Guest Writers

The Guest Writer page features original work from a growing community of writers and poets who share one key trait: a commitment to seeking the truth through their own unique style, process and sense of craft. Our intent is to feature new work - poetry, short fiction and personal narrative - on an ongoing, weekly basis.

If you are interested in submitting your work and being a featured Guest Writer, we ask that you first read the guidelines, or email words@davejarecki.com to inquire.

Brian Turner earned his MFA from the University of Oregon before serving for seven years in the U.S. Army. He was an infantry team leader for a year in Iraq with the 3rd Styker Brigade Combat Team, and Infantry Division. Prior to that, Turner deployed to Bosnia-Herzegovnia with the 10th Mountain Division (1999-2000). Turner’s poetry has appeared in Poetry Daily, The Georgia Review, American War Poem: An Anthology, and in the Voices in Wartime Anthology published in conjunction with the feature-length documentary of the same name.

Here, Bullet, Turner’s first full-length collection, was published in by Alice James Books, an affiliate of the University of Maine at Farmington. The following five poems are from this collection, and appear with the author’s and the publisher’s permission.

© 2005 by Brian Turner. All rights reserved.

TWO STORIES DOWN

When he jumped from the balcony, Hasan swam
in the air over the Ashur Street Market,
arms and legs suspended in a blur
above palm hearts and crates of lemons,
not realizing just how hard life fights
sometimes, how an American soldier
would run to his aid there on the sidewalk,
trying to make sense of Hasan’s broken legs,
his screaming, trying to comfort him
with words in an awkward music
of stress and care, a soldier he’d startle
by stealing the knife from its sheath,
the two of them struggling for the blade
until the bloodgroove sunk deep
and Hasan whispered to him,
Shukran, sadiq, shukran;
Thank you, friend, thank you.

ASHBAH

The ghosts of American soldiers
wander the streets of Balad by night,

unsure of their way home, exhausted,
the desert wind blowing trash
down the narrow alleys as a voice

sounds from the minaret, a soulful call
reminding them how alone they are,

how lost. And the Iraqi dead,
they watch in silence from rooftops
as date palms line the shore in silhouette,

leaning toward Mecca when the dawn wind blows.

DREAMS FROM THE MALARIA PILLS (TURNER)

This time it’s beautiful.
He’s in the kelp beds somewhere
off the California coast, floating
where green leaves touch the sun,
as if he’s disentangled
from thought itself, as if the mind
has come this far, up from the depths
to release him to the crests and shallows
drifting wave by wave back to shore.

He knows there are bombs
washed up on the beach. There are limbs
of people he has never met. Bandages
soaked in blood and salt.
He knows the Qur’an and the Bible
have washed page by page to shore,
their bindings stripped loose, their ink
blurred into the sea.

And if people are crying there,
wading out in the surf to carry it all
back in, then he hasn’t seen them yet.
The ocean sounds in the bones
of his skull, and the albatross fly
reconnaissance over the waves,
searching for a route home.

OBSERVATION POST #798

It is in the watches of the night
   that impressions are strongest
    and words most eloquent.
         —Qur’an 73:1

Tonight, we overwatch the Market District
by the ruins, where we know of a brothel-house:
green light above the door, windows shuttered
in French panels swung open, gauze curtains
hanging translucent in the heat.

It’s over a hundred degrees, even at dusk.
I scan each story with binoculars
and a smile, hoping to glimpse the girls
drawing open the curtains,
their silhouettes edged in light.

When a woman walks out onto the rooftop
smoking a cigarette and shaking loose her long hair,
everyone wants what I hold in my hands,
but I am stilled by her, transported 7,600 miles
away, as a ghost might gaze upon the one he loves,

thinking, how lovely you are,
your pain and beauty a fiction
I bend into the form of a bridge, anything
to remind me I am still alive.

SADIQ

It is a condition of wisdom in the archer to be patient
because when the arrow leaves the bow, it returns no more.
—SA’DI

It should make you shake and sweat,
nightmare you, strand you in the desert
of irrevocable desolation, the consequences
seared into the vein, no matter what adrenaline
feeds the muscle its courage, no matter
what god shines down on you, no matter
what crackling pain and anger
you carry in your fists, my friend,
it should break your heart to kill.

Joseph Millar is the author of Fortune, from Eastern Washington University Press. His first collection, Overtime (2001), was finalist for the Oregon Book Award. Millar grew up in Pennsylvania, attended Johns Hopkins University and spent 25 years in the San Francisco Bay area, working at a variety of jobs, from telephone repairman to commercial fisherman. His poems have appeared in numerous magazines including TriQuarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, DoubleTake, Ploughshares, New Letters, Manoa, and River Styx. He has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts in Poetry, the Moncalvo Center for the Arts, and Oregon Literary Arts. He now lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, with his wife, poet Dorianne Laux, both of whom are on the faculty of Pacific University’s MFA in Writing program. His poems are published here with his permission.

HOMEMADE KILN
      from Fortune

We humped the fire bricks eight steps down
into the root cellar, laid them up
with castable mortar, the drawings
in Pottery Magazine: archway, damper,
recessed firebox, fuel line fed
from a number two diesel drum
resting above in the grass. We loaded
the pots glazed with cobalt and gold,
laughing and passing a fifth
of Jim Beam. That year my drinking
would land me in jail, I’d wreck
two cars and a five-year marriage
while everywhere the gas crunch choked off
the pumps. Ford’s Pinto with its
exploding gas tank selling into the millions,
Nixon and Iacocca shaking hands on TV.
Soldiers came back from Vietnam,
raspy, thin, haunting the unemployment lines,
hitching rides under freeway bridges
smoking their monster dope in the rain.

