Beatrix

The Linnet's Wings SUMMER 2013

THE CELTIC TWILIGHT by WB Yeats Time drops in decay Like a candle burnt out.

And the mountains and woods Have their day, have their day; But, kindly old rout Of the fire­born moods, You pass not away.

THE LINNET'S WINGS

SUMMER 2013

"I'll be at charger for a looking glass, and entertain a score or two of tailors."

Richard III

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Original Illustration was used in The Tailor of Gloucester

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Also by The Linnet's Wings: The Song of Hiawatha by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow One Day Tells its Tale to Another by Nonnie Augustine Randolph Caldecott's The House that Jack Built

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Published by The Linnet's Wing, 2013 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, of transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written prmission of the publisher.

Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way or trade or otherwise, be lent, re­sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form or binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Visit www.thelinnetswings.org and www.TheLinnetsWingsPress.tk to read more about our publications ISBN­13: 978­1490352435

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WB Yeats

THE CELTIC TWILIGHT Time drops in decay Like a candle burnt out.

And the mountains and woods Have their day, have their day; But, kindly old rout Of the fire­born moods, You pass not away.

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WB Yeats

THE HOSTING OF THE SIDHE The host is riding from Knocknarea, And over the grave of Clooth­na­bare; Caolte tossing his burning hair, And Niamh calling, "Away, come away; Empty your heart of its mortal dream.

The winds awaken, the leaves whirl round, Our cheeks are pale, our hair is unbound, Our breasts are heaving, our eyes are a­gleam, Our arms are waving, our lips are apart, And if any gaze on our rushing band, We come between him and the deed of his hand, We come between him and the hope of his heart."

The host is rushing 'twixt night and day; And where is there hope or deed as fair?

Caolte tossing his burning hair, And Niamh calling, "Away, come away."

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TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION The Celtic Twilight iii The Hosting of the Sidhe iv Foreward: x Editor's Note xi The Linnet's Wings Information Page xii

EDITORIALS Obit: A Gentle Heart, Aquila Ismail 9 Photography: Maia Cavelli 32 Poetry: Nonnie Augustine 46

SECTION ONE PHOTOGRAPHY: Nipigon Bay by Frank J. Hutton 2

FLASH FICTION [Major Works of Fiction] Patricia Friedrich3 Beauty and the Beast Cezarija Abartis 5 Hiding by Susan Tepper 7

SECTION TWO PHOTOGRAPHY: Chasing the Storm by Gina Kelly10

MICRO FICTION The Sunday Special by Stan Long 20 The Cellist’s First Date by Marja Hagborg 22 Nesting Dolls by Carly Berg 24 “Amy in the Dark” by Carmen Tudor26

SECTION THREE PHOTOGRAPHY: The First Breath by Frank J. Hutton 28

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ESSAY AND SPANISH TRANSLATION Buenos Aires: A Literary City Diana Ferraro 29 POETRY TRANSLATIONS , Diana Ferraro 33 A Buenos Aires por Leopoldo Lugones Mi Buenos Aires querido Tango 1934 Música: Carlos Gardel, Letra: Alfredo Le Pera Has vuelto Evaristo Carriego Setenta Balcones y Ninguna Flor Baldomera Fernández Moreno After Such Pleasures por Julio Cortázar Letanías de la tierra muerta (Extracto) Alfonsina Storni Marie Fitzpatrick 36

CLASSIC El Cuente Pollo ­­ The Chicken's Story A Selection from the Selected Mexican and Spanish Recipes by Bertha Haffner­Ginger

SECTION FOUR PHOTOGRAPHY: Thiais Village by Gabriel Mtx. Aquirre 44

POETRY John Saunders The Morning I met Seamus Heaney at Tullamore Train Station 47 The Game 48 Howie Good personal history 49 an armed man lurks in ambush 50 Joan Colby Arbitrations 51 Sheila Black Sunflower 52 Short Shrift 54 Changming Yuan My Crow 55

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Paul Hostovsky Romantic 56 Aubade 57

ILLUSTRATIONS

Steven Jacobson Ocean's Alive 58

Inside Cover: Front End The Tailor of Gloucester

Beatrix Potter

Foreword Facing: "Simpkin," said the tailor, "where is my TWIST?" The Tailor of Gloucester

Larry Thomas The Goatherd’s Fingers 59 Colm Scully A Poem Remembered 60

"Why don't those youngsters come back with the dessert?"

From: The Tale Of Johnny Town­mouse 17

SECTION FIVE

The Tale of Ginger and Pickles 19 Ginger and Pickles were the people who kept the shop.

Ginger was a yellow tom­cat, and Pickles was a terrier.

PHOTOGRAPHY: The Stuff of Dreams by C. Mannheim 61

Front End, The Tale of Ginger and Pickles 21

SHORT STORIES Fly South by Ricky Ginsburg 64 Good Friday – Mary Magdalen by Beate Sigriddaughter 69 The First Wife by Yvette Flis 95

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Johnny Townmouse 23 MLF After Beatrix 91

TEAM Managing Editor M. Lynam Fitzpatrick SENIOR EDITOR Bill West GUEST EDITOR Elizabeth Glixman EDITORS FOR REVIEW ENGLISH Bill West Nonnie Augustine Yvette Wielhouwer Flis SPANISH Diana Ferraro Marie Fitzpatrick Consulting on Copy Digby Beaumont

Offices Mullingar, Co. Westmeath, ROI Motril, Granada, Andalucía Online Offices Provided by Zoetrope Virtual Studio Web Hosting Provided by ddWebsites.com Design© TheLinnetsWings.org 2013 Founded, in Edgeworthstown, Co. Longford, in ROI, in 2007 Publisher: M. Lynam Fitzpatick Published by The Linnet's Wings ###

Spanish Translations Diana Ferraro Contributing Editors Martin Heavisides Photography Editor Maia Cavelli Database Manager Peter Gilkes

Web Sites Researched: The Project Gutenberg

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"Simpkin," said the tailor, "where is my TWIST?" The Tailor of Gloucester

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Foreword TENDER BUTTONS FOOD SALAD DRESSING AND AN ARTICHOKE.

Gertrude Stein

It was please it was please carriage cup in an ice­cream, in an ice­cream it was too bended bended with scissors and all this time. A whole is inside a part, a part does go away, a hole is red leaf. No choice was where there was and a second and a second.

CAKE.

1914

Cake cast in went to be and needles wine needles are such.

This is today. A can experiment is that which makes a town, makes a town dirty, it is little please.

We came back. Two bore, bore what, a mussed ash, ash when there is tin. This meant cake. It was a sign.

Another time there was extra a hat pin sought long and this dark made a display. The result was yellow. A caution, not a caution to be.

It is no use to cause a foolish number. A blanket stretch a cloud, a shame, all that bakery can tease, all that is beginning and yesterday yesterday we had it met. It means some change. No some day.

A little leaf upon a scene an ocean any where there, a bland and likely in the stream a recollection green land. Why white.

APPLE. Apple plum, carpet steak, seed clam, colored wine, calm seen, cold cream, best shake, potato, potato and no no gold work with pet, a green seen is called bake and change sweet is bready, a little piece a little piece please.

A little piece please. Cane again to the presupposed and ready eucalyptus tree, count out sherry

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and ripe plates and little corners of a kind of ham. This is use.

OBJECTS BOOK. Book was there, it was there. Book was there. Stop it, stop it, it was a cleaner, a wet cleaner and it was not where it was wet, it was not high, it was directly placed back, not back again, back it was returned, it was needless, it put a bank, a bank when, a bank care.

Suppose a man a realistic expression of resolute reliability suggests pleasing itself white all white and no head does that mean soap. It does not so. It means kind wavers and little chance to beside beside rest. A plain.

Suppose ear rings, that is one way to breed, breed that. Oh chance to say, oh nice old pole. Next best and nearest a pillar. Chest not valuable, be papered.

Cover up cover up the two with a little piece of string and hope rose and green, green.

Please a plate, put a match to the seam and really then really then, really then it is a remark that joins many many lead games. It is a sister and sister and a flower and a flower and a dog and a colored sky a sky colored grey and nearly that nearly that let.

stage and learning. A regular arrangement, the severest and the most preserved is that which has the arrangement not more than always authorised.

A suitable establishment, well housed, practical, patient and staring, a suitable bedding, very suitable and not more particularly than complaining, anything suitable is so necessary.

A fact is that when the direction is just like that, no more, longer, sudden and at the same time not any sofa, the main action is that without a blaming there is no custody.

Practice measurement, practice the sign that means that really means a necessary betrayal, in showing that there is wearing.

Hope, what is a spectacle, a spectacle is the resemblance between the circular side place and nothing else, nothing else.

To choose it is ended, it is actual and more than that it has it certainly has the same treat, and a seat all that is practiced and more easily much more easily ordinarily.

Pick a barn, a whole barn, and bend more slender accents than have ever been necessary, shine in the darkness necessarily. Actually not aching, actually not aching, a stubborn bloom is so artificial and even more than that, it is a spectacle, it is a binding accident, it is animosity and accentuation.

A TABLE. A table means does it not my dear it means a whole steadiness. Is it likely that a change.

A table means more than a glass even a looking glass is tall. A table means necessary places and a revision a revision of a little thing it means it does mean that there has been a stand, a stand where it did shake.

A CHAIR. A widow in a wise veil and more garments shows that shadows are even. It addresses no more, it shadows the

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If the chance to dirty diminishing is necessary, if it is why is there no complexion, why is there no rubbing, why is there no special protection.

A FRIGHTFUL RELEASE. A bag which was left and not only taken but turned away was not found. The place was shown to be very like the last time. A piece was not exchanged, not a bit of it, a piece was left over. The rest was mismanaged.

ROOMS

principle and more than that, change in organization.

A light in the moon the only light is on Sunday. What was the sensible decision. The sensible decision was that notwithstanding many declarations and more music, not even notwithstanding the choice and a torch and a collection, notwithstanding the celebrating hat and a vacation and even more noise than cutting, notwithstanding Europe and Asia and being overbearing, not even notwithstanding an elephant and a strict occasion, not even withstanding more cultivation and some seasoning, not even with drowning and with the ocean being encircling, not even with more likeness and any cloud, not even with terrific sacrifice of pedestrianism and a special resolution, not even more likely to be pleasing. The care with which the rain is wrong and the green is wrong and the white is wrong, the care with which there is a chair and plenty of breathing. The care with which there is incredible justice and likeness, all this makes a magnificent asparagus, and also a fountain.

This cloud does change with the movements of the moon and the narrow the quite narrow suggestion of the building. It does and then when it is settled and no sounds differ then comes the moment when cheerfulness is so assured that there is an occasion.

A religion, almost a religion, any religion, a quintal in religion, a relying and a surface and a service in indecision and a creature and a question and a syllable in answer and more counting and no quarrel and a single scientific statement and no darkness and no question and an earned administration and a single set of sisters and an outline and no blisters and the section seeing yellow and the centre having spelling and no solitude and no quaintness and yet solid quite so solid and the single surface centred and the question in the placard and the singularity, is there a singularity, and the singularity, why is there a question and the singularity why is the surface outrageous, why is it beautiful why is it not when there is no doubt, why is anything vacant, why is not disturbing a centre no virtue, why is it when it is and why is it when it is and there is no doubt, there is no doubt that the singularity shows.

A whole soldier any whole soldier has no more detail than any case of measles.

Dance a clean dream and an extravagant turn up, secure the steady rights and translate more than translate the authority, show the choice and make no more mistakes than yesterday.

A bridge a very small bridge in a location and thunder, any thunder, this is the capture of reversible sizing and more indeed more can be cautious. This which makes monotony careless makes it likely that there is an exchange in

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A plain lap, any plain lap shows that sign, it shows that there is not so much extension as there would be if there were more choice in everything. And why complain of more, why complain of very much more. Why complain at all when it is all arranged that as there is no more opportunity and no more appeal and not even any more clinching that certainly now some time has come.

A window has another spelling, it has "f" all together, it lacks no more then and this is rain, this may even be something else, at any rate there is no dedication in splendor. There is a turn of the stranger.

This means clearness, it means a regular notion of exercise, it means more than that, it means liking counting, it means more than that, it does not mean exchanging a line.

Why is there more craving than there is in a mountain. This does not seem strange to one, it does not seem strange to an echo and more surely is in there not being a habit. Why is there so much useless suffering. Why is there. ###

Editor's Note After our website was hacked our submission page was down and Yvette suggested that we send out a call for flash and short stories based on myth and legend. I thought it was a great idea and we got great work in from our shout­out. Now if only we had more room. # An Ocean of Thought ­­ Laying a Foundation in the Heart God choose the words in the beginning to lay a foundation in the heart for all manner of things that he wanted brought into form. And there’s softness about that: A freeing and a way of seeing that comes with the mention of the heart, and the truth that it enshrines. For its beat is built by arranging one’s thoughts, and it's from them that we watch a piece­of­ourselves being brought into light.

Our thoughts willed, from the world’s oceans, where dreams were joined before their birth and where man was made from tears shed, in plots writ from insights found, in light, and dark.

Perween Rahman, Aquila Ismail's sister, was murdered while going about her work a few months ago.

We're running her obit this quarter and I spoke briefly to Aquila by email about pain. She asked me did it stop, for I lost a sister myself many years ago. I answered that grief eases with time; I didn't answer her question.

But does this pain fade? Well, when I reach back inside my heart I can still touch the pain that I experienced all those years ago when my sister was killed.

Aquila has set up a facebook page: Justice for Perween Rahman that you might consider supporting by liking.

# And that's a slice of harsh reality so let's pop into a once upon a time land. This quarter we’re using some of Beatrix Potter's illustrations. The works of the old illustrators cum storytellers are full of heart and joy, and a grief that fixes itself up in a fashion that doesn't work in our world.

The drawings tell the story as well as if not better than the prose. I enjoyed trawling through her vast collection to find a fit for our micro contributions,I hope you enjoy the choices.

Also, our classic this quarter is 'The Chicken's Story,' or 'El Cuento Del Pollo.' It's an old, and short,

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Spanish, children’s tale, and one that we’re all familiar with. Sure when our skies fell­in over the last few years very few of us were given redress or even the opportunity to look for same.

And just for flavour alongside our chicken’s journey:) we've added some salad dressing recipes from an old Spanish/Mexican Cookbook by Bertha Haffner­Ginger, something to add zest to this summer’s outdoor dining. If anyone tries them please report back. We'd love to hear from you, but be warned I haven’t; I only take responsibility for the upload.

And at the end of another dynamic:) quarter­ we beat the hackers­­ there's a big thank you floating around in cyberspace for our very fine team: included this quarter is Elizabeth Glixman, who guested in poetry, Elizabeth added dash and style to this much loved section; and also to our very, very fine contributors for their consideration.

My best to y'all and here's to a sunkissed summer!

Marie Fitzpatrick Managing Editor

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Flash Fiction

One

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Title: Nipigon Bay (c) Frank J. Hutton, www.frankjhutton.blogspot.com

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Patricia Friedrich

ajor works of fiction] By Patricia Friedrich

No longer could Sidney ignore the knight standing in a corner of her “Survey of English Literature” classroom. She thought he’d go away once the group finished studying Tudor England. Next, she had high expectations for the end of Michael Drayton’s poetry. But now, having only two pages to read on education during the Elizabethan era, she’d lost all hope.

Of course, the word delusion had crossed her mind. Thirst, tiredness, stress, and wishful thinking had been considered and discarded too. But the more she shook her head and scratched her eyes, the clearer the man became, shining with his polished plate shell.

And now he leaned on his sword, one leg crossed in front of the other forming a precarious number four, listening to her more attentively than any student. She avoided his stare, tucked her sleek black hair behind her ears, and searched her brain for the subject matter of the class. Romanticism, it seemed.

