laura King Thomas Griffen Richard D. Owen Matt Morris Pamela Riley Catherine Fraga Kali Pollard Ciara Shuttleworth Cynthia Linville Ann Privateer

Blue Notes for Fireball Whiskey and Ginger Ale Morning Meditation with Stone and Weather Late Return to Landstuhl A Bowering Touch Night Out From the Flagstones Apogee Level: a Definition Sunset over Maroon Bells Waiting for Biplanes Sawdust Memories The Greater Works of the Lesser Known The Gourd First Born A Literary Caution This Is Only A Test Convex Anterior Cingulate Sulcus Far West Texas The Earth Cools Without Me Lost Love Lounge, New Orleans Warning at the P. O. Sonnet on the Marches Inishmore Lament of the Hot-Pie Deliv’ryman The Distant Sea Breakfast The True Story of Eve’s Seduction Ears to Pane Depraved This Cup of White Night Loom in Essence

9 11 12 13 14 16 19 23 24 26 27 28 30 55 57 58 60 61 62 64 65 70 71 73 74 76 79 80 81 83 84 94

Short Fiction Trina L. Drotar Gregory Jeffers Arthur R. Shields

Stairs, Spiders and Secrets Drifters The Pool Game

20 52 66

Features Gary Thompson

Biography

Kingdom, Phylum On Snow Road Plein Air Two May Day Poems Their Golden Worn Down from Reading Wind SSE The First Lesson of Boats Provisioned Boats Interview

Quinton Duval Award in Creative Writing (with Edythe Haendel Schwartz) Richard D. Owen

Winner

32 33 34 35 36 37 38 40 41 42 43 47

Buff in Green Pants

48 49 50 51

Absolem: a Fashion Portrait Didn’t Mean to Startle You Freedom Vallejo Self-Portrait: 6th grade, Before Jail Invictus Us and Them Queen Octopus and Her King Tren Fantasma Madeline

10 18 25 29 56 63 72 78 82 86

On Encountering G7 Luningning Soleil C. de Jesus Honorable Mention

Visual Arts Arthur Jackson V Rachel McPherson Cleber Pacheco Thomas Michael Gillaspy Greg Correll Natalie Francel-Stone Jared Boston Katie Brownell Rita Okusako Rachel McPherson

Contributors' Notes

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EDITORIAL STATEMENT:

Suisun Valley Review, a product of English 058 and 059, the Literary Magazine I and II, was established in 1981 for the students of Solano Community College to learn the art of editing a literary journal while working together to create their own annual magazine. Now in its thirty-first issue, student-editors continue to 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 themselves in the creation of every aspect of the magazine, including the selection of overall design aesthetic and the narrative development of each issue. SVR works closely with 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 Solano Community College courses, English 058 and 059. 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.

—2014 Editorial Staff

Suisun Valley Review is dedicated to

Quinton Duval, Professor Emeritus, Solano Community College

BLUE NOTES FOR FIREBALL WHISKEY & GINGER ALE JEFFREY C. ALFIER

I lost my audience at Northern Lights Lounge when my solo sax got sloppy. Guess I failed to fade my notes in fortissimo range.

Some ass in the Friday night crowd swore I was washed-up, shouted for me to go back to my day job – a shop rat turning bolts at GM. The owner shook his head in dim accord, a dirty change-up when he refused to pay me for the gig. Hitting the street to find my ride, a black cat didn't want to cross my path, not even offer the mercy of its shadow, the fellowship of burning yellow eyes.

When I got back to the Temple Hotel, my woman warmed me with the whiskey and tobacco burn of her tongue, all a man like me ever needed in a bad time. When I told her about Northern Lights, she glared at me like a marked-down suit, said she couldn’t handle me losing one more job. She left Spam frying on the stove and walked right on out, her pace quickening with echoes, leaving me like Eurydice in the underworld.

So I picked up my sax, opened the window to the summer night, and hit a few overtones in Bb range, letting them weave into the screams of Tiger fans cheering another win, my notes and I, all the hunger an audience wants gone.

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ABSOLEM: A FASHION PORTRAIT ARTHUR JACKSON V

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MORNING MEDITATION WITH STONE AND WEATHER TOBI COGSWELL

She straightened up against the uneven and ancient stones of the wall in the narrow alley between her pensione and the harbor. The stones, bubbled with texture like yeast in bread, scratched her back in a satisfying way. To be pushed into them and kissed, this one time, would not feel as delicious as the solitary and unguarded flexing of the warp and weft of her shoulders and back. She listened to the clanking of a family meal being prepared across the way.

In a language she couldn’t understand, but in smells redolent of her childhood, and her family—her chaotic little family, that rarely sat down together over any meal, unless it was in front of a ballgame. Over it all, the perfume of the sea, darkened and angry by weather that was calling this home. Clouds overhead the color of dampened hearthstones before being warmed by morning fires. She watched them move slowly across the tiny alley sky, wondered whether they had any rain to leave behind, soft as tomorrow night’s dreams.

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LATE RETURN TO LANDSTUHL JEFFREY C. ALFIER

Blue-gray clouds edge the peaks of the Pf채lzer Wald.

They seize what light there is over the wind-trodden ground.

Off the stone-scarred road back from Kindsbach, maple, birch, even stinging nettles, wear rumors of autumn.

Unseen bells in soft sonata fade in the key of echoes.

Bread leaves your hands for starlings in the rain.

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A BOWERING TOUCH ARMANDO QUIROS

Hands gently shudder— Even the thunders quiet; You stroke me deafly.

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NIGHT OUT DYLAN DE WIT

I requested one of those corner booths in the back, so my girl and I waited at the bar.

Me with a Tanqueray, she got a lemon-drop, extra sweet.

Man! You should’a seen us!

Yanks highlights ran on a box TV; one with buttons, instead’a knobs, mounted on the wall.

Right above the mirror with Jim Beam’s logo engraved.

She was wearin’ these heels I bought her; absolute knockout.

Long coat, short black skirt.

Glasses clinking and plates scraped with steak knives drowned what music they had.

Conversation was like dumping a pail in the Hudson; Too much going on for it to matter.

Then we got the table in the back, by the murals of Venice, or Rome; is it Paris?

We had the young waiter, with his hair slicked back.

The kid welcomed us, a little salty, but that’s alright, and told us the special.

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Broiled sea bass, lemon peppered, side of veggies.

Excellent, he says.

I acted enthused, but I already heard the kid’s spiel to the table beside us.

I gave the house Merlot a taste, she isn’t a big wine gal herself, neither am I, but you get what you can.

She made an inside joke about a time when we were kids when I tried all 32 at the Baskin Robin’s.

All three of us laughed.

The man a table across was drowning in booze and conversation.

I got another gin, she got a coke.

Bread, water, salami slices. The works.

Good stuff, all of it.

House-made minestrone, scorching-hot spinach cantelleni, I got a peppered fillet, and we both shared some spaghetti.

I stuck with water during dinner, I still gotta drive home.

And after it was all finished, the waiter brought up the tiramisu, and we shared a square.

Too much cocoa for me, but I know people that like it that way.

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FROM THE FLAGSTONES PHILIP O’NEIL

This concrete town with no guts, no grit where we can only smirk as galoshered feet slip ‘n’ slide past our café where exhalations of icy conversations mix with the fog and cigarette smoke.

It’s a damp Danube riverbank town —a border with riptides and sneak currents, no watchtowers or walls, a border for the committed or reckless – the next country a lucky swim away you draw down panelaks, teetering like headstones that lost their plots a regime ago, you pen in the flagstones and millstones of flower tubs filled with butts and dead dogs tarted up with cans and stencils subjects of your studies in pencil.

Nature’s only concession so far as I can see is this wedge like a warm slice of pizza four fall trees jutting out of the bar where dogs curl up in corners mist fishermen selling trout.

I can’t see the shades you use for the toxic trees’

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miserly confetti on a passing procession of Saturday wedders dragging their monochrome train drawn into this twilight fugue whisked by an accordion player, guests laughing back at us while you’re laughing back at them cocooned in wine and tuica.

You smile instinctively lost in your sketch smudging fag ash for sky dreamy with relaxed fatigue of travel and infatuation.

Your pad’s our field dressing that could work for a while before the rot sets back in.

Next time I fear amputation will be the only option— and that’s why I carry a jigsaw to cover all bases—maybe cut out this wedge for my scraps book.

I watch you listening out for the song from the flagstones—about weeds delicate green undamaged muscling through the cracks in the concrete drawn up to the wedge where we also look effortless and kinda green.

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RACHEL MCPHERSON

DIDN’T MEAN TO STARTLE YOU

APOGEE

TAYLOR GRAHAM

The moon saw the fox kit – almost grown – skitter across pavement while its mother-vixen hunted up the hill.

This was a new moon, younger than the kit, but wiser, having gone through so many lives of changes; a moon as small to human eyes as a fox-kit. It watched convergence of kit with blinding light, more blinding than the moon would ever be, except in lovers’ eyes; watched invisible wheels turn the kit to statue on the two-lane centerline.

As the moon passed west it heard the mother-vixen wail – a sound like there is no other. But the moon knew she would have other kits, as moon becomes new to replace the one gone dark.

This kit she’s lost glows fox-silhouette for oncoming drivers to marvel at the keen receptor-ears, the subtle nose flared even after their headlights have passed; still limned by moon.

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STAIRS, SPIDERS, AND SECRETS TRINA L. DROTAR

A couple of years ago my cousin told me that Grandma’s house had been divided into condos. I suppose there was plenty of space for someone to transform 412 Silver Avenue into 412A, 412B, and even 412C. If they didn’t tear down the garage that was large enough to house a small plane, then I suppose that could be 412D and possibly 412E. Residents of 412A would climb only fifteen concrete steps to their front door, whereas those going to unit B in the main house would add an additional ten wooden steps and two landings before reaching the entrance.

Those concrete steps could certainly replace any trip to the gym, and residents of both units would have the best looking butts on the street after climbing up and down those steps daily. Grandma never joined a gym, and she never worked out with Jack LaLanne. Although I can’t speak for her butt, her heart worked hard.

I climbed those steps every day with her. Mondays meant a trip to the grocery store. Down three steep blocks. And back up with a full cart that had to be pushed and pulled. Tuesdays meant a trip to the hairdresser followed by a stop at the drugstore. The drugstore’s gone now, and a chain store is across the street. On Wednesdays, we went to the Doggie Diner, but I’m not sure why. It could have had something to do with that giant dachshund head. Grandma didn’t own dachshunds until the late 1970s, when she received Honey, the female offspring of my mom’s dog, Heidi. Honey used to pee on my dad when he’d come to Grandma’s house, and both those dogs barked all the time. I don’t recall if Grandma liked hot dogs, but I hated them, and in the nineteen sixties there wasn’t the option of chicken at a place like that. I loved the hot dog shape of the diner, though. Maybe we had some milk or soda. On Thursdays, we visited Mrs. Clook and Mae. They lived around the corner on Lisbon, and Mrs. Clook, who must have been a hundred years old then, always let me play her piano even though I didn’t know the first thing about it. On Fridays, we rode the 14 Mission bus and the cable car (before it became simply a tourist attraction). I usually went to South San Francisco on Saturdays and Sundays to be with my mom and dad.

Each day, we climbed up and down those steps, and at least once a week brought groceries home and into the front basement. Grandma unlocked the three, or maybe four, locks, and we entered what is probably now 412A Silver Avenue. Sunlight filtered in through two permanently dirty windows, located behind the hydrangeas that frightened my cousin, Eric, and somehow thrived in a triangular patch of dirt surrounded by concrete. Entering this

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part of the basement from the front was less frightening because there was a light switch on the wall just to the right of the door, next to one window. The only other light switch was in the middle of the room, and it was actually a string dangling from the ceiling. To reach it, I had to jump, grab, and pull.

