Arik Mendoza

Had I had an eye on my nostalgic marble, I would have parlayed my objections to the other fellow. But I forgot the shimmering tiger’s eye tucked safely in my left, front pocket. Oh, it had been there a year, eight, decades before. It had watched Juan go tumbling off over the bump on my second-hand bicycle flying with his hands spread out about to crash over the low wall into the garden below. It had cooked his hot spicy, Harlem beans for years without him, it appears. And where had the north star of Tunisia gotten us? The lost Arab Spring. The army of tanks stopped by a single man in Beijing. The stem of a white daisy stuck in the long thin barrel of a gun by a peaceful young woman. The glass marbles of the past, these have all rolled away, been swept away by a blind, invisible hand. The coarse, spent, gritty thing called democracy in America was rooted out of the world the way pigs’ snouts dig through the easy dirt looking for a dead man’s finger, a dead man’s hand, and the lost golden ring upon it ingested, too, anything at all there to mounch and mounch and mounch, to eat, to consume, to use up as though the good earth were only their own. Since Bobby died in ’68 it had been gone.

Pia Coybonne

The small things that I had remembered had been the the small things that I had  forgotten. Somewhere in the blandishments of my day to day living, the moanings and the excitements, I must have gone straight into the marketplace to pause. People must have have milling about, looking for something new, something fresh. A baby bear fed the stump end of a broken carrot? A double-terminated crystal, clear and colorless, with one of the tips smacked off? A black typewriter ribbon unspooled to line the inside of a talking doll’s universe? All sorts of events, both minor and major ones, had had some effect on my corn husk broom, the dead cats swept off the dirty midnight streets of Tunis, the speeding trains that slowed up just enough to make perfect time on the dot when arriving in Zurich, like a ballerina en pointe. All that I had overlooked, and all that had overlooked me, it was all mentioned in the waters whose rings had disappeared when the pebble I had tossed again and again sank, where the flashing coy fish swam down away to the murk and corners. Were there to have been a difference in the body politic, the grease anointing a king, or a mottled purple gown for another, surely I had raised my head to watch the geese flying overhead, flying south, or flying north, confused by the weather over which way to travel en masse upon the coming of evening during the approaching winter.

Daniel Silvacek Thurgood

The idea of making false statement had never been new to me. I had, long ago in the past, made false statements aplenty. I had lied to counsel about the serfs I had beaten, I had lied to my children about their mother’s indelicacies, I had lied to the pontiff about my faith. Such were the customs, and such were the times. Such time and such customs had relied upon those lying to lie as an expected matter of due and common course. If teleology had demanded it, I could do no better, and indeed, did not. Later on, in the face of justices, judges, juries, in the common court of daily posts, such ways of being, such presentations of self in everyday life were deemed anathema if not wholly illegal. Subjects were placed in psychological prisons, pensions were revoked, and all but the deafest sycophants became deserters. In this fallen time, in which most of us living north of the Earth’s equator presently live, there is an impetus—however—to eke away somewhere, somewhere else, where one can exist and rejoice in being less than half of nothing. To that end, I had tied both of my laces, fastening tightly beneath their crisscrossing the two tongues of my leather boots and headed alone thither.

Joy Riders, Unite!

For the most part, we should plan for life on Mars the same way we might plan for life after a nuclear apocalypse. That is, we can expect to live in underground burrows, like rabbits or prairie dogs.

http://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2016/oct/09/who-wants-a-one-way-ticket-to-mars-2016/

There must be gold, oil, diamonds, copper, and lithium to even think of something so incredibly dumb. Something must be driving the itch to go there. Something must be messing with the balls of the big boys hoping to get enough lucre up to go. And, except for totally fouling the nest of this place Earth [once] called home, it is no surprise that some wonky South African punk, a generation removed from the Apartheid oscilloscope, is hungry for it.

