 Arlington Literary Journal an ejournal also known as ArLiJo, is located in Arlington, Virginia and is sponsored by Gival Press. The intent of ArLiJo is to feature a variety of authors/poets/artists from around the globe whose work provokes readers to contemplate issues, etc. The work chosen promotes understanding and sensitivity across borders, even if initially the work may cause one to take a double-take. Staff: Editor-in-Chief, Robert L. Giron Associate Editor, Sarah Fannon The Reading Period for ArLiJo will open from January 15 to April 15, 2019.  Any work published shall remain the property of the author/poet/artist and for any previously published work to appear the author/poet/artist must still retain the copyright of the work. Please note that ArLiJo is an ejournal. Payment for publication is a book from a selection of books published by Gival Press. Books Available to ArLiJo Contributors NONFICTION: Sexy Liberal! Of Me I Sing by Stephanie Miller FICTION: Dream of Another America by Tyler McMahon Ghost Horse by Thomas H. McNeely Mayhem: Three Lives of a Woman by Elizabeth Harris Show Up, Look Good by Mark Wisniewski That Demon Life by Lowell Mick White Twelve Rivers of the Body by Elizabeth Oness The Cannibal of Guadalajara by David Winner The Best of Gival Press Short Stories ed. by Robert L. Giron The Second Act by Tim Brown Barrow’s Point by Robert Schirmer POETRY: Poetic Voices Without Borders ed by Robert L. Giron On the Altar of Greece by Donna J. Gelagotis Lee Poetic Voices Without Borders 2 ed by Robert L. Giron Songs for the Spirit by Robert L. Giron On the Tongue by Jeff Mann Bones Washed With Wine by Jeff Mann The Great Canopy by Paula Goldman Sweet to Burn by Beverly Burch Protection by Gregg Shapiro Honey by Richard Carr 12 Sonnets for the Zodiac by John Gosslee Adamah: Poème by Celine Zins |
Mark Yale Harris Featured in ArLiJo Issue No 115 Mirror Image  Copyright © 2019 by Mark Yale Harris. About the Artist Mark Yale Harris, a New Yorker, has created an evolving body of work in stone and bronze, now featured in public collections, museums and galleries worldwide, including: Hilton Hotels; Royal Academy of London; Marin MOCA; Four Seasons Hotels and the Open Air Museum - Ube, Japan. The purpose of his artwork is to invoke an awakening of the sensual. Stimulating a perceptual, internal, and intellectual response for the viewer: a visual that speaks to life’s experiences. Creating symbols of universal connection underscores the relationship that one has to another and to nature. Art conveys his nonverbal view of life. An ongoing portrayal of himself, his behavior, adventure, exploration, risk taking, and non-acceptance of convention and the status quo. Constantly in search of the new and different, he is fascinated with the unconventional. Life has a hard, aggressive side, as does much of his work, represented by rigid, angular lines. However, the soft side is also apparent, visible as curves and soft forms. Using the invaluable experience of the mentorship of Bill Prokopiof and Doug Hyde, along with his own vision, he has created an evolving body of work in alabaster, marble, limestone, and bronze. Combining different elements, he brings forth a duality in the sculptures that he creates. Awakening III  Copyright © 2019 by Mark Yale Harris. Raymond Luczak Featured in ArLiJo Issue No. 115 Lichen Those gray crumbly fingers reaching still for something like love but not quite against the tree’s jittery frostbites and snowy epaulets. No, they won’t be stilled! There is the tree, and there is flight: they caress the intimacy of bark chilled, those gray crumbly fingers reaching still for something like love but not quite. The late April sun has begun to spill down buckets of warmth, shadowing heights they must scale toward twilight. Only the most secret afternoons can heal those gray crumbly fingers reaching still for something like first love, but not quite. Copyright © 2019 by Raymond Luczak. Fog and Mist Having climbed up along muddy trails near the falls, we gripped hands, inhaling in our eyes the fog erasing everything except the black bark, the stick arms, the stripped trunk chests straining against the mist unfurling and seeping into the chilled pores of our naked skin, into that empty gap between our hands. Long before that moment of pause and ponder, the shells of