The front basement held treasures that delighted me when Grandma napped every afternoon. Two massive sheet-covered, wooden dining sets were stored in the front left corner where black widows lived. Or where I imagined them living, waiting to come out and attack me. That must have been a holdover from the horror flicks my father used to take me to see because Grandma certainly would not have watched anything like killer spiders attacking. I wondered how I’d know if the spider was a black widow when the red hourglass was on its abdomen. Was I expected to pick it up and turn it over to look for the mark? I don’t recall ever learning about black widows in school, although my second grade teacher required us to choose a pamphlet on a particular drug, read it, and present to the class. My drug pamphlet was LSD. I learned all I needed to about LSD and never went near that drug. If only the pamphlet had been about black widow spiders.

I often climbed under the tables and played hide and seek. Actually, I guess it was more like hide and hide because there was no one to seek me out; no one for me to hide from. I never saw mouse droppings, but I’m certain they lived in that dark basement, lit by a single bare bulb. I suppose the new residents could have placed bookcases filled with Poe and Hawthorne and even a copy of Turn of the Screw. Grandma never kept her books, with some bare-chested, long-haired guy and some woman with a low-cut bodice on the cover, in the basement. Those were secured in one of two drawers by her recliner in the television room. She’d always have my mother buy her a new book, a decent book, before her annual eye exams.

It’s entirely possible that the new condo owners would have placed their sofa and loveseat and big screen television against the right wall where Grandma kept three wooden trunks that dated back at least fifty years from the time I lived there in 1965. Perhaps they have finished the basement and covered the wooden skeleton with drywall, or maybe they thought it would be cool to paint or apply wallpaper. Although I never opened the trunks, I imagined the treasures they contained. Okay, so I didn’t have to imagine because Grandma used to come downstairs and remove items. Each trunk was dark brown, a cross between milk and dark chocolate, and each contained tarnished metal strapping across the tops and along the front, back, and sides. Two had barrel-shaped tops. The third was rectangular.

Large enough to store at least a full-sized man. Inside the trunks were no fine laces from Ireland. Or Shetland wools. There were no photographs of Grandma as a child, or as a young woman, or as a middle-aged woman, and there were no photographs of Grandpa or any of their family inside. No

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wedding gowns or treasured books or artwork from her three children were stored in the trunks. No souvenirs from trips abroad.

She pulled out plastic tablecloths.

It seems that Grandma, one day, had decided she just didn’t need any frivolous items. Out went the tintypes of her parents, wedding photos of her and Grandpa, and all photos of her. Well, almost all. One photo of her at age two, taken in St. Louis in 1900, remains. There are no other photos until she is at least sixty years old. Grandma gave the trunks to her friend, Mrs. Rossi.

The owners of 412A would be more fortunate than those of 412B, upstairs, not only because they had fewer steps to climb and because the basement remained a balmy fifty-eight degrees year round, but because the back basement, which I do not believe contained any black widows, was Grandma’s laundry room. The upstairs folks would have had to install a washer and dryer or make arrangements with the downstairs residents to use the laundry facilities. Worse yet, they would have had to take their items to the coin laundry. By bus. After first walking at least two long blocks to Mission Street, crossing over, walking down another half a block. We never had to do that, though, because our washing machine, nothing fancy but always dusted and clean, stood against the wall that faced Silver Avenue, and the dryer stood against the wall facing the backyard. Not everything could be machine dried. Many items, particularly women’s delicates, were placed on the drying rack that kept watch in the room’s center. Fortunately, I was too young to own any women’s delicates (being only five), so I didn’t have to worry about creatures crawling inside of them like the only time I went to Girl Scout camp, and one of the campers discovered a scorpion in her bathing suit bottom. It was 1968. I never saw the creature, and I suppose it could have been the wild imagination of a mind on LSD. My clothes still go in a hot air dryer.

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LEVEL: A DEFINITION TAYLOR GRAHAM

1. a device for establishing the horizontal by means of a bubble in liquid in a glass tube, as I held the level while you nailed studs in place, raising our hand-built home on a hillside that was anything but level, bubbles of cloud passing over in a not-quite liquid sky. 2. measurement of the difference of altitude of two points, as I steadied framing while you drove the nails, cinching a segment of west-wall eye-level with a Raven perched on the tip of a Ponderosa rooted far below our feet, its roots reaching down to bedrock solid as tectonic plates allow.

3. a position in a scale of value, our highlevel expectations of a view of sunset over many years to come. 4. a line that cuts perpendicularly all plumb lines, a surface of still water where at night bats dip over the pond to zap mosquitoes, as Time’s flat-line intersects each of our risers, our plans.

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SUNSET OVER MAROON BELLS DYLAN YOUNGERS

Mirrors below reflect Terra clawing her way into blue skies diluted by red while trees dig their way into her hands.

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FREEDOM

CLEBER PACHECO

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WAITING FOR BIPLANES (FOR RAYMOND CARVER)

JEFFREY C. ALFIER

From my front steps I will watch them thread marine layer fog as they climb beyond the peninsula, the drone of radial engines an aged parent slumbering in a room behind me.

Stacked wings seine wind, like childhood kites that scheme with laughter to tarry the pace of a Sunday afternoon.

In higher clouds, sundogs float – those dim mock suns of arbored light.

Blue portholes in broken decks of milky clouds breach the higher altitudes.

When you wait for biplanes, you lean into a growing sound.

You listen for any whisper.

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SAWDUST MEMORIES KEVIN RIDGEWAY

Uncle Mike opened the paint spackled garage door as the overhead lights all flickered on simultaneously; massive saw machines stood caked in white dust in every corner of the shop, and unfinished wood furniture scattered across transparent tarps waited for him to grind them from their orphanages into the homes of families in the rich neighborhoods that dotted the hills above the main drag of our southern California bedroom community, the L.A. skyscrapers in the distance as the sun bathed the parking lot in an orange ethereal light Mike gave me my first job that day, a pint sized sidekick of four years on this earth I swept the sawdust that rained from murdered wood until we could see the concrete floor at long last he pawed two dollars out of his pocket and paid me my first wage, and I felt cheated for the first time having hoped for a Lincoln five I swept those floors every weekend, yellow tornadoes swirling around me until I could afford to take my grandmother and her paper skin to the picture show, where we flew far away from this dreary suburban dungeon of child labor, scant wages and a legion of strangers’ faces as they wrote in their checkbooks and my uncle loaded their trucks with brand new dressers and coffee tables my cherubic face hidden in anonymity behind a disposable surgical mask, envisioning myself on celluloid basking in the lush front lawns of castles made of gold and not wood I swept those floors and I would pretend the broom was Ginger Rogers and I was a deranged Fred Astaire I danced furiously as the saw screamed daggers into my ears, my fingers bleeding from the splinters that danced all around me my Uncle Mike, the woodworking tycoon smiled at me from behind massive plastic goggles, his eyes saucers as he carved out people’s cookie cutter dreams.

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THE GREATER WORKS OF THE LESSER KNOWN JARED DURAN

I have eaten my share of apples and so can safely say Granny Smith is where it’s at.

The sweet, the sour commingle, copulate on the tongue— make cute little baby sensations.

Bite, nay, snap! Crunch and chew.

Mull this over. Ponder the inevitability of life, because it happens, and death is so over-pondered.

As we mostly hum top forty memories, it is the greater works of the lesser known that follow us in perpetuity, nag us subconsciously, suggest that we do something more than fall, shoulders slumped, into the spaces of the same four bars— the tired sweetness of the Red Delicious, the mottled uncertainty of the Gala.

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VALLEJO

THOMAS MICHAEL GILLASPY

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THE GOURD

ROBERT GIBBONS

I take out my gloves and prepare to take the inside out, to eviscerate not the way my ancestors would clean not the way they would clean the filth and the innards but bury them behind secrets and lies, taking out my pocket knife, to make an incision, a decision how deep a clean cut, a clean break, the fright of my masculine hands taking control of a feminine object of art her eyes become a botched science fair project is deformed and misshapen, contorted a mistake, did not mean to cut too deep while she is asleep, but it is a generational curse we did not call it abuse, put her in her place; the color of a peachvermillion, her cotillion will not be white handling her the way I do my testicles in private, a man has a right to handle his piece to hold and make sure it’s still there in the bone-cold morning.

I want the inside, to consume all of it, rather than a protector I keep my gloves on so there is no evidence creating crow’s feet and facial degeneration, cutting

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and pasting, crafting with grimaces and winces, making my mark strike a match to create the fire inside her leaving only smoke reaching between the eyes and the knife cuts back, but she smells of me because I own her purchasing her from the whore stroll on the avenue, the rows of other promiscuity, it was just that time of night, and the moon is not full because I am empty, so after the shell is battered enough will throw her away and buy another.

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GARY THOMPSON

SUISUN VALLEY REVIEW FEATURED WRITER

Gary Thompson’s latest book of poems, One Thing After Another, published by Turning Point, is a collection of six widely different lyrical sequences. It joins four previous collections: To the Archaeol-

ogist Who Finds Us, On John Muir’s Trail, As for Living, and Hold Fast. For more than twenty-five years, he taught in the Creative Writing Program at CSU, Chico, all the while playing second-base for The Pests, Chico’s storied softball team. In 2010, he edited Quinton Duval’s posthumous collection of poems, Like Hay, for Bear Star Press. He and his wife, Linda, have lived in the Northwest for fifteen years; six years ago they moved to San Juan Island, bringing their old trawler, Keats, home to the waters they love.

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KINGDOM, PHYLUM GARY THOMPSON

My black dog decides to say hello to the black crow at work on the wrack line at Jackson’s Beach.

He veers toward shore with the ho-hum nonchalance we see when cats come through his yard. It’s an act, and the crow knows that, yet holds its gaze and ground. My dog stops within three feet where they pose, black beak to wet, black nose— two unlikely heads of state, eye to eye, with Lord knows what

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ON SNOW ROAD GARY THOMPSON

The two pear trees in the field on Snow Road in Dearborn, Michigan were vestiges of a family farm the family sold after the war when Ford’s River Rouge assembly line called them all to work.

Fences and barns knocked down, the pasture scraped off for basements of modern three-bedroom tract houses, only these two pear trees escaped the builder’s plan for a 1950s-faced America that did not include old orchards.

The unpruned trees grew gnarled, more out of place each year, but we kids were more our gang than Ward Cleaver’s sons, and we loved those trees all seasons, feasting like sticky gods on gold each autumn.

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PLEIN AIR

GARY THOMPSON

Two deer lie in spring grass near a cluster of wild daffodils on False Bay Farm. Their alert ears like dark pyramids against a blazing desert sun of yellow flowers, a sun that warms the entire plein air painter’s scene, idyllic, even on this damp March morning walk along the lane to the bay, where later we will leave our boot prints in the mud of a minus tide, while back here two deer will rise up, rested— while the impressions of two deer will remain for hours matted in the drying grass.

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TWO MAY DAY POEMS GARY THOMPSON

I. The Island Broke Out in poppies that May, determined dots that spotted the island from Cattle Point to Roche Harbor, a rash of raw gold that started itching at our wintry hearts and made us daffy until we all broke down and scratched them into bloom.

II. California Poppies growing just outside my door— solar gold, John Muir called them. Orange, fragile-blossomed when I leave in the morning, they are like the poor poet’s gold of owning nothing—coins so pure you could not bear to spend them.

And in the evening when I return, they are closed, rolled-up little scrolls with fortunes to unfold.

