TLR Tahoma Literary Review – Issue 13 tahomaliteraryreview.com TAHOMA LITERARY REVIEW Number 13 Fall/Winter 2018 Copyright © 2018 Tahoma Literary Review, LLC Seattle • California tahomaliteraryreview.com All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or trans - mitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, includ - ing photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval sys - tem, without permission in writing from the publisher. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, contact the publishers by email at [email protected]. tahoma literary review III Tahoma Literary Review Ann Beman Prose Editor Jim Gearhart Managing Editor Mare Heron Hake Poetry Editor Yi Shun Lai Prose Editor Joe Ponepinto Layout & Design Petrea Burchard Copy Editor Associate Fiction Editors Michal Lemberger Stefen Styrsky Cover Artist Pausha Foley Founding Editors Joe Ponepinto Kelly Davio tahoma literary review V About the Cover “Ales-captem,” Pausha Foley here is a certain feeling one gets when Tfacing mountains covered in snow. The closer one approaches the stronger it becomes—the feeling of still, austere presence. Devoid of sound, devoid of scent. Unmovable, unshakable, untouchable. One could say: lifeless. But it is emphatically not that—rather it is the feeling one experiences when facing the foundations of life. The raw, bare bones of life stripped of all color and sound and emotion. Stripped of meaning, yearning, of striving. Stripped of hopes and dreams, of ambition and desperation alike. When nothing is left but the cold, hard essence of existence. This experience of facing the raw, bare essence of existence is what I attempt to convey through my drawings. This is why I draw in black ink on white paper. Sharp, stark blackness against still, austere white - ness. There is a cedar grove growing high, high in the Sierra Nevada mountains. The trees there are old, grim, towering giants with thick trunks scorched by lightning, riddled by termites, their bark shredded by generations of wild creatures sharpening their claws against them. Overgrown with moss and lichen. Decades after decades they stand still, VI About The Cover spreading their stillness for miles around. One cannot help but feel it when walking among them. One stops talking, one steps softly, one moves slowly. Birds sing, there are squir - rels frisking in the high branches. They do not disturb the stillness. The stillness exists within, not without. This stillness is not passive, it is not a dull - ness of presence —it is its expansion. It is not slack - ening of awareness —it is a perfect state of tension. Tension in balance like that of a guitar string stretched to a perfect tune. This feeling of tense, balanced, alert stillness is what I attempt to convey through my drawings. This is why I draw stony hands trapping a struggling bird. Why I contrast the softness of a flower with the sharpness of a bird’s claw. By juxtaposing beauty against ugliness, sharp - ness against softness, I attempt to convey the dynamic, balanced tension. A number of years ago my husband and I decided to leave our home in California for the French countryside. Neither of us is French, neither of us spoke French at the time. Neither of us had ever lived in France. We had plenty of reasons —we had no end of explanations for our seemingly random choice to move except for the one true one: that we needed to change our lives completely, that we were rapidly sinking deeper and deeper into a rut that would eventually drown us. We didn’t know at that time that instead of waiting for this inevitable end we were taking a hammer to our life. We smashed it ourselves. We sold every - thing we owned. We grabbed a couple of suitcases, stuffed some clothes in them and moved into the unknown. Once in France I chose to enroll in a language course at the local university. It was a splendid course. Very intense. Very well-structured. tahoma literary review VII About The Cover Very effectively taught. I hated it. I hated what amounted to going back to school. I hated the trauma that emerged. A trauma that accompanied the years of education I’d received in my home country only a few coun - tries away from France. The educational system was very much the same. The teachers were very much the same. The classrooms were very much the same. Except for the language being spoken —there I was, back in my adolescent pain. Back in my agonizing teenage past. That I was nearly forty years old made no difference. In self -defense I doodled. I doodled shapes and swirls and patterns and convoluted, surreal creatures. They were keeping me safe and sane among the chaotic memories and feelings emerging from the past to scream into my face in the present. I dove into my drawings. I lost myself in