 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. |
Liz Dolan Featured in ArLiJo Issue No. 94 After They Got the News From behind the lace curtain I watched the black-veiled nuns pour whiskey down Mama’s throat to quell her screams to calm her to keep her from pulling out fistfuls of hair. Copyright © 2016 by Liz Dolan. Acceptance I do not know if you love me as I love you. No matter. When I ride the curves and edges of your body I feel I have fallen off a cliff. But if early on a summer evening under a eucalyptus you wish to whisper sweet syllables into my ear and wind a vine about my heart I will lie silent and listen to the sound of rain falling on the lime green leaves. Copyright © 2016 by Liz Dolan. About the Author: Liz Dolan’s poetry manuscript, A Secret of Long Life, nominated for a Pushcart, has been published by Cave Moon Press. Her first poetry collection, They Abide, nominated for The McGovern Prize, Ashland University was published by March Street. An eight-time Pushcart nominee and winner of Best of the Web, she was a finalist for Best of the Net 2014. She won The Nassau Prize for Nonfiction, 2011 and the same prize for fiction, 2015. She has received fellowships from the Delaware Division of the Arts, The Atlantic Center for the Arts and Martha’s Vineyard Almed Rayan El Nadim Featured in ArLiJo Issue No. 94 The Auctions Who can sell the sun in Auctions? We are sitting on the houses thresholds, looking from behind the sills Waiting for the shimmering, sparkling, glistening, glittering, shining Egyptian moon With all the our open elderly, grey-haired, gibberish, and babble windows Copybooks Disturbances, harassments, and upsets demolish, smash, and tear us down A pallid, wan, and faint city blinded by copybooks, papers and compresses Our lives are thieved by taximeters All electric meters are palsy, paralysis, and paraplegia The faces I carried my heart on my shoulder for eons In the endless seas, I couldn’t find a land I am lost in a handful of sand All faces are colored The one hundred winged stars can’t be attained The horizon is so blind Hug me, my darling love So tenderly and so kind About the author: Ahmed Rayan El Nadim, a poet, writer, and cinema director who lives in Cairo, Egypt, is the founder, promoter, and editor in the chief of El Nadaha magazine, an online magazine for literature and folk arts, folklore, and fine arts. He also produces the Egyptian Colloquial for poetry, the fifth edition issued in June 2016, and the sixth edition issued in August 2016; it is considered the most important aggregation, and grouping of the Egyptian cultural class. He has produced and directed more than 120 short films in the last two years. Many Egyptian and Arabic critics considered him the most expressive of the eastern and oriental fantasy world and the fabulous, legendary, mythical, superstitious, fictitious folklore, and while considering his poetry more philosophical and esoteric. His poetry collections include: Paper walls, Cellophane cities, Fir trees, Thursday market, The seven Crescent moons, Cloves gardens, The chrysalis, My dear love is a turquoise rose, My short poems, Stretching your braids in the palm tree, and others. He has also published his poetry and critical essays in many Egyptian and Arabic journals and magazines for over forty years. Dori LaRue Featured in ArLiJo Issue No. 99 A Hundred and One Ways to Die in Bangladesh My horse’s stall in Shreveport, Louisiana, USA, is roomier than these muddy caves, the best of them like the concrete hovels of some previous civilization. I am walking to school between the women holding their babies for effect, and the vendors officiously fiddling with their fruit and I can’t help wonder, beneath the low hanging rat’s nest of electrical wires assembled by unskillful but courageous electricians, where every intersection sports a sewer’s yawning maw and its standing invitation for dreamers or busy texters: Why are there so many ways to die in Bangladesh? I’m not referring to the monsoons, typhoons, and draughts, political assault, the social barriers, the religious bars on windows with women and children looking out ready to starve or drown whichever comes first, but the primo genesis thinginess of things. I have been known to trace my head cold back to the one who sneezed in class, who gave me a late paper dangling with germs, some snuffling colleague who borrowed my doorknob simply to walk away . . . a salesclerk with puffy eyes. I am mean spirited like that. So let us not forget the heads and breasts of gulls who came to roost on the masts of galleons surging forward as their sails filled with wind and glinted like white minarets, the first sea invasions to India coming as they did into a barely nibbled world with its future of secret meanings. First cause, the armies of Islam fanning out, spreading through Persia, Iraq, Byzantine lands. By 8th century the Spanish Catholics went belly up, and they were knocking on France’s door; then fast forward four hundred years to their little foothold in India; those Hinds living insouciantly on their own rich, fertile, bountiful lands became like someone on a death bed leaving the world in angry silence with no time for grand words. What the invaders wanted was loot. Tough freebooters from foreign lands wanted everything, and