7.

w/ Mike Jurkovic, John N. Miller, DS Maolalai, Genelle Chaconas, Sanjeev

Sethi, Christopher Barnes, Grant Jenkins, Jim Meirose, Richard Kostelanetz,
Mark Halpern, Mark Blickley, Monty Jones, Natan Last, Ewa Mazierska, Liz
Glodek, Jeff Bagato, Sacha Archer, and Mark Young
MIKE JURKOVIC

We Will Judge Angels

We will judge angels

and consider ourselves
the best among them.
Lengthening the ruse of years
by that much more,
that much more.

We will judge angels

and the consensus will tilt
in our favor.
Igniting the fuse
by that much more,
that much more.

We will judge angels

and abide by the ruling
only if. Only if the plaintive
refuses to speak
by that much more,
that much more.

We will judge angels

and never know the truth
inside mirrors.
The verity skewed
by that much more,
that much more.

1
JOHN N. MILLER
Birds of the Rain Forest

By day a glimmer in the leafage, a bright

brief swoosh, peripheral, gone
when you look, though still flitting
somewhere in the trees,

identity a disembodied trill

or low-throated chuckle sifted
with shafts of sunlight needling
through overgrowth. At dusk

when massive trunks enlarge

in the half-darkness and encroach
on fields clear-cut for beans and maize,
natives try to humanize the bird-cries,

hearing a woman wail in agony

of childbirth, or the tok tok tok
they call the coffin bird, as if it tapped
on corpse containers,

as if to leave it nameless would increase

a terror nested in the nighttime forest.
Once, as men worked, hacking, felling, burning
at their fields' edge, to enlarge them,

a bird with large, dark wings appeared,

swooping into spirals low
over their settlement, and dropped
a three-foot serpent from its beak.

That night the jefe of the hamlet

woke to a soft wing-beat near his bed—
the flutter of a rising flame
or a fledgling angel.

2
Vestiges of the Kingdom

In 1939 or so,
father took me hiking in the hills
behind Mokule’ia, where we searched
for scraps of sandalwood
among the wild lantana near our trail.
He told me how whole forests of the wood
had been pillaged by Hawai’ian chieftains
long ago for trade with Canton,
and why we gleaned these hills for remnants of it—
heavy, golden, close-grained chunks
that after decades still released rare fragrance
when he skinned their bark to craft them
into leaf-shaped ornamental pins.

Along the trail we found two peacock feathers—

turquoise fans, their iridescent eyes
unblinkered by the scratchy-stemmed lantana.

Father had no inkling where they’d come from.

“Peacocks,” he could have said, if I had asked—
smart-assed—“Pikake in Hawai’ian.”

Decades later I inhaled the fragrance

of pikake leis, their sweetness
of white jasmine overpowering
lantana’s spicy scent as I recalled
both those peacock feathers and a rare
picture postcard: Princess Kai’ulani,
once heir apparent to the Queen,
with her pet peacocks, after which she named
her favorite flower.

And I remembered, too,

the terrible hoarse cry of peacocks,
the brevity of jasmine’s bloom,
and those leaf-shaped pins Dad crafted,
lost with other family artifacts.

3
DS Maolalai
Chrys says I'm annoying her

and I twist my hair in my hands. I don't say anything

about how she
annoys me sometimes,
because I don't want any arguments,
but she does -
I admit it - I think she spends
too much money sometimes
on fine meals,
when I'm good with a sandwich
and a cold glass of water. and she makes assumptions about people
and I don't like that - she seems to think
she is very good at pinning things down
very early on. I think people
can surprise you
and she doesn't think she can be surprised. just takes new things
people throw at her
and imagines she knew them
all along. I don't think she does it
consciously
so I don't say anything
but she does it. and she doesn't like art much
the way I like art. and doesn't like music
in the way I like music. we're very different, honestly;
strange as a couple -
but god
she is so beautiful
and clever and easy to be with. like singing
a quiet song in the morning
while she combs her hair
and I twist my hair
in my hands.

4
Deep and bitter reds

teeth
tearing cherries
like a shovel cuts turf,
the world
for a moment
a turned bowl
on the table. and your lips
pursed,
curling,
cursing in conversation
as they spit out
the pips.

cherries
are red
and a bitter
waxy fruit. the sex
of the display
and quite sensational,
and only broken
by a phonecall
which I answer -
strange
this flavour;
watching your face
enjoy the fruit
while I receive
our news.

5
GENELLE CHACONAS

Drown

The taste of its raw torpor, its indulgent deep structure complex, vibrant notes, exotic
sweets flowers and fruit, cascading across the palate, tongue, guts, stomach, liver,
kidney, then even deeper. Your mind floats, buoyant, above, doing an elegant
backstroke. The bar, now empty, a wet watercolor. The puddle left by the man mopping
the floor grows, by inches. First to your ankles, then your thighs, then further.

6
SANJEEV SETHI
Fraternization

Entrants touch you one way or

the other. Defilement hinges on
cleanliness of your carpet. One
way to continue with relationships
is to never test them. Keep them
on with the charade of civilities
and air-kissing. Your escamotages
don’t drag me. What nips are the
vacancies in my vault. Why did
I loan you its key?

7
CHRISTOPHER BARNES

Putting You Through Now, Caller (28)

Loretta’s hurling gowns around The Manhattan.

Shall I ad-lib?
The idiot box is regulation low-profile,
A bowtie aerial gin-sticky.
She urged the .45 onto the table.

At times I dread spilled beans

To a pitapat of the network’s jingles.

8
Putting You Through Now, Caller (29)

Two floor-to-ceiling doors pounced slack.

McKissack belly-busted through, wheezing.
I larruped his mug.
Sundown went pasty.
Even traffic cowed, apoplectic.

His ol’ lady’ll be hosannaing for ministry

To all the gangland dead.

9
GRANT MATTHEW JENKINS
[training, religion, war]

They grow up, of course, speaking nothing. Learning your language seems not at all
analogous to developing one.

A rapid method of toilet training the institutionalized

to treat encopresis in a typically developing 12-year-old girl.

Failure to have a bowel movement at this time resulted

in the focus of the study teaching Bill to urinate.

The greater the frequency of reinforcement, the greater the strength of the reinforced
response.

The fingers beneath the briefs and toward the back of the hips.

“He knows what to do but refuses.”

The patient may be grateful for this display of sympathy, but will not derive much benefit
from it.

Phobia might have been socially pleasurable, possibly reinforcing

involves the removal, reduction, postponement, or prevention of

outcomes maintained 14 months post-intervention.

Bill had the opportunity to sit at 7:30am, 9:00am, 10:30am, 12:00pm, 1:30pm, 3:00pm,
4:30pm, 6:00pm, and 7:00pm each weekday.

He converted to a percent metric by dividing the number of times Jill went by the number
of opportunities and multiplying by 100.

Formal assessment of reliability (observer agreement) was not conducted because it was not
possible to schedule two staff simultaneously during visits.

In-pants going, followed by a representation of the edible reinforcer instead of terminating

the visit after 3 minutes of sitting.

“Go, then candy, and then play.”

A negative reinforcement intervention was akin to multiple disabilities.

The myelinization of pyramidal tracts to these areas is not completed

10
utilizing the child's develop mental capacities and interest was the primary goal.

Subtle inner resistance to outside pressure would go through a subsequent period

of bag and breakdown before voluntary compliance.

Pressure to delay training increased the parents' anxieties

provided there was the “guiding ear” of a third person,

16 (1.4%) were failures by the age of 5 years.

Though where the difference of sex requires different treatment, respond to a child’s
signals.

Believing that greater changes than that might be made in our bodies, if we took the right
course, and proceeded by rational steps.

They have leisure enough also to make so much court to Madam Cloacina.

If they go to the place, and do their part, they are sure to have nature very obedient.

Considering the many evils that come from that defect, of a requisite easing of nature,
costiveness.

