A large tortoise meanders with a philosopher’s jaunt
as we and other vehicular traffic choose a path
that does not intrude on his scholarly dissertations.

On the tarmac that intersects academia
and commerce the chanced glimpse
of a bushy tail betrays the pilgrimage of a red fox.

In a moment he is gone, in fact his quick
flight is nearly missed by my two daughters.
For this day we are all fellow passengers
on the highway that unfolds before us.

Here too, are geese, unwelcome guests
who will not leave, with them, their offspring
no longer chicks, but rowdy adolescents
who swagger before stalled impatient drivers.

Further down the street a rambunctious rabbit
forgoes verdant sheltered paths to cross
the byway that dissects a neighborhood.

Later, in solitude on a pathway less frequented
by commuters, I chance upon a red tail hawk
and wonder at the width of its wing span.

Now, I wonder what else lies hidden?
What waits beyond the turn?
Or the rise in the hill?
Or just beyond my neighbor's fence?

More than expected sightings of possum
and raccoon, of this I am sure, for nature seems
to have evolved a pertinacious pedestrian walk
and claims the macadam as her own.

Teresa Ann Lowenstein

I was raised in suburbia
without stigmata.
Jews and Christians roamed
a land once inhabited
by cucumbers, wheat and potatoes.

The wheat became white bread
as did the schools and playgrounds
but soon the fields were no more.

We played soldier killing krauts & nips.
We played cowboys and Indians.
I always wanted to be the Indian
Native American Jew.

We learned to kiss at parties
playing games of post office &
spin the bottle.

Not once did we play
CIVIL RIGHTS LEADER OR
FRIEND.

Our mothers taught
us to get along
with each other
and not be harbingers
of secret hates.

Except the boy down
the street
had parents who hated
Jews
&
Negroes.

There were no Negroes
in the neighborhood
so they centered
their hate on the Jews.

My mother did not understand
ANTI-SEMITISM. She spoke
perfectly pure ghetto before
it was popular.

But that did not stop
the Nazis from being intolerant.
The only museums they had
were dedicated to KRISTALLNACHT
a night of pogrom.

What’s a mother to do?

Today when I think of the Holocaust
I see the bodies piled like timber wood
and the sweetish smoke of burning flesh
the stripping of consciousness
along with gold fillings and JEWelry.

But Mom did not know that the people
down the street hated her because of her blood
and the hate hand-me-downed to their offspring
who wore HH tattooed on his red-haired forehead.
He prevailed that hate through 12 years of school.

Today the president of Iran says the Holocaust
never happened. I challenge him to walk with me
through my childhood and through the streets of
Terazin. Perhaps he can come with me to Auschwitz.

I will make sure he takes out his nose filters &
earplugs, removes his blindfold.

Larry Jaffe

She won’t want to write about food tonight.
Won’t want to describe the texture of pork
when cooked as a loin, or pounded, or jerked
(whatever could become of  a pig). White
space is not a China plate when words rate
like low-end wine. Won’t want to describe Brussels
sprouts like unopened rose buds – no muscles
in that metaphor – and really can’t wait
for inspiration like an unfilled water glass.
The bed and the man in it are downstairs.
She’s eaten well, and drunk even better;
by all rights, she should have succumbed to bliss.
Give her time to digest tonight’s fare,
wait for the repeat of each spiced letter.

Jen Karetnick

Blind Mice
I submit to you
There is nothing
Remotely close
To sauntering through
A thunderstorm
Smiling when lightning
Scares the shit out of mice
That took the cat’s sabbatical
For granted
When the Sleepytime teas shake
On the porcelain saucers
At the chef’s table
From thunder’s dominance
Funny how he gets in
Without ever being invited
Lovely
How darkness shines
Giving shades of gray their fame
Though no one ever wants to notice
Black umbrellas POOF open
God forbid we shower
Before we get home, no conditioner, no comb
They bob and weave like ants
On apathy’s path
Hoping the tears of angels
Don’t stain the silk
Prada doesn’t hold up very well
In puddles
Love descends on me
Collides with my flesh
Washes my wounds
I welcome the kisses
While wondering
What kind of a world
Lives for the fire next time
And runs from the rain?

