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bookstores, tenements and backseats of chevrolets, long suffocated words dying to
come out, words that tattooed their way upward only to crescendo over again, words that
fell off the stage they played upon and lay down on the floor but only to rest, pieces of
lives nobody else cared about.

his passion required effort, thinking that way made your head throb in the temples and
churchs and unforgiving lecture halls, but it was passion that made your heart stop and start
so bruisingly, but you still prayed, Do it again... his fairest game was mock apple pie and
pink fatigues, just magic markers for the poet to manipulate and color in-between the lines,
over the lines, through the lines...

and beyond all that there was still mystical something, some sort of haze induced vision
that couldn't be my sunday school picture of heaven, but a nebulous transcendental one that
he didn't even understand and I don't understand but the picture seared my eyes shut and I
knew that he loved loved loved.

McCosh was packed the day he came here, but I liked him more at three o'clock in the
morning on NPR when a funny old man made me laugh on a long drive, made me wonder
what he saw when he looked out the window at the world, and then he wasn't something I
had ever seen, but the lingering of spices with mystical names that I had smelled or tasted
once.

jazzy words, that's what they were, even when I didn't understand what they
meant or why they were on the page, words that drove threw my lungs, puncturing blood
vessels on the way, firing out my nostrils like smoke and wrapping around my chest and
down my stomach, and, oh, kicking me in the balls so hard I had to want whatever he had.

--Rick Lapidus

an elegy in two acts

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I am a different sort of man, he said,
and flicked his molten filter down some shaft
into the city’s hull from which a draft
arose, a chill of exhalation bled
out from the pallid face of gum-flecked gray
amidst the soles of organ-grinders’ sons
apart from which he tries to stand: he yawns,
while coughing, scratched his cold naïveté.

A man named Allen Ginsberg died last night,
who, had he spoke with this pariah-in-
the-making, might have warmed his stance and sight,
or washed away his mask and stony sin:
to sing oneself to deafness of all voice
to cast off oneness when there is no choice.

--Tristan Snell

Untitled

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“‘Do not store up treasures for yourselves on earth, where moth and woodworm destroy them and thieves can break in and steal. But store up treasures for yourselves in heaven, where neither moth nor woodworm destroys them and thieves cannot break in and steal. For wherever your treasure is, there will your heart be too.’ The gospel of the Lord.” Father Amado lifts his head to signal the people gathered before him that this is their cue to say, “Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ.” Having said that, you and the rest of the congregation take their seats. Father Amado hasn’t begun his sermon yet, but you can already hear his voice in your head denouncing all your secret sins.

Everyone knows about Father Amado: how he stole six hens from Samita’s backyard three days before Thanksgiving; how he stays up until 3 o’clock every morning because he is “not done with the day’s prayers”, and when he finally retreats to his bedroom at 3:37 a.m., it’s only to creep out the window and cautiously tiptoe over to la viuda Perez’s house. Of course, the best-known is where he got the money to buy himself the glittering gold and silver Rolex that reflects the incoming sunlight on the church’s ceiling every Sunday morning during mass. Little Joaquin, the youngest son of Dr. Ramos, distracted by the white dot that kept jumping up and down from ceiling to wall, from wall to wall and back to the ceiling, once invited his father to admire with him his phenomenal discovery by saying, “Look, dad, a white dot!” Dr. Ramos, a little disturbed that his son was making a fuss in the middle of the Penitential Rite, disregarded the pebble-like tip of his son’s index and said, “Yes, son, that is the work of God,” an assertion to which the little Joaquin reacted with even more awe. It became part of Joaquin’s faith and his entry in the miracles section of San Francisco’s parish register.

However, how Father Amado dares to give the Sunday mass after all the rumors about him going around is a mystery. You and the rest of the congregation of Calavares county still imitate his every move and follow his every order: bow your head, get on your knees, say three Ave Marias and four Padre Nuestros before going to bed every night for the next week. Some say that Father Amado lashes himself every night like St. Francis of Assisi used to do every time temptation and impure thoughts clogged his mind. But his raccoon eyes and yellowish complexion are not a consequence of the act of lashing but of sleepless, sexually extenuating nights at la viuda Perez’s. He does say the Penitential Rite while striking his breast three times, and it gives you faith to believe that God works in mysterious ways.