Children should be us’d to submit their desires, and go without their longings, even from
their very cradles;

therefore the father caress and commend them when they do well, shew a cold and
neglectful countenance to them upon doing ill.

Children are of no use when shame does not attend them,

a process by which a parent systematically responds to a child’s signs.

The process of eliciting a specific chain of independent behaviors

Graduated guidance becomes excessive dependence, inconvenience, expense, and, as the

child matures, also social embarrassment.

“What will Santa Claus (or Mickey Mouse, or Daddy, or Mommy, or your brother Bobby) say
about your dry pants?”

It turned out that children thus raised do not, after all, grow up speaking Hebrew, the
supposed language of God and the angels.

The parents characteristically expressed disbelieving pleasure.

11
Most reacted to the program as if it were a very pleasant experience, hugging and kissing
the leader.

Consequently, one can no longer defend an attitude of fatalistic permissiveness on the

grounds that control cannot be hastened.

A reversal: “eliminating stereotyped self-stimulation of the retarded.”

Reinforcement: the training of a normal child.

This permissive view of the exercise in futility has recurred about every decade for the past
60 years.

The program appeared to be a pleasant experience for the children.

The exercise of public worship appears to be the only solid foundation of the religious
sentiments of the people.

They freely offer themselves, for none are forced to go against their wills, since they think
that if any man is pressed that wants courage.

They detest war as a very brutal thing; and which, to the reproach of human nature, is more
practised by men than by any sort of beasts.

He does this not for any reward but because he's expected to

having been blessed with their insistent urgings.

Within you the ability to achieve almost anything if you exercise the proper discipline.

Austerity and seemingly inhuman demands, fought gallantly.

Remember the good old days when kids obeyed their elders without question?

Probably not, because those "good old days" were here in Mexico before the Spanish
arrived.

It can be assumed, however, that earlier cultures practice similar methods.

Their educational system reflected this, and under it, young men were prepared to take their
place as loyal and productive members.

The age at which a child will toilet himself.

There were two distinct types of schools for boys-one for the commoners, called
"Telpochalli," and another for the sons of nobility, called "Calmecac."

Students were assigned daily tasks in addition to classes.

12
The only ship currently operating in that area of responsibility is a crisis-simulation drill
called Dragon's Thunder in response to the growing tensions.

The war games stimulate the expulsion.

In the age of imperialism, it is futile to expect that the press and the rest of the mass media
will preserve its independence.

To approach from a purely sentimental or pacifist standpoint is a futile exercise.

It would be like a doctor who, instead of providing an accurate diagnosis and appropriate
medicine, limited himself to weeping tears over the patient's symptoms.

The story has been told, for instance, of several famous despots, that they had some newborn
children raised from infancy by deaf-mute nursemaids to see what language they would
speak.

If you speculate on Milton’s toilet-training or the social structures of the leaf-cutting ants, the
very next mail will bring you a fat journal containing the definitive findings.

13
JIM MEIROSE

Der High Crimes und Der Misdemeanors

You going to change the flat you are. And he didn’t. Instead he. Instead. Stattdessen. Du
wirst die Wohnung wechseln, die du bist. Und er tat es nicht. Stattdessen er.
Stattdessen. Stattdessen.
Huh!
You may have heard within the deep grapevine of Der High Crimes und Der
Misdemeanors the truth be but th’ gardin’ of these Der High Crimes und Der
Misdemeanors you should not be thinking your Der High Crimes und Der Misdemeanors
You should not be thinking your dearly departed Der High Crimes und Der
Misdemeanors You should not be thinking your dearly departed Der High Crimes und
Der Misdemeanors You should not be thinking your dearly departed true FatherMan
would or could be Der High Crimes und Der Misdemeanors and for the sakes of the
butts of all gathered ‘round here all the who and the they of which know fo’ sho’ a Der
High Crime from a Der Misdemeanor you will not flag any one o’ your selves-down and
plead up the guilty for some reducement—and narrowing this already too thin field to
the one and only last healthy-looking Sonboy amongst yourself that is this that is the
fact that here I am one Mom speaking to you there you are one single Sonboy only, sit
still be hosed folly down with this pure truth saying that. Yes. I can admit to you that
there was a chapter of your Father daddy’s past prior to his absolute expirement, that
which will be explained approximately fifty-five pages prior to where this here rodeo
you’re at is right here right now being held oh my sweet hippo. Your Father did indeed
stand in the dock of the law before the great black robed judgeship so much higher at
the top of that bench of the law and so far back behind that immensely deep bench of
the law that the way he put it to me after his sentence was handed down was like this.
Listen listen well catch the. The. Ugh. T-t-t-t-t-nuace there thank God. So, move on and
listen to what he said—which by the way can be corroborated by searching the
transcripts—unless these were lost in the great fire of nineteen seventy seventy-the-
sixer. To this day family picnics are the custom in Hamilton township and scattered
spots in Ukrania ever other decade or so though, I will admit this—sometimes the
wrong decade is hit as part of the whole deliciously traditional national prank. But here
he is Sonboy.
First the judge said after stating my name and the charges against me the
following—and I swear on the soul of that infant Sonboy in the back room under the fat
blanket near the roaring heater ventation we had installed at great expense, not that it
was fully needed but because were brimming in the fullness of the denial of our mutual
guilt that it would be better for you, yonder prison-bound wretch, if you had never been
born—when he said this I began to mouth gum and lip-shape a sentence to say to first
be subjected to deep-dive review by a benighted panel of experts down my bottom and
then based on that feedback—what are you—retrieved reformed re-toothed re-
gummed—waiting for spit it out—reformed then staged up for flight by inhalation and
exhalation one two three times repeated enough times to pump my mouth-channel
hard enough to withstand the rip roaring fly-past—convict! Will you plead or—of the fat

14
hard immensity of the finally absolutely stunning stream of truth about to firehosed out
me into the greater courtroom space but but will you not? Slow on the trigger is not a
defense—and I stood hard imaging ten feet of bunker-wall pressed my standing as he
hosed me down hard with these all these all all all Der High Crimes und Der
Misdemeanors the truth be did you—assemble knowingly stolen parts of you going to a
Christmas present toy known for the record as change the flat you are radar rocket
cannon toy Der High Crimes und Der Misdemeanors and you didn’t. Did you or?
Jack then oozing out from ‘neath the topslab of our ultimate reality came all ut ut
ut ut, Judge, uh no, I didn’t. I.
Der High Crimes und Der Misdemeanors Stattdessen. Parts of which your willy-wife
spirited off away from a shit job of Du wirst die Wohnung wechseln, die du bist a
seasonal toy factory assembly line und er tat es nicht that is an order soldier are you
going to change the damned flat tire of are you not? Stattdessen er. Stattdessen.
Stattdessen! Der High Crimes und Der Misdemeanors! Are you or not?
Judge no I did not.
Huh—
Sonboy at that point your Father broke down in a wash of tears so thickly abrasive
with hot greasy sorrow that I lunged to take him in my arms.
Father sweet Father, I oozed—justice was not served I feel your pain.
Der High Crimes und Der Misdemeanors.
Father I remember long past the since of this now what you said ‘bout.
Der High Crimes und Der Misdemeanors.
The grease in the gun will fill the jointboots of most late models if the grease fry-
sizzles off its stubbornness in that frypan Der High Crimes und Der Misdemeanors ut.
So that had been tried years back father fath’ when I still bent greasing out the
nipplejoints studding the underpinnings of the old cars made way back when and Der
High Crimes und Der Misdemeanors I fried grease in the pan Father. And that pan I
never washed just wiped it with head-sized summersunny clumps of old school cotton
waste clump after clump filling with ooze tiring me I was beginning to regret trying the
trick I wiped and I. Der High Crimes und Der Misdemeanors. So—summersunny wiped
and fell away sleepy sleep into sleepy deep sleep and forgot—Der High Crimes und Der
Misdemeanors.
Never washed.
Father I plead.
Der High Crimes und Der Misdemeanors.
That pan was used to sizzle up the next day’s Father sausage yes there was a time
he liked Der High Crimes sausage und Der Misdemeanors but but those times got
destroyed this way ess hut hut—Der High Crimes und Der Misdemeanors.
And that was the beginning of the end of your Father’s decline.
So sweet Willie; end of the butt you yah going to change the flat you are.
And he didn’t, so.
So. I be so:
My Mother is a fish.