In The Fray Contributor

Desire means

It’s easier to hide straight in a binary
system of man over, on top of, woman.
When you try otherwise, homophobes
predictably stop emailing, while others
think it’s adorable — a phase — and are thus
entertained by a skirt-watching little pet.

You’ve been lessoned in the temporary
status where you reside, even as some
try leading you in coat tails and a lace
brassiere as if you should finally arrive
anywhere, when it’s the outsider/within
status — the only truth you could embody
despite the colonization of desire urging
you to choose forever one longing.

So you drag king here in bowler caps
and suspenders, and over there it’s heels
and his hand on your thigh. You are an
I strategically and then move on again
speaking a language unrecognizable.

Of importance

I am this space / the body believes in
“Unnatural State of the Unicorn,”
— Yusef Komunyaka

Before wedding vows and consummation,
hyphens, my erasure on family envelopes,
I’m a queer. Before the double mortgage,
the tearing down of paneling, the adopting
of three cats, four fish, a mutt, I’m a queer.
Before the wedding party, the honeymoon,
the move to another city, I’m still a queer
because there’s this safe consumption of
l-word, les. pulp, stone butch blues miles
from imagined community. Did I mention
his parents read straight into everything?
And thus read nothing but vanilla. Before
him there was her. There always is a her.
That for a moment of cold feet. Blah, blah …
I considered never touching women again
and never another man and thought, “Fuck it.”
Marriage is for losers, conservatives, freaks
who’d like insurance, the power of attorney,
the right to ease someone into death by love.
Before all that, I’m a queer marching today
a slogan on me, him, the mutt and I don’t
have to tell you what it says because despite
what you’re thinking, you already know.

Daphne Rhea is a pseudonym.

In The Fray Contributor

I am up in my tree. The sky is spotted with stars — JD used to say stars are vanilla freckles on the darkest chocolate face. I look into that face for a sign of a smile. A night breeze moves the leaves.

The leaves in my tree are green-gold, but you can’t tell at night. Not unless you scrunch down so the streetlights shine through — the streetlights in front of our house — Mama’s and my house.

Mama says it’s not right for a girl like me to be out climbing trees — ‘specially at night, and me only nine years old. I can just see her standing there in her nylons on the scratchy grass in our perfect, tiny yard. Her hands would be on her hips, each one holding one of her grown-up-lady shoes from work. Her big sweet face looks up at me. It wrinkles itself into a get-outta-that-tree-right-now-Young-Miss look. Even though my name’s Antoinette, that’s what Mama calls me, “Young Miss.”

I would climb down and say “Sorry Ma’am.” Mama’s big on Ma’ams — it’s just the way she is.

Mama puts a big soft arm around me, and we head for the house. Can’t you just hear her say, “ooh, ouch,” in a squeaky voice as we walk over the scratchy grass? We would laugh and go inside and order next door for Chinese.

Here I am stuck on the top bunk. The ceiling is too close — all those little bumpy pointy things. They feel like dirty chalk. If Deandra hadn’t gone and broke her leg she’d be sleeping up here and I’d get the bottom bunk.

Up in my tree I can see the whole city. It sparkles out there, so far away ‘cause our place — Mama’s and my place — it’s up in the hills. We got a lot of land around us ‘cause that’s the way Mama likes it after a hard day at the office.

She says, “Who wants to be sleepin’ surrounded by a million folks they don’t know, in a million hotels and apartments, and that ratty old downtown shelter, too?”

Downtown’s full of nothing but people and you can’t even see the stars at night. I should know.

We got lots of stars at our place — Mama’s and my place. Every so often at night Mama comes and wakes me up. She stands there by my bed, all tall and spiky. The beads in her braids say click-click.  She takes my hand and says, “Come on out here, Netnet.” She calls me that sometimes.

We walk out in the yard in our lacy nightgowns. “Look at all them stars,” she says, and we just stand there and shiver together, Mama and me, knowing it’s nice and warm inside.

