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Excerpts:   Leader ~ Poetry ~ Fiction ~ Essay

Leader Excerpt

IT HAS BEEN TERMED THE “LARGEST MASS poisoning of a population in history.”1 Estimates of the number of people of all ages in Bengal who have been poisoned by arsenic vary wildly, from 30 million to more than 500 million. Yet, chronic arsenic toxicity is not an isolated problem. Arsenic contamination of drinking water occurs naturally in many regions of the world, including North America. Thousands of medical reports, studies, and scientific journal articles are revealing that the same hydrogeological conditions responsible for arsenic contamination in Bengal are widespread.
  Richard Wilson (founder of the Harvard-MIT Arsenic Project) points out that “there is as much arsenic in soil surrounding the aquifers in Massachusetts as in Bangladesh; it is merely not easily available in the water, and moreover few people drink water from wells.”2 The U.S. Geological Survey has found arsenic concentrations above EPA acceptable limits in well water and in public water supply systems in hundreds of counties in more than 25 states from Maine to Alaska.3 And people, by the tens of thousands, drink that water.
  The presence of dangerous levels of arsenic in aquifers has been found on five continents.4 In the absence of affordable arsenic removal methods, arsenic-tainted water will become as lethal as pathogenic surface water for the poor in developing countries. On a global basis, access to safe water is now emerging as one of the most serious long-term threats to survival facing the more than two billion people living in poverty and extreme poverty.

1 Smith, A.H. Lingas, E. O. & Rahman, M. “Contamination of Drinking Water by Arsenic in Bangladesh: a Public Health Emergency.” Bulletin of the World Health Organisation, 78, pp. 1093-1103.
2 Wilson, Richard, “Chronic, Arsenic Poisoning: History, Study and Remediation,” available at http://www.physics.harvard.edu/~wilson/arsenic/countries/arsenic_project_countries.html.
3 Focazio, Michael J., Welch, Alan H., Watkins, Sharon A., Helsel, Dennis R. & Horn, Marilee A. A Retrospective Analysis on the Occurrence of Arsenic in Ground-Water Resources of the United States and Limitations in Drinking-Water –Supply Characterizations. U.S. Geological Survey, Water-Resources Investigations Report 99-4279, Reston: Virginia, 2000. See also Ryker, S.J. “Mapping Arsenic in Groundwater,” Geotimes, November 2001, 46(11) pp. 34-36.
4 These include South America (Argentina and Chile), Southeast Asia (Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, Burma, and the Philippines), South Asia (India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka), as well as East Asia (Nepal, China, Taiwan), North America (USA, Canada, Mexico), Africa (Ghana and Romania, South Africa), and Europe (Hungary and Romania).

1st Poetry Excerpt

Rituals
  Krikor N. Der Hohannesian

Another dawn on the front stoop
awaiting the ribbon of blue like
no other blue. In the east, mars and
Venus suspended in indigo. Anticipating

the mockingbird’s symphony,
trilling, warbling long fugues
ushering in the day on cue.

2nd Poetry Excerpt

The Last Time I Saw You
  Paul Bellerive

The last time I saw you,
Your eyes bright with tequila and music,
Your hand resting easily on the shoulder
Of a bearded man laughing and swaying,
You raised your glass as if toasting
An unknown honoree, an anonymous someone
That meant no more to you
Than names in a foreign paper’s obituaries.

3rd Poetry Excerpt

Mornings are Good
  Alice Jay

When the fog lifts off the canyon, she sees
        the beginning. Before
                             the road begins to twist.

Before the twists turn tricky.
        before the garden grows up…

4th Poetry Excerpt

New Ashford
  Sue Ellen Lovejoy

Today on my way someplace else
I drive through New Ashford
meagerness scribbled
in the margins of the Berkshires
Pick-ups sprawled on yellowed yards
It’s June but the roadside signs warn “think
snow” Who lives here anyway
Then I think of you
all those years ago no
name comes to mind just
how you strode across the pages
of that class talking Gerard
Manley Hopkins pre-
Raphaelite in LL Bean

5th Poetry Excerpt

Her Death
  Thomas West

The rose has lost almost all its petals.
When they fall, they clink on the
hard ground like
  bloody coins.
Tears freeze to white skin.
Splinters of dreams protrude from eyes,
it is past the time to say goodbye.
Words cannot crawl out of the cave
  and breaths are fragile as
falling leaves.

6th Poetry Excerpt

Wolf Moon Howl
  Frank Finale

A full January moon gleams
off snow and ice. A stroke
takes my wife into its own frozen world.
I retreat into a room…no TV,
scratched LPs, boxes full of things
she just bought on credit. The wolf tracks
my small pension, nipping at its edges.
A new year. An old war. A new debt.
Some spirit in me rises to meet it all,
writing down what she cannot. Oh, my love.

