Laura Araujo S.

D and Third, San Bernardino

The city employees making their way to one of the six floors at City Hall knew it.
Papá cradled me in the crook of his forearm,
nestled against his chest, my almond roasted skin collected the scent of bundled alfalfa,
scattered hay, and weathered leather from his Wrangler.
The snap button from the left breast pocket
brushed my flushed cheek as Papá gazed into my eyes,
yearning for the Mexico he left behind.

The business owners detected it driving west on Third and north on D,
past the big banks that could one day ruin them. They catch a glimpse of Papá
lifting me in a repetitive motion
slightly so into the air. His calloused hands, rough from lariats,
breaking horses in Rialto, gently hold me from my underarms, the tips of his fingers
meeting securely at the back of my column. I squeal each time I feel the descent.

The residents doing business that day sensed it as they observe
Papá strolling beneath the jacaranda trees in front of the Mexican Consulate’s
on the hottest day in San Bernardino. Separately,
the struggling contractor on his way to the planning department,
the recent widow visiting the social security, the vato renewing a dog license,
and the poet buying passport photos notice as Papá draws me close to his face,
our foreheads touch, his bristly moustache grazing my chin,
a fluttering of eyelids each time we meet.

From his post at the door, the guard at the IRS office sensed it, too.
Keeping watch of the line, the weather, and the tempers, he spots,
from a distance,
Papá blowing sweetly across my face and torso,
a tobacco laden delight. The red Marlboros and heat are
almost undetectable.

Although I will not remember this day,
one day, like the witnesses moving past D and Third Street
on the hottest day in the Inland Empire, I too, will know,
many years from now,
because my body will remember.
Papá loved me once.
Unconditionally
Unashamed

——

Laura Araujo S. was born in Guanajuato and grew up in Southern California. While completing her undergraduate education at UC Riverside, she swore she would never live in that city. Twenty years later, she finds herself residing in the beautiful city of Riverside raising a family. She is a high school teacher.

Max Randolph

California Desert Suite

Overture

Will I speak in the desert of other than dryness
glued like an unripe persimmon to my lips,
other than wind the clear sky has banished
to these dry rocks this fruitless terrain?

Can heat speak of anything but the sun
tanning hiker’s legs on cracked soil:
derelict sea beds fertile with saltbush
in a land where a smile will fossilize?

Still grasses speak of the wind’s hiatus,
how wind borrows the skirt of a breeze,
then casts it off when creosote bushes
dance their wild green thin-branched dance.

And the paloverde like bright green flames
lets spring consume her blossoms in frenzy
of shadows sharpening red rocks’ contours
enslaving a sun that remains undeceived—

until dryness tastes like a persimmon ripened,
sensual on evening’s downy lip;
stars shine like broken bits of earth,
Venus a shard of today’s indigo sky.

1. Before the Hike

Look at this rock shaped like a spear head:
an ordinary stone, but it’s meant to kill.
Our will like rock our hearts shaped
like an arrow that captures spring wind,
turns mill wheels into useless artifacts,
our bread to essential hungers
we overcome with bigger rocks
than those displayed in city museums.

Rocks shaped like mountains
you climb to laugh at the ascent,
to kiss your wounds, send your ambition
reeling over peaks you’ll never conquer.

On the desert floor a sun-bleached carp skull
come from the Colorado close by: souvenir,
symbol, of unceremonied days trekking sand
& detritus in search of thought’s burial ground.

In evening over mugs of Chianti,
under shining splinters of nocturnal bone,
by glowing coals, prowling winds,
we sit on a small rise, coyotes gathering below,
each of us wondering what to speak or sing of.
Campers who no longer hunt buffalo,
never rode wild burros into the river’s jaw,
we’ve mixed our passion for inhospitable terrain
with the waning moon reflected in our wine.

We sing not of hills climbed or unclimbed,
nor of bread or prehistory or heroic expeditions,
but of a life we are slowly reviving,
whose tune is the stillness only the restless find.

2. Hiking

Dry in a dusty land,
alone as the big horned sheep,
as elusive as unseen or rarely seen,
I am what you intended o sun:
memory and destiny of a naked sky.

I am not proud of my holy calling.
I militate only to the needs of vultures
who rip muscle from rock bone from sky,
deposit me in a spurt of undigested light
on some square feet of earth I’ve never known.

Not afraid to say I grow old with the eagle
or crag twisted and deathless on Picacho Peak.
Not too old to say I’m fresh as rainwashed lichen,
nor too sad to say the sun will dry out my fate,
winds will harden my ghost,
moon will polish my lover’s heart.