We fired the kiln for thirty-two hours
while we drank and played cards, passed
out and slept, while the bright flame growled
and sang to itself. Until both shelves
melted and the pots all fell, broken except
for one yellow vase, shining intact
in the rubble. The new moon rose and set
like a stone over battered fields of Maryland corn,
the pond bottom’s silts, red mud of streambeds
hardened like limestone and flint.
We had nothing to sell, nothing to show,
shoveling burnt shards into the trash.
Cattle slept standing up in the pasture,
the death frost burning under their feet
and a siren began to swell in the distance,
kilos of gray ash traveling away from us:
highway ashes, ashes of flight,
ashes of worship and follow-your-bliss.

COMING HOME
      from Fortune

I’m fifty miles west of town,
a stranger driving this coal dust valley,
bottom land chopped into the river.
Bunch grass stabs its glittering arrows
up through the frozen gravel. I can
remember holidays like repeat episodes
of schizophrenia, furniture breaking
downstairs in the dark, everyone’s heads
bowed like hostages over the evening meal.
I’m passing close to the villages:
Avonmore, Saltsburg, Leechburg, Apollo.
Forgive me my history, I want to say
to those broken hills, the slow river,
it feels like it happened to someone else.
Forgive these ghost’s hands bringing you nothing,
this heart filled with cobwebs and rain.

TELEPHONE REPAIRMAN
      from Overtime

All morning in the February light
he has been mending cable,
splicing the pairs of wires together
according to their colors,
white-blue to white-blue
violet-slate to violet-slate,
in the warehouse attic by the river.

When he is finished
the messages will flow along the line:
thank you for the gift,
please come to the baptism,
the bill is now past due.

We live so much of our lives
without telling anyone,
going out before dawn,
working all day by ourselves,
shaking our heads in silence
at the news on the radio.
He thinks of the many signals
flying in the air around him,
the syllables fluttering,
saying please love me,
from continent to continent
over the curve of the earth.

NEAR THE CONTINENTAL DIVIDE
      from Overtime

I said goodbye to my father in a black Oldsmobile,
unwilling to park and linger, waiting for the flight
to Pittsburgh. It was August, almost time
for his classes, and the mountain sky was clear
over Denver as I herded the big car down
through the switchbacks, leaving the airport behind.
That night I camped by a stream in the foothills
named for a saint I’d never heard of.

I don’t think he’d planned on dying any time soon,
stumping through the terminal doors in moccasins
and shorts, the end of a dead cigarette in his teeth.
He’d insulted my poems as usual,
eaten his pork chops and eggs, leering
at the waitress when she brought the Bloody Marys.
Before he got out of the car he’d stuffed two fifties
into the ashtray and told me to keep firing.

When I was twelve I didn’t want to be President
or King of England. I didn’t want to be in movies
like my children do, lying dazed in the TV’s astral glow
listening to the guitars. I wanted hair on my arms
and big shoulders. I wanted to be a man like him,
draped in mystery. A cigar and a hat flecked with rain
singing, “If I Loved You” on the way to work, or leaning
against the Turb Club bar, relaxed and elegant,
the Racing Form in one hand and a whisky in the other,
gazing down at the horses and sighing, “Christ, Mac,
would you look at the wanton splendor of it all.”

That night in the Rockies, jumpy from five days
of drinking, I couldn’t sleep, listening to the darkness.
I wanted to tell him about the wild mustangs
at Pyramid Lake, the Northern Lights crackling across
the Yukon, ask if he thought they might be angels,
ask if it hurt him that I never came home.

My father was six miles above the earth,
Melville’s Typee in his lap, wedged into an aisle seat
and calling for another gin, the lights winking on
across the wing: red, right, returning,
and his hat pulled low
over the yoked forebones of his skull.
The next day I would drive west through deep canyons
into the splintered light of Utah,
electric dust rising from cracked blue hills
where nobody knew my name,.
Whatever it was he gave me, in the early years
after my mother died,
that fierce kindness I’d required
to believe in the world’s sudden reckonings,
was mine now. In a few months
he’d be gone.
Reagan would be President
and I’d be struggling, bankrupt, divorced.

But that night the stars came down close to the road
like the eyes of the coyote
as I cut across Nevada,
remembering how we collapsed in the snow
when the Steelers lost the title,
and laughing to myself through the darkness
all the way back to the coast.

Paulann Petersen is a former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University whose poems have appeared in many publications including Poetry, The New Republic, Prairie Schooner, and Wilderness Magazine. She has three chapbooks–Under the Sign of a Neon Wolf, The Animal Bride, and Fabrication. Her first full-length collection of poems, The Wild Awake, was published by Confluence Press in 2002. A second, Blood-Silk, poems about Turkey, was published by Quiet Lion Press of Portland in 2004. A Bride of Narrow Escape was published by Cloudbank Books as part of its Northwest Poetry Series in 2006. Her most recent collection, Kindle, was published by Mountains and Rivers Press in 2008. The following poems appear her with the poet’s permission. Visit Petersen’s website to learn more about her work.

