Current Issue

Excerpts:   Lead ~ Poetry ~ Fiction ~ Art

Lead Article

 Sarasi

"HER MOTHER BURNED," the small Tamil girl said, whispering into my ear, in a too-loud whisper. It was a balmy morning, the start of another 100-degree Sri Lankan day. "In a camp," she continued, pointing at Sarasi, a beautiful child whose dark eyes were strong, determined, and distant. Deaths were agonizingly common in the lives of children born during the 26-year civil war, but life and death in one of the dreaded camps for Internally Displaced Persons (IDP), especially a death by fire, was worthy of notice. Sarasi picked up the story, as if reciting into the air. "My mother was cooking when her clothes caught fire. I was down the road getting water. I heard her screams, but others got there before me." She paused. "Later, she died." The camp where Sarasi's mother was killed was an IDP camp for ethnic Tamils displaced in the war that pitted them, a separatist minority, against the Sinhalese-dominated government.
     Sarasi's father had also died before her eyes, having been shot outside their home. She reports: "The soldiers came to the door and asked for him. When I said he was not home, they pushed me down. My mother told them the baby was asleep in a room, but they broke down the door, found and hit my father, then dragged him outside. They made him kneel and then they shot him." After killing her father the soldiers captured Sarasi's older brother. She remembers how roughly they grabbed him, and that on the next day, a storm washed away the dark trail of his blood. After that, Sarasi had tried to help her mother who was in shock. Neighbors buried her father because her mother was too weak. Sarasi attended the burial, reciting a familiar prayer at the graveside.

1st Poetry Excerpt

when faith and hope are sliced away from love
Anita Ouellette

there are mornings full of
purple nightshade flowers
with their yellow beak-shaped centers
when the webs of orb-weave spiders
hold their shiny drops of dew
before the unsuspecting butterflies
are trapped....

2nd Poetry Excerpt

Altazor Canto Two
Vicente Huidobro

Mujer el mundo está amueblado portus ojos
Se hace más alto el cielo en tu presencia
La tlerra se prolonga de rosa en rosa
Y el aire se prolonga de paloma en paloma

Al irte dejas una estrella en tu sitio
Dejas caer tus luces como el barco que pasa
Mientras te sigue mi canto embrujado
Como una serpiente fiel y melancolica
Y tú vuelves la cabeza detrás de algún astro...

Altazor Canto Two Translated from the Spanish by Dalt Wonk

Woman, it is your eyes that make the world habitable.
The sky grows more ample in your presence;
The earth extends from rose to rose,
and the air from dove to dove.

When you depart, a star remains in your place —
light spills from you as though from a passing boat,
while you draw my poems along after you, spellbound,
like faithful and melancholy serpents.
And when you return, your face is hidden by a star....

3rd Poetry Excerpt

The Inflatable Poet
Finley Evans

Take me to Volterra, cypress trees blowing me up as they bend.
Show me the Slaves in Florence, heaving pain out of marble
And I'll draft you some lines.
make me a mother of twins,
let them grunt and squeak into me,
five hours old.
I'll sing you a song in the brightest dark....

4th Poetry Excerpt

You Were Gargoyles
Finley Evans

On the ultrasounds.
Whispering paperweights.
swooshing gray, rough stone and bone,
Hovering over your own
tiny kingdom of blood,
food and water.
I could see your skulls,
fragile spines
folding like pterodactyl wings....

2nd Fiction Excerpt

I'D BEEN ALONE IN THE BAR for close to three hours when the old guy walked in. He took a seat at the end of the bar, ordered a Dewar's and soda, and immediately launched into his life story. To hear him tell it, he'd done almost everything there was to do.
      "I've been around the world three times, you know. Once in the Navy, once following college, and the third time, four years ago, after my seventieth birthday. You're never too old to keep learning. I try to tell that to my kids, but they don't listen. I try to tell that to my grandkids, and they don't listen, either. Hell, one generation's worse than another. They think they have all of the answers."
      He grimaced and quickly drained his glass. Then he slammed it on the bar and pointed at it, indicating a refill. I poured him a new one, in a new glass.
     "Don't you know anything?" he snapped at me. "You gave me a new glass and you're throwing away perfectly good whiskey. That's the problem with you young kids today. You don't know the value of anything." I kept my mouth shut, retrieved his first glass, and combined the two....

3rd Fiction Excerpt

DET VAR SLÅET STORT OP I AVISEN. På siden med forlystelser var det annonceret som en sensation, og de talte om det ved morgenbordet, fordi det var søndag og de havde tid til også at læse annoncerne. Drengen råbte straks op om, at det ville han se, og moderen bed takefuldt sit rundstykke til krummer, mens hun gentog annoncens ordlyd for at overtyde sig om, at der ikke var tale om en misforståelse, men at det stód der sort på hvidt og så yderst troværdigt ud: NYT I ZOO - VOLIÈRE MED ENGLE - „Jeg troede ellers ikke, at engle --“henvendte hun sig undrende til faderen, som blot svarede at, „hvad ved man“, og drengen hylede, at han ville af sted med det samme, men skønt dét også var moderens største ønske, lod hun fornuften råde og foreslog, at de ventede, til det blev mandag, fordi der en søndag altid var håbløst med mennesker foran alle bure, og hvordan ville det så ikke være sådan en dag med den sensation, enestående i Europa, som der havde sået i avisen....

