Leaving thine outgrown shell by life’s unresting sea!
–Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Chambered Nautilus
At the corner of Alta and Sunflower street signs hum
like conch shells in sagey wind. The last water receded
an eon ago: runs deep beneath your feet if at all.
The sound sings your first trip west, whipping over desert
in a silver bus. Shells along shelves in shops at Fisherman’s Wharf.
You held pink rims to your ear understanding then the nautilus
your teacher silenced without definition. Didn’t he know
a poem’s tones seep through pages when pressure builds?
You returned after seafaring to the desert wind,
wind like the ocean’s. The shacks are
sinking beam by board into brown sand:
a flag pole clanks in a wide lot:
air pulls forth what was forgotten.
Alexa Mergen lived for two years in the high desert town of Yucca Valley where she walked dirt roads, admired the Milky Way, and listened to wind. She grew up in Washington, DC, making frequent visits to family in Nevada and Utah. Alexa studied Literature and Writing at George Washington University, UC Berkeley, and UC Irvine. Her poems and essays appear in numerous publications. She currently lives in Sacramento where she leads workshops in poetry and memorizing poems, and works as a freelance editor.
Seems there weren’t a god damn thing to do in the Midwest and those families who went West looking for a better life took their hopelessness with them. They packed it all up and tied it to the tops of their cars and the backs of their pick ups and drove – out of Oklahoma, through the panhandle, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, all the way out to Cali-forn-eye-aye. When they got to the desert foothills, they unpacked. They’d run out of money, gas and possibilities. And that’s where the next generation of no-education, nothing-to-do and no hope planted their roots and grew up.
Natalie Hutchens thought she might do better. By some miracle, the rickety-boned genes of her mother’s side of the family and the gaunt, wire-y genes of her father’s side mutated and performed a random act of kindness.
Natalie’s sister had died at birth. She’d weighed 2 lbs. and was born without a lower intestine, the doctor said. Her older brother never could put on any weight and was born with his pinky toes missing. So everyone was surprised when Natalie was born, plump, pink and glowing with health. She had blue eyes the color of nothing anyone there had ever seen and blonde hair; real blonde, not that dirty-blonde color that looks like somebody hadn’t washed it ever. She was pretty-much perfect; a real beauty. If her ma hadn’t known better she would have thought maybe there was a mistake and she’d have to give that baby back.
But it was no mistake and as Natalie grew older, she only got more beautiful. It was nearly an embarrassment to her family. People always wanted to ask if she was adopted. But they didn’t. You’d have to be real stupid not to know that only the rich could buy a baby and the Hutchens people were share croppers. During the depression, folks had enough trouble feeding the mouths that belonged to them, much less looking for more mouths to feed.
Not only was life hard in the country, it moved slower than anywhere else – anywhere else where there were things to do, entertainment – things to distract a body. More than hard, life was brutal. Everything there was to do to earn a living, would crack your skin, peel your lips and make your body ache when it got up in the morning.
Again, Natalie proved to be the exception. Must have been looking in the mirror each day gave her a lift, because she had what people call a sunny disposition. Somehow, that little glimpse in the mirror in the morning seemed to give her the kind of hope that everyone in her family, and those like them, had buried somewhere along the dusty roadside between Oklahoma and where they ran out of gas.
Just the way a flower works its way out of the dirt, drawn to the sun, Natalie was meant for better things. And the very best that Barstow had to offer was the fruit and nut stand next to the only gas station for miles. The picking and packing was for those girls who were genetically less fortunate. Natalie got a job meeting the public. Some folks would stop even if they didn’t need gas or fruit, just to get a closer look at Natalie’s smile.
Some folks coming back from the coast would say she should get out of there – that there were places where they made silent films and the best looking actresses would pale next to Natalie’s good looks. But the road didn’t go any farther than Barstow for the Hutchens family. Everything west of Barstow just plain didn’t exist. It wasn’t until the rest of the world began to show up that Natalie got a taste of what the rest of the world had to offer.
