Chez Robert Giron

Baroque Style Music Is the Craze in Opera Now

2012-01-22T20:30:00.003-05:00

Finally I have heard an opera in English that didn't sound odd, strange, or flat.

This weekend the Met had its HD Live performance of The Enchanted Island which is truly a wonderful experience and one I would recommend without any hesitation.

The opera was devised and written by Jeremy Sams, who along with the all the creative cast, created a charming story line by mixing arias by Handel, Vivaldi, Jean-Philippe Rameau and others with a bit of Shakespeare to create the plot.

The creative crew includes:
Conductor, William Christie; Julian Crouch, Associate Director & Set Designer; Kevin Pollard, Costume Designer; Brian MacDevitt, Lighting Designer; Graciela Daniele, Choreographer; 59 Productions, Animation & Projection.

The signing cast:
Danielle de Niese, Arie; Lisette Oropesa, Miranda; Joyce DiDonato, Sycorax; David Daniels, Prospero; Anthony Roth Costanzo, Perdinand; Placido Domingo, Neptune; and Luca Pisaroni, Caliban.

It was simply magical how it was all woven together so well and performed with such finess that I am convinced that the medium for the English language in opera should be the baroque style.

Now, if it is Broadway, then of course that's another cup of tea altogether but English and the baroque style are what bread and butter are on the dinner table because they seem to blend in the operatic fashion one is accustomed to hearing opera perhaps in French, Italian and German. But sadly too often English falls flat but not in the baroque style.

So get yourself out and see the Met HD Live (repeat of this performance) or look for an opera in English sung a la baroque.

THE NSO:

Then after seeing this performance, I took in the NSO with guest conductor James Gaffigan, with featured pianist Ingrid Fliter.

The National Symphony Orchestra played very well, including the emotive US premier of Fluss ohne Ufer by composer Detlev Glanert.

Based on how the audience responded, the performances by all including Fliter hit the mark and one could not see anyone displeased in the least.

Maestro Gaffigan, bravo!

Poetry Workship Offered on Capitol Hill

2012-01-17T22:11:00.002-05:00

Tapping
Your
Creative Well—
In 2012!

Here is an opportunity to read poetry, get in touch with your personal Muse,
and experiment with new approaches to life and art….

Thursday Evenings
January 19 -February 9
Hill Center

Sessions begin with a discussion of a poem written by a well known,
contemporary author. You will also have an opportunity to: Enjoy Fun Exercises to help generate poems, which can be read aloud (if you choose) in a supportive atmosphere.

Write poems in voices of cranky relatives or loopy friends, or serious poems in first person—using vivid memories, plus current and future dreams.

Discover the poetry in your name and in the landscape of your life. Experiment with fresh, creative ways of thinking by tapping your creative well. Please bring 10 copies of a favorite poem by another poet or info about one you would like to write to the first class.

Teacher: PATRICIA GRAY, Author of Rupture: poems, and many anthologized poems

Time: 6:30 PM to 9:00 PM, 4 sessions.

Proficiency Level: Beginner/Intermediate

Place: The Hill Center, 921 Pennsylvania Ave., SE—near Eastern Market Metro

Remaining Spaces 10 (on January 3, 2012)

Register via: www.hillcenterdc.org/programs.php#writers-center
For Information: e-mail ariana@HillCenterDC.org
or the workshop leader at morepoetry@gmail.com

∞∞ In Cooperation with The Writer’s Center, Bethesda, Maryland ∞∞

Mary Ann Larkin Featured on ArLiJo / The Golden Globes

2012-01-15T22:28:00.003-05:00

Take a break from this extended weekend due to Martin Luther King, Jr., and our society that has decided to honor his life and contributions to our society, and read some poetry.

Here below is a sampling of Mary Ann Larkin's poetry from her most recent book of poetry.

Immigrant Daughter's Song

Gone, the silver-green silk of time
winding down centuries
of custom and kinship,
the pouring of the sea, the stars
on the slate of night, the moon
stamping the spire of the church
on the sand. Time itself changed
to a ticking, a dot on a line.
Customs of grace
and gentleness gone
name-saying and knowing
who begat whom
and when and where
and who could work
and who could sing
and who would pray
and who would not
and where the fish ran
and the wild plums hid
and how the old mothers
fit babies’ hands
to the five-flowered hollows
of blue ladyfingers,
and whose father fought whose
with golden swords
a thousand years ago
at Ballyferriter
on the strand below the church.
Gone from a silken spool unwinding
to rooms of relics and loss
behind whose locked doors
I dream, not daring to wake.

from That Deep & Steady Hum by Mary Ann Larkin (2010, Broadkill River Press). Reprinted by permission. Copyright © 2010 by Mary Ann Larkin.

To read more, click on this link:
Mary Ann Larkin on ArLiJo

The 69th Golden Globes:

And now to the Golden Globes, it seems I might have predicted the winners:

The film The Artist has won both Best Actor, Jean Dujardin, and best Picture: Comedy/Musical.

And The Descendants has just won for Best Picture: Drama and George Clooney won for Best Actor.

Meryl Streep has another win for The Iron Lady. What an incredible career she has had.

Then perhaps my favorite comedy Modern Family has won Best TV Comedy Series.

A good night and to all sweet dreams.

For the complete list, click here:
The Golden Globes

Catch a Film This Weekend--Bring in the New Year!

2012-01-06T14:51:00.004-05:00

The New Year has rung in and so far I'm recovering from body fatigue (a cold and work on my tooth)--it'll get better.

I've been busy getting tax information in order and need a break, sigh, yes, this has to get done and will but let me digress.

Since Christmas I've been able to catch a few moments of bliss:
1. Lovingly watching snow fall on the Franklin Mountains of El Paso before Christmas and perhaps all the while a bit anxious because I wasn't able to travel over the mountain to see my sister and nephews and nieces but wrapped up in getting my iPhone apps in order. Nonetheless, the snow was lovely and I got a day of needed lost time.

2. I heard Iestyn Davies, countertenor, perform at The Phillips Collection. Quite a treat considering that we had heard him the day before in "Rodelinda" from the Met via Live DVD. It's amazing what one can do with his voice, the first musical instrument, and yet still sound manly to boot in real life.

3. Yet the best escape was watching "The Artist" a silent film made in 2011. This is directed by Michel Hazanavicius, who also wrote the scenario and dialogue
(--for the reader). The stars: Jean Dujardin and Bérénice Bejo were heavenly and John Goodman does a very good job.

The silent George Valentin is seeing his career take a tailspin in the Hollywood of 1927 because of the Talkies, while his partner of sorts Peppy Miller's speaking acting career raises and eventually they are involved (I won't spoil it for you; you have to see this film.).

4. If you can't get to Hawaii but love seeing it in films, then go out and see "The Descendants" directed by Alexander Payne (Writers: Alexander Payne (screenplay), Nat Faxon (screenplay),with Nat Faxon (screenplay) & Jim Rash (screenplay) based on Kaui Hart Hemmings' novel).

George Clooney is the lead, with Shailene Woodley and Amara Miller. It's not a fun film but it's not "Terms of Endearment" but close; enough said.

So there you are--some suggestions for some safe escapes. Enjoy.

Annual Gival Press Poetry Award--Deadline Dec. 15

2011-12-05T23:54:00.001-05:00

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The 13th Annual Gival Press Poetry Award
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Deadline:December 15, 2011 (postmarked).
Our dates never change, if the date falls on a Sunday, then Monday becomes the default postmarked date.

Guidelines:
Theme:
Completely open.

Eligible Poets:
Open to all, national and international poets.

Language:
English.

Forms or Style of Poetry:
Original work, not a translation of someone else's poetry. Open to any form or style; simply good poetry.

Length of Manuscript:
At least 45 typed pages of poetry, on one side only.

Status of the Winning Manuscript:
The manuscript as a whole shall not have been published before. However, include an acknowledgment sheet to indicate any previously published poems in the collection (poem/journal/date). It is the responsibility of the poet to secure the right to publish previously published poems.

Format for Submittal:
Include a separate cover sheet with name, title of manuscript, address (street, city, state, electronic mail), and phone number. The poet's name should not appear on the pages of the ms. The numbered pages should be clipped together.

If the manuscript wins, the poet must make the manuscript available to Gival Press on an IBM-compatible disk or CD in Rich Text Format (RTF)—this refers to how one saves the document on one's computer disk.

A short bio should be included.

Always keep a copy of your manuscript; materials will not be returned and will be recycled after the judging.

Reading Fee:
$20.00 (USD) by personal check or USA money order payable to:
Gival Press, LLC.

International entrants must send a check drawn on a USA bank routed through a USA address, such as Bank of America; no international money orders are acceptable.

Please note that Gival Press can also accept the entry free by major credit card; however, we only take credit card information by phone (703.351.0079).

Mail to:
Robert L. Giron, Editor
Gival Press Poetry Award
Gival Press, LLC
P.O. Box 3812
Arlington, VA 22203.

Notification of the Winner:
Include a self-addressed, stamped envelope (SASE) for notification of the winner or visit our website (www.givalpress.com), where the winner and finalists will be announced.

We try our best to announce the winner by mid spring. Unfortunately, it takes time to read and judge the entries and to contact the individuals involved.

Prize:
The winner will receive $1,000.00 (USD) and his/her book of poetry will be published by Gival Press. The winning poet will receive 20 copies of the publication.

A standard publication contract is offered.

Judging: The manuscripts are judged anonymously. The winner for the previous award will be the judge for the following year. The decision of the judge will be final.

2011-12-02T15:22:00.001-05:00

Good Reads: Weil's "Spontaneous Happiness" & Troncoso's "Crossing Borders"

2011-11-30T22:27:00.002-05:00

I got an early Christmas gift this weekend and have begun to dip into Andrew Weil's latest book, Spontaneous Happiness. Though I haven't gotten very far yet, I couldn't recommend a more important book for one's well being than this one. I should say that I was introduced to Weil via friend and writer C. M. Mayo during my bouts of back surgery. His CD has been a god-send to me for relaxation and meditation. In fact I listen to it weekly. I can't wait to get some free time to be able to soak up his easy to grasp advice.

The other book that came by way is Sergio Troncoso's collection of essays, Crossing Borders. Having grown up in El Paso, I can relate to his essays on a very personal level. His range and rather interesting family history is noteworthy, with a sister who lived in Iran for a while and his wife being Jewish. I found "Fresh Challah" revealing but also personal enough that many can relate to his experience in a very universal manner. I look forward to catching more insights into his personal journey of sorts.

Theatre Around DC-Arena Stage, Signature, WSC Avant Bard

2011-11-27T22:02:00.003-05:00

If you have the itch to catch theatre that will enthrall you, then I strongly urge you to visit Arena Stage and see Equivocation.

Equivocation, a play by Bill Cain and directed by Bill Rauch, will keep you on your toes and never bore you, in fact you will sit and try your darnest to put all the plays together, for the playwright has sewed several bits and parts together to help create a memorable night out for engaging theatre. To top it off, the cast is perfect and they work in tandem and yet even when they play several different characters one is never confused by it. I can't push this play more than any serious play I have seen in a long time. When the audience gives it a standing ovation during the first week, if not the first night's performance, trust me you can't go wrong.

I can't end this without saying that the new actors, Gregory Linington and John Tufts, making their debut at Arena, are super!

Hairspray at Signature:
Now for the sublime, if you have the urge to cut loose and simply enjoy a good musical, then I suggest you go to the Signature Theatre in Arlington to see Hairspray.

This musical made famous by John Waters' film with the play's book by Mark O'Donnell and Thomas Meehan and the lyrics by Scott Wittman and Marc Shaiman can certainly let you forget about office politics and the minutia we all have to manage.

Once again Eric Schaeffer, Arlington's director guru of theatre, with Karma Camp and Brianne Camp as choreographers put on a very entertaining evening of retro-theatre (pre-interracial dancing on TV).

Carolyn Cole in the leading role of Tracy Turnblad, along with Nova Y. Payton as Motormouth Maybelle both bring down the house. Stephen Gregory Smith again plays his role well, as he did in the last play titled The Boy Detective Falls--it's his keen ability to move in and out of characters with a wide range of depth and age.

Then for those of you who are used to listening or watching Robert Aubry Davis, hold on to your seats because he is playing the role made famous by Divine, no other than Edna Turnblad. He does it well and his nervous itch adds to the character's actual role on stage; he manages to sign and dance and why on Earth was he not available instead of John Travolta when they redid the film a few years ago.

The Mistorical Hystery of Henry (I)V at WSC Avant Bard:
But if you are still wanting more Shakespeare but a bit shaken and not stirred, then get yourself to the Artisphere in Rossyln, Arlington.

This mixture of plays is adapted and directed by Tom Mallan with a very large cast but they move and shake and you will not be bored but you might have a challenge trying to keep the mixture of plays apart, so be prepared.

The use of visuals is truly awesome and one doesn't get it all until the very end, so I won't give it away.

So there you are. I'm sure there are other deserving plays showing but these were my past week's escape to theatre as I'm really an actor wanting my own stage, as I tell my students often.

Gival Press ebooks in Kindle & Nook Formats

2011-11-04T18:01:00.008-04:00

Gival Press currently has 11 different titles in ebook format for the Kindle and for the Nook.

The Fall 2011 titles include:
Fiction:

Gone by Sundown
by Peter Leach
Winner of the Gival Press Novel Award

Show Up, Look Look
by Mark Wisniewski

The Pleasuring of Men
by Clifford Browder

Poetry:

The Silent Art
by Clifford Bernier
Winner of the Gival Press Poetry Award

12: Sonnets for the Zodiac
by John Gosslee

Previous releases
Fiction:

The Cannibal of Guadalajara
by David Winner
Winner of the Gival Press Novel Award

That Demon Life
by Lowell Mick White
Winner of the Gival Press Novel Award

Second Acts
by Tim W. Brown
Winner of the London Book Festival for Fiction

A Tomb on the Periphery
by John Domini

Poetry:

The Refugee
by Vladimir Levchev

Psaltery and Serpentines
by Cecilia Martinez-Gil
Winner of the Gival Press Poetry Award

Click on the link to purchase ebooks:
Gival Press Kindle ebooks at Amazon.com

Click on the link to purchase ebooks:
Gival Press Nook ebooks at BarnesandNoble.com

Lalita Noronha Wins the ArLiJo Poetry Award

2011-10-23T22:27:00.002-04:00

(Arlington, VA) October 23, 2011—Gival Press is pleased to announce that Ms. Lalita Noronha of Baltimore, Maryland has won the ArLiJo Award for her poem titled Bar Talk.

Lalita Noronha received a cash prize of $100.00, a certificate, and her poem will be posted on ArLiJo.com and the Gival Press website (www.givalpress.com). The ArLiJo Poetry Award was made possible by the collaboration between Gival Press and Arlington Arts Center.

Winner of the 2011 ArLiJo Poetry Award
Bar Talk
by Lalita Noronha of Baltimore, Maryland.

Biography:Lalita Noronha, born in India, is a scientist, writer, poet, and fiction editor for The Baltimore Review. She has been published in over seventy journals and anthologies, and she has won The Maryland Literary Arts Award twice and the National League of American Pen Women awards among others. She has been featured on WYPR, The Signal. The short story collection titled Where Monsoons Cry is her latest publication.

Finalists:
Killer by Nature
by Patricia Garfinkel of Arlington, Virginia.

My One-Tree Cherry Orchard
by Elisavietta Ritchie of Washington, DC.

Travels with Roger’s Ashes
by Bonnie J. Morris of Washington, DC.

The End and the Beginning
by Joseph Baldi Acosta of Rockville, Maryland.

Judges:
Clifford Bernier and John Gosslee who read the entries anonymously, served as the final judges.

###

John Taylor's Translations of Veroniki Dalakoura's Poetry Featured on ArLiJo

2011-10-09T11:19:00.002-04:00

Three poems translated into English from the Greek by John Taylor are featured on ArLiJo.

The poems are from the manuscript Wild Seraphic Fire by Veroniki Dalakoura.

Click on the link below to read the poems:
John Taylor featured on ArLiJo

Biographies:

John Taylor
Taylor is the author of the three-volume Paths to Contemporary French Literature and Into the Heart of European Poetry. He has also written five books of stories, short prose, and poetry, the latest of which is The Apocalypse Tapestries. A new collection of short prose, If Night Is Falling, will appear in 2012. He has received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to translate Georges Perros's Papiers collés, and from the Sonia Raiziss Charitable Foundation to translate Louis Calaferte's Le sang violet de l'améthyste. He has also translated books by Pierre-Albert Jourdan, Philippe Jaccottet, Laurence Werner David, Jacques Dupin, and several modern Greek writers. He writes the "Poetry Today" column in the Antioch Review and has long been a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement. He lives in France.

Veroniki Dalakoura

Dalakoura is a Greek poet whose work shows the influence of surrealism. She published her first book, Poiisi ’67-’72 ("Poetry 1967-1972"), a second volume, I parakmi tou erota ("The Decline of Eros"). Her books often combine poems, prose poems, and longer narratives in provocative ways. These volumes include O hypnos ("Sleep, 1982"), To paihnidi tou telous ("The Game of the End, 1988"), Meres idonis ("Days of Lust, 1990"), Agria angeliki photia ("Wild Seraphic Fire, 1997"), and O pinakas tou Hodler ("Hodler’s Painting, 2001"). Her most recent collection of verse is 26 Poiimata ("26 Poems, 2004"). Dalakoura’s work often develops themes related to eroticism and spirituality. She is also a noted translator of French literature. John Taylor’s essay about Dalakoura, “Eros and Other Spiritual Adventures,” is comprised in his book Into the Heart of European Poetry. John Taylor’s translations of her poems have appeared in several magazines and anthologies.

Riverton Noir by Perry Glasser Wins the 2011 Gival Press Novel Award

2011-10-02T18:24:00.002-04:00

Perry Glasser wins the 7th Annual Gival Press Novel Award-2011

Gival Press is pleased to announce that Perry Glasser of Haverhill, Massachussetts has won the 7th Annual Gival Press Novel Award for his novel Riverton Noir . Glasser will receive $3,000.00 and his novel will be published in 2012.

Biography:
Perry Glasser is a memoirist, short story writer and novelist. He is the author of three prize-winning collections of short fiction: Dangerous Places received the 2008 G.S. Sharat Chandra Prize from BkMk Press at the University of Missouri-Kansas City; Singing on the Titanic (Urbana and Chicago: The University of Illinois Press, 1987) which was recorded by the Library of Congress for the blind; Suspicious Origins (St. Paul: New Rivers Press, 1985), which was the Winner of the Minnesota Voice Competition.

A three time winner of P.E.N. Syndicated Fiction Awards, his work has twice been read on National Public Radio's “The Sound of Writing.” He has been named at fellow at The Norman Mailer House, Ucross, Yaddo, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, was a scholar at Bread Loaf, and in consecutive years was named a winner of the annual Boston Fiction Festival. His memoir about his having been a single parent, “Iowa Black Dirt,” won First Prize from The Good Men Foundation; his story, “I-95, Southbound” received the Gival Press Short Story Award and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize His memoir, “Excelsior” won an award from Memoir (and). He has been a Contributing Editor of North American Review since 1994

Perry lives in Haverhill, Massachusetts and can often be found bicycling the back roads of the Merrimack River Valley. He coordinates the Professional Writing program at Salem State University.

Judge:
His manuscript was read anonymously and chosen by the final judge John Domini, author of A Tomb on the Periphery among many other publications.

Finalists:

The Ruins
by David Hicks of Boulder, Colorado.

No River to Cross
by Michael McGuire of Jalisco, Mexico.

The Missing of Juniper Falls
by Patrick Hicks of Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

The Look Thief
by Elizabeth Harris of Austin, Texas.

New Fiction & Poetry from Gival Press in Oct. 2011

2011-09-18T10:20:00.001-04:00

For those of you out there, here below is a listing of the new October releases from Gival Press. There is a bit of something for everyone, from fiction to creative nonfiction to poetry, from English to French to Spanish, from straight to gay relationships, from recent cultural events to historical events many would rather forget.

Enough of the suspense, read on:

Creative Nonfiction:

Gone by Sundown by Peter Leach
Winner of the Gival Press Novel Award

“Gone by Sundown is an extremely timely novel that traces the origins of a racist atrocity and its effects on residents from bottom-dwelling working class blacks and whites, to the ‘French colored’ and merchants higher up the social ladder, to union agitators and mine owners at the top of local society. Peter Leach has the story-teller’s heart of Harper Lee and the sociologist’s eye
of Frank Norris.”—Tim W. Brown, author of Second Acts

“Almost no other novel treats the creation of sundown towns. Gone by Sundown thus amounts to a one-volume antidote to American amnesia. On top of that, it’s a good read.”
—James W. Loewen, author of Lies My Teacher Told Me and Sundown Towns

Fiction:

Show Up, Good Look
by Mark Wisniewski

“Wisniewski: a riotously original voice.”
—Jonathan Lethem

“Show Up, Look Good is a rollicking, laugh-out-loud romp of a novel.”— Ben Fountain, author of 'Brief Encounters with Che Guevara'

“Mark Wisniewski’s prose is incisive and crisp, bracing and in the best sense destructive, like a straight shot of excellent gin. Part Carson McCullers, part Truman Capote, part Elmore Leonard, 'Show Up, Look Good' is ultimately a highly original, entertaining, and disturbing read, accurate but precisely off-center. Just when you think you know how it moves, it proves you wrong, and you’re delighted. Wisniewski is that crafty a craftsman, that intelligent a writer.”— T. R. Hummer, author of Walt Whitman in Hell

Fiction:

The Pleasuring of Men
by Clifford Browder

In New York City in the late 1860s, Tom Vaughan, a respectably raised young man, chooses to become a male prostitute servicing the city’s affluent elite, then falls in love with Walter Whiting, a renowned scholar and lecturer who proves to be his most difficult client. Having long wrestled with feelings of shame and guilt, Whiting, a married man, at first resents Tom’s easy acceptance of his own sexuality. Their story unfolds in the clandestine and precarious gay underworld of the time, which is creatively but vividly created. Through a series of encounters–some exhilarating, some painful, some mysterious—Tom matures, until an unexpected act of violence provokes a final resolution.

“The Pleasuring of Men ... is deftly drawn with rich descriptions, a rhythmic balance of action, dialogue, and exposition, and a nicely understated plot .. both engaging and provocative.”
—Sean Moran

Poetry:

12: Sonnets for the Zodiac
by John Gosslee
(in English, French and Spanish)

"In John Gosslee’s debut collection, 12, he chisels to perfection sonnets that masterfully treat the characters of the western zodiac. Lyrically intense, each poem portrays a compelling portrait that breathes new life into an age-old celestial system. With a musician’s heart, an eye for detail, and stunning craftsmanship, Gosslee explores the intricacies of the twelve signs—from Aries to Pisces—while dazzling the reader with his descriptive powers. These are illuminating and memorable poems from a new and authentic voice."
—Carolyn Kreiter-Foronda, Poet Laureate of Virginia, 2006-2008

The Silent Art
by Clifford Bernier
Winner of the Gival Press Poetry Award

“Clifford Bernier’s The Silent Art takes us on a journey through countries, landscapes, musical forms and states of mind. Rivers flow through these places to the beat of conga drums, the wail of an alto sax and the voice of a woman singing scat. To read these poems is to enter a work of expressionist art….”—Judith Valente, correspondent, PBS-TV; co-editor, Twenty Poems to Nourish Your Soul; author of Discovering Moons

“Like musicians, poets strive for clarity, originality and perfect pitch. Clifford Bernier’s The Silent Art provides us with a bumper crop of each...."--Reuben Jackson

“Clifford Bernier is the consummate performance artist who harmonizes imagery with syncopated language to break through the silence of the page. Make no mistake, 'The Silent Art' is a fullblown concert.”—Karren L. Alenier, author of Gertrude Stein Invents a Jump Early On

"...Clifford Bernier's The Silent Art is music as sung poetry; it is poetry arranged as a concerto...."--Cecilia Martinez-Gil, author of Psaltery and Serpentines

Rob Jacques Wins the 2011 Gival Press Oscar Wilde Award

2011-08-13T21:26:00.003-04:00

Rob Jacques of Bainbridge Island, Washington has won the 2011 Gival Press Oscar Wilde Award for his poem titled Wonders of the Invisible World, for which he received a cash prize of $100. His poem was chosen anonymously by the previous winner Sarah Machinak.

(photo by Ralph S. Spillinger)

Winner of the 2011 Gival Press Oscar Wilde Award

Wonders of the Invisible World

Ah! Destructive Ignorance, what shall be done
to chase thee out of the world!—Cotton Mather

Gay and blind, he couldn’t see his sexual partners
and so “handsomeness” took on other meanings,
or rather became another esoteric, academic word
akin to “pulchritude,” “beautiful,” and “buff.”

“Gay” itself was problematic enough, flesh not knowing
any orientation besides the vertical and horizontal,
supine or prone, sex in that sense not much different
from masturbating alone, although he learned to cope,

for his ears still heard soprano, alto, tenor, baritone.
His nose smelled deodorant and soap, spiced cologne,
while his tongue tasted salt in sweat, metallic semen,
and the least bit of blood whose origins were unknown.

His hands felt muscle and fat, hairless and hirsute,
felt skin again and again uncovered against his own
without ever knowing its age or color, rolled nipples
never knowing whether they were for work or play.

He liked the warmth, the firm pressing of torsos,
the interlocking nakedness of slender legs and arms,
and never having seen man nor woman, he accepted
every bare body with its unique, secret charms.

Men and women spoke of him with kind emotion,
his willing nudity, unabashed and nonjudgmental,
his potency cheerily thrilling, and they considered
a pleasing notion that, in every sense, love is blind.

Copyright © 2011 by Rob Jacques.

Biography:

Rob Jacques grew up in northern New England. He served in the U.S. Navy during the Vietnam Era and worked for 28 years as a technical writer for the federal government. He has taught technical writing at the college level, and his poetry has appeared in various literary journals, including Atlanta Review and Prairie Schooner. Jacques currently resides on Bainbridge Island in Washington State’s Puget Sound.

Honorable Mentions:

Tonight I Am My Lover
by Heather Barlett of Ithaca, New York.

Happy Anniversary
by Paul Lamar of Albany, New York.

The Feast Between Worlds
by Sandra H. Tarlin of Astoria, New York.

When It Gets Better
by Chuck Willman of North Las Vegas, Nevada.

Short Story Award Deadline: 8/8/11 & New on ArLiJo

2011-08-06T20:27:00.003-04:00

The Gival Press Short Story Award deadline is Monday, August 8, 2011, with a prize of $1,000.00 plus online publication.

For the details please click on this link:
Gival Press Short Story Award guidelines

For the latest on ArLiJo Issue 46, visit:
ArLiJo

currently featuring:
Poetry by Howie Good and Anna Leahy
Fiction by Robert Wexelblatt

Stanley Niamatali's Poetry

2011-07-16T18:08:00.002-04:00

If you are craving poetry with a bit of exotic flavor, check out Stanley Niamatali's samplying of poetry at ArLiJo.

Engagement

I bring you a papaya; you call me
your sailor. The knife lays bare symmetry
of halves, once one. Succulent sienna flesh,
germinated from a hard seed of this earth,
melts with a delicacy unlike this earth.
Pulpy seeds release savory fire.
The sky is full of birds.
You put your hands over
your eyes. Jude, your hound, howls
at a spiraling leaf. The blue
shell in the fallen nest oozes
liquid time. I reach for your hand.

Copyright © 2011 by Stanley Niamatali.

Stanley Niamatali, born in Guyana, has been published by Oberon, Full Circle and Anthology of Appalachian Writers and The Caribbean Writer.

Visit: ArLiJo

Keep the ArLiJo Poetry Award in mind.

Co-sponsored by the Arlington Arts Center and Gival Press, with a deadline of September 30, 2011. For the details, please click on this link:

ArLiJo Poetry Award guidelines

Vive La France! - 14 juillet 2011

2011-07-14T08:35:00.003-04:00

Today France is celebrating its national holiday: La Fête Nationale or Bastille Day.

May its belief in Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity endure!

Vive La France!

Gival Press Short Story Award / Deadline 8/8/11

2011-07-13T17:01:00.001-04:00

The Gival Press Short Story Award deadline is August 8, 2011, with a prize of $1,000.00 plus online publication.

For the details please click on this link:
Gival Press Short Story Award guidelines

Cost Rica's Supreme Court Rules Against Discrimination of Gays

2011-07-02T09:09:00.003-04:00

The Supreme Court of Costa Rica has ruled against discrimination of gays.

Please read the results in Jeff Rivera's own words via his blob; click on the link:

Jeff Rivera's Costa Rica Supreme Court decision

If any of you who read my blog, helped this cause in some way, Thank You!

United against all kinds of discrimination,
Robert

10th Annual Gival Press Oscar Wilde Award Due June 27th

2011-06-21T21:21:00.002-04:00

The 10th Annual Gival Press Oscar Wilde Award

"The truth is rarely pure and never simple."—Oscar Wilde

Deadline:
June 27, 2011 (postmarked)
Our dates never change. If the date falls on a Sunday, then Monday becomes the default postmarked date.

Focus:
This award will be given to the best previously unpublished original poem written in English (of any length, in any style, typed, double spaced on one side only), which best relates gay / lesbian / bisexual / transgender life by a poet who is 18 or older.

Submittal:
Entrants are asked to submit their poems in the following manner: (1) without any kind of identification, with the exception of the title, and (2) with a separate cover page with the following information: name, address (street, city, and state with zip code), telephone number, email address, if available, and the title of the poem submitted. (3) A short bio should also be included.

Poems will not be returned, so poets should keep copies of their poems.

A short bio may also be included.

Reading Fee:
Poets must submit a reading fee of $5.00 (USD) for each individual poem submitted, regardless of the length. Checks or money orders drawn on American banks, routed through a USA address, such as Bank of America, should be made payable to Gival Press, LLC. Overseas money orders are not acceptable.

Mail to:
Robert L. Giron, Editor
Gival Press Oscar Wilde Award
Gival Press, LLC
P.O. Box 3812
Arlington, VA 22203.

Notification of the Winner:
Include a self-addressed, stamped envelop (SASE) for notification of the winner or visit our website (www.GivalPress.com), where the winner and finalists will be announced.

The winner is usually announced on or before September 1.

Prize:
The winner will receive $100.00 (USD), and the poem, along with information about the poet, will be published on the website of Gival Press. The winner will be asked to sign a release form for payment.

Judging
Poems will be judged anonymously by the previous winner of the award. The decision made by the judge will be final.

Help Stop Discrimination Against Gays in Costa Rica

2011-06-20T17:46:00.003-04:00

Jeff Rivera and his partner recently visited Costa Rica and because they simply held hands they were asked to leave the restaurant and now a case is going before the Supreme Court in Costa Rica.

Please help Jeff River, Editor-in-Chief of Gatekeepers Post, and his partner help stop discrimination against gays and others in Costa Rica and perhaps the rest of Latin America if this case gets the attention it deserves.

Please visit his site below and read about it in his own words. Then below I have listed the email addresses you are encouraged to write to in Costa Rica asking that this case be decided in favor of non-discrimination.

Jeff Rivera's blog entry on this case

Here are the email addresses of the offices to contact regardng this case in Costa Rica:

lpmora@poder-judicial.go.cr, info@usembassy.or.cr, ezapata@casapres.go.cr, lchacon@ict.go.cr, gcordero@ict.go.cr, presidencia@poder-judicial.go.cr, zvillanueva@poder-judicial.go.cr, jvarela@poder-judicial.go.cr, ambsanjose@state.gov, rvega@poder-judicial.go.cr, lchinchilla@casapres.go.cr, ernestojinesta@gmail.com, jeff@onlyincostarica.com, acssanjose@state.gov, vcantillo@poder-judicial.go.cr

---My email letter to them---

Dear Magistrate,

I am in full support of Geovanny Delgado Castro and Jeff Rivera. Discrimination should not be tolerated whether it is against gays, lesbians, blacks or Asians.

