 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 |
Featured in ArLiJo Issue No. 114 Cicadas It’s not just the interminable afternoons. . . . (The bees, their pollen put up, haven’t a clue what to be about; the flight paths of June no longer appertaining, drift, as I do, from pane to pane.) It’s when the daylight sheers and summer’s death rattle skirls in the field beyond the house. . . . Lying in bed, I hear the in-, then out-of-phase crescendos; yield to waves of panic glasses of warm milk won’t assuage, cool compresses won’t quell. I get up, go outside (the air a silk cravat) to stare it down. The clamor swells: Darkness audible. Insomniac rune. Primordial, incorrigible tune. Copyright © 2019 by Bill Christophersen. Mnemonic The medical equipment technician delivering the oxygen tank my emphysemic father needs to help him recover from the exertion of walking from one room to the next is coaching him on how much time to allot each half of the inhale-exhale cycle. Here’s the deal, he says, demonstrating. Inhale: “Smell the flowers.” Exhale: “Blow out the candle.” Mnemonic was published by Hanging Loose (93: 2008). Copyright © by Bill Christophersen. January Here’s to the god that looks both ways: behind to evening shadows on the noonday street; ahead to daylight-saving time, upbeat forecasts, the fantasy that all will find restored to them what’s died, dried up, gone gray. God of terminus and god of hope— for that’s the trick, isn’t it? To cope with one at night and glimpse the other by day, so that this winding sheet of ice and snow doubles as cocoon; so that this white light that pains the eye and numbs the soul disperses to reveal an Armory Show of colors cavalcading out of sight; so that the old year takes but its rightful toll. January was published by Birmingham Poetry Review (34: Winter/Spring 2007). Copyright © by Bill Christophersen. About the Author Bill Christophersen was born in the Bronx and educated at Columbia University. He is the author of The Apparition in the Glass: Charles Brockden Brown’s American Gothic (U. of Georgia Press) and Resurrecting Leather-Stocking: Pathfinding in Jacksonian America (U. of S. Carolina Press), as well as three poetry collections: Two Men Fighting in a Landscape (Aldrich Press), The Dicer’s Cup (Kelsay Books) and Tableau with Crash Helmet (Hanging Loose Press). His book reviews and critical essays have appeared in Newsweek, The New Leader, The New York Times Book Review, The American Book Review and Poetry. His poems have won awards from Rhino, the Kansas Quarterly and the Robinson Jeffers Tor House Foundation, and have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and for inclusion in Best New Poets 2014. He lives in New York and plays traditional and bluegrass fiddle. Betsy Hughes Featured in ArLiJo Issue No. 114 Wordsmith You’ll find him in his smithy — poet’s yard. He builds the fire and stokes it with a fuel — imagination. See him labor hard with such as hammer, anvil, powered tool — the pen! It moves across the page to say the writer’s telling truth, the bard’s intent. Bright words are sparking, and the interplay of intellect and heart convey, invent, create anew the universal theme from personal experience. He casts, he shapes the heated mold, designs the dream, he fashions in his forge the stuff that lasts. That blacksmith’s skill, white magic, weaves a spell; its artistry, its poetry compel. Copyright © 2019 by Betsy Hughes. Credo Inspired by Walt Whitman God’s presence in the world is manifest in every blade of grass — the here and now. With radiance in daily life we’re blessed, divinity endowed in us somehow. It is outside our selves in nature’s sight, direct and vivid, beautiful and true; it is inside our selves in inner light, afflatus, holy breath, which surges through creative, vital marrow. Yes, such grace is in the present moment, growing green and democratic in its every place where poems of all the people we can glean. While leaves of grass are blowing without fear, our liberty will never disappear. Copyright © 2019 by Betsy Hughes. About the Author Betsy Hughes graduated from Vassar College, earned her M.A in English from the University of Dayton, and taught English for 30 years at the Miami Valley School. She is fascinated by the sonnet genre because of its inherent qualities of sound and rhythm and its wedding of discipline and freedom. Her first collection of sonnets, Breaking Weather, winner of the 2013 Stevens Poetry Manuscript Competition, was published by the NFSPS Press in 2014. Bird Notes was published by Finishing Line Press in 2017. She lives with her husband in Dayton, Ohio. Francis C. Klein Featured in ArLiJo Issue No. 114 Hawija I buried my brother in an unmarked grave with the other bodies jumbled in the pit. For seven years, he didn’t know who he was. For the last seven, we didn’t know where he lived. Dust made from ashes, ashes from dust, in a no man’s land’s arid plain. Look to the sky for birds of prey. Look to land for a scavenger’s name. Man is as evil as he ever was, Satan with a rifle, black bump stock. Kill the children as they come from play. Hunt them down if they run away. The origins of crime are lost in the chimp’s incisors, swinging fists. Look to the enemy sunk within reptilian DNA. Are you my tribe? Am I on your lengthy enemies list? It’s gone viral, in electric spin. We are all brothers under the