But, thanks be to Our Lord, this story is not about Father Amado and his many adventures. This story is about you, and about Marina. You’ve noticed Marina every Sunday mass because she is hard to miss. With twenty-eight years of voluntary virginity, black azabache hair, dull black eyes, and a paleness that screams for a trip to the Caribbean, Marina is the closest thing to a real-life Ophelia. She scares the hell out of the children of the parish. She is lonely, reserved and retracted, constantly retreating to her own fantastical world of princes who never come by her door and beautiful places her eyes have never seen because all that surrounds her is the muddy streets left after the morning rain in Calavares. It is during those sometimes that Marina takes her self-centered self to a small white house in the outskirts of Calavares. This is one of those days, as she walks out of Church, leaving behind people greeting each other and children running around, grabbing their father’s legs or pulling their mother’s skirt. You follow her home because you’ve decided that today is the day you shall break the mysterious aura that follows her everywhere. You attempt to learn more about her.

Marina’s two-room-two-bathroom house is the pure white that doesn’t exist in real life but only in the imagination since even then the gallons of bond white paint she ordered her house to be painted with had specks of gray. She tried to take them out, one by one with the help of a long, thin piece of wood, dipping it into the heavy mixture and pulling it out after she had caught a couple of the specks. But freeing the white paint of all the gray specks was a task only possible in a hypothetical world. Therefore, the pure white of Marina’s house is only hypothetically pure.

La sala (because by now you’ve invited yourself in) is furnished in a simple, minimal style-- two white sofas facing each other, a low, rectangular table between them with a white cloth over it and a clay flower pot with white lilies. The scarce furniture renders larger amounts of space to move around, making the act of bumping into things almost impossible. The living space is kept impeccable by cleaning every glass surface with rubbing alcohol twice a week and disinfecting, sweeping, moping, and scrubbing every other day. She walks around with a travel size spray bottle of Lysol and a lemon scent hand lotion to counteract the wrinkling effect of warm water and cleaning substances on her skin. If you have ever wondered what is that sound you hear every Sunday morning at the beginning of mass, it is Marina, who, suspicious of who knelt before her on the small stand and put his elbows, or hands or (ugh) even his mouth and maybe drop a string of saliva or two onto the back of the bench in front of her, sprays a generous amount of Lysol on the dark oak surface before she proceeds to rest her elbows on it.

Marina lives by herself-- no companion, no relatives... oh, yes a cat! (which she feeds only gourmet cat food and which she spoils lavishly). What about her family? Any friends? Be silent. It’s not your place to be asking such personal questions.

Marina opens the door to her bedroom. You are surprised she has shown so much trust in you so fast. Shyly, you peek inside. The bed is dressed in white linen. There’s a small night table next to the bed with a smaller version of the white cloth that covers the low, rectangular table in la sala, and on top of it a lamp, a copy of the Bible, and a picture. The picture is in black-and-white, and it shows two girls with their arms around each other smiling. One’s head rests on the other’s forehead. They seem happy. Marina walks across the room and opens the closet doors. She takes a suitcase and throws it on the bed. Next she takes all of the clothes hanging in the closet and piles them up on the bed, next to the suitcase. One by one, she takes them off their hangers and starts folding them. She notices the picture and, after staring at it for a couple of seconds, throws it inside the suitcase and continues to fold.

Marina can still recall the last conversation she had with Laura (who you assume is the young woman with Marina in the picture) because it was the last “deep” conversation she has had with someone in years.

“You know,” Marina began in the somewhat incoherent manner of an amateur smoker suffering from the dizzying effect of smoking her first cigarette, “I really do not know where I come from.”

Laura (who happened to be the person who introduced the marvelous world of smoking to Marina) was smoking at her side. She stared at Marina, who seemed to be about to say something meaningful about her life.

“What do you mean?”

