 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 ArLiJo has reverted to a publication by invitation only. 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. |
Jackson Berkley Featured in ArLiJo Issue No. 88 Sex on the Beach I like my women how I like my coffee. Very hot. At the beach it is easy to remember that women are both very hot and very fat and it is fashionable to sport pockets made for chapstick to get lost. Warm coffee tastes bad. There is no such thing as a warm beach. It is either very hot or cold and firm against your feet. The body is always beautiful at night. It is not the moon. It is the soft light. It is the soft sand and the cold water that makes it hard to tell the difference. I have never been to the beach in December. I guess it makes sense that there are so many Christmas stores. Everything makes sense somehow, though I have never understood the appeal of sex on the beach. Everybody hates sand. That is a fact. At night the ocean opens up and makes a pocket for joints to dissolve in. It is no place to hide when naked. Everybody who wakes up there is trespassing. Everybody who wakes up is born into something. I don’t know what something is. I was born with a scar like a shark bite on my back. There is nothing here for miles but places I am not, and there is nothing in the mirror this morning but the wall opposite and a sailboat on a wooden placard, reminding guests to leave. I decided to stay at the beach. In the morning the east reminds me there is still the west and what the first jogger left behind: a bed, her shoes at the foot of the steps, a moment to admire her legs before she looks up. Copyright © 2016 by Jackson Berkley. Postcard The line from Keats On the back of the postcard From Steamboat Springs: how lifeless Italics can be, The waterfall and bridge And the tall conifers (impossibly green) And the rocks and rapids beneath. O everything, Salida, Colorado, 1979, my father’s name In my mother’s handwriting, In the big cardboard box in the basement, The olive tablecloth And the white candle’s long, gnostic flame. I have enjoyed it all, politely, Like a season Is printed and transformed Into its likeness. And breathless, Up on St. Mary’s Glacier, In summer, All three of us together In our likenesses Became a sigh of relief and a descent. O, sweet everything, How gradually we notice Our lives, how ink trails off As a perilous line Or radiates into a stain: patiently, My mother explained to me How she met my father, in a physics classroom, At Mizzou, in Columbia, Missouri. And how, on Sundays, They would eat dinner at Aunt Tilly’s, With Cousin Jim. And how on their honeymoon They drove with Uncle Doc Through Mexico, and how He was down there running drugs back then. And how I was conceived In August (I must have been) And in Salida, Colorado, in the summer of 1979 It rained and rained and rained And the air Had a texture and a pattern Like old beer cans And bottles of Heinz ketchup At a picnic With my parents in their green khaki shorts And their old friends And the words from my mother’s pen Fading faster Than that damn Keats line That, lovely, will never pass Into nothingness. Copyright © 2016 by Jackson Berkley. Landscape with Beachside Properties The moon — brilliant — climbs the stairs of the black cornhusk heavens — tonight it forgives, unblinking in its incalculable sadness like a speckled milkshake caulked into a cupholder, and the sea and his weird cousin desire are conspiring together, again. The moon forgives this — the warm, sloping winds, the chalkboard signage disguising the menus, the porch swings haloed in sports talk and the cell tower’s twin beacons of grievance and redress. The black shop windows. A kite suspended above the cul de sac twitches in the breeze —. The neighbors wait for it to fall or be shaken free. It has been there for months, fading, trying its best to decompose. The neighbors wait as though for their children to stifle laughter before falling asleep. A figure moves in the yard and a sedan is locked remotely from inside a home. The blue, empty bleachers. Copyright © 2016 by Jackson Berkley. The First Thing I Have Ever Written On the Inside of a Stall Love is always a true love At least for a while. But it is never false. It is not like a dog that dies After eating a pound of chocolate, But more like a mouse that patters Behind the headboard at night, Then one morning decides to try the rafters. As the sun rises behind the mountains, There is always someone there to watch it happen, And another several construction workers Below to mind the scaffolding. Each morning, a public restroom Is an experiment in negative space. It may exist, but not truly be there For anyone but the first person who comes in And says I hate myself too many times For it to come true. That is the problem With truth: it is so often boring, and untrue. People do not love each other unless they see themselves In what