The Battered Suitcase November 2008

  naked fare

  the moon it shines for my

  eyes, and I see crystal clear,

  a white canvas for my arms

  to embrace

  when the sun shines I'm blinded,

  my shell of turquoise that holds

  true in my eyes of grey

  the flowers in my garden, I

  grew from seed, I had to

  soak them in water for twenty

  fours hours

  to soften the hard incarcerating nut

  now a light, green stem escapes

  and grows from a crack that

  burst when the water took, while

  I slept

  summer will be colourful and I'll

  sleep while the those buds ripen

  to hues I've not seen in

  some time

  those sullen hands that hold my

  soul rigid and fingers deep around

  my heart, the dark sea I

  traveled through, still the water didn't

  bleed that nut for me

  Jane's work is an exploration of her inner consciousness, creating her work is spiritual / emotional catharsis for her. She likes music, reading and vegan carrot cake. Jane's poetry has or will appear in the Divine Revolution, The Luciole Press, and The Wilderness House Literary Review. She is the author of "Love, its Wrath and Others", a collection of poetry and artwork. www.janechakravarthy.com

  Boy in a Red Sweater

  Aurora Lewis

  He tossed around a Baby Ruth, his eyes wide like an electric shock, scratching as if bugs burrowed beneath his skin. Ripping the paper from Ruth, he crammed her into his mouth, chocolate saliva running down his chin while he danced in place like a kid needing to pee. His eyes brushed me aside as he ran up Western Avenue into an alley paved with black tar and angel's dust, where lost souls were known to score.

  When I saw him again he was sitting on a crate on the side of the liquor store. He rose from his perch, his feet not touching ground, smiling to himself until he saw me, then tried to straighten up, picking imaginary lint from his red sweater, his eye lids half closed, his words rolling like marbles on a slanted floor. Something about how pretty I looked as I rushed by.

  Next time I saw him, he was in a navy blue suit, his mother sat across from him, the veil of her black church hat hiding her eyes. The sisters on the Usher Board patted her on the back whispering words of God's Will and promises of a lemon pie made with condensed milk that she like so well -- neither eased her pain.

  One by one we passed -- me afraid to look at him should he wake up and reach out to me, but his hands were laid neatly across his chest, his eyes closed. Although I think he smiled as I walked by.

  Aurora is a woman in her late 50's who as a child, dreamt of becoming a writer. She wrote poems and short stories, keeping them to herself. At 22 she stopped writing for the next 35 years. In 2005 she survived an erupted brain aneurism. This incident brought home to her that life was indeed short and that she should pursue her dream of writing. She started writing poems and was encouraged by friends to enroll in the UCLA Writer's Program. She is currently enrolled in her 11th on-line class with the anticipation of receiving her certificate in mid 2009.

  One More Chance

  Paritosh Uttam

  It took Lata a few moments to realize the man was addressing her, and another few to understand that he was begging. He was dressed respectably enough, shirt and trousers intact, as respectable a man she could expect in a suburban train in Bombay.

  “Just hundred rupees, Ma’am. That’s all I need to get back to Goa.”

  Lata tried to relax. Her one hand, she found, was clutching her purse and the other was at her throat, feeling for her necklace that she no longer wore. Why had the man singled her out in that jostling crowd?

  “That’s my home. Goa.”

  That was something she had to learn quickly, to stay on guard. Now that it had befallen her to be a part of this city of a teeming nineteen millions, where people scurried like ants, living fifty thousand to a square mile and fighting for every breath, there was no other option. On guard in the streets against ruffians, in bazaars against unscrupulous shopkeepers, even at home against the suspicious knock on the door, in the train against lecherous men bumping against women deliberately. But this man talking to her didn’t appear to be a threat.

  “This city, I tell you, Ma’am, is full of thieves. Yesterday my purse had five thousand rupees; today I don’t have a purse. I just want to go home, away from here, away from lies and dishonesty.”

  Wouldn’t she? The only one who seemed surprised by this man’s speech was herself. The woman beside her, who had grudgingly vacated six inches of wooden seat for her, gazed vacantly out of the window at the speeding landscape. The rest either hid their eyes in their newspapers, or were simply busy standing up in the swaying train. At least this kind of begging was a welcome change from the usual amputee thrusting his sawn off limb under your nose. And his English surely better than that of certain people in her office.

  “You think I am lying, don’t you?” He was devoid of anger, his voice touched with resignation. “I am a respectable man in my town. Do you think it is easy for me to beg in public? I appeal to you Madam,” here his voice softened suddenly, “because you looked like you could give someone a chance. You wouldn’t be cynical like everybody else.”

  So that made it the second appeal to her trusting nature in less than two days. Lata felt the edges of Vinod’s letter inside her purse. She didn’t need to take it out, having read it four times since it had arrived the previous day. Why was only she expected to get over her distrust?

  “I know I don’t deserve your forgiveness Lata. I didn’t value your love when I had it. But the shameless wretch that I am, I am back and expect your forgiveness and love once more, but this time with the promise of never leaving your side.”