“Well,” Marina inhaled once again, “I really don’t remember anything about my past. I don’t know where my family came from or what my father was like or even if my mother and my father had sex before they got married...” By now the smoke had been too long inside her, and she had to get rid of it if she didn’t want to choke. “Well, my father left my mother and I when I was four, and I’ve never heard a word from him or seen him after that and my mom never spoke about him and I never asked... by the way, talking about this doesn’t make me sad, it just makes me feel stupid.”

“It’s so weird the fact that you care so much about where other people come from, and you don’t even know who you are.”

“I know... I just know one of my grandfathers lived in France for thirty years and fought for the French in the second War, and that he had an illegitimate daughter over there who my mother never met. He owned a restaurant and a jewelry store, and a couple of buildings which he rented. The other one came from Spain, and he established himself in Boria and became a prominent doctor there. Who knows what my grandmothers were like, and I guess I would have never known anyway considering that my mother and I never talked much about important things.” This was the point where Laura chose to laugh to alleviate the tension she thought was building up around them, but Marina really knew that it was a fake laughter to make her feel better though she insisted that she was fine. “About my father I just remember his red corvette and his huge ranch. The ranch was so beautiful and big, but then again, I was so young back then, and everything at that age seems so much bigger than it is in real life though I’m almost sure it was big enough because it had a huge pool and a stable full of horses and there were pigs and cows and a beautiful house and everything was surrounded by trees and there was a path that led from the house to some woods through which I would ride in my tricycle and so many other beautiful things that I wish I could explain but I don’t know how. He also had a condo in Boria and a house in Palermo, which I don’t remember being in but of which my mom talked often. I think she would have liked to keep something after the divorce.” Marina became conscious of Laura’s hand going down her long, tangled black hair, evading the knots so that she would feel no pain. “Don’t worry, it doesn’t make me sad to try to remember all these things. It just makes me wonder whether my mother made me drink something that would make me forget all about my past so I wouldn’t cry as I saw her cry all those times without having a clue of what she was crying about.”

Laura left three years ago. She married well to a man who promised her a beautiful mansion on the hills that overlooked the Mediterranean. Marina and Laura grew up together, and Marina missed her a lot the first couple of months, but now she is used to it, as she is used to have everyone else close to her leave. Marina’s mother is well under ground. Seven years. Cancer ran in the family, and Marina watches out for herself. Dr. Ramos suggested so. She has no brothers or sisters. There is no other person her age in the small confines of Calavares that she can relate to. Most of the residents are old couples, widows (as it often happens that it is women who outlive men), and families with little children. As a result, Marina had grown to like her loneliness and to learn how to entertain herself.

That’s where most of the small fortune left behind by her mother had gone to. With the money her mother left behind, Marina could have had any house she wanted in the lively city of Boria. Marina could have even packed her suitcase and left for a place she always had dreamt of leaving for, like Florence or Paris, and maybe even settle there. Still, Marina decided to stay in the small, gray town of Calavares, where she had spent the last twenty years of her life, and where avoiding being a subject of the widows’ daily conversation was also a strenuous task. She chose a house, modest in size, and furnished it simply. She found herself a cat and fed it lavishly. But now she is packing her suitcase in a hurry. Is she going to Florence? Paris? She closes the suitcase, straightens the bed, closes the window and draws the white linen curtains. Wait Marina! Where are you going to? You follow her as she takes her suitcase out to la sala and then heads to the kitchen.

On the back of the small, white-tiled kitchen, there is a mahogany door behind which there is a staircase. At this point Marina opens the door so that you can see what I am talking about. You follow Marina and, of course, you should feel guilty about doing so because it is similar as breaking into her house. You feel like a burglar, and you suffer every time you think about the victimized Marina. Yet you follow her down the staircase and suffer a little more when you accidentally see the combination being punched in some sort of device next to a metal door. You try to look away, but it’s so obvious... It is her birth date: 051666. But once the door is opened, you could not be happier-- because once the door opens, it’s like Aladdin inviting you to experience a whole new world (as cheesy as it may sound) or Merlin putting the world at you feet and saying “Go, devour it!” Your mouth drops open to let in the air around you. Your eyes open wide. You try to catch everything in a glimpse-- as much as is humanly possible-- because you don’t know when you’ll fall off Aladdin’s carpet or, even worse, when Merlin will close the door. And you are overcome with sadness at the realization that, like little Joaquin, you’ll never be able to catch the white dot of Marina’s flashlight jumping from wall to wall.