A LITTLE PERSPECTIVE
       from Kindle

Seen close enough,
tungsten atoms make
a starburst. Farthest galaxies,
a prick of light.

Tungsten traces lay inside
the tomato I ate this morning.
Its globe held in one hand,
I took it into me

bite by bite. Juice and seed
smeared my chin.
Love apple.
Small, red sun.

Our galaxy lies inside
a cosmos waiting
to swallow me whole.
Night coming–fast.

TRAVELER
       from Kindle

Cast ashore
like some fleck of wood
brought here from afar
by the sea,

you reel–stunned
to breathe this reek of
strange urine, strange perfume
thick in saffron heat.

Here you are, foreign one,
familiar with only
the moon and stars,
a cloud-shaped sky,

the lidless eye of sun.
Take heart: only what floats
could be carried
as far as you’ve come.

AS FALL DAYS CONTINUE THEIR ONWARD COUNT
       from Kindle

I wrap myself in a garment of summer
that carries me back
to the huge garden plot
I tended for years, then left behind
years ago. Far away,

three hundred miles south
and east of here, I carry
a hoe into rows of sweet corn–
chopping at chickweed, purslane, quackgrass,
at sprouts of plantain. By hand I pull out

the interlopers hiding against
inch-thick stalks, then take a rake
to the path of soft dirt
between each row. Rake and step,
rake and step. But not

heedful enough. I have walked
on the earth I so carefully smoothed.
The corn is in tassel. Pollen drifts, thick–
yellow filling each footprint.
Who knows what grows there now.

A TAMING
       from A Bride of Narrow Escape

The bride across the street,
sleek-haired, her fingernails
dipped in red–ran to me flushed
from screaming, awry with fear.
A bird was thrashing, flinging against
pale walls, the picture window,
draperies of her living room.
She was stop-heart
afraid of its frenzied and slow
disintegration, the feathers loosed
and wafting, its refusal
to find the open door.

Her rough boned, no-longer-a-bride
neighbor, I would catch what she couldn’t
bring her finely wrought self
to touch. I would carry it outside,
buoy it home to leafy branches,
into a swath of expanding air.
My fingers long, hands big enough
for its wings to stay safely
pressed along its sides–
heart beating as wildly against
my startled palms
as wilderness itself
held still.

FERAL
       from The Wild Awake

I bleed in a dream.
My hand, clamped
around the muzzle of threat,
lets go. Those milky
teeth are free,
and I bleed

with no reason
for fear. It’s just
color, really
and the lightheaded
reel at the sight
of that color: rush of

wild poppies. Two, three,
a whole rash field,
strew of wet silk
then a fine dust
floating from one black
throat to another.

I let blood in a dream.
No loss, no loss–
it’s merely a step toward
waking, a trail of scent
I leave for each
dream animal to follow.

Penelope Scambly Schott’s publishing credits include a novel, four chapbooks and six full-length books of poetry. Schott has received the 2004 Turning Point Poetry Prize, the Orphic Prize, and a fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. Her most recent book, the verse biography A Is for Anne: Mistress Hutchinson Disturbs the Commonwealth, won the 2008 Oregon Book Award for poetry. She resides in Portland, Oregon, where she writes, paints and hikes. The following poems are featured here with the poet’s permission.

FLYING EAST FOR MY GRANDSON’S BIRTH
      from May the Generations Die in the Right Order, Main Street Rag, publisher

And I’m sailing in high silver over Pendleton and Bozeman
as you journey the last hard inches toward the sill of the pubis.

At 33,000 feet, the outside temperature, according to the screen
and these frost flowers blooming here on the window by my seat,
is minus 59 degrees Fahrenheit.

Council Bluffs and the rectangular plains marking buffalo bones
in late snow. Now the thick MIssissippi twists like an umbilical,
and the cord, coiled through generations, tightens my groin.

Push, they told me, and what else could I do, my back cracking
over the rim of the world?

                        At the darkening edge of the continent,
she is breathing and sweating. Let somebody’s cool hand
sweep damp hair from her forehead.

As I pass over Cincinnati, she is opening in waves and scarlet
birth blood is flowing through us all. East now of Pittsburgh
she is riding her moment of I can’t do this any more, the body
almost inverting itself, and clouds rushing under my wings,
until the lift and gasp in the moving air.

Sometimes we call this
landing.

Child, I will tell you every glorious thing I know:
We are made out of dirt and water. Someday your hands
will have freckles and lines. Many cherished people
have lived and died before you.

Oh, and child, one thing more:
this earth invents us and consorts with us willingly
only because we tell stories.

CONSOLE ME
         from May the Generations Die in the Right Order

The white-faced cattle turning aside
their wide heads–

the afternoons are long catastrophes,
each sunset breakable.

Behind white railings of porches,
shadows fracture;

no one descends the steps.

All night,
during and during and during,

my cheek wrinkles
on a cool pillowcase.

The peace of pain: to expect nothing
and get it,

until all I recall about comfort

is a flock of birds
on the one flat spot in the ocean.

THE BIRDS OF SORROW
         from Baiting the Void, Dream Horse Press, publisher

Stand too long in tall grass,
and they will build their nests
in your uncombed hair.
With small twigs,

they will pick, pick at your scalp until
they unweave your cap of misgivings,
and give you up to pure despair.
A thousand sorrows

swoop and hover over bent grass.
For every clump of grass,
there are many sorrows
and each sorrow

is named sorrow or bunch-grass
or flyaway-grass or broken thing.
Winds rise until your eyes burn.
The round

black eyes of a meadowlark,
slit eyes of a barred owl,
shut and open,
open and shut.