15
RICHARD KOSTELANETZ
Design by Eddie Baker

from One-Word Stories

16
17
18
19
MARK HALPERN

How I Made Partner

… “Faker, faker, faker.”

Kathy was right on all three counts. She leaned over my desk and inspected my
crossword puzzle. I’d run out of real work.
“It’s not your life of ease we envy. Just those business trips.” Her hands gripped
wads of loose documents,
I smiled. That there was envy, even a little, meant that the other foreign lawyers
didn’t know I wasn’t getting a year-end bonus. Even though checking would have been
so simple, since back then nobody bothered with password protection. This illustrates a
historical phenomenon: During the 1980s, if you liked intense living, liked money, took
pride in your intellect, but were afraid to turn on a computer, you became a lawyer.
But me, I hadn’t particularly been destined for the law. I could have been
anything or nothing. Moreover, I lacked any remarkable talent except possibly, I hoped,
the talent for advancing within a complex hierarchy while having a good time. Naturally,
I knew in subtle detail the compensation paid to the others. All except Kathy, who was
on secondment from a New York firm that kept remitting a monthly “tax-free shitload”
for living expenses.
Truth be told, I didn’t deserve a bonus. A half-year logging billable hours and the
total was pathetic. Let me add that honesty about billables helps with a carefree life. I
might have blamed Kanemochi & Arisugi for hiring too many foreign lawyers just before
the market downturn, but there’s a saying. Lawyers tell lies. Billable hours tell truths.
Still, much time remained to reverse the loss of one bonus. As a shallow person
dwelling in the shallows, I gazed upward. What I saw there, hovering above, was
opportunity. Several colleagues would soon return home and their replacements would
need time to overcome the prevailing distrust of foreigners. For the Japanese partners,
the only known quantities would be me and Kathy. And though she was clever and
diligent, she was also strident, clear-speaking, imposingly tall, and pathologically
straightforward. She was American. Whereas I was Canadian. Surely, I thought, I’d turn
things around during the eighteen months remaining on my contract.
As for the envy-provoking business trips, about once a month I’d head out to
some quiet corner of Japan without cellphone coverage, reporting in by payphone.
“What kind of delays?”
“Don’t worry. I’ve got everything under control”.
And then onward to dipping into a hot spring bath, or hiking to a hidden
waterfall, or waking the gods of good fortune with two claps of my hands at some
charming Shinto shrine.
As for the actual work on those trips: “So good of you to come. It’s wonderful you
could find your way here on your own.” Then I’d make my little contribution to the
successful closing of some asset-sale transaction.
On the most recent trip, the vendor’s president, Fukusachi-san, a short and
chubby fellow, was boundlessly joyful at receiving a price agreed at the market’s peak.
Afterwards he drove me to the train station and waited on the platform. There, he

20
chatted in Japanese about Occupation-era GIs dispensing Hershey bars, his first taste of
life’s sweet things. The train arrived and I thanked him for his kindness. He struggled
unsuccessfully to extract a response from his paltry collection of stock English phrases.
Finally, just as the doors closed, he shouted, “I love you.” He then waived until the train
was out of sight. Like a scene from a Hollywood movie whose casting director had
snorted too much cocaine.
Fukusachi-san went even further and praised me to my firm’s client, who in turn
reported favourably to the partner in charge.
“Well done, Mr Fairweather. Everyone is happy.”
I deemed this a turning point.
As the New Year rolled by, I took on the role of English-language speechwriter
for the firm’s head, Kanemochi-sensei. My rule: “-sensei” for partners, “-san” for junior
associates, and the ambiguous “Mr” or “Ms” for those in between.
Kanemochi-sensei could see I wasn’t the type to let ambition stand in the way of
daily pleasures. We clicked.
One day he requested help on a “delicate matter.” The firm’s key contact at an
overseas mega-client was retiring and there’d be a send-off party. Kanemochi-sensei
couldn’t attend, but wanted to contribute to the “book of remembrances.”
“Bill-san often travelled with his wife. This one time I got my wife and we made
up a foursome for golf. A fine day, warm weather, and Bill-san and I both shot seven
over par. Amazing. It was April and his wife enjoyed the cherry blossoms, so over
drinks—” The telephone rang. Before waving me off, Kanemochi-sensei put his hand
over the receiver. “I need it first thing tomorrow.”
If you don’t have a big dream, it’s good to like money. Trust me on this. You get
motivation and, ultimately, a sense of accomplishment.
An example. At age sixteen I was banned from after-school science lab following
a small explosion. The proximate cause was inattention; the root cause was that
chemistry was boring. But then the teacher began awarding a dollar to whoever could
first balance some chemical equation. My hand would shoot up. My report card showed
an “A.”
Bonus or no bonus, K&A paid my salary on time.
I stared at my keyboard. I needed words that seemed distinctively Japanese and
would pass for sincere and meaningful. Since Kanemochi-sensei’s reminiscence had
been skeletal, poetry would be best. I hadn’t written any since the sixth grade. But what
the heck.
A haiku seemed too obvious. Also, too short – almost like asking for my bluff to
be called. But there was also the tanka form, which, so as far as I could tell, was a haiku
plus two seven-syllable lines tacked onto the end.
The next morning I handed the result to Kanemochi-sensei’s fifty-something
secretary, avowing that had I been bold enough to have taken her graceful elegance as
inspiration I’d have conjured up a hundred love poems. Anyway, I’m rather proud of my
first and only tanka.

The warm breeze carries,

with cherry blossoms, onward
four Spalding golf balls.
21
 Our hearts carouse together,
whiskey-and-sodas waiting.

Soon Kanemochi-sensei’s teary-eyed visage poked through my office doorway.