Sort of like moving out of one shitted up chicken coop into maybe another one? For instance, just imagine anybody going family camping around the ruins of Chernobyl. No takers. But if you’ve got minerals and a way to make money (and, hell, all the externalities blowing upon the vacuous emptiness of space, who cares?!), guess we’ve got a wagon train and folks lookin’ for a new 40 acres and a mule.

Just leave all the tar, and chemicals, and waste, and unsolved nuclear pollution, and post-industrial indestructible indissolvable human debris behind for a new little place to…befoul? No, that c’aint be it! And it ain’t some kind of wanderlust. As for the science angle? Nope. It’s just death, like here. So why, Santa Claus, why? Well, li’l Wendy, iz just anotha opportunity to be lookin’ fer them free raw materials before th’other fella gits ’em first, yee-haw! Ride’m, girl! Ride’m, cowboy! Into the solar system!

Isiah Smith

Nobody had asked me what my opinion had been. Nobody had been around to. Though I had snuggled up beside the nearest sandpile, and was reading a note left there by another stranger, before last summer it seemed, I couldn’t imagine ever talking. My boots had become unlaced, too, and filled with several tiny stones apiece, bits of blue I had stumbled upon four miles or so north of the Mexican border, ninety miles south of Tucson. Even there, when I had dined with people, I had been put to their side, served alone outside the purview of ties, dresses, and light but good morning laughter over sausages, eggs, and steaming muffins. Any words, like table crumbs, had been smoothed away and I was forgotten. Now that my heart had been emptied of blood, and my mind had become a near vacuum of human desire, I was as ready as the Rose of Sharon to bloom in Jehovah’s own desert somewhere in a land I had never seen, beside a boulder near the foot of mountain where nothing before had taken root.

Terry Hernshaw

Most of my colleagues had urged me on. They had had belief in me. Others who knew me intimately had sometimes said, upon parting, “You’re a great person, but I felt I was deceived.” That was a silly thing to have said, since I myself could not have known. The great Titanic sank. Machu Picchu is an empty ruin. The Twin Towers have fallen. Busily builders build, climbers climb, workers work, farmers farm. Canoe. Kayak. Row. A, B, C. Alpha, beta, gamma. Blessed by the great guru, I had become at peace with myself. For a minute if not for a day. My spirit I would cast across the lake as rose petals had blown in the wind. My sparkle is eternal, my shine radiant, my mother home.

Close Friends Over Time

My old friend had driven up on his motorcycle and I really wanted to apologize to him. For almost four years I had barely seen him, besides trading emails about which set of snow tires to buy, and some political impertinences. And, just as he had called me about a week before pretty late at night to thank me for a talk that he and I had had while boiling down around a hundred thirty gallons of sap to make maple syrup when the thaw came this past winter about six months ago, I had in return wanted to say I had been sorry not to have been around much as good friend ought to be. There had been such trauma and turmoil in my life, I just didn’t want him to know, I told him. And, I said, really it must have meant not that I was afraid he would have whispered to himself about me, but what I instead might have been whispering about myself. I gave him lunch, some leftover pasta with pesto made from the basil and garlic grown in my garden, and he looked at my gas grill which I had cobbled together from an old rusted one I’d had that for years I was expecting to blow up in my face, and a nice Weber I’d found discarded along the roadside that some people who were not handy at all had ditched, or were too well off to be bothered with. He remarked that he had been impressed, actually, when at a local diner right across from the tall pine trees close by where we both live, I had declined his wish about four years back to sit down in the booth with me and my breakfast companion. There was, he felt, a sort of integrity in my establishing boundaries of privacy like that. But really, if it had been that, it was also that he would have been about to become privy to the world of danger, peril, and deep personal suffering I was just stepping into, despite the gorgeous vistas of the endless Atlantic ocean, the wild spray flung white up on the jagged rocks, and some ordinary summer vacation snapshots of steady Maine lobster boats motoring into the cove at dawn being flipped through at our table before the eggs and toast came. No, I told him, had it really been good, I would have wanted to share everything not hide it all from him. Come over to the pool anytime, he said, before he rode off, no need to call, an invitation he and his wife had been giving me for many years.