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THEIR GOLDEN GARY THOMPSON

The old retriever stands up to its chest in the surf, rigid, facing the old master who sits on a driftwood log, his face blotchy with grief, while the white-haired mistress shoots pictures with a telephoto lens: their old golden and a stick unfetched in the water beyond.

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WORN DOWN FROM READING GARY THOMPSON

yet another midlife me-me memoir in manuscript, I get up from the desk and out to a world that always means something. Today it means to do us in, or give us hell trying, NOAA warns.

A monster storm is at the coast and aimed our way. Power’s already out in Cowichan, and when it crosses Haro Strait this storm won’t be clearing Customs before it smacks us too.

Down at F-dock we double-up our lines, add fenders, and stow everything stowable below.

Even old salts and tribal fishermen are down here, which means this is a true skookum storm, not some made-for-TV news event.

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At home we push patio furniture into the lee of the house, then sit a moment, catching the distant sky darken into squall.

Suddenly, I’m flooded with memories of a grade school outing that exploded into torrents and lightning that struck tall trees around us and knocked me down hard to the ground.

That was a year of memorized poems, where Miss Knapp bade me stand and recite “No Man Is an Island,” the cleaned-up edition, and with proper elocution.

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WIND SSE

GARY THOMPSON

Wind SSE @ say 16 knots, maybe more, windsock straight out, erect, an orange safety cone hung sideways in the air. Up here on the hill, the young willow I stand near is dancing in the gusts, spring buds bulging on each limb.

Two planes have landed, almost straight into the wind, tacked in, and none have departed in the hour I’ve waited here. Griffin Bay’s awash in white spray, and the crash of surf mingles with the thrashing of fir boughs on the hill, and who’s to tell which is which, or is it that simple? No planes taking off, no boats on the bay, no crab fishermen, no pots even. Against these changing black clouds crashing north, cars on the main island road into town seem to idle along, as if our lives on the ground, at this moment, come to nothing at all.

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THE FIRST LESSON OF BOATS FOR

MIKE AND FRIDAY HARBOR MARINE

GARY THOMPSON

Any boat will break down. Any boat will break apart on rocks.

Any boat will break down off rocky shores.

Any boat will break away from sure moorings.

Any boat will break sheer with any other boat and foul anchors.

Any boat will break a lubber’s bank.

A broken boat will break an old salt’s crust.

Any damned boat will break.

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PROVISIONED BOATS GARY THOMPSON

Neap tides are best for loading boats, it takes no genius deckhand on Keats to figure out.

My father learned neap tides in school in Michigan, far from any true tidal action,

but those two words became a code for something secret he repeated in his diaries.

At neapest neap a gravel barge arrives each year at Jackson’s Beach to off-load stones on island trucks.

All day the level ramp to shore lies level—no luck, no genius needed.

Father, ten years gone, a neap tide man in life—steady, a provisioned boat set out to sea.

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FEATURED WRITER INTERVIEW WITH GARY THOMPSON SVR: When did you realize writing poems was your passion and how has it evolved over the years?

GT: I fell in love with poems so early that I can’t remember a time when I didn’t love to hear and say them. For instance, I remember many weekends at my Aunt Jessie’s ramshackle Victorian house in Grayling, Michigan when the kids who were visiting would be expected to put on an evening show in the parlor for the grownups. Often we made up short skits, but sometimes we just recited famous poems. One that I recall vividly was Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” which my aunt apparently loved, and on more than one occasion we belted out “Cannon to the right of them, Cannon to the left of them…” with all the gusto and drama that little kids could muster.

Of course that memory is about my passion for poetry, not necessarily the writing of poetry, and at the time, I had no clue that I might one day write a single poem, let alone spend my life trying to write them.

At the time, I thought all poets were dead, and I guess I believed that until I was 13 or so when I watched, on black and white TV, Robert Frost struggle to recite his poem at John Kennedy’s inaugural.

But I deeply believe that you cannot be passionate about writing or doing anything unless you are passionate about the traditions of the genre you are working in. So I pretty much “loved” every poem I

came across, in school or out, however indiscriminately, and that was a good way to get started, absorbing whatever came my way.

I started writing poems regularly in high school in study hall (if you were on a sports team---track and football, then cross-country---you didn’t take PE during the season; you were sent to study in the cafeteria to keep your grades up). I wrote poems, keeping them hidden from those around me of course! I wrote and wrote each day and could not believe my happiness.

For 50 minutes each day, I was making what seemed like “real” poems, with iambic pentameter and rhyme and every traditional device and variation I could dream up. And now, all these years later, and after all the years of teaching poetry, I can’t think of a better education for a poet than what I fell into back at El Camino High in Sacramento. My teachers recognized my love of poems and helped enormously, but it was always that passion for hearing poems that drove me on.

SVR: As a longtime teacher of creative writing, what advice could you give to authors who are just beginning to find their voice?

GT: : Read, read, read. Aloud, aloud, aloud. I taught well over 100 classes of Beginning Creative Writing during my teaching days, and for every one of those students, the key to writing something better than they ever could have imagined on that first

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day of class was reading and hearing poems and stories each and every day. There simply is no substitute for immersing yourself in the field, and I can’t fathom why anyone would think differently.

SVR: Who or what is your biggest influence(s) and how has it affected you?

GT: You know, I never do a very good job when talking about influences on my work, let alone the “biggest” one. If we’re talking about poets whose range of work I admired young and continue to admire, I can start a list: Emily Dickinson, John Keats, James Wright, Elizabeth Bishop, Cesar Vallejo (in translation), Theodore Roethke, and on and on. If we’re talking about influential poems, I’ll name five: Lowell’s “For the Union Dead,” Dickinson’s “After Great Pain, A Formal Feeling Comes,” Bishop’s “One Art,” Roethke’s “Journey to the Interior,” and Wright’s “Blue Teals’ Mother,” which is pretty much an unknown classic. If we’re talking about influential teachers, it just so happens that my latest book is dedicated to them: “For Ray Carver, Madeline DeFrees, Charles (Greg) Gregory, Dick Hugo, Bill Kittredge, and Dennis Schmitz---lifelong friends, lifelong teachers.” So I don’t really know how to answer this question directly, except to say that the American West is a big part of who I am, and it’s important to me to know something about the history of this place.

SVR: Do you have any audiencespecific goals in mind when you compose a poem?

GT: Not while I’m actually writing and revising the poem. I’m just

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trying to make it come clear in my own head. But when and if it comes time to send the poem out into the world, I start to think about how a reader might hear, see, and understand the words I’ve written.

At that point, I do listen attentively to feedback from friends and editors and eventually try to confront and reconcile differences in how we may sense the poem. In general, I see my audience as people who like to read and listen to language and who will take the time to quiet themselves to do that.

I don’t believe I’m writing for a specially trained audience that has studied poetry or literature, the literati insiders. For example, my all -time favorite publication is the poems that were reprinted in Kim Weir’s Northern California Handbook, a travel guide from Moon Publications. I like to imagine a family visiting, say, Yosemite for the first time and while walking through the park and reading about what they’re encountering, they read my little poem too. It’s all part of the fuller experience and poetry contributes its bit.

SVR: Natural imagery and the musical line are clear priorities for you across the breadth of your work. Can you discuss these or other priorities and how they contribute to your creative process?

GT: For me, the lines must sing, first and foremost, and there are so many ways to achieve that, especially in free verse. Most of my poems are relatively quiet---the rhythms don’t thump across the page, the rhymes are mostly muted and subtle---but that’s the kind of music I enjoy and that’s what I hear in my head.

As for the imagery, the simplest explanation is that the natural world is pretty much where I live, day in and out, and so it’s only “natural” for my imagination to play with those elements in my work.

But there’s also a larger, perhaps more profound, explanation. All art should bring us to the truth of our lives, and one of the most basic human truths is that our species belongs to the natural world. It is true that our modern way of living tends to deny that basic connection, and as a result, many may live sadly disconnected lives.

So for me, any reminder that we live in the natural world helps. Also, I think we who live in the West sense deep-down that the wilder places we have left on this earth just might be the last places for hope for our humanity. Certainly John Muir believed that down to his bones.

SVR: In conversation with the students at Solano College you mentioned that you feel burdened by your unique sensibility as an archivist. Could you elaborate on what this identity means to you and your writing?

GT: What a surprising question! A lifelong friend, Tom Crawford who is a wonderful poet, first pointed out my archival tendencies in a beautiful poem about long friendships. The poem is called “Harvest,” from his book Wu Wei, and it begins: “Fifty miles inside Washington, alongside/ some nowfamous bay with a new name,/ we pull to a stop, me behind my old friend/ where he, archival in these matters,/ tells me about the Bruce brothers, who in 1853/ made a killing by harvesting the oysters/

here and shipping them to San Francisco.” That sentence pretty well sums up how I see and make sense of the world around me, and archival seems like a good word for it. Archivists preserve the records and stories of the past, and I mostly feel comfortable in that role as I write my poems, so I was probably being a tad facetious when I said I felt burdened by it. I suppose it’s more of a burden for my friends and family, especially when my kids were young and could care less about anything connected to the past!

SVR: How do you feel poetry as a medium has changed over the span of your writing career? Are there new techniques with which you like to experiment in your poetry?

GT: The biggest change in American poetry during my lifetime doesn’t have anything to do with the various schools of poetry, the techniques or styles, or even the quality of the poems being written.

The biggest difference is simply in the sheer number of people writing, publishing, or presenting their poems in one form or another to an audience. When I started writing poems somewhat seriously, I knew of no one in my high school who also wrote poems, nor any teacher who might have been interested in reading my poems. There was no “Poetry In The Schools” program or any other way that writing poetry was encouraged. Yes, Robert Frost was still alive and was certainly the most famous poet in the country.

And I was vaguely aware that there was something called the “Beat” generation of wild poets in nearby San Francisco. The poetry sections in most bookstores contained very few volumes, far fewer than today,

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and certainly nothing by any living/ breathing poet, except perhaps Frost.

So in 1962 in Sacramento, writing poetry seemed like a very unusual and very lonely thing to be doing.

SVR: What are the biggest challenges you faced getting a collection of works published? Does this process become easier the more you’re published?

GT: Although I started writing seriously pretty young, and by 21 I was publishing 6-10 poems a year in national journals, I didn’t publish my first collection, a chapbook called Hold Fast from Confluence Press, until I was 37. Part of the reason was that there were far fewer places to publish in those days, and the editors of the presses seemed remote and out of my sphere of comfort. Each year I put together a manuscript for the Yale Series of Younger Poets (at least until my age made me ineligible!) and dutifully sent it off, but my heart really wasn’t in it. And it was probably the same with the other presses I tried.

Looking back, I can see that most of those manuscripts weren’t very well organized and thought-out. They contained many good poems, I’m still happy to see, but the collections themselves weren’t ready for the world. So I can say now that it was for the best that my first book didn’t come out until later, but it was terribly frustrating at the time. Bill Kittredge, one of my fine teachers at Montana, once said about publishing: “You know, it’s not a foot race,” and that sums up my experience and my attitude. Fortunately, the process does become somewhat easier as you gather publishing experience, but still, the book publishing world is changing so fast. It’s hard to predict where we’ll be in 10 years.

SVR: Quinton Duval and Suisun Valley Review are inextricably linked as is his on-going influence at Solano College.

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You were his friend for many years, and you worked with him in the last days of his life to assemble his posthumous collection, Like Hay. How has Quinton and/or Quinton’s connection to Solano impacted your writing life?

GT: My connection with Solano College goes back to the first days of this campus when it opened in 1971.