Dry in a dusty land,
ready as milk of unsucked breasts,
alone as children of a god that never was,
children who must eat their names,
who carouse with scavengers of light
and sleep like prayer on a few feet of sun.

3. Getting Lost Overnight

A rag of mountain hangs from the vulture’s beak . . .
The hill lying on its side apes a man . . .
When the crow caws the sky will be bluer . . .
For I’ve learned to love these animals,
protective spirits; and I’ve learned to love fear
alone, lost in the desert night, all night,
obsidian night, stars of quartzite, comfort
only of knowing I still sleep on earth,
bare legs buried in arroyo’s gravel.

Daytime creature, I am also of night,
of the frenzy of ants, deliberation of tortoises.
River of misguided pilgrimage,
composer of my own death sentence—
hiker to the peak that wont save me.

A splinter of determination, dead eagle’s feather,
sun-varnished crag bloodied with memory,
impales my exhausted hands, blistered faith.
Yes, I believe in the savagery of the sun
even while the sun refuses to slay me.
It has more howls in its jaundiced throat,
more blood to smear on my logbook.

I rise at dawn from wash into wasteland
to celebrate not the malice but the confluence
of animal nights with days of chanting and magic,
knowing radiance may yet kill before reaching camp.

4. Back at Camp

Night is
sparkling mica. Day a green branch that sings
these weeks of living nomadic, half idle
captives of the elements that disdain praise
or censure . . . inheritors of America’s divine
average on a willing diaspora, self-exiled
to a country that is tent, hibachi, day long hikes,
eating outdoors except cold nights we dine
in the tent like two westernized Bedouins.

(She cooks in beauty who did not go with me
to climb the peak. She awaits tearfully news
of my fate knowing it was my will to go alone.
I return bedraggled, empty-handed, mindless,
with no god in my gut, just a hug for her.)

Day is a time for collecting unusual stones.
Night is a black serration of many hills.
Day is a jackrabbit that eludes the trap,
learns the trick of surviving to find life good,
to return to love after conquering his fear,
a raven’s wing jauntily tied to his brow.

Coda

Stones are torn from the mountain’s ribs
to create a woman craggy as desert peaks,
a man tender as a hedgehog cactus bloom;
stones torn like clouds from a hawk’s shadow
on dusty mesquite lining heat-struck washes.

Azure birdsong over earthen shoulders, buttocks:
shale, sand of my body bathed in its beginnings.
Terrain translucent, accessible as an easy death,
piling eyesight on affection for stone,
shadows and wind on the contours of stillness.

I have climbed the crumbled rock of my thought
where absent brothers peopled the eyescape.
Afternoon was spent in a dry arroyo where sun
knew no discretion . . . then back at camp
predusk winds and dove’s coo were the song

of myself, her self. Notes she heard on the wind,
cooking, as I sat silent on the rise looking west
toward the peak that almost claimed me.

——

Max Randolph is the author of “A Horse on the Moon and Other Dreamprose.” (2012, empty sky press, his own imprint.) Born in Canada, Randolph holds dual citizenship. He lived in southern California for 24 years before moving to Tucson, where he currently resides. He’s been published in The Lunatic Gazette, Grain, Poemeleon, The Sun Runner, The Intriguist, Connexions, has performed many solo as well as group readings, and writes a blog at emptyskypress.wordpress.com. His book “Autopsy on a Ghost” will be published in early 2013.

Shali Nicholas

The Fog Has Moods

The fog has moods
that I tiptoe quietly through.
It rolls in thin and laughing,
tumbling over itself,
a mean edge to its saunter,
begging for play, but canyons
lay still, too frightened
to respond. Rejected,
it sits heavy and brooding,
hiding things in its pockets,
a boulder, a fox, the red
warning of a street light.
Finally it weeps under
its own weight, tiny circles of
tears bubbling up on its skin
like a burn.

When we are sad

Gene Louise and I walk/scramble to the lake.
We sniff urine, dandelion fluffs, that stupid stray
cat, the rotting corpse of a fish and someone
somewhere is grilling steak. We curse them
and their happy, Laissez-Faire life. We want to
chase egrets but all we can find are ducks. We
dig holes for strollers to stumble into. We discover
two tennis balls (one neon orange, one bleached
a beige) that have sat on the shore since
our last visit. Poor tennis balls. We cautiously
lap the water. Sand-coated and sun-warmed,
we finally make our way back home, pissing
on everything along the way.

