‘May you live in interesting times.’ — ancient curse

We’re certainly living through a time of global uncertainty. Whoever created this saying believed that calmer historical eras were more conducive to peaceful, prosperous individual lives. However, ‘interesting times’ can provide creative inspiration.

I’m now at the age where the world events of my college years are showcased on public television documentaries. And I’m listening to a historical fiction panel discussion with Alex George (The Paris Hours), Whitney Scharer (The Age of Light) and Meg Waite Clayton (The Last Train to London) and they just posed the question of what sort of literature would emerge out of, or inspired by, the coronavirus pandemic.

Mark Young’s systematically created non-persona, non-imagistic poetry perhaps characterizes this period of economic and health uncertainty. Its narrative unfolds according to an unseen logic of its own and readers are left to wonder and watch for what will happen next.

Amlanjyoti Goswami contributes poems of survival, re-creation and change, while Michael Robinson writes of compassion, love, and the autumnal season of the year and our lives.

Norman J. Olson, who usually writes about his art-infused travels, reflects on how times have changed and brought him and his wife home. J.K. Durick conveys the endlessness of the time in quarantine without any of our usual chronological markers.

J.J. Campbell ponders illness, isolation, and decay in short understated, uncapitalized bursts. John Dorroh describes through dreams the visceral, grotesque reality of quarantine.

Chuck Taylor writes clever formal poetry about ordinary subjects, including a baby’s binky, although he includes one poem about a truly traumatic childhood. Daniel DeCulla turns to whimsy with an amusing illustrated piece about a monkey.

Michael Lee Johnston’s pieces evoke dislocation, speculation about the future, and sorrow over the historical injustices Western colonizers perpetuated against indigenous people.

Mike Zone’s short story centers on a more individual injustice, where a scammer pretends to be an elderly woman’s relative for his own gain. Yet he develops a sense of connection with her that causes him to leave her, but not without a bit of curiosity on whether he could rewrite the facts of their history.

Federico Wardal looks to ancient history for inspiration, to the glories of ancient Egypt, which he considers even more awe-inspiring than we realize.

Abigail George reflects on her early childhood against the backdrop of apartheid in South Africa, wondering how much she could have understood or impacted the world at that point.

Chris Butler writes of hypocrisy and love forced to compete with addictions, showing speakers trapped by their weaknesses and by those of their societies.

Elizabeth Hughes reviews books that explore human nature in further depth in her monthly Book Periscope column. John Altson’s Does Harry Dream of Electric Sheep? satirizes American social institutions and questions how much we can change our behavior and morals, while Laura McHale Holland follows a single family within a small Midwestern town in her highly character-driven novel The Kiminee Dream.

Christopher Bernard reflects on nature reclaiming ground while some human activities have ceased due to the virus, while Mahbub celebrates the gift of life while criticizing our tendencies to waste resources. Joan Beebe points out the power of roses to lift our spirits, while Chimezie Ihekuna dramatizes the potential of humanity’s reconciliation with nature.

We hope this issue will be creative food for your mind, heart and soul while we make memories and become primary sources about this period of history.

Also – I’m sharing this on behalf of Leticia Escalera, author of the upcoming memoir A Journey to Begin in Life and part of our Synchronized Chaos family. Her book is about ways to encourage, help and empower people you know (or yourself!) who face learning disabilities. I’ve read it and completely recommend it.

Leticia Escalera has an amazing story and believes in inter-dependence, kindness, and making the most of her life. I’ve heard her speak many times before on her own journey and on her work on behalf of the Latina, immigrant, and disabled members of the Bay Area.

She’s been involved with the Spanish Speaking Citizens Foundation and the Center for Independent Living in Oakland, CA and has coached many people about developing strategies to work around issues that they have so that they can figure out how to accomplish personal or professional goals and access resources to assist them to survive.

Here’s the preorder campaign for her book, hybrid-published through Leticia Bradford (Hayward, CA)’s firm.

The Departure

by

Mike Zone

They held each other tight, before her train departed.

They could’ve been mother and son but they weren’t.

            “What a foolish old woman, I was…romancing the past, thinking it could be like old times.”

He smiled shyly, looked to the sunbeam shining on the floor and chuckled. She held the homebound ticket he had purchased her with his own money.

            “Guess, we’ll always have piano lessons on hot summer afternoons with lemonade and a bit of bourbon.” She laughed.
He embraced her again, gazing at the passing faces of strangers and thought about his mother, because everyone probably thought this was parting mother and son.