Two friends from college days, Sarah Phelan and Tom Crawford, were among the first teachers hired here, and they invited me a time or two to visit with their classes to read poems and talk about poetry. Later, my good friend, Quinton, was hired here, at first part-time then later as a fulltime instructor, and my connection with the campus deepened. When Suisun Valley Review was started in 1981, I believe, Quinton asked me to send a few poems for consideration, and the editors published two. And wasn’t that “Celebration Issue” a strong and promising beginning for SVR, now in its 33rd year?

As for our friendship, I’ll say that it worked on many levels beside poetry.

We shared a love of places dominated by water: Q’s Sacramento Delta, and for me, the coasts of Northern California and Oregon, and later the Puget Sound and Salish Sea. We loved music, though he leaned toward old-time country western (I can still hear him twanging out Lefty Frizzell’s “I Buy the Wine” as we drove along the Oregon Coast one summer long ago). We both enjoyed cooking, though his tastes were far more refined and continental than my own.

I guess you could simply say that we enjoyed each other’s company, no matter what we were doing, and that only deepened when Quinton met Nancy Lee, and we evolved into a foursome, the two couples hitting it off as comfortably as Quinton and I had over the years.

THE QUINTON DUVAL AWARD IN CREATIVE WRITING PRESENTED BY

SUISUN VALLEY REVIEW 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 mention(s). 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 published. Submissions are also considered independently

EDYTHE HAENDEL SCHWARTZ GUEST JUDGE, 2014

Edythe Haendel Schwartz is retired from the faculty,

Department of Child Development, California State University, Sacramento. She is the author of two poetry collections, “A Palette of Leaves,” Mayapple Press, 2012, a finalist for the Eric Hoffer daVinci Eye Award, and “Exposure,” Finishing Line Press, 2007.

Recent awards include first prize in the 2012 Friends of Acadia competition for “A Natural Phenomenon.”

Edythe’s poems appear widely in journals and anthologies, including Calyx, Cave Wall, Earth’s Daughters, SVR,

Spillway, PMS, Natural Bridge, Pearl, Poet Lore, Potomac Review, Hawaii Pacific Review, Cider Press Review, Thema, and Water-Stone, among others. A visual artist as well as a poet, Edythe’s oils and

mixed media works have been shown at The Pence Auction, Davis Studio Tour, Second Friday Art-About, and from January through March 2014, in a solo artist show at Logos Books in Davis. She is the 2013 featured poet of SVR. SVR 47

RICHARD D. OWEN

2014 QUINTON DUVAL AWARD RECIPIENT Richard D. Owen is a longtime parttime Solano student and a native of that deliciously mundane suburban strip of Northern California. Reading and writing often in his early years, he somehow lost his way as he grew older and chose to instead embrace a variety of distractions, none of which could evoke the precise feeling that accompanies a well-placed word. In 2012 he decided to return to his roots by taking his first creative writing class at Solano Community College. There he met a bevy of talented and encouraging peers and encountered an inspiring and generally incredible teacher. Since then, he has worked as an editorial assistant at World Trade Press, won The Reporter's 2013 Spooky Story contest, and continuously worked toward a career in the world of words.

What drew me to “On Encountering G7,” was the poem’s surprising and delightful interplay between the G7 of music, a triad plus a note forming an interval of a seventh above the G chord’s root, and the G7 of global finance, a group of seven finance ministers from seven advanced economies who set economic policy. Here we find digits, “the five digits of man, ” digits that strike a keyboard or pluck a guitar to make music, digits in numbers we manipulate to find a sum, to assess our place in the global economy. From the opening line, “In shuffles B, world-weary,/forlorn,” to the poem’s assertion, “F and G…commit themselves to a “foul homogenization,” the reader encounters thought provoking allusions and whimsical conundrums.

Perhaps B stands for Britain, a member of the G7 but not a member of the EU. Perhaps F and G stand for France and Germany, two G7 nations devoted to the euro, its “foul homogenization,” undermining weaker EU economies like Greece. Yet F and G also refer to tones that create dissonance when played simultaneously. With playful images that hold multiple layers of meaning, the poem’s surface belies its import and leavens its tone. The poet who tells us “B loses buoyancy, falls, drowns, / godless and forgotten” has given us much to think about in these beautifully crafted lines. —EDYTHE HAENDEL SCHWARTZ

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ON ENCOUNTERING G7 RICHARD D. OWEN

WINNER, 2014 QUINTON DUVAL AWARD

In shuffles B, world-weary, forlorn; its heavy burden pulling you toward a left path.

Smallest digit contorts, straightjacket loosens, a reaching; white wash finish fades away from the keys that rest, important and complacent: five keys for the five digits of man. C lies disgraced; F and G will have none of it. They commit themselves to a foul homogenization; B loses buoyancy, falls, drowns, godless and forgotten, buried alive under the mute black skies.

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LUNINGNING SOLEIL C. DE JESUS

2014 QUINTON DUVAL HONORABLE MENTION

For Luningning de Jesus, books were her good friends while growing up, transporting her to other worlds she could only visit in her imagination. They also birthed in her a love of words and for fitting them together to share her heart with others. In high school, she wrote for the school paper and dabbled in youthful poetry. The intervening years, spent raising a family and exploring various career paths, meant a dry spell for her creative writing. Taking Creative Writing

“Buff in Green Pants” explores the visual and emotional impact of Joan Savo’s painting, with a measured pace built from short lines that echo the movement of an artist’s brush. In diction and syntax sonorous with assonance and rhyme, the poet contemplates Savo’s relationship to her work, as well as to the daughter who is the subject of the painting. Here, “broad-brushed strokes” on the daughter’s clothes, “pile on light,” yet the subject leans away, the fair girl “clothed in shadows” as if the subject’s thoughts / can bear no more / illumination. The line break after “more” suggests darkness in the painter/mother–subject/daughter relationship. Heightening the reader’s sense of the ominous is the poet’s depiction of Savo’s figure–“Arms crossed / legs closed /as if to hug / her darkness tight.” “Buff in Green Pants,” built on close observation, awakens the eye, the ear, and the mind..

—EDYTHE HAENDEL SCHWARTZ

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BUFF IN GREEN PANTS (OIL ON CANVAS BY JOAN SALVO, 1965)

LUNINGNING SOLEIL C. DE JESUS

HONORABLE MENTION, 2014 QUINTON DUVAL AWARD

Joan – “gift from God” in company so proud.

Descended from the wise, are you yourself a sage?

Was it Aquarian Age that washed you down from North Beach to Monterey?

Did winds blow chill from the Bay as you set brush to canvas capturing your daughter’s form one foggy summer morn?

Your broad-brushed strokes pile on the light yet she leans away as if her thoughts can bear no more illumination.

The scene is bright your daughter fair but clothed in shadows.

Your palette strong to bring her out.

Did you feel her shrinking as your pigments on her melt away from the white?

Arms crossed legs closed as if to hug her darkness tight and keep it in hold it safe from yellowish-beige brightness that would rub darker shades away exposing green.

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DRIFTERS

GREGORY JEFFERS

Weren’t just his tattered clothing and bedroll. She also pegged him as a drifter by the way he walked. Dust billowed at the remnants of his boot heels. Stones skipped off the toes, clicking on the bottom tread of the crooked porch steps when he stopped.

She held the Springfield by her side the way Andrew had shown her. Nice and easy. Barrel down. Fingers on the stock, just south of the trigger guard. Thumb wed to the hammer.

“Stage stop here Ma’am?” He rotated the Stetson one full time in his hands.

Kentucky, she thought. “So the sign says, but the next stage ain’t for two days.” She knew her voice came across as gravelly. Not much call for talk since Andrew’d left.

“East,” she said, before he could ask. Not a bad looking boy.

She didn’t figure him as a body who’d enough money for stage fare but it weren’t her business. A robber? Not with such baby-face and gentle manner. No more than nineteen. She set the gun against the inside of the doorjamb and stepped onto the first porch board. It squeaked loud, as if she’d trounced a mouse.

“Back from the war?”

“Yes’m. Seventeenth Kentucky.” He sniffed. “Ma’am, you reckon I could work for some food? I’m a hard worker.” He looked at the ground and then at her again.

“You at the Battle of Shiloh?”

“Yes’m. And Bull Run. And Antietam.” He shifted from one foot to the other and back again.

She turned and started back through the door but stopped and turned to face him again. “Corral needs fixin’. Those horses get loose, Overland Dispatch’ll make me pay for ‘em. Tools are in the shed.”

He looked at her for a second or two with new life in his eyes. A look she remembered from boys at the dances six, maybe eight years back. Or the look Andrew had given her most every morning ‘til he’d been called up to Shiloh with his brothers.

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The boy made for the shed, now picking each boot cleanly off the dirt before setting it down again.

At the doorway she peered back into the cabin, seeing her reflection in the tin mirror for the first time in how many months?

Wisps drifted at the braid of her disheveled hair. Dirty apron, ragged blouse cuffs, yellow collar. Thinner since Andrew’d gone missing. She rubbed one freckled cheek with her fingertips, but only made it dirtier.

That she cared about it troubled her more than the way she looked.

It’s not the boy. It’s about my self-respect.

She removed the apron and dropped it into the basket next to the bed. Out back, she rolled the blouse collar down and washed, the smell of lye filling the air around her face. She scrubbed hard at her nose and the back of her neck.

Leaning the steel bowl against the pump handle, she patted her face with the old towel, then let the hot, dry air do the rest.

With a plank in each hand, the boy appeared alongside the barn.

“Eat first,” she said. “By the looks of you, I’m more apt to get my money’s worth if you fill your belly before you start.”

He put the boards down and followed her to the porch.

“Sit there.” She nodded to one of two chairs on the porch and stepped into the cabin. She came back with cold beans and a large hunk of hard bread slathered in lard.

He ate in silence, occasionally looking down the road to the west.

She sat in the other chair but kept her gaze straight ahead.

Andrew had ridden off with his three brothers near two years ago .

She could see him now, spurring his big chestnut, cranking its neck, nodding his head to her as he rode off. But for that, the barn door would be mended, the cow would be in season again, and she wouldn’t have lost three hens to the bobcats. She couldn’t do it all.

Thank the lord she hadn’t caught a baby from him.

She sensed the boy looking at her.

“Thank you, ma’am.”

“More?”

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“No, ma’am. Can’t work any better on a stomach that’s too full than one that’s empty.” He stood, setting his bowl on the small barrel.

A tall boy. He moved his auburn hair off his forehead.

Then she knew. He had a wife, or a least a sweetheart, the way he looked at her now as if waiting for permission to leave the porch. Or would it be a mother he would look at this way? No matter and not my business.

She stood and walked back into the cabin.

At dusk she built a fire in the stove and came out again. He had mended the fence and was finishing up the barn door.

“You’ve done enough. I reckon I owe you dinner now. There’s half a dozen hens’ eggs and some potatoes.”

He drove the last nail, and placed both hands behind his hips, stretching his back. “Thank you kindly, ma’am, but I should be movin’ on.” He looked toward the sun, still an inch or two off the horizon.

“Have it your way, then.” She walked back to the cabin, her spine straighter than it had been for months. Perhaps a year. The scratching sound of his footfall faded.

She placed the greased skillet on the hot stove and pared a potato into it. Fetched two eggs from the basket. A breeze picked up and a rising branch of the big willow caught her eye through the west window.

She squinted. Leaned back and squinted again. Then she snatched two more eggs out of the basket and a potato from the bin and put them next to the stove.

She tucked an errant tress behind her ear and went back to the bin to fetch yet one more potato.

A boy. Probably still growing.

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FIRST BORN DYLAN DE WIT

My brothers play In the drainage ditches I dig.

I dig the trenches.

