1 Ginosko Literary Journal #17 Winter 2015-16 www.GinoskoLiteraryJournal.com 73 Sais Ave San Anselmo CA 94960 Robert Paul Cesaretti, Editor Member CLMP Est. 2002 Writers retain all copyrights Cover Art “Beach” by Sarah Angst www.SarahAngst.com 2 Ginosko (ghin-océ-koe) A Greek word meaning to perceive, understand, realize, come to know; knowledge that has an inception, a progress, an attainment. The recognition of truth from experience. γινώσκω 3 To write the red of a tomato before it is mixed into beans for chili is a form of praise. To write an image of a child caught in war is confession or petition or requiem. To write grief onto a page of lined paper until tears blur the ink is often the surest access to giving or receiving forgiveness. To write a comic scene is grace and beatitude. To write irony is to seek justice. To write admission of failure is humility. To be in an attitude of praise or thanksgiving, to rage against God, or to open one's inner self and listen, is prayer. To write tragedy and allow comedy to arise between the lines is miracle and revelation. Pat Schneider 4 C O N T E N T S Say it with Feathers Jay Merill Sainthood Old Woman Hanging Out Wash High Contrast Mitchell Krockmalnik Grabois HE DIDN’T REFUSE Sreedhevi Iyer The Waters of Babylon Andrew Lee-Hart Breast Fragments When the World Was Tender The Wolves Have Sheared the Sun The Prophet of Horus Grant Tabard Conversations in an Idle Car Filling in Jack C Buck The Man Who Lost Everything Erica Verrillo Doused Your Summer Dress Magenta Stockings Promenade John Greiner Dead Fish Jono Naito Misnamed Ghetto Melissa Brooks A Country Girl Rudy Ravindra 5 Heavy Compulsion Samuel Vargo The Company of Strangers Michael Campagnoli Lions Venetian Balloons C. R. Resetarits SHE CONTEMPLATES A TRIP SIRENS Jacqueline Doyle The Girls We Love Alaina Symanovich Quadriga Jeff Streeby Nefanda Jocelyn Deane THE COLORS OF MIRRORS NAUTICAL DREAM ON THE LAST DAY OF MY FIFTIES I LEAD A TOUR THROUGH NORTH BEACH APPARITION VACANT PUBLIC SPACE Mark J Mitchell North of Falling To Me To You Smoke Over Water Ron Gibson, Jr. The Taste of Blood and Oak Amanda Nicole Corbin 6 Hive Mind The Peacock Crawlers Tornado Moon Highway Andrew Jarvis Shadowboxing The Taste of Water Opium and Opera My Heart Needs a Home Skin Jeremiah Castelo SHAKEY John Haggerty Coterminous Lives Kirie C. Pedersen TO CYNTHIA IN THE CITY OF LOVE Bill Tremblay Black Crush Adam “Bucho” Rodenberger The Concrete Daniel Abbott LIVING UP TO EXPECTATIONS Kim Farleigh The Kudzu Stanley’s House of Power Jelly’s Travels Reptiles Inside the Body J Todd Hawkins Black Dog Steve Passey 7 Lens The Memory of What Is Not Memory Belonging to Sgt. Bill Culpepper Metallurgists, All Mothers Who Die Alina Stefanescu FINITUDES DUST MOTES ELEGY (FOR WENDY) A BACKWARD GLANCE Anne Whitehouse Excerpt from the novel Ravensbone Catherine Rosoff Brother Caleb Blake Kilgore Joseph Caroll Ann Susco The Woods Robert Earle Spit & Shine Original Flight Pattern Logged Conflagration: August 1971 James Claffey Dawn Telephone Absence of Subject Historiography Elizabeth Light The Keeper SONNET IN NEGATIVE CAPABILITY At Easter The Lupines Staged Position At The Hips of the Hills THE AUDIENCE-- Waiting for W.S. Merwin To Read OUT OF CENTER, LOOK BACK IN WORLD NEWS AT HOME Julia Vose 8 Swan in Love Susan Phillips Windows Portrait of a Lady After an Unsuccessful Poem Out from the Baghdad Mental Hospital Train to Stuttgart Self-Portrait in an Expanding Universe Gary Charles Wilkens My Mother Has Been Very Ill Angels, Above Janelle Elyse Kihlstrom AN ANTIQUE CERTAINTY BOOM IN DUBAI CLOUD DRAGON’S GIRL FLYING FINN J Tarwood In the Mental Ward Distortion Hide and Seek On the Eve P C Vandall horse trading on the blue mesa Rick Richardson Hi T. E. Cowell After Alaska The Walk Home My Father’s Cereal Trash Day Therése Halscheid 9 DOG HOUR OF THE WOLF UNIVERSITY AT DROUGHT’S END HONEY (HOSPITAL POEM VI) FLAT Chelsea Eckert [untitled] Jeremi Handrinos Okra Mojave Swing Scott Sherman Rituals of Grief: How Gen Y Is Reinventing Mourning and Making Every Life Matter Edissa Nicolas The Consequences of Violence Steven Thomas Howell C O N T R I B U T O R S 10 Say it with Feathers Jay Merill A young unnamed woman sits on a sl eeping bag in a doorway twirling a feather in one hand. My mum and dad have come again today. As usual they’re unable to speak. In my family there are two opposing pictures of how a woman is. On my father’s side she’s a dazzler; on my mother’s, a pale grey goose. Or that is the way I felt when my mother said, ‘It’s the male birds that have the bright plumage. There’s no getting away from that.’ I couldn’t help wondering why Dad got together with my mum. My mother’s own explanation would have been that a man might like to flirt with sparkly but he wouldn’t want to marry it. At six I experimented with the background-goose image but as a teen became a party-girl and went for glam. If nobody wanted to marry me I was fine with that. Dazzle was my middle name. My mother has an ascetic streak and Dad an urge for the colourful splash. But it became clear to me that both approaches were rooted in the world of appearances. And I wanted more for myself than that. I found my parents superficial. My hostile manner led to rows. They skulked together like dissatisfied children while I berated them with statements about the importance of the real. Funny it should be me who brought them together in the end. I got heavily into politics, wanted the parents to know what was going on everywhere around them, expecting my mum and dad to denounce the iniquities of the age. I ached for them to have an awareness of global consciousness and the effects of poverty but they were too busy feathering their nest. They clung to consumerism as though it were a god. She stands and wraps her sleeping bag round herself, indicating cold, the feather hangs limp in one hand. The parents stood together in a show of unity and I was the one at odds. This was a new phenomenon as throughout my entire childhood they’d been at war. One or the other of them was always on my side for the purpose of doing the other down. When I joined Occupy the goose-feathers and the party-feathers flew at home. After which they kind of twined together as Mum and Dad joined forces against me. I couldn’t bear to watch and guess what, I didn’t have to. I moved lock and stock into the St Paul’s site, because how could I feel anger about the greed and poverty which were rife in our society and yet do nothing? When the site closed down I was on the street – to me it was a moral statement. Gave me a sense of solidarity. My mum and dad saw me one day begging by the roadside. Since then they’ve followed me around. 11 Then she holds up the feather and blows it away in the wind. They have come to persuade me to mend my ways. I could have dazzled in more than name or I could have been the sensible dull one letting the men wear the brighter feathers. Either get-up they’d have understood. But the Real Me is too much for them to take. 12 by Mitchell Krockmalnik Grabois Sainthood Radioactive giantism will feed the masses. My green writing glows on the page, not even a page anymore, a screen, infinitely mutable, no sign anywhere of a cross-out, as if I were immaculate, error-free, radioactive, gigantic. The masses will crawl out from under their collapsed garment factories. They will brush their damp and matted hair from their foreheads. They will pick up knives and forks spilled from the broken cafeteria and they will attack the hundred-foot oarfish, prehistoric and tasty, and the one-hundred-sixty-foot squid that washed up on a Fukushima tide. My errors melt like snow in the Colorado sun the day after a storm, and leave no trace. I am nominating myself for sainthood. Calamari for one and all. Calamari for your tired and poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. My errors disappear like a perfect crime, a perfect murder. The process of creation is fat-free, gluten-free, violence-free. 13 Old Woman Hanging Out Wash 1. After I heard about the murder of twenty children in their crayola classroom, I descended the splintery stairs to my cellar and sat behind my drums, and beat them. By the time the other members of my band showed up, the bassist, who works as a bartender, the guitarist, whose girlfriend went back to Arkansas, and the lead singer, dark as a gypsy, I was frothed, my black t-shirt soaked with sweat, my arms pumped like a bodybuilder’s, the Mounds of Venus at the base of my thumbs hard as walnuts. My dog, who I’d saved from the pound and normally likes rock music, cowered behind the water heater as if the shooter of children were in the room with his assault rifle. I got up to give him a lamb treat and smooth his ears back and tell him that everything was going to be all right.