after their getting everything came four decades of identity dismantlement, the vivisection of 1947. I wasn’t even born yet. It was a few months before my beginnings in the womb, in Crowville, Louisiana, USA, so I wasn’t there. I don’t know. Anything I say is mere commentary, ex post facto, an occidental distortion. But, darkly, moodily, why? Why did Bangladesh opt out? Because of the poets? The heroes? The take-this-country-and- shove-it jingoism? Maybe there were grand words before death. The effects live on in the faces of 21st century under five deaths. Or those who survive, the over fives, looking and pointing at, crying for kabobs sold in the streets, these streets I walk to school on every day, (occasionally decorated with dead rats), jog on in Nikes I’ve brought back, bought in the USA, made in one of the Bengali slave factories. Is the answer in a scholarly analysis of history’s, say the British Empire’s, greedy gut? “Empire’ is not the Brit’s word for it. But nevertheless the lowly loom came to be symbolic and Gandhi immortalized it, protested the way Britain banned its use, banned the cotton, the sturdy shirts, with threads like a man’s, like a woman’s sturdy charactermdash; all that was outlawedmdash; their multi-kazillion dollar worldwide trade gone, dooming them all to slave. Britain was selling the first mass produced clothing to the world notwithstanding their very own Ruskin, his lofty whining about craftsmanship and the sin of haughty architecture. Then came the war to end all wars, then American hegemony, then the peace to end all peace, created in whimsical drawings at tea. In the Pink Palace, in Old Dhaka, according to the tour guide, Aga Khan II often ate lunch. (In Aga Khan’s Palace Detention Camp, Gandhi fasted.) Everything in Bangladesh seems to be globally warming, the snows of Nepal, the clear ice of Everest are melting, melting because of greed, overflow the Padma, because of greed, because there is no law against dams or what happens after dams to lower countries that sink and rise, and sink again. There is no law against greed, and this is no proof. We go where the hungry heart goes. The conquerors noisily step ashore. They leave packs of warring dogs to roam the streets. They teach many to accept their lot, and teach many the flip side of consumerism. Why are there so many ways to die in Bangladesh. Please forgive my lack of question mark. Perhaps, despite the grammar books, that last was rhetorical and does not deserve one. Perhaps it is a polite request. Copyright © 2016 by Dorie LaRue. The Consolation of Laundry Dickens saw it on his London slum walks. In N.Y. C. Melville saw it strung between Five Point’s buildings. Rio, Manila, Nairobi— They are still with us. Something makes the dwellers rise from dirt floors, and near piles of garbage, in buckets, rivers, ditch, perform the liquid ritual of consecration. Thus on Palestine’s shattered streets wrung out trousers eternally sway, pairs of socks, scarves, a child’s cap and even by itself, one man’s undershirt , can testify to the enduring consolation of laundry . In Dhaka beside the floating latrine and narrow bamboo bridge an invisible agent (read woman like a slender captive) has spread clothes over a wire strung head high. She has already spent yesterday’s wage on meds. (Give her a sick child, a wallah for a husband, a gnawing fear of eviction.) She can go to her street sweeper’s job now in Model Town, Uttara. When she returns the bulldozers may have come and gone, the latrine ascended to greet her, her toddler grown more croupy. Maybe her husband will have been beaten beside his rented rickshaw, but now a clean shirt covers his back, and tomorrow’s clean shirt flutters in the morning wind, like a planted flag on some impossibly scaled mountain. Copyright © 2016 by Dorie LaRue. About the Author: Dorie LaRue’s poetry collection entitled Mad Rains is due out January 2017 by Kelsay Press. Paul Lieber Featured in ArLiJo Issue No. 94 Homesick I’m facing north, the ocean over my left shoulder. That would be the Pacific. On the east coast, the Atlantic would be swaying over my right shoulder. Two blocks away my wife and child argue and another 2448 miles east stands Parker Jewish Memorial Nursing home where my mother free associates. I skim the ocean, its swells, channels and salutations. The surfers look for thrills. I’m just looking. They wait for the wave in hiding. Everything below the surface rises and bursts open, a billion epiphanies. Where will they break? Surfers misjudge the future like the rest of us as cells collect and spin in their assignments; water cells adhere to water while humans stick to humans until these smooth collisions. Foam spreads, temporary maps dissolve. I sit cross-legged and my calves tingle, asleep until I change positions, maybe move back east and wake the entire body. Copyright © 2016 by Paul Lieber. I’ll Bury It in the Catacombs My son plugs into eIectronic isolation. I want to drag him back a few centuries, to cross the Tiber River on to the Pantheon. Pigeons approve in Trastevere. One starts towards us and retreats, a pecking of black and gray like a 14th century Syrian or Jew searching for a nibble on these streets with so many slants, the ups and downs, the difficulty of putting one foot in front of the other on this