they wish would bother them, Like the faintly Canadian accent Virginians detect In people from Maryland. When something happens too often To call it a mistake, we call it art. Love is great art, and a big mistake. It is an arc. The middle phase is miserable, The end euphoric and that will go away as well. What remains is a tidy black hole, a pause That breathes life back into a phrase, A plate caked with burnt hash That shouldn’t need a cycle but will probably Get one anyways. But it’s important to love that too Because sometimes that’s all it takes. Copyright © 2016 by Jackson Berkley. Previously published in the Blue Bonnet Review. Biography: Jackson Berkley lives in Portland, OR, where he writes, works, blogs, and makes art. Check out his blog, short films, and other musings at jacksonberkley.com. Visit this author's homepage at www. jacksonberkley.com
Michael Mingo Featured in ArLiJo Issue No. 88 Will It Play in Peoria? The red carpet’s been rolled out from storage, the marquee polished, announcing the premiere of King Lear: The 4-D Extravaganza. The Ford commercials and coming attractions finally stop, the lights dim and Shakespeare takes the screen. The seats recline for Act I as Lear takes his throne. That’s you, dear viewer, reigning over England, sitting on polish gold. But then the daughters dress-down their father and throw him to the heath. You’re beside him wandering through the storm, water streaming down your head, over your eyes, past your lips, through your windpipe. Then: total blackout, the gouging of Gloucester’s eyes. The shrieking chorus behind you is not a sound effect. The seats dip forward, then push you to the tile. As you pick popcorn kernels from your teeth, Tom O’Bedlam convinces you that Dover’s cliffs are not so deadly. Copyright © 2016 by Michael Mingo. When We Play with Model Trains When we put together model trains, we reconstruct the past. Vivien Leigh lies enchanted, seduced, in Clark Gable’s arms on posters plastered across the station and dry goods store. When model citizens watch, eyes frozen, the Technicolor scene, the burning of Atlanta, they construct the present: Europe once again gone mad, asking for more American boys. When put the model trains away, we put away the past. What cannot be seen can be ignored, neglected. No one wants to watch china figurines pretend to be content. We know they’re not content, we know we’re not content, we’re just waiting for the breaks, for the wheels to lock in place. Copyright © 2016 by Michael Mingo. Biography: Michael Mingo is a student at Carnegie Mellon University and attended the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University in 2015. His poetry has previously appeared in Jersey Devil Press, 3Elements Review, and The Record. Sanbud Tehrani Featured in ArLiJo Issue No. 88 Some Morning in Los Angeles Pizza as a breakfast course cushioning vodka You wonder at the chittering cat bells of last night’s cease-to-be Doors to rooms you can’t see open and close with frightening presumption, no longer unglued, the light is slowly fixing its fishnet and garter belt These taxi cabs in Jell-O packed fish bowls don’t particularly care about your raison d’etre But then again neither do you saxophoning hot smog steam on some pitch for a sport as yet unseen I haven’t yet learned how to score, but offsides? . . . yeah buddy. I’m packaging paper peanuts with my yellowcards, there’s a keenness there that doesn’t speak the language of your hair when you wake up in the morning with a bitter belt halo You’d better bet yourself for the over and under in this dusk-ended amusement park Just don’t assume a receipt means a refund There’s no way out but deeper down these stairs, Lon Chaney’s there, and you don’t know why Why is just the remnant echoes of payphone pests and flipped flapped pogs But there’s no slammer but what’s in you But No whys or I love yous really manage to make it past the first casting call They’re just emotions that never learned to emote, worse wheat to wit when you realize you’re entourage, crops sustained by could-have-beens and limp snake sirens, you were your own worse plague but never managed to write down the prim proper pursuits you arked forbidden You were made noncanonical a long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long long time ago So don’t bother blushing when you burp with those butterflies, there’s nothing in it anyway, no one started keeping score and your peace is your penalty (it’s too early to rest but now you revise a snore). Copyright ©2016 by Sanbud Tehrani. Biography: Sanbud Tehrani is a young Persian American poet based in Southern California with a taste for surrealist automatism. He has composed and released two compilations of his poems thus far and is the lazy vice president of a local Orange County poetry club. His most treasured writers are Graham Greene and Thomas Hardy. |
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