To show my support my family and I do not plan on visiting Costa Rica until this issue is resolved in a fair and just way.

Please make the right decision regarding this case: #Exp 1149-81-0007-CO.

Sincerely,
Robert L. Giron
Publisher, Gival Press

New Poetry Award for Mid-Atlantic Poets

2011-06-19T13:47:00.004-04:00

—————————The ArLiJo Poetry Award Guidelines—————

Arlington Arts Center and Gival Press are pleased to announce the ArLiJo Poetry Contest. All poets who live or work in the Mid-Atlantic region, which includes Virginia, West Virginia, Washington DC, Maryland, Delaware, or Pennsylvania, are eligible to enter.

Poets may submit one poem, previously unpublished, in English which must not be longer than 25 lines in any style or form, any subject/topic.

The poet's name must not appear on the actual poem. A cover sheet for the poem should include:

name
address
telephone number
email address
title of poem

The poem must be submitted by email to:
givalpress@yahoo.com with ArLiJo Poetry Award in the subject line, with the poem attached in a Word or Rich Text Format document.

Deadline: September 30, 2011, by midnight.

There is no entry fee.

Prize:
The winning poem will be published in the online journal ArLiJo, with a short bio.

A certificate will be presented to the winner on Oct. 23, 2011 at the Arlington Arts Center (3550 Wilson Boulevard, Arlington, VA 22201-2348) or mailed, if the person is not able to attend the Gival Press Poetry Reading, featuring John Gosslee, author of 12: Sonnets for the Zodiac, and Clifford Bernier, winner of the 2010 Gival Press Poetry Award for his manuscript titled The Silent Art.

The poetry reading will be held on Oct. 23, 2011 at 5 pm. An honorarium of $100 will be granted if the winning poet is able to attend to present his/her winning poem.

In addition, the winning poet will get feedback, be it in person, phone or email, from the two poets reading on Oct. 23.

The entries will be read and judged anonymously by Robert L. Giron, publisher of Gival Press and editor of ArLiJo, an online journal.

The winner need not be present to win.

Sponsors:
Arlington Arts Center and Gival Press.

Visit:
Arlington Arts Center

Gival Press

Clifford Bernier Wins the 2010 Gival Press Poetry Award

2011-06-11T10:03:00.004-04:00

Winner of the 2010 Gival Press Poetry Award
The Silent Art
by Clifford Bernier

Gival Press is very pleased to announce that Clifford Bernier of Alexandria, Virginia, is the winner of the 12th Annual Gival Press Poetry Award-2010.

His manuscript was read anonymously and chosen by Cecilia Martinez-Gil, winner of the award for the previous year. Clifford Bernier will receive a cash award of $1000.00 and twenty copies of his book. The book is due to be released in October of this year.

Biography:
Cliff Bernier is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Earth Suite, The Montserrat Review’s Best Chapbook Summer 2010 and recently nominated for a Library of Virginia award, available from Finishing Line Press; and Dark Berries, one of The Montserrat Review’s Best Books for Spring Reading 2010, available from Pudding House Publications. In January 2010 he appeared on the National Public Radio show “The Poet and the Poem from the Library of Congress.” He has published in the Potomac Review, The Baltimore Review, the online journals Notjustair and Innisfree, and elsewhere, and is featured on a CD of poetry duets, "Poetry in Black and White," as well as on two jazzpoetry CDs, "Live at IOTA Club and Cafe" and "Live at Bistro Europa." He is anthologized in poem, home, an anthology of "Ars Poetica." Bernier has been featured in readings in San Francisco, Seattle, Buffalo, Detroit, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and the Washington, DC area, including the Library of Congress, the Arts Club of Washington, George Washington University (where he is a member of the Washington Writer’s Collection) and the Writer's Center. He is founder and former host of the Washington, DC-area poetry reading series, Poesis. He has been a reader for the Washington Prize and a judge for the National Endowment for the Arts' Poetry Out Loud recitation contest. He has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and a Best of the Net Award.

The finalists in the contest are listed below:

Finalists:

Stealing Bacchus
by Christopher Bursk of Langhorne Manor, Pennsylvania.

Rumors of Fallible Gods
by Peter Ludwin of Kent, Washington.

Rivering
by Dean Kostos of New York, New York.

Tea in Heliopolis
by Hedy Habra of Portage, Michigan.

This and That--Reading for Gay Pride Month

2011-06-01T21:20:00.004-04:00

June has arrived in a flash and with it the heat, though the rain this evening in Arlington has cooled things down a bit.

Here are some ideas for future reading this Gay Pride Month.

1:
ArLiJo is featuring a personal essay by John Trumbo titled Castaways. John lives in Alexandria and is currently studying at the Johns Hopkins Writing Program.

Click on the link:
ArLiJo

2.
Teresa Bevin who found her way to Santa Fe after a long sojourn in the Washington, DC area has yet another book out. Her latest titled Papaya Suite is about a woman who leaves Cuba, her homeland, and travels to Spain and then eventually to the USA. Naturally there is a lesbian liaison which makes it a good match for Gay Pride Month.

Click on the link:
Papaya Suite

Novel Award Deadline--Postmarked 5/31/11

2011-05-24T10:07:00.002-04:00

The 7th Annual Gival Press Novel Award postmarked deadline is this coming Tuesday, May 31st, since Monday the 30th is a holiday.

The award has a purse prize of $3,000.00 plus publication.

For the details, click on the link below:

Guidelines for the Gival Press Novel Award

"The Refugee" by Vladimir Levchev Is Released

2011-04-24T12:01:00.007-04:00

Vladimir Levchev's most recent book of poetry titled The Refugee has been released by Gival Press.

This collection of poetry is translated from the Bulgarian into English by the poet with the assistance from Henry Taylor and Alicia Ostriker.

Advance Praise:
“Vladimir Levchev’s work has been for several decades an important poetic bridge between Bulgaria and the US. This book will surely strengthen that reach.”
—Elizabeth Kostova

“These spare, beautiful poems—so imaginatively rich and expertly distilled—vibrate with a restless brilliance, reminding us, as Levchev writes in The Refugee, that ‘every minute/ has its secret corridors/ leading to dark rooms.’ Reading them, I felt as if I could hear the silences from which they are made now begin to gather themselves into these true and necessary words.”
—Richard McCann, author of Mother of Sorrows

“Vladimir Levchev’s poetry: An original voice, wise beyond its years. A dark vision, but beautiful all the same.”
—The late William Meredith

“His poetry is a place you’ll never want to leave. We are in the presence of a large spirit who writes in the greatest tradition of European masters. The world of literature is lucky to have him.”
—Grace Cavalieri, Prooducer/Host “The Poet and the Poem from the Library of Congress”

Biography:

Vladimir Levchev is a Bulgarian poet and writer whose parents are a poet and an artist. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Sofia, in 1982, and from the MFA program in Creative Writing at American University in Washington, DC, in 1996. Levchev’s magazine Glas (“Voice” or “Vote”), was the first independent periodical in Communist Bulgaria, and it was banned by the authorities before the downfall of the regime on November 10, 1989. It featured some of the best known Bulgarian and Eastern European dissidents. Levchev received a Fulbright scholarship in 1994. He resided and worked as a language instructor and a professor of literature in the United States for 13 years. Since 2007, he has been teaching literature and writing at the American University in Sofia, Bulgaria.

He has 15 books of poetry, two books of essays, and two novels published in Bulgaria. He has had three books of poetry, Leaves from the Dry Tree, Black Book of the Endangered Species, and The Rainbow Mason, published in the United States. His poetry has appeared in many anthologies and literary magazines, including Poetry, Chicago, Child of Europe: Anthology of New East European Poetry (Penguin, 1990), The Anthology of Magazine Verse & Yearbook of American Poetry (1997), Clay and Star: Contemporary Bulgarian Poets (Milkweed Press, 1992), etc. His poems have been translated for literary magazines in Russian, German, French, Greek, Turkish, Polish, Hungarian, Punjabi, and Hebrew.

Levchev is the translator of Allen Ginsberg, Stanley Kunitz, and other American poets in Bulgarian.

To order a copy at Amazon.com, click on the link below:

The Refugee

Kim Roberts Strikes a Chord with New Book

2011-04-20T22:21:00.006-04:00

Kim Roberts, our local poetry mistress--as I like to call her--, has a new book out. Animal Magnetism, winner of the Pearl Poetry Prize (Pearl Editions, 2011) made its debut earlier this year and has struck a chord with many with its echoes of far away places.

For example:

PORTRAIT OF HIPPOCRATES, OR BUQRAT
from The Falnama of 1703, Topkapi Palace, Istanbul

O augury seeker,
           know and be aware…
     In the book of divination,

Hippocrates rides the simurgh,
           a mythical bird,
     as he returns to his home

carved from emeralds
           on Mount Qaf.
     With his white turban,

scholar’s dark beard,
           and bright orange robe,
     he looks over one shoulder

and strokes the bird’s
           golden tail feathers
     as she flits through an azure sky

between eddies of clouds.
           Healer of the sick,
     Builder of the first hospital,

Master of alchemy,
           astrology and magic,
     I have prepared myself

for your prognostication
           with bathing and prayers,
     opened the book in my blindness,

opened my heart in hope
           and placed my body,
my wounded body, in your hands.

Copyright (c) 2011 by Kim Roberts from Animal Magnetism. Reprinted by permission.

Biography:
Kim Roberts has two other book of poetry and is also the author of the nonfiction book Lip Smack: A History of Spoken Word Poetry in DC (Beltway Editions, 2011) and the editor of the anthology Full Moon on K Street: Poems About Washington, DC (Plan B Press, 2010). Her poems have been translated into Spanish, French, German, and Mandarin, and she is the recipient of residency grants from twelve artist colonies across the US. She has developed a series of literary walking tours of Washington, DC, celebrating such writers as Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and others. For over ten years, Roberts has edited the online journal Beltway Poetry Quarterly.

Visit her website: Kim Roberts.

Ventura Valdez Poetry Awards Are Announced for 2011

2011-04-10T12:06:00.010-04:00

Gival Press is pleased to announce the winners of the Ventura Valdez Poetry contest it sponsors at Montgomery College for present and past students.

The winners for the English and Spanish contests each received a prize of $100.00 and a certificate.

Winner of the 2011 Ventura Valdez English Poetry Award

Family Meal Time

Twin shores of Mother and Father:
The parents wordlessly emit a hum
"We held their shoulders like roses.
We loved their eyelids like violets,"
While giant offspring slouch over the evening meal.

These are the homes where the warmth
Vibrates and wiggles and rises
Silently over roofs
Wrinkling the air so thoroughly
Trees wiggle softly
As if seen through old glass.

And at the dinner table
Any pain runs away like rushing water,
Because there is love in the soup.

Love lies wedged with the small dirt
Between floorboards, under radiators.

All this kindness, all these gifts
And still my constant worry
"What if this were always?"

Copyright © 2011 by Leslie Gerhard.

Winner of the 2011 Ventura Valdez Spanish Poetry Award

El amor en silencio

Me encierro en mis sueños y mis pasiones cada vez que te veo.
Deseo mostrarte el mundo y conocer junto a ti las siete maravillas del mundo.
Quisiera llegar a la puerta de tu corazón pero tu silencio me impide
mis mayores anhelos.

Dime cómo puedo hablarte si tu silencio me mata.
¿O acaso no te gusta dialogar?
Escapándome de esta realidad en que vivo cierro mis ojos.

Sólo por un segundo y sueño contigo.
Pero no puedo dormir en paz porque tu rostro me persigue
Hasta lo más profundo de mis pretenciones.

En mis sueños bajo hasta los más profundo del mar
Y me ahogo en tus entrañas.
Subo hasta el cielo y te encuentro callada y tranquila.

Mirándome me sonríes pero de repente llego a la realidad
Con su suspiro muy profundo. Y me digo a mí mismo
Que el amor que siento por ti está nada más en silencio.

Copyright © 2011 by Jesualdo Flores.

The following received an Honorable Mention:

for Stolen Lines in English, James Haitchwai

for Vida in Spanish, Grego Pineda

Earth Is Calling for Healing

2011-03-23T21:20:00.002-04:00

The past two weeks have been extremely disturbing. On the eve of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami, I could not sleep and awoke to hear the sad news. From that point up to recently I was glued to the TV and found I couldn't walk away from the urgency of the trauma to the people of Japan but also to the release of radiation from the nuclear plant which is still continuing.

My heart goes out to the people of Japan. There is no clear answer to why Nature acts like it does but acts such as the one that happened in Japan lets us know that any of us can be raised from this planet in a flash. We simply don't know when a similar act can happen.

What I come away with is the urgency for us/the Planet to figure out other sources of energy that are not as destructive if damaged by Nature. It is time for Capitalism to hear the calls and for Corporations to start thinking outside of the box instead of relying upon the traditional modes of energy.

Here below is a call for healing from the Hopi Nation:

Hopi Nation's Prayer for the Japanese People and Earth in General

Finally, today while driving home, I learned that Elizabeth Taylor has died. All of us are indebted to her tenacity to question the USA government's reaction or lack of action in the 1980s when AIDS first began to makes its presence known. It was beautiful Taylor who spoke up and used her money and influence to address a neglected disease and those who were held in such contempt. Sadly the disease is now a global phenomenon.

Taylor was a gem, not only for her talent but more importantly because she spoke up for those who were neglected.

It is in that vain that we need to speak up for the homeless, the sick, those without health care, and the many who need help.

The USA should revisit its tradition and listen and help those who need assistance. What Nature has proven over and over is that at any time even the high and mighty might become those who are in need of assistance.

Congratulations! Cecilia Martínez-Gil

2011-03-18T12:26:00.003-04:00

Psaltery and Serpentines
by Cecilia Martínez-Gil is a finalist for the
2010 ForeWord Reviews' Book of the Year Award.

For more details about the book, click on the link below:
Psaltery and Serpentines by Cecilia Martínez-Gil

Board Forms in Arlington to Save Lubber Run Amphitheatre

2011-03-02T21:38:00.004-05:00

For two years individuals have struggled to save Arlington’s Lubber Run Amphitheatre in Arlington, Virginia. To help this effort the board has formed a nonprofit foundation dedicated to bring county government and citizens together to return the amphitheatre located near Ballston as a public venue for outdoor entertainment.

Free programs at the Lubber Run Amphitheatre have been a staple of Arlington's cultural life for more than 40 years.

We are in the process of gathering signatures to persuade Arlington County to save the amphitheatre.

Please consider signing the petition:

Sign the Save the Lubber Run Amphitheatre petition and read comments of those who treasure their Lubber Run Amphitheatre.

Visit: Save Lubber Run Amphitheatre

Also, join Lubber Run Amphitheater supporters on Facebook.

Save Lubber Run on Facebook

Please attend the March 23, 2011 Meeting:

Community Action in Our Parks: A Case Study of Success

Wednesday, March 23, 2011
7:00 pm
Arlington Central Library Auditorium
1015 N. Quincy Street

Join us for a program to highlight the importance of individual and community action in reclaiming our parks and natural areas. The program will focus on the success story of the restoration of Lubber Run Park. In 2000 Lubber Run Park was covered with invasive exotic plant species that were rapidly crowding out and killing the native plants and turning the park into a wasteland of weeds. Neighbors and community volunteers played a critical role in educating the community and pushing for the dramatic restoration of this beloved park. These efforts might be duplicated in other natural areas.

Introductory Remarks by
Arlington County Board Chairman Chris Zimmerman

Speakers Include:
Greg Zell
Arlington County Natural Resources Specialist
(recently retired)

Juan Diego Florez Soars at the Kennedy Center

2011-02-27T18:31:00.005-05:00

Photo from his website; visit: Juan Diego Florez.com

This afternoon Juan Diego Florez proved once again that his talent and ability to hit the high C notes is not a passing thing.

The sold out concert pleased the audience in more ways than one. For one, Florez is really quite soft on the eyes and his vocal ability is heavenly, for while listening one is transported to the emotional milieu he is singing about. For another, sans subtitles one is able to understand his Italian and French and finally his Spanish; he enunciates that clearly. I can't tell you how often it is nearly impossible to understand what is signer is singing for the lack of clarity/enunciation, even if sung in English. However, with Florez his clarity is as heavenly as is his ability to emote with such sincerity that one believes him.

Florez began with "Pria che spunti in ciel l'aurora" from Il Matrimonio Segreto and easily won over the audience but it was his ability to hit the high C's in "Ah! mes amis, quel jour de fete!" from La Fille du Regiment that we all stood and applauded with bravo after bravo.

From here, he came back to the stage and sang three encores, choosing to end with a Spanish love song that showcases his Latin roots while pleasing his numerous fans.

Bravo, Juan Diego Florez, well done!

Fiction by Jendi Reiter

2011-02-26T18:08:00.005-05:00

Featured on ArLiJo

The Away Team
(Summer 1995)
--Runner up for the 2010 Gival Press Short Story

They were my friends and I hated them. Four-thirty in the morning and Tomas was drunk, draped like a crumpled dress on the back seat of the van we'd borrowed from his boyfriend's catering business. "It's an Irish funeral," he'd defended himself, to which Stan returned the predictable retort that Tomas wasn't Irish, sparing me the effort of opening my mouth and releasing whatever sharp fragments of words still remained inside me. Then I saw Frank.

"You are not — you are not wearing that," I groaned. His ensemble was complete, from his black patent pumps, to his Mamie Eisenhower belted black dress with pinhead polka dots, to the veiled pillbox hat perched on his crow-black waves of teased hair. Miss Anna Bollocks had stepped out of the nightclub shadows and was evidently expecting applause for deigning to wait with us in this alley where the West Village restaurant owners parked their delivery trucks.

"He loved me this way," Frank replied, in Miss Anna's voice, which was husky as his own but with the extra echo of an actor projecting to the cheap seats.

"You're not the widow." All my bitterness was turned on Frank. Hesitantly he unpinned the hat from his wig, sidled up to me and placed it on my head. I knocked it off and stomped on it. Only then did I see the kindness and pain in his mascara-crusted eyes. He'd given me what he had, like a child offering his teddy bear.

"Julian." Stan touched my arm, a mild reproach. I wondered how long I could hold out without asking him for a Valium. At the very least I'd have to wait the six interminable hours it would take to drive from Manhattan to Pittsburgh, so I could spell Stan and Peter at the wheel. Frank had put himself out of commission with this getup. A drag queen driving a bakery truck is a temptation no highway patrolman should be expected to resist. Five miles over the speed limit and we'd become the clip du jour on Fox News.

Still, I apologized. "I'm going to need a new hat," Frank pouted, but without real resentment. I helped him reattach the veil to his stiff pompadour, using the brooch as a sort of barrette. It was all a lost cause, anyhow. My nice black suit — Brooks Brothers, nothing too fashion-forward — wouldn't make us any more beloved. They knew who we were. That's why we hadn't been invited.

Peter, the last member of our delegation, pulled up alongside the van in his compact Toyota. When he stepped out, I saw his eyes were red-rimmed and tired already. He'd meant to drive down from Albany last night but his boss, rookie Assemblyman Shawn Defalque, had kept him late at a staff meeting. Peter hugged me first and I welcomed the familiar collapse into his arms, till my body sensed that for once, he wouldn't be able to hold me up.

In better days, Peter would get on our case for being flamers. He was the kind of queer that straights liked, the kind they didn't notice, at least till he said what was on his mind, which he usually tried to do through someone else. Now he showed zero reaction to the circus in the alley, even when he saw the soot-smudged white van with the legend "Christopher Street Treats" over a sliced-open cherry pie. All he said to Tomas was, "Is it safe to leave my car in this spot?"

Tomas pulled himself upright with a flourish. "Safe? You lived in New York all your life and you want to know if it's safe? Nothing is safe. Parking is...like God. It is a mystery."

"Thank you, Stephen Hawking, now move your drunk ass so Peter can take a nap," I said. Tomas climbed into the front passenger seat. Peter stretched out on the fold-out seat at the rear while Stan and Frank huddled together in the row behind me. The height difference between them was more noticeable when Miss Anna presented herself. Eye-level with her shoulder pads, Stan could have been the henpecked husband from an old comic strip. That was the problem right there. Take a picture of us, destroyers of manhood, pie-eating clowns, speeding down the highway to your big steel-hammering city, to your church. To mourn.

There was no place inconspicuous to park a catering van next to Our Lady of Sorrows so we ditched it by a supermarket a few blocks away. Full sun on the asphalt, a blazing, dusty day in June. Frank brushed on another layer of face powder. Peter straightened the boxy jacket of his off-the-rack suit, which, like everything else he wore, didn't fit as it should. A big guy, he overcompensated by buying a size he could get lost in. I should have helped him; at some point, when we were bleaching piss-stained sheets, when we were wrapping my lover's shivering body in hot towels from the dryer, feeding him his meals through a straw, there must have been a moment when we could have turned to each other and said, "So, what are you wearing to Phil's funeral?"

I had a strong urge to go into the supermarket, just to look at the unfamiliar brands of cereal that Phil might have eaten, growing up in this neighborhood of bars and boarded-up factories. There wasn't time for anything; the service was at eleven. Peter led our phalanx down the streets of cracked pavement toward the small red-brick church. Tomas, more sober though less continent under the influence of coffee, leaned on my arm.

"Why didn't we just have a memorial service back home?" he grumbled under his breath. I heard his fear, thinly disguised as the usual queeny bitching he excelled at in several languages. But I didn't explain again.

Why? Phil's body was here.

The usher at the door, a stooped, red-faced old man, gave us a grim inspection. Without Frank, we might have passed. Four young men in adequate suits, we could have been Phil's college buddies, if he'd gone to college, or friends from work, if he'd ever had a job where people wore ties. But he marked us, potential trouble-makers, and after mentally consulting the risk table that all funeral directors probably carried in their heads, steered us toward a dark pew at the back.

Phil's older sister Barbara, standing in the aisle, recognized us with a stony look. If we hadn't already been inside, we'd never have made it, but now she too had to weigh the costs of making a scene. Phil's block-headed build and snub nose weren't as attractive on a woman. Still I studied her as long as I could, but it was worse than looking at a stranger, this hostile, imperfect copy of the face I remembered. Barbara had come to New York to take charge of the arrangements. How could I not feel for her, imagining my own sister having to identify my carcass, tears streaming down her little pixie face like Holly Golightly when she shoves her cat out into the rain? Only of course Laura Sue wouldn't do that, she'd haul my brother up from Atlanta to do it for her. And Barbara hadn't cried. She had taken his books and his clothes. They were directed to give us no information at the hospital. There's no health-care proxy for a dead man. Only family survives. Spouse: none.

The five of us crept into our pew. Frank sniffed loudly and dabbed his eyes with a black-edged handkerchief. I couldn't help but be impressed by his thoroughness. If you're going to live your life as a Bette Davis movie, get the props right.

Then I saw the casket being wheeled in from the side of the church, a closed, polished box gleaming in the dim light of the altar lamps. Who were these six strangers touching it? Involuntarily I shot up, about to run to it, unthinking, lost to myself.

Peter's embrace pulled me back down to my seat. No, I couldn't tear my clothes and fall into the grave like a soldier's mother; any break from my invisibility would be read as drama, not grief. But it was all wrong, that expensive lid over Phil's face. If they'd really loved him, they'd have wanted to look at him till the last possible minute, despite his wasted frame, his lesioned skin, death's causes undisguised by a cosmetic artist less skillful than Frank. I wondered about our former classmates at the Fashion Institute, if any of them were now working on the dead. Toward the end I'd taken so many pictures of you, Phil, our hands bathing your scarred and heaving chest, your hands lighting a cigarette you couldn't smoke, till I no longer knew what beauty was — whether it was everything that existed, or nothing, a thin film of tears we blinked away. Darling, you never went blind, you just got too tired to open your eyes.

Philip Joseph Shanahan. November 12, 1970 – June 4, 1995. Our folded paper programs curled in the heat. The small church was half full. At ten past eleven an old lady began playing "Abide With Me" on the piano. The usher helped a middle-aged couple, undoubtedly Phil's parents, into the front pew. Both short and solid, she had brittle dyed-brown hair and an unsteady walk; he wore the fixed scowl of a man who can't cry. The fat sisters sat beside them, Barbara with her crew-cut husband and baby boy, Mary Claire by herself.

The priest's brief eulogy could have been about anyone. If only we were mistaken, it was the wrong funeral, another boy who had died. This priest was too young to have known Phil. Not Father O'Shea, the terror of Our Lady of Sorrows Middle School, who twisted the boys' ears when they came to class with dirty shirt collars, but let Phil off with a dozen Hail Marys when he released the science teacher's white mice instead of feeding them to the snake. I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die, the voice from the pulpit read. I remembered Phil's body, dying, how his mouth opened and stayed open, and then he was suddenly and completely somewhere else where I could never do a single thing for him again, where he could be in pain forever and I'd missed my chance to make it stop. He'd thought nothing happened after death, just dirt and sleep. I could see how that would have appealed to you, Phil, you lazy slob. Oh, no more jokes, no more fights, the judgment was in and no one cared that your few years of being yourself were over.

The other sister, Mary Claire, rose to speak. She had a welcoming sort of plumpness, unlike Fortress Barbara. The shiny black bow on the broad bosom of her dress kept getting knocked askew when she leaned over the pages of her prepared remarks. "My brother loved books," she said. "He wanted to study history. When we were kids he wrote a history of Pittsburgh for a term paper. It was only three pages because, he said, nothing ever happened here. Father O'Shea got mad and asked why he picked it, then, and he said, because that's where we live." She smiled through her tears and sweat.

Tomas groaned. I hoped he wasn't going to be sick. Stan slipped him a pill. The usher coughed meaningfully behind us. Some clean-cut young guy was in the pulpit now, talking about how he'd copied the wrong answers off Phil's test when they shared a desk in Catholic school. Now he was studying for the priesthood, this guy, and what a shame it was that Philip had died so young. Yeah, get over yourself, kid; no one remembers who played opposite Cagney in "Angels with Dirty Faces".

Stan slid out of the pew to help Tomas outside in search of slightly fresher air. Frank's queenly posture sagged a bit when his boyfriend was no longer beside him. His makeup, still intact, seemed over-bright for his tired face, like an actress at the end of her tour. I held his hand. On my other side, Peter sat at the edge of his seat with fists clenched. I thought I could feel his heart thumping.

When they'd all left us, helpless, Peter had been there. When Phil could no longer eat the meals Tomas brought from his restaurant, or even laugh at his efforts to make gourmet food in a blender; when he couldn't pay attention to Frank's Edith Piaf imitation; when my sister made the mistake of telling him about a healing at our new church and he asked her to pray for rain because the Mets were losing in the fourth inning; all those nights it was just me and him, touching anyplace he wasn't sore, reading to him to share insomnia's loneliness, my sleep so broken that I put the mayonnaise in the microwave and my camera in the fridge. Phil didn't like to hear the Bible. He wanted poetry instead, all weird stuff about swans raping girls and daffodil bulbs sprouting from skulls. He had no idea what it meant, I'm sure; crazy words proliferating like cells colonizing the brain. When I burst into tears during a fashion shoot for Redbook, I realized it was time to radio for backup. Tapestry versus straw handbags should not be an emotionally fraught topic, even for fags.

Peter would lie on our bed and read the minutes of legislative committee meetings while I bathed Phil; later, we would clean him together, when he wasn't able to hold himself up in the tub. I could take a precious hour to cry and stare at the television while Peter sorted through the bills and hospital paperwork that had piled up on our kitchen table. No one could argue with insurance companies like Peter Edelman. Relentlessly polite, he had read every policy down to the last "subpart J" and woe betide you if you didn't accept his explanation of how it related to subparts K, L, and M.

Did you see us, Phil? You weren't talking much by then. Did you hear us watching the Home Shopping Network in the living room at 2 a.m., passing a joint and a bowl of popcorn back and forth? We were laughing so hard we had to hold each other. This poor woman was hawking a set of folk-song CDs and her jowls were just like the hound dogs on the album cover. And as for "Blowin' in the Wind," well, you were never too smart to enjoy the obvious. Then that song came on, the one you said your Pop used to sing at family parties, about the green green grass of something or other — the only thing you told me about him, other than that he drove a truck and kicked your queer ass out at sixteen. We almost ordered it for you. Peter had his hand on the phone. I admit, his other hand was under my shirt. The small print below the toll-free number said orders would arrive in six to eight weeks. We got as far as the woman saying hello and he hung up on her. She didn't hear the rub of our jeans together when I rolled on top of him, wanting to discover the clean salty taste of his body, at last, after all our false starts. Peter had too many thoughts to fall in love easily. My poor cock had to compete for his attention with the fate of mankind, particularly that segment of mankind that wanted Assemblyman Defalque to fix their potholes. And you, Phil, tumbling out of bed, overturning your bedpan, just as he was groaning into my neck and digging his fingers into my thighs so hard it hurt, and we were ready to let something good happen to us for the first time in so long.

A pretty girl was speaking at the funeral. Her solemn pose was like a suit worn for a first interview, a temporary muting of the bouncy energy of her brown curls and round blue eyes. She folded her hands dutifully in the pulpit. "Phil was my boyfriend in high school. I just want to say that he was the most... real...guy I ever met."

Something rose in my throat, a laugh or a cry. I swallowed it back. Peter tensed, leaning out of his seat. "I can't stand this," he said, loud enough that heads turned and the usher cleared his geriatric throat again.

"It can't be true. She doesn't look a thing like me," I whispered, putting my hand on his broad back to keep him down.

"They're telling lies about him, and they think that God..." He said the last word like it was a curse. I spotted Phil's mother staring at the girl, a fierce triumph warring with the grief that lined her plain square face, as if she were willing into existence every word that came out of that cute gap-toothed mouth. She had to live the rest of her life in this parish pretending she wasn't ashamed of her son.

As for Frank, he chewed his scarlet-painted lips. Miss Anna's confidence was leaving him. Real is a word that ends stories, with the happiness of Pinocchio, finally wearing a face that doesn't give away his thoughts. Or the Little Mermaid, that post-op trannie, split in half and silenced by love. Who was the real Frank Abruzzo? I never asked Phil whether he wore his drag when they did it. Now here he was wilting in the back pew, the widow turned Other Woman. "Buck up, Jezebel," I murmured. Recalling his diva, he stiffened up and showed us his Bette Davis eyes.

It was taking an awfully long time for Stan and Tomas to come back from the men's room or wherever they'd gone for a breather. The service was drawing to a close. It was torture but I didn't want it to be over. Only seeing the box go into the ground would be worse. My sister had wanted me to do something about Phil's soul, and by extension, my own. They were praying for us at the Broad Way Church, where I went with her every Sunday because I felt worse when I didn't. Phil had gotten that bit of Walt Whitman stuck in his head, about living like the animals who don't lose sleep over their sins. He was resolved to go to his grave an unrepentant cocksucker. "You're not sorry, Julian?" he'd whispered to me, one night, after I'd tried to pray over him again. His faded blue eyes so innocently needy, his hand clutching mine like a child's: "You don't wish...we hadn't been?" My courage failed me, Phil, my sweet pain in the ass, what could I say but the truth: I couldn't call it worthless now, our love, the only life you'd had.

I'm half Catholic on the X-chromosome side but I didn't go up for Communion. I was tired of my body and I didn't want God or anyone else inside it. The idea of life continuing after the last chord was struck exhausted me. Maybe that was hell, to know that you were insubstantial and yet forced to play out that story, to remain in that consciousness forever. Souls in paintings are like diamonds, outlasting the pitchfork and flames. Another reason pictures lie.