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SELF-PORTRAIT: 6TH GRADE, BEFORE JAIL GREG CORRELL

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A LITERARY CAUTION JESSICA DAWSON

Do not attempt to shave your legs while reading William Carlos Williams in the bath, under the influence of medicine stronger than your sickness.

You will find that poetry demands attention, leaving legs bare, bony knees and ankles white and ripe for a lesson in rank.

Your inner thighs' softness is no match for a well-worded metaphor, which in itself is a metaphor for something you are not prepared to grasp.

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THIS IS ONLY A TEST ERIN RENEE WAHL

I live my life for _____. a) coffee b) Jesus c) the occasional sighting of a large sperm whale When you start thinking about things in multiple choice format have you lived in academia for too long?

Please state your answer in a 1,000 word essay.

Compare and contrast the way you lived your life before your personal discovery of that peanut butter with the crunchy pieces inside of it.

The whole world looks and smells like a 7-day-old tuna sandwich shoved between couch and wall. Do you agree or disagree? Give several examples.

True or false: Every poet writes uncensored crap.

To what extent is the previous statement true?

Please choose the statement which best reflects your own personal interests...

1. The world is full of hollow bumblebees searching for an open jar of marmalade.

2. Hibiscus blooms run over on the highway by a semi carrying AC adaptors is the saddest thing you've ever seen.

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3. I want to die a horrible death involving glutinous rice because my wife has just left me, I've discovered my Jack Russell Terrier is an alcoholic, my cactus is shooting up heroin, and I have a rip in the ass of my favorite black vinyl skirt.

The answer is always -C- lemons for more bitterness and satire, and sometimes paragraphs about snow-covered pigeons.

On any given day we all hate daisies at least once and want to rip off their petals, not to determine our own true love, but just to see the smug bastards suffer.

Luckily for thistles, they don't have to take that kind of shit.

The best thing you can do for yourself at this point is to give up all hope of succeeding.

Join an Arctic-bound fishing boat wearing a yellow rain slicker, hoping to become the next Captain Gorton and share your love of fish sticks with the world.

See #3 for further good reasoning.

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CONVEX

ELIZABETH BECK

Staring at the ceramic bowl, I remember to reverse anger flood it from my toes through my body out my finger tips to mix with wooden spoon until it peaks into grief I carry accepting violence is not my nature instead, I rail against blisters life sears into my skin because I always forget to wear oven mitts in my haste

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ANTERIOR CINGULATE SULCUS

*THE AREA OF THE BRAIN HYPOTHESIZED TO BE THE SEAT OF VOLITION

Smells like Macintosh apples brushed with butter & cinnamon.

You are the seat of volition, says Crick.

You are the sheen of a fork in a toaster which is only a bad idea after a few forks have been stuck in toasters – that is how it works right? See & decide. Sometimes I stay up late watching game shows & reality

TV. Disturbed, in regard to gods transfusions are accomplished through the mouth, as no blood streams in supernatural flesh-caves, since gods do not bleed, unless there’s a point to be made – when Prometheus’ liver is removed he survives. The gods can be cruel as the eagle cannot taste the ironsweet organ, he obeys his daily chore – we forget the purgatory of the helpless bird. I share my thoughts as plates are passed & icecream finds cobbler in the dining room of my girlfriend’s parents’ summer cottage after eating string beans & eggs of bobwhite quail, as her father picks corn from his teeth with a fork. I say Francis flicked a quarter in the river Cam, stuck his dick into a toaster, killed by his colon on the California coast & everybody laughed, for a moment.

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FAR WEST TEXAS (FOR LISA AND LARRY D. THOMAS)

TOBI COGSWELL

A roan in a group of chestnuts— solitary, as still as the sun that falls on its back, shy as wandering mule deer. Hummingbirds rev wings, dip into sugar, buzz in delicate arcs.

Sun and birds mark the odd damp cut of river, surprise gash in the brown.

At first blush desolate, it teems with wildflowers and wildness created under turning skies.

Satellites and stars etch the blackness at night, the way cloud-shadows punctuate hills. Between them, pump-jacks and phone lines—circuit-board across the wide vast.

We stand, fragments against the infinite, suspended in failing light.

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INVICTUS

NATALIE FRANCEL-STONE

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THE EARTH COOLS WITHOUT ME KALI POLLARD

Frankly, when the moon cannot bring itself to rise above the hill curve and the stars whimper weekly through soggy dust clouds, I have to wonder who of us is running late.

I feel cheated by the rain song snuck in at work’s windowsill, When it’s just quiet cold at evening’s rest.

I am chilled by opportunities left unfulfilled, hollow echoes affirm the negative, quote the omission.

The day dream nightmare unravels phrases and images left intentionally unrefined, left exposed to the elements, left little to remember.

The wind eats the cave away, so slow, but sure, a death.

Pressure release, equilibrium reach, time best erases its own progress.

This cup of tea, this bathtub, this world, will only be just the right warmth for a while.

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LOST LOVE LOUNGE, NEW ORLEANS CYNTHIA LINVILLE

Most who cross the threshold are worn-out weary yet bone-deep hungry for pennies that turn to silver dollars in the moonlight.

The regulars are wise enough to let their last Ace stay played but are not averse to a little amusement.

The women can smell a snake-oil addict ten yards away and always keep a little in a perfume spritzer.

The men have their own brand of bottled lies in three flavors: smoky, spicy, or sweet.

The true veterans bring plenty of quarters for the juke box but have mostly turned to writing their autobiographies:

Overlooked Self-Deceptions

The Art of Losing

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THE POOL GAME ARTHUR R. SHIELDS

A large crane and flatbed truck rumbled up our tree-filled street in St. Paul and stopped at my house. The big front window on our third floor attic was already out. A giant metal arm reached down to the truck and lifted off a strap-held full-sized professional pool table.

It carefully inserted the wood and slate behemoth in through the gaping hole in our attic. My life began that day. I had a real pool table in my bedroom. I was seven.

Our hard working father did amazing things to “keep his boys home and not out in the streets getting into trouble.” That professional pool table next to my bed was one of them. Another was the blacktop basketball court in our back yard with high wire fences to keep bouncing balls out of our much-traveled back alley where most neighbors’ cars were garaged. The court stretched between our garage and a big tool shed 50 feet away—plenty of room for four-on -four. The backboard was suspended out so you could soar up at the 10-ft. high regulation basket without slamming into a wall. Many friends from many blocks away came to play—often.

Other ways my parents dealt with growing boys were private schools, places where education and discipline were professionally imparted by the Sisters of St. Joseph and the Christian Brothers. In the mid-century mid-west, Catholic parents signed waivers at the beginning of each school year eagerly surrendering their children to these saintly teachers of truth and virtue.

Breaking boards over misbehaving butts was a common religious practice. I did feel, however, that a huge “Brother,” suspending a young person by his ankles out a third-floor window to gain silence in his classroom, was a bit un-Christian. Nevertheless I learned to be silent in school except when called on, to play backyard basketball well and to shoot a great game of pool in my attic bedroom pool hall.

But my story took place in a small town in South Dakota, 200 miles away where my grandmother, grandfather and my grandmother’s brother, my great uncle Frank, lived. The little railroad town was spread along two busy train tracks. Grandpa was the SVR 66

Station Master. Uncle Frank ran the work crews that pumped their handcarts up and down for miles keeping the tracks in good repair.

Grandma ran the big house where they all lived. She also ran several women’s organizations in this town of about 2,600 people. Most of all, she cooked really good food.

My older brother and I, 14 and 12 respectively, were sent to live with our grandparents for a summer week because our mother was having another baby and was rewarded by one week of quiet. I was used to being shuffled to my grandfolks’ home in prior summers as our family grew. On one visit, Grandpa and I had dropped into the local bar on his way from work. As he sipped his foamy beer at the long bar and chortled with the aged bartender, I noticed men in the back playing at three full-sized pool tables. I always remembered those pool tables with envy. A guy like me who has his own table in his attic wants to show off his skills after all that practice.

So naturally, my brother and I wanted to teach those small town amateurs a few fine points of the game at that neat bar pool hall. We pleaded our case with Grandpa shortly after arriving—flaunting our mature ages of 14 and 12. Grandpa said “No” emphatically. Grandma said she didn’t go in bars—ever. After a few days of our annoying pleadings she asked Uncle Frank, her elderly brother, to “take the boys down and let them play pool at Herman’s.” Uncle Frank wanted no part of the deal but we whined him into submission too and he reluctantly agreed to take us to play a game or two.

The walk was about eight blocks and Uncle Frank, long retired from the railroad, wasn’t moving very fast. It wasn’t difficult to see how big his now hunched shoulders had been. His muscular arms and hands still showed the many years pumping a rig, moving iron tracks and swinging a big maul. As we slowly followed the lumbering oldtimer, my brother and I maturely planned our approach at the pool hall. We agreed that we should play each other at first rather than making a local guy look bad—right away. My big bro was a good pool player but by this time, six years after the crane launched my pool career, I could beat him handily and anyone else who dared come up the many steps to my third-floor bedroom pool hall.

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Uncle Frank opened the door for us and mumbled something to the white-haired bartender who okayed our presence. The lights in the back revealed all three pool tables were busy. We were disappointed at the prospect of a long wait.

But as we moved towards the back a strange thing happened.

Whispering and fingers pointing our way were followed by tables emptying and balls racking. Wow! My reputation had somehow preceded us.

Several players ran to the wall telephones to announce loudly, “King’s here. Yah, he’s brought two kids but I think he’s gonna play.

I’ll save you a chair.” The whisperers kept chattering, “King’s here.

Jeez, how long has it been?” The eager roomful spread out along the chairs and walls and quieted down to watch as our former Uncle Frank, now “King,” moved toward the center table.

Befuddled, we grabbed cues and watched as King opened a compartment in the wall revealing a pearl and ivory cue stick— obviously his private customized property. His huge hands drew it out gracefully and spun its two perfectly matching parts together snug with easy finger movements. King fondled the cue stick a bit, chalked its perfect tip and asked softly, “Well, young men, what’s your game?”

Startled by the people running into the bar from the street to watch, I stammered, “I like rotation!”

King smiled and said, “Me too. You two big city pros go first.”

My older brother made the opening break—happily not ripping the smooth green felt. The balls broke apart smartly but nothing went down. With hands trembling I pocketed a couple before missing an easy shot. I stepped back red-faced. “King” slowly pondered the table and then bent down for his first shot. His shoulders were no longer hunched and any lumbering had disappeared. The room was dead silent—all eyes on the King.

I don’t know how long it took or how many games King played.

Every shot looked so easy—one after another. The last ball left always found a pocket as his cue ball broke up the next rack of balls placed by his eager fans. I’m guessing he played at least 15 games, floating around the table, sometimes humming, not giving us a shot. If the SVR 68

chatter got too loud, a slight eyebrow raise from King silenced the room. When new racks were being set up he’d often shake hands with other white-hairs sitting near the tables. He didn’t drink.

As I stood in awe watching, a hand gently pulled me back towards the bar. The smiling bartender asked quietly if we’d like a Coke. “It might be a while boys. We don’t know how long he’ll play today. He hasn’t been in for a year or two. He still rolls ‘em in as if he practiced every day. King’s sure something to watch, ain’t he?”

He handed us Cokes and continued softly, “Ya know, I’m so old I’m one of the few guys here who saw King throw those two nohitters back in the thirties. His football scoring record is still unmatched at the high school—gone pro if that hip didn’t give out.”

Our embarrassment at our pool skills soon changed into enormous pride in our great uncle. King finally lowered his cue, smiled but dismissed the applause as he spun his pool stick apart and returned it into the wall. He reverently patted the glass cover closed.