“Fairweather-sensei,” he said, “you are the only one at this firm who catches my true
feelings.” And I was on a roll.
In March, two foreign lawyers left. The gap before replacements arrived was
perfect for expanding my intra-firm social network. I attended a K&A “tennis night”.
After dallying at my desk until eight, I headed over to the sports club with a
young Japanese lawyer who’d once been posted to America. We emerged from the
locker room in our tennis whites just as two secretaries had finished warming up. Only
one court was free, so we played mixed doubles.
The three Japanese had textbook-perfect swings but, in terms of actual tennis,
were profoundly feckless. I sent the ball to my opponents as gently as possible and the
first set was tied four-four. A splendid time all round. Then Kathy arrived.
She had nowhere to go, so I acted the gallant male and proposed she sub-in for
me. This turned out to be a faux pas of gravest proportions.
The Japanese regarded my proposal as the barely-comprehensible utterance of a
madman. Clearly, I’d misunderstood the meaning of “let’s,” “play” and “tennis.” Nor did
it help that I referred to “tag team,” a concept associated with professional wrestling.
Perhaps the secretaries feared Kathy was preparing to body-slam them. After all, her
demeanour and, especially, her silver-and-scarlet leotard were entirely consistent with
the latter sport.
Yet the day was saved by Kathy herself. Lacking instinctive understanding of faux
pas, and rejecting out of principle the validity of any such notion, she burst onto a
neighbouring court and snagged in mid-flight the just-dropshotted ball of a two-on-
one game. She then insisted we all reorganize into appropriately-matched doubles
contests.
I’ve never, ever had such guts. Kathy became my idol.
Anyway, back to tennis night. The young Japanese lawyer had studied Americans
well. He explained matters to his compatriots in succinct Japanese, whereupon they
embraced Kathy’s directive. Her firm was a massive source of K&A business. She
deserved respect.
But the reimposed calm was superficial. As balls went to and fro, a rigidity in the
Japanese players’ bodies betrayed their struggle to comprehend the stopping of a game
in progress other than for an earthquake. I thought of The Robot on Lost in Space, a
boyhood favourite of mine that you might know from reruns. Confronted with
circumstances beyond his programming, The Robot would flail his wobbly mechanical
arms and cry, “This does not compute! This does not compute!”
As for me, my earlier blunder was reinterpreted as a doomed effort to keep a lid
on Kathy. And the Japanese place great value on effort, especially in the face of
inevitable failure.
Circumstances continued to conspire in my favour. Soon afterward, a partner
called me into a meeting where I was introduced to a middle-aged woman wearing a
floppy hat. It had a purple feather that protruded ominously forward.
“Mr Fairweather has lived in London.”
22
 “Fine. You must help me. I was swindled out of the home in Westminster that I
inherited from my uncle.”
I mostly just took notes, but wished clarification.
“Please show me precisely where.” I’d sketched out a map.
“Here.” Her forefinger pressed down on Buckingham Palace.
“I see. Perhaps our library has a better map.” I couldn’t conceal my skepticism.
The client grabbed her handbag and ran out, slamming the door behind her. We
chased her to the elevators, where she screamed, “I graduated from University of
Tokyo.” From the elevator shaft we heard faintly, “I also graduated from Oxford.” Sane
or otherwise, the Japanese are obsessed with formal education.
The partner sent her a 90,000 yen invoice and, with his support, I received a pay
raise in the second year of my contract.
This was a time when Tokyo firms were growing in size. K&A, like its main
competitors, decided to permanently employ one foreign lawyer, who’d be accorded
higher status. Some partners favoured promoting me, while others advocated recruiting
an American lawyer with more experience. Regrettably, Kanemochi-sensei had just
retired.
The big problem was a sixth-year associate whom I’ll call Takahana-sensei. He
had influence with Arisugi-sensei, the firm’s new head and, rumour had it, his
prospective father-in-law. Takahana-sensei did not like me.
A quick aside to stress the importance of identifying who at work might dislike
you. For me, it’s usually highly-intellectual individuals with sophisticated cultural
pursuits, dismissive of those who don’t take lawyering too seriously. But since almost no
clients fall in this category, I can live with it.
Back to my story. Now, all this was happening right when I’d decided to stay
permanently in Japan, savouring forever the pampered life of a foreigner.
My dilemma: I hoped to keep basking in the familiar comfort of K&A, but only if I
got the promotion. Yet if I sought out another firm holding promise of a better future,
word might get back to K&A, in which case the chance of promotion would likely
vanish. Even my contract-renewal could be at risk.
I consulted a headhunter and got a nasty surprise. Not only would other firms fail
to match my current pay, he said, but K&A was actively recruiting in New York for the
senior position. The game was up. I’d look elsewhere, though the best I could hope for
was a temporary step backwards.
The next day I arrived at work early, planning to utilize K&A’s laser printers and
fancy paper in privacy for cover letters to accompany my newly-updated resume. But
even this was thwarted, as staff were already milling about. I saw secretaries go in and
out of Takahana-sensei’s office and went to investigate. His nameplate missing.
“I thought he wasn’t getting made partner until April, but they never tell the
foreigners anything. Which way to his new office?”
“I’m not sure.”
The mystery lasted until nine-thirty, when more-talkative staff arrived. A paralegal
had complained of sekuhara – sexual harassment. Takahana-sensei no longer worked at
K&A.
Days later I was offered elevation to Senior Foreign Counsel. I’d do less lawyering,
but would help build new business and take responsibility for supervising foreign staff.
23
My salary would go up and there’d be an incentive bonus. So I did what one must do
when good luck comes knocking. I let it in.
Yet some partners still opposed my promotion and were perhaps scheming for
my failure. I felt pressed to accomplish something of genuine substance, but had no
idea where to start. Just then Kathy appeared at my desk.
“Be bold,” she said. “I will help”
Before I could ask specifics, the telephone rang. Fukusachi-san, the happy,
chubby gentleman from Ehime, planned an overseas venture and I was the only foreign
lawyer he knew. I nearly blurted out, “I love you too.” That same week, Kathy’s New York
firm began funneling in work through me. I was bringing in business. I was a player. Life
was good.
Life stayed good. My practice flourished and eventually I became K&A’s first
foreign-lawyer partner. The firm grew and grew, and my professional reputation drifted
upwards.
Looking into the audience, I’m honoured to see among you the managing
partner of Toorich & Overhead’s Tokyo office, who even at this moment is tapping out
emails on her iPhone. Ladies and gentleman, I give you my former colleague and eternal
hero, the powerfully beautiful Kathy Flintlock.
Her success is different from mine. But however you define success, I don’t think
you’ll find it without a commitment to honesty – in billable hours and otherwise. Look.
She’s nodding in agreement.
Some people, like Kathy, are born to be inspired by dreams, to work long and
hard, to build lasting monuments. Others are content to frolic along the shimmering
surface of life, where the world–as it is–remains in plain sight. For us, we take it easy
once we get the chance. Nowadays, my life is filled with tennis and skiing and visiting
tucked-away corners of Japan. And a little work for my friend and only client, Fukusachi-
san. With so much time on my hands, I was delighted at the invitation to address you
today about “Opportunities for Foreign Lawyers in Japan.”
I’ve been told to give some advice to the young folks among you. So here goes.
First, be yourself. Second, decide what you really want, making sure it’s
consistent with being yourself. Third, keep an optimistic watch for opportunities and
grab them, making sure that what you grab is consistent with what you really want.
Good luck to you all. And do note that Kanemochi & Arisugi is presently
recruiting.

24
MARK BLICKLEY

Brainard Bullion: Creative Consultant

Image by Dario Saraceno

What do I look like to you? Don’t be shy. Do you find me attractive? Repulsive?
Charming? Scary? How about determined?
Please allow me to introduce myself. My name is Brainard Bullion and I am a
certifiable creativity coach, a conduit to the sacred hermaphroditical muse, CYN. I reside
in a Long Beach, New York rental unit that offers a partial oceanfront view. My passions
include somersaulting in the nude and doing unusual things with eggs. As a devoted
disciple of CYN, I praxis and teach reasonable and sound enchanted thinking that
invariably leads to the achievement of affirmative outcomes.
Let me offer you an example of the positive power of my sacred CYN praxis that
occurred just last week. I was riding the F line subway train to Neptune Avenue when a
foul smelling young man of great height boarded the train and pushed his way to the
center of the car. He wore a white baseball cap with the words EAT THE RICH stitched in
large lavender letters. As the young man cleared his throat, I expected him to either spit
or begin an agonized plea for money.
He did neither.