skin. Copyright © 2019 by Francis C. Klein. In Super Eight I wrote in a dark room, the cave of the past behind me as I reeled the movie backwards in super eight. What frame should I stop in, let the light burn through the closed projector, the scarred sprocket smell of dust and acetate? I found you dancing in a basement, in a yellow dress, one measure of the long waterfall of youth. Where was my face in this picture? Others passed me, screened my figure, made a scrim of bodiness. I will be gone before you see me, shade uprolled into the valance, shadow on the pavement of the flesh. Copyright © 2019 by Francis C. Klein. In the Gated City Who is like me? What man? what image? I began as a cell. Who, except me, had my sequence of teachers, advisers of the book? On the first page, I wrote in a garden, maze of the fourfold path. When I was yours, I walked to all compass points, a jetty in the sea. When you were mine, the oak gates opened, vines in the towering trees. You sat on my right side, rib extension, stretch over the core, the knee. Kneel with me in the gated city, teach me the constant consonants of the scrolls. Copyright © 2019 by Francis C. Klein. Iron Filings Lay your hands on my shoulders, one of the chosen ones, made in the image of the wind. Currents of air come down from the mountains. I walk through tracks of dust. We make the magnetic bond of lines of iron filings in ellipses on the plate, muted attraction and repulsion, the positive and negative of place, curves of the storm. When I saw you, you bent me to you. Now we align as one. What is the gap between the index finger and the thumb? What is the arc that joins us in this moment, mind over mind, thunder in the palm? Copyright © 2019 by Francis C. Klein. About the Author Francis Klein has had 3 chapbooks published by Finishing Line Press: Podebrady (2011), Untouched by Morning (2012), and Dais (2017). His work has appeared in Mudfish 18, Fear of Success, A Letter Among Friends, red herring ii, Lion Rampant, Penumbra, Oberon, and The Ledge. Kenneth Pobo Featured in ArLiJo Issue No. 114 Brown Cords His first time in a gay bar, Steve wore brown cords, a pack of Newports in his pocket. Some guy asked him to dance to “Dancing Queen,” put his hand on Steve’s ass— part of him wanted to say stop that, part of him wanted to say more please. After the song ended, the stranger slipped away into other dancers. Steve ordered a gin and tonic, more at ease but ready to go. Copyright © 2019 by Kenneth Pobo. Jeff Sees His Old Church Is a CVS From age seven I sang in the choir. Mrs. Selkie taught me how to get notes to fall just right. I got solos. Deacon Pinter said he wished every boy would be like me. Maybe I didn’t look gay— he’d have kicked my ass in a most unholy way, as they all would. Long ago. At work I make up tunes I hum silently. A few I share with Jerry who once egged me on to audition for Dancing With The Stars. I dance too. Today The Bible Church of Tibbs Ford is a drive-through CVS. We get bagged drugs while eating McDonalds fries. Pills, a small blue choir in a bottle. We swell with praise, forget what we’re praising. Copyright © 2019 by Kenneth Pobo. About the Author Kenneth Pobo has a new book out from Clare Songbirds Publishing House called The Antlantis Hit Parade. Forthcoming from Duck Lake Books is Dindi Expecting Snow. Mike Wall Featured in ArLiJo Issue No. 114 MLK in Vermont In the space between mist and slope he feels borne aloft but so bewildered at this cresting, bumpy touch and go push up and rise he forgets the wound scarred shut, and laughs and glides along a line of the Green Mountains in how the hell did he wind up in Vermont. He sees farmhouses up here, pastures so sweet-green he smiles at his pleasure. He folds his arms piston-ready, a runner’s brace in this sudden young-body exultation of ebb and flow. The liquid of his joints renewed, he rocks forward smoothly a steady 3 or 4 feet off the ground, climbs the contours of the fields in arcing light until darkness slips around him and he hovers among fireflies, dew glistening on the shoulders of his coat. Copyright © 2019 by Mike Wall. Musashi (Considering a 1942 Black and White Photograph of Hundreds of Sailors at Ease on the Foredeck of the Japanese Battleship Musashi) Perhaps they raced each other out of the reek of diesel up vertiginous stairs and discharged into the sun, and so young they gathered in packs by the rails and looked out to the mild sea, but no one approaches the prow which runs into haze but pauses here, captured by the photo which none of them could have supposed I would see. The engine pulse in the steel never stops, the rhythm they felt habitual as their heartbeats. Two men move away from the others. One gazes out, one in a handstand, balances, smiling, I think. At shrines tucked into corners below decks, they offer thimbles of sake, bits of dried fish to the kami of Musashi, to its gray elongation, to the big guns turreted behind them, squatting in their ancient geologic expanse. Copyright © 2019 by Mike Wall. About the Author Mike Wall taught English for 36 years at Owen J. Roberts High School in Pennsylvania and now volunteers with rescue dogs and with retired police officers. He works at a bookstore. This issue constitutes his first publication which has created “a state of unexpected, happy delirium” for him. |
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