them and when I began to resent the teachers and classmates for bothering me with irregular verbs and conjugations and sentence structures and the proper pronunciations and interrupting my doodling, I quit the course. The course had become a distraction —the drawings were what mattered. I’d never drawn like this. I’d never really known how I wished to draw or what I wished to draw. I tried some different media, some different subjects. I was rela - tively satisfied with the results but never ful- filled, never entranced, never consumed the way I became con- sumed with my doodles. With the sharp, stark, black lines I drew on the austere white paper, outlining shapes and swirls and patterns and VIII About The Cover convoluted, surreal creatures. I have found my medium. I knew that for certain. Underneath the teenage angst, underneath the old trauma I was forced to face and confront again and again, I found my voice and most importantly, I have found my language. The language with which I could describe the essence of my experience. The language with which I could depict the inside of my mind. To convey the essence of my experience, to convey the insights of my mind, is why I draw. That is why I paint. To speak to others? Yes, but chiefly to speak to myself. To create on paper a reality that is a reflection of my reality. To create an experience that is a reflection of my experience. To create an experience of stillness that is a reflection of the stillness that resides within me. To express the tension that spreads throughout me. To pour the inner reality of being myself onto paper and surround myself with the images that reflect me and amplify me, so that the outside matches my inside. So the world I live in becomes one of my own creation, my own design. Completely. Inside and out. tahoma literary review IX Table of Contents About This Issue XII Ghost Dance , Arthur Allen , poetry 3 Crime is Not a Problem at This Time , Tim Conrad, fiction 4 The Augury of Bats , Kiran Kaur Saini, flash fiction 20 Our Jean , Anna Lewis, nonfiction 25 what child is this , Dujie Tahat, poetry 33 Body Parts , Sara Henry, flash fiction 34 Fragile, Liquid, Perishable, Hazardous , Becky Tuch, fiction 37 Wheels , Richard Hoffman, nonfiction 56 The Flare , Jeannine Hall Gailey, poetry 61 My Face That Was , Kathleene Donahoo, flash fiction 62 A Broken Man’s Game , Roel F. Concepcion, fiction 64 The White Cloud and the Human Form , Gina Franco, poetry 75 Sailing Lesson , Michael Harty, poetry 77 On Boyhood , Hope Wabuke, flash nonfiction 78 X mr sausage. , ali whitelock, poetry 81 West Fork Tack & Saddle Co. , Rosanna N. Henderson, fiction 83 Tumbling , Ainsley McWha, flash nonfiction 95 The Vagabond , Steve Trumpeter, fiction 98 The Gunpowder Theory of Life , Mark Jay Brewin, Jr., poetry 115 Wrong Half , Lindsay Fowler, flash fiction 123 Snow , Mary Fancher, fiction 125 Lodestone , Isaac Yuen, flash nonfiction 137 For Your Leaving, My Night -Traveler, Pamela L. Sumners, poetry 139 Cultural Goalposts , Amber Wong, nonfiction 143 , One Night , Rita Banerjee , poetry 151 Contributor Comments 154 You can hear many of the authors in this issue read their stories, poems, and essays at https://soundcloud.com/tahomaliterary/tracks . tahoma literary review XI About This Issue his issue drew a record number of submissions and features 25 Tcontributors. Their works talk of dreams and omens; bodies in motion; how we deal with fear and grief; what we inherit and what we pass on. These stories, essays, and poems range in time and geography from the drought-ridden Midwestern plains of the 1870s to present-day Cheung Chau, Hong Kong. You might say that the overall zeitgeist of this issue is range. Our cover artist, Pausha Foley, finds inspiration in snow-covered mountain ranges and moving into the unknown. Her drawings convey the essence of her experience in sharp black lines on soft white paper. With splashes of color, her “Ales-captem,” our cover illustration, captures a perfect state of tension. Perhaps nothing ranges more widely than the scope of our parental legacies. In “Ghost Dance,” we meet a son in the English Lake District who is on the path of a father who died too soon, and “what child is this” takes into account an immigrant father’s alienation at the hands of America’s current immigration system. “On Boyhood” lays bare a mother’s sympathetic plea to shed the restraints of toxic masculinity by teaching children to be more open about gender roles, “Cultural Goalposts” explores a mother’s Chinese-American cultural inheritance and how the family’s various generations straddle two cultures, and in “Wheels,” a grandfather biking to a neighborhood XII About This Issue café considers the array of experiences assembling within his 8-year- old grandson.