25
 Instead, he pulled out a pistol and ordered an attractive woman in Tanzanite
heels to pull the emergency stop chord. After the train pummeled to a stop he began to
rage how humans have become lactose intolerant because we stopped ingesting
mother’s milk and replaced it with the cow milk that has made American women look
like heifers and American men look like castrated bulls. “You fools! Your last glass of
milk actually came from a bull,” he screamed.
When a trio of teenagers tried to rush him from behind, he shot the ringleader.
He then punctuated each sentence of his memorized dairy manifesto by pointing his
gun at a different rider and yelling, “ Pow cow!” While transit riders cowered and many
wept, I remained calm and silently invoked the healing power of CYN. Much to my
surprise, these words leapt from my throat:
Coughing milk through your nose is one of the seven cleansing rituals of dairy
yoga. Milkshakes are the gift from heaven that come in different flavors.
Life happens, honey. What are you going to do? Cry into a bowl of milk?
Upon hearing this, the gunman shot himself.
They called me a hero, responsible for saving many lives on that train. But it
wasn’t me. What saved us was CYN’s oral response to my silent desperate plea for
guidance. My mouth was just used as Its vehicle of protection.
There are many creative consultants who live to milk the bank accounts of the
anxious and insecure. Not me. I live to share this sacred praxis of CYN with you. I,
Brainard Bullion of Long Beach, specialize in the reclamation of frustrated, disillusioned,
humiliated and blocked artists suffering within all branches of the humanities. My post-
graduate work in the fields of Scatology and Sanitation are the perfect precursors for
my present avocation as a creative conduit to aesthetic satisfaction and artistic
fulfillment.
My consultations are done exclusively through house calls because creativity
must engender movement and momentum in order to succeed. Skeptics have accused
me of using house calls to avoid office overhead while living off the pipedreams of
others. I abhor pipedreams. I make a virtuous living as a pipefitter. I install, assemble,
fabricate, maintain and repair artistic ambitions by helping artists secure airtight
connections to their creative process and products. I work with an array of national and
international non-profit/commercial art networks.
To begin with, I never submit an artist’s work. To submit means to be judged
unfavorably as a possible non-equal. Submission is the acceptance of creative surrender.
An artist must never submit to any authority except to that of CYN. I offer up a client’s
work to prospective dealers, curators, producers and publishers in the same spirit one
offers up a gift—as an enticement for pleasure, prosperity and affable enlightenment.
I first came to understand the unique powers of CYN’s gift of individualized
creativity when I was a young child who still believed in Santa Claus and the Easter
Bunny. A CYN inspired epiphany occurred one Christmas Eve while I was playing a Wise
Man in our Church’s annual Christmas pageant. While in bearded costume bowing and
presenting a gift to the baby Jesus in the manger, tears suddenly spilled down my face
and I wept so loudly Pastor Weber had to pull me off stage. After the church service
ended, I was brought to the sacristy and given cookies and cocoa while the pastor, my
parents and the Sunday school teachers who supervised the pageant tried to calm me
and discover why I was so upset.
26
 In between sobs I told them I could no longer believe a wise man could ever be
joyous over Jesus’ birth and that anyone who says Merry Christmas, throws parties,
decorates trees, strings lights and exchanges gifts all in celebration of this infant must
be a cruel liar. Why is everyone so jubilant to see this baby born? Just three months
later comes Easter and this baby is a grown man who is mocked, betrayed, tortured and
murdered in a most excruciatingly sadistic manner that ends with his broken body
tossed into a stranger’s grave. Ho! Ho! Ho!
Instead of acknowledging my precocious insight into raw truth they became
upset and told me it all had to do with sin. My sin. And then I was slapped into a decade
of psychotherapy. But unbeknownst to my parents, one of my shrinks practiced Reiki
therapy, which means "spiritually guided life force energy." Reiki involves the passing of
energy from a trained Reiki practitioner's body to the client's body as a method of
healing. This Reiki practitioner used a series of established hand positions as a means
for allowing energy to move freely between her body and mine. That’s when CYN first
formally introduced Themself to me and I learned how most people corrupted CYN’s
name because of their fear of visionary thinking and so chose to misspell it and
interpret it as sin. This is done in order to obliterate Their healing properties of unique
transformative thought that always turns into affirmative action.
I’m currently working with a client who is a prolific and accomplished fine arts
photographer. Not too many years ago she was a widely exhibited and published
winner of multiple N.E.A. artist grants as well as a recipient of highly competitive
residencies at both Yaddo and MacDowell artist colonies. However, for more than a
decade her work has been completely ignored and she’s become dangerously
despondent. When we met she presented me with a shocking proposal.
My client is a purist who refuses to succumb to digital photography and give up
the excitement of her darkroom discoveries. However, film and chemicals are just too
expensive and spatially she can’t afford the extra room in which to develop her
photographs. Her last two agents dropped her when they insisted she needed to create
art videos based on her images in order to revive her photographic career. She abhors
video art, claiming they are mostly repetitive, appropriated images and soundtracks
sans the fingerprints of a personal humanity. Her proposition was for me to help her
complete her first and final art video that will chronicle the soul crushing loss of her
artistic voice. She engaged me to help her conceptualize and create the world’s first
artistic suicide snuff film, a final ironic protest against the cruel indignity of her cultural
neglect. She was determined to kill herself on camera in a most powerfully imaginative
manner. Her expectation was that the video would be her swan call that would fly into
international galleries and museums, thus avenging her neglected and rejected late
period artist life.
Upon hearing her goal, some may call me crass as I always accept checks and
credit cards, but I amended this policy and insisted she pay me cash up front. I thought
her project cutting edge and I immediately came up with a conceptual title for her
terminal performance video, Sentenced to Death by the Muse. She loved it, but a few
days later my conscience got the better of me, as well as fear of the legal implications of
assisting a suicide.

27
 When I tried to talk her out of filming her suicide and change course for her first
and final art video, she was defiantly adamant that the reason for her taking such a
drastic, innovational lethal action was “the lost echo of my uniquely artistic voice.”
Hmm. The loss of her artistic voice? She claimed not being able to afford print
photography supplies, a dark room and the total lack of art world attention to her work
the loss of her Artistic Voice? That kind of thinking is irrational and is most certainly not
to die for.
Thanks to the intervention of CYN, I was able to explain to her the scientific
conceit developed by physicists that sound waves never disappear. Sound waves spread
out and get weaker and weaker until they just about disappear and that’s when they
transform into thermal energy units that are eternal. According to this highly respected
theory, we are surrounded by the voices of every word that’s ever been spoken by both
the living and the dead, but we can’t hear them because the ultimate sensitive listening
device has yet to be invented. Thankfully, after much debate she finally accepted my
proposition.
Using this concept, I sketched out a new video I called Babel On and Off White to
be shot within Brooklyn’s Green Wood Cemetery’s kinetic landscape of funereal
monuments and sculptural ossuary patinas.
The goal of this new artwork is to have the viewer experience what I call a
seduction from the graveyard dead who are excited and impatient to recruit mortals
into their powerful and extremely vocal eternal community choir. This terminal
seduction will be achieved by inducing a kind of video viewer trance rooted in an
escalating aural and visual cemetery cacophony. This rising dissonance approximates an
ethereal heart attack by allowing her viewers to pass over into the world of the dead
when the jarring crescendo of flashing funereal sculptural images and the humming,
hissing, screeching garble of overlapping voices abruptly ends when the screen is
suddenly filled with a silent, blazing white. There are dead in this art video but in my
updated version, thank CYN it isn’t the artist herself.
We were recently notified that Babel On and Off White has been short listed as a
finalist for the prestigious and lucrative Alfred B. Sloan Foundation Grant, awarded to
artists who seek to build bridges between the two cultures of science and the
humanities in order to develop a common language to better understand and speak to
one another.
So, how may I be of service to you?

28
MONTY JONES

Souvenir
“Jack Otis kept his most prized possession attached to the dashboard of his car: a piece of the
Parthenon that he acquired in Greece. It symbolized for him the pursuit of knowledge,
understanding and justice.”
—Newspaper obituary

Rock by rock, we could manage to move

the whole thing over here and have it set up
on the wide flat roof of any parking garage.

Of course we would have to work together,

taking the pieces in order, unless we are to end up
with a big heap of antiquity. But it could be done.

Even before it was finished, I suspect, people saw

what it was going to mean and started carrying away
little bits of it, no one of those acquisitions

mattering much by itself. Twenty-five hundred years

later, we see what’s left, one of the original ruins,
made up mostly of pieces too big to easily pocket.

Through the dusty centuries those art lovers had help,

like the gunpowder blast of 1687, the Turks seeing
no better place for their ammunition, the Greeks

no choice but to fire away. And who can forget

the British Museum itself and its own acquisitions,
far more than we could hide away in our luggage.

And after all, who has not seen fit along the way
to lift a little something with great personal meaning,
a palm-sized petrified rock, an arrowhead, a rare cactus,

anything set aside for all but sitting there in such

abundance who will notice, who will care, who better
able to appreciate it, who with a better place to put it?