Sidney’s life revolved around fiction. When she didn’t teach it, she read it. More books than friends, more reading credits than clothes, and more experience with timelines than with real life. To have a fictional character attend her lecture was the next illogical step. She couldn’t say she was shocked. She was curious, not surprised.

“Can anyone explain how industrialism affected English literature during the Victorian period?”

Somewhere at the back of the wood­paneled classroom, a female voice was addressing the question, but Sidney’s attention was elsewhere. She was pondering whether or not to acknowledge the knight with a smile.

A shy smile at first, worthy of any Guinevere. Then wait for the knight’s reaction before any bolder move.

Peruse the classroom mocking interest in the students’ answers. And walk to the very back of the space to rap her free hand on the armor and check if any clanking noise resulted. Neither one of these alternatives seemed unreasonable to her under the circumstances.

She chose the timid smile. He acknowledged with a tipping of his head. His blue eyes blinked slowly, as if he were just waking up from a dream, in an invitation for her to continue talking. She followed his lead and opened a book. Some more poetry to calm her now unraveling nerves. Keats was what she needed: ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci.’ She found a hook, a link to trick the class. She prayed her move was seamless.

She read with renewed contentment. Exposure had dulled the senses and habituated her mind. Perpetual contact with fiction had numbed Sidney’s brain to its magic. She had dutifully performed her teaching,

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Major works of fiction

stopping at all the necessary historical stations. But she did it with the zombie­like detachment of folding laundry or wiping windows.

But now she read avidly, pronouncing every last syllable with nurse­like care. Whether the knight was a product of her imbalanced imagination or a transplant from some alternate reality was a mere immaterial detail. Words escaped from her lips like hungry prisoners. And when she looked again at the armored figure, she couldn’t help but wonder, want, and wish that he had come to stay.

Had Sidney paid the least attention to her classroom, she would have seen the surprise in her students’ wide eyes and dropped jaws. She would have caught the stolen glances, the swapped notes. Never before had they heard her read with such gusto, tasting the words as if they were Italian gelato. She even looked pretty with her flushed cheeks and dancing hands. Her heavy brown shoes brushed the creaking floor with the gracefulness of a Viennese waltz dancer’s slippers. When she moved, the light coming from the big windows infiltrated her skirt revealing charming sculpted legs.

For once she owned the usually oversized and overwhelming classroom. She was not Sidney anymore, nor Dr. Thompson. She was a muse and her poet; she was the music and its lyrics. She was Guinevere.

The strange case of the armored knight could not be explained, and Sidney didn’t want to resolve it. She was the only one who could see him, and her life had changed for the better since he materialized. She now looked forward to teaching, and she chose the readings with special heed to give him the right impression.

But one Friday after weeks of intimacy, when with her heart pounding and her ears throbbing, Sidney entered the room wearing a new special flowery dress, she felt an imaginary spear pierce through her stomach.

Her knight was not there.

She vowed not to panic; after all, maybe her melodic voice would cause him to reappear. So she recited the words with all of the strength in her soul, and she treated the verses like a prayer.

Still the corner remained empty and sad. Still her chant reverberated on the constricting walls around her, no salvation in sight.

In her mind, Sidney sunk to the floor broken and shattered like pieces of a fine Chinese vase. In reality, she put on an expressionless mask and finished the class. Done, she dragged herself home to her books and her empty apartment. She could not fathom teaching another day.

She collapsed on the chaise near the window and let her left arm rest on her face to cover her eyes.

Nothing for them to see. At least she was grateful for the thick rain that fell outside.

She got up. Aided by the light of a lamppost, she accompanied the trajectory of the raindrops toward the sidewalk.

That was when she saw him, standing in the rain, staring at her second floor window. She spent minutes looking his way, hearing the metallic sound of the drops against his armor, wondering if he felt cold or lonely or bewildered.

But somehow it all seemed to make sense.

This time she did not rub her eyes. She did not shake her head. She did not question what she would leave behind. She simply disappeared into the night, never to be seen again. ###

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Cezarija Abartis

eauty and the Beast by Cezarija Abartis The merchant looked in the pawnbroker’s window: a necklace of cheap beads dangled from a hook, a thousand­piece puzzle of a zoo was propped at the front and, beside it, a stuffed dog. The dog blinked. A real dog then. But no rose.

His youngest daughter had asked for a rose as a gift. But his trip took months longer than he expected, and it was winter, and there were no roses in this small winter town. Perhaps in the city he would stay at tomorrow night, he would find a garden store that imported flowers from the south.

His daughter would understand if he didn’t bring home a rose. In his trunk, he had silk scarves, pearl earrings, gold rings from the ships that docked successfully. There was treasure enough to provide handsome dowries for all three daughters.

He wandered around the store, examining the cloisonne jewelry, the mosaic inset tables, the cut glass perfume bottles, the leather bound books. But what he liked best was the shaggy white dog that followed him around the store, barking and humming intelligently. His beloved late wife used to have a small dog she doted on, which died a long time ago. The merchant called for a clerk, but could see none.

He petted the shaggy dog, the cleanest dog he had ever seen; he walked among the shelves and down the rows, now ahead of, now behind the dog, until he was at the back of the store, where, in a porcelain pot decorated with blue paisley designs, grew a red rose. He shouted for the owner, but no one appeared. The dog thrashed his tail mightily.

The merchant took a coin from his wallet and lifted the pot with the rose. He left the coin on the counter. He strolled out into the cold carrying his potted rose. Its fragrance was sweet, especially sweet on this snowy day. The snow flakes fell on his sleeves and instantly dissolved. He wrapped his scarf more tightly around his neck and smiled at his prize.

A voice boomed behind him: “You think the world is yours for the taking.”

The merchant turned but could see no one. “I left money on the counter.”

“Your kind thinks everything can be bought,” the voice growled.

“Please, I’ll return it.”

“You’ll pay dearly for this,” the voice shot out. “Only another rose can repay me. I want your youngest daughter as a servant.”

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Beauty and the Beast The growl terrified the merchant. “I would rather die.”

“Your choice: you and your daughters can all die.”

The merchant left the rose at the threshold and ran into the night, but the street curved back to the front door of the shop. His heart grew cold and then beat wildly as if it would fly away. He bent toward the rose, touched the stalk, and pricked his finger on a thorn. A drop of blood fell on the snow. He collapsed and clutched at his chest.

“The rose was dear to me,” the voice said. “You’re right­­everything does have a price.” The shadow grew a hand, opened the merchant’s mouth and placed a pill on his tongue.

The merchant sat up and wanted to thank the man, but nobody was around, only the dog at the doorway, thumping its tail.

The merchant rested, set out for home the next morning, and told his daughters about his mistake, and how the shadow­man saved his life.

His youngest daughter patted his hand. “I’ll freely go. No cost. I’ll indenture myself to him, and he’ll see I’m a good worker, and I’ll pay off the debt and come home.”

The merchant wished he had not told her the story, but he could not prevent her from going.

She worked diligently in The Shop of the World, dusting the knick­knacks, sweeping the store, washing the windows. At first she was afraid and lonely, but she had the sweet dog for company and whispered her loneliness to him. He whined in sympathy. Once, she was writing a long letter to her father and sisters and forgot to feed him, but he was patient and loving and forgave her. When spring came, she planted flowers in the window boxes, geraniums, carnations, petunias, and he danced around her ankles in appreciation. She petted and fed the shaggy dog, who followed her and sat beside her when she rested. One year passed and the voice asked if she would like to get married.

“I’m content as I am.”

“But wouldn’t you like to be a fine lady married to a rich man?”

“I’m content as I am.” She rubbed her chapped hands together.

The voice snarled. “Is there any way to buy your love?”

“That’s disgusting! You’re repulsive!”

The voice swallowed his anger. “I meant is there a way to have your love forever?”

“Free my father of the debt.”

“Done.”

“Free me.”

“I’m loath to do that,” the voice boomed and quieted and exhaled a sigh that curled around her.

“You’ve fulfilled your side of the bargain. I understand your worth.” The dog was gone and in his place stood a man. His arm was behind his back, and she hoped he did not clutch a knife. He had sad brown eyes. He looked down at the ground, ashamed. “I was bewitched because I misunderstood the worth of things, because I got angry, was impatient. I thought wealth and success were important.” He moved his hand from behind his back and extended a rose to her. “This is important.”

She stared at the white rose with its soft petals. She stretched out her hand, took the rose and put it up to her nose. “The smell is sweet.” She laid it on the counter and took his hand in both of hers. ###

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Susan Tepper

iding by Susan Tepper It always happens this way. I make a travel plan and it gets disrupted by my inability to keep track.

Strangely (coincidentally?) there is a theme of time in this hotel. Each room (at least those I’ve occupied over the years, about five, I think)— each has an entry way that’s papered in black antique time­pieces against white. The first time I entered a room here I was charmed by this sophisticated whimsy in the décor. Clocks, watches— I said something like that out loud. Then Jack made a comment about my never wearing a watch. How he’d bought me several expensive watches over the years. I honestly don’t remember receiving a single watch as a gift from my husband. I have no idea what he was talking about.

At any rate, I’ve been in this hotel longer than I anticipated. Denis, the manager, assuring me it is perfectly fine, that my mini­suite has not been reserved by anyone as it’s the off­season.

I’ve gotten to know him over the years. Yesterday we were having a drink in the lobby bar, cozy, tucked away in a corner. Outside was turning dusky, and of course raining. I told him I didn’t know London had an off­season. He patted my hand and said my dear. That’s all. Some men can do that.

“I’ll never get enough of this city,” I told him.

Every night I go alone to the theatre. Because Denis is French and married and running this hotel, he never gets to the theatre. I regale him about this or that play. I tell him London is somewhat like New York only way better. Laughing, he disputes my claim saying New York is still the best city in the world.

I tell him that I love the blue and white striped canvas summer chairs they put in the parks here.

“New York would never put out chairs in Central Park. They’d all be stolen in an hour.”

“An hour?” he says.

“Maybe a half hour.”

The steps leading down to St. James Park are practically outside this hotel door. The waterfowl and other birds have diminished because of winter coming, and naturally the chairs have been stored away, but I still see some birds and ducks and of course the pigeons.

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Hiding

“It’s sad, sometimes, the winter,” I say to him.

“Don’t be sad. You come here not to be sad, isn’t that so?”

“Totally.” I flash him a forced smile.

One trip here I discovered a shop that sells old maps. I saw it again the other day and got a burst of happiness. Maps being a passion of mine. I’ve collected hundreds that are molding away in some storage facility, rolled into bins like tight diplomas. Clear out the place— my husband’s idea. The new glass house he’d built had to be minimalist. It escalated the silent war between us.

Here in London I have a routine that involves nothing. I never set the clock. It’s one of the worst sounds in the world, a ringing alarm clock. I sometimes wonder if people commit murder or suicide on a day they set their alarm. The body becomes nervous and distracted, and so does the mind. In this hotel, I wake up when my body is ready to receive the day. It is the receiving that most interests me; the taking in. It occurs to me that I might be having sex sometime soon. I haven’t had sex in a while. Sex is hovering. It’s a large bird in hiding from winter. ###

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Aquila Ismail

Gentle Heart By

Aquila Ismail (Karachi, Pakistan)

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A Gentle Heart

The butterfly counts not months but moments and has time enough…Tagore ***

pu! You’re here! Great!” my little sister Perween, would greet me every time I arrived at her door from Abu Dhabi at 3:00 in the morning followed by hugs and kisses.

The fragrance of her embrace would right every little grievance that I had with the world. She had a habit of doing this smile with a tilt of her head that renewed life and plunged me into a world of twinkling eyes, melodious chimes of her bangles, peals of laughter and high fives.

The sentence that invariably followed was, “Apu I have to meet someone from the KWSB/Goth/Union council/etc. in the morning so I will leave early and come back early.”

Knowing fully well the answer I would ask, “How early?”

“By six for sure!”

“Oh, Perween can’t you take half a day off? Just once …” Asking her to take a whole day off was a non­ starter. So the negotiation would begin with half a day.

“I can Apu, not today, but I promise on Friday!!”

Friday was already half a day at work, “Okay on Friday when will you be back?”

I had to take whatever crumbs she offered.

“I will start from the office at 6 and be home by 5 and then we can go out. Let’s go out and have chaat and paani puri. We can give Ammi her ice cream.”

Half a day was coming home at five when every day it was six.

Okay Perween Friday it is. I hope you will take Sunday off at least.”

“Of course Apu. You know I never work on Sundays. Can we watch a film Saturday night?”

“Which one?” This was asked not so much out of a need to obtain the DVD but the trepidation that it would be a silly film full of song and dance, knowing Perween’s love for MTV, “I don’t want to see these tragic tear­jerking films. They are so unreal. I don’t think there is so much desperation in the world,” she would say.

“But life is like that is it not.” The cynic in me would reply.

10

Aquila Ismail

“Not at all. Everyone tries to make the best of their lives.”

So we would end up watching a rollicking masala Indian film with the stammering don et al or films like I Bought a Zoo, about animals and hope.

I would lie in bed watching her morning ritual with a statuette of Buddha looking on as well. This would begin with greetings by birds chirping in her garden on bushes of red and yellow exora, hibiscus flowers, graceful palms, butterflies, and clay figurines of ducks and elephants. Her bed was right alongside a window to the garden and the curtains were never drawn. The cats who slept on her bed, one at her feet, the other by her head would begin their call for food and she would tell them to be patient until she had washed her face and brushed her teeth. They never ever listened, so with hair flowing admonishing the cats she would head to the kitchen to dole out their food. Added to the two permanent feline members of the family were the disabled, sick or injured kittens she would pick up on her way to and from her OPP office in Qasba Colony, Orangi. The mornings then would also be time to check their health status and given Calpol when she thought they were feverish.

The washerman’s donkey got hooked on the medicine and would not leave until given a dose each Friday and Perween despaired that she had created an addict.

Ammi would then be asked to get up and commence her day. The sun did not rise for her until Perween said it did. They would sit for breakfast with Perween in direct visual line with the dining room window which was abound with red, pink and white fragrant jhumka flowers, yellow flowers of the radhachura and trailing vines with heart­shaped leaves. The table was surrounded by blue, rust and yellow pottery, vases, pitchers and plates on the floor, sideboard and shelf, interspersed with plants growing in bottles. She had brought these from the numerous trips to towns and cities of Sindh, Khyber

Pakhtunkhwa and Punjab to meet the partners who shared the OPP methodology. Her best friend and colleague Anwar Rashid would always accompany her.

I had gone along on several trips to attend the Community Development Network meetings: to

Khairpur where we paid homage at the tomb of Sachal Sarmast, felt the injustice in the dismal rooms of Faiz Mahal and marveled at the majesty of the quarry of Aror; to a village near Hala where we were told, without being asked, by the man in Ray Ban glasses who drove us there, that there was no kari kari in ‘his’ goth. The women we met did not meet our eyes when we asked them if this was true; to the banks of the Indus in Sakkur where we sat by the boats of the Mohannas. We saw and bought the most exquisite rallis made by women in Sinjhoro; in Uch the meeting was held in the shadow of the striking tomb of Bibi Jawandi. We ate street food in Lahore, and walked in the dappled sunlight with the peacocks in Tharparker.

In 2004 my daughters, Saima and Sahar, were to go to the United States to pursue their studies, and Perween’s goodbye present to them was a trip to Bhitshah. She wanted them to remember the sufi tradition of Shah Abdul Latif Bhitai, whose songs to

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A Gentle Heart

the seven queens of Sindh, Moomal, Sassui, Heer, Lila, Soroth, Marvi, and Sohni, spoke of their beauty and purity of heart through the ragas that bore their name. Anwar Rashid joked that if Perween had lived in the days of Bhitai Shah there would surely have been a raga for her probably called sur muskkurahat or the song of smiles!