There’s a little river making its water-noises in back of the house, and all the frogs are croaking a nightsong, and there’s even a firefly out by the shed. Mama’s big on nature. That’s just how she is.  

Are Frances and Deandra gonna keep moving around all night? All those plastic crinkle sounds keep me up. I stay still as I can so I don’t make any plastic crinkles, myself. Most rules in this place are okay, but not the plastic sheet rule. Plastic sheets are for babies.

In my tree I look down at my watch. It’s on my left wrist. I told Mama I didn’t need a watch so nice, but she insisted. She said “Little Toni Girl” — that’s what she calls me, you know, it’s short for Antoinette. She said. “Little Toni Girl, anyone pretty as you ought to have a pretty watch.” Then she put that watch on her credit card. I don’t know which one. She’s got ‘em all: Visa. MasterCard, American Express — she’s what you call one of those golden customers.

I think about how I shouldn’t be climbing trees wearing my new watch and nice clothes. How I should climb down and go in the house. I should go to my room I don’t even have to share with anybody, and look through all the clothes in there for some tree-climbing clothes. I think I should, but I don’t. I just sit up here and study those vanilla freckles.

Maybe when I climb down tonight I’ll go inside and read. There’s books in our house — Mama’s and my house — whole big wooden bookcases like at the library, with those little numbers and everything. They’re all filled up with piles and piles of books, and me and Mama read ‘em all the time.

Mama’s so smart she’s always reading. Did I mention she’s got glasses? Mama loves books so much she’s got some of those gold-frame glasses. Mama says keeping her hair so short and wearing those gold glasses make her look dignified. I like that — having a dignified mama.

Sometimes Mama just sits in her big soft chair and reads all night. And so do I — right next to the fireplace — we got us a nice fireplace, you know. That’s where I read all those books, next to Mama’s big chair by the fireplace.

“Yeah?” I say.

Frances is breathing soft and slow over in her bed. The toilet flushes down the hall. Deandra clumps in and leans her crutches against the ladder. She crinkles a lot when she gets in bed, but she’s got that big cast so I try not to get too mad at her.

JD used to say only little monkeys climb trees, but really he just knew he was too big. A man that big could never climb a tree, so he was just grouchy about it. If he hadn’t eaten all those pancakes every morning and bought himself double-triple french fries and left all that trash in the van maybe he would’ve got skinny enough to climb a tree. Then he wouldn’t have to go calling me a monkey.

But who wants to think about old JD? That was two placements ago. I’m up in my tree now, with its creaky noises when the wind blows like tonight. Right now I’m thinking about Mama and me coming out here to the garden where my tree’s lined up with a whole mess of other trees. We got bananas and pumpkins and kiwi fruits growing in our garden, and all that green grass all over the yard, and our pretty little house all warm and cozy.

Did I say how Mama bought this house here in this neighborhood back when I was born? That way I live here all my life and never have to change houses. All the other houses on the street are nice, but not so nice as ours — Mama’s and mine.

There’s a click-click sound and a whoosh when the front door opens. 11 o’clock. They’re changing shifts. I hear Suzanne whispering to whoever, telling all her little secrets about all of us and whatever happened today. Then she’ll go in the office and write a bunch of notes while whoever is getting settled in. Will it be Joanie Rae? I hope. Or maybe Elizabeth, or that substitute lady with the jingly bracelets?

Joanie Rae’s all right.

Nobody else ever climbs up my tree. It’s all mine. Mama had this great idea — she built me a fence around my tree so nobody would come up and bother me. So I don’t have to fight off people like those boys that jump in front of you in line at lunch, or laugh at what you’re wearing. I don’t have to fight off people like Ted at the car wash, or old Mr. Hinkley at Eastside Shelter or Rita’s nasty brother.

Up here in my tree I wonder. I wonder about Joanie Rae. Where does she go when she’s not here? Suzanne talks about where she goes home. She says her man doesn’t treat her good. I wonder about Joanie Rae. I sure hope there’s somebody out there who treats her good.