Around you in frozen grasses
the feathers fall, unpreened.
You may say shroud
or yes, white birds,

come peck my eyes blind.

EXTRA INNINGS WITHOUT MY MOTHER
         from Baiting the Void

The spotted backs of your hands, smooth
as the palm of a catcher’s mitt, thump
of a called strike. We are two teammates
in an old game: the game of getting old.
How restful this scuffed field, the sagging
scoreboard. I need never be glamorous
of spiffy or sophisticated, never get rich.
I need only become your orphan up here
in the bleachers like the crotch of a tree,
peanut skins drifting to the dugout roof.

When I try to describe how safe I’ll be,
I remember the white backs of her hands,
her slim fingers, towers of golden rings,
two strikes against me, my rough slide
home. Now I am stacking the top half
of a peanut shell, lid of a sarcophagus
expectant in the great museum, empty,
though inlaid with topaz.

David D. Horowitz founded and manages Rose Alley Press. His newest collection, Stars Beyond the Battlesmoke, was released in November of 2008, and his previous collections include Wildfire, Candleflame; Resin from the Rain; and Streetlamp, Treetop, Star. His poems have appeared in a number of literary journals, and he gives frequent readings in and around Seattle, where he lives. In 2005, Horowitz won the PoetsWest Achievement Award. In 2007, he edited, as well as published, the Rose Alley Press anthology: Limbs of the Pine, Peaks of the Range.

Cure

These headlines sear and spear and scald.
They spurt such bloody violence
His seasoned heart still feels appalled
To worried saddened silence.

He’s heard of panaceas, saviors,
The Prophet’s signs. They make him wince.
Not snide, yet not naive, he favors
A balance tuned from long experience.

Into Monday

Dusk’s saffron-ruby smoke above the mountain range
   Greys weekend into distance.
Pines print consistency on silhouetted change
   And blacken in persistence
Through night. Dawn blazes, then extinguishes, the lamps,
Lake’s silver silence beaming shaky scarlet lance
   And freshly lit existence.
Soon deadlines govern dreams, and sky turns plainly blue.
Most hurry to their job, ignore the window view.

Sparrow

I’m an ounce
Of flit and bounce,
An inch
Of hop and flinch.
I chirp and chatter,
Perch and scatter,
Alert, still.
The world can kill
And think it doesn’t matter.

No Given

Pine, spruce project on twilight’s ruby screen
As lamps define arterials and streets,
And freeways flow commuters home. Rose streaks
Stretch opal stratosphere to starry skein,

And data, deadlines, details fade to night.
Day’s bribe, threat, and deceit still live–no, thrive.
Integrity must battle to survive,
In shadowed lunar scene must sharpen sight.

Peter Sears is the author of two books of poems, The Brink and Tour, New & Selected Poems. He received his M.F.A. from the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa and is the 1999 winner of the Peregrine Smith Poetry Contest. He currently teaches in the M.F.A. program at Pacific University. The following poems come from his most recent chapbook, Luge. .

Luge

I love snow, long gone now from the valley,
but still patching and striping the Cascade
mountains and, beyond the front range, the
white triangle of Three-Fingered Jack shining.
Makes me want to try out for luge. They hold
tryouts around the country – who knows,
there might be a senior circuit. I love the high
banking in the turns as if the luge is going to
shoot off the track. Perfect for me: push off
and pray. The motion at the start when you grip
the handles and swing back and forth in place,
that I can already do. I do it on the floor with
my cat, watching a ball game. I can learn how
to lie back down once I push off. I’m not sure
whether you steer with your hands or with
your feet. How do you hold on, though, through
the tunnel racket and see where you’re going?
If you look up, you lose speed. If you don’t
look up, you could go over a bank into a tree.
Then again, if you must go, it’s not bad, as
long as you go all the way out. Otherwise,
you’re farmed out to a faux old country-club;
you are the third guy in the second row of
rockers on the front porch, rocking gently
—there are speed limits—but you are no
trouble maker, you take your meds smiling
off the tray in your own plastic cup, and you
don’t swear or do those mating calls any more.
Your baseball cap, you pull it own because
your face has become a little pocky from too
much sun as a kid. It looks like you walked in
the wrong door of a tavern dart contest.

Dear Giant Squid

This is a fan letter. I don’t care what the Japanese scientists say,
I saw them on TV getting all excited about how they have photos
of you and almost caught you by dropping juicy bait down to
the creepy depths where you live, along with a fancy camera.
Next time, eat the camera. Their footage shows you approaching
the bait and taking it and getting caught, then dragging the line
up and down, around and around. When you finally ripped yourself
free, you lost a tentacle, which they dangled on a post as if
they had been down there fighting you with their bare hands.
What a joke! You would have wrapped them – right? – and popped
their eyeballs out. So now you know they won’t quit until they
get you. They will scrounge more money and more cameras
and more bait and more boats because that is the way
humans are, most all of them some of the time and some of
them all of the time. So you had better head down, way down,
and don’t wise off and try to take on some whale. A drawing
in a book when I was a kid showed a whale as black as the black
sea it dove down through, with its jaws open over most
of the tentacles of a giant squid, just like you, and the whale’s
eye right up next to the giant squid’s eye. Made me sick,
I turned the page, then turned back, I couldn’t help it,
those jaws closing on so many tentacles, about to chop them
like so much spaghetti. That’s how we humans are, bloodthirsty,
even when we are young and small and not so mean yet.
There is a lot about us not to like. The scientists won’t rest
until they lift you breathless out of the water and lower you
into a cage, take lots of measurements, speak in low, earnest
voices to the eager public, and shake hands all around.