In Bhitsah while climbing the steps to the main building of the blue and white floral embellished mausoleum Perween stopped by all vendors, and discovered their wares as if for the first time, although this was, perhaps, her tenth trip. With accompanying trills of laughter she bought arjak chadars, amber and turquoise embedded rings, sets of green glass bangles, small painted clay pots, all to be given to her team members in the OPP. Since 2010 the recipients of her gifts were also members of the Women’s Savings Groups that she organized and supported. Several members were taken to meetings in Nepal, Bangkok and Sri Lanka to present their projects. They came from Orangi, Baldia, SITE, Korangi, Malir, Neelum Colony and groups in Dera Ghazi Kahn, Jampur, Badin, Ghotki, Naushero Feroze, Jafferbad, Matiari and Battagram.

Usually on each of my trips we would spend a weekend at my house in Seaview by Clifton beach. On our way back Sunday night, when the car reached the foot of the Baloch Colony Bridge, Perween would excitedly point to the left, “Look Apu, look at how covering the Manzoor Colony Nala has changed this place. Can you see the children playing there.”

“I know Perween, I know …” I would try not to roll my eyes at the umpteenth mention of this.

“Remember how we explained this to the minister and saved the people of the area from being evicted? You were with Guru and me in that meeting, you do remember right Apu?” Guru was her name for Arif Hassan, her friend and mentor whose house had been the setting for many a discussion on the meaning of life and other

T Secure Housing

such very serious topics. Invariably Perween would be sitting with Arif Hassan’s friend, known to all who loved him as Galla, and Perween’s melodious merry laughter would punctuate our discussions as she responded to every irreverent joke that Galla cracked.

Needless to say she was his favorite person and according to him one who was the meaning of life.

At the wedding of a team member in Orangi, Perween decked in a sari and wearing lipstick was persuaded, not that much persuasion was needed, to come on to the dance floor. She danced and thumka’ed much to my embarrassment and when she came and sat with us for a breather, her ‘boss’ Dr. Akhtar Hameed Khan, said to her, “today you have been transformed from a ‘jungle ka sher’ to a ‘circus ka sher’.” It was meant as a mild rebuke, for dancing was anathema to Doctor Saheb, but Perween threw back her head, laughed and exclaimed, “wow I did not know that the circus lions had so much fun.” That is the way she was!

As to our conversation on the drive back home, invariably after the Manzoor Colony mention, the conversation would veer to, “And remember the Orangi Nala that we fixed.”

“You fixed you mean.”

12

Aquila Ismail

“No no it was all of us!”

As the car rolled on to Shahrah­e­Faisal and

Nursery she would say, “We worked in Chanesar Goth.” To Perween’s chagrin the work was stopped after a few lanes were done. Lanes or ‘gallis’ were the units of measurement in her work in sanitation and housing. Success and failure was measured by how many lanes were organized and worked in.

When we went past the Awami Markaz, she would invariably remind me of the time that the railway people tried to evict the settlements along the train tracks behind this public building. They had lived there for years and the contention was that 100 feet of land was needed on either side. This was a blatant attempt at eviction of the poor because in fact only 30 feet on either side were needed.

“Do you remember the map I gave you showing some buildings like this Awami Markas, and those factories and apartment blocks built just ten feet away from the tracks and not marked for demolition? Can you imagine the unfairness of it all? But we saved the settlements by giving the residents that map.” The map was made by the Urban Resource Center, which she and some architect friends from Dawood Engineering College, her alma mater, had set up. She had been the recipient of gold medals in eight out of ten semesters of the Bachelor’s in Architecture course.

Of late Perween discussed, with immense joy, being able to help get land tenure for residents of more

than two thousand villages, or Goths as they were called, that lay on the periphery of Karachi city. Using Google Earth to identify the location, her team would physically verify its existence and then with the permission of the goth elders map out the village.

With these maps the elder could demand that the authorities acknowledge their existence and their right to land that they had lived on for many many years.

All along the way she would point to illegal water filling stations, the so­called hydrants, from which water earmarked for the city was siphoned off and sold. The enterprise was worth millions. Perween’s quantification of this trade, subsequently made public, was fraught with danger and I had cautioned her many, many times, that she was stepping on powerful toes.

“Whatever, Apu. You know how the poor suffer for lack of water and the rich buy what rightfully belongs to everyone. I cannot know this and not do something about it.”

“I’m not asking you to stop documenting it but don’t go overtly publics with it.”

“No, no, you know I never do things publicly like go on television. That is for others to do. I just want to put my head down and do my work…”

“I know that, but this time be careful with who you give the information to…”

13

After breakfast her beauty ritual or ‘sola singaar’

Secure Housing

A Gentle Heart

On Site: Karachi

as she called it would commence. Massaging her neck and her forehad with Oil of Ulay, combing and tucking her hair with a clip at the back, putting on her stone­encrusted silver rings and bangles, her looped earrings, her small bead pendants she would carry on a running set of instructions for Ammi’s caretaker Mussarat: this medicine at this time, this for lunch, take her for a walk even if she protests, massage her knees, etc.

Mussurat would also each morning make her some vegetables for lunch, carried in a small steel tiffin box.

Saleem, Anwar Rachid and she would eat lunch in the small canteen every day around three. If Mussarat asked Perween what she would like for lunch Ammi would answer,” Why are you asking her, you know if she has her way she would eat only daal. Make her some bhindi bhaaji.”

“Baji, why don’t you eat some chicken or kababs. I can quickly fry you some kababs.”

“No, no, don’t do that. You know I don’t eat meat. So stop trying!”

Tiffin box in hand, bottle of water tucked under the arm, her colorful cloth bag filled with papers, she would give Ammi a kiss on the forehead, promising to come home early, and head off to Orangi, and on March 13, 2013 never to come back. That day her throat was pierced by a hired assassin’s bullet at 7:15p.m. It took just a few moments for her gentle heart to stop beating. ***

14

Micro Fiction

Two

15

Chasing a Storm Credit: (c) Gina Kelly, www.ginakelly.com

16

Stan Long

"Why don't those youngsters come back with the dessert?"

From: The Tale Of Johnny Town­mouse

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The Sunday Special

he Sunday Special By Stan Long

The heimlich hadn't worked and Giacometti ­ slowly turning blue ­ was choking on a weasel­word he'd swallowed with a mouthful of vroticelli ­ the Blue Onion's Sunday Special ­ not that he hadn't choked on one before ­ some technique of the cook to bring attention to himself who among the gathering of local intelligentsia felt lowly and put upon ­ except this time he'd gone too far ­ targetting the guru of the Poetic Front ­ others ­ all seasoned wannabes ­ eating from the same pot had maybe coughed a bit but not seriously enough to interrupt their various ad­lib ­ stream­of­conscious [same thing] rantings ­ the noon hour wore on and each was still able to have a turn at the mike ­ as Jacko would have wished ­ so it was most unfortunate that someone had pissed on his parade ­ no one believed it was deliberate ­ things happen ­ "Serves him right" ­ the sous chef was heard to mutter when the ambulance doors slammed shut and the paramedics took off. ###

18

Marja Hagborg

Ginger and Pickles were the people who kept the shop. Ginger was a yellow tom­cat, and Pickles was a terrier.

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The Cellist's First Date

he Cellist’s First Date By Marja Hagborg Sitting alone doesn’t bother me like it bothers many people I know. They always ask me why I travel alone, shop alone, and eat alone in restaurants where I’m clearly seen as a poor woman, a freak, who has no one to keep her company.

I don’t need company, even if I sometimes appreciate it, especially if it makes me glad and inspired. I don’t need a bore at my table yakking about things that don’t interest me.

People look at me feeling pity. I feel pity for them having their meals with people who talk endlessly forcing their own highly fascinating personality and excellent verbal skills, their great sense of humor and wittiness on them. Everybody listens, but the eyes are turned inwards, the mind is trying to figure out what to say next so it makes sense. Then everybody laughs, throws their heads backwards and show all their bleached teeth. How charming they are, indeed.

When they drink more, they laugh more and louder. Their body language gets more dramatic; their eyes are not introspective anymore.

I’m eating alone enjoying my dinner that’s tasty even though the ambiance is not the reason I chose the restaurant.

Give me a steak Palomilla with black beans and I’m happy, no need for candlelight or servers in monkey suits.

The couple in front of me catch my attention. I sense the guy’s tension level is sky high. Maybe this is their first date and the guy may think that the girl is prettier than he deserves. Both feet keep tapping under the table, not just light taps on the floor, but like he was keeping a machine going on with his feet. He must have found out that focusing your tension on your feet lessens the tension in your upper body and makes it possible to talk.

The girl is beautiful in a quiet way, like someone who plays cello. Her long dark and shiny hair is framing her friendly face and she is looking at the guy with intense eyes, clearly interested in every word he utters. It’s pretty obvious she likes nerdy guys and is not even interested in pretty boys. The girl is looking for brains with a future.

I would like to tell the guy to stop tapping his feet because the deal is closed. Maybe it was done before the date.

He keeps tapping when I leave the place. I hope they would marry when he’s a doctor and she is a cellist, maybe, one day, even a world famous one.

In my mind I wish them all luck in the world. ###

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Carly Berg

Front End: The Tale of Ginger and Pickles

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Nesting Dolls

esting Dolls By Carly Berg 1) Mother was a venus figurine in her youth. Her rampant sex parts got her filled, then receded.

Now she’s full, a vessel with a passel, a birch marsupial. Promoted, demoted, children are boring miracles. Their fathers ran off but she got a face and some clothes. No limbs.

The children echo her growth rings. Each that she was, she still is within, a mama diorama through time. She straightens her blood red apron, turns back to the cookfire.

2) Miss­ There’s barely room for her curvy warp between the mother barrel and straight­ sided Girl. Miss hates her mother’s house. If she gets a chance, she’ll roll off and do something better. She’s not sure what’s better.

3) Girl­ On her report card, the teacher wrote: Works hard. Clever. Obedient. Excellent posture.

4) Little girl­ Twirls in the cold sun, a ballerina, a tornado.

5) Baby girl­ Love me or I’ll die. ###

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Carmen Tudor

From: Johnny Townmouse

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"Amy in the Dark"

" my in the Dark" By Carmen Tudor

In a place where the tree limbs curled and unfurled like wings, that is where she went.

The sky too was dark there. Not as dark as the reptilian scales of the tree bark, but dark as an extinguished candle. A little haze hung about, and where the clouds covered the moon, that is where the candle­like look went.

She sat under the tree. Taking from her bag a wrapped sandwich like the ones her mother made her in her school days, she tasted, nibble­like, from the corners. Forcing the bites down one labored swallow at a time, she bit down the inner side of her cheek.

The girl with the dark hair and blue eyes she insisted were blue­green sat waiting. This was the hour, she knew. It would either come, or it wouldn’t. It was funny, she thought, the way a waited­for thing would either come. Or it wouldn’t. She tossed the bread aside for a little bird. Or a big bird. Maybe a black bird of prey.

Only it would waddle, she thought. It would waddle and stare into her eyes and forget that it was a monster to some. It would eat from her hand, if she only looked back into its eyes and told it it was okay; that it was the right thing to do.

Perhaps the monster bird was sleeping, or perhaps it was the wrong time to fly. Whatever it was, the monster bird, and the waited­for thing, didn’t come, and so she sat. The outline of the bread on the carpet of leaves and grass stared up at the girl. Its eyes, unlike hers, unlike the monster bird’s, were not the seeing kind.

But still, the bread watched her as she watched the outline of the hazy moon. It waited, she thought, for her to pick it up, dust it off, and taste from the corners—nibble­like. But her empty stomach didn’t ask for food. Only butterflies. Or fireflies. Or some angelic, winged thing to flutter about and create a chaotic little tempest within her.

But the waited­for thing still didn’t come; nor, rightly so, did the winged thing.

A lone leaf was stirred by some night­time breeze. They were the best kind, she knew. The kind that went unheeded and unknown except by those waiting under a tree in the hazy light of some extinguished­candle moon. The leaf broke away from the curled fist of the limb. It spiralled down to where she sat and fell on her knee. The girl picked it up and put it in her backpack.

She closed her eyes and leaned back against the scales of the tree. The bark tickled the back of her neck like the fingers of a shadow. Or a monster.

She sighed lowly and waited. That place, that lone place...that is where she went. ###

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Spanish­Language Literature

Three

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Title: First Breath (c) Frank J. Hutton, www.frankjhutton.blogspot.com

26

Diana Ferraro

UENOS

IRES:

A LITERARY CITY By Diana Ferraro

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Buenos Aires: A Literary City

W

here the world’s map almost ends, as an afterthought of the Spanish conquistadors, Buenos Aires stands up as one of the great city capitals. Leaning on the Río de la Plata, the widest river on earth, the city's primeval spirit comes from its port ­­“ ¿Y fue por este río de sueñera y de barro/ que las proas vinieron a fundarme la patria?” “Was it then, by this sleepy and muddy river, that bows came in to found my homeland?” says Jorge Luis Borges, the most famous of porteño, that is, Buenos Aires’ writers. Since the beginning, the port represented the opening to the world beyond the river and the Atlantic Ocean and, by the end of the 19th century and beginnings of the 20th, it became the key to the amazing Argentine wealth. Founded twice, in 1516—with no luck, for the Indians killed the Spaniards—and in 1536, with a more endurable success, Buenos Aires wouldn’t accomplish the initial promise, to delivering silver, that imperial dream which gave its name to the river and to Argentina, but would still prosper. The city’s fate was signed by the land barons, the estancieros when they became commercial partners of the British Empire, selling grain and meat, and building over the remainders of the poor, modest colonial town, the European city that has lasted until now.

Buenos Aires is seen as the different, exclusive city in Latin America, with its French and Italian imprint, as well as the British touch and a distinguished Madrid­Spanish style, peeking here and there, and where the European literary tradition, whether Hispanic, French or British and later Italian, has always been part of the city’s heritage. The universality of its rich literary landscape comes from these deep Western roots rather than from any native primitive culture and the character of its production is specific and personal, and more related to its location, far away from the civilized world and inserted as an anomaly on the large, void flatlands of the pampa.

Buenos Aires’s first name was Santa María del Buen Aire, the virgin patroness of sailors, who relied on the “good air,” that is, the wind that would allow a fast and secure journey. Four centuries of colonial rule did little or nothing for the city, which even as the capital of the Virreynato del Río de la Plata, kept its muddy and neglected profile, once it was clear that there were no silver mines around and before the extraordinary wealth of the pampas found its way. Under the double sign of air and mud, Buenos Aires, self­perceived as the last post of Western Civilization in a void, meaningless land, became a place fertile in writers. Distance and emptiness have marked this fate: where other cities in the world have represented a better metaphor of the writer, one who's always on the margins of whichever society by temper, and prone to fill any void with fantasies and the works of imagination? Far away from the great cultural capitals of the world but still craving for the civilized “best” which seemed so out of reach, local

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Diana Ferraro

writers have always looked from the port onto the river, and further, to the sea and up to the sky, crawling distances and time, and making of the invisible world of inherited diverse cultures the substratum for their own creations. Faithful to the Spanish cultural roots or breaking away toward French and British influences and whether coming from the high educated classes, like Borges or from the middle class like Roberto Arlt, the porteño writers have a unique identity in the literature of the world. Wistful and spiritual, megalomaniac and universal, romantic and passionate, often pushing pathos into bathos and making of the grotesque a local style, Buenos Aires writers have created a literary class across centuries. No matter where their own family comes from, they represent the city’s particularity which, in a not quite federalized country, is still seen as the most precious Argentine jewel, that so often quoted “Reina del Plata,” Queen of the Plata.

