INTERPRETATION

Of course,
We all could condone any vitriol 
Spilt on the rifts of the long hibernation.
The flesh seems fresh than conjoined
For those who want to believe it.
You see it banal from the space
Between your index and thumb.
The night is blank sentence,
Projected perfectly onto the medulla oblongata
Where 
The vector of light pokes the horizon
To trace the core of the cross.


HAPPY BIRTHDAY 

The top layer swanks creamy
Decorated with an arty-farty cut lemon body
Ornated and candied,
More aesthetic than functional.
Nobody knows and wouldn’t ask
If some hours ago
The acid juice splashed its hangman’s pink skin, 
Innocent,
Seeking dormant wounds
To nip.



ADVENT

I try to imagine my curbed ego,
The marking commas, the restrictive brackets.
I knew the coin’s been already thrown
For a voice which grammar has many cogent rules.
The new beginning would be inky,
Far from all those pastel-painted frames
With empty rooms fostering pastorali
In stuffed poultry hearts.
The real blood never puts artless colors on its pride.
From the chandelier fell too much of words 
Keeping silence about the profit of being mortal.
I tried to discern the salt in the wound, bugs on the face
Worn promises, Holly knowledge. 
I regret losing my taboos in remission of sins
But the new me still has time to slip into my old 
Long haired coat
Because the snappish winter is coming close.         



REVIVAL

Morning is tiptoeing over to the window
Like a cat
Descending the tree of wishes
Head first
To see all ghosts off
Too modest in their self-knitted hats
And backs heavy with the weight of the tenderness.
Interjections wait woven into the soggy day.
Lungs implore more oxygen.
Movements set a Morse code rhythm
Flirt with coffee steam 
Dance under the wind’s baton
On the garnished with fine mica flakes pavement.
From the crowd’s sleepy orbits 
Protrude huge, perplexed, yesterday‘s question- marks.



CORROSION IS IN FASHION

We are charming in ochre, scarf-styled,
Radiating that exceptional dress sense
While fall is parading its paradigms.
The warmth of gold is already proven
Out of time arguments
When the taste for art mimics the lack of logic 
In the global language.
Sometimes we wonder
If the closed societies undergo attitudinal changes.
In fact, silk on wool presents fond delusion in rainy days.
That world’s hurly-burly,
A storage of nonsense we use to feed scraggy wars
Pretending that they’re somewhere far
In order to satiate our nonchalance 
And quell any inner disturbances.
Happy hypocrites we are
If believe in the grace of the swan neck
Garlanded with luxurious plumage.
Beneath the camouflage— the wormy throat. 

Black Fire Matters

	Many people both inside and outside his home 'hood thought of Jimmy as a firebrand, his style as long as anyone could remember.  At fifteen he organized demonstrations and led protest marches.  The police picked Jimmy up several times, charged him with disorderly conduct and creating a public nuisance once each, but never convicted him of anything.  Unlike many of his peers, he kept his nose clean—Jimmy never messed with drugs or with selling them.  He was a thorn in the side of the authorities, but he was not a criminal—and more thoughtful observers thought of him more and more as a peacemaker.

	Jimmy spent two years at the local community college and two more at the state university to end up with a bachelor's degree in social work.  Instead of going to work for a government agency, Jimmy had worked with a community-based social services provider in the neighborhood where he grew up.  Seeing many of the community's problems deriving from politics, he decided to return to the university for a master's degree in political science and enrolled for the next academic year.

	In the meantime, a series of deaths-in-custody and other suspicious deaths of unarmed black teenagers at the hands of police led to a wave of angry protests.  The law enforcement community didn't seem to get the message, though, and the deaths continued.  Predictably, that eventually led to some people taking the law into their own hands and exacting vengeance upon police.  Jimmy could see the situation easily spiralling out of control, so he contacted several influential community personalities and organized a series of meetings.

	At first, Jimmy tried to persuade each group that the best strategy involved negotiation and well-disciplined peaceful demonstrations, but he soon saw he risked being totally ignored and becoming irrelevant.  Many of those who attended his meetings said, “We've already tried that, and we know it doesn't work,” or words to that effect.  A few had already begun organizing groups of armed black vigilantes.  In an effort to prevent the spreading conflicts from escalating into an all-out war, Jimmy chose to accommodate those groups.