—-

Shali Nicholas is a student in the MFA program at Cal State San Bernardino. Nicholas lives and teach in the San Bernardino mountains for Rim of the World School District.

Michelle Gonzalez

Workshop Feature: Inlandia Creative Writing Workshop – Riverside

Workshop Leader: Ruth Nolan

215/60/91

Getting on the 215 to San Bernardino meant
we were going to grandma’s house.
Passing the 5th street exit,
then getting off at Baseline
meant I would be
making fresh flour tortillas on Saturday
and walking to St. Anthony’s on Sunday.

Going on the 60 meant
a trip to the drive-in movies
right by Rubidoux mountain
where you can see the truckers pass
on the freeway as they honk their horns.
I climb into bed at 1 am after
trying to stay up for two movies.

The 91 freeway to Riverside meant
possibly going to the mall,
getting new shoes for school
or maybe even a long trip
to the sandy beach.

But at the end of the day,
I was always glad to be home
where I have my new daybed
and flower bed set
that matches my sister’s.

Midnight Drives

On the third of our many dates,
we drove down the 60 freeway
around the midnight hour
to see the glimmering meteors.
We talked about how
beautiful the sky would look
once we got to the badlands,
small, but still beautiful.
I imagined it would look like
a brighter version of the moon,
glowing in the darkness
all alone.

We passed the exits with the stores
and other signs of life,
until we reached our destination.
The headlights lead the way
to the dark hidden spot.

We got out of the car and
sat on his dusty hood.
Looking up, all we saw were
the shadows of clouds
covering the dark sky.
There were no meteors to be seen,
but somehow, that was fine with us.
We decided to stay and talk awhile.
He asked, “Have you ever made a wish,
on a shooting star?”
I lie and say, “No.”
It’s too early to tell
all my secrets.

Michelle Gonzalez is a longtime member of Inlandia’s Creative Writing Workshop in Riverside. She earned her BA in English from the University of California, Riverside. She also received her teaching credential from University of Phoenix and MFA in Creative Writing from National University. For the past 29 years she has lived in Riverside and has no plans on leaving the Inland Empire. Her poems have been published in National University’s literary magazine and other local magazines such as Slouching Towards Mt. Rubidoux Manor and 2011 Writing from Inlandia: Work of the Inlandia Creative Writing Workshops. Recently she has published her book of poems, Morning in the House by the Field.

Ontario Creative Writing Workshop Collaborative Poem

Written as an exquisite corpse during the first workshop session, Spring 2012

Authors: Marie Griffiths, Florelei Lueb, Linda Rhodes, Heather Dubois, Bill McConnell, Victoria Waddle; Workshop Leader: Cati Porter

___

Sprinklings of an Inside-Out Beach Tea Party

He sat on a sofa in the sand, his saxophone
leaning sadly against his leg. I am walking out

at low tide at Chapin Beach & the breakers
are half a mile away; stepping over clam shells

I can smell the salt air & hear the call of gulls
overhead. The air conditioner couldn’t quite

cool the room, leaving a hint of mugginess,
like the air in the veterinarian’s office the day

I had to give my dog the needle. Shining,
smooth and polished, the titan’s spoon reflects

scribbling patrons in its concave bowl, scooping up
their delicious thoughts. Sitting at the maple

dining table, covered with a fifty-year-old linen
tablecloth, she waited until her grandmother

appeared with the tray holding a silver sugar bowl
full of cubes, silver tongs, pink napkins, a fine

china teapot, and matching cups. Really? It is
another emergency? You mean to tell me that

the contract you signed three months ago
and the other technical studies you’ve had written,

yet again didn’t clue you in to tell me you needed
an air study before the week you need it finished?

The first object I saw when I walked in the room
was the iron backed chair, scroll-worked into

fanciful curlicues. I hear the chinking
of silverware as Sandra scoops up two fistfuls

of spoons and forks out of the sink, and I smile.

____

Background: This was a fun workshop exercise in which I wrote a random selection of words/phrases on the backs of large sheets of paper; each author was asked to use that word/phrase to write a line of poetry. We were seated in the cafe at the Ovitt Family Community Library in Ontario, California. Many of the sounds & images were drawn, either deliberately or subconsciously, from our surroundings.

After everyone had finished writing, I collected the sheets and read them in order around the table, and, strangely, they all fit together, with an implied narrative and surreal setting. While the participants were initially skeptical that an exercise like this could produce something readable, everyone was surprised by the clarity & cohesiveness of the finished product.

