The National Guard is on patrol
in combat boots and GI Joe camouflage,
M16’s slung down to their hips,
young as boys on Halloween,
ready for anything, and I want
to hand every one of them a bag of candy.
Playa d’Oro
The canopy above ajerk with toucans
ajerk with toucan, and no,
you can’t eat them,
so sorry.
“Debris, left.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I answered, clicking my turret around. The truck swung wide right. On the side of the road, the debris was nothing more than a pile of rocks and broken up concrete. Two years earlier, two hundred miles away, that might have warranted a bit of anxiety. The headphones pressed to my ears were silent as the convoy waited for an answer. I flipped the switch down to announce my verdict. “Clear, left.”
Jen Acker–along with Jay Baron Nicorvo and Don Lee–will take part in this panel discussion at the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP) Literary Publishers Conference at Association of Writers and Poets, Lake Michigan, Hilton Chicago, 8th Floor. The Common will also exhibit our wares at AWP’s Bookfair, Space M22.
Dispatches will be taking a two-week holiday break and will resume publishing on Wednesday, January 11th. Until then, please enjoy this seasonal dispatch about a Christmas vacation gone wrong…
I always say that I fell in love with my husband at Kinko’s. Charged with printing blown up photographs for the annual fundraiser for the afterschool program where we both worked, I arrived to pick them up only to find the pictures grainy and only half of the job completed. While I panicked that I’d be fired and was ready to scream at the woman at the counter, Terence calmly, but firmly explained what needed to be done and the urgency with which it had to be completed. We’d been dating for less than two months, but in that moment I thought, this is the person I need by my side. Three years later, we were engaged. For our Christmas affianced, we booked a trip overseas, eager to show our independence, and maybe even create a new tradition apart from our families. On December 22, 2009, we arrived to New Delhi, India. Our plan was to spend a few days there, and then on Christmas Eve we would take a train to Agra so that we could see the Taj Mahal on Christmas Day. From there, we’d travel through Rajasthan and eventually fly to Mumbai.
Every time I eat a watermelon I remember that day. It was the dry season, when the rust-red floodwaters of Quebrada Fierro or “Iron Creek” subside to a lazy trickle, exposing wide, meandering beaches near its mouth on the upper Manu River in southern Peru. I was with a group of Matsigenka men and boys, we had spent the past few hours under a feverish noon sun portaging boat, motor, and gear to circumvent a stubborn Dipteryx trunk, impervious as tempered glass, that blocked dry season passage along the creek. It was the summer of 1995 and I was taking Hiram, a dear Matsigenka friend who called me “brother”, to meet up with a film crew camped out at the research station of Cocha Cashu down river. I was helping Hiram’s community negotiate for an upcoming shoot. Cheronto, who came from a rival community nearer the station, was the best boat pilot in the region. He was taking us down the river to close the negotiations.
Issue 02 contributor Phillip Lopate and nine grads of Bennington College’s MFA program in Creative Writing (including Dispatches contributor Julia Lichtblau and editor Jennifer Acker) will read at Brooklyn’s Invisible Dog Art Center, an exhibition/performance space in Cobble Hill, on Tuesday, January 17, 2012, 7:30-9:30 pm. Wine and book sales will follow. The event is one of an evolving roadshow of readings by established and emerging writers from the Bennington program.
“Commons” at Bennington College
An event at Newton Free Library, in Newton Center, MA, at Houghton Garden, the subject of contributions to Issue 02 from Daniel Jackson and Sarah Luria.
I’d leave as early as I could and head north, straight up US 51 for three hours. Just a few years before, I was living in the same small Illinois town that my great-great-great grandfather, Hezekiah Gill, had come to from Tennessee, just before the outbreak of the Civil War. Then he turned around and fought for the Union, surviving the battles through Kentucky, Mississippi, his own native Tennessee, and on to Atlanta. But he returned back to Illinois, and it was there in that tiny village that my family stayed for the next 130 years.
Morning
Outside, autumn turns over
as the beat of a bodhran
Winter’s coming, winter’s coming, winter’s coming
Morning builds. Like a reel,
the first heat arrives, and with it,
leaves fall, dead bees, a cortege.
The slowstep into church is accompanied
by an organist and weeping in the pews.
Later, a feast, a céilidh. Far off, bells toll.
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