You follow the white dot where it takes you: first a whole view of the study. A study heaped with books, a sofa, an ottoman, a center table, a reclining chair, a piano, a television set, a music system. After she turns on the light, you go item by item. First the books: Madame Bovary, The Awakening, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Brothers Karamazov. Then the piano: a black grand piano. Then the television set: a 60” square TV set. Then the music system: a 10- CD player with two-cassette players and an FM/AM radio. Then the details: Flaubert, Chopin, Alexandre Dumas, Dostoyevsky. A Sony. A Steinway. Its surface is so shiny that you can even see yourself on it. You check that you are looking okay-- everything’s in its place-- the hair, the eyes. Anything embarrassing up your nose? No? Good. Then you walk to the center of the room. Careful with the rug: if you only knew how much it’s worth, you would take your shoes off before walking on it. Doesn’t that chair look comfortable? Touch it. It’s the finest linen from Italy. That kind of linen which so many people confuse with silk. Sit on the sofa. Look at the three candles on the table in front of you. The tall, the medium, the small. Nice, isn’t it? Wouldn’t you love to live here?

Marina walks over to the piano. She lifts the lid and sits down on the black bench, searching for a comfortable position. Once she finds it, her skinny fingers begin to press the keys until Brahms comes out. Maestoso. Adagio. Rondo. Allegro non troppo. Such a talent! You are still dazed by the time she plays the last note, and when you wake up from your trance, her eyes are shut, her head is still, and a tear slowly makes its way from the brim of her right eye. What’s wrong? Have you offended her by not complimenting her talent? Is she thinking about a past love? That’s not possible. She has never fallen in love. The memory of Laura? No, that isn’t it. Her mother? Could be, but don’t think too much about it. She’ll never say what’s wrong.