Her brown eyes swallowed him whole, isolating them from all the rest.

            “I was young, you really… just a boy but, God, how I loved you Henry…and that’s my biggest regret, I didn’t take you away from your parents. Now you’re grown and I’m a crone.”

            “You’ll never be a crone, Gwen.”

            “Henry, you’ve made a doddering old lady happy for one night in imaginary Paris. Don’t ruin it.”

Gwen put her head down. He lifted her chin.

            “We can still…”

            “Henry, I don’t like deception. You’re married.” She removed his hand and continued “…even if you don’t wear the ring and don’t act like it, you need do…maybe being a traveling salesman isn’t good for you, piano sure wasn’t.”

He thought of his mother, whom she reminded him of.

The Driftwood Bar the night before, Frank was looking for his next mark. It’s what he did. Scam old war widows into bed and dig as much as he could into their pockets before moving onto the next.  She came up to with bright smile and shining eyes.

            “Henry, you got my letter.”

            He didn’t know her but she talked and talked like his own mother who couldn’t even remember her own name like alone who he even was. Frank soon came to find out this guy Henry was kind of like him only probably more successful.

Frank played shock, told her how he remembered Moonlight Sonata, then felt pity knowing Henry would never show. He bought a bottle of  “their bourbon” from behind the bar, knowing he’d make thrice the amount come morning, only to find a bit of loose change and small bills at the bottom of her purse, as he laid in his underwear relaxed as she went into the powder room to prepare.

            She came out looking a fright in lacy moth eaten black pajamas, overly made-up face like a terrifying clown…he took a hard slug of the bottle, with a squeeze of lemon and spoonful of sugar.

He didn’t have the heart to tell her.

He wasn’t the man she was looking for.

Mike Zone resides beyond the pines…the author of Void Beneath the Skin and A Farewell to Big Ideas, a frequent contributor to Alien Buddha Press and Mad Swirl, his work has been featured in: Horror Sleaze Trash,  Cajun Mutt Press,Outlaw Poetry, Piker Press, Synchronized Chaos, The Whiskey Rye Review and Cult Culture magazine.

reflections on travel and life in the era of Pandemic

by:  Norman J. Olson

my wife retired from her airline job in 2015 and had worked in the airline and travel industries for many years…  we have travelled extensively with employee pass travel discounts since our adult children were young and have had many amazing travel experiences, from a surly cab driver on Lombok to a view of the Alpine snow peaks through the clouds flying into Zurich… we have crossed the Atlantic and Pacific oceans by ship and by air, back and forth over the International Date Line and the Equator…  we have seen the shipping in the Malacca Strait between the Malay Peninsula and Sumatra…  we have sailed into the magnificent harbor of Rio de Janeiro with Sugarloaf looming on one side and the famous Statue of the Redeemer looking down from the pinnacle of mount Corcovado, 2300 feet above the city… we have walked in the water meadows around Kelmscott Manor where Dante Rossetti painted Janey Morris in 1871 and visited the house where James Ensor painted his masterpiece in Ostend, Belgium… we have been to Graceland and walked among the gigantic sequoia trees 6000 feet up in the Sierra Nevada Mountains…  we have seen, heard and smelled much including an erupting volcano on Stromboli and the smell of woodsmoke in rural Mexico… we have made lifelong friends and found lovely, amazing, interesting and beautiful people everywhere… along with a few grumps…  it has been a terrific ride…

now, in the new reality of a worldwide pandemic that as yet, has no cure, vaccine or even treatment, I wonder if travel as we have known it will ever come back…  I have no crystal ball and in the past, efforts by humans to predict the future have not been very successful…  so, who knows…  some say that the cruise industry was in big trouble before the epidemic…  and it certainly was an industry with a history of problems including some questionable environmental impact, and a product that was becoming more and more out of step with the modern world…  people complained about small staterooms, seasickness, and uneven quality and of course, communicable disease was a problem long before ships started arriving with hundreds of passengers ill and some dead from Covid 19… what we enjoyed about cruises was the food, the conviviality with others in our age cohort (baby boomers), the chance to see and be on the ocean, the calm and relaxing atmosphere of watching the waves roll by in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, or the excitement of arriving in a new port…  things that no other form of travel could provide…  I will not argue for or against the cruise industry…  in our history, it was there and gave us a chance to see and experience things we could not experience any other way and we took advantage of travel industry employee discounts which made these cruises, especially the long transoceanic, “repositioning” ones a real bargain for us…  we got to see and experience the oceans and ports of the world… if the cruise industry goes away, we will travel by whatever means are still there, if traveling anywhere ever again, in our lifetime becomes safe…

