California State University (CSU): Open Journal Systems

Cory, Juliana

Like as if as how 
Happiness slinks in like a dog beaten 
Holding his tail behveen his teeth. 
Malodorous refuse chokes mg nostrils 
'Blinds mg rose .. colored glasses. 
ChaHer, it don't maHer 
As mg tongue tastes the happiness 
l captured. lt is rough on mg hands. 
l eat mg happiness with a spoon 
At Thelma's Cafe in Tuscon, Arizona. 
Happiness reallg is smooth going down. 
Juliana Cory 
UJe sat in the iunkgard at four in the morning 
And scammed. l am happg because l have happg stuff. 
Like as if as how 
Purple jars of sadness spill on clean sheets 
, Sad as refrigerators. 
UJe sat at full speed. 
Ceegee can't roll her tongue 
And won't ever forget it. 
As sad tires rolled motionlessly in their heaps, l knew 
l would find meaning if it weren't so mean. 
Quelquefois, je dine dans la salle de ta coeur 
UJhile the silverware dozes off, 
And happiness lingers in the parlor. 
Tbe Nortbridne Review 
201 


English

Like as if as how

Ezikian, Onnig

What Do You Want Me To Do, Bleed?

Mendivil, Josè

Lessons

Villani, Luisa

Luisa Villani 
(featured at the Phoenix Readings, November 1996) 
Language of the Self 
"True loss is for him whose days have been 
spent in utter ignorance of his self." 
-Baha'u'llah, The Hidden Words 
In the graveyard walking is not easy. There are no 
smooth surfaces in the highlands. In San Cristobal the streets 
are cobbled-the stones flesh-colored like the upturned soles 
of feet-and the houses sag. Telephone poles lean into the 
wind and listen. 
This is not the city. This is an early morning in the vil-
lage of San Juan Chamula. Mist rises off peaks and in the 
graveyard of the burned out church, it rolls from waiting 
graves. 
"The light is fantastic." Clare snaps her camera. A 
man stumbles out of a cloud. "Damn. I almost missed it." 
"Where did he come from?" The air freezes my fingers 
into a hook around my water bottle. I'm not used to the alti-
tude. 
"I think he was sleeping in a grave," Clare says. 
His legs bow and wobble as he moves across an ocean 
of crosses and clumps of grass mottled with ribbons. He might 
have a bottle of posh under his poncho, or maybe he's just 
rubbing his stomach. 
Behind us, music-squeak of strings and the harmo-
nious squeeze of a concertina-dissolves in the distance. It's 
early. I remember reading the words of Rigoberta Menchu: 
... requests for marriage usually take place 
atfour in the morning because most Indians 
leave home before five, and when they come 
home from work at six in the evening they're 
usually busy with other things. It's done at 
four in the morning so as not to cause too much 
23 
Luisa Villani 
inconvenience and they leave when the dogs 
start barking. 
Let me begin again. Clare stands in the sunlight look-
ing at her hand, her fingers flexed wide. "It's incredible," she 
says. 
I'm in the dark, in the doorway of the talle. A man 
presses his foot down in the bottom of a basket. Underneath, 
wet pulp flattens on the stones. He's making paper. He lifts 
the basket and the circular pattern of the weave remains there 
in a square of tan mush, flecked with the lavender of orchid 
petals and the small pinioned spines ofleaves. Over my shoul-
der a wide face in a bas relief of brown paper whispers in 
Tzotzil: the light, the light. I am making a story. 
Let me begin again. 
Once, a small, filthy child in a cave of pepper tree 
branches held the black Labrador's bouncing teats-not 
knowing how they ached-amazed at their fullness. A squeal 
from the sunlight and she runs from the shade. Pails of water 
empty in the air-droplets streaming over her-then hit the 
ground with a slap, that sound only water can make as it rais-
es puffs of dust. 
We ran the vineyard rows, vines swelling around us, 
bees hiding under leaves. The ground was different from the 
gray dirt of the yard. The black mud sucked my toes down, 
drinking my steps. At the end of a row, I turned, saw my foot-
prints fill with water then melt in the sunlight. The leaves held 
their breaths-accumulating a silence-behind them in the 
shade, a universe of grapes and bees humming in their orbit. 
Let me begin again. 
A lunar eclipse calls us. Hotel guests stand on the roof 
where ruffles of red tiles outline a patio. Fingers point. Lovers 
hug. Crack of fireworks in the air-smaller than the crack of 
gunfire-as Mayans launch their prayers toward God. A moth 
throws itself at the jelly jar of a light fixture. 
I don't see the photo of the graveyard until we return 
to Los Angeles because I've spent the day in the streets of San 
Cristobal chasing shades of meaning. Clare returns-exhaust-
ed, elated-finds me in the hotel room sunk in the 
24 
Language of the Self 
mattress, the flattened backs of books around me. 
"Did you see the eclipse?" she asks as she removes her 
backpack. 
I say no, even though I did. 
"I watched it from the road." Film containers roll onto 
the bedspread. "I hitchhiked back to town, rode in the back of 
a pig truck," she says, her lashes wide as wings. My spine 
stiffens. It's dark. We're not supposed to be in the villages 
after dark. 
"The light this morning was great. You should have 
come. I shot this guy in the graveyard at sunrise." She spins 
around the room, bumps the dresser, sends a guava tumbling 
under the bed. 
We go to the zocalo for coffee and to check out another 
bookstore. Feather giants of clouds saunter across the dark 
sky, luminous and deep blue as they pass. The restaurants 