She stands up and walks across the room. This is your cue: it’s time to go. She turns out the lights and, before you know it, she’s out and the door shuts behind her, leaving you trapped in the darkness. What do you see? Scattered colored dots superimposing a black background? Nothingness. You try to make your way to the door. Be careful that you don’t stumble and fall. Oops, are you okay? That’s what you get for being so nosy. Who asked you to come in, in the first place? What are you going to do now? You take your silver lighter out of your pocket (your mother always asks what you get out of smoking), and you start a small flame that makes the place look magical, with a certain gothic beauty that enchants you. You walk to the table in the center of the room and light the three candles. Why sacrifice this beauty with electricity? Looking to your right, you can see your shadow covering the books in the bookcase. You walk over to it and for the first time you notice each shelf has a gold leaf on both of its edges and each leaf has a different engraving. The leaf you are looking at right now is taken out of a scene from the Odyssey but, of course, you wouldn’t recognize the scene because you never really gave that much importance to Homer anyway. Back then, you zealously believed that Cliffs Notes would do the job. You take a closer look at the books. All the volumes are leather-bound, and their titles are in golden letters that look more like roman numerals than the alphabet they taught you back in first grade which had a capital letter followed by a smaller-case version of the same letter for every letter. Every page of every book is framed with a gold ridge, and that annoys you because, closed, the book seems to be made out of gold but once you open it, you feel cheated: it’s common black-and-white pages with letters that look more like roman numerals than letters. Under the stereo and the television set, the shelves are heaped with videos and CDs-- mostly classical. There’s Mozart, Beethoven, Handel: the usual. Out of Africa is inside the VCR. You remember when you first saw Out of Africa: you tormented your family every day for the following couple of weeks because they wouldn’t let you go to a safari. But it was okay because you submerged yourself in every book that had to do with Africa and colonization, and soon you got bored of reading so much that the idea collapsed in less time that it took Sydney Pollack to construct it in your mind. You find a CD that you like-- Beethoven’s Concerto in D Major, Op.61 for Violin and Orchestra -- and play it. Allegro ma non troppo. Larghetto. Rondo Allegro. You have to admit that you’ve been holding yourself; that what you have been wanting to do all along since she first opened the door has been just to dive for the piano and try to see if, throughout all these years of nonpractice, God has silently granted you the talent to play at least some decent notes without your being aware of it. But you still restrain yourself because you don’t want to seem like a desperate six-year-old. You head for the piano slowly, trying to hide your anxiety and excitement even though there’s no one there for whom you should pretend. Your palm slides smoothly over its curves. You lift the lid, sit down on the bench and find a comfortable position like Marina had done. Then you start touching the keys, and you feel the awkwardness of the cold, the emptiness of black and white; right away you recognize the lack of connection between you and those keys. But you try to disregard that feeling, and, instead, you close your eyes and try to concentrate on Beethoven. A calm melody that reminds you of what it feels like to walk through the streets in a fall day and see the brown leaves falling off the trees and feeling the breeze brushing your eyelashes. So you just press the keys as you think fit. You imagine a small kingdom in the summertime. A man on a white stallion visiting the place for the first time. You imagine his awe at seeing the beauty of the green hills extending in front of him and the shadows formed by the afternoon sun whose rays try to make their way between the mountains. A violin plays a peaceful melody that is an oasis of calmness and introspectiveness. As the man slowly makes his way into the village, people stare at him and his white stallion. He looks down at the people. An old woman with seven children stands next to the bakery. She has just bought bread to feed her hungry family. She approaches the man and looks at her bread with sadness before she offers it to him. The soloist instrument engages in an intimate dialogue with individual solo instruments. The man gratefully takes the bread after unsuccessfully begging the lady to keep it. What are you going to feed your children with now? The woman looks down in sadness, and he gives the her some money, which lights up her wrinkled face and her light blue eyes and which she takes gratefully to buy some more bread. Where does the king live, the man asks. Go straight, young man. The piano has begun to play full-handed chords. And as the gentleman approaches the small castle, his heart beats faster, and he begins to sweat. This is the day he’ll finally ask the king for his daughter’s hand. His happiness begins today. The violins excitedly agree to play in unison. The notes start getting higher and the violins start to move faster, so fast that it seems the bow’s stretched horsehair might tear the violin’s strings apart at any moment. You find it impossible to catch up with them and what comes out of the piano is a cacophony anathema to Beethoven if he were ever there to listen to you. You try to concentrate again, but by now you’re so annoyed with yourself, that it’s impossible for you to produce any beauty. Where’s the kingdom and the gentleman on the white stallion? A rumbling bass pedal marks his arriving at the wide portal of the castle. He dismounts the horse and arms himself with courage. He explains to the porter the reason for his visit. Sorry, the porter says, the king just offered his daughter’s hand to another man a moment ago. He waited for you, but he thought you might have changed your mind. The orchestra accompanies the violins in a violent, defiant outburst of high yet dark notes, so forceful that you see the deception on the gentleman’s face. The bass pedals rumble every few notes. The porter closes the gate behind him, and the man walks back to his horse. His sadness evokes a more elegiac, melancholic movement. He mounts his horse and makes his way back to the entrance of the kingdom. As his horse takes him back past the bakery, the notes become lower and the violins’ movement becomes slower and the melody begins to fade. By the last note your eyes are shut, your head is still, and a tear pushes itself out through the brim of your right eye. Why should he be denied happiness? Why should he pay for your lack of skill? If you would have been able to keep up with the violins, maybe you would have gotten him there on time before the king offered his daughter’s hand to another man. And what is that? Why are you crying? Get a grip on yourself! It’s only a childish story. The disc changes automatically. Brahms is next.