A young man could be heard saying, “Well, that was sure worth the wait. I’ve seen his pictures over at the school but never saw the King play before. Wait ‘til I tell Fred I just watched King play pool.

Jeez, he’ll be so jealous.”

Uncle Frank walked us out into the late afternoon sun apologizing, “Gents, I’m sorry. Sometimes I get on a roll and can’t stop. Nothing like an audience to get the juices goin’. Sorry you didn’t get much play time. Maybe on your next visit.”

King didn’t lumber on the way home. Our smirking grandma asked us if we enjoyed our game with “King.” We said it was fine. Her bread pudding at dinner with Grandpa and King and no pool talk made life bearable again. My lesson in humility remained my private reality check—one I have remembered all my life.

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WARNING AT THE P.O. ROBERT W. KING

You may not mail Dangerous Goods, whether infectious or corrosive, radioactive, toxic, poisonous or flammable. Nor may you mail Articles of Unusual Value and Human Remains are in that category with coins, currency or unset precious stones.

So if you are planning to mail a body, that Article of Unusual Value,

you may not do that and particularly you may not put coins or currency in its pockets, precious stones in its eyes or platinum, gold or silver in its hands.

You will have to find another carrier for such dangerous, such precious things.

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SONNET ON THE MARSHES LAURA KING

There is a marsh where elves and goblins linger as they please, Where the warmth of the western wind walks through the golden reed, And where live fearsome fairy folk who laugh with impish ease, For whom we picked, from brambled bushes, blackberries to feed.

Could we be satisfied with stomachs full and fingers’ hue Made crimson with purpling juices? Or with our lips stained red With pleasure stolen from the sweetest of those fairy brews That intoxicate and trick unwary strangers from their beds?

Looking back o'er the marsh, I still see us, the star made dust, In a home where, while I ate that fruit, I began burning With a havocking yearning, with the frightful wanderlust That haunts us, the fairy-touched, and so forces our sojourning.

The urge to leave the marshy bog behind will never stop But ceaselessly drive our journeys, ‘till into death we drop.

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JARED BOSTON

US AND THEM

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INISHMORE

THOMAS GRIFFEN

It’s not tourist season and my visit is an inconvenience.

She’s run plum out of marmalade and state-issued island maps.

With a knobby finger she points to my room at the top of a steep stairwell.

Two sepia photos above the desk show a long-haired woman dancing on hardwood.

I hope you have some towels of your own,

she says with one brow raised, then her threelegged Jack Russell greets me like it knows me.

Without looking up she tells me it’s called Rosie and that it usually doesn’t like Yanks.

She asks for my name – then pauses before writing in her register. Come again, she says, then tells me there were Griffens on this green rock before the Great War. Most died in trenches. A few with missing limbs and lungs.

Her hazel eyes meet mine with a half-smile as the dog barks and barks.

She says, well then,

make yourself at home, because you are Rosie’s picking up on something familiar in your blood.

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LAMENT OF THE HOT-PIE DELIV'RYMAN RICHARD D. OWEN

My dearest Miss Bergman, how do you do?

It's the pizza guy here (my name is Stu), Calling on behalf of justice and peace, Sighs of contentment, and mouths full of grease.

Goodly Miss Bergman, are you sitting down?

For though I do speak, I speak through a frown Filling my face as I speed from your place, Because of one child, some bastard disgrace Who squirll'd away my tip, and with it my Desire to continue delivery.

Being young once, I fully comprehend The value of money to child of ten.

But each penny spent is first rightly earn'd, Else in brimstone fires we see ourselves burn'd.

And thus, our great God made grass long and green, And man made the great lawn-mowing machine, That those irksome youths might mow up some cash 窶年ot pocket my tip, then proceed to dash.

Miss Bergman, what level of hell in truth Do you s'pose they reserve for wicked youth?

To steal, dishonor one's parents, and lie, and worse, make mockery of pizza pie.

A bundle of sins in seconds enact, Surely then, a gracious God should exact In similar magnitude a hellish pain, That the boy might walk in the light again.

Bergman, would I be off far in my claim

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That you should know this foul tip-stealer's name?

That you named him once upon his birth, that he Could go named upon the earth, so let me Know the name that stole my dollars three and I can drop off this next cheesy viand!

O, David, you say? He's on t'other phone?

Well, David, now that my tip is your own, You being bold and taking dollars three, Be so bold now as to simply tell me Why you would come across as such an ass, And take those few dollars needed for gas?

Young David, is what you say truly true?

You took the money to see Hobbit 2: The Desolation of Smaug? Yes, I see.

Perhaps then the tip wasn't meant for me.

In honesty, it wasn't gas for car I was going to buy, but a Rockstar, Or maybe two tall cans of Steel Reserve, Sorry for calling and losing my nerve!

Daring wee David, perhaps you mistook Our meeting at door for scene in a book, Hearing Gandalf rat-tatting on the door, The way a thrush knocks the moment before The last light of the setting sun shines free, Revealing truth for those who seek to see.

The Tookish lad David hoped to impress A wand'ring wizard with burgling prowess.

Though I be no wizard (I'm merely Stu), It be in my powers to forgive you.

But be warned, your house shall ever be curs'd If you see movie ere reading book first.

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THE DISTANT SEA MATT MORRIS

Stars gone, God dead, the unknown vessel drifted, hopelessly lost. Pounding surf tossed her across deserted waters, turning windward toward disaster. Splintered hull bobbing, all at once plunging, refusing to come back up, she spewed drunk & dreaming men, sprawled in their cabins, into chaos & further oblivion. No panic, no flailing arms.

Head tilted toward the swirling surface light, the old sailor tried to call out: nothing save an involuntary gasp. Eyes empty as they closed.

Was he asleep?

He wanted to roll onto his back to wake up but descended paralyzed into black, as if the sun itself, unhooked from its golden chain, sank extinguished below. No up, no down, yet he kept going—motion is actual—his ribs cracked, his lungs collapsed in the depth’s frigid embrace, unaware of the other existence, the beast feeding in the darkness, devouring, like a squid, him. He lived inside the whale’s belly, Spartan quarters furnished via a catalog of shipwrecks: the tragedy of the Viscount providing an antique glassenclosed bookcase, among

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its hold Moby Dick (moderate wear due to rubbing, some tears), Three Men in a Boat (binding shows minimal use) & The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (dust jacket missing, slight damage to spine); the doomed Essex bequeathing a braided rug embossed with a 19th century schooner; the harpoon, displayed with irony on the abdominal wall, gobbled up easy as lime sea foam when the Lorelei went down, taking a hundred good men with her.

One day a pine box washed up with a crow as big as a man inside–a portent of death, the old salt thought, but as it turned out, the bird proved an entertaining conversationalist, well-versed in philosophy & politics, as well as a skilled chess tactician who’d play hour upon hour losing nary a piece, bishop & knight breaking, ever & again, the gray-haired seadog’s flank. In matching wing chairs, they sat long into the evening, asea in complex stratagems. Ticklish, the leviathan snorted when the crow plucked a long, elegant quill for the old gob, who, lighting a meerschaum recovered from the Lusitania, jotted down his wry observations.

For instance: Whale-ness equals wholeness. Or: it always smells of fish around here, but on the bright side, we never run out of oil.

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QUEEN OCTOPUS AND HER KING KATIE BROWNELL

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BREAKFAST

PAMELA RILEY

Breakfast was your favorite time— your mouth full of muse, cats lapping up the foam of crumbs and cream from saucers.

I got lost, hiding behind the linen— napkins and curtains stirring up the morning heat.

You never said much, just poked the eggs like savages and savored the din of toast crumpled beneath the jam, leaving quiet traces of nothing there as we sipped with determination and ignored the air in front of us.

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THE TRUE STORY OF EVE’S SEDUCTION CATHERINE FRAGA

On a summer patio after several chilled rounds of grapefruit juice and vodka glasses sweating in the valley heat conversation turns to DH Lawrence eases into figs and Women in Love how luscious and exquisite the fruit guarded in soft, purple casing.

Many insist it was an apple suspended innocently prompting Eve to reach and pull and commit the historical misfortune.

This red orb of crisp flesh is fodder for fairy tales but not well suited for Eve’s first fall into humanity.

Yet, the soft seductive fig skin velvet cloak of purple darkness splits at the seams thick with sweetness the sugary reward secret seeds of mystery.

Another cocktail, another prediction.

Surely a pomegranate is equally alluring rich scarlet pods, captured inside a thin smooth skin of hope.

Surely this triggered Eve’s lust and longing for eternal perfection.

It is not coincidence sharing this conversation, all of us women all of us familiar with the forbidden.

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EARS TO PANE KALI POLLARD

Assaulted by rain sounds at the window, I am reminded of the importance of listening, of patience.

I am conscience nagged and heart battered into stillness.

I pause everything to remember something else, something just outside that knows my name, and whispers it in taunting tones, low and mostly hidden in the shadows of the clouds.

In misted silence I transcribe that weeping world; SVR 81

TREN FANTASMA RITA OKUSAKO

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DEPRAVED

CIARA SHUTTLEWORTH

When he can’t sleep he beats his head against his pillows, wakes with an ache like he’s pounded against a cement wall and what becomes of him in daylight when nothing looks as sinister, especially not with spring’s soft light that seems to halo the wicked most of all. Haloed me, hallowed be…

He makes his voice singsong and believes to love less is to master the art of forgetting. He drinks with anyone who will laugh—at or with him— and becomes the life story he’s made for himself for the night: tragedy buys more free drinks so he steals yesterday’s news.

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THIS CUP OF WHITE NIGHT CYNTHIA LINVILLE

Things got out of hand.

Just kids blasting away at the creamy center doing exactly what they wanted to do playing fast and loose with the fire underneath the spoon.

Soon they were invisible— enjoying the fruits.

Then came the low growl of

just not enough

the long howl of breaking windows and noses.

Now she’s scraping the ceiling off her psyche on an extended white-walled vacation.

Now she’s telling on herself to anyone who will listen.

He’s still a glutton for it keeps asking her how long will it take.

So this is what it leads to.

Somebody knew.

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BABY I DID IT FOR YOU KELSEY HUNKINS

You know, it’s pretty funny the way people see you after this kind of thing. You’re selfish one way and a slut the other way but the thing is, I really don’t think I’m being selfish here, baby. I swear I’m doing it for you. The last thing I want is for you to grow up like me with that slum pride, hip-swaying, cool-cat attitude like I had on the rail of a balcony, half for being serious, half so the boys could see up my skirt.

And listen, I know it would happen too, what with the ghetto ass street I live on where you’re given shit because you do speak English.

Not to mention that your fucking high and mighty daddy ran off on me (not blaming you or anything.) What’s really funny is that it wasn’t the little cross that sent him packing, oh no, he was thrilled to see the piss-stick. The more I think about it, it’s my fault because of what I have to do for you, so again, no hard feelings. I should actually thank you. Your daddy wasn’t known for his loving touch, or maybe it was his touch that showed me he loved me, at least that’s what he always told me. But I stopped buying into that “this is how I love you” shit a long time ago when my daddy, your granddaddy, I guess, crawled into my bed drunk one night with a twinkle in his eye and honeyed words in his slack-jawed mouth. See, I don’t want that for you. I wish I could tell that to these self-stroking sign holders who get their high from Sunday school spasms. In my neighborhood, you only get that God-shaken from a rusty needle and some really bad stuff. It helps me to picture them in those fifties collared dresses, you know, the ones that scream “I gave up my personhood when I became a mom”, holding a self-righteous pie instead like, “have you gotten your daily serving of Jesus today?” But I never cared much for what anyone thought of me, so I dunno why I’m trying to justify myself or why my hands are shaking so bad. I mean, it’s not like I’m worried. My mind’s made up and I’m doing it for you, I don’t care what those skirts think.