	“You don't just go out and start blowin' honkies away.  We don't want to kill honkies—or even white cops—just because they're white.  That's jes’ as bad as them killin' us because we're black.  Is that OK?”
	“Hell, no!” his small audience roared.
	“Exactly!  So we don't want to do that either.  We're talkin' self-defence.  We only go after people who are killin' our bros.”
	“How about the head of Standard Oil?” came a voice from the crowd.
	“That'll have to wait 'til later,” Jimmy replied.
	“But they're killin' us.”
	“True dat, but right now we want only clear responses to direct threats.  What we want to do is take out those cops that are killin' our bros—and nobody else!”  Jimmy paused for a moment, then asked, “Does anybody not understand that?”


	Amid nodding and head shaking, a chorus of “Nah,” “Yeah,” “All good, bro,” “You go, Jimmy!” bade him proceed.
	“If the man is just doin' his job, even if we don't like it, we don't touch 'im.  Everybody got dat?”
	“But, Jimmy,” said a large man in the middle of the room, a man Jimmy had known in high school, “this is our city.  It's ours as much as it is theirs.  We ain't gonna let them kill us off or drive us out of here.”
	“Of course we're not,” Jimmy replied.  “I'm jes' sayin' we don't need to kill all of them off either.  We defend ourselves.  Anybody not OK wi' that?”

	“Right, bro,” and other sounds of assent encouraged Jimmy to continue discussing plans to defend the demonstration in front of the city hall the next day.  His friends and neighbors trusted him and knew he was on their side.  Even though many wanted to take more direct and comprehensive action, they allowed Jimmy to persuade them to try his way.
	Another half hour of discussion and an hour of organizing teams left Jimmy and the rest feeling well prepared for the next day's protest.  The meeting ended with a positive vibe, and Jimmy went home feeling they might even achieve a breakthrough in their relations with the authorities the next day.

	The morning dawned grey and gloomy, with a light drizzle falling.  “That'll keep our numbers down,” said Jimmy's friend and sometime lover Crystal, who had helped organize the day's actions.  To the surprise of both of them, more than three thousand people had crowded onto the sidewalk (and into the street) in front of City Hall by the time the rain stopped at quarter to eight that morning.
	Unlike the rain, the stream of people showed no sign of stopping.  Buses arrived, delivering supporters from other communities.  One of Jimmy's three cellphones signalled an incoming text message just as the other one rang for a 'phone call.  He answered the call and learned that the state police had begun stopping buses on the outskirts of the city.  The text, from a different bus, conveyed the same news.  He told Crystal and showed her the text, and she quickly arranged press coverage of the interceptions.

	By 9:30 the sky had turned blue and nearly ten thousand people, mostly black but with many white supporters, had packed the space in front of City Hall.  By 10:30 buses succeeded again in getting to the city center, swelling the numbers to well over twelve thousand as the day grew comfortably warm—and still people kept pouring into the street.  Official police estimates of the crowd claimed nine thousand demonstrators, but photographs showed the number approached twenty thousand.
	Surprisingly, considering the numbers, the first real trouble didn't occur until almost noon, when two policemen began using their nightsticks on a black teenager who had been standing quietly on the edge of the crowd.  Several people intervened and were clubbed to the ground for their trouble.

	At the other end of the block, Jimmy stood relaying information to the vigilante teams in windows and on rooftops of buildings up and down the block.  In particular, he told his teams where police snipers had been spotted.  “Yeah, right in City Hall itself—sixth floor, fourth window from the left,” he told each of his teams in turn, then, “The roof of that big glass and steel building at the end of the block.”
	Across the teeming multitude, the black teenager lay unconscious but unmolested, as two large white policemen vented their fury on a middle-aged man who had tried to intervene.  The man lay inert, clearly unconscious, but still the cops hit him.  Suddenly, the face of one of the cops exploded forward onto their unconscious victim.  The other cop straightened to look around him, and the back of his head spattered over several witnesses.