The universal city has created an equally universal library. The early writings of Sarmiento and his founding stone of Argentine culture, the essay “Civilization and Barbarism,” the brilliant chronicles of Lucio V. Mansilla and Eduardo Wilde, the avant­la­lettre existentialist novel of Eugenio Cambaceres, the patriotic consciousness of Leopoldo Lugones, the metaphysical cultural maze of Borges, the graceful world of the novelist Manuel Mujica Láinez, the grown­up harsh city and its dreamers in the novels of Roberto Arlt, the eternal battle of faith and truth, in the never enough acknowledged extraordinary work of Leopoldo Marechal, the ethereal magic of Julio Cortázar, the dreams of distance and love in Manuel Puig inform, among the work of many other writers, the local prose. Poetry has also found powerful voices, but it’s in the tango lyrics that the highest poetical quality and most distinct local spirit can be traced. If poets such as Alfonsina Storni can be aligned in the modernist ranks and even though in her “Litany of Dead Land” she dares to create a farther beyond than the Western civilization—a dystopian view on the end of all life on earth—it’s in the poetry of Alfredo Le Pera, Homero Manzi, Cátulo Castillo and Enrique Cadícamo, among others tango lyricists, where the sweet, melancholy and graceful intimate spirit of the city perspires.

In the 1920’s and 1930’s there was a literary split among the writers: the Florida writers named after the, at that time, elegant street, and the Martin Fierro group, named after the gaucho invented by José Hernández, a porteño poet devoted to give a voice to the lonely, neglected inland gauchos. Florida was supposed to represent the high­class intellectual endeavors, so inclined to dream upon the invisible or abstract heritages, and Martín Fierro, to report the social changes and the lives of the poor. Needless to say that both currents melted later in the newest generations: writers like Osvaldo Soriano, Ricardo Piglia and César Aira, to name just the three best known abroad, are metaphysical as well as realist writers, and their creations have metamorphosed the literary legacy from the first part of the 20th century into original and equally universal pieces of art reaching the 21st century with a recognizable voice across centuries.

A main actor in the bumpy country’s history, Buenos Aires as a city has provided the artistic witnesses that accounted for it. Greatness as well as the extremes of violence and civil war can be traced in its literature which, as the city and country itself, has always been reborn from ashes after its periodical self­ inflicted fires. “No nos une el amor sino el espanto: sera por eso que la quiero tanto,” “It’s not love that brings us close but terror: that may explain why I love her so much.”, as Borges has pointed out, with his wit but also his irreductible endearment to his native place.

As a literary city, Buenos Aires has not only a wonderful international annual book fair, but thriving small publishing houses in quest to renew the city’s well­earned prestige in the world’s publishing industry, somehow tarnished by the country’s financial mishaps of past decades. Borges would maybe repeat now: “A mí se me hace cuento que empezó Buenos Aires: La juzgo tan eterna como el agua y el aire,” “I don’t believe the tall tale that Buenos Aires ever started: I see this city as eternal as the water and the air,” to remind us that Buenos Aires literature cannot be but as eternal as the city.

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Buenos Aires: A Literary City

POEMAS # A Buenos Aires por Leopoldo Lugones Primogénita ilustre del Plata, En solar apertura hacia el Este.

Donde atado a tu cinta celeste Va el gran río color de león; Bella sangre de prósperas razas Esclarece tu altivo salvaje Pinta su nombre sazón.

Arca fuerte de nuestra esperanza.

Fuste insigne de nuestro derecho.

Como el bronce leal sobre el pecho Asegura al país tu honra fiel.

La genial Libertad, en tu cielo Fino manto a la patria blasona, Y eres tú quien le porta en corona El decoro natal del laurel.

En tu frente, magnífica torre De la estirpe, tranquila campea como amable paloma la idea De ser grata a los hombres de paz... esperanza la impulsa y, parece Cuando así su remonte acaudalas.

Que de cielo le empluma las alas Aquel soplo pujante y audaz.

Joya humana del mundo dichoso Que te exalta a su bien venidero.

Como el alba anticipa al lucero Aun dormida en su pálido tul, Cada vez que otro día dorado Te aproxima a la nueva ventura.

Se diría que el sol te inaugura Sobre abismos más hondos de azul.

Certidumbre de días mejores La igualdad de los hombres te inicia

En un vasto esplendor de justicia Sin iglesia, sin sable y sin ley Gajo vil de ignorancia y miseria Todavía espinando retoña Sobre la áspera Cruz de Borgoña Que trozaste en los tiempos del rey.

Mi Buenos Aires querido Tango 1934 Música: Carlos Gardel Letra: Alfredo Le Pera Mi Buenos Aires querido cuando yo te vuelva a ver, no habrá más pena ni olvido.

El farolito de la calle en que nací fue el centinela de mis promesas de amor, bajo su quieta lucecita yo la vi a mi pebeta, luminosa como un sol.

Hoy que la suerte quiere que te vuelva a ver, ciudad porteña de mi único querer, y oigo la queja de un bandoneón, dentro del pecho pide rienda el corazón.

Mi Buenos Aires tierra florida donde mi vida terminaré.

Bajo tu amparo no hay desengaños, vuelan los años, se olvida el dolor.

En caravana los recuerdos pasan, con una estela dulce de emoción.

Quiero que sepas que al evocarte, se van las penas de mi corazón.

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Diana Ferraro

La ventanita de mi calle de arrabal. donde sonríe una muchachita en flor, quiero de nuevo yo volver a contemplar aquellos ojos que acarician al mirar.

En la cortada más maleva una canción dice su ruego de coraje y de pasión, una promesa y un suspirar, borró una lágrima de pena aquel cantar.

Y luego de un valse te irás como una tristeza que cruza la calle desierta, y habrá quien se quede mirando la luna desde alguna puerta. ¡Adiós, alma nuestra! parece que dicen las gentes en cuanto te alejas. ¡Pianito del dulce motivo que mece memorias queridas y viejas!

Anoche, después que te fuiste, cuando todo el barrio volvía al sosiego ­qué triste­ lloraban los ojos del ciego.

Mi Buenos Aires querido, cuando yo te vuelva a ver, no habrá más pena ni olvido.

Has vuelto Evaristo Carriego

SETENTA BALCONES Y NINGUNA FLOR

Has vuelto, organillo. En la acera hay risas. Has vuelto llorón y cansado como antes.

El ciego te espera las más de las noches sentado a la puerta. Calla y escucha. Borrosas memorias de cosas lejanas evoca en silencio, de cosas de cuando sus ojos tenían mañanas, de cuando era joven... la novia... ¡quién sabe Alegrías, penas, vividas en horas distantes. ¡Qué suave se le pone el rostro cada vez que suenas algún aire antiguo! ¡Recuerda y suspiro!

Has vuelto, organillo. La gente modesta te mira pasar, melancólicamente.

Pianito que cruzas la calle cansado moliendo el eterno familiar motivo que el año pasado gemía a la luna de invierno: con tu voz gangosa dirás en la esquina la canción ingenua, la de siempre, acaso esa preferida de nuestra vecina la costurerita que dio aquel mal paso.

Baldomero Fernández Moreno Setenta balcones hay en esta casa, setenta balcones y ninguna flor. ¿A sus habitantes, Señor, qué les pasa? ¿Odian el perfume, odian el color?

La piedra desnuda de tristeza ¡dan una tristeza los negros balcones! ¿No hay en esta casa una niña novia? ¿No hay algún poeta lleno de ilusiones? ¿Ninguno desea ver tras los cristales una diminuta copia de jardín? ¿En la piedra blanca trepar los rosales, en los hierros negros abrirse un jazmín?

Si no aman las plantas no amarán el ave, no sabrán de música, de rimas, de amor.

Nunca se oirá un beso, jamás se oirá una clave... ¡Setenta balcones y ninguna flor!

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Buenos Aires: A Literary City

After Such Pleasures

de los hijos ya muertos en el seno.)

por Julio Cortázar (Título original en inglés) Extracto

Ni una ciudad de pie... Ruinas y escombros Soportará sobre los muertos hombros.

Olvidada pureza, cómo quisiera rescatar ese dolor de Buenos Aires, esa espera sin pausas ni esperanza.

Solo en mi casa abierta sobre el puerto otra vez empezar a quererte, otra vez encontrarte en el café de la mañana sin que tanta cosa irrenunciable hubiera sucedido.

Desde allí arriba, negra la montaña La mirará con expresión huraña.

Acaso el mar no será más que un duro Bloque de hielo, como todo oscuro.

Y así, angustiado en su dureza, a solas Soñará con sus buques y sus olas, Y pasará los años en acecho De un solo barco que le surque el pecho.

Letanías de la tierra muerta (Extracto)

Y allá, donde la tierra se le aduna, Ensoñará la playa con la luna,

Llegará un día en que la raza humana Se habrá secado como planta vana,

Y ya nada tendrá más que el deseo, Pues la luna será otro mausoleo.

Y el viejo sol en el espacio sea Carbón inútil de apagada tea.

En vano querrá el bloque mover bocas Para tragar los hombres, y las rocas

Llegará un día en que el enfriado mundo Será un silencio lúgubre y profundo:

Oír sobre ellas el horrendo grito Del náufrago clamando al infinito:

Una gran sombra rodeará la esfera Donde no volverá la primavera;

Ya nada quedará; de polo a polo Lo habrá barrido todo un viento solo:

La tierra muerta, como un ojo ciego, Seguirá andando siempre sin sosiego,

Voluptuosas moradas de latinos Y míseros refugios de beduinos;

Pero en la sombra, a tientas, solitaria, Sin un canto, ni un ¡ay!, ni una plegaria.

Oscuras cuevas de los esquimales Y finas y lujosas catedrales;

Sola, con sus criaturas preferidas En el seno cansadas y dormidas.

Y negros, y amarillos y cobrizos, Y blancos y malayos y mestizos

(Madre que marcha aún con el veneno

Se mirarán entonces bajo tierra

Alfonsina Storni

32

Diana Ferraro

Pidiéndose perdón por tanta guerra.

De las manos tomados, la redonda Tierra, circundarán en una ronda.

Y gemirán en coro de lamentos: ¡Oh cuántos vanos, torpes sufrimientos!

POEMS TRANSLATED To Buenos Aires

by Leopoldo Lugones Illustrious first daughter of the Plata Sunny opening to the East where, Attached to your light blue ribbon, Flows the great river with its lion’s color.

Beautiful blood of prosperous races Enhances your arrogant savage while Ripeness paints its name.

Strong ark of our hope Celebrated column of our right Like the loyal bronze on your breast Assures the country your faithful honor.

Brilliant Freedom, on your sky, Emblazons the homeland with a fine coat, And its you who brings her in a crown The original decorum of laurels.

On your forehead, wonderful tower of our lineage, like a friendly dove soars the idea of being pleasant to peaceful men…

Hope impels it and, it seems, when you so treasure its flight, that the sky feathers its wings With a daring and pushing breath.

Human jewel of a blessed world

That exalts you to its coming wealth.

Like dawn anticipates the morning star Even while sleeping in her pale tulle, Every time another golden day Brings you near to a newer fortune.

One would say the sun inaugurates you over everyday deeper chasms of blue.

As a certainty of better days Equality among men starts you Into a large splendor of justice Without church, sword or law, An evil shoot of ignorance and misery Still blooms as a spindle Over the rough Burgundy Cross That you split when there was a king.

My Beloved Buenos Aires Tango (1934) Music: Carlos Gardel Lyrics: Alfredo Le Pera

My Buenos Aires, dear city when I see you once again there’ll be no more oblivion or sorrow.

The little lantern in the street where I was born was the guardian of my promises of love, under its quiet light I saw her, my sweet gal, glowing, shining there just like a sun.

Now that fate allows me to see you again, city and port, the only one I love, I hear the wail of bandoneon, my heart races and in my chest I loose its reins.

My Buenos Aires flowery land there where my life

33

Buenos Aires: A Literary City

will reach its end.

Under your shelter no disappointment, years go by, pain is forgotten.

In caravans memories ride, leaving a trail of pleasant feelings .

I’ll have you know that when thinking of you all my heartaches do vanish away.

The little window in front of my suburban street in which a young girl blooms and smiles so sweet once again I want to stare back at those eyes full of caresses as they look at me.

In any meanest passage there is a song telling its tale of great passion, nerve and guts and one more promise and then a sigh, a tear of sorrow all erased by such a song.

My Buenos Aires dear city, when I see you once again there’ll be no more oblivion or sorrow.

You’re back Evaristo Carriego

You’re back, barrel­organ. On the sidewalk, There’re laughs. You’re back, tired and whining Like before.

The blind man waits for you, most of the nights sitting by the door. He keeps quiet and listens. Fuzzy memories of far away things, he evokes in silence; things from the time when his eyes had a tomorrow when he was young… his sweetheart…who knows!

Joys and pains lived in hours now long passed. How soft his face becomes everytime you play an ancient air! He remembers and sighs.

You’re back, barrel­organ. The humble people watch your stroll, melancholy.

Little piano crossing the street with fatigue, grinding the eternal familiar tune that the past year you moaned under the winter moon: with your husky voice you’ll say in the corner, the naïve song, the usual one, maybe the one our neighbor prefers, she, the young seamstress who went wrong.

And after a waltz you’ll leave like a sadness crossing a deserted street, and there’ll be who stays there, next to any door, watching the moon.

Farewell, our soul! people seem to say every time you go away.

Sweet little piano rocking Memories dear and old!

Last night, after you left, when the whole borough returned to calmness, ­­how sad— the blind man’s eyes wept.

SEVENTY BALCONIES AND NOT A FLOWER Baldomero Fernández Moreno Seventy balconies this house has, seventy balconies but not a flower.

What’s up, Lord, with those who dwell there?

Do they hate parfum, do they hate colors?

The stone naked in her sadness,

34

Diana Ferraro

How gloomy those black balconies are!

Isn’t there in this house a girl to be a bride?

Not even a poet full of illusions?

Doesn’t anyone wish to see behind the glass the diminutive copy of a garden?

Neither roses crawling over the white stone, or jasmines opening over the black rails?

If they don’t love plants, they’ll not love birds, And never know of music, rhymes or love.

Never a kiss will be heard, or the sound of a scale…

Seventy balconies and not a flower!

A day will come in which that cooled world Will know a deep, dark silence: A great shadow will surround the sphere Where spring will not return; The dead earth, like a blind eye, Will continue to walk always without peace, But in the shadow, blindly, lonely, Without a song, without an aye!, nor a prayer.

Alone with her chosen creatures In her breast, tired and asleep (Mother who goes on still with the poison Of her sons already dead on her breast.)

After Such Pleasures

by Julio Cortázar (Original Title in English) (Excerpt) Long forgotten purity, I wish I could rescue The pain of Buenos Aires, that waiting without pause or hope.

Alone in my house opened to the port, to begin loving you again and again to meet you in the morning coffee without any of those things that one cannot give up having ever had happened.

Litany of the Dead Land

by Alfonsina Storni (Excerpt)

A day will come when the human race Will have dried like a vain plant, And the old sun in his space Will be as useless as a dim torch.

Not a city standing ­­ ruins and rubbles She will bear on her dead shoulders.

From up there, the black mountain Will look at her with sullen expression Perhaps the sea will not be more Than black ice: dark like everything else And so anxious in its loneliness it Will dream about its ships and its waves And will pass the years lurking For the one boat that crosses its chest.

And there, where the earth rises in dunes, the beach will dream with the moon, And nothing will be left but desire Since the moon will be another mausoleum.

In vain the block will want to move mouths In order to swallow men, and rocks To hear about them the ugly cry

35

Buenos Aires: A Literary City

Of the shipwrecked crying out to infinity: Now nothing will remain; from pole to pole A single wind will have swept it all: Sensual dwellings of the Latinos And the poor shelters of the Bedouin; The dark caves of the Eskimo And refined and luxurious cathedrals; And blacks, and yellow and copper, And white and Malay and half­caste Underground they will look at one another; Asking forgiveness for so much war.

And from the hands taken, in a circle, They will surround the round earth.

A chorus of lamentations wailing: Of what vain, bumbling sufferings.