have come to life, breathing music and the dusty infusion of 
candlelight into the streets. The front door of the bookstore 
casts a yellow parallelogram onto the stone sidewalk. 
"Here's something you can relate to," Clare says as she 
hands me a slim white book, Sarcojagos by Carlos Adolfo 
Gutierrez Vidal. I'm not sure if she means I'm obsessed with 
death, or obsessed with verse, since this is a book of poetry. 
She smiles and moves on to a shelf of Mayan histories. 
I open the pages and my eyes catch on a phrase, le 
cane se bebe las palabras-the street drinks words-and this 
is the book I must have. As we walk past the indigenistas 
asleep outside the cathedral, I hold this book in the warmth of 
my armpit. In the courtyard, a child wearing orange sandals 
kicks a skinny dog. The dog yelps. I'm agitated. In Spanish 
dog is perro, In Tzotzil it's tzi, pronounced with the teeth and 
tongue. The dog's tawny eyes look at me as it runs sideways 
in the dark. 
Let me begin again. Many of the indigenistas asleep 
outside the cathedral are outcasts. They've been forced to 
leave their villages because they've upset the Mayan balance of 
life, usually by professing an evangelical faith. They come to 
the city of San Cristobal to make a living selling whatever the 
tourists will buy, hand woven belts, wool ponchos, zapatista 
dolls. They stake out a section of sidewalk, roll out their 
25 
Luisa Villani 
blankets, and live-from sun up to sun down-weaving, mak-
ing, selling. At night they sleep in the zocalo or in the shanty 
town at the edge of San Cristobal. Their children live with 
them, often roaming the block with black plastic bags on their 
arms, bags which are filled with tiny clay figures or macrame 
pens, para uno peso. This is a fact. 
We walk by the green and blue bat design of a woven 
blanket, the heat of my armpit captured in the pages of my 
book. A family of Chamulans sleeps beneath a Coca Cola sign. 
Tomorrow, the sun will rise in a yellow blaze, amplified by the 
flan colored walls of the San Nicolas Catedral. They will have 
the morning light, then in the afternoon, the blessing of 
shade. I imagine a brown hand reaching for the rough edge of 
the billboard, finding it at daybreak the way I find my tongue 
sometimes on the edge of a just chipped tooth. 
How would it be to live between the parenthesis of 
night in space no wider than my height? To know so perfect-
ly the edge of the sidewalk-that silhouette of stone-as if it 
were my own signature? To lean against the terra cotta tiles 
and breastfeed, while the sidewalk is worn shiny from shoe 
leather and the oils of bare feet? The sparkle of a discarded 
gum wrapper could enfold the intimacy of a distant space, a 
counter over which the money was exchanged, an airport 
where the gum was purchased. 
Now, I'm making a story. 
Clare is annoyed with my lack of presence. "C'mon. 
Are we playing chess or what?" She waves at Julio to bring 
more cappuccino and tequila. The flickering light on the chess 
pieces stretches their shadows beyond the parquet of the 
board. In the far corner of the coffee house, stucco arches 
over a small stage where a five-man band plays American and 
French top forty. In that grotto the glint of electric guitars and 
belt buckles moves across the darkness with all the sheen of 
a velvet Elvis painting. 
"You're in another world," Clare says as she takes my 
knight. 
In the eclipse of memory I am in a cave with the small 
applause of leaves swimming the air above me, raining down 
shafts of light on my outstretched hand. 
26 
Language of the Self 
"You should have been with me this morning," Clare 
says, looking down at her chess pieces. 
"You and I approach things differently." 
"You don't approach them at all," she says as the band 
leaves the stage. In their baseball hats and surfT-shirts, they 
are indistinguishable from the tourists in the coffee house. 
"That's not true." I rub the sweat from the side of her 
tequila glass. "There's an intimacy you know, an intimacy to 
space, no matter where you go." Clare focuses on my mouth 
as I speak. "I don't have a camera to capture what I want. I 
have words. My words already have things attached to them. 
Spaces." At a table far to the right, a woman laughs as she 
touches her husband's knee. "You want me to run out and 
find a story, but I've already got one. I remember every space 
of my home, every corner I ever hid in. Things keep doubling 
back for me. There's an elliptical quality to experience and 
memory." 
"I disagree," she says. "I can't remember all those 
spaces. My parents moved a lot when I was small. We lived 
in more than thirty different houses." 
"But perhaps that's why I write," I say. "I do remem-
ber." 
"Perhaps that's why I photograph," she says, "I don't." 
Clare finishes her drink. A small drop of tequila leaves a yel-
low hyphen in the bottom of her glass. In the coffee house 
mingled laughter and conversations come to an end as the 
band takes the stage. 
Let me begin again. 
My cup makes a brown ring on the table. Clare stays 
to hear the band play and to wait for Julio's "last call," so she 
can photograph the lead singer. On the stage Spanish songs 
now swirl the air, stirring the cigarette smoke. The drummer 
yawns. On the Calle Diego De Mazariegos a dog raises its 
head from its paws and looks at the sky, waiting for the dark-
ness to go gray. I stay in the street for a long time, drinking 
in the past, the way a long distance swimmer can't help but 
swallow a gasp of water. 
27 


