 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 Special 2020 Black Women Poets, edited by Teri Ellen Cross Davis Special 2020 Poetry Month Bilingual (Spanish/English) Edition, edited by Luis Alberto Ambroggio Special 2019 Women in Translation Month, edited by Katherine E. Young Access each issue by clicking on the Issue No. to the left of this homepage (scroll downward). Please note that publication in ArLiJo will be by invitation only, starting August 1, 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 listed below which have been 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 |
Sarah Browning Featured in ArLiJo Issue No. 105. Ballad of the Seven Days For seven days she did this — killed a man— and on the eighth day she rested Put her feet on the railing and drank sweet tea Each man was locked in a shed or in a barn on her father’s farm the banker in the outhouse you know he had to go the minister with the sheep and goats she had a sense of humor no one could deny it Henry who milked was in the shed, the milking shed the puling cows growing heavy uddered, sleepy Tony the Italian who came round sometimes to sell, his cast iron tinkling in the distance, hoping to sit with her a spell as the sun crept away, hoping one day she didn’t even know if he did hope each visit the same, never closer Tony was in the ice house she could bring him out for a visit a swing or see him there whenever the dust put the aching back in her eyes the dust she had meant to clean that busy week Elliot and Joe, the brothers were together in the woodshed where they belonged where they had always been together the hatchets now where they’d forced her mouth before, their hands wide with surprise, forgetting their things, the history of their things in the woodshed There’s that humor all her own once more and Dad, Dad she’d laid out in her own bed, it was one he’d always claimed, his gray hands happy now, frozen where they were expecting the return of their childhood game Sleepwalking Nightie, how it took off on its own when Dad visited it walked a mile in the night Yesterday Dad lay down with the tiny nightie between his legs. She’d asked him to, closed his eyes dreaming of her woman form, its new, mother size Even the shot gun was a woman Copyright © 2017 by Sarah Browning. We All Have Our Thing for Katy Richey For Katy, it’s Womb, the squishy Earth Mother inside us, warm and enveloping, all the passive aggressive demands Womb makes on women, on our aching poems, how each month Womb punishes, pounds with her Mama love against us, demanding to come down and meet the guests, greet the world in her Womb-Mama best red dress. For me it’s Being, as in: I knew in the Depths of my Being that . . . My Being apparently has Depths, though no one’s located the basement steps for me, led me past earwigs and packed dirt, stacked kindling and broken high chair tossed in the corner to greet my Being. Perhaps my Being is the only one lacking Depths, perhaps she’s upstairs stretched on the couch, ogling George Clooney’s wicked grin on TMZ. Or maybe my Being’s hanging with Katy’s Womb, trading dating tips, maybe they could give a shit about their persnickety people, Katy and Sarah, who can’t stand them. Perhaps they’re writing their own poem, The Womb Beings or In the Depths of My Being, There Lives a Womb, a poem to answer all poems, the poem school children will memorize forever, not because they must, but for its sheer power and gorgeous song, the key it crafts to every rusty unyielding lock, the door swung creaking but, at last, open. All that fucking welcome. Copyright © 2017 by Sarah Browning. Body, Self, and All What I loved of your body: hard fingers I took in my mouth, would have kept there forever if I could: knuckles to suck, nails to lick, hair and its tickle, fingers in the back of the throat, hand to mouth, mouth to round belly, long feet— the size of you stretched the length of me, obliterating me. I was in love with disappearance, how I slipped away in our lovemaking, my body left behind in my stead, how your hands drew my map, inscribed my key, how you navigated my roads and borders, forded my many rivers, wandered my thorny woodlands. Until the navigation of me became routine, all my byways you thought you knew, my paths dusty, your hands weary. I was a lonely country then, unpeopled and fenced. My journey away had not brought me back. Body, self, and all— I dropped off the edge of that world, the one I’d thought was round. Copyright © 2017 by Sarah Browning. Day 7 After a week of no dialysis my mother begins the true work of dying. She twitches and startles, mumbles. The sun shines hard on the new snow. Every few minutes my mother shocks awake, more electric than in all the months of illness. When I tell her the nurses say it’s normal, it’s OK, my sister takes me to the corridor— Stop reminding our mother that she is dying. We do not know what’s in our mother’s mind and neither do the helpful hospice pamphlets. We don’t know what Balkan path she might be hiking, what war and boat and ocean she might be crossing. I fumbled our living, I know, and now, too, her dying. Except for this: Today, at least, I do not leave. Copyright © 2017 by Sarah Browning. About the Author Sarah Browning is the author of Killing Summer (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017) and Whiskey in the Garden of Eden (The Word Works, 2007). She is co-founder and Executive Director of Split This Rock and an Associate Fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies. She is the recipient of fellowships from the DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Adirondack Center for Writing. She has been guest editor or co-edited special issues of Beltway Poetry Quarterly, The Delaware Poetry Review, and POETRY magazine. Browning co-hosts the Sunday Kind of Love poetry series at Busboys and Poets in Washington, DC Joanna Howard Featured in ArLiJo in Issue 105. Untitled “Trauma Keeps Us Standing in the Same Place” —Marilyn Kallet, Sept. 11, 2016 Ghosts keep floating from the screen though the television has been turned off body after body like laundry in the wind Protoplasm writhing in suits from Barneys bleeding through chef jackets outfits bought on sale at Goodwill—souls blasted out of their bodies no time to catch a spiritual drop down mask to lead the way to the other side these ghosts shot from crumbled and burning legs torsos ripped away from shoulders brains