  He obviously did not remember that as one of their marriage vows that he had already broken.

  “Look Ma’am, give me your address and I will send the money back to you as soon as I get home. I give you my word.”

  Now that the novelty of his fluent English was wearing off, his persistence was beginning to irritate. Lata felt flustered with the attention it was starting to get her. Despite their newspapers and vacant stares, everybody’s ears were open. She fished inside her purse and got out a note.

  “That’s only fifty rupees, Ma’am.”

  “I can’t spare more.”

  “But it won’t be enough, Ma’am. You either trust someone or not; you can’t half-trust. I will send the money back. I swear.”

  The longer she entertained him, the more embarrassing it was turning out. Now they had dropped their pretenses and were looking on with unabashed curiosity. Lata handed over another note.

  “Thank you so much. Your address?”

  Lata began mumbling her address before realizing it was not a very intelligent thing to do in public. “Forget it.”

  “God will reward you for your kindness and trust,” the man said, edging away from her, and losing himself in the crowd quickly.

  The woman next to Lata spoke up. “You shouldn’t have given him the money. It’s their daily business.”

  Lata shrugged, forcing a casualness into her voice to mask her anger. “Who knows? Maybe he was speaking the truth.” Why had she kept mum while the man was importuning her? “Everybody deserves a chance,” Lata said. “We need to trust people sometimes.”

  “Not in Bombay,” the woman said, barely able to keep the laughter out of her face.

  “If only I had that much money to throw around,” someone sighed behind the cover of a newspaper.

  Lata ignored them for the remainder of the journey. She was glad when it was her stop, and at office, she couldn’t wait for the day to end. In the lunch break, she re-read Vinod’s letter in a quiet moment.

  Back home, after supper, Lata sat down
to compose her reply. Two hours on, she found she had filled six pages detailing the anguish and rumble-tumble of emotions she had gone through after his abandoning her for another woman. The shock, the hurt, the insecurity, the humiliation, the practical business of having to earn her keep, but most of all, the loneliness.

  Reviewing her own letter, Lata was seized by doubt. Maybe she was opening herself up too much, too quickly, to the same man who had betrayed her trust. She had to be more pragmatic this time around. She settled for a couple of lines, agreeing to meet him and talk things over. That would make him think she wasn’t falling over herself getting back with him, though she was not sure she could maintain her poise when they met. Her heart thumped at the thought of meeting him again after so many months. She couldn’t half-trust. She kept both the letters — the sentimental 6-page one and the practical half-page one — in her purse, unable to decide which one to mail.

  The letter-writing kept Lata awake late into the night, and consequently, she woke up an hour later than usual and pushed her next day’s schedule by an hour. But it was not too much of a worry: her secretarial job in a government department was a sort of sinecure. Her arriving to work one day at eleven instead of ten wouldn’t cause the skies to fall.

  Lata felt she was beginning to get used to Bombay and its nuances: she felt the crowd in the 10.42 Fast different from the one in the 9.38 Fast. Given time, one probably could get used to anything — to loneliness, to crowds, to the jostling for every square inch of space, to squalor, to fancy skyscrapers standing tall amid clusters of slums.

  “Just a hundred rupees, Ma’am. That’s all I need to get back to Goa.”

  The man obviously did not recognize her. Perhaps it was hard to remember when you said the same thing to a gullible face in the crowd over and over, hundreds of times. Lata felt her eyes smart with tears.

  She opened her purse. The man faltered in his tale, disbelieving his easy success. Lata took out the letters, tore them, and let the wind snatch the pieces from her hand outside the train window.

  Paritosh Uttam is 31 and leads a Dr Jekyll-and-Mr Hyde existence in Pune, India. During the day he is a software engineer and turns into a writer at late night or early morning. Many of his short stories have been published in magazines, newspapers and webzines. More on his writing at: www.paritoshuttam.com.

  Jakez Daniel

  Jakez Daniel is 37 years old, French, and lives in Finland with his wife and kids. He's been studying photography by himself from film camera to digital (and back to film again this year) for about thirteen years. He is not a professional; photography is simply a passion that he hopes to keep learning. The Digital Age has given him the possibility of making pictures from the shot until the print. Finnish nature, elements and seasons are a big source of inspiration and he would like his work to represent a loverOs vision of the world we live in. https://jakezdaniel.deviantart.com/

  The Sky Sleeps in the Water

  To Feel

  To Feel the Wind

  Upon Us a Little Rain

  Where is My Mind

  Lullaby

  Cynthia Miller

  “...There they are, your wildest dreams, of great balloons and lions’ screams…”

  She likes to think it starts with the dreams.

  A toe in the flattened grass; the swipe of humidity on the inside of her wrists; the exhilarating arabesque of cogs and wheels ticking when they shouldn’t be; beats of a million and one tabla drums thrumming in time to the generator hums.

  Sometimes, she wakes up, and it’s raining softly against her matted black hair. She feels white cotton under her cheek (white because she doesn’t dare to dream of hospitals in color) but when she turns around — really presses her nose and crosses her eyes — the stinking, coarse pavement rises up to meet her. She utters a soft cry, slowly rolls onto her back.