Sometime in the 1920’s a glamorous-looking couple driving an open topped roadster stopped for gas. The man got out and struggled to put the top up. Newly deposited sand and dust coated the sleek new touring car. A goddess of a woman had covered herself with a hat and scarf and could be heard complaining dramatically about her hair. A greeting committee of three or four mongrel dogs crept out from under a tar paper covered shack, their tails between their legs. They were looking for handouts but were skittish and ready to run if given the boot.
The teenager who ran the pump came over to help him. The goddess stayed in the car, applying a fresh coat of paint to her face. Once the top was up and the tank was filled, she insisted she wanted to buy some oranges. To Natalie, the two might as well have been a king and queen. She was tongue tied but the man was a smooth talker and all she had to do was smile and he was smitten. He eyed her naturally blonde hair and curvy figure and, in a low voice, said some flattering words to her. Sensing competition from the hick beauty, the woman gave the man a glare and off they went in their sophisticated machine, leaving behind a cloud of dust and the scent of the woman’s perfume.
That night, Natalie lay in bed with visions of that man in her head. She thought about his slicked back hair and perfectly trimmed mustache. By comparison, the local boys with their chin stubble and cowlicks were as different from him as his sleek convertible was to their gritty, rust- bucket trucks.
Her heart would pound every time a plume of dirt rose into the air behind vehicles approaching from the west. She had a fantasy that he would come back for her someday – that she would then be the woman in the passenger seat of the touring car and he would motor her away to Hollywood where she would become a silent screen actress.
Just a week after those two came and went, she caught a ride into town on her day off and bought a magazine with film personalities on the cover and a lipstick to experiment with on her own virgin lips. Flipping through the pages she recognized the couple as John Gilbert and Greta Garbo. There was gossip that they would marry. Natalie smeared the lipstick from her lips with the back of her hand, got into bed and turned her face to the wall.
The following Saturday night, Buck Davenport invited her to go out walking. He didn’t show up until almost dark. She reached up and lit the kerosene lamp hanging above her head on the front porch. In its light, he looked a little like that gent John Gilbert. He’d shaved his stubble for their date and slicked back his hair although it didn’t look that clean. They’d been out walking before. The other guys knew Buck was sweet on her and pretty much kept their distance from Natalie. You didn’t want to cross Buck.
As they walked, he draped a proprietary arm around her shoulders. Around back of the tar paper shack there were some scraggly trees, a water trough and some old farming equipment left to rust. A cluster of windmills were bent over some, all leaning in the same direction from years of getting beat on by the desert wind. Just about in the middle of the windmills there was an old mattress and they lay down side by side.
Nothing was said between them for a time and then he rolled over on top of Natalie and fondled her. She took the only attention she’d had since the movie fella had flirted with her at the fruit stand. After Buck had his way with her, he zipped up his pants and said his good nights. He left Natalie there looking up at the stars. She lay still for a long while, listening to the rhythm of the windmills, creaking and rasping, like giant praying mantises.
Wasn’t long before Natalie found she was knocked up. The doctor told her he was sure.
From that day Natalie’s hair began to lose its shine. Her skin took on the rough texture of the Barstow earth. She stopped looking in the mirror. She didn’t want to see how her lips had become dry and cracked.
The Mojave that surrounds the gas station stretches away for hundreds of miles in every direction, with nothing but scrub, coyotes, snakes and centipedes. Folks who know, tell it that Natalie walked out into the desert and just never came back.
There’s a local Indian legend that the ghost of a young woman can sometimes be seen along the banks of the Mojave River and after dark they can hear her wail. White people have heard it too, but they say it’s just the wind.
—-
Ellen Hecht grew up writing. Her love of words and story telling came from her mother, a high school English teacher and her immigrant father who enjoyed telling folk stories he brought with him from Russia. Her grown son is also a writer, producing his own screenplays. Ellen moved from Los Angeles and now lives with her husband in Santa Barbara County. She continues to write and has recently taken up photography. She has had two short stories published in the Santa Barbara Independent. A collection of her stories entitled, A Dozen Short Ironies is looking for a publisher. Her photo portfolio may be viewed at: http://www.redbubble.com/people/waddleudo
The desert has filled.
The dunes, once cut only by wild
winds and wild jackrabbits, have new scars:
silver veins,
tattered tracks that line the bedrock,
mined from the molten flow
below.