	Jimmy moved through the crowd toward the commotion surrounding the two dead policemen.  He took a call and heard, “We movin' out.  They comin' dis way.”  That told him the team that had taken at least one of the cops was vacating the room they had used and were leaving it booby-trapped for the SWAT team that planned to apprehend them.
	Another commotion at the back of the crowd rose from a circle of angry demonstrators surrounding four white policemen using their sticks on a twenty-something black male, who was curled into a ball on the ground.  As one of the cops straightened to swing a full-force blow at the man's head, a bullet through the cop's neck dropped his body onto his cringing victim.  The other three cops looked wildly around and one spoke into his walkie-talkie, as the crowd began to close in on them.

	In response to a short 'phone call, Jimmy changed direction toward that new disturbance, hoping to calm the crowd and defuse the tension.  He spoke into one of his 'phones as he weaved through the crowd.  “No, bro, we don't want them tearin' these cops apart.  That'd just be their excuse for more violence against us.  I think I can quieten 'em down.  You jus—”  Jimmy's instructions were interrupted by a police sniper's bullet that entered his heart through his left atrium and exited through—and mostly removed—the wall of his left ventricle.

Educated as a scientist, graduated as a mathematician, Cora Tate has earned her living as a full-time professional entertainer most of her life. She attempted to escape the entertainment industry through work as a librarian, physics teacher, syndicated newspaper columnist, and city planner, among other occupations. Cora has written five novels, three novellas (two published), six novelettes (two published, one forthcoming), and ninety short stories, of which fifty-nine have appeared in sixty-seven literary journals in ten countries.

We Rushed

 

to the sound of broken

water and crashing streams.

 

A thundering knock

at the door, early morning. These

are the pools we stepped in.

 

For too long I’ve spent too much

time puttering on things that just don’t

 

matter, trying to peddle my goods.

 

Time to stop applying a metric

to my faith – good, better, best –

 

Just be.

It’s enough.

            Really.



 

Gaming the System

 
Forget the trees

Outside my door a moment.

 

I was seeing the bright colors

 

Of future worlds by the time

I was ten. In the films I watched, I met

 

Cities and skyscrapers.

 

Batman saved my reading life.

 

In the video games I played, I found

The ability to hop into new worlds, and leap

 

Over unfamiliar obstacles.

 

In those days, we had to level up,

You started back at the home screen if you

 

Stopped the game. No re-spawning.

 

So, my days were spent trying to beat

A boss – then starting back at square one,

 

Over and over.


How many days, wrapped in blizzards,

Did I spend navigating a digital character

Through a video snow.



 There is Space

 
where space should be.

This poem is not about

rockets, I assure you.

 

There is a wondering

absence where there really

 

is not absence. Am I

 

an arm, a mind, an interconnected set

of thoughts and instruments

 

            moving ensemble

 

what is my motion

            my e motion

 

what is my work

            life, work life

 

the continuation, the

            meaning.

 


 

I Have Tried

 

too long to brace verdant reality,

bunching up worries into an

easy-to-follow guide,

 

warnings whispered on websites,

 

and more time, time

to linger longer in the quiet,

stillness of the waters that pass,

decorated with litter.

 

Now, I linger again in the

stillness of this time, unsure

of where the world goes from

here. Hopeful. Realistic.

 

Almost a year ago, I lay

on my back as I do today,

different purposes, new reasons,

 

lack of reason.

 

I thought of what would

be ahead, framing moments

of trust

 

in unseen figures. A constant

hope.

 

Weeks earlier, I accepted

a new path that would

come to reality.

 

I try to know myself,

thinking, reading, believing

in bright promises ahead.

 

I sought connecting

as I wait for warmer

weather.



 

Others See Me As

 
warrior

mentor

soul friend

collaborative writer

Appalachian scholar

supportive

attentive leader

one with kind eyes

 

dependable

covenant partner

educator

sincere

 

one who invited

healing.

 

I am only one person

making a way

in the world,

 

mindful of footprints,

seeking

true words and actions.

 


New Pathway



beginning of a forest,

dogs trotting ahead in the path,

 

fresh air adjusting leaves

like ornaments around me,

 

warmth of summer

years ago, remembered again

 

point of a branch, and I know

I’ll return here soon

 

again and again, and never leave

as I once did.

 

Preserving the silent world.



 

There is

 
a space where

space should be,

 

there is a wondering

absence where they really

 

is no absence. A hollow

that is filled but still echoes.