These are probably the kind of women that spend five hundred dollars on a vacuum, I don’t see how they get off judging me for the same.

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MADELINE

RACHEL MCPHERSON

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TO DEVOUR THE STARS, FIRST PAINT THEM BLUE ASHLEY MITCHELL

“She kinda killed it out there.”

Felix is right, but that doesn't mean I have to like it. I take a breather— which means a drag, really. Necromancy, with smoked out spirits in my throat. I lean my head back against the alley's brick and mortar, let loose the silvery souls as O's of skunk scent.

“I still think,” I say, eyes glass, “he's gonna hurt Esko.”

My name, according to her, is spun sugar and sea water. Saltwater taffy from a boardwalk she dreams of often. Letters, words—names especially, and so people by default—they've got a certain color to them. She told me, once, “Cameron, I like you, because blue's my favorite color.”

Yeah, I'd bet. She's got those waves girls get from salt stained ocean breezes, battering hair like little fighter pilots heavy in the Seattle winds. B52s. The color your skin gets when you've drowned, when you romanticize it, I like to picture she's dyed her hair that color for whatever occasion she'd been planning. When your skin's gone bruised from the Pacific cold, from the flood of your lungs releasing themselves. You know. You picture it deep and almost galactic. Nebular.

In reality, I know it's just navy. But that's too boring for Esko.

Felix stands, taking my baseball cap by the bill and putting it onto his own head.

“Nah, Ian's not going to hurt her.”

He's been wrong before tonight. But he's also got my Seahawks hat, and I'd like to have it back.

“Ian keeps his girls safe, Crank.”

He has it, and it's the only reason I'm willing to follow him back into the joint.

I can't help but wonder what she sees when the music's blaring. If it's any less horrible when you're seeing sounds to the beat of drums and bass. I hate club music, but it's not really about me.

It still feels hollow here, empty of patrons or not.

It's not the sex thing. It's nothing at all about some older-than-it-shouldbe sin or another. It's not even that it was Esko out there, gyrating to beats and rhythms. To the colors real only to her.

It's our secret. Or so she tells me. One of our secrets.

She's said before, when I asked about Ian, “I don't think I like him much.

He reminds me of firecrackers.” He is heat and ecstasy—street ecstasy.

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He is everything she wants.

Everything I wish she'd stop.

It's still nothing at all about some old sin or another.

“You want something to drink?” Ian points to a couple bottles he's still got out. Esko's got her face burrowed in his ribs. If she keeps that up, her nose is going to go raw from rubbing. She's like... If you mixed a child and a kitten, and dipped it in Methylene blue, you'd have Esko. In personality, and color scheme.

I wish I hadn't just thought of it that way. I keep trying to forget the details, if I'm going to let her do whatever the hell she wants. I clear my throat anyway, and say, “Thought you couldn't sell drinks after two.”

Ian laughs, invites me to sit across from the two of them at their table.

About Felix? I've got my hat back. Suddenly I've got an awareness that I hadn't seen him in a quick minute, but it's not really... ...Concerning.

Jesus, fuck. I suck in air, greasy like incense smoke. Like heavy, balmy perfume.

Esko might be rubbing her nose against Ian, but out of the corner of my eye, I'm not so dense I can't tell where his arm's going. Like I can't figure out that he's rubbing against her underwear with the hand not busy cradling his cheek.

Again, it has nothing to do with some age old sin bullshit.

“I'm impressed,” Ian says. The way his eyes crinkle, I can't tell if he realizes I'm onto his exhibitionism or what.

Esko's body is made of trepidations.

“Impressed at what?” It's harder than it seems to have my eyes forced to meet his. My jaw's going sore from grinding my teeth against each other.

“The girls we've got.”

Jesus, don't fucking say we. Just because you basically kidnapped someone from my side six hours ago doesn't make us friends. It doesn't make us fucking...ugh, coworkers.

I spread my arms across the back of the booth. “Oh. Yeah. Yeah, they're good.”

“You see Esko up there?”

“Bit and pieces, yeah.”

His arm is still going. Her back puffs and falls again. He's a fireplace bellow and she, a hearth.

“Ian—”

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My teeth grit.

“Ian— She stiffens.

“For fuck's sake, Ian, she's fucking fourteen!”

Stops.

The hand he's withdrawn from under the table, it gleams under the dead orange of the light with cum.

“You're not going back.”

Esko's back to her primal form. She maneuvers like fluid—her head down, trying hard to take the shape of something that will make me happy.

The patio's cold, but she's out here anyway. Scribbling my name over and over in an old notebook.

Grapheme-Color Synesthesia. You associate color with letters. Words.

Names. Sometimes, I'd come into my bedroom, and she'd be surrounded by pages covered in writing, ripped from her notebooks. My name. Dark blue, she says. Her favorite.

“I'm sorry, Cameron.”

“You promised me. When I brought you back? You were going to help me help you, and we were going to get you better.”

Of course, I sound blue to her, too. Seeing sounds. She'll do that, too. My name, my voice, my letters.

“I know, Cameron.”

“Then fucking—!” I've got my arms up, another cigarette in my teeth and, and... Esko's got her eyes on the concrete. And I keep forgetting what I'm dealing with.

I nearly bite my tongue. “I didn't mean to yell, Esko.”

“I know, Cameron.”

And, like that, she's back. Manic. Esko is all kinds of fucked up, I guess.

But I've known that since her body first bobbed its way into my life. The way I romanticize it, there was a smile on her lips, and her eyes, brown now, a milky film finally free of her storms. In a way, maybe she was finally happy until I showed up.

But, really, who's happy dead? I grew up with girls like her. High school, somehow, the only girls I seemed to attract were the kind who got their kicks scratching into their skin. The only girls who wanted to fuck me, they thought I could save them. And maybe I could. Did, once, the same way I accidentally walked in on Esko's cadaver making its rounds at Pier 57.

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I saved Esko. I guess.

I used to think...there's no such thing as a soul. That's chemistry.

You can kill God with the flick of a light switch—electricity making its way through your brain. You are circuit board. You're a slave to your chemical make up: you feel what it wants you to feel.

But Esko's still here. Back.

If someone dies on their own accord, and for some reason, it just takes me being there to call...something...and maybe a soul, maybe not, back to that body... If that happens, then maybe I'm wrong.

Her hands go to pull my shoulders down from the back. She hugs me tightly against herself, and happily goes on to say, “It's okay. I yelled at you, too, once. Only fair.”

Gun metal. Gun powder. Happy, her words are rapid fire bullets.

I can't fucking stand it. Metal bullets on a chalk board. “And you tried to throw yourself back into the water. Right. Totally fair.”

I can feel her smile.

She kisses my neck.

“No, Esko.”

“Please? We can go inside and—” “No matter how many times you ask, Esko. We're not having sex.”

There goes the sound of her slumping back onto the front porch.

Give it another minute and, right on schedule, she picks up her notebook and goes inside. I need another smoke. I need anything right now, really, because I know exactly where she's going. What she's going to do.

It's not about some age old sin. It's not about, “do no harm,” if God even thought to include your own body in that. If that were the case, I think just lighting my cigarette’s already condemned me. But, fuck it. At least if I go out from lung cancer, Esko finally can, too. I think.

Somewhere in the house, I hear the echo of gun shots, and all I can think to do is exhale the ghosts swelling in my lungs.

For some reason, eleven o'clock at night sounded like a good time to drop by to Felix. I still haven't gone to check on Esko. I'm so SVR 90

pissed off, I figure it can wait until morning. Felix should have had the same thought about visiting before he knocked on the door.

“Ian wanted me to come talk to you,” he says. “He wants to apologize and see if you don't mind Esko just doing weekends or something.”

My throat rumbles, and I put out my latest cigarette in an empty Coke can on the coffee table. “You two are disgusting.”

“Hey, man, you're always meeting girls, and they're always hot as fuck.”

“She's fucking fourteen.”

Felix shrugs. “Doesn't act it.”

Yeah, she does. She just had a temper tantrum with my handgun.

“Anyway,” Felix says, “Just think about it, okay?”

I catch his eye going to my shut bathroom door in the hall. He nods in its direction. “Before I head back out, I've gotta take a piss, though.”

And, well, fuck. My stomach sinks.

“My bathroom's actually kinda fucked right now. Backed up, or something. I can drive you down to the gas station or something if it's really that bad—” “Nah, it's cool. I don't care.” I don't know if he's joking or not, but he says, “Won't be the first time I've peed in your sink.”

Fuck. Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck. Off the couch, I'm trying to stay as level as possible, but my heart, it's going off on its own. It wants to vomit blood in tune with my stomach, and. And. Fuck.

I'd give anything for him to get his hand off the door knob.

I can tell by the sudden stall in his posture he's already seen it.

Esko's in there. My gun's in her hand, and her neck's leaned back.

Blood dribbles like ink blots out of the corner of her mouth. She's everywhere, from the spatter on the shower wall, to the puddle making its way down her chest from her forehead. Her neck. What's left of it. Her teeth look broken, and her tongue’s just barely left to loll against her painted lips.

Brain matter's there to keep the mass amounts of red that have covered the scribbles of my name in her notebook besides her comSVR 91

pany. Drenched. The way spun-sugar cotton candy gets when it's wet. That's the paper pages, curling up the way flowers wither.

And then it starts.

Okay. Don't judge me too hard for it, but it had originally almost gotten comical. When it was just us. I used to think about hiding my kitchen knives.

Then she just found old razors instead. Then she found my firearm.

It was like a running joke almost. Hide and go seek that always ends in the bathroom, and eventually just me, upset I was going to have to be the one to clean everything up and listen to Esko cry. Just. Esko. You were so silly.

You knew I'm going to come back in here, and everything's going to be okay.

I'm your rock, remember? I'm here to make everything better. Save you.

Fucking hate myself in the process.

But it's not so funny now.

“Felix—” But it's also too late to block Felix from watching. Watching Esko's eyes flutter open with a rasp, blood slithering to stitch up her forehead and neck's bullet wound. “...What the fuck is wrong with you, Crank?”

I'm just. Stuck.

He shoves me into a wall, and Esko's screaming.

“I SAID, WHAT THE FUCK, CRANK?” “I don't know, Felix!”

Esko's yelling still, and Felix shakes. Says, “There's something fucking wrong with you,” while going into his coat pocket.

You can probably figure out exactly where this is headed.

But. You can probably also guess that Esko's got just as much experience shooting for the kill. So before my hearing's back, I'm staring at Felix on the ground. He gargles spit the way Esko just did. Only not in reverse. Where the galaxies in her eyes came back with stardust, photons, his are on their way to casting over like spoiled milk.

Him, I can't bring back.

I sighed. “What the fuck did you think—” She's wailing again. Back to sitting down on the carpet. “He was going to hurt you, Cam.” It's not about some age old sin. Thou shalt not kill. I shake my head.

Drag in breath. “Esko, give me the gun,” I say, my hand out.

She hesitates, but gingerly sets it into my palm. She wraps her arms around herself, and slumps down on the floor again. Her short finger nails

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dig into her upper arms to battle the flesh I know wants to burst out of her skin.

“Do you want to go back to your parents?”

She shakes her head. It's about time, but I think I can hear sirens somewhere far off.

If I don't do it, she will. If she does, neither of us are ever going to be free.

“They think you're dead, Esko. Someone's going to come and look for Felix, and if they find you, you'll have to go back to them. They're going to put you in prison. You're going to hurt yourself, and a lot of other people, too, if anything happens to you.”