###

36

Maia Cavelli

Editorial

37

Summer Storms

Photo Gallery: Summer storms . . . . are usually not our first association to this season of sprawling daylight hours. Summertime, after all, is when "the livin' is easy." It's when we re­connect with the nearly forgotten sensation of bright, hot sunshine and fresh air playing on our bared skin, just before thrilling to the splash of cooling water. We envision bright blue skies, a beaming solar disc, and perhaps a few wisps of high lofting clouds. Pleasurable, to be sure, but far from a full or complete picture of the season.

To round that out, we asked our contributing photographers to share their views of the darker, moodier side of summertime skies, from Paris to the heartland of the American Midwest, where nature has been wont to put its massive powers on display. Our thanks to Gabriel M. Aguirre, Frank S. Hutton, Gina Kelly and C. Mannheim for expanding our repertoire of seasonal imagery throughout the pages of this issue. [We also welcome Peter Berman's first time, videographic contribution to LW's on­line edition.*] Maia Cavelli

38

Classic

Cuento Del Pollo Un día un pollo entra en un bosque. Una bellota cae en su cabeza. El pobre pollo cree que el cielo ha caído sobre él. Corre para informar al rey.

En el camino encuentra una gallina.

—¿A dónde vas?—pregunta la gallina.

—¡Oh!—dice el pollo,—el cielo ha caído en mi cabeza y voy a informar al rey.

—Yo voy también, si quieres,—responde la gallina y se marchan juntos el pollo y la gallina al palacio del rey.

En el camino encuentran un gallo.

—¿A dónde vas?—pregunta el gallo a la gallina.

—¡Oh!—dice la gallina—el cielo ha caído sobre la cabeza del pobre pollo y vamos a informar al rey.

—Yo voy también, si quieres,—responde el gallo y se marchan juntos el pollo, la gallina y el gallo al palacio del rey En el camino encuentran un pato.

—¿A dónde vas?—pregunta el pato al gallo.

—¡Oh!—dice el gallo,—el cielo ha caído en la cabeza del pobre pollo y vamos a informar al rey.

—Yo voy también, si quieres—responde el pato y se marchan juntos el pollo, la gallina, el gallo y el pato al palacio del rey.

En el camino encuentran un ganso.

—¿A dónde vas?—pregunta el ganso al pato.

39

Classic

—¡Oh!—dice el pato,—el cielo ha caído en la cabeza del pobre pollo y vamos a informar al rey.

—Yo voy también, si quieres,—responde el ganso y se marchan juntos el pollo, la gallina, el gallo, el pato y el ganso al palacio del rey.

En el camino encuentran un pavo. El pavo quiere ir con ellos a informar al rey que el cielo ha caído.

Ninguno de los pobres animales sabe el camino.

En este momento encuentran una zorra. La zorra dice que quiere enseñarles el camino al palacio del rey.

Todos van con ella; pero ella los conduce a su cubil. Aquí la zorra y sus cachorros se comen el pobre pollo y la gallina y el gallo y el pato y el ganso y el pavo. Los pobres no van al palacio y no pueden informar al rey que el cielo ha caído sobre la cabeza del pobre pollo.

###

The Chicken's Story One day the chicken went into the forest. An acorn fell on his head. The poor chicken believed that the sky had fallen on him. He ran to tell the king.

On his way he met a hen.

'Where are you going?' asked the hen.

'Oh!' said the chicken, 'the sky has fallen on my head and I'm going to inform the king.'

'I'll go also, if you want,' replied the hen and together the chicken and hen marched, to the palace of the king.

On their way they met a rooster.

'Where are you going?' the rooster asked the hen.

'Oh!' replied the hen, 'the sky has fallen in on the poor chicken and we 're going to inform the king.'

'I'll go also, if you want,' replied the rooster and they marched together, the chicken, the hen and the rooster, to the palace of the king.

On their way they met a duck.

'Where are you going?' the duck asked the rooster.

'Oh!' replied the rooster, 'the sky has fallen on the poor chichen and we're going to inform the king.'

'I'll go also, if you want,' replied the rooster, they marched together, the chicken, the hen, the duck, and the rooster, to the palace of the king.

On their way they met a goose.

'Where are you going?' the goose asked the rooster.

'Oh!' said the rooster, 'the sky has fallen in on the poor chicken and we're going to inform the king.'

40

Classic

'I'll go also, if you want,' replied the goose and they all marched together, the chicken, the hen, the duck, the rooster and the goose, to the palace of the king.

On the way they met a turkey. The turkey wanted to go with them and inform the king that the sky had fallen. None of the poor animals knew the way.

At that moment they met a fox. The fox said that she would show them the way to the palace of the king.

They all went with her, but she led them to her den. Here the fox and her cubs ate the poor chicken and the hen and the rooster and the duck and the goose and the turkey. The poor didn't go to the palace and they can't inform the king that the sky has fallen in on the poor chicken.

###

Classic

nsaladas

spanol

Spanish Cheese Fingers To serve with all salads Make very short pie paste with butter, salt; roll and fold several times, sprinkle with grated cheese and chile pepper; roll it into paste enough to make it stick, cut in strips, bake in hot oven, tie in bunches with red ribbon, garnish with sprig of parsley, or cut strips of bread; cover with paste of melted cheese and chile pepper, toast in oven, serve wit

43

Classic

ressings

alad

PREPARED VINEGAR FOR SPANISH SALAD DRESSING Put a button of garlic, large slice cucumber, slice onion, tablespoon parsley, tablespoon taragon leaves, or two tablespoons taragon vinegar into one pint cider vinegar. Bottle and let stand several days, strain and keep for following salads and dressings.

ESPECIALLY PREPARED DRESSINGS Spanish Dressing No. 1 Rub mixing bowl with button of garlic, break into bowl one egg yolk, whip stiff, add one­fourth cup best olive oil slowly, then one­fourth cup lemon juice, tablespoon prepared vinegar, teaspoon sugar, half teaspoon salt, tablespoon green chile pulp. Very fine.

Spanish Dressing No. 2 Six tablespoons of best olive oil in bowl, add gradually three tablespoons lemon juice and one of prepared vinegar, one teaspoon brown sugar, half teaspoon salt, tablespoon red chile pulp, stir with rotary motion until a thick cream, serve at once on salad.

Spanish Salad Dressing No. 3 Lemon or lime juice. Six tablespoons to three of olive oil, teaspoon sugar, one­half teaspoon salt, dash red pepper, teaspoon onion juice.

44

Classic

45

Classic

Spanish Salad, Avacado (Aligator Pear) Peel and cut in half pears, sprinkle with salt and sugar twenty minutes before using, then place in heart of small crisp lettuce head, pour over Spanish dressing No.3

Tomato and Cucumber Salad Select six fine ripe tomatoes; remove the hearts carefully; place on ice until chilled; pare two cucumbers and chop them finely; mix with tomato pulp; pour over a half cup of dressing No. 3 and fill the tomatoes. Serve on lettuce leaves and decorate with thinly sliced sweet peppers.

Spanish Sweet Pepper Salad Remove seed and fill half peppers with chopped cucumber and celery, mixed with dressing No. 3, garnish with pimiento or beets, serve on lettuce.

Spanish Bean Salad One cup Spanish beans cooked tender, small pink (canned red kidney beans will do); chop sweet green pepper, one­ fourth cup, tablespoon each of onion, ripe sweet pepper, parsley and cucumber, mix with beans, serve with Spanish dressing No. 1.

Spanish Tomato and Egg Salad Peel smooth just ripe tomatoes, slice in three slices across, place on lettuce leaf, put border around of hard boiled whites of eggs, stand hard boiled yolk in center, pour over Spanish dressing No. 1.

Stuffed Tomato Salad Scald and peel large tomatoes, remove center, mix with equal parts celery, green chile, onions, fry in little olive oil and lemon juice, salt to taste, fill tomatoes, teaspoon Spanish dressing No. 1, sprinkle little chopped parsley and grated cheese, set on ice, serve on lettuce.

Spanish California Ripe Olive Salad Remove seed from ripe olives, fill with mixture of cottage cheese, pimiento, salt, paprika, parsley, press together, serve on lettuce leaf, cover with Spanish dressing No. 1.

Spanish Moulded Salad Chop enough ripe tomatoes to fill a cup, half cup cucumber, one­fourth cup celery, one­fourth cup green sweet peppers, tablespoon onion, one­half teaspoon chile powder, salt to taste. Dissolve one tablespoon gelatine in one cup tomato juice, pour over above, mix and mould, when firm cut in squares, serve with Spanish sauce Nos. 1 or 2 in lettuce leaf.

Spanish Cucumber and Tomato Salad Pare and chop fine one good­sized fresh cucumber. Shred sufficient cabbage to make one pint, throw in cold water for one hour; scald and peel one good sized tomato and chop fine. Remove the seeds from one large sweet pepper, chop

46

Classic and mix with the tomato. When ready to serve drain and dry the cabbage. Put into salad bowl a layer of cabbage, then a layer of cucumber, then a layer of tomato and a layer of pepper; sprinkle with a few drops of onion juice; then another layer of cabbage and continue until all the material is used. Serve with dressing No. 2.

Spanish Cabbage Salad Two cups shredded cabbage red and white mixed, two tablespoons chopped roasted chestnuts, two of pecans, mix with dressing No. 2 and serve in lettuce cups.

Rice Salad A cup of boiled rice; four hard­boiled eggs, and one head of lettuce. Arrange on platter, alternate layers of rice, shredded lettuce leaves, slices of hard­boiled eggs and dressing No. 1. Over the top layer of dressing press the yolk of an egg through a sieve and garnish the edges with a layer of lettuce leaves and radish tulip. Chop cress and cabbage, equal parts, add few minced chives, add one­fourth cup cream to one­half cup salad dressing No. 3 and serve over salad. ###

47

Classic

48

Poetry

Four

49

Title: Thiais Village Credit: (c) Gabriel Mtz. Aguirre ­ http://www.gmaphoto.com/

50

Nonnie Augustine

Editorial

51

Poetry

Elizabeth P. Glixman is our guest poetry editor for the summer issue. She brings her insight, expertise, and love of good writing to the job and we think you will agree that her ear for the language and music of poetry and her appreciation of visual imagery has given us a remarkable collection of poems.

Elizabeth is a poet, artist and writer. She is the author of the poetry chapbooks: A White Girl Lynching, Cowboy Writes a Letter & Other Love Poems, both published by Pudding House Publications, The Wonder of It All published by Propaganda Press and I Am the Flame published by Finishing Line Press. Elizabeth has also been the Interview Editor for Eclectica Magazine. (www.eclectica.org) She has a teaching degree as well as a degree in fine arts (studio arts) and has worked with children and adults in arts and educational programs. Her poetry, fiction and interviews appear in numerous print and online publications.

Nonnie Augustine

52

John Saunders

This Morning I met Seamus Heaney at Tullamore Train Station standing in for the regular station master.

“She’ll be late,” he said, punching my ticket, his peaked cap cocked North on his creamy head.

“I don’t mind, sure we can have a chat,” I replied, “maybe you’ll recite a couple of poems.”

“This old train’s a long time coming and my head’s sweating, my mind’s a mess.

Don’t you know all success will end in failure, Yes, all this failure is no great success.”

“Sounds more like Bob Dylan than you,” I say.

“It is," he smiles “and isn’t he great.”

The slow train was visible in the distance.

We stood together, looking down the tracks, the sun smiling on our big backs.

53

John Saunders

The Game It bounced back to me as soon as coaching began, how a forward or backward move is a sideways shuffle and defence is a chaos of shadows and waving arms, that the object of the game is to block without touching.

It is the ultimate battle of strategy, stamina and skill, to slam dunk the ball over sky stretched heads, dance the ballet of dribble, pass and rebound, listen to the rhythm of bounce on wood, passes deflected, until the ball is stolen and an offence makes the basket.

How many games did I play, win, or lose?

What have I learned after all these wasted years?

Will he succeed or fail ­ break the same rules?

54

Howie Good

personal history At one job interview, I’m asked the last book I read. I have to think a moment. The Big Book of Baby Names. In this country, you can easily become the sort of person you never wanted to be, broken statuary along your path, a secret hiding place just ahead, schoolgirls whispering behind their hands.

* April unfolds explosively, leaf by black­spotted leaf. The world becomes so overloaded that it tilts far to one side. I turn back at the thought of encountering a pregnant homeless woman shuffling along a street of pawnshops and check cashing stores. The green envelope that appears among the mail contains an invitation to the wedding of people I never met.

* I’m another troubled middle child who grew up breathing the persistent dust of anti­ anxiety meds. Clouds mope about. Babushkas drink a fifth a day. There are many laws, but few arrests. My heart swims around like a black goldfish in a clear plastic bag – what happens when spring arrives fashionably late.

55

Howie Good

an armed man lurks in ambush A bird whistles like a bullet fired from hiding. I pick up a stone and put it in my pocket just in case. Jews are each given a brush and a can of white paint and told to number the trees. I take a piss against the wall, a wrinkled old woman peering over my shoulder. The ground shakes at shorter and shorter intervals. And such wind!

Like a sword waving in glittering circles above our heads! I wasn’t born with so many questions. I acquired them the way prehistoric fish acquired limbs. You don’t want friends, you want admirers, my therapist accuses. I spend the rest of the afternoon in the car. Twice every hour on the radio, Major Thomas E. Kennedy of New York dies again when a suicide bomber detonates a dynamite vest.

56

Joan Colby

Arbitrations The color of running water. or a shaded wasteland lost in distinctions is also the color of unpainted fences or barbed wire.

The ocean on the day someone drowns.

Small rodents, distractions, of prayer, irresolution and philosophy.

A monk in a gray hood carries our hopes gently in his hands. A gray horse waits in the rain.

57

Sheila Black

Sunflower My sister says what hovers over her— wings in stone, the movement stilled but flowing as in a rose­ colored marble. If the flesh could be so removed from the merely cellular.

Metaxu as Plato describes it—the voyage and back, like the game of fingers linked, broken, the games of children on playgrounds, Red Rover, the line calling as if to the dogs. And love which moves through, feels expansive even though the frame is small. My son this morning tells me he will not believe it—that we live on a ball that circles through space, that so much surrounds us, and we are so alone we can’t see it, letting out a breath as we pull on to our house on our dead­ end street, the big mulberry in the yard now yellowed, dead— a few days—at most a week— the plate­like leaves will curl and fall.

When the car hums into the drive­ way, we both close our eyes, try to feel the earth move, feel nothing.

The blind looking in. I never

58

Sheila Black

understood why Psyche is prohibited from seeing him—because she would be afraid, because the large is too large? My sister says, What cannot be reached, her arms above her head, hands opening like heads of sun­flowers.

59

Sheila Black

Short Shrift The square of paler light from the window and before sunrise. The tree on the corner that seems to keel over from an overdose of blossom. Yellow dog licking her hand again. Bus windows now in rain and the click of the wipers. Moment before the moment she straightens her coat, smoothes her hair. That one time she saw him walking to meet her, and he didn’t know she was there. “Irradiated”—that word and “apparate,” from “apparition,” even if it doesn’t exist. The creek that returned even though she believed it gone for good—that year of too much heat. Waist­high grass that tickles too much. Bluefly, dragonfly dead on the sidewalk. Bluebonnet on the highway.

The story someone told her—and why wouldn’t it be true?—about the development behind their house, and when the bulldozers came someone noticed a doe standing so still in the smallest patch of weeds.

60

Changming Yuan

My Crow after so many years the white crow i had been keeping as a pet finally flew away without a single moment of hesitation through the back window blown open by a gust of wild wind last night into the storm of black snowflakes falling down right from heaven

61

Paul Hostovsky

Romantic I'm thinking of moving to Keats Street in Winthrop. Because I love the idea more than the thing. I don't love Winthrop, which is too close to the airport. And I don't love moving, which is stressful and derailing.

I love Keats, though. And I could take the train to work from Revere. And I love the idea of writing a poem on the train about my derailing move to Keats Street in Winthrop near Revere, the conceit of the U­Haul with its mouth open and the long metal tongue of the ramp sticking out in the driveway, a table and chairs on the sidewalk, boxes and boxes of books, a reading lamp, the low­ flying planes arriving and arriving and a few books spilling thunderously onto the lawn.