Sweeter Than Any Silken Losses

What else could it have been, my little friend, that you had gone away so sweetly? The voyage to Mont Saint-Michel never occurred, and the northern sands of Carthage must, too, be blown away. Instead, some old snow shoes in a rusty shed had had to be returned, and I trekked the hills alone last February without you. I can’t even say that I had shown you even the smallest part of my record collection. Most of the things I grew you ate. Few of these I remember your hands, your fingers, planting beside mine. The cords of wood we stacked together, they were burned more than two winters ago. The chemises, silk camisoles, and dress I once bought for you are crammed on hangers with oddly fashioned jackets from the 80’s in my back closet where every so often I go inside and throw out whatever under plastic has grown any mold. Though I re-did by hand the gravel in my driveway for you and me, I think you pulled up beside my car once. I’ve even switched the side of the bed I sleep on; yours was so much firmer. I’m out of all sorts of things. Almond butter. Fish oil. Sardines. Walnuts. Hair conditioner. The reach up to the shelf to buy them is too high for me alone. And I do without them, do without you.

Homeward Bound Forever

I can’t have said who the people were, who they had been. They had separated themselves, distinguished themselves, naming themselves that before all others and all other things. There had been traces, remnants or remains—it can be hard, difficult, sorting out broken pieces of stones, shards, the rubble of earthenware—just as sometimes war and nature precede the overlapping moments when the future’s eye turns backwards upon the sands of Egypt, and so on. Walls that seemed to have been forever were in fact only erected a short time ago, not even two hundred years. A hundred fifty, perhaps. And before that, who knows! Who knows what plains, and deserts, and oceans had been before all this.

There had been some world, long before language. Twelve thousand years. Sixty-eight thousand years. 2.5 million years. All these funny numbers! As if mapping out all human history (and all human pre-history) would make some difference. Instead: when the driving rains come, the black carpenter ants will seek high ground, scurrying and hunting for refuge anywhere they can perhaps find it in your house. And when the driving rains have stopped, the same ants will, too, recede as though they had never been, and find the low ground again somewhere outdoors. All this, like child’s play upon the shoreline of a beach, the wet holes dug in sandbars, cities on the lower cusp of Africa, as well as the tiny village of Kirkenes at the tip of the upmost world, will be washed away and filled in. What the people had known was this, and all their days was a sort of profound and elemental mourning, in full scope, in full knowledge of what had been, who had borne their own witness of it all like eyes within the bubble of a growing but rather thin-skinned universe.

Amour Tunisienne

Before my life’s second half, before the obvious Inferno-rift, which involved my sitting in a dusty armchair on the banks of Lake Champlain after squandering the first half my life, after causing as much suffering and committing, as Saint Paul would have it, enough sin to people a small South American village a couple of times over, before the second half of my life I was asleep. Only when I smelled the cheap dust in a badly upholstered armchair of three homosexual friends who took me under their wing for several months, who fed and housed me in Vermont out of charity and love for me for seven months, maybe it was eight; only then, when I read Dante—and this is the truth—did I wake up from having been an extremely talented waste.

Before inhaling the good filthy dust of an orange-thatched armchair on Lake Chaplain, and being left alone to think and be and masturbate and be, above all, listened to by three men, before I inhaled the filth of Vermont, I was asleep. Over awful pork dinners, over awful pot roasts, over bread-crumb soaked fat-dripping bacon-laid meatloaves that made me sick to have on the tip of my fork, and which, because these male friends were all gay and gallant and generous, who was I in the crapped up shoes I was wearing to have turned down the three gay g’s, even if the last of the triplet is soft? I was in no position to do anything but refuse or submit to their months of dusty love. I could never call them, they called themselves Peter, Paul, and Mary, which was a cute and apt gay joke we kept up for the entirety of my visit; I never called them by their real names, and won’t, out of my love for them. I won’t call them by their real names here in this reckoning. I loved all three and couldn’t criticize their dinner food that was dripping with fat, soaked in animal grease. I can’t even say what they called me. It wasn’t polite. But I won’t say. Some things, even in a perfect reckoning, must remain silent; some things must ever remain silent. That’s the way I am. That’s the way I have always been.