cobbled festival of church bells. Shutter windows open when I grab my son’s iPad and struggle in a tug-of-war. I could scream I diapered you, wiped that mustard sauce from your anus. You’re drowning in pixels and I want you to swim in these streets. I rip it from him, run down the block where a stranger leans on his motor bike. He understands the rage but not this thing in my hands is driving me crazy. I yanked it from his abdomen. See, see his blood drip? Copyright © 2016 by Paul Lieber. About the Author: Paul Lieber’s collection, Chemical Tendencies, (Tebot Bach), was a finalist in the MSR poetry contest. He also received an honorable mention in the Allen Ginsberg Contest. He produces and hosts Why Poetry on KPFK radio in L.A. and Santa Barbara. Guests have included Poet Laureates, National Book Award Winners, and many other known and lesser-known poets. His poems have appeared in The Moth, N.Y. Quarterly, Patterson Review, Askew, Poemeleon, Alimentum, and many other journals and anthologies. He also works as an actor and has performed on and off- Broadway and in numerous films and TV shows. He has worked as an adjunct Professor in Creative Writing at Loyola Marymount University, and lives in Venice, CA. Visit him at www.paullieber.com. David Anthony Sam Featured in ArLiJo No. 94 The Exile is Orphaned Afraid or alive, he is the phone ringing from over the horizon, tolling new pain. Awaiting an old world in winds that blow his heart to unlearn any past, he answers. A voice crackles with discord instead of language so he hears himself as echoes. All is lost in a static of wailing offering him the unacceptable over an unbearable sea. His mother is lost twice over and her voice is left to silence as a dial tone prays. Copyright © 2016 by David Anthony Sam. Defiled by Exile Evil sings a distance shadowed with wanting, blurring the edges of an old passport. A heretic creates names for home when he has none, dreaming inside a post office box. Curses made and unmade bleed the same red in deserts—leaving the whiteness of bones. A coward flees discord and warms himself with flickers of news digested for him. Evil comes regardless with smiles selling stocks and coffee between outrages. A traitor lies undreamt in twisted bedclothes sweating his past into nameless mornings. Copyright © 2016 by David Anthony Sam. Dark Fathers I know my father’s father only as he fades in one browning snapshot taken two years before his lungs breathed final blood. He glares from history with a hawk’s black eyes, suspicious that the camera might reveal his failures, a peddler with nothing left to sell. He is a scorn of choices, of golden Syrian dreams dying on American concrete. He left only his image fading with the photopaper into the sorrow that sometimes wore my father’s face and ghosts now in my mirror— as dark fathers fade into my dissolving image. Copyright © 2016 by David Anthony Sam. About the Author: David Anthony Sam has two collections: Dark Land, White Light (1974, 2014) and Memories in Clay, Dreams of Wolves (2014) and his poetry has appeared in over 50 journals. He was the featured poet in the Winter 2016 issue of The Hurricane Review and in 2015 was twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize. His collection All Night over Bones received an Honorable Mention for the 2016 Homebound Poetry Prize. He lives in Culpeper, Virginia with his wife and life partner, Linda, and serves as president of Germanna Community College. Emily Strauss Featured in ArLiJo Issue No. 94 Leaking Heart this third time on dark streets empty to the hospital occasional street lamps blind houses everyone asleep but us— quiet watchful, no cars I'm driving again not speaking tense, alert this familiar path now turn here entrance ahead shining marble floors follow the nurse I know the routine once more under care once more procedures his heart in question irregular fragile light leaking into the day Copyright © 2016 by Emily Strauss. Shadow and Shade —one always/went envying/ the quietness of stones. Robinson Jeffers, “Ante Mortem” from An American Miscellany (1927) beware of explanations— you cannot interpret stones nor their shadows moving by the hours. Shadows defy that which stands in sunlight attached to their solid companion at a razor edge. Shade, which rocks don’t possess is a more general notion a covering like mottled leaves or long hair pouring down a woman's bare spine. A shadow defines the shape that owns it. Shade is the quiet solemn side of cliffs at noon, when stone rises the vertical light pouring down but for a sliver against the walls, its absence. The shaded walls pulse now with heat or else thaw a little in winter when frost abides deeper within. The stones are all the same. This may be what we envy. Copyright © 2016 by Emily Strauss. About the Author: Emily Strauss has an M.A. in English, but is self-taught in poetry, which she has written since college. Over 400 of her poems appear in a wide variety of online venues and in anthologies, in the U.S. and abroad. She is both a Best of the Net and Pushcart nominee. The natural world of the American West is generally her framework; she also considers the narratives of people and places around her. She is a semi-retired teacher living in California. |
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