Language of the Self

A. Torok, Michael

Michael A. Torok 
Journey #1 
He bought love from a dime store 
and a ghost of a woman 
she'd smile and offer him red hots 
but he always took the lemon 
heads on a rack in the back 
low to the ground behind the sugar 
to watch her bend over 
to a thirteen year brain 
it was heaven 
at fifteen he was in a truck 
with luck and fate to Colorado 
snowy white with peaks of real 
color browning the steps of slush 
he forsook for a lodge 
and hot bath in the back of patrol 
cars whistling up a highway 
back east to refuge and smiling 
skyward at a night filled 
with laughter at seventeen stealing 
cars blue black and red needle 
drawn taught across pinched skin 
for the drop from highway 
to apple wine crash site 
a winter night dark and shining 
stars piercing cracked shell 
of car and silence musical 
in its musk of blood and heroine 
twenty-two times they cut him 
open on the table 
stripped flesh from the hidden places 
to replicate the smoothness of health 
and happiness seized the scars 
with the help of honed silver blades 
41 
Michael A. Torok 
42 
and a mother of fire 
made him whole 
to let him go. 


Journey #1

Takagi, Madoka

Magic Club 
Photograph 
By Madoka Takagi 
45 


Magic Club Photograph

Garcia, Mario

Mario Garcia 
Jazzman 
(For Paul Desmond) 
Last I heard you Jazzman, 
You was cutting some bad licks on your Ax, 
Alto sax, Man. 
Old Tunes 
That have been round longer, 
Than us slow walking Old cats, 
Long before we were young lungs and guts, 
Filled with hash smoke and booze 
Didn't know fast flying Quick Time 
Cause we couldn't read it on the charts, 
But it was there, 
Pulling sidemen under 
Same as it painted our hair 
Thought you mighta beat it, 
Cause you still had the chops, 
Wailing through the changes, 
With those fingers working the Golden Sax, 
Man, you were out there, tying it up like a pretty bow, 
Twisting in and out of the line anyone can sing. 
But later you had to sit down, 
When your thin legs started to shake, 
And some of those bows came undone. 
Quick Time had come stealing in, 
Looking for the Sweet Sound. 
And it found you, 
Crying rifs through the tube, 
Wailing and heaving heavy breath, 
Choking on spit thick in your throat, 
Backstage you bent over hacking, 
46 
While the piano soloed pretty, 
We saw you were broken, 
Like a needle skipping jukebox, 
But it wasn't just you. 
Old Cats near the end of the set 
Heard the Cold One's Mean Screech: 
Jazzman is no more than rusty Ax, 
Some short tunes get played through. 
Oh, jazzman 
Quick Time picked the Man's pocket now, 
God has no more nickels for you. 
Mario Garcia 
47 


Jazzman: For Paul Desmond

Waggoner, Kathy

48 
Soul Skin 
Ceramic Sculpture 
By Kathy Waggoner 


Soul Skin Ceramic Sculpture

74 
Wonder Wheel 
Photograph 
By Madoka Takagi 


Wonder Wheel Photograph

Introduction to the 50th anniversary meeting proceedings by the editor that reflects on this history and work of the organization over the last five decades.&nbsp

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