62

Paul Hostovsky

Aubade The sun is raising its hand.

It's practically levitating in its seat, reaching its fingers up as high as they will go, spreading them, wiggling them, stretching and straining its toes and kicking out its feet, exploding with oh, oh, oh, I know, I know, I know.

It's dying­­the sun is simply dying to get the earth's attention. But the earth turns an infinitely patient, sardonically tilted, patronizing eye toward the sun, and the birds juke and jeer and the trees bend over backwards with laughter. And what can the people do but get up, urinate, roll their eyes and yawn at the sun's same old wrong answer.

63

Steven Jacobson

Ocean’s Alive the emerald sea washes against the jagged rocks in successive attempts. crashing and displaying a mighty show of force while polishing and smoothing the craggy shoreline. the air tastes of saltiness and the sea gulls rampage the sky, circling around for morsels of food. the golden fiery orb bears down while a gentle breeze offers a reprieve from the heat. a myriad of sunken footprints cover the beach, littered with sea shells and small crabs while the tide is ebbed. life is measured and realized to be precious and worthy of special regard.

64

Larry Thomas

The Goatherd’s Fingers They move a dark palimpsest of his labors, more the cloven hooves of animals than the tender appendages of men.

Even in his sleep they move, as if to the muted drums of his dreaming.

They tremble in the moonglow, warmed by the ragged bellows of his breath, redolent with the musk of teat and udder.

65

Colm Scully

A Poem Remembered Between these quays a book store once overflowed its surplus of frayed and fretted book spines.

Its fusty cluttered causeways captured in urbane verses.

I hear the author’s voice.

Rummaging with the owner, the thud and spring of book piles, a search for Rousseau’s letters.

The banter between strangers amid the dusty sparkle of sun slits across shelves.

Recital at the counter.

Does any one else remember his long forgotten poem?

66

Short Stories

Five

67

Title: The Stuff of Dreams Credit: (c) C. Mannheim, Ibidemimages@yahoo.com

68

ly South By

Ricky Ginsburg 69

Fly South

Zongxian dropped out of a comfortable thermal, nearly a thousand feet above the ocean, following his ragged formation of twenty­one gulls, survivors of a grueling two­week journey down the Atlantic seacoast, as they descended to the surf. The lead bird, Qiulian, a female, one year his senior, splashed head first into the light chop of clear blue water, spiraling up seconds later with a small silver fish wriggling in her beak. Lightly skimming the surface, the first wing of gulls behind her overshot the school and coasted low enough to dust the sand before turning back toward the ocean. With daylight disappearing, as the sun slivered between the tall buildings that grew beyond the dunes, they were only a couple of hours north of their winter roost. The joy of the long rest now foremost in their minds. Unfortunately, none of them had eaten for over two days. Nesting would have to wait until hungry gullets were sated.

They had been a flock of twenty­five when the sun was just an orange glow on the horizon the previous morning. Lifting off in the light breeze, Zongxian looked back as three males skittered to the ground within seconds of each other, no strength left to urge their wings further, no breath in their will to continue.

Perhaps they would find food at the hands of some generous beachgoer. Perhaps a live fish would wash ashore within reach of their last waddling steps. Zongxian gave it little thought, turning his gaze south, not even sure of their names. There was nothing he could do that wouldn't jeopardize his own survival.

The weather in New Jersey had fooled them, summer stayed late, autumn even later. When winter exploded in the middle of the night, sparked by a frigid Canadian clipper, the birds awoke freezing and unprepared for their annual journey south. Not that there was luggage to pack, but several days of hearty feeding was necessary to marshal the young, the first­timers, for the rigors of constant flight. A mother and four of her seven chicks perished the afternoon they embarked.

As fearful as the weather could be, gull­hungry predators awaited them with each mile they flew closer to

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temperate climates. A hawk took a female Zongxian had mated with recently, as the brood stirred to life on the morning of their eighth day. He and several of the other males chased the aggressor for over a mile inland before turning back to the coast. While they were gone, a second hawk had killed a young male, who tried to protect the flock on his own.

This was Zongxian's sixth migration to South Florida, the number of fellow travelers he'd seen lose the battle with Mother Nature on these journeys was twenty times that. Lowering his head to scan the water for prey, Zongxian felt the muscles in his neck tighten and pinch with the effort; his wings just wouldn't give the air a full measure when they beat. Shuddering in a sudden crosswind, he wondered to himself, "How many more times will I survive this trip?"

The outgoing tide had exposed the flat runway of a sandbar several yards offshore. Trapped between it and the beach, thousands of small bait fish became dinner for the hungry flock. Ever vigilant as to the shroud of twilight slowly draping itself over her charges, Qiulian took to the sky, shouting at the feasting gulls to follow. Zongxian slid in next to her, wingtips barely touching, as they cleared a line of feathery green Silk Pines leaning away from the constant on­shore breeze. The trees formed an anguished border, tilted to the west as though they were trying to lift their roots and run away from the ocean's persistent roar. For Zongxian, they were a landmark, a point on a map that would never be printed, yet clear as a billboard in his mind. In a single swoop, he arced below and in front of her, taking the lead as he had done for years, guiding the birds over the last few miles.

He had led the flight once, four years ago, from the swamps east of Savannah all the way to their rooftop perch in Ft. Lauderdale. A storm that grounded them in the false security of thick marsh weeds had taken Kaiping, a lead female who'd birthed over a dozen of his offspring. She'd tried to guide the flock into a wooded patch at the edge of the swamp and was struck by a falling tree limb in the wind.

Zongxian had flown mid­phalanx from the Jersey shore and simply took over when he realized she was crippled and unable to fly. Halfway down the Florida seaboard, the gulls were ambushed by a large flock of vultures when Zongxian selected a hammock that he thought was unoccupied for their night's rest.

Nine of their troupe died that night; only eleven lived to see the sun come up from their rooftop on the beach a fortnight later. Zongxian vowed to bring up the rear from that day forward, but was always granted the honor of leading the birds for the last few hours of the trip.

The route turned due south again, as Zongxian spotted the water tower painted with palm trees to his west. A small group of Canadian geese had claimed its struts in decades past and over time had grown into a winter community of more than one hundred squawking birds that he could hear snippets of conversation from, even several miles away. With the lights of the airport in the distance, Zongxian again banked hard, this time toward the east, searching the horizon for the four blinking lights that marked their building Unbeknownst to the gulls, the building ­ a condominium that had been vacant for several years, save for rats, snakes, and several species of spiders that had decorated all of the empty dwellings with their filigree ­ had become an eyesore for the surrounding neighborhood. Amidst a fanfare of sirens, horns, and whistles, a demolition crew had razed the building several months ago in a shudder and thud of dynamite. All of the landmarks Zongxian needed were there to lead him in, but their final destination had vanished.

The warning lights that had marked the corners of the missing building weren't as red as the others,

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in fact, owing to the visual acuity of the gull's retina, each of the thousands of blinking red lights they passed on the journey south had a unique tint. The ones Zongxian was looking for were a bit more to the orange side of the rainbow and one of them, closest to the ocean, blinked much slower than the other three, a cadence he knew as well as his own heartbeat.

Passing the last landmark, the neon arches of one of their favorite dining spots, Zongxian climbed a hundred feet above and ahead of the rest of the flock and began a slow circle to the north thinking that as tired as he was, maybe he'd been off target. There was another pair of golden arches a mile north of the one he'd just passed, Zongxian dove out of the sky toward them, but slowed as he saw the color was more white than the solid yellow now behind him. The flock followed him around to the west and the familiar water tower, turning back into their route and soaring once again toward the coast. But the building was gone.

Zongxian made a slow sweeping arc around the area, coming lower with each turn, and finally drifted down to the deserted beach. Qiulian landed next to him and together they stared at the empty hole where there should have been a large coral­colored building with white balconies. The other gulls, squawking and bleating out complaints, gathered around the two leaders, anxiously wondering why they weren't high up in the safety of their roost.

Nodding once to Qiulian, Zongxian stepped back from the assemblage and cawed several times, loud enough to bring silence. He walked around them, stopping between the flock and the missing building and cawed again, but just once, taking to the air as the sound disappeared into the crash of a wave.

His leadership had again been questioned, tested, and it had failed. It was now his responsibility to save the flock and regain his standing. Zongxian took a deep breath and for the first time in his life, questioned whether he was still capable of such a task.

There was another colony of gulls on the roof of a tall building several blocks south, a group that they shared mates with over the years. Zongxian figured if their number was small enough, perhaps the two flocks could share the roost. This plan showed little promise though, as their colony, from the Canadian Maritimes, had left a month earlier than normal on a hunch by one of their elders that the cold would come unexpectedly. What little space they had left had been filled by an assortment of Sandpipers, a noisy family of Orioles, and a squirrel, who chased Zongxian around the roof until he leapt for the sky.

He continued south, coming in low over several buildings to check for occupancy, his luck and fortitude running dry. The last rays of sunlight had been smothered by clouds in the west an hour ago and Zongxian was now navigating by moonlight. He knew the gulls would be fine sleeping on the beach, not the most comfortable arrangement and certainly not adequate quarters for the entire winter, but they'd done it before. However, having accepted the position of authority, wrestling it from Qiulian with a single word, Zongxian would not rest until he'd located satisfactory lodging for the entire clan.

Lost and disoriented, Zongxian glided to a landing at the back of a line of stores. He waddled to an overturned trashcan and picked through the debris, finding several pieces of stale bread and a half­eaten dinner roll. A light sprinkle of rain began falling and he took cover under the lid of an open dumpster until it passed. With a break in the clouds allowing the moonshine to spray across the sky, Zongxian scurried into the air, figuring if nothing else, he'd be able to find his way back to the flock.

The wind had blown him much further in from the coast then he first suspected; the rooftops here considerably lower in elevation than the skyscrapers on the beach. Most were surrounded by palms and thirty­foot tall Ficus trees, those already home to indigenous birds or too small to accommodate the remaining twenty­two gulls in his flock. Passing a mosaic of orange and pink roofs, a cluster of large

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buildings loomed in the distance. The tallest of the buildings, an ominous structure of mirrored glass, had several large antenna masts along with a small water tank. With an ample supply of twigs and dead palm fronds for nests, Zongxian saw it as an acceptable substitute for the missing building on the beach.

What he didn't see was a family of owls living in the cluster of palms closest to the building. To an owl, a seagull is as popular a snack as a baitfish is to a gull. Even though a gull can outmaneuver and, for long distances, outpace an owl, if the hooters get the upper claw it becomes a death grip that no gull will ever escape.

Zongxian landed on the roof less than twenty feet from the alpha male of the brood.

If the cloud cover had thickened, the owl, even with its natural gift of night vision, might have missed Zongxian, as he was only on the roof for a few seconds before a door opened and someone came out from the fire exit. But at the moment the door squeaked open, the moon broke through the clouds, and the gull's white body became a glowing lump of food in the owl's eyes.

The owl glided out of the palm with less noise than a feather falling on a puddle, its talons opened wide as it swooped toward Zongxian. It would have been an easy kill if the man on the roof hadn't shouted in amazement at the size of the huge bird. Zongxian had no idea what the man was saying, but the sudden motion with his arms, as though he was trying to fly, was enough to guide the gull's attention toward the owl's six­foot wings less than a yard away.

Zongxian folded his wings in close and dove to right just as the owl let out a death screech that frightened the man on the roof back inside. One of its claws caught a single feather on Zongxian's back, yanking it free and causing the gull to tumble to one side in pain. The owl's steep dive took it past its intended target, far enough that Zongxian was able to spin clear of the attack and flap hard into the night sky.

But the owl recovered just as quickly, swinging a wide semicircle around the antenna array, and coming up from behind the gull at close to an equal pace.

Had Zongxian not been as tired as he was, he would have been able to accelerate away from the predator and fly for the safety of the beach and reinforcements from the flock. One owl and one gull is a fair fight if your money is on the owl; one owl against six gulls and the odds run in favor of the masses. However, his burst of speed was short­lived, as Zongxian called on muscles that were long overdue for a respite. His only hope was to get a lucky shot at the owl's thick neck, a peck in the right spot and the pain might be enough to dissuade the owl from continuing the fray.

Taking advantage of his smaller size, Zongxian flew headlong into the nearest Ficus tree, clattering through the leaves and thin branches at the crown. He hurtled out the other side and flew around the corner of the building. But this was the owl's territory and every square foot of it was air and turf it knew as clearly at night as it did during the day. It saw the gull go into the tree, followed it by the flutter of leaves, and was waiting for Zongxian when he rounded the building.

The owl's claw caught Zongxian in the left side, tearing a deep gash through feathers and skin; a streak of crimson stained the gull's white body, tiny drops of blood trailing behind it as it fell. Triumphantly, the owl spread its wings and dove after the gull, the taste of the kill driving its passion. Even as Zongxian gathered his wits and fought against the pain, the owl closed the distance between them with frightening speed.

The sudden flash of lights blazing on in a corner office startled both birds, blinding the owl more than the gull. Zongxian dropped low to the ground, his belly nearly scraping the gravel parking lot, as the owl

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roared past him and sideswiped the trunk of a palm. Dazed, the owl managed to fly up to its nest while Zongxian raced hundreds of feet above it into the moonlit void of the South Florida night. He circled the owl's aerie once, mustering all the bravado he could, and screamed out a warning to the owl and his family.

He'd be back in the morning, in the daylight, and he wouldn't be alone. Twenty­two birds had traveled south for the winter seeking warmth and shelter from the cold. Twenty­two birds were coming to live on top of this building and no curved­beak hooter was going to chase them away. Zongxian might never make this journey again, but others would, and they would know that Zongxian had led the way. ###

74

OOD FRIDAY — MARY MAGDALEN

by

Beate Sigriddaughter “...and many women were there beholding afar off”

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Good Friday – Mary Magdalen

...and, yes, I was with them.

I speak to you from that shimmering distance. The cool of night has lifted. The sun burns into the sand. I speak to you from its hot wind shadows. I speak to you from its dolorous weight. God’s son asks for water. I am too far away to hear. They torture him with vinegar.

For two thousand years you have celebrated this day of slaughter. What have you learned?

I speak to you from a time of sorrow and weakness. Women were stoned for making love. Men were crucified for believing in God. What have we learned? And how did we ever learn to diminish, to kill each other so?

My heart hangs twisted between hope and despair. Sacred lives trickle and shift like sand raked by wind.

I do not want his sacrifice to be in vain.

“Master,” I said, “must there be sacrifice at all?”

He looked up from the sand in which he liked to trace shapes and words. “Beloved, some things in life are worth a sacrifice. Peace is, and love is. Sacrifice is never necessary. Sometimes, though, it is the price exacted.”

He could have stirred up rebellion. Many would have fought at his side. His life­blood message was, you do not increase peace or love by fighting.

What does it feel like to watch your beloved prodded in the sun, thirsty, up the gritty hill, in order to be crucified?

Look around. Ask a woman whose husband is sent into action, whose son is sent to the front.

There is a numbness, a distance of disbelief. Death slides between you like a pleading grin that hangs in your faces as you try to reassure one another. The truth is, he just got a one­way ticket to death. He might not return.

You pray on your knees. You know that miracles exist. Riddled with doubt, you keep telling yourself that you believe. You pray so hard, you see stones glitter with pity.

A miracle is something like a simple law of life. If no one nails his hands, his feet to the cross, if no one raises the cross, then life continues. If no one raises these guns, these swords...so possible...the hammer not raised, the nail not nailed in.

You keep praying. You make your private deals with God. You remember even men with stones all ready in their hands have laid them down again when fearless words were spoken.

You would give your life if his could be spared that way. But your life is not wanted now.

It is not nearly as important as his.

A mad thought grinds in the brains of people with clout, and you are helpless.

