Sample Entries
Maria Mazziotti Gillan, “The Little General”
Carol Leavitt Altieri, “Caring for the Land”
Christine Stewart-Nuñez, “The Artist Paints the Sunset”
Rachel Swearingen, from “Boys on a Veranda”
Zeng Chuqiao, from “Chant of Happiness”
Maria Mazziotti Gillan
The Little General
My brother called our mother “the little general”
when we were teenagers, my brother driving
the car, my mother sitting next to him, her head
a small dark knob barely reaching the top of the seat,
my bossy mother who told us how to live our lives,
my mother who was always moving. When I
remember her, I see her almost as a blur,
like the cartoon of the road runner, my mother
who washed all the dishes as soon as the last bite
of food vanished from the plate, my mother who held
my doctor brother’s foot until he fell asleep when he
was still a boy, my mother who sat at the kitchen table
with us, always ready to hear the stories of our lives,
ready to tell the story of hers, my mother who told me
everything that was wrong with me so I still hear her voice
though she said she told me for my own good,
my mother who loved the feel of the earth on her hands,
who smelled of flour and spices, who baked
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thousands of loaves of bread, cooked innumerable
fragrant meals for her children and grandchildren
in her basement kitchen, my mother who taught me
how to laugh, my mother who could not read or write,
and though she wanted to go to school, my father
wouldn’t let her; “Women don’t need to go to school,” he said
Maria Mazziotti Gillan
my mother who did not know how much money my father
had in the bank and never wrote a check,
my mother who wanted to learn how to do
everything, my mother who could quote poems
she memorized in third grade in Italy before
she had to leave school, my mother who drew
an imaginary line around us to keep us close,
the front stoop our boundary, the family our country,
her little sturdy body better than any magic charm,
my mother whose skin turned orange before
she died, though the week before she got sick,
she planted a huge garden. We were sure
she was too powerful to die. Ma, even now,
ten years after the funeral procession led us
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to Calvary Cemetery and to the mausoleum drawer
they filed you in, I wish I could drive over
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to your house and find you there, your earthy humor,
your warm arms that always were the place
I call home.
Carol Leavitt Altieri
Caring for the Land
Savoring fresh earth and hay scent,
I hear father’s wheelbarrow roll over ground.
Overalls frayed, speckled with weed seeds,
he pulls greens, harvests carrots and beets
with notes of song,
all the verses of “Home on the Range.”
I shell peas on porch
watch his legs fold and back bend
when he digs deeply
with trowel in rhythm
through layers of soil, grubs, and worms.
In his hands, he feels vegetables solid
textures. They’ll nestle with apples
we picked
for root cellar in foreseeing winter.
Heaven knows how much he is not aware
of the divine nature of his being.
Back and forth, trudging in and out of barn,
sacrificing his comfort for our welfare.
He hears ravens overhead beat their wings,
lament of mourning doves
reminding of chores and rituals undone,
the intricacies of connections.
To root out carrots and beets, he kneels
thinking about his father who taught
him to strive, a voice out of deep silence,
multiplied.
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Christine Stewart-Nuñez
The Artist Paints the Sunset
“I paint one-hundred landscape paintings a year.
I cull the fifteen best and throw away the rest.”
—Betty L. Beer, artist statement
She faces fire where colors coalesce,
heat an egg-yolk scarf she’ll wear
in the lush moment just before ripeness.
She paints from her body, her breath a caress
spreading indigo into the air.
She faces fire where colors coalesce
and sings boy-blanket blue across
the ceiling of this framed world. She’ll dare,
in the lush moment just before ripeness,
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with red brick lipstick, to press
her mouth into the sun’s arc. She’ll swear
she faces fire where colors coalesce,
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speaking grapefruit light to bless
the clouds, textures blurring joy and despair
in the lush moment just before ripeness.
Full is her fire is her thought is her promise
as her heart unwinds paint from brush until bare.
She faces fire where colors coalesce
in this moment just before ripeness.
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Rachel Swearingen
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open window and threw bread to the pigeons below. Then he went down to
the lobby to wait for his ride to the beach. By the time he reached the sea,
the rain had stopped, though the sky remained muddy and not at all like the
sky on the postcard. He took off his loafers and his socks and waded into
the water near a group of teenagers bodysurfing. A gull circled and dove. He
sat down and let the waves soak his trousers and watched sand and water
pour through his fingers. The last time he waded into the ocean was during a
semester-long residency in London. He had a lover there, an Irish colleague
with perpetually sunburnt skin, and they sometimes spent weekends rollicking at the sea. He eventually came clean to his wife about the affair. It had
taken fifteen years for her to forgive him, and he sometimes wondered if this
was the reason she hadn’t asked him to come along to Venice.
The teenagers were laughing and when he looked over, one was mimicking him by sitting in the waves and crying into his hands, which sounded
especially pathetic in an Italian accent. The psychiatrist stood and walked
out of the water. Just you wait, he thought. Your time will come too. His anger
surprised him, but so did his embarrassment as he pulled himself from the
waves with his pants sticking to his legs. He had lost all sense of propriety,
and a part of him was a little proud for he had always concerned himself too
much with the opinions of others.