But the young priest dismissed us, to the plink-plunk of the old lady's piano beating out "Eternal Father, strong to save," and the six strangers maneuvered the casket off the altar and trundled it down the aisle on squeaky metal wheels. Phil was not in there. This whole performance was about his not being in there, wherever else he might be. Still I shoved Frank aside and rushed out of the pew to touch the box, as if that could make this day not be about our absence, too. My fingers brushed wood as the frowning procession moved on, their tempo unbroken.

The pallbearers descended into the hazy white glare of an inner-city summer day. Peter, Frank and I followed the black-suited crowd. Barbara stood between us and the limousine, squinting into the sun. "I think it would be better...for my parents...if you didn't come to the gravesite," she said flatly.

"You think?" Peter's voice carried above the noise of muted conversations and traffic that sped thoughtlessly past the line of black sedans. "Did any of you once pick up the phone and call him when he was sick? Did you take him to the hospital in the middle of the night? You wouldn't even touch his body without rubber gloves."

"Peter." I gripped his sleeve. The edges of my vision were turning green, breaking apart into black starbursts.

Barbara's gray eyes were hard in her doughy face. "My brother wouldn't have died if he hadn't run around with you people."

Peter stepped back, but he was only gathering his forces for the next round. I envied his simple, guiltless anger.

"Phil died because you didn't accept him, you and your phony God. You cry over Jesus on the cross and kill your own kids." His broad face was flushed and the cords of his neck stood out. At that moment I didn't know him at all. He was like someone you see on the TV news, aiming his educated voice like a brick through a stained-glass window. There is no God but the Democratic Party and the New York Times is his prophet.

"Phil died," I said, light-headed in the heat, "because he fucked guys for money."

Frank looked daggers at me. I was forcing him to break character. In Mamie Eisenhower's day, one didn't say such things on a church sidewalk. "If he'd been with me..."

"Don't go there," Peter ordered.

"I wanted us to be exclusive," Frank said defiantly.

"To quote the great Patsy Cline," I drawled, "'People in hell want ice water, but it don't mean they git it.'" Then I fell down.

When I came to my senses on the hot pavement, the funeral party was gone and Tomas was pouring something fiery down my throat from a small flask. "Where have you assholes been?" I sputtered.

"The van's gone," explained Stan, who was standing behind him.

"How do you know?"

"Because it's not there, dumbo," Frank snapped.

Ever-patient, Stan filled me in on what he'd already told the others: after the usher refused to let them back inside, he and Tomas had walked back to the supermarket to buy some coffee, only to discover that our borrowed ride was being towed because we were in the wrong spot for commercial vehicles. "Pittsburgh hates us," Stan sighed.

"Niko is going to kill me for losing his truck," Tomas fretted. "The cop said I couldn't get it out of the impound lot because it's not registered to me."

"So now we've got to lay out the cash to rent another one, like we should have done in the first place," Frank said.

"Excuse me for spending all my money on someone's medical bills," I spoke up.

Peter hoisted me upright. "Guys, let's find someplace air-conditioned to sit down and work this out."

We dragged ourselves past a bustling McDonald's and the remains of the Sunflower Diner, an empty room with soaped-over windows beneath a pink and silver sign. Around the corner from the church was the White Dove, a pub with a fizzling neon ad for Harp Lager in the window. A couple of heavy-set guys in jeans and work boots shouldered their way through the brass-handled doors while we stood considering our options. I looked from them to Frank. I wasn't the only one doing it, either.

"Why'd you have to dress like that?" I griped once more.

"Why'd you have to be a fag?"

"Maybe we should go rent the car," Stan said, drawing his arm around Frank in a conciliatory way.

"No, fuck this. All for one and one for all," Peter declared, and shoved the doors open, so hard they banged against the walls of the dark wood-paneled vestibule. We shrugged and followed him.

There was probably a gay bar somewhere in Pittsburgh but this wasn't it. I could tell because, first of all, the roughnecks nursing their pints had good biceps but had totally let their abs go, and second, the name didn't lend itself to double-entendres. We found a table in a dark corner and ordered a Bloody Mary for Frank and beers for the rest of us. The free pretzels were crisp and so salty they burned my tongue and made us all realize we wanted lunch. We ordered some soup and bread, and argued a bit half-heartedly before agreeing that one of us should go rent the cheapest possible car that seated five, and then we'd all chip in to buy Niko a one-way plane ticket to come rescue his truck because none of us could bear to drive down here twice. Tomas drew the short pretzel so we took his beer away and sent him up to ask the bartender for a Yellow Pages. The soup was warm and filling, and I felt good and also terrible that I could be enjoying my meal when one of us was dead. Peter's eyes met mine and I could tell somehow that he was having the same thought, both of us pausing while the others were bent over their bowls.

The White Dove seemed as good a place as any for us to wait for Tomas to return with the car. A Pirates-Mets game had started on TV and we moved up to the bar to watch. Frank went to the ladies' room to adjust his veil and wig, hoping by this charade to pass for an actual woman in the dim light. I wasn't optimistic. A lady of Miss Anna's caliber would not be tying one on in a blue-collar pub at one o'clock on a Sunday afternoon. Not unless she'd conceived a reckless passion for the handyman at the country club and was making an effort to appreciate his rough but wholesome lifestyle, like Jane Wyman in "All That Heaven Allows".

The Pirates scored a run and Peter gave a disappointed sigh. "Could you make an effort?" I muttered. "It's not bad enough to be queer in this neighborhood, we have to be Mets fans?"

But he only drew up one side of his mouth in a smile and clapped me on the back in a false sort of way, leaving his hand there long enough for anyone looking for trouble to find it. This wasn't the Peter I knew.

"You boys not from around here?" the bartender asked. He was a balding middle-aged man with big forearms whose muscles flexed as he wiped out the glasses with a dishrag. I saw only mild curiosity on his apple-cheeked face, for the time being.

"We're down from New York." Peter glanced at the TV, a little more apologetically this time. "For a funeral."

"I'm sorry, fellas. I had a feeling, 'cause we don't usually get suits like that in here." He pointed at my Brooks Brothers tie and winked. "This round's on the house. Was it family?"

"My best friend. Phil Shanahan," Peter said.

"Phil...Phil?" The bartender searched his memory. "Not Joe and Deenie's boy?"

We didn't recall his parents' names. Stan produced a folded-up funeral program from his suit pocket. The bartender looked it over and shook his head sadly. "Yeah, little Philly Shanahan. He used to come in here with his pop and steal the olives out of my jar when he thought I wasn't looking. Poor kid. What — "

His question was interrupted by one of the paunchy guys at the end of the bar banging his glass on the countertop for a refill. A scuffle in the hallway by the restrooms distracted us as well. "Excuse me," we heard Frank say in his frostiest diva voice. The impatient guy's friend, we learned, had pinched his rear.

"An excellent advertisement for support hose," I observed. Frank looked partly flattered and partly scared, which enhanced his female credibility. Peter drained his second pint of beer. I pushed mine away. "Who's the designated driver?" I asked, a not-so-subtle hint that he should slow down.

"Tomas." He reached for my untouched glass.

"No thanks, I'm not ready to die till I shoot at least one Vogue cover."

"It must be nice to know what the meaning of your life is."

I thought of mentioning to Peter that weed did more for his personality than liquor, but given his strange mood, I feared he'd take that as encouragement to further impair our chances of getting out of Pittsburgh. Further down the bar, Frank's new admirer was telling an off-color joke, rather more loudly than necessary: "...and then the Jew bent over to pick up the penny, and the Jew and the Greek went straight to hell."

"Philly, he was a funny kid," the bartender picked up the conversation where we'd left off. "He'd get up on that stool — right where you're sitting now — " he pointed to me again, a storyteller warming to his audience — "and bet you a dime he couldn't reel off the stats on any player you liked. Knew all the teams, Eagles, Pirates, Flyers, you name it." The bartender smiled at the memory. "His pop picked up a few free lunches that way."

"Phil had a good head for that stuff," Stan spoke up. "He could tell you all the Oscar winners, even the tough ones like 'best foreign language film'."

"Not like we ever double-checked," Frank snickered.

"I did always have my doubts about 'Celine et la banane gigantesque'," Stan mused.

"Oh, he assured us it was a huge hit in Algiers," I joked, lost in a moment of happiness from the past.

"What did he wind up doing, up in New York?" the bartender asked.

"He taught bodybuilding classes at our gym, and he did some modeling for fashion magazines," I said. It sounded shallow, as a summary of anyone's life, so I added, "He was saving up to go back to school, for sports medicine. And, uh, he was writing a paper on Yeats." Phil had been too shy to let me read the scribbled sheets of notebook paper stashed in the drawer of our bedside table. They were waiting for the dreaded posthumous housecleaning, along with his porn videos and outdated bottles of Ensure.

"Ah, the Irish bard," the bartender said, affecting a brogue. "That is no country for old men. The young/In one another's arms, birds in the trees..." His eyes held more warmth toward us than before. It sounded like Yeats had been a regretful old queen. "A hit with the ladies, that poetry stuff," the bartender added.

Peter wore a contrary expression. I was afraid he would amend my whitewashed biography — say, by disclosing Phil's screen debut as Power Bottom #2. "Phil didn't do any of that," he said.

"What do you mean, of course he did," I said. "I have the pictures."

"He didn't finish school. He never got to — to learn. To see a better way."

"Better than what?" Stan asked, but Peter's attention was caught by the guffaws of the men at the end of the bar.

"How do you fit four fags on a bar stool?" one of them asked. His friend pretended to have no idea. "Turn it upside down."

Glancing warily from them, his regular customers, to us, the bartender put on his oh-Danny-boy face of wise sympathy and asked in a low tone, "So, eh, if you don't mind me asking, what did our poor friend die of?"

"This!" Peter slammed down his beer glass. "Hopelessness. Narrow-minded bullshitters laughing at him, making him believe he wasn't worth shit. People who are beat down, who think the answer is to kick someone even lower instead of rising up."

Frank was rising up, all right. He was halfway to the door by the time Peter stopped for breath. Stan froze, like a rabbit caught in a clearing between two trees, probably knowing he couldn't stop Peter but unwilling to turn tail so blatantly. As for me, well, I'd bleed all over a $500 suit for Peter Edelman, any day.

"Maybe you kids better move along," the bartender put a word in my ear, not unkindly.

The joker muttered something to his friend, with a nudge of his elbow. The other guy, after some prodding, asked in a blustery too-high voice, "Hey, uh, Donny, what does AIDS stand for?"

"Asshole Injected Death Sentence!"

Peter whacked his empty bottle against the railing, leaving a jagged longneck stump. Oh, Lord. Last time my Daddy did that, I needed a dozen stitches. Then again, so did he.

I tossed my jacket to the bartender. "Take good care of this, darlin', I want to look nice when they bury me." I took a deep breath and went to stand beside my crazy friend.

He'd rattled them. I knew the signs, the ozone smell, the buzz of fear covered by a bully's laughter, as they sniffed the air to sense whether we'd back down. From the corner of my eye, I saw the bartender reach for the phone.

Peter raised the bottle end. The guys were about to lunge from us when he brought it down with a sharp swipe across his other hand. The grin on his face was terrible. "You want it?" he taunted, waving his blood-streaked palm in front of the joker's nose. "You want some faggot blood?" Red drops spattered the man's flannel shirt.

A crash came from behind us. In his haste to escape, Frank had backed into a chair, knocking it into the path of another leatherneck who took this as a sign that the game was on. Now Stan had his little arms around the guy's waist, trying to pull him off Frank, who landed our team's only hit of the day with a well-aimed high heel to the groin. Our two jokers had just taken advantage of this diversion to yank my arms back in a most unsightly position when the cops charged in.

That's how we ended up spending the night in the drunk tank at the precinct. Peter used his one phone call to ring his dad's law office in Brooklyn. Nathan's tiny ears pricked up, I was sure, when he heard that our boys had been at the center of a hate crime. He got the station chief on the line and slung a lot of fancy words at him about equal protection and false imprisonment. They kept us overnight anyhow, supposedly to see whether the guys in the bar would press charges. Against us? We hadn't laid a lily-white hand on them, unless you counted Frank, and somehow I couldn't picture that leatherneck admitting in open court that Edith Piaf had kicked him in the nuts. I called Tomas' cell phone and told him to save himself; Niko could bring us home when he returned tomorrow for the catering van. I liked Niko, a chubby, nervously cheerful guy who smelled like fresh-baked dough, and figured this was my one chance to get to know him before Tomas threw him over for some guitar-playing drug addict, the way he always did when he met someone decent.

"The false consciousness of the working classes," said Peter, "is a truly intractable problem." Squeezed in beside me on a hard bench in the corner of the cell, he picked at his institutional dinner of coffee and a packaged cheese sandwich from the police canteen. His left hand was wrapped in an awkward gauze bandage.

"You want some of my Fritos?" Since he was holding the coffee with his one good hand, I fed him a corn chip. "Scary motherfucker," I said, and he smiled. It was evening, though we had no window to see the darkness. Frank was circling the cell mournfully like the beta-male chimp at the zoo, searching for a place to sit because a pack of newly arrested hookers had taken over his bench when he got up to pee. Stan had swallowed his remaining Valiums before the cop searched him, so he was snoring on the floor with his head pillowed on his rolled-up jacket.

Done eating, Peter sighed with fatigue and shifted around to find a less uncomfortable position against the concrete wall. I stroked the wrist of his injured hand. "That's nice," he said, and winced.

"Hey, you know, Frank hasn't used up his one phone call."

"What, you want to order a pizza?"

"I thought...in case you wanted to let Shawn know where you are."

"He can't do anything for us in here." His voice took on a sardonic edge. "Maybe someday...can you believe, he's got his eye on Washington already?"

"Guy gets around."

Peter grunted assent. It seemed that each time we were together I was facing a new reason to say goodbye to him. "You going with him?" I asked.

"That depends."

"On what?"

Peter didn't answer. I could tell that his hand was paining him. He closed his eyes and leaned his head back against my shoulder.

Over at the urinal, the largest hooker was demonstrating the convenience of crotchless panties for those who, like Frank, were one thing on the outside and another underneath. She was a short mountainous figure with gold-weave dreadlocks and a double chin that helped conceal her Adam's apple. Men don't look very closely when they want something. She was teasing Frank in a big-sister way, if you can imagine your big sister shaking her dick at you, to break him in to life on the street. "That old dress gotta go, honey, a man don't wanna fuck no Aunt Sadie."

Frank, too lonely to keep up his what-a-dump attitude, began telling them the story of the funeral and the bar fight, embellishing slightly, but also leaving out most of the mean things I'd said to him. One of the other girls, a porcelain-faced Russian who smiled with her mouth closed to cover her broken teeth, shook her head sympathetically when she heard how Phil had died: "I know a lot of girls went like that. In here we call it 'ninja' because it sneaks up on you and — pfft." She spat on the floor and crossed herself to ward off bad luck. The guard, aiming to put a lid on our conversation, switched off the lights.

After some bawdy backtalk from the women, the cell grew quiet. I heard bodies fumbling around for their resting places, defending their territory in whispers. With nothing to think about, I noticed the smells more, baked in by a long day's heat: the open toilet, unwashed bodies, industrial pine-scented cleanser, and rising above these, a few brave whiffs of Chanel No. 5. In a shaft of fluorescent light from the hallway, the guard flipped the pages of his People magazine. There might be a photo of mine in there, if that shampoo ad was still running. Personal grooming, the great unifier of mankind.

Peter rested more of his weight on me. His dark curls were soft against my neck. "You okay, Jule?" he murmured.

"Tonight's not so bad," I said, and meant it. Tonight we were together, tomorrow we wouldn't be, the four of us, maybe living long enough to look back on this day as the sum of our closeness, the meaning of youth. All my life I had prayed when I felt about to evaporate. Now I lay me down to sleep. That verse had been on a poster over my bed, bordered with silly blue flowers. If I should die before I wake. When I first learned to read, I thought it was a warning, not to sleep under the frame or it could fall on me. The hand of God tips the picture, the hand of God stops the picture.

From the ladies' corner came hisses, a faint slap, something snatched back from wandering hands. The dreadlocked one's voice carried above the others: "Honey, we all think we too good to be here."

Still speaking under his breath, Peter suddenly asked me, "You know where I was last night?"

"You said you and Shawn were working on that bill to raise public defenders' salaries." A subject that held more interest for me than 24 hours previously, when I'd been on the right side of the law.

"After that."

"I assume this story involves somebody's dick or you wouldn't be keeping me from my beauty rest."

"Why should I even tell you what you already know."

"Because you want to say it and you know you can say it to me."

"He's got a girlfriend in public now — Maxine. Black, of course. Very pretty."

"Toothpaste-commercial pretty or music-video pretty?"

"Toothpaste, I guess."

"Yeah, that's serious...so does she know about you?"

"Everybody knows about me. I'm the nice Jewish boy who writes the speeches and color-codes the index cards. But if you mean, has she shaken my hand and thanked me for keeping Shawn's dick warm, not yet."

"You poor little thing," I said.

"You think I'm an idiot for being in love with him." He sounded disappointed to get a sensible reaction from me — Julian Selkirk, photographer of extravagance, air-brusher extraordinaire.

"I think you're lying to yourself," I whispered fiercely. "I think you just like seeing your own words in the newspaper."

He let this sink in. The guard, alerted by our rising volume, paced away again when he thought the conversation had stopped. Peter inclined his head toward the sound of those retreating footsteps.

"That's what I mean," he said. "Being gay isn't the only problem there is."

"And this makes you want to drop your trousers because...?"

"Because when I'm with Shawn I care about everyone, not just myself, my tribe. Sometimes..." He searched my face for signs of mockery; he ought to have known me better. "Sometimes, he seems to me like everything that could go right in the world."

"So call him." The words caught in my throat. Peter said nothing. He was still leaning against my chest, with my arms crossed over his. "You can't call him because he wouldn't come. He's not here, not even in spirit. He won't listen to you."

I felt his breathing quicken, along with my own, in the thick silence. Touching his cheek, I found it was streaked with tears, big drops that rolled down and dampened the hair at his temples. I had nothing to wipe his eyes with but my shirtsleeve, which was none too clean, but I did my best.

"Phil's dead," he whispered. His body heaved with suppressed sobs. Holding him close, moving my lips soundlessly so he wouldn't hear and argue with me to make himself stop crying, I said a prayer for a boy who had run as fast as he could.

####

Copyright (c) 2010 by Jendi Reiter. Previously published by The Adirondack Review.

Biography:

Jendi Reiter is the author of the poetry collections A Talent for Sadness (Turning Point Books, 2003), Swallow (Amsterdam Press, 2009), and Barbie at 50 (Cervena Barva Press, 2010). Her fiction has appeared in such journals as The Iowa Review, Passages North, The Adirondack Review, and the Bridport Prize Anthology. The Away Team is a chapter from her novel-in-progress.

In Memoriam

2011-02-18T06:33:00.005-05:00

James (Jimmy) Howard Dill: 1953-2011
El Paso, Texas.

The Goodbye

You almost lit the cigarette twice

but I forced my mouth shut.

Watching your every move,

I cleared my throat.

The smoke-filled room

provoked a last word in the silence

--Your chairs need oil.
The backscrews need tightening.

He nodded in Japanese fashion.

Trying to cushion the air,

I found no crisp, dead leaf

to rake moisture left from a choking sea.

Copyright (c) 1999 by Robert L. Giron.

From Metamorphosis of the Serpent God (1999, Gival Press) by Robert L. Giron. Printed online by permission.

Thoughts: Reading of Late / Post Hosni Mubarak

2011-02-16T16:32:00.003-05:00

Recent Reads:

Between classes and the never-ending stream of emails, I occasionally have time to read for leisure, knowing it's not for a meeting or for publication.

Not too long ago, I was invited by Francisco Aragon for a private reading of a poet he has nurtured (I'll write about his book later) over time and after the conversation / reading Francisco gave me a copy of his latest book: Glow of Our Sweat.

In picking up this book and reading it, one will find very thoughtful poems and his translations of others' poems, by mostly Spanish poets.

The poems travel from Spain to California with a mention of France and other places but the thread of poetic history is also running through the book. It's one of those kinds that requires another read and begs you to ponder: what is meant by this or what was he getting at there?

So take some time and pick up a copy at Amazon.com:

Glow of Our Sweat

Post HM:

And so Hosni Mubarak has exited the scene.

Now we watch the turmoil spread to Iran, where the government is being hypocritical, but to be honest that kind of political talk is not common just abroad. We have plenty of it here in the USA.

The House of Representatives gave the rich tax breaks and now it wants to cut jobs of federal works and the like. What kind of hypocrisy does one call that?

Do we wait until the masses are up in an uproar? And will those who praised the civil uprising in Egypt welcome something similar in the USA? I think not and that is why the hypocrisy we are seeing aboard is not anything some in the USA should be quick to point out because four fingers point back at themselves.

My question is this: How long will it take before folks realize they made a big mistake this past November? Something many of us already knew.

Unfortunately, some of those who voted to put these folks into power in the House are the very ones who will be hurting the most in the long run.

It's easy to believe foolish propaganda but it's more difficult to undo it.

Thougts: Post AWP / Egypt / Poetry on ArLiJo

2011-02-09T20:40:00.003-05:00

--AWP

This past week was a busy one with literally thousands of poets and writers in town for the AWP (Associated Writing Programs) Conference. One couldn't walk a few yards without bumping into someone known or a person whose work one has read.

The sessions were interesting, especially those that dealt with the direction the industry is headed: towards ebooks and the like. I saw this coming back in 1998 but the larger publishing houses were slow to move and they are still partly in denial. However, many textbook publishers have woken up and are busy trying to get us (those of us who teach) to inform them about what they should do. I just completed a survey and shared my perspective.

I got to meet some of the poets and authors I have published through Gival Press which was thrilling to me and to them. We had time to sit and talk as we watched the crowds pass by. Fortunately, some folks were buying books but mostly folks were looking for contacts (always a good thing), information and some for freebies.

Rich Murphy had a good suggestion: That the AWP set up workshops on different levels so that in advance students could meet with established poets/writers to workshop their work and get feedback. For many of us who have been around, the sessions tend to repeat themselves with fancier titles, but one who goes to a variety of conferences the same can be said of literature, ESL, or other conferences. Most has been said but we re-invent it and for students, especially the younger ones, they have not seen/heard it before.

All in all, the AWP was a success and thank God we didn't have the terrible ice storm we had a week before this past week. My fear is Chicago in Feb. in 2012. What are they thinking?

---Egypt:

I thought President Hosni Mubarak would have been gone by now but he is stubborn and won't budge. It is a delicate balance and the area may very well be a keg ready to fire off. I spoke with an Egyptian poet friend at AWP this week and she said that the Egyptians are a peaceful people and both she and I fear that others from outside will enter and disrupt the country even further so that the unrest will spread outward. If that were to happen, God help us, because where will it end?

---Poet Maritza Rivera is featured on ArLiJo

If you want to drift off and think of Puerto Rico, then I suggest that you click on the link below and read Maritza's poetry.

ArLiJo

Take a Creative Writing-Poetry Class with Me at Montgomery College

2011-01-17T11:46:00.005-05:00

This Spring 2011 semester I'll be teaching English 223 (and the advanced section English 224 which follows EN223) at Montgomery College-Takoma Park/Silver Spring.

If you are interested, follow the enrollment process at Montomgery College:
Montgomery College
or call me at 240.567.1379 or email me at: Robert.Giron@montgomerycollege.edu.

Description:
EN 223 Section: 34838 - INTRO TO CREAT WRIT POETRY Designed to provide students a foundation for understanding the forms, techniques, and aesthetics of poetry writing in order that they may develop their skills. Emphasis will be on both traditional and contemporary modes to establish each student's style of expression and understanding of the craft. Students' poems, the poems of their peers, and poetry of proven merit will be discussed in a workshop setting. (ARTD) PREREQUISITE: A grade of C or better in EN 101 or EN 101A or consent of instructor based on a writing sample. Three hours each week.

Schedule Types: Lecture & workshop for crafting/revising poems

Course Attributes:
Arts Distribution, General Elective, Upper Level Requirement

The class will meet on Tuesdays only from 2 pm to 4.40 pm in the Commons Bldg. Room 113.

Texts to be used:
Term: SPRING 11 Name: EN 223 Section: 34838 Instructor: Giron Course ID: 34838 Location: TAKOMA PARK/SILVER SILVER

REQUIRED
POETIC VOICES WITHOUT BORDERS 2
Author: GIRON
ISBN: 9781928589433
Edition/Copyright: 09
Published Date: 2009
Used: $20.75 New: $27.50

REQUIRED
POET'S COMPANION
Author: ADDONIZIO
ISBN: 9780393316544
Edition/Copyright: 97
Published Date: 1997
Used: $12.75 New: $17.00

America: Stop the Insanity!

2011-01-09T21:49:00.002-05:00

The tragedy in Tucson, Arizona is a wake up call to all Americans that it is time that we begin to be accountable for our actions: be they verbal, written, or physical.

More importantly, it is a call for all public figures to realize that the tone they set might be inciting anger and hate in this country. We cannot continue in this manner and still maintain our liberty and freedom everyone is so freely claiming they are entitled to possess. Yes, all Americans and residents in the country are entitled to the pursuit of happiness but that does not include being the victim of others' hatred and volatile attitudes.

It is time for all politicians, be they Republican, members of the Teabag Party or Democrats to realize that they were elected to work for the United States not for their own aggrandizement. The country needs them to put politics aside and start thinking about what is best for this country as a whole. Lord knows the world is leaving America in the dust in terms of educational rankings and the like.

My prayers go out to the victims of the senseless shootings and to Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and to their families.

Now it is up to the media to hold public figures accountable for volatile rhetoric that incites hatred.

There is no longer any excuse for stupidity.

Tim W. Brown Wins the London Book Festival Award for General Fiction

2011-01-01T13:32:00.006-05:00

Seconds Acts by Tim W. Brown has won the 2010 London Book Festival Award for General Fiction.

Congratulations, Tim!

Click on the link below to get more info on the book:
Second Acts

Click on the link below to buy a copy at Amazon.com:

Buy it Amazon.com

Daniel Degnan Wins the Gival Press Short Story Award

2010-12-31T17:05:00.002-05:00

Winner of the 2010 Gival Press Short Story Award

Fat Tails
by Daniel Degnan of River Vale, New Jersey.

The short stories were read anonymously and the winner was chosen by last year's winner Perry Glasser.

Photo by Gregory Kershaw.

Runner-up

The Away Team
by Jendi Reiter of Northampton, Massachusetts.

Finalists:

The Radio
by Erik Sakariassen of Bismarck, North Dakota.

Icarus
by Lones Seiber of Morristown, Tennessee.

Summer Was the Gift
by Josie Sigler of Bar Harbor, Maine.

Daniel Degnan's "Fat Tails"

2010-12-31T16:48:00.002-05:00

Daniel Degnan

Winner of the 2010 Gival Press Short Story Award

Fat Tails

One by one I grab the salmon as they wriggle, spit, hiss – some with fins ripped off from their struggle in the net, some disemboweled by crabs. I stick the knife behind their gills, pull it forward through their throats, toss them to the other side of the hull. I’m calf-deep in salmon when I start, but have only bled forty fish when I slip and fall against the edge of the skiff, still clutching a creature in its death throes. Its blood pours over my gloved hands. Its mouth opens and closes mechanically. Its cold eye stares out to sea.

“It’s much easier with three people,” Meg says. She releases the last length of net and it splashes overboard. “We tried putting a lawn chair in the boat so Dad could help, but it slowed us down even more.”

With its hull covered in salmon, the vessel barely has room for the oar, machete, and two gas tanks.

“When will your brother get back from hunting?”

“Soon, I hope,” Meg says, taking the knife from me. She slices and tosses the fish as methodically as she dealt poker hands the day we met at Stanford. I played perfectly – crunched probabilities, measured bets, redirected risk. “Better lucky than smart,” I grumbled when she flipped her winning pocket pair. She bet me dinner on one more hand.

The skiff bobs in the blue sea while Meg bleeds the fish. I sit back on the bow platform to catch my breath. The sheer granite cliffs and lush green hills slide past the distant gray-and-white peaks of the mainland. Meg starts the engine with a pull of the cord. We push our way towards the refrigeration boat across the bay, weighed down by our catch. Fish flop across each other at our shins.

“Not a bad first pick,” she yells over the engine’s groan. “What do you think of Kodiak?”

Meg’s rolled the sleeves and pants of her orange rain gear, but the fabric still drapes over her slender body. She pulls back her hood and unbuttons her jacket, which blows behind her like a cape. The sun glistens off her yellow hair, pink cheeks, moist skin. She’s vibrant against the backdrop of sapphire sea and emerald hills.

“Gorgeous,” I say with a wink. “Though more effort than I imagined.”

She plows into a wave, splashing me. Saltwater drips down my face.

“We’re just getting started,” she says with a wink.

I smile, remembering she used that same phrase at the outset of several of the adventures she convinced me to join: biking Death Valley, kayaking Half Moon Bay, snow-shoeing Alta Peak.

The skiff rises and falls as we approach a cove surrounded by soaring rock cliffs stained white and yellow with seagull excrement. Hundreds of the screeching birds perch in every available nook, scores more circle or hang in the wind drifts. Meg cuts the engine and we float towards the refrigeration barge. She rushes to the bow and ties us to it. Then she hops into the vessel, checks the console, and removes the plywood coverings of three large bins still half-full from a recent pick.

“Doctor,” she jokes, “use that big brain of yours to keep the reds in the left bin, silvers in the center, pinks in the right.” The fish are all silver with dark gray backs. Other than their various sizes, they might as well be identical.

“How did your father react when you told him about your job in San Francisco,” I say, keeping my stance wide to compensate for the rocking of the boat. “About moving in together.”

Meg hops back into the stern of our skiff. She squats down, grabs a salmon in each hand, and lifts with her legs to launch them, two at a time, occasionally crossing them in midair. Each precise toss, timed to the rocking of both boats, just clears the rim of the appropriate bin.

“You haven’t told him,” I say.

She tosses a salmon at my chest. I catch it, dropping the one I’m holding.

“It’s not that easy,” she says. “My father depends on me out here. He and Matt can’t afford to winter in Homer without a strong season.”

“I thought we agreed Matt would get a winter job so they could hire one or two hands next summer. Hell, once I graduate we could even help them out with a little money.”

“That’s a silver,” she says, nodding to the fish in my arms. I toss it into the bin and grab another.

“You think your Dad will have a problem with us moving in together, don’t you?” My forearm and back muscles already ache. “Or maybe you have a problem with it.”

“You’ve never depended on anyone, anything,” she says. “And you’ve never had anyone depend on you.”

She hurls the fish double-time now, briefly clearing a bloody circle around her feet before more fish slide into it. The wind blows her hood back onto her head, masking her eyes, but it hardly matters - she barely looks where she’s throwing. Mechanical movements, concealed features, curves lost in the blanket of wet-weather gear – I could forget that this is the same woman who ran naked into the Santa Cruz Bay to get me to brave its icy waters. She removes her hood, wipes the sweat from her forehead, matted with blond hair, and I’m reminded.

“I’m depending on you,” I say. “Besides, you know me. When I want something, I solve for it. And what I want is for you, this one time, to get what you want.”

What I really want is Meg’s spontaneity in my life: the off-trail hikes, midnight excursions, impromptu costume parties.

“Hold that,” Meg says stepping towards me. She points to the giant striped salmon at my chest – it’s easily twice the size of even the larger salmon, maybe fifteen pounds. Its silver scales shine iridescent. She’s careful to place her feet firmly on the hull as she paces through the fish. “It’s a king salmon, and a nice looking one at that.” She pulls the knife from her belt. “I must have missed it.”

I hold the fish as she slices its throat and spreads the wound apart. She wipes the initial gush of blood aside and peers at the meat within. “It’s a white meat king,” she says. “A delicacy!”

A large wave strikes the boat from the side, causing it to rock violently. I drop the fish into the pile and in an effort to steady myself grab the nearest object – her knife.