What does it feel like to have your loved one nailed to the wood?

I am numb. I am ill. I am so full of hope.

My nerves have forgotten me. I place one foot in front of the other in the sand. This cannot be. This is my friend, my master. He touched. He ate, drank wine. He slept.

I am waiting for the miracle. What will it look like? God’s will—I know this—cannot be slaughter. My heart knows this.

Was I his lover? His wife? Does it matter?

It was a man’s world then. It is a man’s world now. I was a footnote. Yes, and I sat at his feet like a child.

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I wanted to serve him forever.

And so I got sprinkled into unauthorized texts—a few kisses on the mouth, a special love. Two thousand years later, women are still footnotes in this awkward version of reality—ciphers, trophies, curiosities.

I stepped through the sand, heavy with dread and light with hope, tied to the reluctant muscle of my being. I wanted resolution. Not his death. I wanted to behold the miracle.

I was so convinced that there would be a miracle. I stood with the women, afar off, to watch the miracle take place.

I cannot understand how cruel we can be with one of our own. Never have I heard of lions joking and rolling dice at the foot of the cross of one of their own they have just nailed there to die. Never have I heard of tigers crucifying their males, stoning their females—savoring the spectacle, the agony, the body that keeps twitching with persistent will to live despite the pain, the depletion.

My torment was that I was utterly helpless.

Of course I was in love with him. There was nothing pious about my love, but it was sacred, oh, yes.

He was a man with all of God’s beauty. How could I not love him, and in him the glory of life?

Such love—any love perhaps—is never deemed significant enough for history.

I loved him.

I would have given him all that I had and anything else he might ask of me, and more—oil, spice, my hair to dry his feet with a caress. He was a prince of peace among the paupers so intent on slaughter.

I stumbled in the sand and fell to my knees. Today the women kneel on cold wood or carved stone—old women often, with kerchiefs on their hair, or respectable hats. They come in their sadness and offer empty, broken, shriveled, yearning lives. They come and believe—he hears them. They dream of a young God righting the unbalanced, toppling world, giving himself, doing what gods do, with reverence for life.

They dream of redemption in this place where they were sent as girls to have a great weight placed upon their life’s exuberance, a lid on the bubbles of joy that burst from the effervescence of being. They pray to be given back that beauty of being—alive.

Iraq, Vietnam, Korea, the Philippines, Tokyo, Paris, London, Dresden. A woman trembles in her lover’s arms on the eve of his leaving. Later she only trembles with his memory, and with the dread of what it means to have a loved one called up to likely death.

You walk up to Golgatha, one step, then another, with his mother by your side, your eyes on his body, bloody with torture and wretched with humiliation.

Have we bred no end of cruelty into our men? Now they are forced to force themselves upon the beauty of life and make it count for nothing. Nothing is honored until long after death.

The high sun breathes life­giving, but still indifferent power. Everywhere there is a cross, a death. The sand burns the soles of his feet, and mine.

“Master, are you trying to prove that you can live your truth without shedding another man’s blood?

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And can you do that without spilling your own?”

Is death just the ripeness of life tearing open to release its seed?

Am I the one he saved from being stoned to death? It makes a pretty story. I then followed him, a beautiful sinner, saved.

“Woman, where are your accusers?”

No one comes forward to accuse.

What is this preoccupation with sin? When just being alive seems already a sin, to love with touch is certainly unspeakable.

I am in love. I wish I could change his terrible philosophy, his love for this stark father vision of God, for barren laws. I wish I could make him understand that light and life is our gift from God, so much more beautiful than any of us could have dreamed.

But we twist it and twist it and twist it, until it is a hewn length of tree standing up, reeking of blood, pain and fear, and not bearing fruit.

Women often love a man in pain they hope to heal. So many of us stand at a cross, afar off, not daring to come closer.

We offer water with our pitcher when he passes by. We sob. We wipe up the blood with our clothes. We scream in our helpless souls.

“And still, Master, I do not want to stop you from doing what is so important to you.”

Here is my staggering dream: I reach the cross before the first nail goes in. I say, “Stop.” So simple. Just “stop.” Reaching out with an unbelievable hand.

Is there a knife in my back for dreaming too much?

In dreams I live in strength and tenderness. Footnotes contain the unwritten. Nothing is spelled out about the women watching from afar.

Yet once we enter the ritual circle of slaughter, we fear the knives in our backs, the stones poised to crush our skulls, our kidneys, our breasts, as though to teach us to practice for death all life long.

But death is easy. Our frailty is its guarantee. Life is what calls for mastery.

It’s not as I thought it would be. The sky tears. It is raining.

Among the women in the distance, I am too dizzy with dread to notice the soldiers roll dice for his clothes, or the vinegar sponge.

We shiver with fear and with fever, first in the sun, then in the rain. We do not have the strength left for another step forward to lay a hand on the soldier’s arm. We stand and we shiver.

What would it look like a few steps closer?

Perhaps I would not have that knife in my back, but merely provoke a quick, humiliating scuffle.

I struggle, slip and stumble on the sand. “No. Let me be. Let him be. Let me go to him. He has done nothing to die for.”

“Just look at the bitch! She has the hots for him still. Hey, bitch, he can’t do it to you any longer.

But I’ll be happy to.”

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A soldier grabs my shoulders, rips my black shawl. I spill from torn cloth to the sand. They spit with laughter. If I am lucky, one of the other soldiers stops him, saying, “Cool it, Tertius. Let her be.”

The other women shiver and look on with dread and love from afar off.

It’s not that God is indifferent. He yearns for our love as much as we for his.

Look how heavy his sky is with thunder and downpour, how sparkling his sand is in the sun, the dust in his air.

Can you not see that God isn’t the one destined to save his son from human hands? This was my loved one’s mission, to stop the slaughter by making it visible. If he doesn’t succeed, who will?

How much I want to reach for him.

After the death, the women dance their agony. They trample the green wheat of spring. How dare you, God? They sway at the altars, buckling in their knees, their spines. How dare you, God? But God’s laws are simple, you see. Sons are not killed by God’s will, but by human bullets, nails, swords, bombs. Husbands, brothers, fathers, neighbors.

You haven’t come this far merely to poke in my suffering for jewels.

Why don’t you seek my joy instead? Why don’t you ever come to seek my joy, the spring blossom pleasure, the quivering lantern of dragonfly wings?

I know the answer of course.

I am one of you, twisted, and seduced by death, seduced for thousands of years, by a suffering that compels us to love, to wish that we could heal, allowing wounds, accepting the burden of soothing.

The women, the footnotes, are always funding the truth, some with their broken passions, some with frigidity, and some with money. And all the men seem so in love with pain.

“I wish you could love life enough to stay with us, my lord.”

It is not God who forsakes my beloved.

God is as helpless as the women lurking in the distance.

I beg you, women of the future, reach back into my past, give me the courage to step further still.

God is as powerful and as helpless as the sun. We have to finish the reality. That’s the contract we enter when we accept the prize of life.

God, give me the courage for one more step, for speech instead of silence.

Women hang back in the shadow with useless wisdom, huge­eyed like caged monkeys, oblivious to power, which has become a very complicated dance. Wisdom whispers it doesn’t have to be this way.

Tradition spins, projecting and protecting, moneys, status, things, importance, impotence, and jealousies.

He loves. He is loved. He has the wealth of unbelievable power. Let’s cut him down a notch, or two.

This is how power will always be stopped. For some, it is the hardest to forgive that someone else can draw from the wellspring of love while they have long forgotten the taste. Money tastes more familiar, doesn't it?

The taste of laws and ownership is easy to remember.

Oh, let the law be love. And if it isn’t, let it become so.

The miracle is looking at each other, each by each, and starting to obey the simple laws of God. If you do not slaughter your brothers, your sisters, they need not die a violent death. There is no bargaining with this.

And there is this, the toughest law of God: God, too, obeys his own laws. God has no shortcuts. God

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can only nurture what reality has set in motion.

The miracle is in my hands. My hands are tied. Oh, let my hands be unbound.

How far is the glistening arm of the Roman soldier? How much sand between me and his muscle?

God cannot intercede. Remember that.

Ecce homo. He wants to prove that peace is possible. What more could we want? Life is who we are.

Life is what we wanted. There is no reason for rage in this world. There is no reason for love in this world.

Why then choose rage over love?

Sometimes a restless woman paces far away, as though she smells a possibility beyond the fence of fear. But mostly the women stand still, huge­eyed and helpless.

Even if I am wrong, I must walk with courage.

My body trembled for him in artless desire. If only I could show him the joy of this world, I thought, perhaps he would choose to stay, for my sake, for the sake of celebrating life.

But he was too taken with sorrow for that.

When all our avenues for ecstasy are blocked, then sorrow seeps in, like seeds of depression attaching themselves to DNA. And suddenly the law is all there is.

And then the law starts growing out of proportion, a powerful vine, choking the heart.

My loved one knew how to heal, how to pick wheat on the Sabbath, how to outwit the pious crowd of men intent on murder who came to test him with a woman who, the law decreed, had to be stoned with stones till she died.

Laws have always circled harsh around women, chaining us to years and tears of silence. You cannot commit adultery alone. But you dare not repeat such thoughts to the inflamed. They only punish you more then. For being a woman, for being wrong, for being their awkward, ever­present temptation. It’s faster to kill the temptation than to enlighten the tempted.

Do you wonder that we stand feverish and watch, like sad crows from the distance, skittish like starving cats? We have grown smaller, stunted in the distance, ugly with fear, like monkeys scattering at a clap of hands.

My body was flooded with fear. Also with hope. I didn’t want to believe that a decree of men of little consequence would triumph over his power, his life; or that he, like one addicted in his DNA to suffering, should choose the solemn sacrifice over the wild dance and dignity of life.

I, too, am subject to the laws of God. I didn’t believe he would go and let himself get slaughtered. Something, at the last moment, would happen to save him. I knew it. By the time I realized that nothing miraculous was going to take place unless I made it happen, it was too late. I was too weak with disbelief.

I was that miracle, you see, and I was too weak to happen.

We all dream that in the core of our being we can bring the seed of salvation to troubled men we love. We are not wrong.

Of course he was the son of God. Of course you and I are the sons and the daughters of life.

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In my attention to grief I became one of the sinners, witness to all this, first flooded with sorrow, then calm with acceptance that we took this life, this God, and shredded him to pieces.

Why did I not step in front of his precious body?

I was so small, confused, befuddled, and I kept believing against reason that it wouldn’t happen. In my distance, I even believed in the ability of God to do something so powerful that my beloved wouldn’t die, like a parent who has the magic to fix what we have broken.

Well, your church masters say triumphantly, he didn’t die, did he? He is still with us.

"Only, he was never human again. We believe in a savior who will not be human again. Do we then also believe in a salvation that will never be human again?

Ask the women with men at war how they pray, what miracles they beg for, how they believe their men will return, against all odds, and in the face of all reality.

I knew from the first I would be wounded by loving him, and by his love for a jealous God who excluded all else, especially all things of earth. Should he, in the desert, have chosen the green earth that Satan offered him, rather than the elusive love of God? True God is not jealous. True God is not at war with angels.

I could feel both his passion and his errors. That was perhaps my greatest sin: to know his errors, and not speak of them, for fear of embarrassing him, for fear of stopping the passion together with the mistake.

I also felt his blessing ways. Each moment in his presence was a gift. Keeping respectful silence seemed a small price to pay. And yet it was too great.

When he was dead, yes, I went to the cross to touch, too late, the lifeless feet, the blood­crusted flesh.

The flies sipped the last bit of life from his blood, which smelled metallic in coagulation. I remember the stench of fear. And still I kissed his stained feet. Behold, this is my beloved.

The diamond grains of sand ground into my knees, into the palms of my hands.

Did I rage against God? No, God raged against me.

When my loved one cried out on the cross, did he realize at last that he had prayed at the wrong altar?

It was not God he should have prayed to, but the men, the hearts of the men that had condemned him from senseless envy, the ones who were his equals, the ones who could have turned the tide.

And he should have prayed to the women who were on his side all along, because they were on the side of love and of life all along…but so afar off in. their fears.

You seem to care a lot whether we lay together in love. Is that so important?

I wanted nothing so much as to touch him, to love my lord. The love was important, not how he chose to receive it.

I wanted to kiss him, even his lifeless flesh.

I didn’t want him to be gone. I did not want to be apart from him.

Sadder than all is that, near two thousand years later, not much has been learned.

Be gentle with each other.

Don’t weep with me or for me today. Rather, reach back in time and give me the courage I need to step out of the shadows and put my hand on the Roman soldier’s arm. And pray for me to reach forward in

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time to give you the courage for a future of peace.

Pray with me at the foot of the cross of my lord. Pray that we may not just receive the blessings of his teaching like children do, but that we may also start to grow with them, as adults, as God’s sons and God’s daughters, strong against the sin of silence.

Pray to step forward from among the women watching from afar, who have been ridiculed, who have been trivialized, who have been humiliated, and yet, who still go forth and celebrate the beauty of life.

This is where the tears fade, the smudges, the odor of fear, the slime of carnage. This is the truth of a woman who wanted to love and be loved. To live. To protect.

You’ve seen me, red­cloaked at times in your salacious fantasies, kneeling in despair, in tragedy, in sorrow.

Don’t look there anymore. Look where my love for him was tenderness. I wanted to sit in the curl of his arm. I wanted to sit beside him and worship, for he taught me everything that he believed.

The walk was long up to the cross.

I am on my knees in the sand. If there is heckling, I can’t hear it. I only dream of standing up, of claiming my desire.

Come closer. I would offer you the future. Your hand on the soldier’s arm. Your word pregnant with power.

Stop. ### “Good Friday – Mary Magdalen” was first published in Moondance (Spring 2006) and is also posted on the author's website, www.sigriddaughter.com.

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he First Wife By

Yvette Flis

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The First Wife

Lilith woke thirsty and bent to drink at a pond. As she lowered cupped hands, her reflection came into view. She was filthy. Her hair was in knots, and small sticks and leaves wove through her curls.

Lilith sat down and combed fingers through her tangles. Clumps of mud rained on her thighs and feet. She worked her hair while the sun rose, and continued through the morning, oblivious to the sounds of the forest. New birds flew and sang in pairs. Shrubs shivered as animals moved through them.

She combed until her hair hung free of debris, and when she lifted her face to the world, noticed that everything moved in sets of two. Only she was alone.

A wind rose and whispered through the top of the trees. Lilith looked up. Adam sat in the crotch of an old oak, arms folded over his chest. He leaned against the trunk and smiled. "I’ve seen you,” he said.

“While you’ve been tending to your vanity, I’ve been watching. Does that make you feel good?” His gaze dropped from her face and lingered for a moment on her breasts, then rose again. The corner of his lips moved up a bit more, and his face pinked.

Lilith’s skin burned. “It doesn’t make me feel anything.” She stood and came close to the tree, shaded her face with a palm and looked closely at Adam, so different and yet familiar. “You have dirt all over you,” she announced.

“It’s not dirt,” Adam said. “I’m covered in dust. You're the dirty one.” He jumped down and when he was grounded, wiped his hands against each other and grasped Lilith’s elbow. “Shall we go?”

She jerked back her arm. “Where?”

“My place,” he replied.

He walked and Lilith followed, not to be less than he, but because he knew where to go, Lilith thought as she watched his buttocks jiggle. Each time his foot hit the hardened ground, his muscles shook, just once, and for only a moment. “You have a nice ass,” she said.

Adam stopped fast and turned to face her. His brow furrowed and he stared hard into her eyes.

“You are pretty forward,” he said. “Is that the right thing for a woman to say, or even think?”

Lilith stared right back, not daring to blink. A flame grew in her chest and suddenly his bottom didn’t seem nearly as inviting. “I say what I think when I want,” she said. “Surely you do the same.”