7th Poetry Excerpt

Faraday
  Thomas Livingston

Ah, Faraday,
Just the sound of your name
Broke the banality
Of Scarsdale Saturdays when
The Heathers, Carolines, Tiffanys, and Sallys
Were off and running to market,
To market, always to market
While across the street, you lashed
The leaves with your bamboo rake,
Singing to yourself, creating a rhythm
Of rake scraping, then silent, scraping, then silent
in the Saturday smell of smoke and oak…

8th Poetry Excerpt

Sitting Ducks
  Shari O’Brien

I have learned
that nothing
is bulletproof-
not the bricks that surround us,
that specious fortress we call home,
not the bedclothes
we curl beneath,
fetus-like and snug,
and not love,
that tin foil shield that I believed
would protect me from slugs.

9th Poetry Excerpt

Spring, she states
 Translated from the
   German by Silvia Kofler

spring, she states
is your good time
and she must know
after all these years
   but in turn
the sun has changed
  even lilacs
even the chestnut tree

10th Poetry Excerpt

The pensioner
 Translated from the Spanish by
   Beatriz Alba del Rio

now that he is
retired from his job
as a torturer
all the afternoons
he sits in front of the ocean

the seagull swoops
he is bothered
by such capricious
freedom…

Estelle ran her tongue along the vee of the envelope flap, then sealed in Dai-Suhn’s birthday card with a tight squeeze from each side. She wondered how a flavor so sweet as envelope gum could also be so disgusting. Is there sugar in that glue, she asked herself, calories? Certainly some nasty substance formed the basis for the glue – it always left her tongue poisoned for hours – sticky and parched at the same time. She contemplated the dangers of sending and sealing letters: glue-mouth, paper cuts on the tongue, the ugly red “return to sender” designation.
  Alone in the after-school quiet of the fourth-grade classroom where she taught, Estelle rummaged in her desk drawer, looking for the book of stamps she kept among the scraps of construction paper, blank name tags, pushpins, and the pieces of pastel-colored chalk, which she sometimes had the craving to eat. Today, for the first time in weeks, she actually felt hungry for food and thought about driving in to the market on Hennepin to pick up a nice piece of salmon or halibut for dinner. But is was past four, with the winter dark falling already, and she knew that Todd would be looking for her at home, waiting like a student eager to discuss a new discovery. Would he want to talk, as she hoped, about the latest chemical company he was planning to punish in the courts for dumping their poisonous wares in the Mississippi? Perhaps he would have brought home fresh artichokes and would draw her into the kitchen to admire their green points. Or instead would he point out in the fastidious fashion Estelle had come to dread a book that she had left sticking too far out of the shelf, thus destroying the symmetry of his learning? Todd’s learning was tidy, and they often debated the systematic versus the serendipitous modes of discovery. Estelle insisted that she wanted to learn things she wasn’t even aware she wanted to know.
  “How can you do that in alphabetical order?” she asked him, one Sunday as they lingered in bed under the down comforter. Todd looked at her coldly, seemingly abandoned by any clear answer.
  “You can’t,” he said, pushing the covers aside and getting up. “I’m heading over to the gym. Are you going to lie there all day?”

2nd Fiction Excerpt

Last night I lectured at Lincoln, Nebraska, and in the morning gave an address to the undergraduates of the State University there – charming audience…. They drove me out to see the great prison afterwards! Poor odd types of humanity in hideous striped dresses making bricks in the sun, and all mean-looking, which consoled me, for I should hate to see a criminal with a noble face. Little whitewashed cells, so tragically tidy, but with books in them. In one I found a translation of Dante…. Strange and beautiful it seemed to me that the sorrow of a single Florentine in exile should, hundreds of years afterwards, lighten the sorrow of some common prisoner in a modern gaol….*

Dear Frank,
YRS OF THE 13TH RECEIVED, AND I THANK you. I am about as usual except for a sore foot, and I hope that your lumbago has improved. I thank you also for the latest batch of books. I will save the one by Mr. Twain till last, to look forward to. There were four - - is that the number you sent? The box as usual had been opened, and some people here I do not trust. Surely you are thinking, if they could be trusted they would not be in here. But I am speaking of one or two or three who work here. (They wear no stripes, but otherwise are no different.) Be that as it may, I am grateful for the books and for your letters. You are a good and loyal brother. A better brother than I deserve.
  You ask, did I see the visitor who caused such a stir. Oh yes, but I do not count it as an honor. Until you wrote, I did not know his name. Mr. Oscar Wilde, indeed. Sir Oscar, the Journal might have been, so high and mighty did he present himself. I confess I had not heard of him, but there are many things we do not hear of here. I gather he must be well known in his own land and is making something of a sensation in ours. I marvel that the enterprising Mr. Barnum has not hired him. Those fancy clothes, the way he walked, his voice, he could have been a nobleman, and it may be that he is one in his own country, but here I suppose he would simply be called a gentleman, as was the man who accompanied him. I have had preachers tell me that in God’s eyes gentlemen are no different from the rest of us, but I know this: sinful as the rest of us they may be, but you would never find them in such a place as ours except as visitors.