Dream of Following
     with a nod to David Romtvedt

I am following my father and mother,
following them although I don’t much like
the idea, and I don’t much like

that the distance to them grows smaller,
so small I’m catching up to them. You’d think
we’d have much to say to one another.

We don’t. My father motions me
to look back over my shoulder.
There’s my daughter following me.

That’s mean of him. I want to hail her,
tell her to slow down.
But I don’t. I turn back, they’re gone.

Stanley Fisher has been a writer working in advertising for 30-years. His plans to become a teacher after college took a detour just before graduating when his team won a statewide advertising contest and Fisher won a job writing for a top radio station in Portland, Oregon. His work in “persuasion, coercion, and propaganda” has earned a national Telly award for creative excellence in cable TV advertising. Fisher’s Simple Pleasures essay project continues and those who’d like to respond to the same request that started the project: “Tell me your simple pleasure, and why it’s meaningful to you,” are invited to do so by emailing Fisher at Stanley.fisher@aSimplePleasureAday.com.

NOTE: Stanley Fisher went off and joined those cotton clouds at the end of January, 2009. We miss him down here on earth and think of him whenever the sun breaks through.

Blue skies.

With those two words the heart lightens, troubles ease and imagination expands to hold half of heaven. If only we could have blue skies all the time. For much of the year you can, if you enjoy living in deserts of sand, or ice.

It’s not the blue sky itself that lightens some things and expands others; too much blue sky causes oxidation, wilt, sunburn. It’s the way the sky changes out of winter’s grey flannel into a new spring suit, or when it removes its rain clouds like taking off a broad-brimmed hat to show me its sunniest smile. And when that beautiful face is accessorized with a necklace and earrings made from huge clouds white as cotton puffs, I fall in love with the sky all over again.

My home state, Oregon, is a place immensely proud of its mythology and despite the pressures of truth and the inquiries of outsiders, meteorologists, and other doubters, we strive to preserve it. One of our greatest myths is that it rains here all the time. Another is that if you live here, you will grow webbed feet.

Truth is: the rain myth does not apply to the eastern two-thirds of the state. That Oregon is semi-arid high desert, a family secret of sorts hidden behind the slogan, “Cool Green Vacationland,” pressed into license plate frames and printed on travel brochures from the state’s department of propaganda and myth preservation.

But here in western Oregon’s Willamette Valley, the most populous part of the state, just ask anyone: it is oddly wet and blue skies are oddly rare. Cars don’t wear out here, they rust. And people don’t really get fat here they just absorb the atmospheric moisture and swell.

I have cousins in southern California; they wash their cars a lot. They like not having to think much about blue skies, they take them for granted. In Oregon we take grey skies for granted. We like not having to think much about washing cars; we know it’s going to rain.

When you’re a child you spend a lot of time looking down at the ground, at bugs and worms and things; and a lot of time looking up at clouds shaped like ships that turn into sharks that turn into ice cream sundaes. And in the middle of your life you spend a lot of time looking straight ahead.

Grey days and mid-life are much the same, a lot of looking straight ahead, cloudy with a chance of drizzle, not much momo to look up. Then it happens: one of those rare days to see ice cream sundaes in the clouds, one of those days to get wrapped in the embrace of bliss. The temperature draws me outside and my blue sky, home from some sunnier escape, presents herself bejeweled with cotton-puff clouds.

Rare days like that cover me like the lopsided boyhood tents built with sheets borrowed long ago from mom’s linen closet. Over cords strung from the top of dad’s favorite chair to a handle on the opposite cabinet hung a miniature sky of cotton percale and beneath it new worlds came and went.

Rare days like that nudge me off the course of myself and my own little world and my own brief life and make me look up and recall ships and sharks and connect with things greater. Whether it’s those fantastic scenes imagined beneath living room tents or today’s expansive reality, the effect is still the same. Calm hues, brilliant highlights, and soft shadows wash over me in currents that gather up troubles, fears, worries—and for a moment—sweep them away.

When one of those cotton puffs floats between the sun and I and day’s brightness suddenly darkens, it is the drawing shut of an eyelid in the sky. Heaven is winking. Someone, something, out there, seems to think I’m still worth flirting with.

Some tell stories about their “out-of-body” experiences. I’ve never had one of those but every time blue skies brush aside the usual grey backdrop and cotton-puff clouds distract me from the usual forward gaze, there’s an “out-of-me” experience that never lasts quite as long as I’d like. But as it departs it always does so cordially with a quiet promise of coming again another day.

And as real life reasserts itself I return to wherever I was before getting nudged off course; a little happier, a little saner and a little more certain it’s possible to face whatever troubles there may be by looking up at blue skies and cotton-puff clouds.

Robin Cody is the author of Ricochet River, a novel, and Voyage of a Summer Sun, winner of the 1996 Oregon Book Award for creative non-fiction. He lives in Portland with his wife, Donna. An earlier version of “Deaf Basketball” appeared in Northwest Magazine in November, 1988.