When he reached his hotel room, he pulled out what was left of the
wrinkled, waterlogged postcard—a distant bay, a few sailboats, the red of a
boy’s beret. He tore off a piece and was about to place it in his mouth when
he remembered the patient who had to be restrained in her bed to keep her
from eating the bed railings and even her own hands. He hadn’t understood
her until now.
He turned the paper scrap over and read the words, tomorrow Ferrara. He
couldn’t recall his wife or daughter mentioning anything about a town called
Ferrara. That evening on his veranda, he listened to music from a dance club
down the street and toyed with the rope in his hands. He couldn’t find a
sturdy place in the room to hang it from, and he wouldn’t subject the tourists below to such a horrific display. Perhaps the shower bar would hold. He
made a noose and tied the rope to the bar. He moved the chair underneath
and climbed onto it. When he stepped off, he found that he had tied the
rope too long. It hung slack around his neck. He adjusted the length. He
tried again. The bar ripped from its mounting. He catapulted forward and hit
his head on the tile, and imagined the hotelier discovering him collapsed and
unconscious next to the toilet.
Rachel Swearingen
He wiped the blood from his scratched forehead and went to bed.
In the morning, he turned over the bloody pillow and made the bed.
Then he looked up Ferrara in his guidebook. He packed his things. He coiled
the rope and pressed it into the corner of his suitcase, under his socks and
underwear.
At the train station, he stood before the railway map and remembered
how his daughter poured over maps at the dining table when she was a child,
tracing her finger from one town to the next just to hear herself pronounce
foreign cities. He read aloud from the map now and heard her voice: Ferrara.
Malabergo. San Giorgio di Piano.
In the gift shop, he purchased a postcard with a black and white photograph of a flapper waiting for a train with a schnauzer on her lap, and he sent
it to his renter to deliver to the woman who lived in the apartment directly
across from his in the building next door. Tell her I will send others, he wrote.
Tell her I’m sorry this one has so little color and nothing good to eat.
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Zeng Chuqiao / Jian-Zhong Lin
terer, however, suddenly realized that they should call the police but none of
the plasterers owned a cellphone, so the monk offered his to call the police
for Lin Daiyu. Yet, to everyone’s surprise, Lin Daiyu coldly stated: “No need
to call,” which worried the plasterers so much that they avoided looking at
her, but Lin Daiyu did not seem to have been traumatized. After putting on
all her clothes, she invited the plasterers at the Mahjong table: “Let’s continue.” The plasterers exchanged a few glances and quietly complied with her
request. Finding no more drama to watch, the monk checked the time on
the cellphone, noted that daybreak was still hours away and felt obligated
to continue with the religious ceremony. The woman on the straw mat took
another look at her husband’s photo on the altar. He was still beaming with
smiles of happiness.
After midnight, the contractor returned alone but brought snacks for
everyone. The Mahjong game suspended, the monk’s suona put aside, all
came around for the snacks. Even the woman returned to her straw mat with
a lunchbox of snacks. The contractor, who had already eaten, sat aside picking his teeth when someone asked him in a whisper: “Is that one alright?”
The contractor replied with a sigh: “One eye is blind.” On that information,
everyone remained so quiet that only the sound of eating was audible in the
tranquil shrine. And no one ventured to tell the contractor what happened
during his absence. Once snacks were consumed, Lin Daiyu rose to leave
but the contractor stopped her. He fetched a checkbook from his pocket,
wrote a check for Lin Daiyu, and said to her: “You’d better go hiding in your
hometown to avoid further trouble.” Lin Daiyu’s tears overflowed when she
read the check amount, still she managed to comment with a quick smile at
the contractor: “Is this the tip for three years of my life?” The contractor was
somewhat embarrassed: “I know this is not enough and I don’t want it to be
so, but the hospital is waiting for me to pay for the surgery.”
With Lin Daiyu gone, the monk resumed his religious ceremony. The
woman remained quietly behind the monk, listening to the monk chanting
and to the men chatting, occasionally giving out one yawning or two. By this
time, the men had lost interest in Mahjong, so the three plasterers started to
sum up winnings and losses. Two of them had won over 400 yuan while the
third came out even. The third plasterer ruminated: “That woman was quite a
player. She won more than 500 yuan from us in a short while.” The contractor retorted: “What you win is my money after all!” The third plasterer then
asked how much the contractor had lost in the end, but the contractor gave
no direct answer except that “Any way you look, my loss is heavy.”
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Zeng Chuqiao / Jian-Zhong Lin
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“More women, more trouble. It is probably better the way it is because
there will be no more fighting in the days to come.”
“It was really hard on that woman. But she endured it without a sound.
She is tough.”
“That is what I call quality. What do you know, my brother?”
“Brother Laishun is the best. He patronized neither mistresses nor gambling tables but devoted himself to working and making money.”
“He has earned money. But he is not here anymore, so what is the use of
money to him?”