This morning I am second in the bathroom. The rule is fifteen minutes each, but those older girls fog things up so bad you can’t even read the clock. I like getting done before they’re even up.

I nod my head and say into her chest, “Yes ma’am,” but she just keeps on crying.

In The Fray Contributor

… like streams of water in a waterless country,
like the shadow of a heavy crag in an exhausted land.

—Psalms 32:2

This is a true story about a woman who was a stone: strong as the bones of the earth.

And she was a pebble. Not in that she was insignificant but rather that she was small but she made a difference, just like that small pebble that can start an avalanche. And she was flint. Not in that she was hard but rather that she was able to strike a spark, set fire to hidebound customs and to many hearts and hands.

And she was granite but not in that she was inflexible. But rather, she was the stuff of mountains, soaring-majestic-inspiring-awesome, and she was onyx, jade, verdite, serpentine, and jasper, beautiful indeed.

But at first she was just a stone in Pakistan, used to hurt her brother, a rock thrown at him; gang-raped on the orders of a local justice council to atone for her brother’s “crime.” He was charged with rape by her village jirga to keep him from telling how he had been sodomized – by leading Mastoi men.

She screamed for help while she was dragged in front of hordes of villagers. She begged for mercy. But no one came to her aid. And it was as if she was stoned as well as raped, in that there were stones in the hands of a mob-like tradition, in that the villagers became stones themselves and bruised the skin of compassion largely with multi-colored and livid marks.

Naked and shivering she walked back home, her feet bare, her path lined – with silent spectators.

In that wilderness of patriarchy, rape victims are known to kill themselves in shame. She could marry – a deep dark well of obliterating water – death bride to Lethe-like relief or shed tears all her life – monsoonic misery storms of grief and wild wailing winds of anger.

She refused to be cairned with shame.

She took the council to court and in the ensuing worldwide attention the Pakistani government tried to block her way. Standing stones of travel restrictions were placed in her way, menhirs – her rapists were jailed but then set free – monolithic obstructions – but her feet were made of water. And more than mere standing stones can be worn away with the obstinacy of water.

She is: avalanche starter, mountain breaker, a stone with feet of water.

She fought back with resolute strength. And she won with a noise in the midst of the news of the world that sounded like a mountain’s CRACK to the women, stones upon stones in places around the world.

The government awarded her $8,300 in cash and she took that money – and started the village’s first-ever school. She has dedicated her life to social work, to education, in that, she has built a school and teaches the Koran to young girls and boys – she says “If women aren’t educated, it’s hard for them to speak up for themselves.” She has even enrolled her rapists’ children. And women everywhere, from women who live in deserts of sand, like hers, to women who live in deserts of moral dehydration and societal dessicance, are saying her name – Mukhtaran Mai.

She has shown that we are stones – who dwell among stones – each building upon the other but each defining – by individual actions – what can or cannot be – Mukhtaran Mai.

She has become polished obsidian for other women to see themselves within. And her name has become a stone in the hands of women far and wide and around this world – Mukhtaran Mai. Her name has become a stone in the collective fist of resistance raised against silence and humiliation. And her name has become the rush and the sound of water – running its course to freedom.

Mukhtaran Mai – many women have been silent stones all their lives.

Mukhtaran Mai – you have called these stones to witness and they will speak.

Mukhtaran Mai – they will speak.

Annette Marie Hyder

In the poem “GAY LIT” I wanted to capture a moment in time that changed the way I look at the world. I’ve had several life-altering moments like this over the years — moments after which nothing is ever the same again, and the universe looks different from that point forward.

My mother and I moved to San Francisco from New York City in 1963, right after the Kennedy assassination. Art and music were everywhere, and I knew early on that I wanted a career in the arts. I started out as a writer, but got derailed at age 10 when I started taking children’s parts in plays for the American Conservatory Theater. I also learned to play the guitar, and by the time I graduated high school I had joined the musician’s union and was playing five nights a week in nightclubs that I wasn’t old enough to be in without my cabaret card.