29
NATAN LAST

Branding

I’m retained by duopolists

in a noon boardroom duel
over sibilants in medicinal
poetry. They want science
but just enough. I say more
Z’s, X’s is the trend—I say look
at my graph, how it’s jagged?
I’m sketching quadrants with
catchy names & plotting
the competition. Avoid any
Aztecan resonance, I wink.
Xochimilco, white acid on
pyramid steps. Palindromes
are flush-drawn lemniscates,
Xanax cures nothing, time-
wise. Zzzquil missed it by
one Z. Zoloft is obviously
villainous. I teach them
about voicing, how [b] vs.
[p] is a matter of vibration.
They rub their hairy chins,
to telegraph meat-based
diets. I charge hourly, &
before I leave, they smile,
& whip out scarlet irons.
One cheek of my rear for
each, where they scald two
dollar signs, $ $. Descended
from peso in colonial accounts.
P with a superscript S, then
collapsing. Writing is hard
enough, so I kiss the moguls
on liver-spotted heads, &
limp home, richer, while the
boardroom stinks of sirloin.

30
Love Song

I want to be clear about everything

you might be.

A cover song mimics shortwave static,

jinxed to sing in a snowglobe

turret, thunderstruck ‘til your hairs moss the glass

& a blonde column cracks its way to Babel.

I want to be clear, here on a dawn cumulus,

that glass slippers are skis & I rewrote

our vows in Xhosa, the clicks metronomic,

the words sapped of timelessness & diphthong,

& I fashioned a ring from tonal language,

bled Chinese for its polysemy & since

your mother is a sierra, magic, to ask

for your hand I invented high-altitude

semaphore, vines curling in the affirmative.

& to appease your blind musician

father I tapped dahs & dits out of stars

& twigs lopped from larger latticework, held

his hand to parchment’s zenith, a sharkskin sky

gasping from Cassiopeia gills. We plucked a duet,

every tectonic plate a porch,

every firefly a humid whole note,

meridian for bass string, mantle for a mandolin’s

white-hot mouth. I want to

be clear, our wedding song comes with

a chorus, bearing witness—que eu existo,

eu existo—never to grow
old, on the saxophone—then post-chorus

honeymoon in craterous jungles, a thatch roof

under syncopated rain.
31
I want to be
clear as water—a droplet as acoustic flood—

that the blanket over us, our percussive dreams,

make an orchestra, our linking limbs

a lento baton, & a morning embrace,

arms stretched in a conductor’s finish,

quiets the ambient noise, our hearts & minds

tricked into thinking the music continues

long after the turntable needle has drowned

white vinyl in ink.

32
EWA MAZIERSKA

Flowers of My Friends

It is assumed that all women love flowers, but typically it means that they enjoy
receiving them from men who are in love with them. However, the women I have in
mind never cared much about receiving flowers from men and, if they did, it wasn’t
enough; they wanted to be masters of their flowers. I also wanted to fall into this
category, but it didn’t work out that way; even cacti dried out and died under my care.
Hence, I stopped cultivating my own pot flowers and then even buying cut flowers as I
realised that this amounts to supporting the ‘flower slaughter industry’. Currently, I
admire flowers almost exclusively via intermediaries. Two such intermediaries who I hold
in my memory most vividly because, in their cult of flowers, they went further than
anybody I know of whilst, at the same time, their attitude to flowers couldn’t be more
different from each other.

Lena or My Flowers Are Enough

The first was my Austrian friend, Lena. Lena was a singer in a band named Lost, first
consisting of three and then only two members. The band gained some popularity in
their country in the 1990s before quietly sinking into oblivion; this being except for a
handful of fans who, myself included, made up for Lost’s wider recognition with their
utter devotion. I was especially haunted by the mermaid voice of the singer. Although I
did not perceive myself as the groupie type, I wanted to learn who was behind the voice
and the lyrics which were, true to the band’s name, about loss, harm, and
disappointment. There was defiance in Lena’s voice, as if the siren wanted to persuade
her followers that suffering loss was a gift, but not because ‘what does not kill me,
makes me stronger’, as in the Nietzsche aphorism, but rather because ‘what kills me,
gives me immortality’.
After several failed attempts to contact Lena, I got her e-mail address from one of
Lost’s most devoted fans, although accompanied with a warning that she would be
unlikely to reply. Days and weeks passed without any response and eventually I stopped
waiting and had even forgotten that I’d written to her. But then, as it often happens to
me, when hope is lost, the dream comes true and Lena replied, although only to tell me
that she had nothing really to say about the band and her old life as a singer.
She moved on, had a different job and different interests. But I replied that I
didn’t mind and wanted to meet her anyway. She agreed, although with numerous
conditions attached such as; I couldn’t bring anybody to our meeting; that she would
have only one hour for me; and that we would meet in a place of her choosing. None of
these conditions were difficult to fulfil, so I agreed but, due to my work, the meeting
could not take place for the next half a year anyway. In the meantime we started to write
to each other with great intensity, on occasions exchanging three e-mails per day.
Practically as soon as she decided that I deserved her trust, Lena started to send me
photographs of flowers. There were several interesting things about them. First, the
flowers were never placed against any background – they filled the entire photograph
and it was tempting to conjecture that she didn’t want to contextualise them; they were

33
meant to remain timeless and placeless and most likely she expected the same attitude
from the recipients of these photos. I thus refrained from asking her where she had
taken these photos, although I assumed that the shots came mostly from Augarten,
Vienna’s famous Baroque public park, because she’d written that she lived nearby and
had described her walks there. Second, the flowers were never young, always mature; as
if they were a metonymy of the photographer who, by this point, was in her late forties.
She also sent a series of photos of old and withered flowers. These were most likely
from Vienna’s main cemetery, the Zentralfriedhof, and there was something ethereal
about them. Like Lena’s singing, they invited one to follow them or enter them, as if
they were the mythical vaginas, dentatas or abysses, concealing their caverns behind
delicate yellow or pink petals, on occasion folded like pillows and quilts made of silk. I
couldn’t miss the horror vacui.
By the time we met for the first time, I had over a hundred photos of Lena’s
flowers and was about to start to catalogue them, as if in anticipation of the moment
when I would write about them. Our first meeting was in a café near Augarten, one of
those where patrons are allowed to smoke as Lena was a heavy smoker; a trait which I
admired given that most middle-aged women I knew boringly obsessed about their
health and appearance. Because I’d seen her on the covers of Lost’s records and a
couple of their videos available on YouTube, it wasn’t difficult to recognise her. This
doesn’t mean that she hadn’t changed from how she looked in those twenty-year old
videos. On the contrary, she had changed a lot; in essence losing her former good looks
and becoming old and haggard. However, the process of aging sharpened everything
that was distinct about her, such as her narrow and slightly hooked nose, her high
cheekbones, and long fingers. Gum disease and many years smoking had made her
teeth dark, crooked, loose and protruding, as if they wanted to escape from her mouth.
When she wasn’t talking she kept her mouth compressed, which gave her a severe look.
The mermaid had changed into a witch and this was fine by me, as I regarded it as the
natural trajectory of a mermaid.
We had a meal for which she paid half the bill, as she was careful not to owe
anything to anybody, even – or perhaps especially - her fans. Then we went to Augarten.
It was late May, the wonderful period when even the pessimists cannot argue that
summer is coming. There were plenty of flowers in the park, but Lena, as for the flower
lover she presented herself to me, was surprisingly inattentive. It was me who had to
stop her, when I noticed a particularly beautiful plant to draw her attention to. After the
walk we went to a café and drank wine. She told me more about her life and her
disappointments: her reckless mother who gave birth to her when she was only sixteen
and then left her in the care of Lena’s aunt (her father was so absent in her life that she
even didn’t mention him); the lovers who abandoned her, on occasions for men; and
girlfriends, with whom she parted upon discovering they had nothing in common, her
being a rebel and them being conventional. Her story was that of a shrinking social
world and eventually gravitating in on oneself; a kind of big bang in reverse. I realised
that this contraction of her world was documented best in Lena’s final record which
included the song ‘My Flowers Are Enough’, her spinster manifesto, which listed all the
things the protagonist banished from her life or never had: children, lovers, pets, a
house (as opposed to a rented flat) for the glory of being locked in her ivory tower.