“Shit!” I say. A pulse of adrenaline surges through me. With two sets of gloves between the blade and my hand, I suspect it wouldn’t have broken the skin. But the pain lingers.

“Did it get you bad?” Meg says, putting the knife back into her belt.

She helps me remove my jacket then the armband. I yank off the wool and rubber gloves. My palm fills with blood. Meg rips off her own gloves and throws them to the hull.

“Let me see,” she says, grabbing my hand.

The cut is about two inches long but doesn’t appear very deep. She wipes the blood away, careful not to touch the wound.

“Is it a white meat?” I ask.

She lifts my hand to her face for a kiss.

“A delicacy,” she says.

I grab her hood with my other hand and pull her to me. I taste my blood on her lips. We kick the fish from between us and press our bodies together. She pulls open my jacket, the buttons snapping in quick succession. We undo the clasps of each other’s orange overalls and they drop into the salmon. We unbutton each other’s shirts. Cool air blows across my chest, sensitizing my skin to the warmth of her hands. With one hand bloodied and another covered in fish and jellyfish goo, I’m forced to trace her body, salty from sweat and sea, only with my mouth. Her hand slips to my pants and I shift to make it easier, but it’s clumsy with a hull slippery in fish-guts, our overalls at our knees, the rocking of the boat. She falls backward into the salmon, with me on top of her.

“Gross!” she yells, and we laugh.

***
We walk up the grey crescent beach littered with tangled piles of nets, oil drums, small creatures’ bleached skeletons. We pass a ramshackle greenhouse and a tottering swing set manufactured from tall logs. Beyond the beach, stairs made of split tree trunks lead up to the deck of a simple plywood cabin with only two sides covered in shingles. Beyond that there is nothing but green and yellow hills rolling up to a white-capped mountain.

The crack of a gunshot from deep in those hills echoes off the mountains across the bay. A bald eagle launches from its perch atop an evergreen.

“Matt,” Meg says, more to herself. She scans the hills, as if out of concern.

“Is he OK?”

Meg shakes her head. “He’s fine.”

We climb the stairs onto the deck. The floorboards, where they are still intact, warp under our weight. Meg steps indirectly towards a screen door at the side of the house. I wait, then tread quickly in her footsteps. In the center of the main room, two beat-up couches are positioned around an oil-drum stove that sits in a bed of beach rocks. Above it hang sweatshirts stained with salt and blood. A propane-powered kitchen lines one wall, with mismatched dishware and cooking supplies. Above a door in the back of the room, a long loft holds a pile of blankets and two sets of couch cushions duct-taped together.

Meg’s father, Jack, ducks under the doorway. Beneath a thick orange and white beard, his skin is red and wrinkled, especially near his eyes, which seem locked in a permanent squint. He limps to the couch, falling forward into each step as if hoping the next footfall will catch him. The whole cabin creaks and shifts under his heavy gait.

“We had a pretty good pick,” I say, guessing Meg won’t mention the knife incident. Jack thought we weren’t arriving until next week, so when the seaplane reached the beach this morning, he wasn’t sure who it could be. He saw me step off the pontoon in my synthetic sleeveless fleece, the price tag still on my boots, and assumed I was with the Fish and Game Commission. Meg told me that when I was out of earshot, he joked, “Let’s hope you don’t need him to lift an anchor.”

“Four-hundred fifty pinks, forty silvers, twenty reds, and one white-meat king,” Meg says, holding up the prize. “Billy wasn’t half bad.” She nods at me and even though I know she’s lying, a feel a tinge of self-satisfaction when Jack nods his approval.

Meg kicks off her boots and slides on her makeshift slippers – older boots cut down to fronts and soles. She grabs a frying pan and spices from the shelves.

“Ugly weather’s coming. Fog. Maybe rain.” Jack drops onto the couch and massages his knees.

“Summers in San Francisco the fog rolls in thick as smoke,” I say, nodding to the thin aluminum chimney rising from the oil-drum stove. “It’s one of the reasons I was happy to get away.” I collapse on the couch opposite Jack. The cushions sink beneath me and a puff of dust rises into the sunlight. I smell fish and sweat and men. A spider so big I can see fangs scampers from the armrest. I shift away, pull my back off the cushions.

Around the room, boards hammered unevenly into the exposed wall beams support whalebones, eagle feathers, a rack of rifles and shotguns. Above the entranceway, a page from a magazine hangs loosely from a nail: “If you shoot the wolves to save the moose, and then you shoot the moose, you’re either out of your mind or in Alaska.”

“Your legs bothering you?” Meg says. She mixes brown sugar into honey.

“They’re fine,” Jacks says, but he grimaces with each rub.

“Can I ask what happened?” I say. Meg pauses her mixing. Jack stops rubbing his knees. “I mean with your legs.”

“They’re fine,” he repeats. He stands up, towering over me in my sunken seat. Hidden beneath his scraggly beard, a scar extends from his left ear to chin. I don’t ask about that.

***

The screen door slams like a gunshot, jolting me from my sleep. A man about my age storms into the room. He has a rifle on one shoulder and a knapsack on the other. He wears a skullcap and fingerless gloves, and his clothes are caked in mud. Each step leaves a wet imprint on the floor. With a shift of his shoulder he swings the gun into his hands in front of me.

“Who’s this?” he asks.

“Dammit, Matt,” Meg says. “Take off your boots.”

“This is Billy,” Jack says. “Remember? Your sister’s boyfriend is spending the summer.”

Matt places his rifle in the rack. He puts his hand in mine. There is no eye contact, no grip, no shake: a dead fish. His fingers are brownish-yellow – filth, cigarette stains, or both. He’s missing at least three teeth and the others barely hang on. He bears no resemblance to the great hunter Meg often described, the boy who protected her by wrestling away a sled dog when he was eight, who cleared twice as many salmon as any other set-netter in ’99, who shot a grizzly twice in the skull as it stormed this cabin.

“So you’re the boss,” I say. I slap him on the shoulder and he flinches.

“What’s for dinner?” he says, retreating to the other couch.

“Rosemary-rubbed venison with green apple mustard,” Meg says. “Assuming you shot something.”

“No deer,” he says, then chuckles.

“King salmon sounds great,” Jack says.

Meg prepares it in the honey glaze, but it doesn’t need it. The creamy white flesh is soft as butter. I even gobble down the skin when she tells me it’s healthy. I eat white rice with soy sauce and banana bread still hot and corn that, even though it’s from a can, tastes like it was harvested out back.

Matt doesn’t touch the fish. He walks to a table in the far corner of the room with a plateful of rice and corn and a giant mug of black coffee.

“For dessert, I’ll have the tiramisu,” I joke. I resist the urge to stretch.

“Once you clean up these dishes, the three of us will head out for the late pick,” Meg says. “Then we’ll set up our beds.”

“Billy stays in the guesthouse,” Jack says.

“Not my room,” Matt says.

“I’m happy to sleep on the couch,” I say. I don’t plan to sleep with the spiders. A celibate summer was not what I had in mind, and with boat sex seemingly out of the question, the offer affords me my only chance of sneaking up to bunk with Meg.

“You’ll be more comfortable in the guesthouse,” Jack says.

Meg mouths, “Sorry.” She warned me sleeping apart was a possibility, not because her father was traditional, just that he had hang-ups. She takes my plate and clears the other dishes as compensation.

“Matt, you share the loft with your sister.”

“God dammit,” Matt yells, ripping the skullcap off his head and crushing it in his fist. “You always take his side.”

His outburst doesn’t faze Meg, who concentrates on the plates in the soapy sink.

“Whose side?” Jack says, straining against the arms of the chair to rise to his feet. “The guesthouse is for guests. Maybe if you spent a bit more time in the cabin I’d know what you were up to for a change.”

Matt tosses his skullcap towards the gun rack. “You two will have to do the pick yourselves. I need to clear my room.”

***

Meg and I push out to sea for the second time that night, a wet wind in our faces. Fog has rolled in, turning the bright greens and blues to subdued grays. The sun is merely a milky-white swathe in the western sky. Behind us, the cabin disappears into the fading hillside.

Meg drops the engine into neutral and we glide towards the basketball-sized red buoy. The strain of lifting it and the attached lines into the boat spreads pain like tiny needles across my lower back. I can’t see it beneath the glove, but I’m sure my scab has cracked open. I imagine gangrene, my evacuation by helicopter. The afternoon was grueling enough without fatigue, heavy air, thoughts of amputation.

“Matt’s not what I pictured,” I say. I drag the lines between two vertical aluminum posts fastened a foot apart at the front of the bow. Meg puts the motor back into gear and the boat crawls forward until she stops it to feed the lines through identical vertical posts at the stern. Then she pulls forward again until gold-colored monofilament netting five fathoms deep bunches between these posts and runs the full boat-length. The first fish plops onto the small raised bow platform. It arches its body to one side, then the other. A steady stream of salmon caught within the netting pulls through the front posts. They pound the aluminum platform with metallic thuds.

“He’s my brother.” Meg rifles through the mess of monofilament, arriving where a fish seems hopelessly stuck in a Gordian knot of golden netting. The thin line is wrapped beneath the fish’s gills, around its small beak of a nose; it cuts into the flesh behind its fins. She twists twine and fish, unraveling the mess in seconds, dropping the fish to the hull. Then moves to the next. The easy ones she simply shakes loose. The slightly tangled ones she attacks two at a time. The tough ones she rips free by brute force, often severing a fin or part of a tail.

“You never mentioned shirking work, rudeness. You never mentioned dental hygiene.”

“What am I supposed to say? My brother is dirty? That he can be a dick?”

“If you had, I might have recommended a Caribbean cruise.”

“He’s a great hunter and a better fisherman. He doesn’t like change.”

“This summer was supposed to be a glorified campout, a break before my dissertation. I’m doing the work of two men.”

“I’m doing the work of two men.” She looks at my first salmon, still hopelessly lost in the net. If anything, I’ve entangled it more. “Make that three. What’s the financial term for a drain on productivity? A liability?”

Meg snaps more salmon to the hull, working her way to where six fish convulse in the net beside me. I could correct her definition, tell her the real liabilities are napping in the cabin, but for two months I’ve got only her.

“So productive optimization is why you tried to stab me to death?” I say, holding up my wounded hand in a peace offering.

She untangles the fish I’ve been struggling with. She pulls a hand out of the net and clasps mine. “You grabbed the knife on purpose to get into my Grundens.” She tugs the straps of her overalls.

“You make it sound so sexy.” I kiss her cheek.

She steps back to the engine and drives the boat up another length. “I’ll talk to my dad tomorrow. He’ll make sure Matt doesn’t dodge anymore picks.”

By the third boat-length of net, salmon cover the hull. Permeating the boat, along with the thickening mist, is the ominous stench of dying fish, and worse, jellyfish. They come through the posts thick and slimy as bloody snot and slowly get ripped apart as they fall through the bunched net, dripping their mucous-y poison everywhere.

I shiver, wet with sweat, drizzle, and ocean-spray. I struggle to keep my balance as the boat rocks and the slick sludge of jelly-goo and salmon guts sloshes back and forth across the hull. I break after every two to three fish to breathe in the stagnant air. I search out the horizon, but the dense fog conceals it.

Meg remains fixated on the nets, continuing her methodic search and release. I press on. Releasing a terribly entangled salmon, I splash a small chunk of jellyfish just below my eye. It lodges itself there, stinging me as if a lit match had been pressed to my cheek. My gear is soaked in the same goop that burns my face. My hands especially, have been sloshing through the sickly jelly and the cheap white wool gloves are now pink with the thick slime. Helplessness exacerbates the irritation, intensifies the burn.

We bury ourselves deeper in dead and dying salmon. A difficult case frustrates me and I wrench the poor creature out of the net, ripping one side of his face off. I stare at the skinless head as it gasps for air through exposed gills. A fish out of water, I think, throwing it gasping and bleeding into the pile. I need oxygen. I need orientation. But fresh air and the horizon are nonexistent. I vomit over the boat’s edge.

“I’m OK,” I say before I finish. I want to wipe my mouth, but my gloves are covered in guts, blood, poison. Even the sleeves of my wet-weather jacket are splattered with jellyfish.

Meg makes her way over to me. She pulls a threadbare, discolored rag from inside her jacket and dabs my lips.

“No, you’re not,” she says, seating me against the railing.

I hate being a burden, but I hate being on this boat even more. I don’t stop her when she lifts a post at the bow, then the stern, and the net, still full of fish, drops back into the sea. She puts the engine in gear and turns the boat around.

The swathe of light that was the sun has faded into the drab gray sky by the time we reach shore. My nausea dissipates as soon as my feet touch ground. I reach the guesthouse and collapse onto Matt’s bed without removing my sweatshirt, soaked in spite of the raingear. I pass out to the steady rhythm of someone splitting wood and the distant drone of the skiff’s engine, returning to sea.

***

The sun pierces my Plexi-glass window after only a few hours. I roll around to escape the glare, but light soon fills the guesthouse. I rise out of bed in spite of the cold tightness of my muscles and joints. I probe the room for something to cover the window and stumble into a five-gallon paint bucket filled with cigarette butts. Maps, some hand drawn, are nailed to the walls of the cabin. A detailed topographical one depicting the Kupreanof peninsula with an “X” at our cabin’s location has notes scrawled across it. They categorize the soil in each square mile region by color and the vegetation it supports, but the colors are not earth tones and the plants are not indigenous – pink earth promotes squash and watermelon; yellow, celery and apple.

I find a hammer and nail one of Matt’s dirty sheets across the window, but it does little to block the light. I’m barely asleep again when the door opens.

“Coffee’s ready,” Meg says. She stands in the doorway wearing the same plaid shirt and grey cargo pants as yesterday. “I’m making pancakes.”

“Are we out of salmon?”

We duck under branches and step over mud puddles on our way back to the cabin. Inside the kitchen, Meg’s as at home flipping flapjacks as she is bleeding salmon. When she won that poker bet, I complained about my limited stipend and tried to weasel her into a meal at the cafeteria. She showed up at the grad dorm with two paper bags full of groceries. Even with the limited ingredients and shoddy equipment of the communal kitchen, she prepared the most delicious Cornish hens with thick garlic mashed potatoes, followed by blueberry pie topped with fresh whipped cream. I assumed she learned from a great mentor, but watching her work her way around the broken cabinets, flickering flames, fractured measuring cups, I know it was necessity.

Matt shuffles a deck of cards in the loft. Jack sleeps on the couch, his chest moving heavily. Meg drops a pan in the sink and his head snaps to. He sits up and scans the room, alert.

“Meg tells me you’re a college man, Billy.”

“He’s a doctoral candidate,” Meg says. She hands us each a plate stacked high with pancakes drenched in maple syrup and butter.

“Once I defend my thesis” I say, “I’ll finally get a job.”

“And what’s that,” Jack says.

“One of my teachers runs an investment fund.” I don’t want to brag about the six-figure quant job Professor Rota promised me. It’s not like Jack would understand anyway.

“No, no,” he says. “What’s the thesis?”

I consider giving him my dissertation title: Quantifying Pragmatic Options: A Generalized Approach From a Decision Analytic Perspective. “I use math to help people make choices.”

“Math?” he says, chomping on a heaping bite of pancakes. “Everything you need to decide is right here.” He pats his gut. “Did Meg ever tell you how I ended up here?”

“That’s not a nice story, Dad.”

“This lady told me she was on the pill. Then she tells me she’s not ready for a baby anyway, least of all the bastard child of a mechanic. Next thing I know, the Honorable Judge Red Pumps tells me that even though I had no say in her having the kid, I had every obligation to pay for it. I said, ‘If it’s a portion of my salary you want, take it. A portion of zero is zero. And if it’s fathering you want, good luck trying to find me.’ Don’t put me in a situation where I have no choice. I’ll make one.”

“You did have a choice,” Meg says. “You didn’t need to sleep with her. Besides, that’s not the end of the story.”

Matt rushes down the ladder, jumping halfway. He’s got the deck of cards and a notebook in his hand.

“You’re good with math?” he says. “I look for patterns in the cards.” He opens the notebook. The results of hundreds of card flips are meticulously detailed on each line of graph paper, with symbols and notes besides each toss. “After the three of spades, I always get a queen or a red card.”

Assuming no knowledge of the cards already thrown, I calculate the odds of it happening once at fifty-five percent, twice, thirty percent, three times, less than seventeen. More than three times, the likelihood falls off a cliff. “Let me see your notes.”

The first column begins with numbers and crude symbols that correspond to actual cards. But halfway down the numbers are replaced by random misspelled words: presidents’ names, animals, ingredients. Further down the words and numbers transform to intricate sketches of animals and vegetables. I look for some type of code but guess it’s gibberish.

I point to a string of symbols – spiked images connected around a broken circle. “What’s that mean?”

“Fire,” he says. “You know, when you get cards of the same suit.”

“Flush,” I say. “But what’s the significance of the symbol?”

Matt stammers and Meg puts a hand on his shoulder. She takes the pad from me. “We should do the early pick. Are you up for it?”

I’m not sure which one of us she’s asking but I say, “I think so.”

***

“You know how to bleed?” Matt asks. He giggles as he jokingly thrusts the blade in my direction.

“Sure,” I say with an uncomfortable chuckle. I carefully grasp the knife with my injured hand.

The weather is clear and crisp this morning and I breathe the fresh air deeply. With fewer jellies and three people we make much better time running down the net. Halfway through, Matt tosses a fish overboard. A flash of light glints off its side as it swims away. Meg doesn’t say anything. I wonder if he saw something I didn’t see: a parasite, some other problem. I keep picking and bleeding.

The next time he brings the fish right up to his face, mouths something to it, then throws it overboard.

“What the fuck, Matt,” Meg says.

“It wasn’t right,” he says.

“Don’t start that shit. I’m not busting my ass earning money for you so you can just toss it overboard.”

“Sorry, Meg.” He grabs the rail and faces the open ocean. “That one wasn’t ready.”

Meg’s pained headshake, her exaggerated sigh, are borrowed from me. I’ve given her that reaction a dozen times since we met: that first dinner, when we discussed her plan to get a Master’s in Social Work, and most recently when I argued against her decision to forego the telecommunications marketing job I found her for a low paying psych ward internship. She once told me all the men she met had problems. She liked me because I had solutions. So I was surprised whenever she ignored my advice. But watching Matt look out to sea, helpless and certain, I know now she withheld key information.

Meg won’t look at me. She guides the skiff up another boat-length and idles the motor.

“You run the engine,” she says to Matt, relieving him of his position in the thick of the net.

***

“Matt’s hearing voices again, Dad.”

“I accidentally dropped a fish overboard,” Matt says.

“Dammit, Matt,” Jack says. He sits in front of the barrel drum stove. He places a log inside and stokes the fire. “I thought we were done with that. If you can’t keep your shit together, you can’t run the site.”

“Who says I want to? Let her run it. Let him.”

“If you don’t run the site, what the hell are you going to do?” Jack says. He points a log at Matt’s face. “You barely have teeth in that head of yours.”

Matt grabs a rifle from the rack.

“Put that back,” Jack says.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Meg says.

“I’m going hunting,” Matt says. He holds the weapon by its stock, gesturing at Meg with it as if it’s an extension of his arm.

“Watch where you point that thing,” Jack says. He uses the log to lift himself up.

“Are you kidding me,” Meg says, throwing her hands up.

She’s more concerned about Matt’s leaving than the rifle’s implied threat - accidental or otherwise. I’m not sure what I plan to do with it, but I grab the meat cleaver off the kitchen counter.

“You talk to me as if I’ve never handled a gun,” Matt yells back at Jack. He puts the barrel under his chin and pushes the trigger with his thumb.

“Stop!” Meg screams.

I cover my eyes with the cleaver’s blade.

“Safety,” Matt says, thumbing the trigger again. He storms out the door, slamming it behind him.

Jack launches the log at the door.

Meg grips her face in pain. “I can’t do it, Dad.” But already she pulls pots and pans out of the kitchen cabinets to prepare lunch.

“I’m sorry, honey,” Jack says, calming himself. “Give him an hour to cool off. Then I’ll go talk to him. He’ll be all right.”

“Not without serious help,” I say. “Did you not see that?” I point the cleaver at the gun rack, then at Matt’s notebook and cards. “He writes in code, sees patterns that don’t exist. He talks to fish. He won’t be all right. Not without professional help.”

“No shit, Doctor,” Meg says, taking a break from rinsing a pot to seethe at me. “You don’t think we’ve seen psychiatrists? Tried medications? Dad’s got Homer Medical on speed dial. We sprinkled Zyprexa on his goddamned pancakes for a year when he refused to take it. This isn’t a puzzle you can solve with decision trees, so keep your diagnoses to yourself.”

“Calm down, Meg” Jack says.

“Funny,” I say pointing the cleaver back at the gun rack, “This is the first I’m hearing any of this. I’m thrilled to be stranded in the middle of nowhere with a rifle-wielding madman.” I regret the last word before I finish uttering it.

“Settle down,” Jack yells. He takes a heavy step towards me.

The cleaver feels heavy, clumsy in my grasp, and Jack’s glare makes me realize that all of a sudden, I’m the madman. I step back and bump into the kitchen counter. Jack reaches out his sinewy arm, takes the cleaver from me gently, but firmly, and places it on the top shelf, out of my reach.

“I’ll deal with Matt,” he says.

“He thinks I stole his room,” I say, trying to defend myself.

“He’s not dangerous,” Meg says, drying the pot. Her mouth contorts as she takes heaving breaths. She bats her eyes and her face turns red.

I’d never seen her cry before. Never saw her vulnerable. I used to assume she played strong to impress me. But she is that strong. Forget the rugged winters, the grueling summers. She’s held this family together despite an absent mother, a disabled father, a crazy brother. She’s performed the roles of fisherman, hunter, chef, and medic, captain and crew. It’s her strength, but even more this inevitable chink in the armor that emboldens me to ensure she sees it can all be better, easier.

“Meg’s not coming back next summer,” I say to Jack. “She got a job in San Francisco. We’re moving in together.”

“I can’t believe you!” Meg cries. The tears stop, anguish morphs to rage. She lifts the pot as if to throw it at me, but holds back. “You prick!”

Jack steps between us, holds out his hands as if refereeing a boxing match. “Billy, go to your room,” he says, shoving me towards the door. “Meg, go to mine. Don’t come out until I tell you.”

I slip out to the guesthouse guilty and frightened as a child. The brother who thinks I stole his place has a gun, the girlfriend who thinks I betrayed her has a knife, and the father - who knows what he thinks - has his callused hands. But I’m still exhausted. I look for something to secure the door shut, slide the bucket of cigarette butts beside it, then remember it opens out. I collapse onto Matt’s bed.

***

I return to the cabin. Jack’s passed out with a year-old magazine on his chest. I touch his shoulder and whisper, “Can we talk?”

He stirs, gets up. He grabs a bottle of whiskey and two glasses from a kitchen cabinet and motions me towards the door. The sky is cloudless and the sun has had time to warm the air, though the breeze is still crisp and carries the faint scent of pine. I follow Jack towards the edge of the deck but stay back a step - the boards are rotting and there’s no railing. He holds both glasses in the palm of his hand and fills them to the rim.

“Sometimes fin whales breach just two hundred yards from here.” He hands me a glass and with his own, motions past the skiff, the white mooring buoy, the outcropping of rock. “When they raise their heads near the skiff, you realize how small you are. But you chase them anyway. Cheers!” He clinks my glass and gulps his whiskey.

“She did find me,” he says. “Matt’s mother. She moved here from Seattle. We made it work together in Homer. We had Meg. We got this site license. We had some great years I’ll never regret. But she was already tired of Alaska, and me, the day the bear attacked the cabin. She hid, hysterical, up in the loft. Matt grabbed the rifle and ran out to meet it. Sad thing is, that time of year, with all the food in the hills and streams, that bear had no business bothering us. It was sick.” He taps his temple and takes another sip.

“Matt shot it twice as it charged him. It took off up the rocks there.” He points toward the outcropping jutting into the sea. “Matt tracked it to make sure it wouldn’t come back and found it dead on that cliff. Ma radioed for a seaplane that day.” He downs the rest of his glass.

“Some people need the supermarket, electricity, 9-1-1.” He refills his glass and tops mine off, emptying the bottle, which he tosses over the edge. “Me? I don’t understand…I don’t want to understand tax deductions, resumes, insurance premiums. Give me a fishing rod and a gun and get out of my way. Matt doesn’t fit in either place. Meg’s at home in both.”

“I was out of line,” I say.

“That’s between you and Meg. I want her to not worry about Matt and me. If San Francisco is where she wants be, I’m happy for her. For both of you.”

“But she does worry about you. And she won’t be happy unless she knows you and Matt are OK. Can’t you force Matt into a hospital?”

“Not against his will, not unless he’s an imminent threat.”

“He just pointed a gun…” I can’t seem to say it out loud.

“He knows the rules by now, knows what to say.”

“There must be some other way.”

“I’d beg her to go with you if I thought it would help. Matt’s problem is his head. Meg’s is her heart. I can’t change his mind. I wouldn’t change her one bit.”

“Talking about me?” Meg says. The screen door slams behind her.

Jack hands his glass to Meg. “I’ll get a refill,” he says, leaving us on the deck.

“Sorry I went all crazy back there,” I say.

“Me too,” Meg says. “I had an inkling to throw the fishing knife at you.” She pats the holster at her hip.

“It wouldn’t be the first time,” I say, holding up my palm. “I shouldn’t have broken the news to your Dad like that. I thought San Francisco was a done deal.”

“I hoped everything here would have sorted itself out, or at least gotten better. He’s worse than I’ve ever seen.”

“Stick to the plan,” I say. “All the other sites hire fishermen.”

“Matt scares them away before they’ve learned the ropes. It’s more hassle than help.”

“Bring them to San Francisco.”

“It’s sad, really,” she says, sniffing the whiskey and taking a sip. “Cabin fever keeps people from coming here. Matt’s sickness keeps us coming back. My brother will never move. My father will never leave him. They can’t live without me.”

“And you can’t live with them. If your brother doesn’t get help, he’s going to get himself into trouble. Or all of you. You’re just postponing it.”

“Then postponing is what I have to do.” She says it staring off at the water, so matter of fact.

“And what do I do?” I say.

“You’re the expert decision-maker.”

“Exactly. So trust me.” I turn her towards me and hold her tight by the shoulders. “You can’t help here. Even your Dad will tell you that. There’s often not a perfect solution, but there’s always a best decision.”

“Well, whatever that is, it doesn’t need to be made this minute.” She turns from me and I can see she’s holding back tears again. “I brought you here to see a different world.”

“You’ve certainly delivered,” I say.

Meg pulls me to her and hugs me. “Let’s try to enjoy the rest of the summer.”

Jack returns with another bottle and glass and three foldout chairs.

“The fish can wait until tomorrow,” he says. He unscrews the cap and pours.

We sit and drink and watch the skiff rock in the gentle waves as they roll towards shore. The sunlight flickers off each crest like a million brilliant sparks.

***

I wake to Meg lying in bed next to me. I’d been sleeping so soundly, I have no idea how long she’s been here. She stares at me with a sinister smile. I put my arm around her, nuzzle closer, but she has a different idea. She grabs my arm and slides off the bed. She’s fully dressed in a thick sweatshirt, jeans, and boots. She pulls me after her.

“What?” I say, resisting her efforts. “I’m exhausted.”

“Let's go,” she says. She yanks my arm hard, dragging me off the mattress. She tosses me a sweatshirt. “There’s a hat and gloves in the pocket.”

The night is clear and the sea, flat. I push the skiff back from the rocks and hop in while Meg starts the engine. We glide out into the deep blue darkness, past the cliffs, and on to the sea. The fresh chill air, the drone of the engine, the rhythmic splash of the water soothe me. I close my eyes and forget myself, half-sleeping – we may have cruised for minutes or hours.

Finally the boat turns and Meg cuts the engine. She hops on the bow platform and sits cross-legged, facing forward. I follow her lead. The sea opens up in this direction and its nothing but water for miles. The deep violet overhead gradually brightens to the dipping red sun in the northwest sky. But already that same sun casts its first rays across the northeast.

Meg puts her hands in mine and we snuggle close for warmth. The slow rotation of the skiff reveals sunset, twilight, a purple sky interrupted by the faintest stars, then sunset again. We float until the sun rises and everything shines bright blue-green.

***

The Fish and Game Commission radios in a three-day fishing hiatus while it assesses quotas. Once the nets are up and we’ve caught a nap, twenty hours of daylight seems like eight too many. We straighten up the grounds. It takes all four of us to roll a tree trunk, worn white and smooth as bone by the sun and surf, to the back edge of the beach. We do some old-fashioned rod-and-reel fishing without success. We read decade old news magazines. I even have time to review my dissertation. I’m editing a section on perceived value when Jack returns from the freshwater spring with a six-pack of cold beer. He hands me one. “What are you working on?”

“My professor surveyed a group of people to determine the dollar value they put on their own life,” I explain. “He asked questions like, ‘Assume that you were about to take a car ride that had a one in ten thousand chance of ending in your death if you didn’t wear your seatbelt, and I offered you one hundred dollars not to wear it, would you take the money?’”

“I’d take that bet,” Matt says from the loft.

“Well in that particular case, the person who takes the money values their life at one million dollars.” I don’t finish with the necessary caveat, “At most.”

“That’s a lot of money,” Matt says.

“I once got a ticket for not wearing my seatbelt,” Jack says. “I took the skiff to Kodiak City – two hours through cold rough seas. Driving my truck from the dock, I got pulled over for swerving. I must have been hypothermic. I’m shivering like crazy and the cop assumes its DTs. He asks me to walk the line – you can imagine how that went.” He smacks his leg and we all laugh. “Anyway, he thought he let me off easy.”

“Do you like to gamble?” Matt asks. He hops down the ladder. He’s got a competitive spark in his eyes. “Let’s play Texas hold em.”

It’s suddenly clear how Meg got so good at cards – during weather delays and Commission enforced downtime, there’s not a whole lot else to do. I put down the thesis and brace myself for some tough competition.

“Winner skips the next three picks,” Matt says, pulling a bucket of beach pebbles from a crossbeam in the wall.

“Have fun fishing without me,” Meg says, dropping a pan into the sink. “But while we’re betting, first one out does the dishes.”

Jack hands out more beers. Meg offers fresh-baked banana bread. Matt distributes the beach rocks. I sit next to him at the corner of the table, keeping Meg across from me. Matt deals. Jack picks up the first hand, but I ascertain little about his and Matt’s playing style. On the next hand I draw pocket kings. Meg and Jack fold after the flop, but I’m able to draw Matt in. The river card gives no possible help, which means he needs pocket aces to beat me – less than half a percent probability. I go all in, pushing my pile of pebbles to the center of the table, feeling a slight surge of adrenaline. I snicker when Matt pushes his pile forward, and cackle when he flips an Ace and a Joker.

“For real?” I say.

“Pair of Aces,” Matt says, scooping up the rocks.

I look around to see if I’m crazy. “You play with Jokers?”

“Why not?” Meg says. “It’s more fun, more unpredictable.”

“Especially when you don’t know they’re in the deck,” I say. “That’s a regular Black Swan, right there.” I point to Matt’s hand. “I’m adding that to my thesis.”

“Black Swan?” Jack says.

“Can I borrow this?” I say to Matt, grabbing his notebook. I flip to a clean page of graph paper. “Most events in life fall into what’s called a normal distribution.” I draw a tall bell curve.

“It looks like a fish in a net,” Matt says.

He seemed so normal a minute ago, I’m surprised at how quickly this new delusion manifests. Matt picks up on my concern. He looks me in the eyes for the first time. He takes the pen from me, turns the page so I see it from his angle, and draws a small circle within the peak of the curve, off-center - the fish’s eye. The gridlines are the net.