I hear them in the night:
the trains. The whistle,
like the cuckoo in the clock,
sounds each hour: a howl,
a scream, an owl-cry,
the harbinger of the rattling cars,
the hollow thump
of an engine faraway.
The headlights, jaundiced wolf-eyes,
cast their jaded stare over the blackened desert,
cut the smoke, the long thin stream
of condensed breath, huffed out like a sigh.
A gusty gasp at the end of a long early run.
Up ahead, the engine room.
The pulsing heart, the empty shell,
the lone dweller in a line of dead machinery.
The brakes squeal, a child dragging its feet.
In the station, the cars couple,
uncouple, the fumbling, tender hitch-and-lock,
the ecstasy of a long union, the final, sated slide
apart, after a heavy haul.
The animal sounds, alive in the night.
Alone, in my yellow-bright room, I look out,
into the dark.
I listen.
__________
Caitlin Boyd is a lifelong resident of the Coachella Valley who recently graduated from the University of Redlands with a degree in creative writing. She is currently pursuing an MFA through the University of California at Riverside. She is at work on a young-adult fantasy novel.
this
is a
letter
to it. this
letter is to
it. this is a
letter written
down and sent
to it. this letter is
to be read by it. this
letter is a question, a
timebomb. this letter smiles
looks to it so that it can breathe.
this letter’s smell will blur and sting.
this letter’s feel, for it, is heavy. this is
Edward’s letter. this is Jeffrey’s letter. this
is Richard’s leftover in the car, waiting for him,
letter. this letter is like that. this letter is made of
chicken wire pulled tight to cut out a name. this letter
is made of ice to clean out the room. this letter is pieces
of grass, of eggs of sunlight in the glass. this letter is a rip.
this letter will take dogeared hands of understanding and place them
back on road, where Yolanda can be clear, or at least love with her feet
next time. This letter, says, yes, Inshallah, but this letter is not cotton candy.
It is not that they left this letter to crawl slowly out of that place where medication
is sprinkled on shredded minds. It is not that they left this letter to it, the whispering,“I
can’t make him love me”, and the walls running with their skirts away from the war, and
the understanding of goodbye. This letter is it. This letter, this particular brand of cure.
__________ Nikia Chaney finds herself surrounded by very small people. She teaches poetry classes for children and she has five children of her own. Nikia also teaches community creative writing workshops at San Bernardino Valley College. She has an MFA in Poetry from Antioch University, and she is currently in school for a second master’s degree at California State University, San Bernardino. She has been published in 491, Sugar House Review, Badlands, Pearl, with upcoming publishings in New York Quarterly and Saranac.
When radio waves get lost among the noise of sea,
A car fire burns its last cassette in the glove box,
Ignites a picture album,
A conversation about socks.
The forest shrugs it off—as nature does,
Just another bear-trapped raccoon with cheese in its mouth.
We spend the night in a tree house and play with a ghost spewing from candlelight.
Pretend its fog that calls us closer with a finger,
When it gets too real, we hide inside an orange we squeezed hollow.
Then we safety-pin our lips together—as mankind does,
But Mother grows mold in our showers to remind us:
We shouldn’t forget the dead.
___
Larry Eby writes from Southern California where he earned his BA in Creative Writing from CSUSB. His work has appeared in the Sand Canyon Review, Welter, Badlands, the Pacific Review, the Secret Handshake, and Call of the Wild: Being Human by Editions Bibliotekos press. He is a founding member of PoetrIE, an Inland Empire based literary community, and currently has plans to attend CSUSB’s MFA program in poetry. In addition, he also has plan to open a publishing house in the Inland Empire.
Reflections For A Lingering Summer Raincross, California September 1919
Summer rains
bring them forward
dragonflies
but for too short a time.
Estelle Sampson
notices legends
parallel reality
a bit neatly
in this set of hills and valleys
and her periods of placid years
are placed too far apart
by all sorts of gods and demons
that romp and rampage
under the signal of
the double raincross
a blend of Catholic and Navajo
that defines this land
just a bit too well.