My father died in the Air Force so I was eligible for V.A. benefits. I studied creative writing and music at City College of San Francisco on the G.I. Bill and got an apartment in Chinatown. I picked up some bad habits along the way, and 15 years later, at age 38, I was in the county jail facing three-to-five years imprisonment for possession of heroin. In court they would decide if I could do 18 months of residential substance abuse treatment in lieu of prison time.

I had distinguished myself by getting caught bringing dope into the jail, so I was placed in the so-called “gladiator school” cellblock, with people who were much more dangerous than I was. Except for me, everyone in this corner of the jail was waiting for a bus: the “immigration bus” that took people to Tijuana; “the grey goose” that took people to the state penitentiary; and for some, “the happy bus,” which took people to Atascadero, the California state prison for the mentally ill.

These buses would come in the middle of the night and everyone on the line would wake up. Those who were leaving were taken out of their cells, and for a few transitory minutes they could walk around the dayroom that was in the center of the cellblock. They would walk up to different cells to say their goodbyes, bequeath their candy bars and other jailhouse treasures to their homeboys, and maybe ask a good friend to call their loved ones.  

During my second night on the floor, the grey goose came and I got up at 3 a.m. to watch the ritual. Virtually everybody was standing near one of the cells that lined the dayroom, saying goodbye. But one person was sitting in the dayroom alone. This guy had the typical prison-issue insignias, but instead of “White Pride” down the back of his biceps, he had “Gay Pride.”

I had one of these moments that I was telling you about. I had a crystal-clear revelation that everything that I believed to be true was in fact not true; that reality was only perception, and different for everyone. I changed in that instant into a wiser, but weaker, man. I also felt a deep sadness for this guy going to the joint with “Gay Pride” tattooed on his arms and no one to say goodbye to, no place to call home, and no one to love. Maybe you’ve never done time, but I’m sure that you know enough to understand why I considered this tattoo to be an incredible act of courage. Still, I saw in that moment that this man was as frightened and vulnerable as a baby.

I considered calling him over to my cell and asking him if there was someone that I could call for him. And I’d like to tell you that I’m that kind of hero, but I was scared, man …

I have always regretted not talking him that night — maybe that’s why I wrote the poem.

I got out of my prison sentence and went to the drug program. While I was in there I started writing again — success stories for the agency newsletter. The people running the place asked me if I thought I could write a grant proposal; I said I thought I could.

For the last nine years, I’ve worked in some of San Francisco’s largest human service organizations as a grant writer. In the last place, all the people that worked with me had master’s degrees and I started getting an inferiority complex. Then my mother went back to school (at age 73) and got a master’s in gerontology and the carnage was complete — I enrolled in San Francisco State’s creative writing program. By the time you read this in December, I will have graduated.

I wrote “GAY LIT” for a workshop. Our class went out and sat on the grass near the Humanities Building on an exquisite April day and I received critiques of my poem from a group of intelligent and extremely attractive women who were half my age. They liked “GAY LIT” but they wanted me to change some things, which I did. Then one of these elegant young women read a poem about masturbation. I lay back in the grass and asked myself, “When did I become a king?”  

In The Fray Contributor

Women  

Since the beginning, women were sharks,
rocking their pain and causing waves in the ocean.
On moonless nights, their hearts throb; by morning
their love floods the shoreline.

A woman is a finicky shark, swimming
in a male dominant sea of obscurity — waiting
to swallow man’s fish-eyed soul
or fillet him of all living lies.

My blue angel

In all the circumstance of delight and grief,
my bottle bum is punctual in picking at my garbage
each morning. Embracing beer cans like a lover,
he clenches each aluminum can to his heart
before placing them into his stolen shopping cart.

His tattered blue polyester suit, unboxed
by someone long ago, whirs behind him,
like the frayed wings of a fallen angel; thick hair
like static-electric fur reaching for the empty sky.

On warm windy days, his presence
makes me feel like someone just pissed
in my nostrils, and though I gasp for air, I dare not blink —
for I fear that I might miss
his gullish blue wings take flight.

In The Fray Contributor