I hold the pad up so I can see it better. “Look at that,” I say. “I always thought they called them fat tails because it’s where the curve trailed off. But it’s also the tail of the fish.” I show the diagram to Jack. “Ninety-nine point nine percent of living is experienced here.” I point the pen at the gut of the fish. Then I circle the tips of its tail. “But life happens here: bank runs, sovereign debt crises.”

“Jokers wild,” Meg adds.

“Those don’t sound like life,” Jack says.

“They are if you have a sound investment strategy,” I say, tapping on the fish.

“Too bad you’re out of rocks,” Matt says, laughing.

“Yeah,” Meg says, ganging up on me. “Go scrub the dishes. We have a game to finish.”

I slink off to the sink.

***

The long days flow together in a rush of activity, broken only by brief nights of sound, but never fully satisfying sleep. We wake, we eat, we pick, we eat, we pick, we eat, we pick, we sleep. By the time the cut on my hand is lost among scrapes, rope burns, and calluses, I’m able to keep up with Meg in the nets. I captain the skiff and pitch salmon into the bins with ninety-five percent accuracy. I’m even put in charge of the weekly rendezvous with the cannery’s barge – Matt’s old job – to unload the refrigeration boat and pick up supplies. They toss me a fifth of tequila the day our haul sets a record.

Matt still dodges the picks and I’m happy for it. Meg and Jack treat him as if nothing is wrong, which is to say they ignore his outbursts, his delusions, his insistence on sleeping with his pistol. But I can’t. I study him as if he’s one of Professor Rota’s term projects. I note his frustration as he clears the beach of clutter: rusted barrels, frayed lines, tattered nets. I time the frequency and duration of his disappearances into the hillside. I analyze his moods when he returns for his vegetarian dinners, muddied and giddy. And while Meg insists he’s safe, I sense desperation, recklessness, violence.

“Have you thought about the patterns in the cards?” he asks one evening.

I’m mixing a cocktail I concocted to celebrate our award-winning haul – salmonberry margaritas.

“Not particularly,” I say. “I’ve been busy fishing.”

Matt laughs uncomfortably.

“You should get back out there and protect your record,” Jack says, clinking my margarita with his. He ruffles my hair, and I’m strangely proud. Meg smiles at the gesture. Matt bristles. He returns to flipping cards for a moment, then tosses them to the floor.

“I’m going hunting,” he says. He grabs the shotgun off the rack.

“In the dark?” Meg says.

“With a shotgun?” Jack says.

“You don’t need me here,” Matt says.

Meg places a hand on his shoulder, calming him.

“We do need you here. We just can’t wait forever.”

“It’s not working anymore.” He glances at me as if to signal I’m the reason, but then looks ashamed for suggesting it.

“What’s not working?” Meg asks. But Matt’s already halfway to the door.

“I’ll show you,” he says, “I’ll bring back a deer.”

***

The sun is warm and the breeze cool. We race through the morning pick in record time and Jack has lunch waiting when we arrive back at the cabin. We eat on the deck as the bald eagle hovers on the wind currents and a fox scampers across the beach. It’s been three days without a sign of Matt, save the occasional echo of a shotgun blast.

Jack takes our dishes and returns carrying two rifles. He places one against the cabin and slides his lawn chair to the edge of the deck. He gestures for me to take a seat.

“Here’s the scope. Here’s the safety. Here’s the cartridge,” he says. He places the butt in the crook of his shoulder. There are two cracks as the shot’s echo reflects crisp and clear across the water. The mooring buoy a hundred yards out dips briefly underwater and pops back up.

I have to brace my left arm on my knee to steady the rifle’s muzzle. I center the crosshairs on the buoy. Another two thunderous cracks and the scope kicks back, catching me above my eye.

“Did I hit it?”

“Were you aiming at the water?” he says with a chuckle.

Meg loads another cartridge and places the rifle back into my hands. She stands behind me, places her hands on my shoulders and whispers in my ear.

“We’re on the beach in Santa Cruz. Remember?”

I remember her naked in the waves, calling me to her. My heart picks up its pace.

“Not that part,” she says, guessing my thoughts. She smacks my head playfully. “The warm sun, the light breeze, the soft sand. We weren’t sure if we were awake or asleep.”

Her soothing words relax me. Her fragrant hair refreshes me. Her gentle touch reassures me. The buoy looks fat in my sight. I pull back on the trigger and watch it sink beneath the water.

***

Across the green and yellow hills, purple lilacs sway like waves in the breeze, always out of reach. The terrain is tight with brush and thorny thickets. We try to stay on the ridgelines and under the evergreens where the ground is soft and mossy. But it’s slow going, especially with Jack.

“If we see a bear, don’t startle it,” he says. “And don’t run.”

“We’re going to see a bear?” I say.

“Probably not,” Meg says.

“‘Probably’ doesn’t put limbs back on.”

“Bears have poor depth perception,” Jack says, stopping to rub his thighs. “They only see through one eye at a time.” He turns his head from side to side, demonstrating the motion. “The trick is to back away slowly.”

“The real trick,” Meg says, “is to file down the front sight on your rifle. That, and bring along someone slower than you.”

Jack catches me sneaking a glance at his leg. “Why do you file down the sight?” I ask.

“So it won’t hurt as much when the bear shoves it up your ass,” Meg says. “Dad, why don’t you wait for us at the cabin? We’ll be OK.”

***

We smell the carcasses long before we see them. Two full sized deer, three foxes, a few smaller rodents piled together. Maggots, worms, and all sorts of other critters writhe in the rancid flesh. The fresh body of a fox has the skin torn free from its face where the shotgun blast struck. The larger deer has a strategically shot rifle hole through its neck. Its purple tongue hangs in the dirt.

Meg rushes ahead, pushing her way through the brush. I find her squatting in front of a camouflaged tent.

“He’s not in there,” she says. She pulls out a filthy sleeping bag, a machete, and the cores of some green peppers. I wait until she moves ahead before switching off my rifle’s safety.

The brush opens to reveal a large flat field. The earth has been turned and roughly ploughed. Stretches of fishing net section off and protect neat rows of various types of vegetation. A deer lifts its head above some tomato plants, red juices hanging from its chin as it chews. Meg’s rifle instinctively rises to her shoulder. I place the beast in my sights too.

The deer’s magnified skull collapses in an explosion of tomato, blood, and brain matter. It vanishes from my sight before I register the sound of the blast, which comes from in front of me, not beside me. Matt lifts himself from a prone position within the field. He stands directly in my line of fire, his chest in my crosshairs. He holds his shotgun above his head in a victory stance, his tongue flicking through the hole in his smile. His head is monstrous compared to the buoy I shot earlier. The trigger is cold on my finger.

“It’s time to go home, Matt,” Meg says. She slowly lowers my rifle’s barrel with her hand.

We take turns dragging the buck back to the cabin. Matt grabs his deck of cards and climbs the ladder to his bunk. I join Meg on the deck to help her prepare the deer. She sticks her knife between the bones of the forelegs and twists it, creating two holes. She rams the end of a broomstick through them, lassos a rope around it, and throws the line over an overhanging beam. I help her lift the deer into the air, tying the rope off against the cabin. She places a large blue bucket under it.

“You’re going to stay with them,” I say.

Meg plunges the knife into the deer’s chest, just under the neck, and pulls it down with both hands. The bones of the ribcage snap in succession. She presses the knife down all the way to the deer’s crotch. As the chest cavity opens, blood pours into the bucket. The deer’s entrails push through and hang below its torso, and again the smell of death hits me like a stiff wind.

“I can’t leave them. I’ll go back with them to Homer after the summer.”

“I worry after the summer will be too late. And Homer will be inadequate. It’s a bad decision.”

She clears the insides with the knife. She places the deer’s heart and liver into a frying pan. She cuts the skin around its neck, and uses the knife to pull at its hide.

“Are you breaking up with me?” she says.

“If you really plan to move to Homer I think you’re breaking up with me.” I pull at the deer’s skin while she cuts it from the flesh with her blade, until the prey hangs without an outside or an inside, its decimated head rolled to one side, its guts stinking in a bucket beneath it.

“You could wait for me. You could come with us.”

“Meg,” I say, grabbing her arm to make sure I have her full attention, “why did you bring me here this summer? What did you expect to happen?”

“I wanted you to meet my family, to see my life. I told you. I thought he would be better.” She puts the organs and a large chunk of flesh in a pan.

“Going to Homer doesn’t solve the problem. It enables it. And in the process it will ruin your life. My life. Our life. I won’t let him drag me down, too.”

“That’s up to you,” she says. She turns towards the kitchen.

I turn her back to me. “Did you bring me here to chase me off?”

“This isn’t about you!” She shakes free and storms into the cabin.

Jack joins me on the deck. We each grab a side of the bucket of guts. Jack stumbles across the beach rocks. We step out into the water and the waves lap against our boots. We put the bucket down next to a large boulder. Jack tosses the entrails and skin fragments on top of it. “For our eagle friend,” he says, nodding toward the evergreen. “Or a nimble fox.” He rinses his hands in the water. Rivulets of blood twist among the stones.

I squat down and dip my own hands, feeling the water’s icy chill. I raise the salty liquid to my lips and feel the scruff on my face. I look down at my reflection, my full beard, and hardly recognize myself. I look worn but strong. I look like a man I would be frightened of.

“The herring run off Anchorage in the winter,” Jack says. “An icy, snowy night a few years back, with visibility less than a few yards, I fell off the boat retrieving the net. I managed to climb back in before anyone noticed, then finished the job. I refused seeing a doctor until it was too late. I lost three toes and suffered nerve damage in my legs. The kids get their stubbornness from me.”

“I can be stubborn too,” I say, stroking the ragged hair on my face.

***

The cabin fills with the smoke and smells of broiling meat and steaming vegetables. Matt shuffles his cards in the loft. Meg puts the finishing touches on the meal.

I lean on the kitchen counter and speak softly to her. “I need to know something.”

She spoons glaze onto the ribs.

“If things were better here, like you hoped, would you still be moving in with me?”

Matt stops shuffling. Meg nods.

“Do you love me?” I say.

She nods.

We eat tender chunks of venison steaks marinated in a garlic sauce, broiled ribs in a brown sugar glaze, rice pilaf, corn, peas, salad. Matt takes a healthy heaping of vegetables, a mug of coffee, and isolates himself in the corner. In between bites, he flips his cards and takes notes.

I slice off half of the fried fist-sized heart and sit beside him. He shifts away from me, further into the corner. I shift closer, blocking his escape.

“Some heart?” I say, offering him a bite-sized chunk.

“I don’t eat meat,” he says, focusing on his dealing.

“Why is that?” I say, popping it in my mouth. “It’s not like you love animals.”

“Billy,” Meg says, “leave him alone.”

“We’re just talking,” I say. “How’s your three of spades theory working?”

“It never fails,” he says. “A queen or red card always follows.”

“I’ll bet you it does fail,” I say. “In three tries it will fail. If you win, you get your cabin back for the rest of the summer.”

Jack gets up to get another serving, though his plate is nearly full.

“Sure,” Matt says, shuffling the cards.

“But if I win, you have to agree to fly out of here tomorrow to see a doctor in Homer.”

Meg glares at me. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“It’s a fair bet,” I say. “He says he has a hundred percent chance of winning. I say it’s one in six. Russian Roulette. For all of us. Because if Matt wins, each of us - especially Matt - loses.”

Matt puts down the cards and gets up to leave. I don’t budge.

Jack sits at our table, meat stacked so high on his plate it nearly topples. I make eye contact only briefly and it’s enough to cause a shiver. But he doesn’t stop me.

“You don’t have to take that bet if you don’t want to,” Meg says to Matt. She stands over the table.

“Even if your theory is wrong,” I say to Matt, “which I’m sure it isn’t, you only have to talk to the doctor.” I hold his deck of cards up to him.

Matt grabs the deck from me and sits down.

“What makes you think you’ll have better luck now?” Meg says to me, her tone easing. She pulls a chair up next to Jack.

Matt throws out cards until the three of spades appears on the fifth toss. Matt takes a deep breath and tosses out the queen of clubs. He licks his lips and reshuffles. The second attempt, he flips a joker.

“That counts,” he says. “Jokers are wild.”

“They sure are,” I say, dropping my head in my hands, furious with myself for not remembering. With two jokers in the deck and only one round to go, my odds drop to forty three percent. Better than a fifty-fifty chance of sleeping with the spiders for the next three weeks.

When the three of spades arrives in the last hand, Matt stands to deal the final card. A three of clubs. He collapses into his seat. I pop a chunk of venison into my mouth, vindicated. Jack studies Matt’s reaction.

I pat his shoulder. “You only have to talk to the doctor.”

“It will be OK,” Meg says, reaching across the table to hold his hand. “I’ll go with you.”

“Are you OK?” Jack asks Matt. When Matt nods, Jack walks to the radio. He sets the dial and speaks into the microphone, “Outlet Cape requesting two passenger pick-up at oh-seven-hundred hours.”

“Sleep in your room tonight,” I say. “I’ll take the couch.”

***

Late that night, with the blood of the deer pulsing in my veins, I climb the ladder into Meg’s loft. The smell of the night’s feast hangs in the air. It mingles with the odor of a generation of summer meals, of fish and game. It mingles with the scent of Meg. Her body is taut from the summer’s efforts. I’m surprised by my own body’s strength, of muscles tightening in unexpected places. I take her in spite of, because of, the grit and grime that cover us.

***

We wake to the sound of the seaplane’s engine. Meg holds me tight, then climbs down the ladder. Before I make it down, she has stoked the fire and placed a kettle on the stove. I hug her again. She hands me a cup of tea and I feel its warmth pulse through my hands. While Meg prepares breakfast I pull out my dissertation and review it. I’m jotting down some notes when Jack arrives and pours himself some coffee.

“What’s that?” he says, pointing to the corner table.

A tower of cards rests on top of a page from Matt’s notes. In front of the tower five cards are facedown. I flip them: the three of clubs and each of the four queens. I slide the paper out and the tower crumbles. On it, Matt has written, “I meant the three of clubs. Gone hunting. Love, Matt.”

“Good for him,” I say, crumpling the paper and tossing it into the stove’s fire. “Me? I’m done hunting. He can garden all week for all I care.”

“I don’t know what you expected,” Meg says. She puts the fourth dish back on the shelf.

“I expected him to keep his end of the bargain,” I say, pointing out the door with my rolled up dissertation. “He lost fair and square.”

“There’s nothing fair about it,” Jack says.

The double-crack of a rifle shot startles us. Meg drops a plate to the floor.

“He’s too close,” she says.

“On the water,” Jack says, stepping towards the door. I follow Meg as she rushes past him.

***

I chase Meg down the beach, across a mountain stream, and up the rocky outcropping towards the cliff where Matt had tracked the grizzly. Jack lags behind us, maneuvering up the incline with the strength of his arms when he can’t trust his foothold. Above us the bald eagle circles, screeching. Further out, the seaplane approaches, the sound of its engine amplified as it descends towards the water.

Meg’s scream is bestial, primal, full of raw panic and pain. She yells, “Why?” and the response that echoes back across the water is her own twisted shriek. She squats on a grassy mound in a clearing, beside Matt’s body. She places his bloody, broken head in her lap, bends her face to his.

Faceless fish, piles of prey, disemboweled deer. So much wasted flesh. I want Meg to stop screaming but I’m paralyzed in place, my eyes shifting from her rocking body to the approaching plane. I drop my dissertation copy, caked in mud from the climb, into the dirt.

Jack stumbles past me, rushing to Matt’s side. He falls heavily to his knees and administers CPR, but it’s useless. There are no paramedics, no emergency rooms. Meg lifts her head to face me. Her blond hair is matted with blood. Her eyes are blank.

She doesn’t say, “You couldn’t leave him alone?” But it’s in there. I squat down next to her and pull her to me. She pushes away from me, pulls her father up, and they hold each other.

I step to the edge of the cliff. The air is clear and the water is flat and deep crystal blue. The seaplane lands with a splash. My bowels tremble and I remember Jack’s words: it’s not math, it’s gut. I don’t have the stomach for this. The plane glides towards the beach. The pilot steps onto the pontoon and waves to me. The world I came from is a half-hour flight over the ice-capped hills.

Jack grabs the spent cartridge from the grass beside Matt and turns it over in his fingers before slipping it into his pocket. He runs his hands over Matt, tenderly frisking him. He finds a stale biscuit, a knife with a broken tip, and a box of bullets. He tosses the biscuit towards the eagle’s nest, attaches the knife to his belt, and loads a new cartridge into Matt’s rifle. He stands and looks at me but I can’t meet his gaze. I look over the cliff edge to the crashing waves below and am overcome by vertigo. I crouch to the ground, clutch the earth until a fingernail cracks.

“There’s a shovel in the greenhouse,” Jack says to me. “Tell the pilot there’s been a change of plans.”

***

We take turns digging in silence. I shovel furiously, distracting myself from thoughts that Jack, holding the gun, waits for me to finish digging my own grave. Distracting myself from the sight of Meg, pacing between the cliff, where she walks too close to the edge, and Matt’s corpse, where she scatters flies. Distracting myself from the dreadful fears of isolation, responsibility.

Just as there is no doctor, pronouncement, or certificate, there is no priest, eulogy, or ceremony. Jack lifts Matt’s body as if carrying him to bed and places it into the hole. We refill it. When we’re done, Jack gives us our orders. I collect and chop wood and prepare a bonfire at the far end of shore beside the giant white tree trunk. Meg cooks a feast: salmon and venison with tomatoes and peppers picked from Matt’s garden. There’s even melon for dessert. Jack returns in the skiff with a bucket-full of snowcrabs, the span of their claws longer than my arm. We stab sticks through their shells and hold them in the bonfire like marshmallows. Their legs and claws stretch out, grasping at the turbulent air above the fire. We drink whiskey and when that runs out, beer.

Jack turns Matt’s hunting knife over in his hands.

“You were barely walking when I gave this to Matt,” he says. He speaks to Meg as if I’m not there. “Your mother worried the point was too sharp for her little boy. So he could keep it, he wedged it between the floorboards and snapped off the tip.”

Meg laughs and I follow her lead.

“I remember one of my first fishing excursions with just him, after you bought him his first gun,” Meg says. “He caught a halibut bigger than me. We couldn’t lift it into the boat, so he shot it dead with his pistol and dragged it behind the boat all the way back to the beach.”

“It was delicious.”

They continue telling stories while I continue drinking beer, feeling out of place and unwelcome, as if I’ve invaded some personal religious ritual. They talk about Matt before he got sick – about his fearlessness, his selflessness.

Jack kisses and hugs Meg goodnight. He stumbles off to bed without a word to me. I inch closer to Meg, press my leg against hers softly. She loops her arm through mine and snuggles close. I feel slight, but enormous relief.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

“It’s not your fault,” she says.

I meant it as a condolence, not apology, but I crave the warmth of her body next to mine. I want to pull it into me, but I’m afraid if I squeeze too tight I’ll lose it forever.

“It’s my fault for bringing you here,” she says. “I should have known he’d be too fragile.”

“You were only trying to live your life.”

“I didn’t need to throw it in his face.”

“You did everything you could to protect him. You’re the one who’s selfless and fearless.”

The sun dips below the hills across the bay and the landscape begins to lose its color.

“What now?” I say.

“It’s up to Dad,” she responds too quickly. “But I think we’ll return to Homer to clean up Matt’s things. Then go from there.”

I guess I’m not part of the “we.”

“What about your internship?”

“It can wait.”

“What about us?” Her grasp loosens the slightest bit.

The northwest sky turns gray. The fire crackles as the logs settle into hot embers. They cast shadows across the rocky beach that give the illusion of motion.

“Do you want to come to Homer?” She knows I have to complete my dissertation. But I’m desperate. I call her bluff.

“If it will make you happy.”

I think I see a fox sneaking towards the boulder offshore, but I can’t be certain.

She let’s go of my arm, shakes her head.

“I’m sorry,” she says. She kisses me deeply and I try to hold it, save it, remember it like it’s our first. “Dad radioed for the seaplane to return first thing tomorrow morning.” She pulls away and walks to the cabin.

***

One by one the stars appear in the south, filling the indigo sky with faint white constellations. The bonfire’s embers are searing hot and glow red and yellow in the gentle breeze. Past their light, little is visible. There’s a splash in the water. Leaves rustle in the breeze. Preceding each lapping wave is the rhythmic metallic clang of the skiff, always out of place.

Returning to Matt’s bed would be sacrilege and Meg’s loft, off limits. There’s the couch, but the spent shells of the snowcrabs, bleached white in the fire, haunt me, making the spiders seem even more vicious, threatening.

The night air is comfortable and already the hidden sun faintly cuts the darkness in the northeast sky. I slide off the tree trunk and lay in the warm rocks beside the fire.

I wake to a sharp biting pinch on my neck. I smack it and feel the hard writhing flesh of an insect between my fingers. A bug the size of my thumbnail – a sand flea or some sort of beetle – squirms in my hand. I toss it into the fire. Three more cling to my shirt. I jump up, swat them to the rocks. I ruffle my hair, yank off my shirt, wipe down my pants. Hundreds more emerge from the rocks. Like tiny jumping crabs, they crawl and leap past my boots. I swat one that wriggles on my thigh and scrape my boots together to clear some others. I circle the fire and watch as they close the perimeter around the embers. And always more and more emerge within the bonfire’s radiant reach, continuing their mad march toward the light, where they bake themselves upon the scorching rocks.

Copyright © 2010 by Daniel Degnan.

Biography:

Daniel Degnan is a recent recipient of the Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award from Poets & Writers. His work has been published in the anthology, 2Do Before I Die, and online by Opium Magazine and Poets & Writers. He was a Sarah Lawrence submission to Best New American Voices and a finalist in Opium Magazine's 500-word memoir contest. In addition to writing, he is CFO of Winston Preparatory School, a school for learning disabled students with campuses in New York, NY and Norwalk, CT. He holds a BS in Art and Design from MIT and an MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence. He lives in River Vale, NJ, with his wife, Dao, and his son, Daniel.

2010-12-15T13:40:00.004-05:00

Season's Greetings for the Holidays!

Gival Press Poetry Award: Deadline Dec. 15th

2010-11-21T09:34:00.003-05:00

The deadline for the Gival Press Poetry Award with a prize of $1,000.00 plus book publication is Dec. 15th.

For the complete guidelines, click on the link below:

Gival Press Poetry Award Guidelines

Past winners have included:

Cecilia Martinez-Gil (Psaltery and Serpentines)

Rich Murphy (Voyeur)

Richard Carr (Honey)

Barbara Louise Ungar (The Origin of the Milky Way)

Donna J. Gelagotis Lee (On the Altar of Greece)

Paula Goldman (The Great Canopy)

Beverly Burch (Sweet to Burn)

Janet I. Buck (Tickets to a Closing Play)

George Klawitter (Let Orpheus Take Your Hand)

Gerard Wozek (Dervish)

Jeff Mann (Flint Shards from Sussex)

Peter Leach Wins the 2010 Gival Press Novel Award

2010-11-14T12:59:00.002-05:00

Gival Press is pleased to announce that Peter Leach of St. Louis, Missouri, has won the 6th Annual Gival Press Novel Award for his novel The Racial Cleansing of Ste. Genevieve. Leach will receive $3,000.00 and his novel will be published in 2011. His manuscript was read anonymously and chosen by the final judge Tim W. Brown.

"The Racial Cleansing of Ste. Genevieve is an extremely timely novel that depicts the impact of hard times on a small, Depression-era Missouri town. Peter Leach expertly interweaves several storylines that trace the origins of a racist atrocity and its effects on residents, from bottom-dwelling working-class blacks and whites, to ‘French colored’ and merchants higher up the social ladder, to union agitators and mine owners at the top of local society, all of whom wrestle for the town's soul. Featuring a kaleidoscopic cast of noble and base characters, the novel begins as a murder mystery and ends as a powerful indictment of gossip, greed, violence, and vigilantism. With the storyteller's heart of Harper Lee and the sociologist's eye of Frank Norris, Leach reminds us of how far America has come in eighty years, and how far it has yet to go."
—Tim W. Brown, author of Second Acts

Biography:
Peter Leach was born and grew up in St. Louis. He attended Amherst College, spent two years in the Cold War army in Germany, then studied playwriting at Yale Drama School. He has taught at Bryn Mawr College, the University of Louisville and currently teaches in the night-school at Washington University in St. Louis. His short story collection Tales of Resistance won the George Garrett Prize and was published by Texas Review Press in 1999. His work has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, Minnesota Review, Indiana Review, River Styx, Panache, Artful Doge, and Kansas Quarterly. One of his stories was reprinted in an O. Henry Awards and another in an NYU Press Best Little Magazine Fiction. His story The Convict's Tale won the Nebraska Review fiction prize. Leach received a National Endowment for the Arts creative writing fellowship.

Finalists:
The Sea of Wise Insects
by Terry Westby-Nunn of Cape Town, South Africa.

Julia and Rodrigo
by Mark Brazaitis of Morgantown, West Virginia.

Hill County People
by Jim Sanderson of Beaumont, Texas.

The Dieter
by Mark Connelly of Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
###

Psaltery and Serpentines by Cecilia Martínez-Gil

2010-10-03T15:48:00.002-04:00

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Subject:
Cecilia Martínez-Gil's collection
Psaltery and Serpentines: a book of poems

Date: Oct. 4, 2010
Contact: Robert L. Giron (703.351.0079)

October 4, 2010 (Arlington, VA) Gival Press is pleased to announce the release of Cecilia Martínez-Gil's collection Psaltery and Serpentines: a book of poems, winner of the Gival Press Poetry Award.

About the Author:
CECILIA MARTINEZ-GIL has published in Voices: A Santa Monica Women’s College Publication, Anthology of Latin American Writers in Los Angeles, and Imaginarias: Antología de Poesía (Ediciones de la Crítica, Montevideo, Uruguay). She translated and adapted from Spanish to English the critically acclaimed book Escape de Punta Carretas: LA FUGA by Eleuterio Fernández Huidobro, for a film project in 1999. She also co-wrote and played the lead character in the award-winning experimental video Itinerarios, directed by Roberto Mascaró. A graduate of both USC and UCLA, she is currently pursuing a master’s degree in English and creative writing at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. Originally from Montevideo, Uruguay, she now lives in Santa Monica, California.

Praise:
Psaltery and Serpentines kisses its readers on the mouth so that the poetry becomes ‘the ripe fruit to . . . lips,’ and one wakes to loving poetry, this poetry in particular. Cecilia Martínez-Gil welcomes the reader into the
world of poetry as a partner in the creative act, and readers engage this
book-length seduction as tango partners and ‘symphonic creatures.’... Opening this book to any of its poems will sweep the imagination into the poet’s creation, and its reviewer’s lips will burn for hundreds of kisses.”
—Rich Murphy, author of Voyeur & judge for the 2009 Gival Press Poetry
Award

“…This is a luscious and lustrous collection of poems, a delightful first book
from a poet who demonstrates convincingly here both the gravity and the
joy of her calling.”
—Gail Wronsky, author of Dying for Beauty

“Reading Cecilia Martínez-Gil’s collection of psaltery serpentines, one feels
the supremacy of metaphor and music over meaning and sense. ”
—Prof. Mario René Padilla, Santa Monica College

Fact Sheet for Psaltery and Serpentines: a book of poems
October 2010
Trade Paper
114 Pages
ISBN 978-1-928589-52-5
Gival Press, Arlington, VA
givalpress@yahoo.com
www.givalpress.com
Available through Ingram from BookMasters, Amazon.com, & other outlets.

Click on the Amazon.com link:
Buy a copy at Amazon.com

About the Publisher:
GIVAL PRESS is an award-winning, privately owned press located in Arlington, Virginia, founded in 1998. Gival Press publishes literary work that has a social or philosophical message in English, French, and Spanish. Gival Press also sponsors four annual contests for fiction and poetry, including the Gival Press Poetry Award, Gival Press Novel Award, Gival Press Oscar Wilde Award, and Gival Press Short Story Award.
#####

Second Acts by Tim W. Brown

2010-10-01T20:44:00.011-04:00

Second Acts is a comic historical novel set in 1830s America, a time of great social upheaval and reform fervor, not unlike the 1960s. The novel tells the story of a young man, Dan Connor, who has followed his wife Rachel and her lover Bruce Bilson, a University of Chicago physics professor and the inventor of time travel, into the past. In his journey he obtains a mystical sidekick, a Potawatomi transvestite named Listening Rabbit (aka Bunny), and he befriends historical figures such as Albert Gallatin and Samuel J. Tilden. Rachel and Bilson maddeningly stay one step ahead of Connor. But as time moves forward, Connor’s fortunes rise while Bilson’s fall, and Rachel attains fame as a lyceum speaker, the Oprah of antebellum America. Second Acts refutes F. Scott Fitzgerald’s notion that “There are no second acts in American lives.”

Based on 10,000 pages of historical research, Second Acts describes 19th century life and culture while it satirizes timeless aspects of the American character with the same biting candor, dry wit, and laugh-out-loud moments as Brown’s earlier novels Deconstruction Acres, Left of the Loop, and Walking Man.

About the Author:
TIM W. BROWN graduated summa cum laude with an American studies degree from Northern Illinois University. He is the author of three novels, Deconstruction Acres (1997), Left of the Loop (2001) and Walking Man (2008). His latest literary effort is Second Acts, a comic historical novel set in 1830s America. Brown’s fiction, poetry and nonfiction have appeared in over two hundred publications, including Another Chicago Magazine, The Bloomsbury Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Chelsea, Chiron Review, Colorado Review, The Fiction Review, The Ledge, Main Street Rag, New Observations, Oyez Review, Pleiades, Poetry Project Newsletter, Rain Taxi, Rockford Review, Slipstream, Small Press Review, and Storyhead. A long-time resident of Chicago, where he was a fixture in that city’s literary scene as a writer, performer, and publisher of Tomorrow Magazine (1982-1999), Brown moved to New York in 2003. He currently earns his living as a writer at Bloomberg LP.

Praise:
“Really clicking, Second Acts is a picaresque, sci-fi/western, such as Verne or Welles might have penned it. In subverting history Brown’s tale celebrates it, with a scholar’s eye for authentic details and at a pacing so swift the pages give off a nice breeze.”
–Peter Selgin

“Half-magical, half-farcical, Second Acts is full of vitality and humor, a modern update of Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Second Acts is a sparkling gem of a book, one that inspires both contemplation and more than a few belly laughs.”
–Greg Downs

“Second Acts draws equally upon history and imagining, and the result is a brilliant book that Mark Twain might’ve written had he shared a brain with Jack Finney for awhile.”
–Sharon Mesmer

“With Second Acts Tim W. Brown may well have written his masterpiece. In this surprising, satisfying novel, he channels Twain. Brown’s clever construction, arch humor and unforgiving candor are on hand as ever, but they’re leavened this time by a goodly dose of heart. Funny, engaging, relatable and even educational, it’s a great read.”
–Paul McComas

Fact Sheet for Second Acts
October 2010
Trade Paper
206 Pages
ISBN 978-1-928589-51-8
Gival Press, Arlington, VA
givalpress@yahoo.com
www.givalpress.com
Available through Ingram from BookMasters, Amazon.com, & other outlets.

Click here for the Amazon.com link:
Buy it at Amazon.com

The Cannibal of Guadalajara by David Winner

2010-10-01T16:52:00.008-04:00

The Cannibal of Guadalajara is a refreshing dark comedy that centers around a middle aged divorcée named Margaret whose one night stand with a curiously troubled young Mexican-American named Dante leads to a wild emotional and geographical journey that stretches from the posh Upper East Side of Manhattan to Dante’s surreal familial estate in Guadalajara that is collapsing (literally and figuratively) under the weight of its nasty secrets. Along the way Margaret gets to know her ex-husband in the way she couldn’t during their long marriage and finds herself part of a family she never knew she had. Wildly imaginative, it paints a lush yet pointedly satirical portrait of New Yorkers in love and lust, baby boomers in mid-life misadventures, Gen-Xers in the grip of perennial childhood, and the aspirations that have led them all astray.