All I have left, for example, from my amour Tunisienne is a little brass plate, an ashtray really, and a single photograph, which, since I never take pictures, I have no pictures of my loves, is exceptional. For me it is taboo. I will say as little as possible about my amour Tunisienne, not out of shyness, not out of shame, not out of guilt, not out of pride. I will not name her. People I have loved I never name. The only external reminder I have of my amour Tunisienne is a small brass ashtray, a souvenir plate, with her name’s meaning, along with other arabesque designs, banged into the side, banged into the lip. Her name means star. I may point to every constellation I know of in the heavens; with my etymological wand I may point to her name itself; I may indicate it with the index of translation; but I will never say it. Somewhere in my lifelong heap of junk I have this plate with her name hammered into the side of it in English capital letters, in, I should say, a Roman alphabet, a small gift she passed to me sometime before our clandestine love affair was discovered by her older brother.

I have been mad about women all my life; for me, as others bend their knee to the Cross, I lower myself to women. As others seek spiritual salvation through Christ, my life has been a Golgotha of women. Everywhere on this hill of skulls, my loves are crucified. Everywhere on this bloody hill of women there is another lover. My journey to the divine heart has been through women, from my earliest teens, when I was a doubtful American thrown on the white coral beaches of Carthage, where along the promenade at vespers young girls walked their light-brown arms wrapped around each other’s waists, down and up the red-tiled promenade above the Mediterranean Sea, their unheard voices drowned out by the skulk and shuffle of matchstick-striking boys leering here and there, like me. All my life I have lit matches, and struck them before the faces of illuminated women. In Carthage and elsewhere, much of my life has been a discovery of the divine through an ongoing and endless crucifixion of feminines. It is the only way I seem to learn. Through loss I have learned and through loss gained everything.

Just last year I traveled to a local film screening and, seeing a seat free beside a young woman, asked her if she minded my sitting beside her. Shortly after welcoming me to the seat, she put out her hand and greeted me with her name. Establishing within the several minutes before the screening room darkened about us an intimacy of names and places, more than just her raw beauty itself, to which I am and always have been irrevocably attracted, the shaded salience of a cheekbone, the knobbed attenuated wrist bared at the cuff, the smell of beauty, that sweet unguent of salt and water and grease, it is a smell itself that draws me in like the word itself love uttered by another before me, more than just the similar social accents exchanged between us, I was lost to my now perpetual silence. While I later, the next day in fact, sent to this lovely young woman, whose surname and town in which she lived she had given to me, a copy of the extant text of the great poet-lover Sappho, marking the spot with a yellow autumn leaf where on the right-hand page the English reads the English, and on the left-hand page reads the Greek, I will never hear from her again, I will never in daylight see her.