most of our travel has of course, not been by ship…  we have flown all over the USA and to other continents and have traveled in the USA and elsewhere by car and train…  we have ridden the metro in Singapore, driven from Loch Ness to Bristol (on the WRONG side of the road many years ago when our kids were young) and ridden the bus from Victoria Coach station to Amsterdam Sloterdijk Station…  we have driven from Las Vegas to Riverside, California across the Mojave desert many times and from the granite cliffs of Yosemite to the gnarled Monterey Cypress Trees on the soft beach of Carmel by the Sea in California…

well, whatever the future holds, we hope to make it through the current crises…  we are age 72, so are carefully self isolating and doing everything we can to avoid becoming victims of this disease that has killed so many, and still carry on with our lives…  we have enjoyed being home, walking and bicycling in our area as spring is becoming more summer like every day…  making art, listening to music, watching television in the evenings, tuning into the rhythms of Maplewood, Minnesota, where we live and of the life we have been privileged to enjoy now for 72 years…  typing this now, I am looking out the window where the bushes and trees are only beginning to bud…  it is bright and sunny if still chilly…  I see the intricate shadow of the branches of the spruce and honey locust trees… I see the grass in my front yard becoming green through the mulch of last years leaves and since the new leaves are not out yet on trees and bushes, I can look across McKnight Road and through the network of branches to see the dusty blue, rippled surface of Beaver Lake…  this morning on my walk around Beaver Lake, I saw Canadian Geese, Mallard ducks and migrating wood ducks with their brilliant colors and patterns…  a few days ago, I heard a loon call…  loons stop on their migration sometimes in the summer and fall to spend a day or two on Beaver Lake, before heading north or south depending on the season…

this morning while eating breakfast, I read a bit of a doorstopper biography I have been reading on the life of the late Victorian artist G. F. Watts…  I have visited the house where he spent his final years (near Guildford, England) and find it fascinating to learn how someone who died 45 years before I was born looked at the world, at life and at art…  to think about art…  how Mr. Watts was, and thought of himself as, a truly important and immortal artist but became in the 20^th Century, at most a footnote in the history of art…  (even though he is not a great artist, I think he is an interesting one and some of his drawings are really very fine)…

when I finish writing this, I have my drawing board nearby and my fingers are itching to pick up my steel dip pen and see what kind of a drawing develops… 

Mary and I have been married for 50 years…  we have been lucky to have lived such a life with children and grandchildren (video chats are great but we miss the hugs!!!) and so many blessings in every part of our lives…  we have enjoyed each other and our time together…  we are stuck not traveling for now, but that is maybe an opportunity for us to have new domestic experiences and to enjoy the place where we are…  if I have learned nothing else in 72 years, I have learned that I have been very lucky and very blessed in this life…  though I am not a religious person, in this time of crises when so many are experience death, loss and illness, I am truly and forever grateful for what I have been given in this life so far, and that so far, we have been spared…  still, the sadness of so much death and suffering hurts and touches us all… as to the future?  well, I hope we have a future and if we do, I hope for the best for everybody…