About the Author:
DAVID WINNER has received two Pushcart nominations and first prize in The Ledge’s 2003 Fiction Contest. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, Fiction, Confrontation, Cortland Review, Staple, Dream Catcher, Phantasmagori, KGB, and several other literary magazines in the USA and the UK. A film based on a short story of his was shown at the Cannes Film Festival in 2007, and he’s the fiction editor of The American, a magazine based in Rome, Italy. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Reviews: “ a powerful tale of an unlikely ménage-à-trois…Winner’s controlled language is interspersed with adroitly incongruous adjectives that illuminate the absurdities he presents in ways that are psychologically subtle and often hilarious. But it’s also a book about American culture seen through the eyes of a writer who has spent enough time traveling through Latin America to alter his frame of cultural reference enough to identify and appraise that peculiar brand of American expatriate whose most ardent wish is to be reborn as Che Guevara...."
--Andrea Scrima, The Brooklyn Rail: Critical Perspectives on Arts, Politics, and Culture

"Families come in all shapes and sizes; sometimes they sneak up on us fully formed. This is what happens to Margaret Heller after her divorce.... Winner, who won the Gival Press Novel Award, writes with great cunning and precision... Winner transforms embarrassing moments into the briefest of epiphanies. Margaret, Dante and Alfred are as human as they possibly can be."
— Andi Diehn, Debut Fiction ForeSight Feature (May/June 2010), ForeWord Reviews

Praise:
"Is this about ruptured families and their reframing? About Latin and North America commingling by way of Manhattan and Mexico, in a mess of nightmare and dream? Or have we a fine and bumpy ride, comic and yet catch-in-the-throat, through the surprises of sex and romance in a hitherto undemonstrative woman now nearing 60? The answer, as you’d expect in a thwacking sweetheart of a novel, is all the above…"
— John Domini, judge and author of A Tomb on the Periphery

"David Winner’s The Cannibal of Guadalajara is a terrific novel. It is high comedy–both sharp and sympathetic in its precise description of attitudes and manners—and painfully funny in its well-timed outbursts. And yet another aspect I admire—the range of age of the characters. Winner can do smart (though occasionally foolish) middle-aged female, difficult young guy, even more difficult old guy as well as a host of minor characters from scampering children to a crusted octogenarian."
— John Casey

"…a devilishly delicious and disorienting novel. Food, sex, ghastly travel experiences, tantrums, Cannibal has it all, along with one of the most peculiar versions of the family triad in literary years."
— Joy Williams

“David Winner has a clear bright eye and as fine an ear for what is poignant as for what is absurd. I look for more of his profane comic sense.”
— Shirley Hazzard

Fact Sheet for The Cannibal of Guadalajara
October 2010
Trade Paper
224 Pages
ISBN 978-1-928589-50-1
Gival Press, Arlington, VA
givalpress@yahoo.com
www.givalpress.com
Available through Ingram from BookMasters, Amazon.com, & other outlets.

Click here for the Amazon.com link:
Buy it at Amazon.com

ArLiJo Is Featuring Poetry by James Bland

2010-10-01T11:24:00.002-04:00

James Bland is the featured poet this month at ArLiJo.

Clothesline

After washing clothes
in the Maytag,
dad would haul them
to the backyard
in a green laundry basket,
cooked on one side
because I once left it
too close to the heater.

He’d lurch forward
like a robot,
the knitted sack
that contained
the wooden clothespins
baby-birded in the nook
between chin and clavicle.

Unable to do it herself,
grandma would eyeball him
from her bedroom window:
“Clothespin them at the seams.
If you spread them out,
they’ll dry faster …”

Glimpses —
in his frustration,
when she corrected him;
in his pride,
when she was content —
of the boy he once was.

Copyright © 2010 by James Bland.

Biography:

James Bland earned an MFA in Poetry from Cornell University and a PhD in English and American Literature from Harvard University. He has received a collegiate Academy of American Poet 's Prize, a Bread Loaf Writer's Workshop Scholarship, a Saratoga Springs Writer's Fellowship, a Key West Writer's Fellowship, and has been awarded two MacDowell Colony residencies.

His work has or will appear in Callaloo, Agni Magazine, Columbia Magazine, Key West Review, Muleteeth, The Windless Orchard, The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares Literary Journal, Standing on the Verge, South Carolina Review, Blue Moon Review, Antioch Review, and Potomac Review.

To read more of his work, visit:
ArLiJo.com

¡Viva México!

2010-09-17T16:39:00.003-04:00

El grito / the call for independence went out over 200 years ago and sadly not all the problems are resolved.

Yet the spirit of Mexico is stronger than ever and let no one underestimate the will of the people. As Mexicans say: "We forgive but we don't forget." Not necessarily for revenge but for protection.

With all the negativity whirled at Mexico and the mess that the drug lords have created in Mexico itself, nonetheless, to deny or negate one's ethnic background or cultural ties is counter-intuitive if not destructive for the inner soul.

And it's the inner soul of Mexico and its people that will eventually save it from individuals who wish to dominate it and its people. For regardless of one's social rank or social class, the bottom line is simple: When the human spirit is abused by any entity, be it royal, religious, cultural or political, the people will rebel and fight for their independence and it's that spirit that I celebrate and some of my ancestors did as well.

¡Qué viva México y su espíritu! no matter what form it takes and no matter where it lies.

"Exactly What You Want" a Story by Zachary Benavidez

2010-09-01T21:13:00.003-04:00

ArLiJo.com, the Arlington Literary Journal online, is featuring Exactly What You Want by Zachary Benavidez, a local Washington, DC writer.

Exactly What You Want

I hear Carlos’s key turn in the door to our studio apartment. It is Friday night, and with an empty duffle bag on my bed and only twenty minutes before Paul gets here, I hope Carlos goes back to his mother’s house in Columbia Heights, or to a friend’s place in Dupont Circle, anywhere else but here.

“Tom, I home.” Carlos doesn’t really talk like this. The accent had developed over the past four months when one night, in bed, he tried it, and I said I liked it, that it turned me on, so that night he used it until I came. After that, his accent meant flirting and foreplay. I don’t look up from my duffle bag. Instead, I reach into my dresser drawer, pull out a worn blue t-shirt, and sniff the chest and the sleeves. The shirt smells fresh from fabric softener, so I ball it up and toss it in my bag, but I can smell wet cornhusks in the room, too.

“My mom,” Carlos says, standing beside me now, holding a small tin pot.

“Tamales?” I ask.

“You know how she is.”

The smell of red chili tamales, the kind I tasted once at his house, the spicy kind, remind me too much of Carlos’s upbringing, not mine. “Your mother never made tamales?” his mother Soila asked me that night. “What kind of Mexican is she?” And then when she found out I do not speak Spanish, Soila said, “Shame on your mother.” Those memories come to mind, and I shake my head at Carlos, at his small tin pot of tamales, and he shrugs his shoulders in resignation and walks to the kitchen.

“Open a window,” I tell him, and although I want to sound harsh, I cannot bring myself to raise my voice at him. We have not yet reached that point in our relationship where we can use a tone to admonish one another without hurting the other’s feelings. “I can’t have the place smelling like tamales when Paul gets here,” I explain.

Carlos clicks his tongue. “Ah, yes. Jour other husband.” That accent again.

“I don’t have much time. Would you put that pot away?”

“My mother said, ‘Tell Tomás I say hi.’ I told her you like to be called Tom. I said, ‘Mom, he goes by Tom,’ and she said, ‘His mother named him Tomás, so I going to call him Tomás.’” He smiles. “Want some?” He takes a tamale from the pot, puts it near his crotch, and with his thumb and forefinger, he wags it at me. “Is good,” he says. “Very good.” Grease drips onto the floor.

I look at the drops of grease then at him, and I go back to my packing.

“Ay,” he says. “Sorry.”

Paul, the first and slightly older man in my life, never gets my eye-signals, a silent language I tried to cultivate with him so we could communicate in stores to make comments about other customers. In fact, with Paul, this eye language often made things worse because he would ask out loud what I meant then he would look around to see if he had missed something. Carlos, on the other hand, knows how to read me. He rips a piece of paper towel from the spool above the sink and lets it flutter like a feather to the floor. When it lands, he moves it around with the toe of his shoe.

“She said she made them just for us.”

* * *

In these months since I moved from Philadelphia to Washington for grad school, since Carlos and I first met at Club Fuego, and since his mother came into his room that first morning to call us to breakfast, when she talked to us without screaming, or breaking a sweat, or asking for an explanation, yes, since all of that, Soila Rosado has taken me as one of her own. “Think of me like your own mother, mi hijo. Just don’t call me mother-in-law,” she told me. And when Carlos started to spend more time here at my place, she took it upon herself to make food and send it to us every chance she got. Tortillas, menudo, beans, rice, chicken. She knows we can cook, I have assured her many times, but she also knows we don’t have the time to cook. We live busy lives. Carlos works and I have school. What I haven’t told her, of course, is that we spend most of our spare time leg-locked in bed, sixty-nining on the floor, kissing in the shower, and if we had a fire escape like the one Paul has in Philadelphia, we would be out there, too.

* * *

Carlos takes a tamale now and peels away the cornhusks, discarding each layer into the plastic garbage bag we keep tied to a drawer pull under the sink. He picks at the red chili con carne at the center and takes a bite.

“She thinks we’re getting too skinny,” he says as he pulls up his t-shirt to expose his abs and the thin line of black hair that I want to trace with my fingers.

“Open the window,” I say again. My duffle bag still sits slightly flopped over on the bed. It is filled with t-shirts and a few balls of athletic socks. I want to go running along the Schuylkill over the weekend. Hopefully with Paul.

“You always get weird when your husband comes,” Carlos says, pushing the window up as high as it can go: six inches. Only six inches, I might have said, playing a game we made up in the gym locker room—thinking of the good and bad things that stretch out to six inches—but I have a checklist on my mind: jeans, t-shirts, underwear, toothbrush, toothpaste, condoms, lube.

“Where is that bottle of lube, the one that’s almost finished?” I ask.

“Under the bed, I think.”

The bottle is not under the bed where I expect it to be, so I get on the floor. I hear Carlos switch on the fan above the stove.

“I just don’t need Paul asking where I got fresh tamales.” This I mean to say to myself, but as he walks up to the bed, he hears me.

“You could say you made them,” he says coolly.

“He knows I don’t know how to make tamales.” The bottle has rolled further under the bed than I can reach, in the darkest part of the shadow where all I can make out is its shape, a long tube with a round top. Carlos walks over to the other side of the bed and lies flat on the floor. He takes up the bottle with ease.

“Here you go.” He tosses the bottle on the bed, jumps up, and brushes the dust off his shorts.

Up now, too, I watch as he walks back to the kitchen, to his tamale on the counter.

“You know, Tomás, I would like to meet this Paul of yours. I’ll help you take your bags down to his car.”

The idea stops me. The loud fan, the traffic noises outside, the honking, the sirens, the stereos, all stop. Carlos cannot be serious. Not with twelve minutes left. Not after two months of perfecting alibis, managing to keep Carlos’s name out of conversations, and developing a tone of voice that masks the truth. No, Carlos cannot be serious.

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“I mean I would like to meet this man in person. This man you will not leave for me. It is the least you can do. Show me who is so important to you.”

“I told you it’s complicated.” That line.

“You could say I am your friend from school.” Carlos sits on the bed next to the duffle bag, now topped off with two pairs of jeans, Carlos’s jeans, and several of our t-shirts. From his sudden stillness, I realize how much he has been moving around in this small place. He brings a piece of his tamale to my lips. “Come on,” he says. “You know you want some. She didn’t put olives in them this time. I told her about the last time, how you got sick from the olives.”

“You told her?” I cannot believe this either, that he would tell his mother something I said about her cooking. What would she think? The aroma of the red peppers makes me hot in the face and when I put the back of my hand to my forehead it comes away with a smudge of sweat. I wipe my hand with the hand towel on the nightstand, crumpled hard from last night and from the night before. “I can’t believe you told her.”

“She’s my mom.” White corn mush sticks to his teeth as he speaks. “I tell her everything.”

“Now she’ll think I don’t like her cooking.”

“You don’t like her cooking. But here’s your chance.” He presses what is left of his tamale against my lips, but I blow hard against it so it falls out of his hand and onto the floor.

“Paul’s going to be here in less than ten minutes, and I don’t have time to brush my teeth again. Stop.” There it is, the harshness I have been trying to avoid. I go to the bathroom, and though I don’t watch, I know he has gone for another piece of paper towel to clean up the floor.

In the bathroom, standing in front of the mirror, I think of that first batch of tamales I had at his parents’ house. Those tamales had been filled with big green olives, the worst, which caused me to spend two hours leaning over the toilet throwing up rough chunks of corn dough, then afterwards, washing my face, and looking at the puffiness of my eyes and cheeks, and wondering if Carlos would notice. There is a tightening in my stomach from the memory of that night. I grab my toiletry bag and walk out to find Carlos at the kitchen sink, washing his hands.

“You’re sure no olives?” I concede.

“She promised.”

* * *

My cell phone vibrates on the counter just as I finish the tamale: no olives.

“He’s early,” Carlos says, looking at the clock. Not yet six.

I wipe my hands on my jeans, and Carlos reminds me that I am wearing his jeans. The phone continues to vibrate, and Carlos hands it to me then zips up my bag. It is a text message from Paul, not a missed call, and some relief comes over me. His text says he is here, and I go to the window to look down to the street below, and there he is, double-parked by the entrance. I call him on the phone and watch him get out of his car, answer my call, and make his way to the front steps.

“No, no, I’m ready,” I tell him, then turning to look at the apartment, at Carlos by the door. “No, I don’t need your help,” I insist, and remember not to lose control. “Just out of the bathroom,” I say. “Be right down.” OK, Paul says, finally. I hang up and remind Carlos not to call. He puts his hands up as if to tell me not to worry.

“I’ll be back Monday morning on the seven o’clock train,” I remind him.

“In time for your birthday!” Carlos says, handing me my bag at the door.

“Don’t make a big deal of it, please.”

He pulls me against his chest and gives me a kiss, the kind he likes to give me in bed, his full lips sucking on mine, leaving my bottom lip with a small bite. He tastes like tamales, and I know I do too, but there is no time to brush my teeth. I pull away, but he kisses me again.

“I got all the tamale taste out of your mouth with the last kiss,” he says.

“Paul’s waiting.”

Carlos turns me around, squeezes my ass, slips something into my back pocket, fitting whatever it is tight against my wallet, and pushes me out of the door, toward the elevator.

“I am waiting, too,” he says, and he closes the door behind me.

* * *

In the car, Paul leans in to kiss me, but I make it quick. You taste good, he says. Just had dinner, I tell him. Mexican leftovers, I consider saying, but that is too much of an explanation. We drive down New Hampshire Avenue, through Foggy Bottom, and onto the Key Bridge to get out of the city. His sons, Matthew and Andrew, are on his mind, I can tell, because this is not our usual route or routine. Usually, we drive through Dupont Circle, have dinner on 17th Street, then we head out of the city through Silver Spring. Not tonight. Not really in the mood to be social, he tells me. He will have Matthew and Andrew later this week, and the planning is getting to him. His ex-wife Christine is being her usually difficult self. A half-hour later, on I-95, north of DC, on our way to Philadelphia, Paul points out the sign to Columbia, Maryland.

“That’s the way to Matthew and Andrew,” he says, looking at a place beyond the lush band of trees.

He has never mentioned that sign before, though we must have passed the town ten times since I moved down here for school. Odd, too, that I have seen his ex-wife’s forwarding address on his mail and never registered the town’s name. He has been waiting to introduce me to his boys, perhaps after I finish school, when I would officially be his live-in partner, but why wait that long? I ask him to take the exit, just to show me his routine when he has custody weekends, when he spends his time with the boys and not me. Besides, I think to myself, I want a sneak peak at Christine’s house—not hers, really, her parents’—because I want a setting for the stories of all the fights they have had. Carlos’s words, “Show me who is so important to you” keep going over in my head, too. Paul doesn’t want to get off the road; he makes that clear by complaining about it the moment I suggest it.

“It’s your own fault,” I tell him. “You knew I’d be curious.”

“I’m going to want to stop,” he says. “I hate being so close and not stopping.”

“Then you should stop. I’d love to meet the boys.”

Paul says nothing.

“We’ll just drive by,” I say. “I’ll look at the house from the main road. We won’t have to turn onto their street. We won’t have to stop.” As if automatically, he takes the exit, and I sit back and watch as the town shapes itself out from behind the trees. There are apartment complexes, I see, and a pavilion, a sign tells me, and we pass a mall with a P.F. Chang’s and an IMAX.

“They might see us,” he says, driving at 25 miles-per-hour, a speed that makes us more obvious in the evening traffic. Teenagers pass us in their cars, but nobody honks or seems annoyed at Paul’s slow driving. He takes another street, and we are suddenly in a neighborhood.

“Nobody will see us,” I say. “They’re not expecting you, so it’s not like they’ll be looking out for your car.”

“Exactly. My car will stand out more.”

The suburban houses all look the same, red brick with white siding. I expected more than what I see, more than quiet streets and perfect green lawns, more than this sudden feeling of being out-of-place. There are no teenagers throwing hoops in the driveways despite the nets and backboards nailed above every garage door. It is dusk, and the lack of sunlight makes the houses look deserted. Everyone must be at the mall. Small plastic stop signs stand in the grass at the corner of each front yard warning burglars. Inner-city burglars? Who would drive all the way out here? We pass a street called Whitford Road, typical of suburban street names, and after we pass it, I know that I have seen that name on papers, legal documents left on his kitchen table.

“Paul, that was it.” I turn around in my seat and look at the green sign: Whitford Road. “Yep, that was it.”

Paul drives out of that neighborhood, and the sign grows smaller and harder to read. Finally, it disappears when he pulls into a Wawa parking lot.

“What are we doing?” I ask, getting out of the car after him. “Wasn’t that it back there? Whitford Road?” I look at the main road, the sign now completely out of sight, then I look across the roof of the car at Paul, and as always, I admire how tall he stands, a full six-feet two-inches. He looks away from me, away from the road, and I notice he is graying at his temples. Gray at age thirty-five. Beads of sweat form above his eyebrows despite the cool September evening, and the base of his neck has turned pistachio red, like he has sunburn, though the sun set over half an hour ago.

“You want anything?” he asks.

* * *

Inside the Wawa, we decide on a large can of Pringles to share, black coffee for Paul, and Mountain Dew for me. At the counter, when from my back pocket I pull out my wallet, a pack of Dentyne Ice falls out. Carlos’s thoughtfulness makes me smile, but the cashier and Paul have their eyes on me. Brought this from home, I want to explain. Got it before we left, I want to tell Paul, but instead I put it on the counter next to the Pringles and pay $1.80 for my mistake. Soon we are back on the interstate, not speaking. There is no need for silence, but I cannot think of anything to say, cannot tell Paul how I really feel, that it is time for me to meet the boys. Paul tears open the pack of Dentyne, takes a piece and hands the pack to me.

I think of Carlos back in the city, the feel of his hand on my ass, this gift of gum in my hands. He is not as uptight as Paul, but he has certainly never been in as serious a situation either. After all, the boy still lives at home with his mother, whereas Paul’s parents turned their backs on him after he came out and started divorce proceedings. I stare out the window, at other cars’ dashboards, the small patterns of lights that illuminate the faces of perfect strangers whose lives must be so uncomplicated. It will be awhile before we get to Paul’s Rittenhouse Square apartment—the one he got for me, when we first started our affair, the one he moved into himself after he sold the house where his family both evolved and dissolved—I close my eyes and think of those arguments in Christine’s driveway. I have never been there to witness the arguments myself, but I have heard stories, first-hand accounts from Paul. He often told me about those fights when the adrenaline was still boiling at the brim of his consciousness, usually just moments after he dropped off his sons from a custody weekend. She is fat, I know that much from their wedding albums, and she is what Carlos calls a frosting-covered candy-sprinkled bitch. She can tell Paul where to stick it and still end her calls with “Have a blessed day” or “Love in Christ.”

I picture her standing in the driveway shouting, “There’s a special place in hell for fathers like you!” What did those words taste like coming out of her mouth? Sweet like cake being chewed or sour like mucus you cough up and swallow to be polite? I know she wears purple sweatpants and matching sweatshirts, because Paul told me that since she had the boys, sweats are all she wears now. I think of her the way I first saw her, through the lens of Paul’s laptop camera. When we first met online and started chatting, me at my dorm room desk in Arizona, he at his kitchen table in Pennsylvania, Paul would take incredible risks. The best secrets are kept in the open, he would say; besides, she never asked what he was working on so late at night. The night I saw her she appeared behind Paul as a headless torso. He had been caught.

* * *

Two hours later, we park on Spruce Street, near an Italian café that has just closed. This part of Center City smells of olive oil and wet leaves, and the night’s breeze gives me a chill. After we bring in my bag, I sit on the bed to take off my shoes, and Paul asks if I am OK. His way of moving out of the awkward drive of silence. When I say nothing, he asks if I want to take a shower, which is his version of Carlos’s accent. Sex with Paul is clean, always clean, and familiar, me on my back, legs over his shoulders, his face buried into my soap-fresh neck. Nice, yes, because there is comfort in the routine, but not much romance, not much rhythm anymore. I shower, of course, and we get into bed. Sometimes, like tonight, I imagine our first summer together, after he moved me to Philadelphia, into this place on Spruce Street, so that he could come by before and after work for sex. I think about the secret pictures he had taken of himself in each room—spread-legged on the bed in the bare white bedroom, flexing in the mirror of the yellow-tiled bathroom, leaning against the counter in the kitchen filled with midday light—he is naked in each. He had emailed the photos to me, saying he wanted to give me a sense of the small part of Philadelphia I would come to know. He included photos of the row houses, the iron railings on front steps, the thick dark oak trees lining the streets, and him, a married man, a father who had everything, and still wanted more. Our sex in this apartment building—once in the damp basement amongst the storage lockers—is my deepest impression of the city. I think of all of this tonight, after our silence and after my shower, as he puts me on my back and kisses me.

* * *

The next morning, after Paul leaves for the corner market, I empty my duffle bag on the bed and call Carlos.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“Just waking up.” It is nearly nine o’clock, and sleep still lingers in his voice.

“Did you go out last night?”

“Me and Jose went to Fuego, but it was so lame without you.”

He moves around in bed, sleeping naked, of course, probably even massaging himself. Because I can hear the bed sheets rustling, I ask what he is up to.

“Ay, you know I save myself when you go away.”

This is true, he does “save himself” when I am away, because always just after he picks me up at Union Station or after Paul drops me off, Carlos is at the door, pulling away my clothes, unbuckling his belt, calling me mami, sometimes with Paul’s car just turning out of the street. He pulls me onto the bed next to the wall-sized mirror, his trick to make the space feel larger. Of course, I know the truth is he likes looking over at himself while he pumps back and forth behind me like a salsa dancer, my elbows digging into the mattress with each thrust. No shower, no scents of soap, just Carlos’s large hands pulling my waist hard against his pelvis, pushing himself into me as far as he can go.

On the phone, we talk about birthday plans, the surprise he has for me when I get back to D.C. on Monday—he offers only one hint, it is something I told him I want—and then he tells me to be good.

“Take care of your husband, but remember who I am, too,” he says.

* * *

On Saturday morning, during my return run on Kelly Drive, past the rowers gliding along the blue waters of the Schuylkill, past the statues along the riverside park, then past the reservoir and the sound of the river breaking and falling at the base of the palatial museum, I think. Not necessarily about Carlos or that he is right to want to meet Paul, no, but his wanting to meet Paul tells me I am important to Carlos, and I begin to feel how much Carlos is important to me. As I cross the front of the golden-bricked Philadelphia Museum of Art and run around Eakins Oval, I feel like I have been going in circles with Carlos and Paul, wanting both of them and deciding on both, but knowing that having them both cannot last forever. Carlos has been growing more curious about Paul and more demanding on the issue of my leaving him, this man that left his wife for me. That is what people do when they meet someone new, Carlos has insisted many times. They leave. Paul did it, he left his wife for you, and so he will understand, Carlos has argued. I run past Rodin’s statue of the Thinker, the nude male leaning over his knees, trying to work something out in his head. How can I get Paul to introduce me to his sons? We have been together for nearly two years, and because he has spoken so much about them, and so much of his anxiety comes from wanting to be with them, I want to meet them more than I have ever wanted before. I pass the fountain in Logan Square that faces the Cathedral of Peter and Paul, and the idea of shared roles comes to mind, partnerships and responsibilities. My Paul insists on going through his divorce alone, which, I suppose, is the only way he can. Down 18th Street, suddenly cast in the shadows of the downtown buildings, more questions emerge: how does he balance being the boys’ father, my boyfriend, and Christine’s ex-husband? How does he manage to keep these roles separate from one another? Can’t I help? Through Rittenhouse Square now, parents and children are already throwing Frisbees or rolling around in play on the grass. They are laughing and smiling. I will ask to go with Paul when he picks up the boys tomorrow night. It is time we stopped alternating our weekend visits and actually spend a weekend together, the four of us. If I come back to Philadelphia after grad school, to make a home with Paul, shouldn’t we soon tell the boys who Paul and I are to one another? All these are steps we will take toward coming out to them, I will tell him. A yes from Paul about meeting the boys would be the best birthday present, I will say as a finish. Now, with cold sweat matting my shirt onto my chest and back, I am ready to approach our apartment on Spruce Street.

* * *

At home, the place smells of coffee and bacon, and I hear Paul in the kitchen. “Going to take a quick shower,” I yell. When I come out, he is sitting at the table with his laptop. He has scrambled some eggs and left them in a pan on the stove. He pushes me a plate of toast.

“There’s juice in the fridge,” he says, not looking up from his laptop screen.

“Fairmont Park is so cool in the morning. You should come with me tomorrow.” I bite into a piece of crunchy bacon then take the juice out of the refrigerator and pour myself a glass.

“She’s doing it again,” Paul says.

“What?” I say with my mouth full.

“She won’t let me have Matthew and Andrew next week. She says Matthew has ‘an important social obligation’ after church on Sunday. She’s telling me seeing a friend is more important than seeing his own father.”

Now with toast in hand, I read over his shoulder. He must be exaggerating about her language, but no, Christine has worded her email exactly that way.

“Man, she pisses me off,” Paul says, as he types a reply.

“You really need to get everything finalized,” I say. “Get a court order.” I am not telling Paul anything he doesn’t already know. My own knowledge about court orders and custody battles comes from him.

“She wants me to give her my word that I’ll be off from work all week and that nobody else will be watching them,” he says.

There it is. Her greatest fear: her boys being with me. Suddenly, it makes sense that Paul keeps the boys and me apart, at least during this particular time, while he and Christine are in separation phase, when weekends and living arrangements are still being negotiated.

“She’s worried about me,” I conclude out loud. “She wants to make sure I am no where near them.”

Paul says nothing in response to this.

“Just tell her I don’t live here anymore.”

It has been a year since the divorce proceedings began, and a little less than a year since we moved in together, but even then, when I lived here, he would take his boys to his parents’ house on custody weekends. After I moved out, we started alternating our visits so Paul could have his sons here in the apartment. Tell her all of that, how we put our relationship second to the complex arrangements we have made to appease Christine’s needs, I want to say. Instead I say, “Tell her about our alternating weekends.”

“It’s none of her business,” Paul says. “She should trust my judgement as a parent. I never question hers.”

Paul continues typing. I take my plate, grab the newspaper and my laptop, which he has set out on the table for me, and I walk through the bedroom, climb out of the window and onto the fire escape. We have a folding chair out here, and on cool mornings like this, the fire escape feels as good as any balcony. The sun shines behind our building, but its glare hits the large window directly facing ours. A gay couple live in that apartment; I met them when Paul still lived with his wife. One night one of them knocked on our bedroom window and asked me to top his boyfriend, so I crawled out of our window and into theirs. Easily. Their apartment has lots of plants, I recall, and the boyfriend was already on the bed, waiting. I sat on the sofa with the other guy, the one who knocked on the window, not because he was cuter, but because he asked about Paul, my regular “gentleman caller.” Have they knocked on the window for Paul? Or perhaps they moved out. These are questions I cannot ask.

I put the plate and the newspaper under the chair and open my laptop to check email. The fall semester is already in full swing, but it is so far from my mind. The summer classes I took also seem like a distant memory. Early admission to my program allowed me an early start, something that seemed like a good idea back in June, but moving to D.C., dealing with Paul’s divorce, and meeting Carlos in a matter of months have me forgetting all about school. I close the computer, keep it on my lap, and shut my eyes.

Carlos has probably gone back to bed, tired from a night of dancing at Fuego, the club where we met. Or he may be online, chatting, or going to hang out with friends by the fountain in Dupont Circle. In any of these places, I imagine myself close to him, leaning into his arms. One thing I am glad about is that Carlos knows about Paul. Harboring too many secrets can get confusing. Being candid with Carlos has never been a problem because two young Latino men somehow know there will always be another man in the equation. It is just the way things are. A given. Besides, my relationship with Carlos is only a few months old. A justifiable need, because Paul is so far away. Carlos always agrees with this point, usually with a smile, his head on a pillow next to me. We talk about marriage on mornings after sex, and about kids, a daughter for me a son for him. Then we go for a run—both of us shirtless—through Dupont Circle up the gradual hill of Massachusetts Avenue to Observatory Circle, and back. Afterward, we shower together, and after that, I call Paul to check on his weekend with the boys while Carlos makes breakfast or leaves for his mother’s house. He is good like that.

* * *

There is a creak on the fire escape, and I wake up from my nap to see Paul stepping out, rubbing his head with his hands.

“Did you eat your breakfast?” I ask.

“Not hungry.” He leans against the railing.

“You can’t let her do this to you. See what she’s doing to your health?”

“It’s not her,” he says. “I’m just not hungry.”

“I want to go with you when you pick up Matthew and Andrew.”

Matthew and Andrew are four and two, not yet old enough to fit their names, but Christine has asked Paul never to call them Matt and Andy, saying if she wanted to call the boys Matt and Andy, she would have named them Matt and Andy.

“No,” Paul says. “She’s never seen you and I want to keep it that way.”

“Why?”

“It could lead to something,” he says. “It’s ugly enough when I go by myself.”

“I could stay in the car,” I suggest. “She won’t notice.”

“She’d definitely notice if you were sitting in the car,” he says. “She helps me put the boys into their car seats.”

As I lean back in the folding chair, the metal scratches and scrapes the brick wall.

“Why don’t you just keep them the next time you have them?” I ask. “What can she do?”

“She’d say I was kidnapping them, like always.”

Christine has accused Paul many times of kidnapping. If he did not return the boys exactly on the hour, she would call his cell phone and threaten to call the police. He was usually just down the road at McDonald’s, buying the boys Happy Meals, and he would have been at her house in fifteen minutes, but to Christine, fifteen minutes is enough to call Paul a kidnapper. Once when Paul picked up the boys for the weekend, he was so excited to have them that he drove away without their overnight bag. Minutes later, Christine called him and said unless he drove back for the bag this would be considered kidnapping, and she was sure the courts would agree.

“What if you did that,” I wonder out loud. “Actually kidnap them?”

“I’d get caught. And then I would never see my boys.”

Across the way, at our neighbors’ window, there is movement behind the curtains. The laptop is still on my crotch, a good thing.

“What are we doing tonight?” I change the subject.

“Let’s just stay in,” Paul says. “I’m not really in the mood to go out.”

A nice dinner, a small present, an evening out with you, all of this is why I am here, I consider saying. The talk I scripted on my run seems muddied now and it cannot be drawn out from the recesses of my mind. Instead I look hard at the curtains, which are no longer moving, and I try to see if anyone is back there, but I am blinded by the sun’s glare in the window.