“I'm not going to hurt myself,” she mutters, little moons where her finger nails were pressed. Here and there, it's not exactly beading blood, but the skin's still breaking.

“Esko.” I put the barrel to her temple.

“I'm sorry, Cameron. I don't wanna die anymore. Please. Okay? You're what makes me happy now. I'm sorry. I'm sorry I kept fucking up.” Her words are gunpowder. Rapid fire, spitting as she shakes. As her body tries hard to liquidate.

“Esko, listen to me. You need to pay really close attention for a moment.

Okay?”

Her throat bobs with thick spit. She nods.

“What color does a bang make?”

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LOOM IN ESSENCE ANN PRIVATEER

Infuse easy jazzy ecstasy stay away and play breezy tunes at the beat bar where magic stays to accompany melody.

I howl, searching for a solo a road, for a way, a holiday a rhapsody complete with no cargo in snow white winter of caramel espresso so dream on, because nobody will arrive soon.

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CONTRIBUTORS’ NOTES JEFFREY C. ALFIER is author of The Wolf Yearling (Silver Birch Press), Idyll for a Vanishing River (Glass Lyre Press) and Terminal Island: Los Angeles Poems (Night Ballet Press, forthcoming). His recent work appears or is forthcoming in Spoon River Poetry Review, New York Quarterly and Tulane Review.

ELIZABETH BECK is a writer, artist and teacher who lives with her family on a pond in Lexington, KY. She is the author of insignificant white girl and Interiors. In 2011, she founded The Teen Howl Poetry Series that serves the youth of central Kentucky.

KATIE BROWNELL is an outsider artist from Fairfield, CA who now resides in Minnesota with her husband and pet corgi. You may find more of her art on www.facebook.com/KatieBrownellArtist and www.etsy.com/shop/ArtByKatieBrownell.

TOBI COGSWELL is a multiple Pushcart nominee and a Best of the Net nominee. Credits include or are forthcoming in various journals in the US, UK, Sweden and Australia. In 2012 and 2013 she was short-listed for the Fermoy International Poetry Festival. In 2013 she received Honorable Mention for the Rachel Sherwood Poetry Prize. Her sixth and latest chapbook is Lapses & Absences (Blue Horse Press). She is the coeditor of San Pedro River Review (www.sprreview.com).

GREG CORRELL is finishing a dual memoir with his grown daughter, Molly Correll. He's had two plays staged, one off-Broadway. He has written for Salon and writes on Open Salon (http://open.salon.com/blog/ greg_correll/). He was the project manger and chief architect for Yale University's Climate Institute site. He won a CLIO for Best Package Design, and his illustrations have appeared in The New Yorker.

JIM DAVIS is a graduate of Knox College and an MFA candidate at Northwestern University. Jim lives, writes, and paints in Chicago, where he reads for TriQuarterly and edits North Chicago Review. His work has received Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominations, and has appeared in Seneca Review, Adirondack Review, The Midwest Quarterly, and Columbia College Literary Review, among hundreds of others. In addition to the arts, Jim is a teacher, coach, and international semi-professional football player.

JESSICA DAWSON is a modern-day Wendy, living in the East Bay with Peter Pan, a baby bear and a future Supreme Court justice. She’s the author of one book of poetry, Fossil Fuels, and has had poems published in various places. She abhors self-promotion but requires an audience at all times, reads the dictionary for fun, and speaks only in degrees of sarcasm.

LUNINGNING SOLEIL C. DE JESUS is a Solano Community College student where Creative Writing classes reawakened her love of words.

She shares living quarters in Fairfield, CA with her daughter Nadine, her son Nikko, two cats and a chihuahua-terrier.

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DYLAN DE WIT hails from Maxwell, CA and is currently majoring in Literature at California State University, Chico.

TRINA L. DROTAR is a literary and visual artist working in poetry, prose, watercolor, egg tempera, ink and fiber. Her work has been widely published and is held in several collections, notably the Museum of Women in the Arts and Sacramento City College. She teaches workshops at the Crocker Art Museum and other venues.

JARED DURAN earned his BA in English (Creative Writing) with a minor in Sociology (just to make absolutely certain that he did not go to school for anything remotely useful) from Arizona State University. He is a writer of some note—not a lot, but some. (His work has either appeared or is forthcoming in Up the River, Four Chambers, Canyon Voices, and others.)

CATHERINE FRAGA teaches writing at Sacramento State University. She has been published in numerous literary journals and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her poetry collection, Running Away with Gary, the Mattress Salesman, is published by Poet's Corner Press.

NATALIE FRANCEL-STONE is a symphony musician, freelance bassoonist, artist, and adventurer in Wichita, Kansas. She recently graduated with her MM in bassoon performance from Wichita State University, and regularly performs, teaches, and shows her artwork locally. When not being grownup, Natalie and her husband Ray enjoy spending time with their two rogue kitties, going on road trips, flying kites, and reading comics.

ROBERT GIBBONS moved from the small southern town of Belle Glade, FL to New York City in 2007 in search of his muse—Langston Hughes. He has read at New York City venues such as Small Jazz Night Club, Cornelia Street Café and Otto’s Shrunken Head. His first collection, Close to the Tree, was published in 2012 (Three Room Press).

THOMAS MICHAEL GILLASPY is a northern California based photographer with an interest in urban minimalism. His work is forthcoming in Streetlight Magazine and Apeiron Review. Contact information and more examples of his work can be found at: www.flickr.com/photos/thomasmichaelart.

TAYLOR GRAHAM is a volunteer search-and-rescue dog handler in El Dorado County. She’s included in the anthology California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present (Santa Clara University). Her latest book is What the Wind Says (Lummox Press, 2013), poems about living and working with her canine search partners over the past 40 years.

THOMAS GRIFFEN is a poetry student in the low-residency MFA program at Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon. He is also a visual artist and curator of the We Are Carrboro project in his cozy North Carolina hometown. In his spare time he enjoys running and cycling. www.tomgriffen.com KELSEY HUNKINS is currently a Solano Community College student majoring in English. She hopes to pursue a career of creative writing in the entertainment industry. Aside from writing, her main hobby is trying new video games.

ARTHUR JACKSON V has been a Solano Community College student since fall 2009, and received an AA in Fine Arts 2-D in 2013. He hopes to pursue a major in fashion design and minor in creative writing and linguistics.

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GREGORY JEFFERS’ stories have appeared this year in Every Day Fiction, Grim Corps Magazine, Anassa Publications, and in the anthology Hardboiled.

He lives and writes in the Adirondack Mountains and on the island of Vieques.

ROBERT W. KING’S first book, Old Man Laughing (Ghost Road Press), was a finalist for the 2008 Colorado Book Award in Poetry. His second, Some of These Days, was published in 2013 by Conundrum Press. He recently won the Grayson Books Chapbook Competition with Rodin & Co. He lives in Greeley, Colorado, where he directs the website www.ColoradoPoetsCenter.org.

LAURA KING was born and raised in Suisun City. She is currently an English major at Solano Community College.

CYNTHIA LINVILLE’S two poetry collections, The Lost Thing (2012) and Out of Reach (2014), are available from Cold River Press. She has taught in the English Department at California State University, Sacramento since 2000 and has served as Managing Editor of Convergence since 2008.

RACHEL MCPHERSON is an artist and illustrator who likes subjects that are a bit off. Creatures and people who have something else going on beneath the surface entice me. She uses Photoshop and good old fashioned collage to forcibly marry pictures of critters to Victorian photographs and then carries on from there with acrylics and spray paint. She currently lives in Sacramento, CA with her AA from Solano College and BA from UC Davis.

Other examples of her weirdness can be found at www.rabbit-fighter.com.

ASHLEY MITCHELL is originally from Fairfield, CA, and a Solano Community College alumni. She is a 21 year old English undergrad at Sacramento State University with plans to obtain her teaching credentials immediately after receiving her BA. She has been previously published in the 2012 and 2013 editions of SVR with her fiction pieces, “Did You Mean Pillar of Salt?” and “Manic Pixie Clay Girl.” When not stringing words together, she enjoys cosmetics, serenading her (very dim) kitten about kibbles, and taking naps with her mischief of rats.

PHILIP O’NEIL has published a book of poetry, Riera (Alexander Press), and contributed to a number of poetry websites. He worked as a journalist for twenty years in Central Europe, Belgium, the US and the UK. He currently lives in Prague where he is working on two novels: Mental Shrapnel and Krohn.

RITA OKUSAKO is a graphic artist based in Sacramento. She loves traveling, nature, art, and hilarious animated gifs. Her “Tren Fantasma” drawing, published here in SVR, is loosely based off the Tren Fantasma (Ghost Train) ride located in Montevideo, Uruguay. She regrets to say that she was unable to go on the ride when she visited a few years back. View other works of hers at SensibleRita.Blogspot.com and ThoughtLion.com.

RICHARD D. OWEN is a longtime part-time Solano student and a native of that deliciously mundane suburban strip of Northern California. A former editorial assistant at World Trade Press, he won The Reporter's 2013 Spooky Story contest and was also voted “Most Likely to Start a Cult” at Vaca High.

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CLEBER PACHECO is a Brazilian novelist, short story writer, poet and playwright. He has books published in Brazil, UK, United States and India. His play Intimacy received two awards. His book Mysteries won a contest in the United States and has been included in international literary anthologies in Brazil, US, Ireland, Canada, UK, and India.

KALI POLLARD is a student at Diablo Valley College in Pleasant Hill, CA. To read more of her poetry, please visit crotalusoreganus.tumblr.com.

ANN PRIVATEER is a retired teacher who spends time writing poetry, painting or photographing pictures, and eating from her garden. Life is good!

ARMANDO QUIROS is currently enrolled in Solano Community College.

He is 31 years old and was born in Panama. He was formerly the SCC governor for applied and fine arts. He has developed into a promising poet thanks to the mentoring of Dr. Quentin Carter. He intends to write a book once he’s finished writing 40 poems. It is to be entitled Tastings From The Nectarine Tree. He is currently pursuing an AA degree in Communications and hoping to transfer to either Sacramento State or UC Davis.

KEVIN RIDGEWAY is from Southern California where he lives and writes in a shady bungalow with his girlfriend and their one-eyed cat. Recent work has appeared in The Mas Tequila Review, The Commonline Journal and Trailer Park Quarterly. His latest chapbook of poems, All the Rage, is now available from Electric Windmill Press.

PAMELA RILEY is native New Yorker who still misses the Big Apple. She likes to spend her free time going to the theatre, museums and traveling. She has been writing for years and enjoys working in both poetry and prose. The little quirks and imperfections of life are her inspiration.

ARTHUR R. SHIELDS lives and writes in Vacaville, CA. CIARA SHUTTLEWORTH is previously published in Alaska Quarterly Review, Los Angeles Review, The New Yorker, The Southern Review, Weber: the Contemporary West, and Suisun Valley Review.

ERIN RENEE WAHL has MAs in creative writing and library science. Her work has recently appeared in Sterling, Meat for Tea and Literary Juice.

She currently works as an archivist in Tucson, Arizona.

DYLAN YOUNGERS is a student of Solano College majoring in Mathematics and Foreign Language Studies. He has been previously published in Poetry Quarterly and Three Line Poetry.

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Special thanks to Bruce Clark, Jowel C. Laguerre, Jane Sinkewiz and the creative writing faculty of Solano Community College for their continued support and efforts for the Suisun Valley Review

SUISUN VALLEY REVIEW

ENGLISH DEPARTMENT SOLANO COMMUNITY COLLEGE 4000 SUISUN VALLEY ROAD FAIRFIELD, CA 94535 SUISUNVALLEYREVIEW@GMAIL.COM