* A prose Translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy.
One of the books requested by Oscar Wilde while he was imprisoned at Reading Gaol, and included on a list submitted by the warden to the British Home Office on July 28, 1896.

3rd Fiction Excerpt

IT IS NOT UNTIL WE’RE WHEELING the casket down the aisle that I see him, sitting with his head slightly bowed, his hands clasped serene intensity. He’s not wearing a suit, or even a tie, just trousers and a short-sleeved shirt, and though his face is creased and weathered, from the neck down he has not changed at all. The shirt rides tight against his pectoral muscles; the forearms suggest a grip that will not let go. As the casket rolls by, his head turns slowly in my direction, and his eyes are alarmingly blue. The do not approve of what they see.
   I am 215 pounds, 57 beyond the weight I wrestled at in 1979, the year that he and I almost won a state championship together. I could tell you that my weight gain over the past quarter-century is entirely natural, and, in biological terms, inevitable. But I am honest about my dissolute nature. I started to let myself go almost as soon as I lost the final match of my career. I eat because I enjoy it. I don’t exercise very much because I don’t enjoy it. I greet Coach Fortmach’s gaze with a somber nod of my chin, and he quickly passes out of my view…

4th Fiction Excerpt

NEW ORLEANS AFTER MIDNIGHT WAS A NEW day dancing in old clothes, and that’s fine. The door of the clubs stood open so we could see the strippers in the bold sweaty light that bronzed their flesh or hear the high-flying horns, the off-beat drum, the strident upright piano like a surging creek barely keeping within its banks. So many men and women on the narrow walk that Paula and I, holding hands, were spilled into the lamp-lit street with a half a dozen others, tottering, just keeping our balance, as if we’d all had more dinner drinks than usual. No, the two of us had the customary sour mash that we both favored. And a brandy with coffee. Then we were on the street,. Around us the traffic crawled along without honking, only an impatient revving in its throat, the cars and dabs flossy and pouting. It was almost spring and the air was thick with the moisture that flowed ahead of a storm stalled over the bayou.
  We made our way back onto the cobbled walkway where a boy in a sleeveless shirt was selling single cigarettes while he palmed a pack of matches. He held the cigarettes between his fingers and wagged them to get attention. At his heels trotted a tawny short-haired dog, Yip, missing its left foreleg, where a wooden peg was attached by a snug-fitting harness. The boy skipped and bobbed among the crowd until he found a customer. “Yip, sir.” The dog sat watching the transaction with soulful eyes. Then the boy was on his way. “Smokes?” he asked, in a high cawing voice that the night had rubbed raw. A black man in a dapper, well-tailored suit, stopped to pet the dog. “Smokes, here.”
  A different line for women.
  “Light you up, lady?”
  Paula replied with a quick lift of her jaw and we moved on…

Essay Review Excerpt

Poems (1947-2000) by Philip Murray, 74 pp., Hardcover, $32.00, 2005
Editions Imagi, Baltimore, MD

IN THE UR NARRATIVE OF The Poet’s Life, we find the aspirant called by the sirens of the art to begin cobbling together first poems, then with persistence and luck beginning to publish work in a variety of small, perhaps important literary venues before a first book appears to little notice, some notice, or maybe acclaim; then onward the career proceeds, hopefully the outward measure of the poet’s true artistic progress, but if not then surely the proverbial cream rises to the top eventually, surely a poet of note in the solitary art will gain notice in the wider, buzzing, shifting world in which the poet fades, fares, or flourishes. This is the tale even the most jaded of poets tell themselves if only in sleep or half-conscious whispers, a guard against he recognition that taste and recognition are arbitrary, that good work will gain an audience however long it may take, and the one’s own work is to be counted among the worthy few to thrive and survive however humbly among the chosen. Who wants to believe, really believe – even among those pressing up to the rows of literary gaming tables at the AWPC (Associated Writing Program Convention) – that chance and choice preside over the poet’s art like capricious gods?...