Mostly Water

From a womb of seawater we glide to earth

On a river of salt and blood. In life

A river of salt and blood encircles our hearts

And the moon speaks to our bones.

Our bones pass from the earth and are gone, but the water stays.

When I die let me climb the veins of an oak tree

From the veins of an oak tree let me pass into air, into cloud

Let me fall over cities and towns

Over rivers and streams let me thrash in the rapids

In a clear glass bottle let me cultivate stillness

Let the eye of the sun find a clear glass bottle

Let it turn me into a pillar of light.

Jenny Williamson’s writing has been featured in 24Mag, Wild River Review, Poetic Voices, and in Philadelphia’s Writing Aloud series.  She has also received recognition from the Academy of American Poets and NPR’s Young Poets Series.

Leapt

“Two teardrops floating down the river”

Whisperin’ Bill Anderson

Having no need for discussion

but enjoying a conversation

God told Lucifer

about plans for Adam

As cheeks puffed up

Lucifer leapt

Went down chasing nostalgia

before it

-they-

hit the river

to be lost

forever.

Tears fall faster than angels do

and as the dawn breeze cut across

the land and Adam arose,

the garden found

water for thirsty seed.

Lucifer, in luck,

caught a couple

straggling drops

before Eden did

Holding tight to them

all heat gone

from hands

crystallized,

tucked them

down below

in mimicry of man.

The tree grew

and shape was changed momentarily

but most of all,

the imitation of the envied

remained

As further the spiral was assembled

As first Cain and Abel

then the others arrived

Until even the inner sanctum

of melancholy was invaded,

traversed,

and Dante caught glimpse

of much treasured tears

icy

below the waist

so maybe God

wouldn’t know

the difference between hate and hiding

So maybe the commonality

of want and wait

could be kept secret.

Should Want For

There goes again

the pass over

Where’s all this time to waste

as again given reprieve

for

from

what?

Shame spins webs

honest

and devoid

of ancient tricksters

In the silk of spidery ropes

of arachnid

highways

are words

threaded

Are spells to be cast

and curses broken

Should want for touch

be disobeyed

if missing, the gone-away

could keep back hands

to bring the fool further along the journey.

Together

Together remaining where occurrences can

undisturbed by air

Thought unexpressed for fear of suffocation

Fingers crossed behind back

differ from those brought into view

If on a winter’s night

travelers come upon

coral wound through

commercial, residential

districts

symbiosis will be best understood

Swimming by — of arms interlocked

against

quieting breeze.

Ideas away from exposure

may be preserved

but age becomes

time lost.

The squid’s ink

has been left runny

alongside where

pedestrians walk.

Following is a chore.

Form changes

Together maps –

isolates.

Kenyatta Jean-Paul Garcia is the editor of ALTPOETICS and author of Yawning on the Sands, This Sentimental Education and What Do the Evergreens Know of Pining. After growing up in Brooklyn, NY, upstate has become home and is where the past few years were spent cooking and getting a degree in linguistics. More work can found at kjpgarcia.wordpress.com.

He met his new partner

In the inner-city trenches

Wrapped in neck tattoos

Reflected off the graffiti

Of the perspiring walls

Out of the corner of his eye

He saw the calculations

Triggered by sensory input

Enabling targeted algorithms

Which exceeded intuition

Continue reading →

Fran Laniado

Forget Me Not by Grace Chen

 I have to admit to knowing very little about twentieth-century Chinese history . Before I read G.X.Chen’s novel Forget Me Not, set in the second half of the twentieth century (during and after China’s Cultural Revolution ) I knew even less. Am I more knowledgeable about it now? Perhaps a bit. But the knowledge is more on an individual level, than on a national or global scale. Forget Me Not deals with the political events of the time, as seen though the eyes of its main character, Li Ling and his friends.