De Anza and his compadres
brought strife and persecution
to this inland place
of sharp peaks and deep arroyos
the flattest plains
and their soils,
waters and animals
now suffer
now more than even before
when the other gods
were more benevolent
when the earthbound people
just let them be.
Estelle looks to the western
always-hot sun
and thinks of dogwood winters
back home
in eastern
West Virginia
and smiles.
Yes she just sits bemused
before rest calls her home
between Jurupa and Mission Boulevards.
___
Del Rosa 1968
In the full moon
of an August Sunday,
the one before Labor Day,
just above San Bernardino,
the stingy musky slap-smell
of grapefruits
from the tree next
to the half-covered patio
on Holly Vista where
Dogwood does a “T”,
is another special specimen
of lanterns in the darkness
which add a sad spice
to such a series of nights
right before autumn
and elementary school
comes galumphing in.
___
Emmaline Case
The lady in the moldy woolen cape
searches for the answer
to why all these years
have come up missing
or misplaced
and why children are in crosswalks
around three each afternoon
why the stores on Arlington
would not let her in
any more.
And those who give her rides
smile just a bit too much
for her taste:
Learning to drive in Arkansas must have happened was it yesterday later today sixty-seven years ago or a week from now but it occurred and I was unbounded then.
___
Mike Cluff is a fulltime English and Creative Writing instructor at Norco College. He has lived steadily in the Highland and Redlands area since 1998. His eighth book of poetry Casino Evil was published in June 2009 by Petroglyph Books.
the hill has been butterflied
and everything that causes noise speaks
in a foreign language
a radio chokes itself
saying the sound of empty country is snow
the distance between freeways is arrested
as reports about frost come second-hand
(things the soldiers fell like:
trees, leaves, airplanes)
an owl blasts through the mountain,
angels, expatriated from our father’s paradise
do taxes in a public park
Overpasses arc like the rings of a dying planet
Nobody can find work
now kids have taken to demanding
explanations from god
while last night the anarchists
doing their best to imitate the pacific
found only the silence of constant traffic
___
Jaime Garcia is a 23 year old libertarian conspiracy theorist from Rubidoux, California. His work has appeared in dotdotdash and Voiceworks, and is forthcoming in Contrary Magazine.
Once You’ve Seen Anything Die, You’ve Seen Everything Die
Mercury in retrograde has us on a red-eye, lipstick on the fly,
racing on the 101
to get to the empty house,
afraid to ask aloud:
what if it smells like death?
We go first to the room where she fell and expect fluid, an outline,
not this mess of shredded paper from the starving dog.
One bent slipper under the bed, unmoved.
The picture frame
she must have grabbed wildly
before breaking her neck against the wall.
In the kitchen: rotten fruit,
Dishes in the sink,
a blinking light on the answering machine
that porcelain creamer cow
I have always loved.
The coroner won’t let us see her,
she’s “unfresh” – we reel.
We didn’t buy enough cold cuts,
I don’t know how to make her noodle kugel.
They play “Turn, Turn, Turn” at the memorial,
We can’t remember if she liked this song.
Someone asks if they can keep her throw pillow.
Lawyers randomly ring the door bell.
A cousin wants to grieve with the big screen tv.
Her sister searches the closet for a borrowed coat.
Later, everything is Lysol, blank, and on the market.
No one wants to pay, say anything small and true
So we tell ourselves the body is mostly just water, anyway.
___
Sometimes You Submit
Oscar the cat sniffs out death
in a Rhode Island nursing home
and thinks: life is a confluence of shambling
but not really, he’s just a cat
with a pinked nose and paw,
light-stepping biting-ball of the best way to say goodbye.
Now see the eternal hummingbird,
Jimmy
who flits the window as the couple paints
his bedroom, it’s been fifteen years
since a two by four sticking out the back of a truck
struck him dead; but they see him.
My fighting beta never did a damn thing
about the Northridge earthquake
which nearly killed me, or did he
paddle upside down, bubble like a pipe
sing like a green canary in the still darkness
while I slept?
___
Lauren Gordon grew up in Southern California and commuted between the San Fernando Valley and San Bernadino while working for the Los Angeles Times. Her work has appeared in Midwest Literary Journal, Knocking at the Door with Birch Brook Press, Scapegoat Review, Web Del Sol, and has been featured on Iowa National Public Radio. She holds Master of Fine Arts degree in Poetry from New England College, and a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from the University of Iowa. She currently lives in Madison, Wisconsin with her husband.