“How could money be useless? How much have you earned in all these
years? Look at Sister-in-law Laishun. At least, she is now a woman with a
small fortune.”
“In that case, why don’t you jump off the scaffolds? I guarantee that you
would earn some compensation.”
“Don’t challenge me. There may be a day when you would arrange for a
religious ceremony like this for me. Damn it! Sometimes I wish I were dead.
With death, I would no longer need to worry.”
“I am afraid it is not that easy to die.”
The woman heard someone around the Mahjong table heave a long
sigh, so she also sighed. It was deep into the night at this time. The contractor displayed one yawn after another while the three plasterers demonstrated
an ever weaker interest in the trite subjects of money and women. When the
contractor could no longer stay awake, he said to the three plasterers: “Please
keep Cuizhen’s company. I have to go to bed as I will need to be at the hospital tomorrow.” Having made the arrangement, the contractor left without
bidding the woman good night. The three plasterers persisted for an additional hour before departing one after another, leaving the shrine to the woman
and the monk. The monk, also, could hardly stay awake at this point, having
performed a religious ceremony before the present one and having nothing
new to chant. The woman did not understand religious chants but, even if
the monk were chanting in the most incomprehensible foreign language, she
could tell by now that he was flipping two sentences over and over again.
“Are you reciting the wrong chant?” The woman asked.
As if stung by a needle, the monk was startled into clearer senses. Looking at the woman behind him, he answered: “How can I recite the wrong
chant? But each sentence needs to be repeated at least thirty times.” The
woman felt it odd for a monk to talk like that. However, she did not know
what to say—after all, he was the monk, not she. Thus, the monk continued
Zeng Chuqiao / Jian-Zhong Lin
chanting for a while but suddenly stopped. The woman waited and waited,
yet the monk made no move, which gave her the perception that the ceremony was completed. However, when she checked her watch, she knew that
the daybreak was still far away.
“Do you want your husband to live a happier life over there?” the monk
asked abruptly, without turning his head.
“If not, why would I have asked you to come?” the woman replied.
“In that case, you need to order Chant of Happiness,” the monk said.
The woman had never heard about Chant of Happiness in her hometown, but as the monk insinuated, it seemed like a local custom. Because
her husband had died away from his hometown, she felt that it would be
sensible to follow the local custom in the religious ceremony.
“Then, please do so,” the woman said.
“It will cost you extra,” the monk said.
“Haven’t I already paid you the full amount? Why are you charging
extra?” The woman was somewhat puzzled.
“Chant of Happiness is never part of the routine in religious ceremony.
Other monks do not know the chant because I own its intellectual property
rights. Intellectual property rights are hot these days, so I have adapted to the
trend in my trade. Of course, you are the one who decides whether the chant
should be recited or not.” Suddenly the monk turned around, gazing at the
woman, and said: “Once a man is dead, whether he lives happily or not in
the netherworld doesn’t really impact the living too much.”
The woman hesitated for a while before she inquired: “How much do
you charge for Chant of Happiness?” The monk broke into smiles: “Two
options are available. The first is to recite 50 times while the second is 100
times. The 50-time recitation is somewhat cheaper, at 150 yuan. The 100-timer is slightly more expensive, at 200 yuan. You have the freedom of choice.
Of course, the effects of both options are virtually identical.”
“Let’s recite 100 times. I will get the money,” the woman gave her word,
then walked out of the shrine as she did not have that much money with her
and needed to go to her dormitory for it. When she returned from the dormitory with money, the woman had put on new clothes, changed her shoes,
and even given her hair some sort of oil treatment—her hair looking shiny
and neatly combed. The monk sensed something unusual about the woman
but did not give it a second thought. He started reciting his patented Chant
of Happiness once the payment was in his hands. In reality, the monk had
no Chant of Happiness to recite; he simply repeated the song “I Want Hap-
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Zeng Chuqiao / Jian-Zhong Lin
piness” again and again in the dialect of Romantic Valley. From the beginning, he had identified the woman as a simpleton freshly from a village who
would not be able to understand a thing even if cursed in Romantic Valley’s
local dialect. As if to verify the monk’s intelligence, the woman grew more
and more confused as the chanting went on. Before “I Want Happiness” was
sung the tenth time, she had fallen asleep on the straw mat.
The woman had not expected herself to wake up again, having swallowed three days’ dosage of sleeping pills. She thought that she should have
already been with her husband in the other world, but hunger reminded her
that she was still alive and well. The altar in the shrine had been removed,
the monk was gone, and someone had covered her with a comforter. The
woman lifted the comforter to stretch herself, feeling good after an uninterrupted sleep. Upon her awakening, a co-worker brought her a spicy and
steaming bowl of plain noodles which she ate on the straw mat and which
helped her regain her consciousness. Once conscious, the first notion to
emerge from her mind was to go home right away—she was unwilling to meander in the city for a moment longer. As she was packing up, she found that
her husband in the photo had surprisingly grown a long, long beard.
.
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—Translated from Chinese by Jian-Zhong Lin