That it was my desire to do so, though it was my desire to see her again, though in her beauty and youth was awakened in me the rapture of Carthage, though my heart could recall the scandaled bliss of placing my hand on my amour Tunisenne’s right knee seated on the filthy curb of an urban street, in Tunis itself, where we had conspired to create our lovers’ tryst, though next to my own smell of my own nose crammed into my own armpit, though besides my own the salted aromas of this movie girl’s body filling up my lips with blood puffed they were the best ever I smelled once in my life, though I felt the urges of a lifetime to compose a thousand poems and shred them to papered fragments to be mulched by the promiscuous woods and pulped by the greasy and slimy estuaries besides which we all live, I could guess even then, when I know nothing of propriety, when I go through the mere motions of manner and propriety, when the coattails of my upright social upbringing are grabbed onto; when, if, for example, to note an entering female I turn the entirety of my albeit squat, foreshortened torso about, rather than cranking around the hairy uncouth knob of my flustered head to view the entrant; when my true barbaric self behind a knoll lies half-hidden and I pretend that outwardly I am the handsome JFK, when this collision happens, when I am neither half the one nor half the other, when both exterminate the other, when I mentioned to this great young beauty whose oily breasts were a button away the poet-goddess Sappho just before the darkness of the movie theatre descended and she knew nothing of Sappho, the name itself was foreign, unheard of, even then I knew in my shivers that I should never meet her again. Throughout the dark screening, my left hand cupping the armrest, I felt her breath exhaled on my warmed fingers. Being placed on the face pointing downwards the nose is such a funny thing, I thought: made to send messages of love even the sender may not comprehend, understand, or even know of. Phoenician thrown from a cliff my love is fallen down to a nameless purple sea.

I will never say to the world the name of my amour Tunisienne or the name of the young movie girl. The one I knew in my teens, the other in my fifties. It is all the same to me, and I have never let a truth in my heart be corrupted by naming it. The particular province of men, to name, is one I have steered away from in my life. To have records of my life runs counter to everything I believe in. Only were I sure that a lover were to be a lover for life would I take her picture. That is why my amour Tunisienne is such an exception. Her picture, which I snapped at a careless moment, I don’t have the impulse to destroy, nor do I wish to keep it. I would never snap the picture of a woman unless I knew I were to spend my entire life with her. That has, except for this one exceptional picture, been my lifelong credo. I have, except for this one picture, been faithful to it. I have no pictures of any of my lovers, not one of them, except of course for the amour Tunisienne.

In the picture, it is actually a picture of her and me, we are standing next to each other, I with my arm hung atop her shoulder, and she with her arm held loose around my waist. Her older sister, Jemullah, which means beautiful, took it. We are smiling. I cannot bear to look at it. Even my memory of it makes me sad. When I look at that picture in my memory, I am saddened forever by how happy I am. I cannot bear to have dozens of pictures like this. So, I have none. Pictures of happiness would be impossible to live by. So, I have none. The idea of pictures of happiness reminds me of the life they represent as no longer being so. So, these pictures represent a life that is false. Pictures represent falsehood. So, I cannot bear any of them. This is especially true for the dozens of pictures of women I have loved. I cannot bear to see any of them. It would be suicidal for me to have kept pictures of my loves. They would have made me feel false, and, therefore, suicidal. So, except for the amour Tunisienne, whose existence has been a silent curse throughout my life, and which I never will destroy, I have not taken any pictures of women and therefore have not been faced again ever with keeping or not keeping some. I have made it perfidious to take and therefore keep any. I have made it sacrilege. I have paid homage to all the women I have loved by not taking and not keeping their pictures.

This, really, is my only religion, it is my only constant lifelong practise. In everything else, I have lived in violation, a sort of violation that at times has been steadfast and at others not. But, in any case, I have lived a life continuously filled with violations, and every violation is a violation of love. The one aspect of my life which I have not violated is the taking of pictures, except for my amour Tunisienne. Excepting her, I have all my life been steadfast and true to this one reigning principle: never to take the picture of a woman whom I did not doubt I would know forever. In this, except for the Tunisienne, a plague to me, I have been true. To me, naming women I have loved is identical to taking their pictures. Their names spoken are identical to the images taken. To me, it doesn’t matter if that name is one from decades and decades back, or if that name is one from the week prior. The divine must never be profaned. To me, naming and creating the image of the divine profanes it. It is taking what is divine and soiling it, chewing up what is real and meaningful to what is rendered mere amusement and sport. I have never named or created an image of any of my life’s loves, besides the one already detailed, and I never will.

(Novel excerpt, 2004—click here for other current works)