* * *

On Sunday morning, as the train pulls into Washington’s Union Station, I call Carlos to tell him I am here. He says he has been waiting for me in the Grand Hall, the wide foyer with the high curved ceiling. He is sitting at the café with the spiral staircase. I picture him there, in the echo of that hall, surrounded by the tourists and passengers, who all look tired and miserable. He is happy I am back early, he tells me over the phone. He will meet me at the gate.
The train stops, and I pull my duffle bag over my shoulder, and stand in the aisle with the other passengers, ready to get off. I cannot wait to hug Carlos. He is tall too, and his wavy black hair, smooth olive skin, and natural muscle tone make him so nice to hold. He is 23, a few months older than I am. We are both just starting out, and sometimes I feel that it would be nice to start out with someone my own age. Carlos lives without baggage, a stress-free life, one that allows him to introduce me to his family, and one that allows him to be here when I change plans suddenly. The attraction would be obvious to anyone who meets him, and it would be obvious especially to Paul, who loves Latinos.

The train doors open and we are let off, and as I make my way past the Amtrak silver train car, it sighs its warm exhaust, and I sigh too. It is during moments like this, with Paul still fresh on my mind and when making comparisons is easy, that I wonder why I stay. Love, I suppose, exists between us. We say it often enough. But seeing the harsh reality of his separation from Christine, from his sons—separations that might never have happened, had he never met me—reaffirms what I already know: I am staying with Paul because to leave him now would be an act of cruelty. I walk out of Amtrak’s Gate A, and almost immediately I see, beyond the shoulders of the people in front of me, Carlos flipping through a magazine at the Hudson News shop by the gate.

“What are you doing here?” I ask smiling as I walk up to him, half disappointed that I won’t get to kiss him in the more romantic setting of the Grand Hall. He takes my bag and hugs and kisses me.

“I hate custody weekends,” he says. “How is he?”

“Not good,” I say.

“Poor old man.”

“Sometimes I think he should take his kids and run. But he’s too smart for that, too level-headed.”

Carlos holds my hand, something that is so easy for him, and we walk to the exit out of the train station that leads to the Metro. On the red line’s platform, I continue: “His ex-wife is making his life hell. She does everything she can to keep him from his sons.”

“What can you do? They’re not your boys.”

“That’s what sucks. I haven’t even met them.”

On the metro, we sit near the door, and I rest my head on Carlos’s shoulder. The metro is usually packed, but as it is Sunday morning, the train car we are in is fairly empty and quiet enough to lull me to sleep.

* * *

“I love this city,” I say once we are in Dupont Circle, walking down New Hampshire to our place. Philadelphia almost always feels so wet and gray. At the apartment, I drop face-first onto the bed.

“Want food?” Carlos goes to the kitchen. “I made chorizo con huevos.”

“Did you?” Suddenly, the place is warm and sharp with the smell of spicy sausage.

“Before I left, I did.” Carlos says. “Thought you might be hungry.”

“I’m glad I don’t have school or work today.” I walk into the kitchen. “I’m going to sleep all day and dream up some way to poison that woman.”

Carlos sets a plate on the counter, pours me some juice, and tells me to eat first.

“What do you want to do tonight?” he asks as I eat.

“What do you mean?”

“For your birthday. What do you want to do?” he asks again. He turns on the faucet and starts washing the frying pan and the dishes he used over the weekend. “Dinner? Dancing? A movie? Your pick, my treat.”

“I don’t know,” I say. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Whatever we do, we have to go to my mom’s first,” he says.

“Why?”

“She wanted it to be a surprise, but I’ll tell you,” Carlos says. “She’s making menudo and baking you a cake. Pineapple-upside-down cake, like the one your mom used to make for your birthday. She called me, by the way.”

“Who?”

“Your mother. She said she called your cell phone this morning, but you didn’t answer, so she called me. She asked if you were OK.”

She called Carlos? She has never done anything like that before; in fact, I cannot remember ever giving her Carlos’s cell phone number. She wishes you a happy birthday and she wants you to call her, he tells me. Carlos’s plans and my mother’s message force me to search back over the last two days with Paul for a moment, one moment, when Paul mentioned my birthday. It was our regularly scheduled weekend together, but he told me weeks before that he would make this particular weekend special. Instead, our weekend was filled with the sound of typing: Paul emailing back and forth with Christine, trying to work something out for the upcoming week.

“What’s wrong?” Carlos turns the faucet off and looks at me. “You got quiet.”

Paul probably hid a gift or a card in my bag, so I leave my plate on the counter, and check my bag on the bed. I dig through my clothes, through the balls of socks, feel around them then dump everything out.

“Did you leave something at Paul’s?” Carlos sits down on the bed and moves the socks around. “We can buy you another one, whatever it is.”

“It’s nothing,” I say, pushing everything aside and sitting down. “I’m just tired.”

Carlos tells me to sleep. It is my birthday, after all.

* * *

Carlos’s mother has dinner ready for us when we get to her house on Kenyon Street in old Columbia Heights. The living room is warm with flavors, mostly the garlic smell of boiling tripe. The Rosados are one of the few Mexican families I have met in a city full of Salvadorians, and Carlos’s mother has told me many times that our finding one another means Carlos and I are meant to be. Carlos’s little niece and nephew run around the house, and from the kitchen his brother yells at them to behave or play upstairs. Carlos chases after them, picks up the littlest, his brother’s three-year-old daughter, and hands her to me.

“Here is your birthday present,” he says.

I laugh. She is so cute with her curly brown hair pinned up especially for the occasion. Yes, I want a daughter just like her someday. We walk into the kitchen to see the rest of the family.

Carlos’s mother Soila and Emilina’s mother are at the kitchen island chopping the last of the lime and cilantro for the menudo.

“Emilina, you want to go home with Tomasito?” Soila asks. The baby smiles and nods and kisses my cheek, then she wiggles, so I let her down. I greet the ladies with kisses on the cheek, too.

“Happy Birthday, mi hijo,” Soila says.

“Everything smells so good,” I tell them, overwhelmed.

After dinner, there is pineapple-upside-down cake, just as Carlos said there would be, and they sing feliz cumpleaños to me, and I blow out the wax number candles, which Carlos set up as “32” for a joke. When they call for a speech, all I can say is how touched I am at all the food and the cake, and I thank them for everything. I look at Carlos and his family and I hope they know what I mean.

“We are family,” Carlos’s mother says. “That is what families do.” She tells Carlos to get the present in the other room. It is a large box, wrapped with shimmering rainbow-colored wrapping paper.

“It’s from all of us,” Carlos says as he hands me the box.

Emilina and her brother reach for it and help me rip away the wrapping. It is a new bag for school, a leather satchel that I have admired a few times in a store in Georgetown. I am embarrassed to know how much it costs.

“This is too much,” I say. “Too much, Soila.”

“Ay, no Soila!” she says. “Call me mom.”

I give her a hug, and Carlos’s brother, his girlfriend, and the babies give me hugs, too, and I get a kiss from Carlos in front of everyone. The party moves into the living room. There is music and drinks, and a piñata on the coffee table ready to be strung-up. Soon I am laughing and talking about the things Carlos does when he sleeps.

“Too much information!” his mother says. “TMI!” Nothing is too much for her, we tease back, but for a moment I wonder exactly how much Carlos actually tells her.

My phone vibrates in my pocket, and I excuse myself to the kitchen. It is Paul, probably calling to make sure I made it home OK, so to be sure I can hear him and to make sure he does not hear the party, I step outside to the back porch.

“She finally let me have the boys,” he shouts. “I am so freaking happy! This is how it feels to get exactly what you want.”

“What?”

“I want you to meet the boys,” he says.

“Wait,” I try.

“I just picked them up, and we’re coming down to D.C. to get you. Screw what she thinks. You deserve to know them,” he explains. “Spend the week with us, or at least have dinner tonight, for your birthday,” he says this last part as if he had not forgotten all about my birthday when I was in Philadelphia.

Carlos opens the porch door, and calls, “Mi amor! My mother wants to know if we want to sleep over.”

“Who is that?” Paul asks on the phone.

“Who is that?” I hear Matthew and Andrew repeat.

Carlos holds the door open. Inside, the piñata is up and the kids are beating it.

“Are you coming in?” Carlos asks. “I think it is ready to break.”

# # #

Copyright © 2010 by Zachary Benavidez.

Review: Signature Theatre Wins at Chess

2010-08-13T13:16:00.008-04:00

The current production of Chess at the Signature Theatre in Arlington is guaranteed to move even the least emotional theatre-goer.

Though the play has gone through numerous lives, as it were, and some of us have seen different versions of the production which is based on the lives of Robert James (Bobby) Fischer and Russian chess-player Boris Spassky, Signature's version is yet another variation. Tim Rice created the idea and the lyrics, while the book is by Richard Nelson and the music is by Bjorn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson.

Eric Schaeffer, who directs, once again has a hit on his hands. As with any production, it's wonderful when all the elements can commingle and produce a diamond. The choreagraphy by Karma Camp is on target and the crew, on opening night, was spiked for the event. They even were able to manage to keep their timing and rhythm when Freddie (the actor playing Fischer) accidentally tossed a drink with ice cubes onto the floor from the elevated platform. More than one of us was afraid someone was going to slip.

The current version is more focused on Florence, played by Jill Paice, who is superb and had the audience with her every step of the way and in tears by the end of the play. Paice has a stunning voice and looks to match but more importantly she is able to get under the character's skin and this is what makes the whole play so convincing.

Both Euan Morton, who plays Anatoly Sergievsky (the Russian Spassky character), and Jeremy Kushnier, who plays Freddie Trumper (the Fischer character) bellow out great songs and emote passion. The set design by Daniel Conway and lighting by Chris Lee work in tandem and do not go over board on being patriotic but I couldn't help thinking where's Anatoly's homeland during the song "Anthem."

There will be some in the audience who upon seeing this version might think: This isn't the same Chess I know. But hey, this Chess is a winner and one to keep for an extended run.

Gival Press Short Story Award Deadline Is Postmarked Aug. 9th

2010-08-05T08:54:00.001-04:00

The Gival Press Short Story Award deadline is August 8; however, the postmarked date is actually August 9th since the 8th is a Sunday. To read the complete guidelines click on the link below for this award with a $1000.00 prize:

Gival Press Short Story Award Guidelines

Last year's winner Perry Glasser will be the final judge.

Sarah Machinak Wins the Oscar Wilde Award

2010-07-24T07:08:00.003-04:00

Sarah Machinak of Pittsburgh has won the 2010 Gival Press Oscar Wilde Award for the best poem that relates GLBT life. Her poem L.B.A. was chosen by Chino Mayrina, last year's winner.

In addition to having her poem published online on the Gival Press website, Sarah Machinak received a cash price of $100. Here below is her winning poem and the list of finalists for the contest.

Winner of the 2010 Gival Press Oscar Wilde Poetry Award

L.B.A.

I awoke in my bridesmaid gown, panties draped
over hotel room doorknob. The pressure

of the wedding gift was painful. But
it was the least I could do after ten years

of friendship. I knew something was amiss
at the rehearsal dinner—could sense her un-

spoken fear as only a best friend can.
She knew there was a possibility

of being labeled L.B.A. (Lesbian
by Association), and we couldn’t have that.

Of all the best friends at Saint Joe’s, why did
she have to pick the lesbian? The girl

who nervously looked away in the locker
room before cheerleading practice, where an

ill-timed glance could result in Bra. Thigh. Belly.
Which would result in lesbian best friend

turning red, sweating, wishing to escape.
Not to mention the sleepovers. What kind

of girl shares her king-sized canopy princess
bed with a lesbian, who must lie

rigidly in the dark, as far away
from her best friend as possible, so as

not to accidentally touch her? After
the wedding, I could be gay again, we

decided through telepathy. So I passed.
Passed on facebook-friending the bridal party,

so they wouldn’t see that I was Interested
In: Women; passed on flirting with Amy,

the cute bridesmaid with whom there was extended
eye contact; passed on genuine conversation

at the rehearsal dinner. But something
had to give. Had enough wine with my meal

to make flirting with the groomsman to my
left seem less than repulsive. Enough wine

that I could laugh graciously when the groom’s
grandmother told me don’t-worry-I’d-find-

a-man-soon-too. At the wedding before
we were announced, hiding in a back room

with the rest of the bridal party: chugged
two beers on an empty stomach when the

underage best man commented on his
allergy to my brand of lip gloss. “No

making out for you two tonight,” the other
guys joked loudly. To which I replied that

the best man was “just a baby, much too young
for me.” Failed to mention that he had the wrong

anatomy. I passed. And I drank. Gave a
wasted maid-of-honor toast and an

impromptu blessing when the priest was running
late. Danced inappropriately with the boldest

of the groomsmen. Pounded shot after gin-
and-tonic after shot. Drank like I hadn’t

since sophomore year of college, since years before
realizing my love of women. I blacked out,

of course, and remember nothing in between
dancing and awaking sans panties. Perhaps

my best friend will decide that L.B.A
is not so embarrassing in hindsight.

Copyright © 2010 by Sarah Machinak.

Biography:

Sarah Machinak is an emerging poet who lives and writes in Pittsburgh. She has worked in the social services field since earning a B.S. in psychology from the University of Pittsburgh. She plans to attend Chatham University’s MFA Creative Writing Program this fall.

Honorable Mentions for the Oscar Wilde Award:
Competition
by Pablo Martinez of San Antonio, Texas.

The Break Up
by Michael Montlack of New York, New York.

Parentheses
by Julie Weber of Ashland, Oregon.

On Turning 40
by Michael Montlack of New York, New York.

Spanish-Language Anthology Reading Set for 7/23

2010-07-21T21:20:00.008-04:00

Calling all Spanish-speaking lovers of poetry.

The recently released Spanish-language anthology of poetry titled Al pie de la Casa Blanca: Poetas Hispanos de Washington, DC (At the Foot of the White House: Hispanic Poets of Washington, DC) edited by Luis Alberto Ambroggio and Carlos Parada will hold a reading at the Haskell Center of the Folger Shakespeare Library on Friday at 6.30 PM.

Where: Haskell Center of the Folger Shakespeare Library
When: Friday, 23, 2010
Time: at 6.30 PM

The following poets will be reading from the anthology in Spanish.

Quique Avilés

José Ballesteros

Emilio Bernal Labrada

Rei Berroa

Mayamérica Cortez

Robert Girón

Consuelo Hernández

Gladys Ilarregui

Sami Miranda

Vladimir Monge

Grego Pineda

Arturo Salcedo Martínez

Marty Sánchez-Lowery

José Varela

Ron Singer's Poetry Is Featured on ArLiJo.com

2010-07-18T09:00:00.002-04:00

ArLiJo.com is currently featuring poetry by Ron Singer.

Two South Africa Poems

1. In Westcliff Flats

In Westcliff Flats,
a poor township,
I found, at last,
a quiet, peaceful sleep,
hard to come by
in Fortress South Africa.
Perhaps, the dogs
had all been eaten.

2. The Poor Live Off Our Garbage.

In New York,
they collect empties,
catch-as-catch-can
—and bottle—
a nickel a pop.

In South Africa,
young men glide up
to stopped cars,
bearing garbage bags,
sagging, wrinkled,
all the air let out.

In the mendicant position,
“Half a rand,”
they ask (seven cents),
“a quarter, anything.”

If you have no trash
(or prefer to litter),
“Half a buck, please, Sir,
for bread? I beg.”

[“Buck” is Sousth African slang for “rand.” I wrote these poems after spending seven weeks in Botswana and South Africa.]

Copyright © 2010 by Ron Singer.

To read more poetry, please click on the link below:
ArLiJo.com

Gival Press Oscar Wilde Award--Deadline June 27th

2010-06-25T11:33:00.001-04:00

Please note that the deadline for the Gival Press Oscar Wilde Award is June 27th. Please note that the postdate is actualy June 28th since the 27th lands on Sunday.

Click on the link below for guidelines for the best original English poem about GLBT life:
Guidelines

Give Us a Break Rep. Barton and England

2010-06-25T11:25:00.004-04:00

How in the world can a USA elected official have the gall to apologize to a company who agrees to pay for the damage it has done?

Sure some Republicans have kept their distance from Rep. Joe Barton of Texas (oh, my, land of my forefathers; but please don't judge us all by the same measure), but Rep. Barton then retracted his apology and then took it back and then tried to retract his retraction. Boy, that's some politics for you.

Now how can the English complain that their pensions are being affected by the money being laid out by BP for the damage they did. How about all the Americans' lives who have been destroyed by the company's incompetence? Who should pay for that if not the company that created the destruction.

What has become of responsibility and politics for the country not politics for powerful corporations?

My Faith in Big Business (here BP) Is Restored

2010-06-16T17:41:00.003-04:00

I have to say that I was pleased to hear that BP (formerly known as British Petroleum) has stated that it will make 20 billion dollars available for the damn mess they have created in the Gulf of Mexico.

I chalked this up to President Obama who no doubt applied pressure to get BP to cough up the money and to stand by their company.

I also believe that though stockholders of BP are international, the company nonetheless reflects on the United Kingdom and frankly I have heard many folks beginning to blame the UK outright. No matter how much of an Anglophile I am, I was/am quite pissed about what has transpired in the Gulf.

So in the long run, England's honor was on the line and I respect the company though I am repulsed by the damage BP has done in the Gulf of Mexico, damage that we will live with for 10 to 20 years, I fear.

Let's hope that the BP and the UK can be trusted to pay for the destruction.

That said, it's also time for us to begin thinking of other means of providing energy for the USA so that we are not victims of others' actions nor at the mercy of others' resources.

ArLiJo Features Ventura Valdez Poetry Winners

2010-05-02T20:57:00.003-04:00

Winner of the 2010 Ventura Valdez English Poetry Award

*Curandero of Juárez (A Childhood Memory)

Curandero,
my aunts bring me to you.
I have been ill. They tell me you heal.
Word of your gift is known
north and south of the border,
from Las Cruces to Camargo,
my maternal family home.

I entered the room.
A powerful graying man came forward.
I felt calm, at peace in his presence.
I saw my beloved father in his face.

Curandero
with thick, mystical
two-thumbed right hand,
how do you cure me
with blessed holy water, then
making the sign of the cross
on my bloated belly?

He was seen at his home in the Juárez barrio,
disciplines said, as Cuauhtémoc,
Aztec chieftain incarnate—
red and yellow feathered crowned aura
merging with his,
curandero and chieftain both speaking
a strange native tongue.

Curandero,
where do you go when in a trance
to find him?
Still in a daze, he slowly awakened,
unaware of what I, a mystified child,
was asking.

*In Latin American a curandero is a traditional folk-healer.

Copyright © 2010 by Joseph Baldi Acosta.

Biography:
Joseph Baldi Acosta was born in Los Angeles, California and is of Italian-American and Mexican heritage. He grew up in the Culver City-Venice area of southern California, in a predominantly Spanish speaking household.

He has an undergraduate degree from the University of Southern California in biochemistry, and a master’s degree in Ibero-American studies from the University of Wisconsin. In 2003 he retired after 37 years of working for the federal government, where his various assignments and contract employment included U.S. based and international public health and development assistance work (Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, and Jordan) for the Peace Corps, U.S. Public Health Service and the U.S. Agency for International Development. He has since worked as an independent consultant in the fields of primary health care and HIV/AIDS.

Baldi Acosta is the author of several articles dealing with primary health care in rural areas of the US and public health in developing countries.

In addition to his family, his passions include international travel, foreign languages, birding, tennis, and most recently, creative writing – particularly poetry, which he has studied at Montgomery College. His diverse cultural heritage and foreign assignments heavily influence his world outlook and writing. Baldi Acosta’s hope is that his writing will be enjoyed by those who read it.

He is married to Maria Thorne and has two daughters and a granddaughter.

Winner of the 2010 Ventura Valdez Spanish Poetry Contest

Sobreviviendo

Sobreviviré a la catedral de tus sueños,
me arrodillaré ante tu altar el día
que caiga la luna hacia la sombra de
mi poesía; suplicaré perdón un viernes santo
que el agua queme tus cabellos, mientras
crucifico tu dominio bajo los clavos de
mi razón…
resucitaras bajo aquella sombra besando tu
oportunidad, lagrimeando tu confusión,
mientras abrazas el polvo de tu sin razón.

Abriré tus puertas bajo el techo húmedo,
la oscuridad será cómplice de tu temor;
olvidaras tus sueños y mi amargura la
beberás una tarde tibia;
olvidaras tus pecados y te entregaré a mi perdón,
te haré impoluta a mi ilusión…
aunque mas tarde te sepulte bajo mixtura
de flores…
aunque sufras en el infierno cerrado de mi olvido.

Copyright © 2010 by Harvy R. Valencia.

Biography:
Harvy R. Valencia was born in Arequipa, Peru; he came to the United States in 2005. He has been writing since he was very young, his first influence came from Cesar Vallejo, one of Peru's most talented poets.

Valencia has not only written poetry but also essays and plays. His inspiration comes from the mixture of sadness and love, loneliness and life, religion and pain and his own philosophy of life. He has a degree in economics from the University of San Agustin in Arequipa, and will be graduating this May from Montgomery College with a degree in paralegal studies. Valencia plans to publish a book based on his life in a near future and also a collection of his poetry. Finally he also plans to attend law school. One of the main aspects of his poetry is the lack of titles. For the purposes of the Ventura Valdez Poetry Contest he had to title the poems he submitted.

Visit, ArLiJo:
ArLiJo.com

ArLiJo.com Features Poets Don Berger & David Dorantes

2010-04-04T14:19:00.002-04:00

ArLiJo.com is currently featuring poets Don Berger of Takoma Park, Maryland and David Dorantes, originally from Mexico, who now lives in Houston, Texas.

Don Berger's To Haiti is a poem that commemmorates the earthquake tragedy of 2010.

David Dorantes' haiku poems are in Spanish.

To read the poems, click on the link below:
ArLiJo.com

Chip Livingston's Museum of False Starts Is Released

2010-03-17T17:49:00.006-04:00

Gival Press is pleased to announce the release of Museum of False Starts by Chip Livingston of New York City.

Livingston’s poetry has been called unique because he writes about his diverse background. Though he lives in New York City, he has Mvskoke ancestral ties and he is a gay poet. The combination of these two has led him to write from a varied place, yet it is accessible to the reader. This is Chip Livingston’s first collection of poetry.

Advance praise:
“...Chip Livingston makes the ordinary exotic, erotic and extraordinary.”
—Ai

“…Not a false start at all, this first book is a distant drum announcing a fresh vision and an original approach to craft in our poetry.”
—Alfred Corn

“All poets must juggle the sacred and profane and each must make some kind of peace with the paradox, fight it, or find a unique road in the up and down. Chip Livingston, in his first book, Museum of False Starts, makes a distinct trail of poems, through Mvskoke ancestral country, through the maze of American myths, through bars and parties at the edge, through disturbance and awe. What an auspicious beginning!”
—Joy Harjo

Photo by Nicolás Arellano.

Biography:
Chip Livingston’s poems and stories appear widely in literary journals such as New York Quarterly, Ploughshares, Mississippi Review, Cincinnati Review, McSweeney’s, and New American Writing. He has received awards from Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas, AABB Foundation, and Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers. He has taught writing for the University of Colorado, the University of the Virgin Islands, Brooklyn College, and Gotham Writers Workshops. He lives in New York City.

Look for him on Facebook.com

To order a copy, visit:
Museum of False Starts at Amazon.com

ArLiJo.com Is Featuring Isaac James Baker & NC Weil

2010-03-09T12:31:00.002-05:00

ArLiJo.com is currently featuring fiction Recovery about anorexia nervosa in men by Isaac James Baker and Burial by NC Weil.

To visit ArLiJo.com, click on the link below:
ArLiJo.com

Isaac James Baker is a 26-year-old writer originally from New Jersey. A journalist and reporter by trade, he currently works as a communications specialist for the federal government and is working on a master’s degree in fiction writing from Johns Hopkins University. His first novel, Broken Bones, the story of a young man’s struggle in a psychotic ward for individuals with anorexia nervosa, is being published by Historical Pages Company in 2010. He lives in Washington , D.C.

NC Weil prefers the elbow room of novels to the restricted arc of short stories, though she writes both along with songs, poems and film reviews. Her fiction has appeared in the anthology Electric Grace (Paycock Press, 2007). Weil is the President of the Washington, DC Chapter of the Women's National Book Association, a network of women and men devoted to books and literacy for over 90 years.

To visit the Washington, DC Chapter of Women's National Book Association, click on the link below:
WNBA

How Does One Reconcile Loss?

2010-02-26T19:59:00.003-05:00

Perhaps there is no perfect way to commemorate a tragic event, but to forget it is certainly not a good choice. Of course, there are numerous accidents almost everyday and people are affected by the loss they create, but when a plane crashes it rekindles the tragic event of 9/11, and such is the case with the Flight 3407 which ended the lives of those on the airplane on Feb. 12, 2009.

Needing to heal from the tragedy, poets, writers, family members and friends from the Buffalo area put together the collection The Empty Chair: Love and Loss in the Wake of Flight 3407 edited by Gunilla Theander Kester and Gary Earl Ross.

Sympathetic Grounding
by Jane Sadowsky

The birds didn't fly on Friday.
I know; I looked for them.
I wanted to see wings that stayed aloft,
that ferried their passengers safely
from tree to tree.

The birds didn't sing on Friday.
In vain, I listening for them.
I wanted to hear sweet warbling,
to drown out the sirens in my head.

The flowers didn't bloom on Friday.
Though February, I searched for them.
The rose that opened to the night air,
had petals of flame.
Its scent lingers.

The empty spaces grow large and larger,
empty seats, empty hands,
empty hearts.

The earth, charred beneath our feet,
swallows our hopes.

The embroidery threads have broken;
the hoop spills.

Long, it will be, and long,
before we can talk of this
without tears.

The birds didn't fly on Friday.
Like our hearts, stilled.

Copyright (c) 2010 by Jane Sadowsky.

With loss, one needs time, for time allows the healing to take place. And the process of grieving calls forth our need for explanation but at times there is no explanation; things just are, yet, we continue to ask as does Kester in the following poem:

Conjugating Grief (for Susan)
by Gunilla Theander Kester

Promised Land. Should I ever find
you on my own, turn me to salt
if you wish, but I will step
over your threshold backward.

When you meet your Moses, taking you
through the desert to the promised land,
do you always know it? Do you know
you must arrive along?

Past tense: Hallelujah, I get it. I am fluent in
Egypt, slavery, hard labor and bitter herbs.

Future tense--@ present scrambled, Can't de-
cipher its hieroglyphics, useless text.

Yet that conditional tense, effort of
every moment, my constant companion:

What if?
What if?

If only?

Copyright (c) 2010 by Gunilla Theander Kester.

To purchase this collection of poetry, fiction, and essays, click on the link below:
The Empty Chair

Make that Full Sun on K Street

2010-02-12T14:59:00.004-05:00

The Washington, DC area is the subject of the recently released anthology of poetry Full Moon on K Street edited by fellow poet and friend Kim Roberts.

Now given that we are literally thawing out of over 2 feet of snow--3 feet in some areas--I say, make that: Full Sun on K Street.

The anthology has numerous well known poets from the area but the works that caught my attention on this snow-thawing day were the following.

The Cervantes Prize-winning Mexican poet José Emilio Pacheco, who teaches at the University of Maryland at College Park, gives us a poem Dos Poemas de Sligo Creek (translation Two Poems from Sligo Creek by Cynthia Steele) that speaks to the transformations that take place in this area (not unlike others, of course, but it's about our area):

No hay belleza
como la de una hoja a punto de secarse
y caer al suelo,
para que la tierra en donde sus restos
van a ser vida
sea fecundada por la nieve.

--No beauty can match
the leaf as it withers
and falls to the earth,
so the soil, where its carcass
turns to life,
is made fertile by the snows.

Yes, with so much snow upon us at the present time, let the soil become fertile so spring will burst with its blossoms, its daffodils and tulips.

And how best to melt some of that snow? I hear the area received tons of salt from Latin America to help us melt the snow. But Richard Peabody's poem I'm in Love with the Morton Salt Girl is just the treatment we need:

I want to pour salt in her hair and watch
her dance. I want to walk with her through the
salt rain and pretend that it is water. I want to
get lost in the Washington Cathedral and follow her
salt trail to freedom.

Boy, do we need salt to help us melt this snow, just don't allow it to cause too much flooding.

With the desire for the spreading of salt, add the desire for a rain to wash it all clean as Belle Waring describes in Storm Crossing Key Bridge:

Seventy-five feet over the water, what stops you
still as the rivets in the bridge's arch is
thunderheads bellowing on the horizon,
under the bridge the swallows darting home, winds
riffing you with their pregnant
smell of rain coming, scent of a storm...

In the middle of the week's blizzard, I looked up at the sky and only saw white. Now we need a wash so that we can hope for the sun to come.

Rebecca Villarreal calls the sun forth in After the Rains:

...
oh the celebration of sun
preparation for Folklife Festival...

so that we can join the tourists and laugh again instead of watch out the window in a state of panic.

So that we can do what Venus Thrash reminds us of in Thicker Than Water:

We have been here before,
our brown bodies laid bare,
embraced in the warmth

of this ancient sun.

So, yes, let's make that Full Sun on K Street, but let us not overlook the history, culture, politics, and the poetics that Full Moon on K Street has laid out for us to enjoy, albeit in snowy days, knowing that sunny days are coming our way.

For more information about the anthology, click on the link below:
Full Moon on K Street

Literal: Latin American Voices Reviews Poetic Voices Without Borders 2

2010-02-11T22:16:00.002-05:00

From Literal: Latin American Voices, Vol. 19/Winter 2009/2010

"'The fence behind your house / is the zero border,' writes Martha Collins, but it's 'Hasta luego and over you go,' thus encapsulating the experience of the reader and many of the poets defining, challenging, and redefining the idea of borders in the multicultural, multilingual anthology Poetic Voices Without Borders 2 by Gival Press....

These poets, among 150 others in this collection encompassing nearly 300 poems, erect and dismantle borders in lingual, cultural, national, and personal terms....

[The] desire to cross boundaries, to transform and eradicate them—'as if to say that within literature there isn't a border for the human spirit'—is the commonality narrowing this wide arc to its flexible focus, and the stated goal of editor Robert L. Giron in his introduction....

Poetic Voices Without Borders 2 is a tool to affect passage through these arbitrary boundaries. It is a literary passport for traveling beyond imposed limits, and one to keep close for handy reference, for as Collins assures us, 'You crossed the border hours ago.'"—Chip Livingston

For information about Literal, a bilingual magazine, email: info@literalmagazine.com
or write:
Literal: Latin American Voices
770 South Post Oak Lane, Suite 530
Houston, TX 77056

Is America Afraid of Gays?

2010-02-06T15:52:00.005-05:00

Hurrah for Kevin Huffman for his Washington Post article "A Super Bowl ad too far? Straights can take it" (2/6/2010) for calling CBS on the carpet for rejecting the ManCrunch ad and for telling it like it is.

To quote Huffman: "The vast majority of Americans now say they have a close friend or relative who is gay or lesbian. This may be a radical proposition, but maybe it's time for our cultural institutions to go ahead and let people out of the closet. Somehow, I suspect the heterosexual community will survive."

For those of you who haven't yet seen the rejected ad from ManCrunch, click on the link from YouTube.com below and see for yourself:

ManCrunchAdOnYouTube.com

It also seems more than one political spokesman has a taste for hypocrisy. McCain has done a I take back my words on the position of letting gays serve openly in the military, even though in the past he said he would listen to the Military speak. For the record, the military has spoken, and so McCain now doesn't like what they have to say about repealing the policy.

Why are Americans so afraid of gays? After seeing District 9 (the film up for a Best Picture Academy Award), gays can't be any more powerful or dangerous than aliens from outerspace yet one would think so by the way Americans seem to behave.