our hardened feet had already split underground, our manroots shooting pellets, clean and white, deeper into the earth, back to the cradle of birth and death. Copyright © 2019 by Raymond Luczak. Beyond Houston for S.J. Sharp flints in my eyes, your backyard desert boils a clay pot of squints between us, a solar panel off your white undershirt. Your gold earring is a wedding band on the tanned hands who never claimed my body, yours. Your eyes azure scorch until my clothes soak. Your kiss is a pale wind. It is a jagged metal, gone in years ossified. Even the sun weeps. Copyright © 2019 by Raymond Luczak. About the Author Raymond Luczak is the author and editor of 22 books. Recent titles include Flannelwood (Red Hen Press, 2019) and Lovejets: Queer Male Poets on 200 Years of Walt Whitman (Squares & Rebels, 2019). He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Visit: raymondluczak.com. Kevin A. McGowan Featured in ArLiJo Issue No. 115 Bourré A Cajun card game similar to Spades. Charlie Bordelon says we ought to make our own krewe for Mardi Gras. Delma can chip in his horse and meat cart, the one for hauling slaughtered pigs. I’ll play my guitar and sing, and Charlie’ll wear a jester hat and drive. We’re in the back of Pepin’s store, after hours, sipping dirty rum made from Charlie’s still. Charlie and Delma and me are playing bourré, a penny a hand, using the blind deck of cards Pepin ordered special for me, and Celie’s playing Pepin in checkers. Celie’s watching they don’t cheat me. I crown you the Krewe of Oblivion, Celie says. She also says not to holler for her if and when we get in trouble. Pepin says two more hands and he’s shutting down. He’s gotta open the store come first light, and Delma’s telling Charlie play to win, but that’s common knowledge with this game, that’s something we get here early on. —Alcide Blind Uncle Gaspard (1878 or 1880-1937) was a Cajun musician who recorded sixteen songs in 1929 with Delma Lachney, a left-handed fiddle player. Much of Gaspard’s life remains a mystery. Copyright © 2019 by Kevin A. McGowan. Guillory’s Dance Hall Sometimes the power lines sing, and I track them to the dance hall Saturday night. Eady must be smoking pork sausage out back, and the club smells of catfish and sweet corn and hickory chips and fresh cedar. Delma’s warming up his fiddle, the D string just a hair too high, and I candlewax the back of my guitar neck. Mainly the voices and scents are the same, though tonight I’m catching a foreign perfume, jasmine it seems, and I think of the night Celie walked out the room and out of my life, leaving me silent and electric. I feel a song coming on. Copyright © 2019 by Kevin A. McGowan. Jeb Came Running —Mississippi River Flood of 1927 The rain just wouldn’t stop all winter into spring, and the young priest-in-training left for Mexico. Old Father Jacques postponed his retirement to tell us, No the world ain’t ending again, remember the rainbow. I never seen no rainbow, Amadie said, and Sis told him not to badmouth God. Amadie started his pirogue ark Ash Wednesday. He took a hammer and chisel to a cypress log, big enough to hold seven with provisions, our whole family and then some. Pepin moved the gunpowder and grain to the top shelves of his grocery store, and Delma built a floating barge for his four cow and five pigs. By mid-May, the levee broke at Bayou des Glaises, and my brother Jeb came running to say the river was heading our way, the streets of Simmesport were flooding with water four foot deep. We pulled away in our pirogue heading west. Father Jacques wouldn’t leave the church house, and Pepin sat on the porch of his store, shotgun-ready and staying put, he said, high waters be damned. Copyright © 2019 by Kevin A. McGowan. About the Author Kevin A. McGowan now works for the VA, after teaching at Remington College in Lafayette, Louisiana for twenty years. He has two chapbooks, Rubric and No Passengers. He plays the guitar left-handed and is working on some songs. Jo-Ann Mort Featured in ArLiJo Issue No. 115 Land Day in Rahat The women cooked the chicken outside in an open fire near the tent. I sat with the men in the house in a circle on the floor, unable to refuse when the brimming plates of salad and rice and the newly killed chicken were placed in the center on the Bedouin mat. It was Land Day* in Rahat. The family