smashed to mud These souls cling to the warm electrons of last night’s news and the hand that should have written this poem hangs over a sheared slice of airplane somewhere in Arlington Unitilted first appeard in A Splendid Wake Poetry Pop-Up in June 2017. Copyright © 2017 by Joanna Howard. Pointing Out the Obvious “You have my bue jeans,” Mom said While folding laundry downstairs In the basement of my dreams. Copyright © 2018 by Joanna Howard. Playing My Card Right “Double Down” Dad advise me— And like my sainted father, I’ married not once, but twice. Copyright © 2018 by Joanna Howard. Old Bard’s Headache Take away the rush and clutter frantic dancing in my head. Take away my plotting parley— proffer passage to my bed. Take away what’s mattered most in the evening when I’m gone: Take away my sacred touchtones, my whiskey, pipe, and song. Copyright © 2018 by Joanna Howard. About the Author Joanna Howard is a local poet and college professor who coordinates A Splendid Wake, a volunteer-based group working with George Washington University to archive the history of poetry in the DC area. She has been published in a variety of magazines and was a 2016 finalist in Arlington’s Moving Words Program. Katherine Smith Featured in ArLiJo Issue 105. Before We Move On No matter how bad it gets, I’ll remember the bench overlooking the docked ferry, two women eating oysters on shaved ice from a paper plate on a bench, ripping hunks of sourdough wheat bread with raisins and butter. No matter how unjust the scales that balance the life of a single eight-year girl twirling an umbrella in the rain against statistics, no matter the injustice of numbers, I’ll remember the simple facts of steamed buns with soy sauce, of the little boy on his father’s shoulders waiting for hot chicken at the market, the mother holding bunches of parsnips in one hand, her daughter’s hand in another on Powell. When I see the power of destruction I like to admire the Aronson building’s olive fruit amid foliage that survived a century of earthquake and fire, to gaze at the glass plates, teal-blue, of the Jewish museum, the hopeful scaffolding of the Mexican Museum. When I’m empty, I like to walk through the new plaza to Jessie Street, to turn onto Stevenson Street and back to Market past a coffee shop where a man with his belongings and his mangy dog in a heap at his feet is eating a sandwich, drinking hot coffee. We live for the moment of happiness before we are told to move on. At the world’s end I hope I’ll remember the bus driver and his passenger, a woman in a camel pea-coat talking about the best way to cook pinto beans, where to find the best soul food in Oakland before he let her out of the bus at 3rd street. Copyright © 2018 by Katherine Smith. Ode to Orange A little orange goes a long way, like friendliness: a bowl of tangerines on a blue cotton table cloth a single egg yolk for breakfast, the ginger cat on the road slipping under the beach house, fruity shadows in the pleats of a peach silk gown Too much is the color of golden retrievers, football fans filling stadiums, certain poisons staining the ground. The mind hungers for mangos, not so much for used car salesmen or fake tans. After nibbling winter’s white crop, orange gnaws through spring’s acres of cloudy pink blossoms, swallows the blinding light of midsummer. The autumn animal burrows into turbinado and acorn squash, streaks apples with flame, stains the not-quite passion of persimmon, stops before the inside of pomegranate. There’s no heartbreak in orange, only a ripening to rust. The closer you get to winter the less seldom it’s seen, traffic cones, ambulances, emergencies, iron, the jack o’ lantern with its grin of friendliness teenagers hurled onto the street, eyes split open, spilling seeds. Copyright © 2018 by Katherine Smith. Happiness We walked into the school board building in the rain, my father and I, the July before the eleventh year of my schooling began. My father in the tan jacket with the zipper he wore for all bad weather, winter or summer stood behind me. I begged the school superintendent, a black man in suit and tie with a polite frown to let me take the city bus across town to escape the high school where I was the Jewish girl whose family didn’t belong to any temple, whose brother chanted Hare Rama in the library, who never joined Young Life to pray around the flag pole and scatter to spread the Good News after lunch, who ate alone in shop class surrounded by the smell of burning metal. I was bad news. Let me go somewhere else. The superintendent smiled. My father’s shoulders slumped. You’re zoned for that high school. You’d have to prove the new school has something your old school doesn’t. I thought hard. I’ll join ROTC. The two men laughed. My father took off his jacket. The superintendent signed the transfer. For the next two years I took the city bus across the town to a school where no one knew me. The day I never had to go back to the world I’d always believed was true was the first good day. Copyright © 2018 by Katherine Smith. Easter You decided the year you planted petunias and marigold in terra cotta pots behind the iron grillwork that if the burden of earth wasn’t too much for the balcony it wasn’t too much for you heavy with child. Many years later, in the neighbors’ yard, little girls in peach-colored dresses search for eggs from what they mistake for a clump of daffodils, sprouted through the body of a dead squirrel. The children scream, run to their parents. But you are in late middle age, with no one to run to. Your life is made of glitter, mica, fools’ gold. On Good Friday, the student from Togo wore a cardboard sign around her neck that said, Trust Jesus in sparkly letters. She asked What do you live for? You smiled, answered I live to teach you to write paragraphs with topic sentences and vivid detail. I live to teach you to make sense. She chuckled, forgetting for one blessed instant to praise Jesus. Copyright © 2018 by Katherine Smith. About the Author Katherine Smith’s poetry publications include appearances in Poetry, Cincinnati Review, Missouri Review, Ploughshares, Southern Review and many other journals. Her short fiction has appeared in Fiction International and Gargoyle. She has had two publications of poetry: Argument by Design (Washington Writers’ Publishing House, 2003) and Woman Alone on the Mountain (Iris Press, 2014). |
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