34
 Although Lena had scheduled our liaison to last only an hour, we spent half the
day together, eventually parting at the metro stop near her apartment, slightly drunk.
The next day I had some other business in Vienna and then returned to England without
visiting Lena in her rented “ivory tower,” because she didn’t invite me there. We
repeated this routine twice or three times. I enjoyed our meetings, although on the last
occasion we were slowly running out of topics and, at the same time, we had failed to
reach the stage where we were comfortable to sit and say nothing, maybe because
restaurants and cafés do not lend themselves to sitting in silence.
I would never have seen where Lena lived, were it not for the fact that on my last
visit I had an accident – I tripped on a protruding slab of pavement and hurt myself.
Blood was pouring from my knees, my hands and my face, and all this happened
practically in front of Lena’s block. It felt like she had no choice but to take me in there
and dress my wounds. We climbed to the fourth floor, me hobbling behind her as she
strode resentfully ahead, and then entered her small abode – a one-bedroom apartment
with an extra room fulfilling the function of a dining and a living room. It was neither as
small nor as shabby as I expected, but it was weird. There were many flowers there, but
all of them were dry, with their heads hanging down, as if they were convicts who died
after a long torture. What shocked me even more was that, contrary to the impression
she’d given previously, she did not grant her flowers autonomous existence, but used
them to decorate her numerous photographs, ranging from the time she was a teenager
to her most recent incarnations. This was like in Henry James’ “The Altar of the Dead,”
except that on this occasion the supposedly Dead was still alive and it was Lena. With
my internal eye I saw the next stage – Lena lying there in a coffin, covered by these dead
flowers.
Shortly after this visit our friendship dissolved. She stopped replying to my e-
mails which, by this point, I was sending out of duty rather than pleasure, and she told
the man who put us in touch that she found me boring.

Aga or Where Have All the Flowers Gone

It came first as a surprise to me that my friend Aga, who, like myself, was Polish and
came from Łódź, got interested in flowers in her early fifties because, before she
reached this age, she had many opportunities to learn about plants. This was because
Roman, her ex-husband, had a gardening business and he used their apartment as its
extension. He kept seeds there and experimented with plants, crossbreeding flowers
and creating miniatures so that they’d fit in minute glass containers, not unlike a ship in
a bottle. He was always on the verge of some botanic discovery, which was meant to
bring him a fortune, but this never happened, at least not before Aga and Roman
divorced.
I realised that Roman’s job, rather than make Aga love plants, put her off them –
they reminded her of a man whom she wanted to get rid of from her life. More time had
to pass before she was ready to embrace them because, after the couple split, Aga got
herself two cats who turned out to be extremely disruptive. They trashed everything that
got in their way and they were particularly vicious to anything which they found on the
windowsill, a portal to their freedom. It was only when one cat was killed by a car, when
he jumped out to the street from the window, and the other died from cancer that Aga

35
started to think about different companions. Initially, she bought several pot plants,
some violets, one orchid and miniature chrysanthemums; the last not even for keeping
but to take to the grave of her parents. Yet, once she put the pot of chrysanthemums
next to the violets and orchids, she lost the will to part with them, thinking that it wasn’t
the fault of the chrysanthemums that they were regarded as more suitable to
cemeteries than balconies. She kissed the small yellow-brown flowers, whispering: “I
won’t let you go,” and put them on the windowsill in her bedroom between the violets
and the orchids, as if to prove that chrysanthemums were of the same stature as
orchids. And so Aga’s story as a rescuer of flowers began. Soon she started to visit
florists, asking if they had any spoiled pot flowers. The florists initially treated her with
suspicion, thinking she was a tax collector or a waste inspector, or at best an eccentric
to be avoided, but most agreed to give her the waste as it obviously meant less waste
for them to dispose of. She took the plants home and tried to reanimate them, initially
using water and potions for plants bought in the flower shops, till she elaborated her
own formula using, among other things, her hair and nail clippings mixed with compost,
on the premise that these fragments of the body are particularly nutritious. When Aga
put the flowers in special trays, she stroked the leaves of these semi-dead creatures. If
they delicately vibrated under her fingers, it meant they were on the way to recovery.
Most of the plants brought from the florists she managed to rescue. But it wasn’t
enough for my friend. Her next destination was the cemetery. There, the fate of flowers
was even worse than those at the florists, especially after All Saints’ Day when the
cemetery attendants threw flowers onto a gigantic heap, together with used containers
for candles, plastic bags and other grave decorations and soil. When Aga looked at the
discarded plants she thought about the piles of bones from crematoria in films about
the Nazi death camps. The flowers were like these anonymous remnants of people,
deprived of their individuality and dignity, except that not all were dead. In fact, the
majority of the pot flowers thrown away were still alive; people got rid of them because
they didn’t want to look after them. So Aga picked them out, put them in her small car,
and brought them home to resuscitate them and nurture them to full health. For those
which were dead, she tried to offer a more dignified place for their last rest, burying
them in the back of the cemetery or in the allotments of her neighbours.
Eventually Aga had so many plants in her two-bedroom apartment, that there
was barely enough room for her bed. She needed to move to the next stage. She set up
a website: “Pot Flowers Looking For Loving Homes” and so people started to come to
her for free flowers. In common with the owners of pet shelters she was, however,
careful not to entrust her plants to those who might neglect them. For this reason, she
always asked the people whom had been gifted the flowers, to send her their
photographs of them and return them if the plants got ill. Her visitors were almost
exclusively women or men who wanted to give the special flowers to their wives and
girlfriends, to prove that they were the “caring type,” who would rather get a mongrel
from the shelter than an expensive pedigree dog. Such requests from men, Aga typically
ignored. However, one day a man in his mid-fifties named Ryszard came, telling her that
he wanted a pot flower for himself, ideally one which would keep him company till the
end of his life, and one which had just one flower as he didn’t want to be overwhelmed
by beautiful creatures. It was not difficult to conjecture that he was both divorced and
prejudiced against women, and that his relation to a flower would be sexual. Aga did
36
not mind any of these traits, as she was prejudiced against the opposite sex herself and
felt that the guy wasn’t a rapist, but rather a stalker type and a caresser, and flowers like
to be stalked and caressed. However, she told Ryszard that she was unable to fulfil his
request in full because no plants flower continuously whilst, at the same time, have only
one flower. Demanding from the plant to have just one flower would be like asking a
woman to stay forever young and childless.
In the end she gave Ryszard a plant which looked like a bee orchid, except that it
wasn’t pink and brown but yellow and dark-red and, obviously, it wasn’t a wild flower
but one which was cultivated. Aga found two of those on the rubbish heap at the Lodz
cemetery and had spent a lot of time and effort bringing them back to life, so it was
hard to part with any of them, but she trusted its new carer. She assumed that she
would never hear from Ryszard again but, not only did he send her a new photo of the
orchid every week which he called “Aga’s Bee,” after some months he returned, asking
her to give him another pot flower. This time she gave him some miniature Japanese
irises. Normally they would be planted outdoors but Polish florists, seeking innovation
at all cost, tried to miniaturise many flowers so that they could be sold in pots. As a
result, a lot of flowers were discarded, leading Aga to fill her apartment with these
crippled, diminutive creatures and posting online petitions against miniaturisation of
flowers and plants at large (pun intended by Aga). In this way she joined in the anti-
Bonsai movement and once, when visiting, I tripped on a pile of leaflets explaining – as I
later learnt - in graphic detail what the plants suffer when they are not allowed to reach
their full size, comparing their miniaturisation to the cruel practice of bandaging the
feet of Chinese women. Only, on this occasion, not only are the feet of plants
constrained but their entire bodies. Reading these leaflets, I couldn’t help but think
about Aga’s ex-husband’s attempts at plant miniaturisation. Was Aga not bothered
about his experiments or was this a factor in their split? But I didn’t ask her as she didn’t
like to talk about that stage of her life.
Subsequently Ryszard took a third pot flower from Aga, a yellow zebra plant. And
then a fourth, a Christmas cactus as it was January and the florists were getting rid of
unsold stock. On this occasion Ryszard mentioned that the number of his pot flowers
matched the number of the women he had divorced. However, he kept visiting Aga,
usually at weekends as on weekdays he was very busy with work, and started helping
her in the shelter and going with her to the places where she expected to find her
“crippled orphans.” He would also bring her bags of shopping and invite her to
restaurants, not least because Aga was so involved with flowers, while also working full-
time, that she barely had enough time to eat (I guess she also felt guilty devouring the
cousins of her beloved creatures). Eventually Ryszard invited her to his house.
Reluctantly she visited him in what turned out to be a large house in Zgierz, a suburb of
Lodz renown for a number of so called “Gypsy palaces”; highly ornamented large
houses with dome-shaped roofs and large external stairs, wide at the bottom and
narrower at the top. Apparently, at one time, these buildings - erected in the 1980s -
belonged to the most sought-after contract killers in Europe but, by this point, they
stood abandoned and in disrepair. Ryszard told Aga that he had recently bought one of
these palaces, as they were incredibly cheap, and he thought about using some rooms
and the garden as a house for Aga’s flowers. A greenhouse was also on offer. In the
longer term, he wanted to make the Gypsy palace look like a kind of Xanadu from
37
Citizen Kane, only lighter, more airy, and flowery. Ryszard assumed that Aga would be
over the moon with his proposal but she, by this stage in her life, being practical,
pointed out to him the various shortcomings of this solution to her problem. First, it
took ages to get to Zgierz in the frequently heavy traffic so, looking after “his flowers”,
would require her putting more money and time into her flower-rescue operation than
she could afford. Second, for most of those who wanted flowers from her shelter, it was
easier for them to get to her apartment in the centre of Lodz than from Zgierz. Thirdly,
what would happen to the flowers if Ryszard changed his mind and decided to sell the
house? Would he throw the flowers away like the florists or the cemetery attendants?
Ryszard then admitted that he also had plans for Aga. He wanted her to move
there with him and become his fifth wife, if she were not averse to this bourgeois
institution. But Aga refused. In principle, she didn’t object to being somebody’s fifth
wife, but she didn’t find Ryszard attractive. The long years of communing with the most
beautiful creatures made her averse to the mousy-haired—or balding—square-faced
and stout creatures that were to be found walking the streets of Polish towns, Ryszard
included. She also felt that, despite superficially sharing a love for flowers, they had little
in common. Yet, she didn’t want to admit these truths. Instead she simply said to him:
“My plants are enough. I don’t want anybody else in my life.” After this rebuttal, Ryszard
stopped visiting her so often, but they remained on friendly terms. Eventually he
installed a different woman in his Xanadu palace. Aga didn’t like her, so she didn’t
entrust this woman with her flowers.
Over several years, whenever I visited her during my trips to Poland, Aga would
tell me about her flowers. Because I lived in England - and was so inept with flowers - I
couldn’t take any pots from her and neither would it be practical to bring any flowers
for her to nurture to good health. What I did bring were songs about flowers as, after
flowers, music was my friend’s greatest love. She liked Lena’s songs, although found her,
and rightly so, somewhat morbid. Most of all, she liked a compilation of different
versions of “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” including three by Marlene Dietrich.
When she heard the line “Girls have picked them every one, when will they ever learn?”
she had tears in her eyes and I hugged her and cried too, I don’t know if from sadness
or happiness.