“I do, but I can. You are supposed to listen to me. Now come on.” With that, Adam grabbed her arm, turned and continued on his path. His footfall, even heavier than before, was quick and Lilith stumbled, but Adam did not slow down. She regained her balance with difficulty and jogged to keep up with him.

Lilith quelled the anger that grew within her. This was not a great way to start things. He was headstrong and willful, maybe as much as she. Lilith would bide her temper for a time, and with patience

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might be able to get him to see her side. But what if she couldn’t?

Their fast pace through the woods softened both tempers, and as they moved, it slowed until they fell in time and walked side by side.

She glanced up at him; his profile was sharp and not unattractive. His brow bent around large black eyes that darted over the lush forest. A long aquiline nose rose above full motile lips. His long, muscular limbs seemed built for action, and ended in broad hands and feet. She wanted to touch them.

Instead, she said, “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“I know.”

“But it’s true. And I’ll say as I feel.”

“Let’s not talk about it.”

“We’ll talk later.”

“I’ll be busy.” Adam set his jaw tight and loosened it, over and over. The side of his throat pulsed.

Lilith sighed. They walked in silence, through a valley and, after crossing a brook, turned to walk besides it. After a time, the brook broke out onto a sunlit meadow where in the distance, a lion moved over the back of a lioness, arched his back a few times, and released her. “What’s that? She asked.

Adam stopped and turned to face her. “That’s how the animals breed.”

“How odd,” Lilith said, “but I suppose they both maintain their balance that way.” She began walking again. Adam caught up with her, passed her, and pointed across the field, where a mound of soft hay had been piled between two trees. “There’s my place,” Adam said. “I have food. Are you hungry?”

“I don’t know.”

“We will see,” Adam said, and they walked to his nest. Adam knelt beside the piled hay, reached under a corner of it and pulled out a melon, cool from the shade. He broke it open and handed half to Lilith. He smiled. “Here. Try this.”

She took it. Adam bit into his half, and Lilith followed his example. Her eyes grew large and she smiled too. “It’s wonderful!” Under the flesh of her face, her jaws ached for a second and her mouth watered. Suddenly her middle felt hollow and she bit hard and fast into the fruit, gorging on it, and another that Adam gave her as he saw her need. She ate and ate until her jaw was tired and her belly full.

Then she lay back on the sweet hay, where Adam had reclined and had laughed as he watched her eat. She rolled on her side and said, “That felt good.”

“I remember,” Adam said. “When I awoke, I had no idea. You will see.” He rolled to face her and gently placed a hand on her shoulder. He drew her to him and she did not resist.

But as they moved to couple, she assumed the position she’d seen the animals take. He rolled her onto her back and slid above her, nudging her thighs apart with his knees.

“That’s not right,” she said and tried to press her legs together. He held his place, his strength greater than hers, and insisted. With a bit of force he was inside her.

“No,” she said and scooted her bottom back. “It’s not right. You can take me like the lions but I will not lie helplessly beneath you. Would you lie beneath me?”

“You will do as I command.” He insisted, with both his mouth and his body. *** Night rose and fell away while Lilith and Adam slept. Dawn unfolded around Lilith and she stretched to the morning. She shook her head, remembered, and ran palms over her hair. No mud, just random blades of hay. Lilith removed them, then rose and squatted by a tree.

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Adam lifted his head and watched. “You should move further away from this bedding than that.” He rolled off the hay pile and moved to the edge of the woods. “Here’s where I pee, and you should too.”

Lilith shook her bottom and stood up. “Are you going to tell me how to do everything?” she asked.

“It is my job to do so.” Adam approached a stern look on his face.

Again, thought Lilith, but she kept her mouth shut. Her chin pushed forward though, and she watched him come closer.

Adam stepped hard as he came, his fingers tightening and loosening. “I have been naming animals and directing action. I am experienced at it and you must do as the beasts do. I’m in charge and you are here for my pleasure.” His jaw clenched.

“For your pleasure? I don’t think so!” Lilith stood straight and thrust out her chest.

“Yes, that’s what I’'ve been told." He moved forward a step.

“No one's told me anything and I've had enough of your telling me what to do.”

“Me too,” Adam agreed. “This is not what I asked for.” He turned to leave but she followed close behind.

“What you asked for?” She raised her eyebrows. “You asked for me and I appeared? Wrong. I just woke up. That’s all.”

He jerked around, his lips twisted in his red face. “Yes, I asked for a mate and you awoke. You are mine.”

“No!” She spit at him. “I am not yours. Did you ask for a mate or a beast? I will not do as you choose, but as we decide together, and If we walk together it will only be as equals.”

“So be it,” Adam said, and he walked away. *** Adam did not return to the place where they’d slept. Lilith disposed of spent hay and replaced it with fragrant green grasses. As the day progressed, flies collected on the remains of their dinner. She gathered up the scraps and buried them by the riverbank. Evening came, her hunger returned so she scavenged. She watched small mammals to see what they ate, and followed suit. Lilith learned that although many ate grass, it tasted dull, not like the melons that Adam had fed her the night before, but she ate it anyway. The birds hunted for bugs. Lilith tried a spider. She tore off a leg and liquid from inside dripped down her forearm.

She licked it up – sweet but not filling. Lilith tried a beetle. Crunchy.

Night approached and Lilith slept, but not soundly. Rustlings in the forest and hoots from night birds demanded her attention.

Days passed. Adam did not return to the nest, so Lilith worked hard to make it her own. She brought fallen timbers from near the creek bed and formed a framework to hold the bedding. She collected flowers and fruit for future meals, and piled them on low branches to keep them away from the earth­bound insects.

In time, the area that Lilith knew increased, and small animals no longer scampered freely near her, unless under cover of the night and then only as she slept. She learned to move silently and to lay traps.

Lilith grew to move with grace in her environment. The nights lengthened and grew cold. Lilith saved the furs of small game she’d caught, and burrowed beneath them for warmth. Fresh fruit and vegetables became scarce so she worked harder at collecting them and ate less.

As the days shortened, the steady green forest leaves changed to scarlets and golds and then to brittle browns, which, when the winds blew, abandoned the branches. Lilith slept longer, and sometimes hid from the bitter cold through day and night. Her larder emptied and Lilith knew deep hunger.

But the cold season broke and led to longer days and more gentle nights. Lilith had been alone for so

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long that she was not certain if she had ever known companionship, or whether Adam had been part of the elaborate hunt dreams that kept her company as she slept, where she met people that looked like her and some that looked like Adam. She named them and felt powerful, and in the mornings never knew whether the events that had occurred at night were real, or had been thewandering of her lonely mind.

The spring grew and food became abundant again. Lilith’s larder swelled. She wandered further, exploring sometimes for days, and kept track of her traveling by attending to the sun’s position.

She had crossed two rivers and a mountain when she saw an otter skin left on a boulder. Its belly was sliced from throat to loin.. Another day she found a deer carcass thrown over a high limb, covered by large leaves. Could Adam have done it? At that moment, she remembered his touch and their coupling. She missed their one shared meal, like a blade in her heart, and yet Lilith was unsure whether she wanted to speak with him at all. His hard headedness and need to dominate still annoyed her. Nevertheless, she was curious about how he’d fared over the winter. She wondered if he’d thinned as she had.

Lilith wanted to see him. She hid beneath nearby shrubs and waited. She lay under the spring green bower and smelled what the wind brought her way: lilacs and lavender, a boar. Crickets called and time stood still. Lilith curled into a ball, rested her head on clasped hands, and dozed.

She woke with a start as heavy footfall in the distance thudded through the earth under her belly and hip. Its rhythm too regular – a two­step that could only have been that of a human. Lilith’s breath came fast in excitement. She slowed it and loosened her suddenly tense limbs. She raised her body and shifted a branch to watch what approached.

It was not Adam who broke through a thicket, but one like herself, smaller than Lilith, with dark hair tied off her face and animal skins wrapped across her breasts and over her gravid belly. Lilith knew she could easily best this woman so she simply watched as the other woman reached up and pulled the animal carcass free from the high tree limb. It came down on her with a thump and the woman fell. She groaned.

The woman, caught under the heavy weight, could not free herself. Lilith rose from her bower and lifted the carcass. The woman struggled to her feet. “That’s mine!”

“I know it is,” Lilith answered. “I can get all that I need for myself.” She let it fall. “I wanted to see if you were all right.”

“You hid.” The woman held Lilith’s gaze.

“Yes, I thought you would be Adam,” Lilith said. “But you are not.”

“I’m Eve, his wife. What do you want with him?” Eve's gaze focused and she set her jaw.

“Not one thing,” Lilith said and turned to leave. That Eve deserves Adam, Lilith thought. “Not one word of gratitude from her. Serves them both right.”

Lilith trekked towards her own territory. If she hurried, she could be there by the next morning.

She hadn’t gotten very far when she heard branches cracking and Eve’s heavy footfall approach.

“Wait,” Eve called. “I’m not as fast as you are.”

“Nor as quiet,” Lilith replied as she stopped and turned to wait. “You’ll get us both eaten if you carry on like that. What do you want?”

Eve came into view, breathless and supporting her swollen abdomen with her otherwise empty

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hands. “I don’t think I can carry the food back to our camp by myself. Adam felt certain I could do it, but he’s wrong. Would you help me?”

Eve’s soft brown eyes reminded Lilith of a fawn that shared her gentle river, and Lilith’s heart swelled.

Tiny frail Eve, soon to birth, had been sent on a quest beyond her capabilities and although she could try, Lilith saw Eve’s weakness, as she knew that Eve did not. Her large and unbalanced middle made her fair game for the wild beasts that roamed the forest. Eve’s mission was a sign of Adam’s continuing sense of superiority and command. How better to retain control over this woman than to show her exactly what she could not accomplish?

Adam’s a bastard, Lilith thought, but she said, “I will help you.”

The two women retraced their steps in silence. Eve led the way and turned back to look at Lilith often.

An uncomfortable smile played around her lips. Lilith could have ridiculed Eve for playing such a fool, for allowing that lug to treat her the way that he did, but Lilith didn’t. She just whispered thanks that she had not conceived too, and found herself as clumsy, cumbersome and helpless as Eve. How would she have survived?

They stopped at the tree where they’d met and Lilith hoisted the doe's body over her shoulder. “Let’s go,” she said. “I’ll take you near your camp, but not into it. I don’t want to see your mate. I don’t want to cause you any trouble.”

“Anything you could do would be great,” Eve replied. “But hold on a minute.” She scrounged among her pelts and extracted a gourd that hung from her hip. She removed a shaped stopper from its mouth, tipped the gourd to her lips and swallowed several times, then offered the gourd to Lilith.

Lilith took it and offered thanks before swigging off the gourd herself. She handed it back to Eve, and then followed her towards the camp.

Eve’s trail brought them through a valley carved by a fast moving stream that wound from the sunrise to the sunset. Near the far end of the valley, boulders had been gathered and stacked against a rock face. Palm fronds and Banana leaves lay over the top, interwoven together to provide shade. A man bent over a circle of stones, blowing embers into flames.

“That looks like Adam, “Lilith said. She dropped her load and faced Eve. “Can you get it from here?”

Eve looked nervously at Adam and replied, “I think so. Or I can get him to come and get it.”

“You realize, Eve, that you will have lied to your husband.” Lilith spoke deliberately, allowing some space around each word for impact. “I mean, if you let him think you brought it here all by yourself…”

Eve furrowed her brow and looked at the small doe crumpled on the dirt. “That’s true. I’m going to get him.”

Lilith continued, “But if you tell him that I helped you, he’s going to be angry. You didn’t do as you were told. ”She cupped her chin between her index finger and thumb, and then she slowly smiled while Eve’s face turned red. “What can you do?”

“I don’t know.” Eve lifted her face to meet Lilith’s smirk. “What can I do?”

Lilith placed her hand on Eve’s shoulder. She stared straight into Eve’s face and the light bounced in her eyes when she whispered, “Do what you need to do to keep the peace in your home.” She patted Eve twice, gave her a peck on the cheek, and left.

Eve turned to bid farewell, but Lilith was gone. Not even the leaves or grasses swayed to show that she had been there. Lilith peeked from behind a tree, Eve searched for her. Lilith’s smile spread. She knew just how quiet she could be, and now she'd put ideas in another's mind. Lilith was happy.

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Eve called to Adam and he turned to monitor her return. He crossed his arms over his chest when Eve struggled to pick up her burden. He shook his head as she staggered back to their camp.

Lilith leaned into the tree trunk, sucked on a tooth and pursed her lips. ###

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After Beatrix: MLF 2013

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POETRY BIOS

Editor Elizabeth P. Glixman is a poet, artist and writer. She is the author of the poetry chapbooks: A White Girl Lynching, Cowboy Writes a Letter & Other Love Poems, both published by Pudding House Publications, The Wonder of It All published by Propaganda Press and I Am the Flame published by Finishing Line Press.

Elizabeth was Eclectica.org's Interview Editor until recently. You can read her poetry, fiction and interviews in numerous print and online publications

Contributors Sheila Black is author of House of Bone and Love/Iraq (both CW Press). A third collection Wen Kroy is forthcoming from Dream Horse Press. A 2012 Witter Bynner Fellow in Poetry, selected by Philip Levine, she co­edited Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability (Cinco Puntos) with Jennifer Bartlett and Mike Northen. She lives in San Antonio, Texas.

Changming Yuan, 4­time Pushcart nominee and author of Chansons of a hinaman (Leaf Garden, 2009) and Landscaping (Flutter Press, 2014), holds a PhD in English, tutors, and co­edits Poetry Pacific with Allen Qing Yuan in Vancouver. Recently interviewed by PANK, Yuan's poetry appears in 709 literary publications worldwide, including Barrow Street, Best Canadian Poetry, BestNewPoemsOnline, Exquisite Corpse and Threepenny Review.

Howie Good, a journalism professor at SUNY New Paltz, is the author of the forthcoming poetry collection The Middle of Nowhere (Olivia Eden Publishing) and the forthcoming poetry chapbooks The Complete Absence of Twilight (Mad Hat Press), Echo's Bones and Danger Falling Debris (Red Bird Chapbooks), and An Armed Man Lurks in Ambush (unbound CONTENT).

John Saunders' first collection 'After the Accident' was published in 2010 by Lapwing Press, Belfast.

John is one of three featured poets in Measuring, Dedalus New Writers published by Dedalus Press in May 2012.

His second full collection Chance was published in April 2013 by New Binary Press.

Joan Colby has published widely in journals such as Poetry, Atlanta Review, South Dakota Review, etc.and has received many awards including an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship. She has 10 books, the latest “Dead Horses” from Future Cycle Press which will issue a “Selected Poems” in 2013.

Larry D. Thomas, a member of the Texas Institute of Letters, was privileged to serve as the 2008 Texas Poet Laureate.

He has published twenty collections of poems, the most recent of which is Uncle Ernest (Virtual Artists Collective, Chicago, 2013). His Larry D. Thomas: New and Selected Poems (TCU Press, 2008) was long­listed for the National

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Book Award. His poem in this issue of Linnet’s Wings is from his chapbook­in­progress titled, The Goatherd.

Steven Jacobson was born and raised in the Mid­west graduating from UW­La Crosse, WI with a double major in Physics and Mathematics. He has attended (8) classes from the Loft Literary Center, promoting all levels of creative writing. Steven's interest in writing poetry happened seven years ago, when he submitted a poem for Vail Place Newsletter for mentally challenged.

Paul Hostovsky is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Hurt Into Beauty (FutureCycle Press, 2012). His poems have won a Pushcart Prize and two Best of the Net Awards. To read more of his poetry, visit him at www.paulhostovsky.com Colm Scully is a chemical engineer from Cork. He has been published in Cyphers, The Stony Thursday Book, Poetry Bus, Wordlegs and Boyne Berries. He was shortlisted for the 2012 Fish Poetry Prize. He has guested in Cork and Limerick, and around Coventry as part of the Twin City Poetry Exchange 2011.

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The Linnet's Wings 2013