Never mind that numerous countries, including Israel, have gays and lesbians serving opening in the military, all with efficiency.

Is the USA that weak? that afraid?

ArLiJo.com Featuring Poetry by Catee Baugh & Essay by Holly Berardi

2010-02-02T15:06:00.002-05:00

ArLiJo.com is currently featuring poetry by Catee Baugh, a native of Washington, DC, and an award-winning essay by Holly Berardi from suburban Maryland.

Exhibitionist

Touch is a pleasure
Making me yelp-
After pushing all my caustic emotions
Up to the pores of my skin and
Watching them leak out,
I realize now I am a burn victim
And to touch me is to touch
The skin of an atomic survivor.

But pain is both poison and antidote,
A vaccine against the ordinary.
So for you,
I will expose myself
And all my defenses and pretensions,
Though not pretending
Their removal is easy or safe.
They are duct-tape band-aids
Tearing away the hair
And meager portions of singed skin
When I yank them off
To the tune of my
Screaming laughter
So that you might see thin ribbons
Of muscle and vein under my superficial layers
While I laugh at the infection seeping in.

Yes, there is something
Masochistic in my sullen art.
And I remember all those muttered words
From the mouths of teachers about
“Narrator as imagined construct in poem.”
But I would rather be
Slit open and displayed
On iron tables in museum hallways
With my very intestines hanging off,
Dripping onto the feet of passerby,
And they pulling off my skin like burnt offerings
Than be a masked and painted actor on a stage,
Only there to forget my made-up lines.

Copyright © 2010 by Catee Baugh.

To read more poems click on ArLiJo.com

To read Holly Berardi's essay A Deeper Look into Negative Campaigning, click on the link below:

A Deeper Look into Negative Campaigning

3 Gival Press Books Place at the 2009 London Book Festival

2010-01-15T12:09:00.006-05:00

Gival Press is proud to announce that three recently published book have placed at the 2009 London Book Festival.

Fiction: Honorable Mention, A Tomb on the Periphery by John Domini

To order a copy at Amazon.com, click here:
A Tomb on the Periphery

Poetry: Honorable Mention, Voyeur by Rich Murphy

To buy a copy on Amazon.com, click on the link below:
Amazon.com

Poetry: Runner-up, Poetic Voices Without Borders 2
edited by Robert L. Giron

To purchase a copy at Amazon.com, click below:
Poetic Voices Without Borders 2 at Amazon.com

Perry Glasser Wins the Gival Press Short Story Award

2009-12-26T16:01:00.003-05:00

Perry Glasser of Haverhill, Massachusetts has won the 6th Annual Gival Press Short Story Award-2009, which has a purse of $1,000.00.

(photo by Rod Kessler)

The short stories were read anonymously and the winner was chosen by last year's winner Tim Johnston.

Praise for I-95, Southbound:

"In a field of strong contenders, I-95, Southbound prevailed because in addition to its incredible fineness of language, its mastery of point-of-view, and its pitch-perfect voice, it simply knocked me out of my chair with a great wallop of surprise. I don't mean a surprise twist in plot or any kind of artificial trick; I mean the story delivers a moment of revelation, of truth, so exquisitely timed and rendered that it plunges the reader into deepest empathy and sends him reeling back through the story, back through time, along with the protagonist. There are, as one would expect in fiction of this caliber, signposts to this powerful moment along the route, but they are embedded so artfully in the narrative as to only seem like signposts on a second trip—which I-95, Southbound, beautiful and hilarious and terrifying, certainly merits, and rewards."
—Tim Johnston, judge and last year's winner

To read the story, click on the link below:
Perry Glasser at Gival Press

Biography:

Perry Glasser is the author of DANGEROUS PLACES, a collection of short fiction that received the 2008 G.S. Sharat Chandra Prize from BkMk Press at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. In 2009 the book was named the recipient of the National “Best Books 2009” Award—Fiction & Literature: Short Story Fiction by USA Book News. Two novellas were featured in NEXT STOP HOLLYWOOD, a collection of fiction from St. Martin’s Press in 2007. He has also published two prior collections of short fiction, SUSPICIOUS ORIGINS (St. Paul: New Rivers Press) and SINGING ON THE TITANIC (Urbana and Chicago: The University of Illinois Press), a book recorded by the Library of Congress for the blind. His work has twice been read on National Public Radio's “The Sound of Writing” and has three times won P.E.N. Syndicated Fiction Awards. He has been named at fellow at Ucross, Yaddo and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, was a scholar at Bread Loaf, and in consecutive years was named a winner of the annual Boston Fiction Festival prize. His memoir, Iowa Black Dirt, about being a single parent, won First Prize in a contest sponsored by The Good Men Foundation, and appears in that anthology (November, 2009). Glasser has been a Contributing Editor of North American Review since 1994.

Finalists:

The Brotherhood of Bastards
by Deirdra McAfee of Richmond, Virginia.

In the House
by Clarinda Harriss of Baltimore, Maryland.

The Butcher
by Kindall Gray of Tucson, Arizona.

The Tombstone Races
by José Skinner of Edinburg, Texas.

Gival Press Poetry Award--Deadline Dec. 15th

2009-12-10T11:04:00.002-05:00

The deadline for Gival Press Poetry Award for a ms of original poetry in English of at least 45 pages or more, in any style or form, is this Tuesday, Dec. 15th.

Purse: $1,000.00, plus book publication.

For complete guidelines, click on the link below:
Guidelines

ArLiJo.com Is Featuring Hemil Garcia Linares & David Lott

2009-11-21T17:32:00.002-05:00

ArLiJo.com is currently featuring a short story by Hemil Garcia Linares and poetry by David Lott.

Journalist and writer Hemil Garcia Linares was born in Lima, Peru. He has published articles in Peru’s El Comercio newspaper, as well as in several Hispanic periodicals in the United States. He is editor of Raices Latinas, a bi-monthly magazine in Northern Virginia. His stories have been included in anthologies in the United States, Mexico, and Argentina. He was a finalist at the 2008 Junin Pais International Short Stories Contest in Argentina. Contact him at his webpage, www.hemilgarcia.com, and blog, www.hemilgarcia.blogspot.com.

Carambola

The haiku master Basho

named himself

after the word

for banana tree –

it’s true.

But if he had seen

the starfruit tree

in this Caribbean courtyard

we might know him today

as Carambola.

As every star is a sun in potential

every ripe starfruit

is a sun in miniature

and each carambola tree

a little daytime

constellation.

Copyright (c) 2009 by David Lott.

David G. Lott, an associate editor of Potomac Review, has taught English at Montgomery College for seventeen years. His work has appeared in Light, Aethlon, Washington (D.C.) City Paper, and Opium, and he is currently working on a collection of poems called Gringo in Guayama, about his time living in a small Puerto Rican town.

To read the ArLiJo.com issue, click on the link below:
ArLiJo.com

C. M. Mayo Gives Us Another Great Read

2009-11-10T15:44:00.003-05:00

For those of you who are perhaps engrossed with all the talk of the Maya 2012 calendar and the soon-to-be-released film "2012," 19th century Mexico might be a less traumatic period to read about.

With The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire, writer C. M. Mayo has placed herself on the mantel for not only engaging the reader but for creating a fascinating tale of the individuals (based on real characters) and the tensions of the historical period of 1864.

In a nutshell, without giving away the story, Mayo lucidly gives us the background and the inner desires of the leading characters, which include Alice Iturbide née Green (who it turns out had a Washington, DC connection) and eventually Maximilian and Carlota of Mexico under French rule.

Mayo who has so elegantly described Mexico in her other books does a great job of pulling the reader into this true story yet it is her imagination that has filled in the details. It is so cleverly done that the reader buys into the plot and wants to turn each page to discover what will come next in this whirl of Mexicans, Americans and Europeans.

On a number of different levels, many of us can identify with the drama of this period, be it ethnic, cultural, or political, for while one reads he has to ask himself: What would have happened if things did not turn out the way they did in Mexico? Is this the nature of things to come?

For myself, I can't wait to pick up the book and read it once again, for the history and personalities are so vivid that Mayo makes me want to visit these folks again, perhaps to echo a period I should know.

Poetic Voices Without Borders 2 Wins the 2009 National Best Book Award for Fiction & Literature: Anthology

2009-10-26T10:27:00.004-04:00

(Artwork by Joel E. Traylor III / JETgallery.com)

Poetic Voices Without Borders 2
has won the 2009 National Best Book Award for Fiction & Literature: Anthologies, sponsored by USA Book News. Congratulations to the contributors and Ken Schellenberg, the book designer.

List of the Contributors:
Alenier, Karren LaLonde
Ambroggio, Luis Alberto
Ambroggio, Xavier
Amen, John
Antler
Ayala, Naomi
Barkan, Stanley H.
Baysans, Greg
Beck, Gary
Belin, Mel
Berger, Donald
Bergman, David
Bernal, Leonel P.
Bolz, Jody
Bourgeois, Louis E.
Bowen, Kristy
Browder, Clifford
Buck, Janet I.
Burch, Beverly
Cantú, Norma Elía
Carrión de Fierro, Fanny
Cavalieri, Grace
Cellini, Don
Chun, Ye
Collins, Martha
Conlon, Christopher
Corn, Alfred
Corwin, Nina
Cravzow, Roy
Cremades, Luis
Cross, Teri Ellen
Dasgupta, Shome
Davis, Bradley Warren
Del Peschio, John
del Pliego, Benito
Domini, John
Dove, Rita
Duhamel, Denise
Encinar, Jesús
Evans, J. Glenn
Falco, Edward
Fellner, Steve
Fisher, Andres S.
Garfinkel, Patricia
Garza, Efrain
Gaspar de Alba, Alicia
Geyer, Bernadette
Gilgun, John
Gilman, Josh
Gilreath, Shannon
Ginsberg, Arthur
Gioia, Dana
Giron, Robert L.
Godoy, M. Juan
Goldemberg, Isaac
Goldman, Paula
Gray, Patricia
Greenberg, Janet
Grossberg, Benjamin S.
Guerrero, Jose Marcial
Gwiazda, Piotr
Habra, Hedy
Harjo, Joy
Harjo, Suzan Shown
Hislop, Robin Ouzman
Holland, Walter R.
Hudson, Ron
Hurezanu, Daniela
Ifland, Alta
Inez, Colette
Jensen, Kim
Joysmith, Claire
Kasprowicz, Marcella
Kessler, Stephen
Kester, Gunilla Theander
Kirkpatrick, Kathryn
Klappert, Peter
Klawitter, George
Koch, Randy
Kreiter-Foronda, Carolyn
Lader, Bruce
Lecrivain, Marie
Lee, Daniel W. K.
Lee, Donna J. Gelagotis
Lehmann, Gary
Levchev, Vladimir
Levine, Philip
López-Luaces, Marta
Luczak, Raymond
Luna-Escudero-Alie, María Elvira
Mann, Jeff
March, Sydney
March, Thomas
Marín, Desiree S.
Martínez, Pablo Miguel
Martínez de Merlo, Luis
Mayo, C. M.
McCombs, Judith
Meléndez, Mario
Melleby, Arnold
Micheaux, Dante
Miller, Edmund
Miller, E. Ethelbert
Mills, Stephen S.
Montlack, Michael
Moore, David Miles
Murphy, Kay
Neisser Moreno , Yvette
Nye, Naomi Shihab
Ostriker, Alicia Suskin
Pantano, Daniele
Paris, Anika
Pastoriza Iyodo, Benito
Peabody, Richard
Plum , Emily Lupita
Queneau, Raymond
Reevy, Anthony W.
Rimbaud, Arthur
Rivera, Wanda
Roberts, Kim
Robinson, Blake
Robinson, J. E.
Roffé, Mercedes
Ross, Joseph
Ross, Sean
Rummel, Mary Kay
Rutkowski, Thaddeus
Saba, Mark
Salum, Rose Mary
Schaffner, M. A.
Schimel, Lawrence
Shapiro, Gregg
Shulklapper, Lucille Gang
Singer, Ron
Slone, G. Tod
Smith, J. D.
Snider, Clifton
Soden, Christopher
Soniat, Katherine
Tandon, Jason
Tilley, Jonathan
Toscano, Rodrigo
Tusa, Chris
Ungar, Barbara Louise
Van de Kamp, Alexandra
Vando, Gloria
Vélez-Mitchell, Anita
Wade, Julie Marie
Walt, Jeff
Whittenberg, Allison
Williams, Jill
Wormwood, Ernie
Wozek, Gerard
Yakovina, Katharina

To buy a copy at Amazon.com, click on the link below:
Poetic Voices Without Borders 2.

The finalists in the 2009 National Best Book Award category included:

Cuentos del Centro: Stories from the Latino Heartland
by the Latino Writers Collective

Dragons Composed
by James Ferris

Little Stories
by Jeff Roberts

Randoms
by Keith B. Darrell

Sunil Freeman & Mary Kay Rummel Are Featured on ArLiJo.com

2009-10-08T20:44:00.001-04:00

Talking

Not quite poems but more
like the rind of poems,
how your wine glass, raised right,
coaxes a plump ruby from falling
afternoon light. How we know
the river scene, sun-dazed
shock of blue and white to silver,
could use a sailboat.
What the boaters might say.

I love it when you say “marinara,”
say anything at all, like
“try some of this.”
A waft of butter and garlic
roams from your bowl to mine,
mine to yours, as our words
find a rhythm we might walk.
We look from the canvas
back to each other, touch glasses,
let the silence breathe a while,
then head on down that road.

Copyright (c) 1999 by Sunil Freeman. Talking first appeared in Wordwrights! and Surreal Freedom Blues, (Argonne Hotel Press, 1999).

Sunil Freeman is author of two books of poems, That Would Explain the Violinist (Gut Punch Press) and Surreal Freedom Blues (Argonne Hotel Press). He is assistant director of the Writer's Center, and has been a managing editor of Poet Lore, the nation's oldest continuously publishing poetry journal. He is the Washington, DC Branch Bureau editor of the Party for Socialism and Liberation's website, www.pslweb.org. His poems have appeared in several journals and anthologies, including Gargoyle, Bogg, Abbey, Minimus, Wordwrights, The Delaware Poetry Review, Beltway, Kiss the Sky: Fiction and Poetry Starring Jimi Hendrix, and Cabin Fever: Poets at Joaquin Miller's Cabin, 1984-2001.

To read more of his work, click on
ArLiJo.com

Dreaming that Shaman, the Tongue

1
Because our tongues move us
from one unknowing to the next,
let nothing obscure the mystery
of that thumb-deep vault
my open mouth,
the cave where Eurydice is lost
where Orpheus, your tongue,
enters only the ante-chamber.

2
Let our tongues meet midway
like dragon and damsel flies crossing
star-laced waters, one thimbleful.

3
A man leads a horned cow,
morning, evening, across a square.
Your tongue is that well-served cow
and the man who shepherds him.
My tongue is the breeze from the mountain
that licks your sweating skin.

Across the square a white temple
with gold framed arches, open door.
Your mouth is that temple and my tongue
waits to enter, a redbird losing color in captivity.

4
Your tongue whirls in one place
like a Dervish of Damascus
whose red gown tulips
around his spinning knees.
My tongue is your chanting enchanter.

5
Tonight I want to take you
the glisten of your mouth
relearned, reloved.
Tonight I want to take
that shaman of your soul
drumming inside my mouth.

That wild clock spinning us
backward: glass to sand,
sand to freshwater pearl and forward
into a universe of whirling.

Copyright 2009 by Mary Kay Rummel.

Mary Kay Rummel’s newest poetry book is Love in the End (Bright Hill Press, 2008). Other books of poetry are The Illuminations (Cherry Grove Collections 2006), Green Journey Red Bird (Loonfeather Press), The Long Journey Into North (Juniper Press) and This Body She’s Entered (a Minnesota Voices Award winner from New Rivers Press). Recent publications include: Nimrod (as an award finalist), Askew, Dust and Fire where she is the 2009 Diane Glancy Award winner, Lavanderia, the Irish journal—The SHOp and Poetic Voices Without Borders (Gival Press, 2005). Her short fiction is forthcoming in an anthology from Wising Up Press. She loves to collaborate with visual artists and musicians. She divides her time between Minneapolis and Ventura, CA where she teaches at California State University at Channel Islands. More information and poems at marykayrummel.com.

To read more of her work, click on
ArLiJo.com

That Demon Life by Lowell Mick White Is Released

2009-10-02T20:19:00.005-04:00

Gival Press is pleased to announce the release of That Demon Life, winner of the Gival Press Novel Award, by Lowell Mick White of College Station, Texas.

“Here is the story of success in spite of oneself, rendered with a sly and witty and wry appreciation for the ordinary horrors of everyday life. That Demon Life is a hoot, a virtuoso tale by a master story teller. Mr. White, where have you been keeping yourself?”
—Larry Heinemann, author of Paco’s Story, winner of the National Book Award

“Lowell Mick White takes readers places John Grisham’s novels overlook. With a keen eye for the absurd, White gives a glimpse into the lives of the hapless and dysfunctional attorneys and judges who inhabit the Capitol of Texas.”
—Christine Granados, author of Bride and Sinners in El Chuco

"That Demon Life has got Austin in its sway, or at least this novel's motley crew of characters. A horny judge, a defense attorney with an attitude, an entourage of petty criminals, a dating service maven, a self made internet porn star and a boy toy or two—they're all slouching toward Sixth St. and beyond. This is a fast-paced, hold-on-to-your-bar stool satire, a hilarious, stumbling romp through law and disorder, urban ennui and its after-hour antidotes, Texas-sized lust and doom."
—Alison Moore, author of The Middle of Elsewhere and winner of the Katherine Ann Porter Prize for Fiction

"Lowell White’s first novel, That Demon Life, is hootenanny of jurisprudence, internet sex, false teeth, and box wine—all under the big skies of Texas. White's mischievous prose makes the fabulous realistic and the absurd an afterthought. Through it all, the audacity of the narrative allows us ample opportunity to laugh, even when the joke is on us.
—Adrian Matejka, author of The Devil’s Garden

"The slacker blonde has found her muse! In the hilariously disinclined attorney Linda, a no-account Austinite whose idea of legal research is a rerun of Law & Order, White has given us a transgendered update of the madcap A Confederacy of Dunces. Indeed, you could say Dunces is done one better in That Demon Life, because this swift-moving new picaresque of work-avoidance takes us into the realm of sex…."
—John Domini, judge for the Gival Press Novel Award

Biography:
Lowell Mick White is author of the story collection Long Time Ago Good (Slough Press, 2009). His work has been published in over two dozen journals, including Callaloo, Iron Horse Literary Review, and Short Story. In 1998 he was awarded the Dobie-Paisano Fellowship by the University of Texas at Austin and the Texas Institute of Letters, an honor that has previously gone to such writers as Sandra Cisneros, Dagoberto Gilb, and Stephen Harrigan. White lived in Austin for 25 years, at various times working as a cab driver, as a shade tree salesman, and as an Internal Revenue Service bureaucrat. He is currently a PhD student at Texas A&M University, where he specializes in creative writing and regional literatures, and teaches creative writing and freshman composition.

To contact him directly: Lowell.white@gmail.com.

To buy a copy on Amazon.com, click on the link below:
Amazon.com

ISBN 13: 978.1.928589.47.1 / $20.00 pb / 194 pgs
###

Voyeur by Rich Murphy Is Released

2009-10-02T20:01:00.004-04:00

Gival Press is pleased to announce the release of Voyeur, winner of the Gival Press Poetry Award, by Rich Murphy of Marblehead, Massachusetts.

(Artwork by Mark Johnson)

“Mr. Murphy is a very careful craftsman in his work, a patient and testing intelligence, one of those writers who knows precisely what he wants his style to achieve. His poetry is quiet but packed, carefully wrought, not surrealistically wild, and its range not limited but deliberately narrow. It takes aim.”
—Derek Walcott

“In Voyeur, Rich Murphy earnestly explores the complicated nature and innate integrity of the ‘wild’ -or even divine- feminine as subject to chance, circumstance, and interaction with the masculine. In some sense, a pervasive longing at once subtle and tense, for a ‘natural life,’ defines this collection of poems. Murphy’s Voyeur, while never revealing the *I*, bares a sensitive and often perplexed masculine narrator. But this bemusement, and a masculine struggle to fathom the feminine, is essential to the manuscript; it is the elemental brightening force of this aptly titled collection – a vision to previously veiled poetic spaces. While Murphy’s poems are most often set in a contemporary world of suburban gyms and kitchen tables, they nonetheless draw from aspects of Greek mythology, recalling the Homeric king Odysseus and sorceress Circe; however, as in the centuries-old tract established by the poet Sappho, Murphy’s paramount focus rests not on stories of gods and heroes but rather in the quiet sublime of the turning of hours in a life at once familiar and heterodox.”
—Ginger Knowlton

“In Rich Murphy’s exciting and sexy collection Voyeur ‘men / and women fall in love with their minor / economies and haggle over appearances / and favors.’ Murphy reveals to us that ‘I pan from coast to coast / and bedrooms frame acts of the American / Dream in abandon.’ Like family, Voyeur is complex yet accessible, and Murphy’s powerful use of metaphor will intrigue you, ‘Husbands and wives fill houses/ with doodads and two strangers.’ But also ‘father’s fetishes, mother’s moods, / and aunt’s angst, are wrapped in love.’ Voyeur is a reflection of the family seen through the eyes of an extremely gifted poet.”
—Leah Maines, author of Beyond the River and Looking to the East with Western Eyes

“Voyeur is a work of vision and virtuosity. Concerned with relationships, marriage, sex and power, the poetry is dense, rapid, dazzling, the voice commanding, the speaker charismatic…The poems are extraordinary as individuals, from the intriguing declarative first sentence of each down to its decisive, glistening last line. And as a collection, like 'a subtle song [that] travels / from ancient feet through hearts / to first breath in the world,' Voyeur is spectacular."
— Richard Carr, judge and author of Honey

Biography:
Rich Murphy holds degrees from Boston University, including a graduate degree in creative writing. He studied with the late George Starbuck and Derek Walcott. He currently teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University and lives in Marblehead, Massachusetts.

His credits include a book of poems The Apple in the Monkey Tree (Codhill Press); chapbooks Great Grandfather (Pudding House Publications), Family Secret (Finishing Line Press), and Hunting and Pecking (Ahadada Press); poems in hundreds of journals in Anglophone countries; and essays in such periodicals as The International Journal of the Humanities, Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning, Reconfigurations: A Journal for Poetics Poetry / Literature and Culture, Fringe, and Big Toe Review. His essay on poetry’s evolving ecology will be in a special issue of The Journal of Ecocritism (University of British Columbia). His work has been nominated for several awards.

To contact him directly: murphy.rich@rocketmail.com.

To buy a copy on Amazon.com, click on the link below:
Amazon.com

ISBN 13: 978.1.928589.48.8 / $15.00 pb / 100 pgs
###

David Winner Wins the Gival Press Novel Award-2009

2009-09-11T15:37:00.003-04:00

Gival Press is pleased to announce that David Winner of Brooklyn, New York has won the 5th Annual Gival Press Novel Award for his novel The Cannibal of Guadalajara. Mr. Winner will receive $3,000.00 and his novel will be published in 2010. His manuscript was read anonymously and chosen by the final judge John Domini.

“Is this about ruptured families and their reframing? About Latin and North America commingling by way of Manhattan and Mexico, in a mess of nightmare and dream? Or have we a fine and bumpy ride, comic and yet catch-in-the-throat, through the surprises of sex and romance in a hitherto undemonstrative woman now nearing 60? The answer, as you'd expect in a thwacking sweetheart of a novel, is all the above. Small wonder that its turning points generally arrive, with a satisfying bang!, during expansive and complicated meals. Small wonder that expectations about who will wind up with whom, and why, get delightfully upended. For all the control with which it's written—always at just distance enough for a smile, but never enough for a smirk—The Cannibal of Guadalajara proves anything but a finicky eater.”—John Domini, judge & professor of English and Creative Writing at Grinnell College and author of The Tomb on the Periphery

Biography:

David Winner has received two Pushcart nominations and first prize in The Ledge's 2003 Fiction Contest. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, Fiction, Confrontation, Corland Review, Staple, Dream Catcher Phantasmagori, KGB, and several other literary magazines in the USA and the UK. A film based on a short story of his was shown at the Cannes Film Festival in 2007, and he's the fiction editor of The American, a magazine based in Rome.

Finalists:

Show Up, Look Good
by Mark Wisniewski of Lake Peekskill, New York.

Sally Paradiso
by Jeanne Larsen of Roanoke, Virginia.

Chantal
by Louella Bryant of Lincoln, Vermont.

Listening for Life
by Matthew Pitt of Gulfport, Mississippi.

###

ArLiJo Features Poetry by Lee Leong Koh & Jeff Walt

2009-09-04T21:58:00.002-04:00

ArLiJo is currently featuring poetry by Jee Leong Koh and Jeff Walt.

Jee Leong Koh's book Equal to the Earth was recently released. Here below is a sample from the book.

Spinoza on Love

In Amsterdam, that curious strand,
a man of trading blood was banned
for thinking it was very odd
that man should worship man in God,
and not the God of love’s demand.

Demand of me, my Love, demand
I give up all to understand
the ordinary and the odd
in Amsterdam.

Devoting all to understand
what stayed or traded on that strand,
he thought, therefore I am—how odd!—
the intellectual love of God,
the love that binds, what once was banned
in Amsterdam.

From Equal to the Earth (Bench Press, 2009 ) Copyright © 2009 by Jee Leong Koh. Reprinted by permission of Bench Press.

Jeff Walt, who has twice won the Gival Press Oscar Wilde Award, recently was awarded First Place in the 2009 Gertrude Press Chapbook Contest and his chapbook Vows will be published in 2010.

Here below is one of his poems:

I Walk My Neighborhood at Night

The mutt my ex left me
has broken free from the back yard fence.
Now I’m scavenging the streets,
still in my work boots, greasy clothes,
the paper mill’s stench that hangs on me
no matter how much soap I use.
“Lucky,” I shout, as if the mongrel might come running, jump up,
lick my face; as if I have something to offer besides a chain
around his neck and leftover Spaghetti-Os.

I stumble through dark yards—
windows glow, boxes of private lives lit: families
finishing dinner, clearing tables, watching TV. A boombox
screeches “Cocaine”; a man yells at a woman, hands
thrashing in the air. I remember being struck by love.
What would I say if I slammed in there? What words
would change anything?

My neighbor rattles home in his car, calls his six kids
little sons-of-bitches—their small, vague
bodies like shadows, skipping circles and clapping
lightning bugs dead between their hands.

As a boy, I wanted to kill
everything smaller than me: beetles sprayed
with AquaNet, butterflies smacked
from the bright air, wings dipped in motor oil.
In those moments, I was certain
I would become a man who could conquer anything.
I yell down a dead end street
for a dog I know doesn’t love me; a pet afraid
of my voice hard as the two-by-four I’ve whacked
against his rib cage, days and days chained to himself.

First appeared in Mangrove Review, Fall 2005. Copyright (c) 2009 by Jeff Walt.

To see their work posted on ArLiJo, click on the link below:

ArLiJo.com

Chino Mayrina Wins the Gival Press Oscar Wilde Award-2009

2009-08-28T07:00:00.004-04:00

Gival Press is pleased to announce that Chino Mayrina of Davis, California has won the 8th Annual Oscar Wilde Award for his poem entitled We Must Always Sing.

Chino Mayrina received a cash prize of $100.00 and his poem is posted on the Gival Press website (www.givalpress.com).

Winner of the 2009 Gival Press Oscar Wilde Award
We Must Always Sing
by Chino Mayrina of Davis, California.

Honorable Mentions:

The Break Up
by Michael Montlack of New York, New York.

Boneyfiddle: Floodgate
by Amanda Rachelle Warren of Aiken, South Carolina.

My Carpenter
by Jeff Walt of Honolulu, Hawaii.

Everyone Knows
by Trish Cole of St. Mary's City, Maryland.

WINNER OF THE 2009 GIVAL PRESS OSCAR WILDE AWARD

We Must Always Sing

There is a time for everything,
a season for every activity under heaven.
- Ecclesiastes 3:1

***

We heard the water running
before it turned into milk.
Our teeth felt buzzed and sweet
before we were told of honey.

Our open mouths swayed,
having been throbbed into
prehistoric song before learning
about dissonant supplication.

The smell of sizzling meat
washed from our tingling beards
as we drank from the chalice
we poured our love into.

We bathed in clear river when
there was no need for stronger bones.
We tasted the same peaks when
there was no need to stomach them.

***

It is sunset,
the rivers are burning,
but for now
everything is perfect.
In this narrow strip of space
on the brimming Castro Street
condensation means love.

We are marching
to the pulse of our bridge.
18:23 and 20:13
are nothing but times here.
We are naked without having to
huddle through nights lit
by new moons.

If we must burn, may we
smolder like foxfires—
wound healers earth diggers
hopeful children of modernity.

Glittering precariously on the brink,
we blow kisses to the coming night
because we know the earth is moving.
Out of smoke and liquor
neon lights and guns
the air drips
with mouths swaying
condensing
almost like rain.

***

Our bottles and jars will not be empty.
We will be tired, but just like star-loved children
we will sway in moonlit concert, mouths
pulsating to the lilt of rivers unburned.

Copyright © 2009 by Chino Mayrina.

Biography:
Chino Mayrina is currently a fourth-year undergraduate at the University of California, Davis, pursuing a major in English and minors in Spanish and French. He plans to get an MFA in Creative Writing in the future. Meanwhile, he’s hoping to graduate on time and teach in Spain for a year or two as he scrambles to pay off his student loans. This is his first publication and award for writing.

Judge: Stephen S. Mills, last year’s winner, who read the entries anonymously, served as the final judge.
###

Senator Edward M. Kennedy: 1932-2009

2009-08-27T07:03:00.002-04:00

May we all remember what Senator Kennedy stated at the National Democratic Convention last year:

"For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives and the dream shall never die."

May Democrats and Republicans in Congress come to the realization that they represent the people of this country and not the interests of the select few or corporations.

May Democrats in Congress realize that if Republicans refuse to work collaboratively with them on the issue of health care that they have it within their power to work on the issue that was Senator Kennedy's most passionate cause: Heath care for all in the United States.

May Congress finally pass a major bill on health care as a tribute to Senator Kennedy who fought so passionately for the good of the American people.

Health Care Aside Perhaps Poetry Will Cure the Ailment

2009-08-20T21:38:00.002-04:00

Health Care:

Who knew people would get so riled up over the current health care issue?

Certainly is helps to learn via Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow that many of the folks who are attending political meetings are being supported if not paid by political groups and insurance companies to protest. Sadly many are protesting against a possible bill that might give them the insurance coverage they currently don't have. But then when one needs a buck, there is no telling what one will do for the almighty dollar.

Sadly, the unruly protests and people attending such sessions with their guns might make the most sane think twice about attending any such sessions.

Enough of politics, let's think of poetry.

ArLiJo.com is featuring poetry by Lee Leong Koh and Jeff Walt.
Here's the link: ArLiJo.com

For Lonely

Lying on top of you, my arms and knees
support my body even as I grope
for how much of me your frame will carry.

You hold me closer, you’re not heavy. So
I lean a ladder into you, step hard
up, and clamber to the top window

to hear you play Chopin’s Etude in C
Minor. I enter through the window, drop
into your room. I sit down quietly.

You come to a passage hazardous and slow
like footsteps on decaying floorboards
of an old house. The pedal mutes the piano.

Then I become afraid you will not be
playing, beside me, with such quiet hope
forever, for nightfall, for lonely,

and what that will do to me. I tiptoe
to the window while stroking your forehead,
lean back into myself, walk away below.

From Equal to the Earth (Bench Press, 2009) © by Jee Leong Koh. Reprinted by permission of Bench Press.