38
LIZ GLODEK

Elevator Escape

I still remember his face,

the hair that hung limp
in long, greasy curls,
framing grey eyes, blistered
by drugs, glistening from a place
even he wasn’t aware of.
Skin, dry and ashy, dead skin
so thick, it made his cheeks
look like a chalkboard that needed
washing. Lips curled into a smile
as he reached down to his zipper,
a smile that missed his eyes, already
someplace else. Please don’t, sir. A whisper,
repeated over and over again
in the elevator of a building I did not know yet
in a city I had just moved to.

Quietly I stood there, my voice the only

noise till the elevator stopped, his hand
still on his zipper, his eyes, unfocused,
staring at mine. Both of us pleading.

39
JEFF BAGATO
By the Wind, By the Sea, By the Storm

The waves that drive all

kin away, and later
the sand
that fills the rooms
shall keep them pure
beyond time

Stone beds, stone dressers, stone

seats, stone commodes,
and a hearth of rock
where burning kelp adds warmth
to a house sunk in earth,
sheltering

When all you have is stone,

your living becomes stone
bordered by sea and wind
as if forever
could be reached
from here

Stars of squill and thrift

color the mainland plain
to the witness ring;
rune bound lintels and spiral
bound orbs tie
our meaning
to the land,

while our bones and hearts

lie elsewhere
less wet, less cold,
less smothered down
by storm

40
Coming Home to Lemuria

Salt sea might be a desert

for all the drink
it affords
a boatman

Food could bite

back, or sting, or snare;
should a man fall
from his phantom island, he goes
to his doom—airless
dark like a dream gone
foul

No signs, no markers
can be set here upon
the ocean, this beast
that eats greater
things with a storm

Terra firma, it appears,

raises peaks
like fingers gesturing from the waves;
trees and birds dance
on its horizon—

though this proves a trick

of sunlight
and sea, the slander
of an ancient god-king
against the likes
of man

41
SACHA ARCHER

from Horse’s Mouth: Letter’s without Bodies

Letter #36

I am a little bit, and then I am a little more. Like an amazing job, editing, but it is warm
and sunny. Days, and then I am not. I am a new one from the future. The Nature of the
work of mine—who is in tip top shape? If you are, you still want to get the train? At
around noon on Saturday (but it is dangerous) it is very good luck—and keep in mind
that I am not really sure what you think you can come up with. You have to be in the
background of the work. If you have to go back and forth between the two, have a
coffee, or something like that—I don't think I'm gonna try to make the most of what
you want.

42
Letter #39

If so, I am writing. If so, I am not able to do the same to the same to the same. If so I am
nothing. I will be able to do this, for the delay in responding to the mail and the
package is the only thing that is not the same. The work that is not the same to me, as
soon as I am writing this letter, is to the same to the same to the same.

43
MARK YOUNG

the distinction is minimal

There is a snake in my toilet.

It is singing La Mer in the
manner of Charles Trenet. Starts
to hyperventilate when
asked to list the three major
components of a CPU. Con-
trols its breathing finally. Says:
"The hermeneutical view would

involve taking a careful look

at each word to determine its
original meaning, especially
those that might be considered
keywords." Pauses, then advises
the public not to start panicking.

44
damp trumpets

Today the
postman brought
me a military
parade down
Pennsylvania
Avenue. I was
so disappointed.
Where are the
submarines? I
shouted out. You
promised you'd
drain the swamp
so I'd be able
to see the submarines
that were lying
on the bottom.

45
The theme is mirrors

Why are there grace notes pollinating my world?

Were red. Now orange. The color changed through chemical impurities. & are pure.

A dragonfly is dying on the path. Segmented tail, longer than the glossy green-
backed body. Faint hum of fluttering wings. Frantic upward spin. Then imitates a
falling helicopter. Classic Hollywood. Upward again. Down. Spin. Silent. Hum. Up.
Down. Rotor wings. Silence.

Where did error begin?

Your email address will not be published.

46
the effects on dendritic spines

The existence of classes of

voltage-gated calcium channels,
even in the continued presence
of such incompatible mindsets
as exist between France's manure
policies & those of the northern
European countries, is evidence
that the Neanderthals hunted

big game. Chemical analysis of

their fossils shows that they ate
significant amounts of red meat,
generating enough nitrous oxide
in the process to cause the few
woolly mammoths that remained
to laugh their tusks off as they
lumbered towards extinction.

47
FIG. 1 – Dorian Gray’s Portrait Frame

48