The novel opens in California, where the adult Li Ling seems to be living comfortably with his wife. However, a letter from his native China, distresses him with news that his childhood friend, and first love has died. His wife sees him crying, and he tells her the story that he never told her before. The narrative moves to back in time to Hong Kong, where a nine-year old Li Ling is living with his grandparents, while his parents are working in Shanghai. However, with the Cultural Revolution taking hold, it looks suspicious for Li Ling’s parents to have a son living in Hong Kong, which is not considered a part of China proper. So Li Ling leaves the only home that he can remember, and his loving grandparents behind, and travels to Shanghai to live with parents, who are little more than strangers to him. Fortunately, he quickly comes to love them, and makes several important friends in Shanghai. One is the beautiful Lily Zhang- his classmate and protector in his early days at school. The other is Big Head (yes, that is a nickname, but it is one used throughout the book!) whom he meets at violin lessons.

Lily’s father is a history professor at Fudan University in Shanghai, and is considered an enemy of the new regime, based on some historical books and articles that he’d written during his career. Li Ling and Big Head come up with a daring plan to help Lily break her father out of prison, and smuggle him out of Shanghai to the countryside. Their plan is successful, at least, for a while, but it separates Li Ling from his beloved Lily. He’s soon separated from Big Head as well, when Big Head is sent to the countryside to do farm work, while Li Ling is permitted to remain in Shanghai since he is his parent’s only child. Looking for companionship, Li Ling joins the Communist Youth League, an action that gets him into more trouble than he ever anticipated. With Mao’s death, more changes come to China, and Li Ling is able to attend university, where as coincidence would have it, he is reunited with Lily. After some hesitation on her part, the two resume their friendship, Now, both in their twenties, it quickly becomes romantic.

Li Ling narrates his daily life under the various regime changes and his adjustment to each. What he doesn’t experience first-hand, his friends recount. But while the uninformed reader can understand the experiences of the individual, the novel never really goes into the reason for these experiences on a larger level. For example, why is it believed that school children need “re-education”? Why is Big Head sent to do farm work? Why is Li Ling allowed to stay in the city because he is an only child? Why are jobs assigned arbitrarily for that matter, rather than based on skill? I might have appreciated more information regarding some of these questions.

However, it is both fascinating and horrifying to hear about some of the things that these characters endure. Some of it almost defies belief! But as they say, “truth is stranger than fiction!” When Li Ling’s father, a surgeon, loses his job as a medical doctor, he is forced to be a hospital janitor. I felt bad for him. It also seemed like a tremendous waste of a valuable skill. When we learn that surgery is now being performed by Red Guards who “practice” their new skills on patients, I cringed!

People living under these circumstances are forced to take desperate actions at times, in order to survive. Li Ling experiences the time period from a somewhat sheltered vantage point. He faces danger, but nowhere near the terror experienced by his friends, who have to fight to survive. Both Big Head and Lily face the possibility of death from starvation at some point. During her time away from Li Ling, a starving, desperate Lily was forced to make a decision that will shape both of their futures. When they are reunited, she shelters him from this truth- for a time. Here the reader knows that something is wrong, but not what. While Li Ling dismisses Lily’s hesitation, the reader is waiting for the other shoe to drop. And it does. Eventually she becomes unable to keep her secret. It is a secret for which Li Ling resents her for at first, but comes to understand many years later.

Forget Me Not is a fairly short book at 246 pages. Yet it covers nearly thirty years of Chinese history from the point of view of several different characters. It also creates a love story in which the reader becomes invested. Li Ling is a fully drawn character with many strengths and many flaws. Lily is a harder character to know, but that is because we see her through Li Ling’s eyes. As much as he loves her, she always retains an air of mystery. Readers looking for a novel with the scope of an epic but without the length, need look no further than Forget Me Not. It transports the reader to a country of beauty and violence. Cultural values and traditions may be different from what is familiar, but the feelings of love, friendship, hurt, betrayal and hope that the characters experience should be very easy for western readers to understand and identify with.