When you referee a deaf basketball team, keep in mind that the players are deaf. Blow the whistle and they just keep going. How would they know? Make crisp visual signals, and allow them a little more touching on defense. You wouldn’t think sound helps track a basketball opponent, but apparently it does.

I refereed the Oregon State School for the Deaf, from Salem, at Westside Christian School in Portland. Varsity girls. The deaf girls played basketball with exuberant energy and unthrottled emotion. They had fun. I’d forgotten there isn’t much laughing out loud in high school basketball. These girls emitted quick shrieks of surprise or pleasure as they went grunting and careening about the court. They lost badly but cheerfully to the Christians.

They did have one good athlete, a tall blonde with fine springs in her legs and a bright spark to her eye. Gazelle-like, she moved. She snagged rebounds that weren’t meant for her. She fired sharp outlet passes. On offense she had a nose for the basket, but her teammates seldom delivered her the ball.

Late in the game, this gazelle girl got the ball in the key. She took a couple of steps without remembering to dribble, and drilled a sweet hook shot.

My referee partner, Ed Denmark, a well-to-do hardwood dealer in real life – had whistled the play dead. Traveling. The poor girl’s celebration at having sunk her pretty shot was eclipsed now as she realized it wouldn’t count. She grabbed the ball and slammed it to the floor with sufficient force that – although she right away knew better and tried to smother it – the ball rebounded above her head.

The normal and accepted procedure here is for the referee to blow a T. A technical foul. It was Denmark’s call, not mine. What would he do? I held my breath. The kid was sorry. She’d already lost that neat hoop. Her team was getting crushed. Mercifully, Denmark decided just to warn her. He would explain it to her.

But she’s deaf.

The game stopped. We summoned her coach from the bench to sign this decision to the girl. She was contrite but thoroughly puzzled, expecting the T but getting words. So you see. Mercy was the wrong call, the same call I would have made in Denmark’s spot. When you referee a deaf basketball team, keep in mind the kids are just deaf. They’re not stupid. The girl deserved a T.

* * *

After the game I showered, changed clothes, and settled into the deaf section of the bleachers to watch the boys’ teams warm up. The gazelle girl was not wearing a cheerleader outfit, but she posted herself among the cheerleaders and joined right in.

Deaf cheerleaders have all the right moves, but they voice no sound. Here they trotted over to the opposite side of the court to face the home team fans. They mimed an introductory cheer that included acrobatic routines and finished with individual salutes — “Hi, I’m Deborah,” “Hi, I’m Judy” — you know that one. Each cheerleader, in turn, tried to say her name out loud. In most cases, you could tell what her name was.

When they came back to our side, an American flag appeared at mid-court. We all stood at attention, with hands over hearts. A chubby girl from the Christian school sang “The Star Spangled Banner” into a microphone. She was good. She was so good singing the anthem that a great wave of sadness passed through me. I’m not what you would call a sucker for the national anthem, but this was chilling.

When the anthem was over, the deaf kids knew it was OK to make noise. In fact the hearing-impaired can generate unseemly noise just taking a seat, unwrapping a Snickers bar, chewing potato chips and signing joy. While our section was preoccupied that way, the Christian fans across the court had bowed in silence. A young man at the scorer’s table was reciting a prayer.

Nobody else in my section knew it.

Soon the adult sitting next to me – probably a teacher – saw what was up. Her look of panic must have mirrored my own as our eyes met. She tried to nudge and sign silence through our rude section of the bleachers, but we probably succeeded only in drawing more attention from the prayerful. It was awful. What would these Christians think of us?

When their gaffe finally dawned on the deaf students, the prayer was over. They, too, felt awful. For maybe three full seconds. Just long enough for each cheerleader to face the home crowd and – apparently spontaneously, all at once – slap a palm to her forehead and roll eyes heavenward in a how-stupid-could-we-be-please-forgive-us gesture that would break your heart, it was so correct.

J.D. Smith was awarded a 2007 Fellowship in Poetry from the United States National Endowment for the Arts. He has published two collections of poetry: The Hypothetical Landscape and Settling for Beauty. His poetry has received three Pushcart nominations, while his essays and reviews have appeared in American Book Review, Grist and Pleiades.

Smith’s newly published children’s book, The Best Mariachi in the World, is a bilingual (English/Spanish) embedded text picture book that incorporates cultural tradition, wishes, and finding happiness.

The following poems and essay excerpt are previously published, and are featured here with the author’s permission. An interview with J.D. Smith will appear Friday, 11/14 on the blog. Visit his website to read more of his work.

Elegy

Dusk. The plangent geese migrate.
Ragged chevrons that used to bisect a continent
now settle near a golf course and the retaining pond
of an office park, small oxymoron
inside the larger, land development.
The flocks will rest in head-tucked clusters,
low, transient monoliths, like modest gods
left by a miniature people.

Still, the land-crossing cry
persists as if to close
not a day, but a season,
and mark its loss
with a portion of the brokenness
that informs the haiku’s heart
and the weightless bone, somewhere in my heart,
that is struck and softened
by the sentimental string arrangement
that bathes the climax
of a made-for-TV film
about the latest disease
or another private distress
raised to a social issue, if not elevated:
all is forgiven, by everyone, at death’s door.
Inevitably as that death,
the notes well up, break forth,
and with them my tears.