  The spot behind townhouse number 43, hidden behind a garden gate and a ceramic bathtub, is hidden but she feels like others can see her. She looks left, a brick wall; right, a brick wall, down, the uneven pavement; up, black wrought iron trellises that seem to arch up forever into the sky. She’s not even certain it’s the sky, because sky is the meaningless word meant to be crushed into plastic bottles and forgotten about. Strict relevance, she chants methodically; wrings her clammy hands, looks over her shoulder. But then again, when have words ever stopped listening?

  Then there are days when images flash behind her eyes, a slide projector stuttering in the enormous, darkened room. Images racing, loping past each other into a frenzy of jerky movements — and suddenly the projector stills on the image of a puppet dancing, a forced smile painted on his contorted face. On days that it’s too cold to force warm breath onto her hands, she dreams she’s the puppeteer.

  And then, there are images she’s never seen before: expansive blue water, unknown creatures or an insect landing on an outstretched palm that isn’t cracked and calloused. All these thoughts, she knows, are not her own and struggles to find their proper place, fit them in where they ought to be but she can’t — they’re too real and too coarse to slot into her mind. She hums without knowing why, hurriedly rolling up her dreams with numb unmoving fingers and pushing them into the cracks in the bricks. The bricks she scratched at long ago, eroded with the rain and her strange desperation to keep those unknown, coarse memories safe, now form loose rubble around her ankles. And it’s at this point, where her temples throb like acid corrosion on garden gates, she tastes the word lunacy on her tongue. It tastes like unresolved sadness. She spits it out onto the wall and wipes it off on the back of her hand.

  Then, there are the days when she knows the sun is shining. In the relative unknown of Possibility, the sun floods the back alleyway, sweeping with one grand motion into the corners and holes of the craggy walls. It twists and heaves as only sunlight with naïve confidence can. She covers her eyes with her small hands; frightened pants forced between her fingers. I don’t want it to find me, she whispers and draws her hands tighter against her face. Above her, streetlamps flicker on and off sporadically, as if their yellow bulbs were contesting the brazen sunlight. They shattered eventually with fury, each bulb in each streetlamp in the alleyway a thousand houses long exploding, throwing themselves through the air. Bits of glass and particles of burnt coils rained down around her.

  She looked up, further and beyond the streetlamps and the black sky trellises, and noticed thousands of tiny shards of light raining down from that nameless expanse, a thousand tiny raindrops of glass falling down into her hair, her arms, her eyebrows. She felt, rather than saw, an image flickering onto the screen behind her eyes: a small, hazy girl sitting on a swing, pulled by the wind. Two bright coal eyes swam shut. Strands of slick black hair. It could have been raining — she heard the rain of the memory patter in her ears — the girl stuck out her tongue, tasting rain. She opened her eyes, the image fading, and pushed her tongue from her dry mouth, tasting glass raindrops and smoke. Smoke in pipes and tunnels; the image came to be re-played again on a sickening loop with startling clarity.

  Something unbidden and full rose from the depths of her chest, swirling as it came up her throat, and she — laughed. A harsh bark from sore vocal chords threw itself into the deserted alley. She reaches her cracked hand out, shaking uncontrollably, as if meeting an old friend for the first and last time. But no one else is in the alley, so she pulls the hand back and clenches it around her chest, right above where her heart is pulsing slowly like a giant red balloon. Her coal black eyes swim shut and she parts her mouth, tasting the day; day breaking into night.

  There is a woman who lives with the rain, behind the dilapidated townhouse — number 43, in the alley a thousand houses long, with a trillion yellow streetlamps as her broken, stoic guards. The one with the memories. And the life that shutters to a stop when the slide projector hums to a close as the generator fades. She reaches, slanted forlornly across pavement, and dreams of lions.

&nbs
p; "Listen; there's a hell of a good universe next door: let's go." - e. e. cummings

  Cynthia Miller has spent half of her life in Asia and the other half gradually accumulating pages of thoughts in the manner of a harried bag lady collecting bits of pens. Having lived in Nepal, India, and China she has seen the sun rise without distinction over mountains and over the gritty veneer of cities running in circles; running with stops and starts and handles of hand-pumps broken. She's currently living in swaths of sari silk, lifting up her skirt with ink-stained fingers to climb into a rickshaw. She's trying to find some humanity between the lines. To the next-door universe, please.

  Sean Patrick Hill

  Down in the Flood

  My father keeps his own small house

  with a phone he rarely touches.

  When I tell him I want to come home

  he says, What do you think you'll find here

  after all these years.

  One summer, out on the mudflats,

  I unearthed a parking meter

  the flood dragged twenty miles.

  No matter how I shook it,

  its face registered nothing

  but a thin red flag -- violation.

  My mother says, Too much like your father.

  I don't know what you expect.

  Let me put it this way:

  I always wondered what else got buried.

  Call Before You Dig

  warns the square squat grey-green electrical box,

  for there are power lines underground.

  The man walking alone beside the road

  can hardly believe it.