Angels
Translated from the Danish by K. E. Semmel

THE STORY WAS ALL OVER THE NEWSPAPERS. The events calendar called it a sensation, and because it was a Sunday and they had time to read the announcements, they talked about it around the breakfast table. Right away, the boy shouted he had to see it. The mother nibbled her breakfast roll thoughtfully into crumbs, and repeated the sound of the announcement to convince herself that she hadn't misunderstood, that it was truly printed in black and white: NEW AT THE ZOO--ANGELS IN CAGES.
      "I didn't think angels," she began, addressing the father, who simply grunted, "Who's to say?" And the boy whined that he wanted to go that very instant. But even though that was the mother's greatest wish also, she let her good sense win out and suggested they wait until Monday, since Sundays were always hopelessly crowded with people. What would it be like today with this sensation--described in the newspaper as the only one of its kind in all of Europe?...

4th Fiction Excerpt

Union
Louise Kantro

I HURRY HOME, PULL INTO THE DRIVEWAY, OPEN the trunk, and grab all six plastic grocery bags. Dropping the bags on the kitchen counter, I go out to the living room, where the TV is blasting.

Melissa is on the couch, eyes glued to the set.
I grab the remote off the coffee table and mute the volume.
"Homework?"
"Done. Well, mostly. Can I start the essay after dinner?" she asks. "I have to do a rough draft and it'll probably only take me about forty-five minutes, but my ideas aren't solid yet."
"So you figure they'll solidify while you're watching TV?"
"Uh huh," she says, grinning.
"Show me what you've got after the movie."

     Melissa is watching an old Joan Crawford film on cable. It's not going to surprise me if she goes into some aspect of filmmaking. She has no yen to try acting, nor costume nor set design, so I'm wondering if she's going to end up behind a camera. Nick told me last week that he's saving up to buy a video camera for her for Christmas. Struck me as a pretty damned expensive gift for a fifteen-year old.
     I hurry back into the kitchen to put the groceries away. Pre-heating the oven, I place the chicken in a glass-oven dish, put cloves of garlic in a circle around it, add a little water, and pop the dish in the oven. When I sit on a barstool in the kitchen, I begin to cry, my shoulders heaving.

5th Fiction Excerpt

Gag
Keith Lord

WE'RE IN MY OFFICE AND BRIANA'S ASKING, "How long have you lived in San Francisco?" and before I can say five years and isn't the weather lovely, she's nodding like they all do. The talent at Gag, the online fetish emporium where I serve as bookkeeper, often assume I'm gay. Sipping a Diet Coke as she makes inspection (my style recalls a thwarted architect: dull-gray hair, rimless reading glasses, crushed corduroy jacket), Briana, I'm thinking, has me down as the quiet type. No parade-floats for me. No here and queer and get used to it. Safe, woolly, and monogamous. And in a way, of course, she's right.
     "You haven't lost your accent," she giggles.
     "Oh, piffle --" I wave her off across the desk. It's a small desk in an office with a deliberate air of the stock-room. My ledgers hustle for shelf space with DVD's, reminding me of my sublunary status in this cybernetic pleasure dome. "You should see me back in London. No sooner do I climb into a cab than the driver's quizzing me about the Yankees, or whatever mishap's befallen the President lately."
      ‘Well, I think it's cute," she says, with a smile that settles it. She's sitting, knees primly fused, on the simple wooden chair before my desk, the one designed to discourage long stays. She's ‘popped in’, but shows signs of staying. For once, I don't mind.
     "Why anyone would leave London --"
      She pauses, and I know what she's thinking: sorry, I can understand why you left London. The repression. So Victorian. And again, she's right, in a way.
      "Actually, I didn't have a choice. I was sent to New York when I was sixteen to live with my uncle. My parents were killed in a car crash. My sister, too. She was ... very young.

1st Art Excerpt

The famous photograph of the Warsaw boy being held at gunpoint by SS officers was taken during the clearing of the Warsaw ghetto that took place between April 19 and May 16, 1943. It was one of 49 photographs contained in an album assembled by Jürgen Stroop, the German police commander in charge of putting down the Warsaw uprising and cleansing the ghetto of its remaining 60,000 inhabitants. The album, intended as a report and birthday present for Heinrich Himmler, the Reichsführer of the SS, was entitled “THE JEWISH QUARTER OF WARSAW IS NO MORE”.
      Though originally taken to illustrate and to boast the thoroughness of the SS operations, the photograph has taken on iconic status for the post-Holocaust world due to its content and composition....

Representing the Irreparable:
The Shoah, the Bible, and the Art of Samuel Bak
Edited by Danna Nolan Fewell,Gary A. Phillips, and Yvonne Sherwood
Pucker Art Publications, Boston, MA