— Cati Porter

Jeff Mays

Pieces of the Ocean Are Floating in the Sky

The sun’s rays heat the top
of the ocean – its waves cresting

and falling, the krill bobbing
and swimming, the seaweed

sleepily drifting

Warmer and warmer it gets as the sun
seems to climb and presto

chango! it poofs into vapor,
causing the thin blue horizon to

shimmer, if you’re looking

The sweating vapor is released like a
balloon striving for the cooler

air to calm and condense it
back to water, tiny droplets that

are magnets of white fluff

Until windtraveled and seeping
with inky blue and grey

these chunks of ocean floating
in the sky finally succumb to gravity

and make their mad, foreseen dash for home

Lunch at Victoria Gardens

a man with a beard black
and grey sat on a bench under

a sheet of shadow and light, his
dark jacket keeping him warm,

his folded card-table legs propping
up an opened book, his disinterested arm

holding up an apple, its orange-red
variegated skin like an ornament

and behind the bench the boxwoods ran
their green around a sycamore which

was all reflected in a storefront window,
the glass glinting silently as a shop-

woman, young and full of possibility,
stooped like a simple calligraphy

rearranging the props and wares, as if
Edward Hopper hadn’t been here

a hundred times before

_____

In addition to being published by the Inlandia Journal, The Pacific Review, and The Sand Canyon Review, Jeff Mays is considering joining an indie rock band to write lyrics for in order to find an audience for his written work.

Karen Greenbaum-Maya

Cattail Fever

Root-bound pot of cattails packed vegetal solid,
black pot cracked, stretched into white plastic
the roots a dense mat, truly hair-vegetable,
Mandarin pun on ‘long life’: ‘can never die’.
           Roots tough as wire slice your bare fingers.
Crack open the pot to release
not roots but shoots prowling around slow inside the pot
           circling, hell-bent on digging in
then rising up, zombies called from their graves,
hunting fresh food, driven to take hold.
           At the edge shoots escape, hang over the side
like cold fingers, rusty ivory, cracked,
weathered like zombie fingers.
You must chop them off.
The host will not stop, will not die.

Once the pot gives way, cattail spears
will invade the entire water garden.
Zombies hanging over the side,
they’re thumping solid against the pot,
no need to rush when pressure is all.

Crouch low in the ditch among cattails.
           They crowd the banks
in ditch water clear like you’ve never seen it.
Snow melt numbs your feet,
your hands are become strangers.
           Cattails are Wal-Mart in a ditch,
strange flour, sweet syrup, Cossack asparagus.
           Over-ripe, even green, boil them and eat up.
Iris rhizomes, those will kill you.

You will die in this green-gold place under the trees
where the light is filtered as through water
so cold you forget how to swim.

Cattails, the Wal-Mart of rushes,
zombies in a ditch
spreading by pollen slough, by cold white spears.
To destroy them
cut off the fingers, below the water-line

drown the new sprouts do not let them breathe

_____

Karen Greenbaum-Maya is a retired clinical psychologist in California. For five years, she reviewed restaurants for the Claremont Courier, variously in heroic couplets, anapest, and imitating Hemingway. In an earlier life, she was a German Lit major and read poetry for credit, earning her B.A. from Reed College. She started writing when she was nine. Since 2007, more than 70 poems have appeared in many publications, most recently The Centrifugal Eye, Word Gumbo, Convergence, and dotdotdash. Her first chapbook, Eggs Satori, was a finalist of note in Pudding House Publications’ 2010 chapbook competition. She keeps water gardens.

Deenaz P. Coachbuilder

Desert Rose

Hewn from the granite mountains,
each petal edged in frail white
carved across millennia, you were witness
to the graceful pronghorn as they made their way
through the Piute and San Jacinto mountains.
You mourn the shrinking grasslands,
scarce desert tortoise, forests of Joshua trees,
and sunshine amidst vast silent spaces,
the wild valleys of a vanishing frontier.
You long for a time devoid
of the footprint of mankind,
of telephone poles and fences.

The Last Bird

In the trees, along the lake,
countless water birds
breed in the winter months.
Snow-white egrets resting
beside soot-black cormorants,
the mighty open bill storks lived peaceably
next to the small white ibises,
the purple night herons.
          The common sparrows twittered,
          busily hunting for dry seed
          and nesting twig.

In the autumn, after the rains,
beyond the yellowing grass
gleams the rich dark green
of the lofty sal.
The fiery blossoms of the
flame of the forest disappear.
May-awe screams the peacock,
displaying its splendid feathers,
fanned out before adoring hens.
Those forgotten sparrows bathed in the dust
collected beneath overhanging branches.