Walking by Beaver Lake

By:  Norman J. Olson

walking along McKnight Road,

along Beaver Lake, I can

see trees, grass, weeds…

a world of green that feeds on

sunlight, minerals

and carbon dioxide…  of course,

the axis of this planet is tilting

toward

summer

now…  natural history

has me by the throat

and yellow gold finches

fly from twig to twig…

letter to the future

By:  Norman J. Olson

imagine this planet 2.4 billion

years ago, if time on that

scale has any meaning at all…  was

there a snowball Earth??  a planet covered

with ice and snow…

all the water turned solid

until volcanos finally put enough

carbon dioxide into the air

to warm things up

a bit…  for 3 or 4 hundred million years

snow and ice

covered the planet, according to

scientists, or, maybe not… they cannot agree,

but whatever happened, we have had both

glaciation

and ice free poles…  and through it all,

tiny bits of life survived (lucky for us, I guess)…

will we be around for the next glaciation?  will

our home again

become snowball Earth…  will humans somehow

survive through the millennia?  well,

the odds are against us…  a meteor or

even a giant volcano could mean the end of us…

not to mention our own

self destructive militarism and idiocy… 

drought, flood and famine are always

just around the corner… our tolerances

of heat and cold 

are small…  for much of our brief tenure on this planet

starvation has been our companion, death and disease,

our daily lot…  will that change in the long term,

or are we in a brief golden age of medical miracles

even the scientists and fortune tellers do not know for sure…

so, my children’s children’s children x 2000…  I hope 

you survive and if you do, good luck with the

ice…

The legendary Zahi Hawass, spokesman for ancient Egypt

by Count Federico Wardal ——————————

When it comes to Egypt, scholars bow. Even those who don’t know much about Egypt, but have only seen the image of Tutankhamun’s golden mask, are enchanted. 

Egypt’s ancient culture crosses the limits of knowledge and much of it is still mysterious today. Egyptian culture has always focused its gaze on the infinite, calling to itself the unknown.  Egypt has built a staircase without limits towards the immense: each point shows a reality which in turn shows another reality, going beyond space and time.  

This can be clearly seen when visiting the funeral chambers of the ancient tombs, admiring the paintings which are exact star maps.  Egypt perfectly combines life and death, physicality and spirituality and represents both with Beauty in its supreme form. Science and knowledge in Egypt are instruments of beauty. So we can admire sublime and perfect faces carved in granite.  

But, great mysteries immediately emerge: it is impossible to imagine that sublime and perfect faces were made in granite 7-8000 years ago without having modern technological means.  Another Egyptian cultural goal was to pass on to posterity the image of the great deceased with all the important things they had used in life.  

To achieve this goal, to achieve perfect conservation of the human body, the absence of humidity, a constant temperature, and other elements unknown to us are necessary.  

The style of Egyptian art, which is metaphysical, is absolute in its uniqueness.  There is no previous, contemporary or subsequent civilization to the Egyptian one that was capable of producing such original art.  The Greek and Roman civilizations, subsequent to Egypt, certainly represented Beauty as well, but always in a more earthly form.  Only since the last century has art, for example abstract art, hovered again towards celestial forms and creatures.  

But why has Egyptian civilization, above all others, disappeared?  The answer would be simple, but it is not. One answer would be that Egyptian civilization disappeared because it had achieved perfection, the perfect balance in everything.  It had accomplished the mission for which it was born.  

I said “disappearance”, since our language is inadequate.  From another point of view, the Egyptian civilization has never disappeared: its echo, its energy is eternal and is eternally on earth and speaks to us, as it does to all of us. In every instant of our life, nature speaks to us,  the universe in an endless motion and cycle.  

The sensational discoveries of the mysteries of Egyptian civilization have no end and help us understand, each other, our times, and what our future could be.  And here is the importance of a great figure who for decades has given us amazing discoveries.  He is a man who wrote 44 books that are invaluable for human knowledge, the engine of our future and survival itself.  

For all this, he is considered a living legend: he is the archaeologist Dr. Zahi Hawass.  I recently met him in Egypt and San Francisco during his world tour.  He is a great man who sees peace and civilization, so he is a worthy son and spokesman for the immense Egyptian civilization.  He recently had al-Fath mosque restored in Cairo, St. Mark Cathedral in Alexandria and Moses Ben Maimon Synagogue in Cairo for a strong dialogue of brotherhood among Muslim, Christian and Judaic traditions. https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3765207,00.html.

Dr. Hawass also explained to me that there was no slavery in ancient Egypt.  Those who built the fabulous and immense funeral monuments and Egyptian temples were people devoted to the pharaohs and divinities who were their life, their cult, their essence and existence.  Their work, which often lasted their entire lives, was a tribute to the universe and creation.  “They were buried in the sacred places of temples and funeral monuments and for this reason they could not be slaves,” Dr. Hawass tells me.

This year the Great Museum of Giza, the largest museum in the world, will be completed.  It is a project that was begun in the 90s. For Egypt, 2002 was a year of enormous historical importance: on January 5, 2002 President Hosny Mubarak laid the foundation stone of the Grand Museum of Giza and on October 16 heads of state and royalty  from all over the world were in Alexandria for the reopening of the legendary Bibliotheca Alexandrina presided over by the former First Lady HE  Suzanne Mubarak, defender of women’s and children’s rights.  