Pendejo que soy!
The small tide breaks
against my reason.
Pendejo que soy!
The small tide breaks
against my reason.
Literally, in Spanish,
what a pubic hair, meaning fool, I am.
Even my confession is reduced.
In Latin Augustine cried Mea saura!
Literally, what a lizard I am,
Meaning the serpent’s cousin,
and hardly less intimate
with the foot-hardened ground.
Mea maxima saura!
What a great lizard I am,
shouted across the gulf
between perdition and salvation,
showing the passage that awaits
those who can summon
such heights and depths.

From my depths, I’ve summoned
a spiral thread of hair, less than
what I could have called myself,
without affecting a second language:
asshole.

Others might.
I should welcome a promotion to simple flesh,
untroubled by distant sounds that weaken
and arrive to no effect, no more than
an earthquake on another continent disturbs
an office park’s builders, or their earnings.
I could look past the short flights
now joined to the landscape
like sparrows, or a soybean field.

(published in Innisfree Poetry Journal, Issue 1)

Bout

I punch a gray wall
and break nothing.

The bones of my fingers
have not cracked,
their skin is not scraped.

We can spar like this for hours
until, bored with me,
the low fog burns away.

(published in right hand pointing)

Coitus

It is only flesh,
More or less the same compendium

Of water, laced
With carbon and trace minerals,

That makes up a bison’s leg,
The pork on a plate.

It is only flesh
Meeting more of the same,

The means for a double helix
To spiral through time.

It is simply flesh
In an aroused state,

Soon satisfied,
Made a vessel

Of attachment, of regret, infused—
afflicted—by what some call a spirit,

Whose noted powers
Do not include taking back

The entanglement of flesh with other flesh,
Now complex as a molecule.

(from Settling for Beauty, by Cherry Grove Collections)


An Immodest Proposal (excerpt)

How a little blue pill could get big results — in species conservation, we mean

Quick: what do sea turtles, black bears, and Philippine fruit bats have in common? At first glance, not much. They don’t look alike, and they have very different ranges and habitats. In fact, one would be hard-pressed even to find them on any of the same guest lists.

But these creatures share one very important trait. Along with seahorses, rhinoceroses, and macaques, they are all hunted, sold, and consumed for use in potions and dishes with alleged “aphrodisiacal properties.” For men. And I think we know what that means.

In a more perfect world, we men might be willing to age gracefully and hang up — well, whatever it is we hang up, say, spurs — and retire from certain pleasures of the flesh. When that happens, though, men will be too distracted to care. We’ll be busy watching pigs fly.

Until that day arrives, there will be a market for products that enhance “male performance” (presumably not in rugby). In Asia and Central America, among other places, this means resorting to traditional, animal-based remedies. Two tragedies can result. The first is personal: they may not work. The second is even, ahem, greater: threatened species are being hunted to extinction, with untold consequences for ecosystems and economies.

As experts in international development know, however, this is generally not a matter of good guys and bad guys, black hats and white. Poachers, often poor and uneducated, are simply trying to make a living by meeting a demand. If the market for their contraband product dries up, or if alternative livelihoods are available, they might well find other work.

Of course, this is easier said than done. Behavior and culture take time to change, and there is no silver bullet. There is, however, a little blue pill.

Yupper. That one. Sildenafil citrate, though no one calls it that. It is currently sold by Pfizer (in which I have no stock) under the name of Viagra, but even after the patent expires the name seems likely to remain in the language, like Kleenex or Xerox, as the term for a whole product category and not just one brand.

Of course, there are now other products for the treatment of erectile dysfunction, which goes by the friendly acronym ED. (This sounds like someone you might play poker with once a week.) Treatments for our pal ED now include Bayer and GlaxoSmithKline’s Levitra (vardenafil hydrochloride), a brand name derived from the Latin root of the verb “to raise,” and ICOS and Eli Lilly’s Cialis (tadalafil), which sounds like an MTV VJ from the late 1980s. More brands are forthcoming and, as with Viagra, after the patent period expires, the eventual generic market for these drugs is expected to be sizeable.

The implication is clear. If we want to save black bears and rhinos, we have to get these drugs into the hands of the people who would otherwise be paying for those animals’ parts or doing the hunting for themselves.

(Read the entire article from the March 22, 2005 issue of Grist online.)

John C. Morrison’s poetry has appeared in numerous journals, including the Seattle Review, the Cimarron Review, and Southern Poetry Review. Most recently, he directed the Writers in the Schools program for Literary Arts or Oregon, and currently teaches poetry at Washington State University, Vancouver. His first full-length collection of poems, Heaven of the Moment, is a finalist in the 2008 Oregon Book Awards for poetry, and three of the poems below (“Evening Dress,” “My Neighbor’s Dog,” and “Spinoza and the Morning”) are included in the collection.

Evening Dress

for my son

One day the sky will open,
promise, like there’s a zipper
invisible from our side. One

long zip from zenith,
where cirrus clouds curve
mare tail strands, down

to the horizon, green peaks
of distant spruce trees. What’s next?
What’s behind? No, it’s not

a giant pant fly, God’s prick
ready to douse our world, his infinite
love and patience at end. No.