You open your eyes to a candle-lit room, and you suddenly notice something that... how could you have not noticed it before? A painting hanging on the wall, over the piano. The face of an old man with long, white hair that goes down to his shoulders and a long, white beard, a pointed nose and protruded cheekbones covered by rose-tinted skin. He looks down to a crystal plate that carries gold coins in it, like those used in Church to collect the money. His robe is gold with a glittery blue pattern embroidered on it and a fur collar that contrasts sharply with his white beard. His bushy gray eyebrows and small, half- opened eyes give him a rather pensive appearance that seems more melancholic as you notice the fine, horizontal wrinkles across his forehead and the deeper patas de gallo that flow out of the corner of his left eye. There is a sentence written at the upper-left side of the painting. You shall not set your heart on your neighbour’s house. Where have you heard that before? Elementary school? Sunday school? You remember it’s the tenth commandment of the Decalogue, and you feel so relieved that all the morals they taught you in elementary school are still there within you. You look at the bottom part of the painting’s frame. There’s a metal leaf that tells you it’s a Rubens. Oh, wouldn’t you love to own a Rubens...

You hear someone at the door. It’s probably Marina. What are you going to do now? You feel like hiding. Why? You have done nothing wrong, or have you? She probably noticed that she left you behind and has come to look for you. What are you going to answer when she asks you what you are still doing down here? Quick, go blow out the candles! You don’t want her to find out that you’ve been here all this time, going over her things and playing her piano and listening to her music and wishing you owned those mahogany bookcases with the engraved gold leafing that hold so many books, or the Sony that you want but it’s too much to pay for a TV set or the Rubens... The Rubens.

As you’re thinking all that, you run to the table in the center of the room. Before you know it, you trip over the corner of the rug, which Marina had forgotten to flatten the day before after she had lifted it to sweep under it. As you’re falling down, you stretch your arms so that they can stop the motion before your head hits the floor. But a miscalculation causes you to hit your chin with the edge of the table instead, while your hands push the candles off the table so that one of them falls straight down to the floor, another one brushes the sofa, and the last one catches your sleeve. A fire has begun. Save yourself! Run for the door! No! Marina is there. What are you going to tell her? You don’t want her to see you. What are you going to do? Quick, make up your mind before everything turns into ashes.

Marina opens the door. She is carrying the cat in her arms. The heat of the flames slaps her face, and she covers it with her hand. A fire. How? She puts the cat down, who doesn’t do anything else but screech. “Hush,” she says looking straight at the fire. Dante, Kafka and Poe are all burning in hell now. Good, she thinks to herself, she has always hated their works anyway. But then she remembers the Rubens... Not her Rubens! Apart from the cat, the old man has been her only companion for years. Only Rubens can understand why she cries whenever she plays Brahms. And the piano! Her piano!

You scream out for help, Marina, Marina!, but she can’t hear you. You are the uninvited guest-- a snoop who’s doomed to burn in hell. Wanting to know everything. Asking too many questions. Looking, touching, wanting everything. But God works in mysterious ways, remember? And you felt relieved when you remembered the Tenth Commandment... You are such a fool. Marina, Marina! What a waste of oxygen! Hold on to it. Soon enough you’ll miss it. Ha, ha, ha.

The Brahms CD is still playing. The horsehair bows want to tear the life out of the violins’ strings. The bass pedal wants to make itself noticed. Its rumble reverberates through the room. And the violins compete for attention with a defiant outburst. The books are burning, and so is the furniture. The cat screeches. The table’s practically gone. Everything will have disappeared in an hour. Still the music prevails.

Marina pushes the cat to the staircase and closes the door. Marina, what the hell are you doing? Marina! She walks over to the piano. She takes the painting off the wall before the fire reaches it. Marina puts it against the piano where she used to read Brahms from. She closes her eyes because she knows this part by heart. She begins to play, the piano joins the violins in their elegiac, melancholic movement.

--Paola Pascual

Seeing Mallards from a Bridge in the Spring

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I arrived a stranger to storefronts
and magazine stands,
thinking of a place without sidewalks.
But still, from the path on the Second Street Bridge,
I saw three mallards near the river
of melted mountain snow.
My highland winter feeds the lowcountry spring.

--Kevin Bhatt