 

Am I an arm,

a mind, an interconnected set

of thoughts and instruments

 

for making syllables and other

sounds.

 

What is my motion

            my emotion

 

what is my work

            life, work-life,

 

where are those boundaries

now?

 

the continuation, the meaning,

            as days stack up.

 

I want to be a better

teacher, a voice that’s honest

 

a clear teacher of teachers.

 

 

I Held My Breath

  

We had been crowded into a low-ceilinged

room the size of a small church.   Cement

walls and floor.   The soldiers had confis-

cated all our clothes, our shoes, what jewel-

ry and personal effects that had remained

with us.  Most of it had long ago been

bartered away for food or clean water or

other privileges scarce in the compound.

 

We were completely naked:  the men, the

women, even the little children.  Our heads

had been shaved.  Rumor had it that the

Huns stuffed their pillows and mattresses

with our hair.

 

The room was entirely vacant but for the

human bodies; our pale white flesh was the

color of a fish’s belly, and we were stuffed

into the room like oysters into a turkey.

 

We had all been shipped to the death

camp--Todeslager--like cattle to the

slaughter, in box cars, with no food or

water.  With scarcely enough room

to breathe.  Once or twice a plane flying

overhead had strafed the train with

machinegun fire.  Perhaps our own

brave pilots.

 

There were no youths or middle aged men

and women; they had all been absorbed into

the vast slave labor network the Huns oper-

ated.  Only the crippled, the maimed, the

feeble and the old, like myself, were here,

save for the very young, who weren’t hardy

enough for slave labor.

 

We were in Treblinka.  It was June, 1943

and the rumor was that the camp would

be closed soon.  We had no room to lay or

sit or even turn around.  We were like the

kippers that were packed in oil or mustard

and that the inmates in labor camps--the

Arbeitslager--got from the Red Cross.  At

Treblinka we never received our kippers.

There were nothing but rumors flying

throughout the compound:  I had heard it

said that the German women made lamp

shades with our skin.

 

Some of the old men stared up at an aperture

in the ceiling, about a foot and a half over our

heads.  That, they said, was where the Ger-

mans would deposit the Zyklon B, the poison

they would gas us with.  The Commandant,

addressing the prisoners some time ago, had

bragged that superior German industry had

created many wonderful things.  This was per-

haps the example he had in mind when he

said that.  He had seemed very proud.

 

One of the younger of the men had been a

helper, removing the bodies from the chamber

after the gas had dissipated.  After everyone

was dead.  He told us all about how it worked. 

The poison--prussic acid--he said, worked fast. 

There would be a rattling over our heads, in the

chute that the poison was fed into.  Someone,

he said with a grotesque grin, always tried to

keep the pellet from descending.  But fall it

always did.  For his labors he had received

an extra crust of Brot.

 

We waited.  And waited.  Suddenly there was a

clattering overhead, in the chute.  The pellet of

Zyklon B was descending.  A tall man, as if act-

ing a part in a movie, attempted to prevent the

pellet from falling, where it would crack open and

then dissipate in a cloud of murderous vapor. 

His hand slipped.  Suddenly, a large white pellet

crashed to the floor, burst open and a deadly,

diaphanous cloud rose up.  A woman cried out.

The lethal “showers” had begun.  I held my

breath.

This piece was originally published in Children, Churches and Daddies.

archaeùlogy

picking up
the remnants of what was,
the could haves and would haves
securing them in an amber
worn around her neck
laced with flesh-eating bacter(I)um
inflaming her voicebox
digging up corrosives
burying her confidence
with every negative
self-talk

xxxxx

petrichor

seeping into 
pillows and sheets
housing your scent
and mine...
before i rain

Lorelyn De la Cruz Arevalo
Bombon, Philippines

How Lexi Howard’s Cassie/Hallie was actually Arthur Miller’s Marilyn/Maggie

Dangerous, Messy Blondes from “After the Fall” to “This is Life”
If Marilyn Monroe was alive in our times, everybody would have hated her.

What a ditzy blonde, obsessed with her sexuality, why can’t she get a grip? She should use her privilege to lift other women up, not fall all the way down the stairs? 