Dr. Hawass has strongly contributed to the conception of the Grand museum of Giza, always in cultural cooperation with the director of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, Dr. Moustafa El Feki and with the former minister of culture artist Farouk Hosny, inventor of the Cairo International Festival of Experimental Theater.  

Hawass has strongly cooperated with UNESCO in carrying out colossal works in Egypt and supported the author of the law against female genital mutilation, H.E.  Moushira Khattab, for her recent candidacy as UNESCO ‘s Secretary General.  

Dr. Hawass is constantly lecturing in the USA and, as soon as the coronavirus emergency is over, Dr. Hawass will hold the conferences that were scheduled for May. 

His speaking calendar is in this link https://hawasslectures.com/.  Over the course of millennia, Egypt has undergone various epidemics and has always survived.  President El-Sisi has long taken drastic measures against the spread of coronavirus, although there are few cases in Egypt.  Egypt and Dr. Hawass wish the world a very rapid resolution of this pandemic, being pleased to reopen the doors to the magic and splendor of Egyptian monuments and museums.

Pandemonium in the Pandemic

I woke up speaking Portuguese, wearing

red-hot pajama bottoms with black-and-white

penguins. My bottom lip was puffed up like

I had a Botox injection and I was

bleeding between my toes on my left foot.

The reflection in the mirror showed a palm

tree, a little gray squirrel monkey scurrying

to the top, a miniature machete in his right

paw. There were crows lined up on the

telephone wire across the street where

Mettler Construction raped the beautiful

ridge where my heart used to lie. And my

big dog has another tumor.

You spoke to me in a dream to tell me

that the house was on fire. Get out! You

exclaimed, run for your life. But I couldn’t.

The blood from my toes was filling

up the house, and I needed to swim but didn’t

know how. The toaster was glowing reddish-

orange and three flamingos started pecking

my knees.

There were unexplained abrasions and contusions,

scissors stuck in the fat at the back of my head,

and my car was a John Deere combine, too large

to drive out of the back yard. The dogs had wings

and the cat three black tongues. There was a tornado

heading my way and no place to go, no place to go,

no place to go….

I stopped and prayed: Jesus save me. That’s all I knew

to do. And I woke up inside the vault of a bank,

surrounded by cops who had mouths like pregnant

carp. My stomach harbored a knife wound and there

was a knot the size of a golf ball on the side of my face.

My house was gone except for the foundation, which

looked like a flattened trampoline. I can’t recall having

learned a lesson here so I checked into a local hotel

and took a much-needed nap.

Transparency

So often you look at me and say hello

as we pass each other, entering or leaving

our building like two strangers who easily

could become

friends. But we don’t. Instead I carry your

sweet smile in my head, take you to Barcelona

where we eat tapas and stay out until the salmon

sun slides up from the horizon where water meets

sky.  Too complicated to remove the plastic

sheet, not sanitary or prudent perhaps to peel

off our skins. We’re just neighbors, right?

We’re on Hiatus, or Abaude with Leaky Roof and Old Yeast

Please don’t ask me questions right now

or knock on the door. We’re staying inside

and not receiving guests. We’re making morning

bread with old yeast that might be too sluggish

to work.

Our roof leaks in this bad weather, and the big

dog has new tumors. Food has no taste.

I wake up in the morning wanting to climb

into my own body and never get up.

I cry at the drop of a hat.

We’re wiping down the kitchen counters

and table with homemade wipes, praying

that light will ooze into the windows while

we’re asleep and the whole thing will have

been nothing more than a seriously bad dream.

My teeth need cleaning but I don’t care.

Why I Quit Sunday School: Virtual Handshake with Peter, Breath like a Camel

An argument ensued about whether Jesus

had an odor, and I asked, “Was He a man?”
And they said yes, of course. And he was

perfect in every way.

But hygiene must have been an issue because

of the heat, and most humans sweat. Did He

bathe everyday? I’ll give you a few minutes

to prove one way or another whether He smelled

like everyone else.

I know you can find some Scripture in

your Bible. You always pull out Scripture

to prove your point, just as attorneys

often do, skewing the data in their favor,

expecting the world to accept their fluff.

So I ask you, Peter, did Jesus have bad breath?

Did he have dandruff and a mild case of eczema?

I say He did, Peter; had a breath like a camel

and toe jam between each and every toe.

But no one will ever know, so why do we spend

valuable time attempting to prove something

that never mattered in the first place? Can I get

an amen? How about a handshake, Peter? It’s

about all we had left.