Promise. The sleek zipper
belongs to the back of a long
dress. From sweet wisps at cool nape

down to dimple a tip of the tongue
above the buttocks. While everyone
goes about their day in cars,

on sidewalks, in dusty offices,
all beholden to a dull script,
you will see what to reach for

as the dress slips off into evening,
into darkness. Promise. Close your eyes,
draw her close, breathe stars.

My Neighbor’s Dog

Better for me had my neighbor died
before we began to drink out our nights
at a table stained with red wine:
his eyes, two tight circular syllogisms,
two eight balls rolled back black and white
into his head. The old philosopher
who named his dog Being. Capital B,
Being. His colleagues at every
university struggle with phantom
answers. Professor Tiederman dismisses
them as alchemists and names Being,
discovers Being becoming, Being,
which wasn’t and now is, Being
born in a litter of nine retrievers.

And the world, roundly, makes too much sense,
like looking in your rearview
after a long day at the end
of a long, straight street to see
slow traffic laid out behind you:
braided silver glinting wet
in the sunlight through clouds. You say
how wonderful to sit still beside
a black van pumping country rock
at an interminable stoplight
and then be here: woven in the bright braid,
and then be here. Being is like that,
halfway in my tipped garbage can
one minute; the next, shredding
in his bird-soft mouth my copy
of the daily Oregonian.

I’m home Sunday, ignoring my headache
from La Salles, ignoring the sticky smell
of Chianti in my sinuses, the smell
of Tiederman’s tedious chatter,
his illicit flurries while his wife,
sweet Janice, sits home warming her feet
under the belly of Being,

Being. Ignore it all because my son
shouldn’t see his old man drunk
or marred by wine. Better for him to play
street football unencumbered while I rake leaves
and the leavings of Being, lean
against the sweetgum and watch his team
huddle for a second down call.
Read the lips on my son, the light receiver,
he’s telling Tiederman’s boy Lewis,
that foul-mouthed shit, Throw it to me
on a fly pattern. Bent over at their hips,
the five study the line my son
draws on his dirty palm, a crisp line
up the gutter to the Hubner’s driveway.
The quarterback Lewis, always the arbiter
of cruel mediocrity, says
loudly enough for Being to hear
and howl out back, Fuck you. Everyone
goes short. Listen to him, son. Listen
hard. Listen to Being scratch at the fence gate.

Spinoza and the Morning

The surgeon knotted sutures one step
too slow to seal the net of vessels
oozing around his heart. Mother

rocked, framed by a window
shining on the penultimate hour.
Stunned, stuck like the late night

was clear pitch, I watched the dark
for sign of morning. Young, at school
I’d write for philosophy and push up

from the kitchen chair to step outside,
breathe, and see the strange stars
spun to us from the other hemisphere

and return with less time to Spinoza,
the lens grinder who taught relentless trust.
By morning when I packed my papers

in my bag and started toward campus,
I was drunk on exhaustion and his axiom
that we are God thinking. So let God learn regret.

A few years later at work, the other janitor
and I scrubbed floors, toilets, grime inside
light fixtures so close to sunrise, he insisted

we have the light find us facing west
and the great Sacramento Valley.
The streets were empty as we drove, reckless,

balancing large paper cups of dark beer
through the dim. We outlived our folly.
Spinoza wouldn’t survive the glass dust

that lacerated his lungs. Dad,
bloated by another four liters of saline,
another twenty pounds of pressure to give his heart

traction, ceased, and three of us, quiet
as dust in the room, struggled to remember
how day begins. Those years before

out of the car and up the rocky hill’s dirt path,
my friend and I turned to see
already it was bright morning across the river

in the towns of Fruto and Chrome. We stood
in the shadow of the Sierra
watching the wall of light careen our way,

emblazing pools of distant rice fields
and the deep green of almond orchards.
Faster than thought, light swept toward us,

claiming creek and stones, onto us
and over us, a wind from heaven to warm
our backs, lay our shadows in the grass.

Our Brother the Rain

More than ascribes to
more than holds to
more than maintains
the rain
the rain insists.
We go quiet
mortified
even ashamed for the rain
who pushes
pushes the point
that was never really in question
that was only ever a friendly call
for clarification
and we were all
more than completely clear
a cloudburst back
a silvery syllogism long ago
and at that moment
the rain had a point
well-made
well-put
a bon-mot
well-taken
and now a point long since
conceded
one the rain made first softly
deliberately but gently
then with increasing vigor
until we have no choice
but admit the mania
of our brother the rain
who will finish by weeping
our brother the rain
who blusters toward torrential
deaf to our deep hush.

Last Work

For my strain of cancer, after
surgery, radiation was perfunctory,
a mopping up of the most likely dead
and gone. Unless a car or some other great
stroke of dark luck took me,
I’d live through my youth to have
a few amber years to shuffle

on the sidewalk, an old man
in the luscious summer shade. But what
about the already elderly men around
the waiting room like around

a campfire, ringed by forest-green drapes,
the quiet eerie as the secret heart
of a temple? We would arrive
at the clinic in street clothes and emerge
from behind the cloth wall to join
the circle in a faded but sterile gown.

In conversation, they were
always onto a project, new circuitry
for the basement, laying a slab
of smooth concrete. Each man

had a bit better than 50/50
and in one sentence I’ll teach you
about both odds and faith:
Within a year half would rise
glorified, the rest would remain

on our planet with me but have
a clean garage, the mower slick-
oiled and blade-sharp, and be ready
for a lonely, languorous recovery.