Feminists would have been the first to attack her. Want proof? Here’s what happened to another sexy bombshell, Megan Fox, another beauty icon who instead of garnering sympathy and worldwide attention was thwarting attacks coming at her with the same frenzy of all the toxic men who wrote petitions accusing her of being a snob, a diva, and what for? She was young, inexperienced, and lacked the Old Hollywood glamour.

It’s so easy to hate Cassie Howard from Euphoria.
It’s so easy to collectively spite a young, blonde, flawless-looking -or so they are described- woman whose public humiliation and downfall alludes to the rise and fall of starlets like Marilyn Monroe, Nicole Richie, Britney Spears. These beautiful and haunted women give our societies so much pleasure in masturbating to their beautiful faces and delicate bodies. But as something that is so out of reach for us, we also enjoy crushing them, breaking them, watching them get raped or hurt onscreen, watching them lose it or publicly humiliate themselves, that’s when we can safely call it quits and roll the word on our tongues like caramel Mckintosh…yes, we got ourselves a big, bad, whore.

A whore. That’s what Cassie Howard became for everybody. A sensational, privileged, white-ass, pouty-lip whore. Everybody started hating her and creating memes about her. Cassie became the manifestation of the Britneys, the Marilyns, the Nicoles, and the Pamelas that we buried, long forgotten as they caved under constant critique. Despite being the byproduct of the industry and the culture from which they so rightfully emerged, these women were doused in hatred gasoline, lit and left to burn, only for a whole world of hungry onlookers masturbating to the slithering flames. 

So Cassie Howard, if not patient zero, but she was the pinnacle, the head on the stick for every defamed, shamed, young sexual woman out there, who was not born with a catalogue as to how to navigate the modern world without being constantly abused by men, relatives, friends, and family.

Cassie might have been a fictional character, but to a lot of close inspectors, she was the manifestation of their worst nightmares. Women who were not yet enamored by the GRRRL Power anthems and the -somewhat hypocritical- inclusion themes of sisterhood and feminine friendships on basis of a so-called sophisticated form of white feminism. Would women accept Cassie in their all-feminist club? Maybe. But if that so, why wasn’t Megan Fox accepted? Was it because she was taller than everybody, hotter than everybody, sexy and unabashed about it, outspoken and vocal about her likes and dislikes, about how men treated her in a mute Hollywood, pre #MeToo era? If Megan Fox saw that treatment, then Cassie Howard would be no different.

It's hard to accept Cassie in a world where female celebrities who are cheered on their sexuality and sexual appeal to all sexes are constantly screaming independence, acting as if men are the least things on their minds. While some of them are sincere and true, some of them make it hard for a woman to show weakness, let alone admit that at some stage of her life she was obsessed with her looks or how she would look in the eyes of men.

In her book 90s Bitch: Media, Culture, and the Failed Promise of Gender Equality, Allison Yarrow describes the scrutiny a woman faces when she is under the public eye:

“Women touched by scandal, whether they were alleged perpetrators or victims, were hounded by the press. When any woman made the news, she often stayed there for days, weeks, months, and, in some cases, years. Meanwhile, news consumers blamed women for their own unceasing visibility, as if they had narcissistically engineered unflattering coverage of themselves for personal gain.”

Rings a bell? All that applies to Cassie, even though Cassie was the byproduct of an upbringing where she became well aware of her sexuality early on in her life, with two parents quarreling and getting at each other, the “father” her favorite who became her first letdown and her biggest heartbreak, and the mother who idolized her beauty to the degree of worship, creating a raft between Cassie and her sister Lexi, whose years were spent watching Cassie being idealized, catered after, and polished like the virgins who are raised and beautified only to be eaten by the dragon at the end.

Cassie had her share of toxic, manipulative, insecure men, who were so confused and helpless in the face of her sexuality. Her boyfriend McKay loved her, but as an insecure American teenager, held under the toxic masculinity grip from the neck, he doubted his love for her every second. He was unable to accept her for who she was; small, quivering, insecure, addicted to feeling loved and ogled over. Every step Cassie took was a mistake. She went from man to the other, most of them only there for that temple on which they would bow at first, then try to break at the end of the day, gaping viciously and aroused at the ruins.

