New poems by our contributors VIRGINIA KONCHAN and GABRIEL SPERA
Table of Contents:
Virginia Konchan:
Gabriel Spera:
By JIM GUY, with ARONNE GUY
Oregon
A fruit tramp family of the 1930s stayed in many places for short periods of time. We arrived, picked the crop, and moved on. That’s why we were called tramps, nomads, and many other things not nearly as complimentary. Our shelters while picking could be the loft of a barn, a converted hen house, or a small sleeps-two tent. On occasion if you were in an especially nice place, you might have a cabin or a large canvas-covered dwelling with a wooden floor. If we had a place of permanency, it was the car or truck that took us to the next job: we might spend the winter in California or pick apples in Washington State. It was all dictated by the season. Packing and moving was as much a part of our life as picking the crop.
We went to the bathhouse because it was Dorian’s thirtieth birthday and, being the kind of friend he was, he wanted to do something for himself—partying at Chicago’s Boystown, a neighborhood we’d frequented when we’d been undergraduates at Iowa—and then something for us, especially for Aviraj, who was Dorian’s closest friend and still a virgin. He had flown for this, Aviraj had; I had flown, too, but it wasn’t as big of a deal, because I had come from New York—costing me around $250—and he had from Mumbai—which could’ve cost shy of $1,000 (not that I asked). This infamous holding-out on Aviraj’s part had come, on the one hand, because of his spiritual beliefs and, on the other, because—idealistic as he was—he had never been able to keep a man, which had brought about that soothing old joke of ours where we told him not to worry; he was surely the type of guy who never dated and then, bam!, he’d marry on his first try. The group would laugh at this jealous joke, yet a jealous silence would always follow, for not only did we believe it to be true, but we also believed Aviraj to be the only one of us who had marriage in him.
sugarcane fields whisper to those who reach el otro lado
descansa aquí amongst víboras y machetes
descansa aquí abajo de luna conjurada
If the heart is a temple,
each statue will be broken.
But I have practiced idolatry:
loved the creature more than
the creator, whom I can’t see.
There’s a hole where the sun
should be. It has entered me,
along with the cloud and river.
No I do not want everlasting life
to be condemned to forever here
on this wasted earth no merci messieurs
unlike the Struldbruggs hailed all the way
from the island-nation of Luggnagg
discovered at the end of Book Three
of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels
our truck gathers speed as we approach the hills of el valle and for
a few seconds i am in flight we accelerate embark the horizon’s
I cannot remember a time when I was not chosen last.
That and the great, timeless subjects: music, weather, war.
Wounds are openings through which presence shines through.
The child in the doll, Christ in the wafer, the ocean in a droplet.
By AIDEE GUZMAN
Cowboys aren’t remnants of the Wild West. Today they herd cattle across state lines, national borders, and now even oceans. From the feedlot to the slaughterhouse and from pasture to greener pasture, a cowboy’s travels feed the food industry machine.
Your modern cowboy sits on eighteen wheels with six hundred horsepower and saddles up truck stop to truck stop. They trot along the asphalt and follow the commands of reds, greens, and yellows.
This is a torn map of the forsaken world.
There are lines even wolves cannot cross.
Every voice an epitaph, then a little tune
from the neighbor’s garden apartment
suggesting a rondo, or circle of fifths.
Plato said the soul is a perfect circle.
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