hosting me made an exception to welcome me as the lone woman in the room. I had barely eaten in weeks, my dress range shrinking to a ridiculous size 6. How could I say to these men: No thank you as I watched each of their hands plunge into the communal plates? How could I sit there with nothing between my lips, forsaking their hospitality? It didn’t matter that you called off our engagement, and on the telephone at that... You were in Boston or Westport, far away from these warm souls who embraced me with my otherness. My first Land Day in Rahat was quiet. It was sometime in the 1980s; honestly, the year doesn’t matter. You were in my life and then you were gone. Or sort of. You lingered for years, maybe a decade, but in Rahat, the chicken was fresh as a fresh kill could be. The women, sitting around the open pit of fire that was really just smoke by the time I left, all smiled at me, nodding their heads as their men drank sweet, sweet coffee and the early spring afternoon erupted into another unsettled day in the Negev. Copyright © 2019 by Jo-Ann Mort. *Land Day is recognized by the Arab citizens of Israel each year in March, as a day of protest for the government taking their land. Sometimes, the demonstrations become violent. Rahat is the largest Bedouin city in Israel. About the Author Jo-Ann Mort’s poems have appeared recently in Plume and Stand. Having returned to poetry after a 22 year hiatus, she is also a journalist and co-author of Our Hearts Invented A Place: Can Kibbutzim Survive in Today’s Israel (Cornell U Press). She lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Andrew Oram Featured in ArLiJo Issue No. 115 Anticipación Rut-crippled and cracked, does the hard-wrung landscape harbor the moisture heaven asks of it to weep for you— for the muddled calculations that took you through the mud, border-barred, hips limp-aching Flatbeds and buses your accomplices, the rolling hills your witnesses, relentlessly expelled by way of tin villages and depleted marshes dry as tongues, once you make it, the policema’s leer will be the same, the noxious water will still slay you, garrulous eyes will mock your anticipación If you don’t turn back in tears, dual-condemned citizens, you will broach your enemy’s gasping jaws You will not reap the winnings of those who came before— The line drawn through rivers and deserts removes your face on either side —On October 20, 2018, about 5,000 Central Americans crossed the border between the Honduras and Mexico, intending to form a caravan that would head some 3972 kilometers to the border between Mexico and the US. Two months later, they were stranded in camps in Mexico near the United States border, thwarted in their attempt to enter the U.S. Copyright © 2019 by Andrew Oram. Junctions Neighbors exchange gossip in mismatched alphabets their chickens chasing them for the value-added tax A street rings out paprika memories its slums are renewed every decade—the dancers move elsewhere but leave their projectiles a cap tips happily as a thought erupts bishop deviously sliding six spots to grab the corner of the board in licensed cellars initiates stir vats dripping with measured molecules But now a city delicately breaks off and starts to float into the Mediterranean sharp ferrets now peep from every wormhole with beady eyes glow stalking the scabbard bearers march through with forgotten slogans Could a skein of junctions trucks trains passports patents and pilgrims cohere a continent? Will stalwarts place shovels in the rich murmuring loam spread over the ruins hushed just yesterday? Copyright © 2019 by Andrew Oram. About the Author Andrew Oram is an editor at O’Reilly Media, a highly respected book publisher and technology information provider. He currently specializes in open source, software engineering, and health IT, but his editorial output has ranged from a legal guide covering intellectual property to a graphic novel about teenage hackers. He also writes often on policy issues related to the Internet and on trends affecting technical innovation and its effects on society. Print publications where his work has appeared include The Economist, Communications of the ACM, Copyright World, the Journal of Information Technology & Politics, Vanguardia Dossier, and Internet Law and Business. |
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