Even to her sister, a compassionate female bystander, Cassie was nothing but the image of the mess she makes. She was the icon of failures and disrespect. She was a feminine woman reminiscent of the 1950s/1960s, she was a joke, a bad replica of someone who wanted to audition for the drama club rendition of Oklahoma. And to her sister, she was what Marilyn Monroe was to Arthur Miller; a Maggie, an archetype. 

In his play After the Fall, Arthur Miller brutally dissects Maggie, calls her a joke, a beautiful piece trying to take herself seriously.
Lexi describes herself as an informed, smart, hardworking, and curious woman, while reducing her sister to the size of her tits. In a sort of meta/deux e machina theatrical interpretation of her life, Lexi savagely tears her sister apart, displaying all her embarrassing, pathetic, vulnerable moments. Lexi became a badass, a hero, a triumphant of all the side characters in real life. Essays were written about how Lexi was relatable since everybody felt sidelined in their lives, so Lexi’s revenge seemed, a work of art, but Cassie’s public meltdown seemed “pathetic, uncontrollable, shameful, and what Arthur Miller would use to describe his Maggie, “a tart”.

In Lexi’s After the Fall, Cassie was called Hallie, the resemblance between both Hallie and Maggie is undeniably brutal and scary. These two blonde, sexually attractive women who were mainly “known for their bodies” were put under the microscope, so that audiences at stare at their tiniest action and analyze their reactions, like a mirror that both women use respectively to discern the size of their pores during a night beauty routine. Intead of creating a safer narrative for women to grow without being judged, both Arthur Miller and Lexi have given viewers the opportunity to ridicule and make fun of these women.

Still with Allison Yarrow describing the ideal woman on TV in the 80s/90s:

“Television’s ideal woman in the late 80s and early 90s was “beautiful, dependent, helpless, passive, concerned with interpersonal relations, warm and valued for her appearance more than for her capabilities and competencies,”

So when Cassie emerged like a phantom from 90s TV grave, everyone was horrified. Why was she there to remind people of the things they need to forget. Female TV characters nowadays are strong, cold-blooded, vicious, uninterested in seeking romantic conquests, and they definitely…definitely, were not interested in finding the right man. So when Cassie; a drunk, gurgling mess, standing with her skimpy blue dress, her boobs showing during a lengthy scene, or being dressed like a Nabokovian Lolita by her abusive lover/her BFFs on-and-off boyfriend while the camera glazes over her soft skin and her long, well-coiffed blonde hair, people couldn’t help it but glare. They couldn’t help but reduce her to a joke, a meme, a funny incarnation of a woman. Cassie, to them, was a dark mirror in which they saw shadows of self-destructive women that they obsess over but insanely want to ignore, gaslight, or interpret as creatures unworthy of their time.

But in the end Cassie is not the victim nor the perpetrator. She’s neither a hardcore feminist nor a brainwashed Southern girl, she’s a woman who has not been handed a catalogue on how to live life like a free soul, regardless of her gender, her sexuality, or sexual desires. She was not being told any compliment beyond her looks, to the extent of craving them, and when she is denied that pleasure, she sits there like a broken China doll, wilting in shame, regurgitating all her moments of public humiliation, accenuated by her sister’s satirical portrayal of a Cassie-like blonde figure, masturbating in front of the eyes of a hungry audience, reducing her to a mad woman lashing out at those who harm her, wanting them to stop. Britney Spears of the 00s anybody?

At the end, I will quote Allison Yarrow’s book again, just to highlight some points in the Cassie argument:

“…let’s reexamine the stories that are told and sold about women—that we tell and sell ourselves. Probing the failed promise of gender equality for truth and meaning is the first, essential step in confronting the sexism that suffuses women’s lives today—and to prevent it from suffusing the lives of our daughters and sons in decades to come.”

Introduction/Bio: Nika is the pen name of Dr. Jim Force, a retired educator. He is a passionate haiku poet who combines his haiku with his passion for photography. Both haiku and photography reflect his minimalist approach to life in general. The images used in entropy are of sidewalk cracks that he encountered on his daily walks in his neighbourhood. Adjustments in exposure, dynamic range, levels and curves are the only manipulations of the images. Nothing has been subtracted or added to the images. He lives in Calgary, Alberta, Canada with his wife Colleen and their two cairn terriers.