Mumbai city attracted the screeching parrot
that scolded from the burnished brown
of the gulmohor tree.
Grey pigeons goodo-goed,
awkwardly encircling each other
along dusty ledges of rusted windows.
Crows held a caucus in the evening gloom.
Sparrows drank off muddy water
gathering along the dripping eaves.

Then the river waters rushing through
Manac’s spectacular gorge
                    dried.
Sanctuary grasslands that sheltered
the chukor partridge and the sarus crane
                    lay waste.
Leaves of the city’s gulmohors
                    cracked,
the garden guavas, house of the green totas
                    stripped, denuded.

And then the birds were gone.

Only the dull sparrows,
unnoticed amidst the dustbins
sang
a last faint song.

A Scattering of Stars

Supposing that abruptly you learnt
how brief your life was to be, a year
left in this veil of reality,
what would you do?

A woman of consummate morality,
hers is a sunny life, rewards of work,
love of family, the warmth of friends.
She believes that men are intrinsically good.
She knows that for some there is a world
of darkness, but it has not touched her.
Disregarding prayer all her life,
she lives it quietly instead.

Her mind becomes a tumbled jumble
of unfulfilled desires and disbeliefs. What
if it were not true? Could she spend a week
amidst the tangled golden waters of Kerala?
Did she have time to read the holy Vandidads?
Whom should she tell? Seek out a habit of prayer?
Recount stored memories, to leave behind some mark?

She chooses the precious familiar,
a world reflected in her beloved’s smile,
the neighborhood evening walk,
and daily bread.

On an eternal orbit, her life span
is a tiny speck amidst a scattering of stars,
here, and then gone, her tracks slowly fading.

____

Deenaz P. Coachbuilder has been a resident of Riverside, California, since 1981. She received a Doctorate in Theater Arts from Brigham Young University, an M.S. in Communicative Disorders from Utah State, an M.A. and B.A from Bombay University, India. Deenaz is an educator, artist, poet and environmental advocate. She is a retired school principal, an adjunct professor in Special Education at California State University, San Bernardino, and a consulting Speech Pathologist. She is a Fulbright scholar, and the recipient of several awards, the most recent being President Obama’s 2011 “Volunteer Service Award.” She is a published poet in the U.S. and India, and is currently working on a publication of her poems.

Anita Harmon

Between the rocks at Joshua Tree

For some reason I think of Egypt.
The wind there, they say, is the
sound the dead make, as they flow
between the stone hills, out
of the Sahara. Pharaohs, scribes
farmers, the diggers of wells
tall fathers shouting across fields
mothers singing.

This voice then, the only familiar
whistles itself up, then dies away.
The buzz of a fly, bore of a plane
cry of a bird. Silence is always
welcome.

The dead trail behind each one of us.
They have followed me here, stacked
high in the strata of rock, gusted in piles
of boulders, whispering in the pinion.

They could have no voice without
these impediments. Like wind
the dead must have their instruments
to claim our attention – their right
to haunt our movement
to quiet places.

Humming Bird

Loneliness has
no antonym
worth a damn, unless
you count
being with other

people: little bright
iridescent birds,
very bold, immensely fast
needle the jasmine

the sky hurries
past with you gone

these delights
hurt

Two Haiku

A pine cone rat-tats
on the Buddha-hall roof
– delivers the moment

A Stellar’s Jay
rasps the winter evening
smooth and quiet

Anita Harmon retired to the desert from London six years ago. She lived in London for 60 years so it was a bit of a shock! In her working life she was an actress, a psychologist and a Business consultant. Now she works on memoir in various forms, as well as poetry. She has studied and practiced Zen Buddhism for twenty years.

Robbi Nester

Southern California Apocalypse

In the meadows of the Republic
there are no moles. Their burrows,
corked with plugs of clay, lie empty.
Once, with the blind certainty of saints,
they’d navigate their native element,
an unzoned metropolis of tunnels, every
entrance with a back way out.
Now, tollroads flap like flypaper
under the bare-bulb sun.
The tame hills, furrowed with faults,
shake their broad brown shanks
and shudder to their knees.

—-

Robbi Nester is the author of a chapbook, Balance. She has published poetry previously in Inlandia, Poemeleon, Northern Liberties Review, Qarrtsiluni, Floyd County Moonshine, Victorian Violet Press, and Caesura. She also has a poem forthcoming in Jenny. She has published reviews in Switchback and The Hollins Critic, and her essays have been anthologized in Easy to Love but Hard to Raise (DRT Press, 2011) and Flashlight Memories (Silver Boomer Press, 2011).