Jim Morrison and Dionysus Sober Up in Riverside County
On the steps of the County Jail,
Jim Morrison and I sit, waiting
for the sun to sprout and crown the skyline
or at least a light for our smokes.
Behind us, the glass doors swing open.
Cops stampede past us and descend
into their chariots as orderly as Apollo,
unable to summon the sun.
Jim recalls poor Dionysus, drunk and barefoot,
cornered between nausea and oneness with all,
staring blankly at the blood and other fluids
splattered against the drunk tank’s walls,
stuffing his shirt with our cell’s last toilet
paper roll, and wrapping the rest
from rotten tree-stump feet to eggshell skull
to keep his brandy, dreams, and memories
from spilling out. All through the night
the sockless men keep stumbling in,
with their beltless slacks slipping down. You cannot petition the Lord with prayer!
Jim tells the man kneeling in the far corner,
as I brush a fly from my eye,
yearning to spy from its body, any body
but this one, barefoot, slumped against
the numbing concrete floor, petitioning
the same irreconcilable cosmos
as you, Jim, shirtless and sockless,
reading Neruda on these walls
and finally understanding his desire
for socks— spun moonlight,
soft and warm as fire.
___
Matthew Nadelson is an English instructor at Norco College in Norco, CA. His poems have appeared in Blue Collar Review, ByLine Magazine, Chiron Review, Connotation Press, Mobius, and other literary journals, and in the anthologies Beloved on the Earth: 150 Poems of Grief and Gratitude and America Remembered. His first poetry collection, American Spirit, was published in August 2011 by Finishing Line Press.
the man who wrote in his hat I kept saying it’s a miracle Ed Rosenthal
because he is a poet
he always carries a pen for jotting down phrases
but now he is lost in a desert of grotesqueries
Joshua trees contorted like tongues tasting salt
he forgot to top off his water bottle
that was six days ago when he left the resort
he thinks thirst is rocks sand and rocks
which he wants to write down but he hasn’t a pad
he will do without paper and still write his poem
he drags a stick in the hard-crust dirt to draw letters
then sketches on orange rocks with a black stone then
erases his illegible lines with the back of his trembling hand
he wanders farther he tries to drink his urine
but the output of his body disgusts him
he won’t dig a cool shallow pit in the sand
because it looks like a grave
he tries to remember the Sh’ma
but only a few syllables of Hebrew
remain in his cupboard of prayer
he hallucinates he believes he has won the Nobel for Poetry
and the Peace Prize for Achieving Understanding at Sinai
till at last from the low reptilian stem of his brain
an instinct claws its way over his city mind
the desert insists on economy the kestrel and buzzard
do not flutter in their search they glide
there is wisdom in staying still and letting it come to him
he stops moving in circles and collapses
flat as parchment parched as his hat
he takes off his headgear to write on it
he still has his pen his stylus for poetic inscribing
but instead of a new Xanadu distilled from delirium
he scribbles his ethical will and testament in his floppy hat
naming his pallbearers giving advice leaving love and
now he recalls his Hebrew shalom to daughter and wife
his witnesses a long-tailed pocket mouse chewing a seed
and a basking gecko his notary a night moth
his signature validated by a black blob of a spider
sprawled like sealing wax on the hat’s brim
he waits near expiring the sun like a burning bush
for whichever piece of paper comes first
a coroner’s certificate or a tabloid with rescue headlines
or a banner of light made by night stars over the desert
saying mazel tov good fortune a great miracle has happened here
___
Lorine Parks knows the high desert from having lived on an Indian Reservation in Nevada for a year. In 2008 she took a plein air Tebot Bach Foundation poetry workshop in Joshua Tree National Forest and stayed at the legendary Twenty-nine Palms Hotel. From that it was easy enough to imagine the trials of the poet-hiker who was lost in the Joshua Tree wilderness. One must always respect Mother Nature, especially so in the strict economy of the desert.
Inlandia: A Literary Journey 