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The Morpo Review Volume 09 Issue 2
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T M M OOOOO RRRRR PPPPP OOOOO RRRRR EEEEE V V IIIII EEEEE W W
MM MM O O R R P P O O R R E V V I E W W
H M M M O O RRRR PPPP O O RRRR EEE V V I EEE W W W
M M O O R R P O O R R E V V I E WW WW
E M M OOOOO R R P OOOOO R R EEEEE V IIIII EEEEE W W
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Volume #9 April 15th, 2002 Issue #2
Established January, 1994 http://morpo.com/
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CONTENTS FOR VOLUME 9, ISSUE 2
I Don't Know Her Last Name Either . . . . . . . Russ Bickerstaff
For Julio . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Michael Ansa
canal street, eleven . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Luis E. Munoz
Play the Enemy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ian Randall Wilson
A POEM FOR DAPHNE, NO. 117 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Duane Locke
Marbled Composition NOtebooks . . . . . . . . . . . Richard Fein
Avatars Descending . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Glenn Osborn
About the Authors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Authors
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Editor + Poetry Editor
Robert Fulkerson The Morpo Staff Kris Kalil Fulkerson
robert@morpo.com + kalil@morpo.com
Associate Editor Fiction Editor
Lori Abolafia J.D. Rummel
lori@morpo.com rummel@morpo.com
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
_The Morpo Review_. Volume 9, Issue 2. _The Morpo Review_ is published
electronically on a quarterly basis. Reproduction of this magazine is
permitted as long as the magazine is not sold and the entire text of the
issue remains intact. Copyright 2002, The Morpo Review. _The Morpo
Review_ is published in ASCII and World Wide Web formats.
All literary and artistic works are Copyright 2002 by their respective
authors and artists.
ISSN 1532-5784
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
I Don't Know Her Last Name Either
by Russ Bickerstaff
She showed me her turtles
she showed me her frogs
she filled me in on all the intimate details
of the checkered history of the furniture in her apartment
we played with the magnetic poetry she had made by hand
we watched a fishing show that she'd taped off the Independent Film
Channel
while drinking scotch on the rocks
it was around the time she started to list her high school
achievements
from years ago
I went up to use the bathroom
I couldn't find the light switch
so I eased nature in the dark
and I realized:
I'm going to love her
and it's not going to matter
in the long run
sometimes the best way to enjoy a good auto accident
is to avoid it.
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
For Julio
by Michael Ansa
The freshly scrubbed, pubescent-
Looking
Puerto-Rican boy who confesses love
To me tonight on
A crowded dance floor
Doesn't know
Anything
His name is Julio and he is
Twenty Two
He calls me "beautiful" and likes
"Older men"
"Older, black men"
I laugh and want to be kind to him
When he asks for
"Only a kiss"
Strangely tonight,
My grief is for him-
Because he wears that hungry look
Because he doesn't yet know
This is not a place for love
But a house of prayer
Because he doesn't understand
You must sometimes walk away
Because he is me
A thousand different nights ago-
"I love you too."
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
canal street, eleven
by Luis E. Munoz
the procession slips
through the rain
the sea of black umbrellas,
a white dress guiding
grandmothers and unwed nieces
to the steeple, clouded
his hand, malfunctioning,
shielding his face
from black soot
and ash
as they walk down
canal street,
unable to distinguish
new york drops
from his eyes or the rain
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
Play the Enemy
by Ian Randall Wilson
1.
Because Jimmy says so
Five younger boys huddle
fall chilled and planning,
lines in the mud drawn by sharp sticks
send Billy this way
Kevin to cover our flank
Robby on the point.
We're behind my house
near a scatter of trees,
the shadowed woods beyond.
Our breath jets out
in plumes of steam.
We are excited.
We are scared.
Jimmy is calm.
We are executing maneuvers
designed by von Clausewitz and Tsun Tsu,
the names difficult to pronounce,
classic runs of Army confrontation
laid out in dusty books that Jimmy reads.
We never lose.
Because Jimmy says so
Five warrior children
charge the south slope
up a shallow incline, sliding
on the rotted cover
of dead leaves and loamy earth.
We weave through evergreens
hurling pine cone grenades
shout our Semper Fi.
The opposition has no chance,
the air blues with the pop
and crack of cap rifles;
Christmas presents for boys.
No prisoners are taken.
We never lose.
Because Jimmy says so
we build ice forts and a maze of trenches
with cardboard overhangs
that traverse the Feldman's sidewalk
to end up at the Smith's.
We take advantage
of the terrain's natural cover--
those are Jimmy's words--
laying in supplies of high-piled hardened snowballs,
and hot chocolate for drinking during truce.
The air stings our cheeks red
we wait for Jimmy's command.
Then, from across the street
with a shout and smash
the battle begins.
We hurl our snowball cannonades
as fast as we can grab and toss
high over the plow-heaped banks
a white barrage flung at the Enemy beyond.
Those brave boys who venture out
in desperate dashes
across the no-man's land of Aspen Ave
are easy targets for Jimmy's sure-thrown hand.
We never lose,
until our parents call, Dinner.
We never lose.
2.
His letter comes to me
in the safety of my college dorm
between classes
with foliage raging into full color
during sweater weather
when the girls still show some leg.
Here, I plan my strategies
for bringing Mary to my bed.
Here, I devise ways
of answering the calculus tests.
Here, I read the words
of dead poets
analyze their rhyme,
examine their reason.
His letter comes to me
in the safety of my deferment
behind the defense of bad knees
and an uncle with a friend
who knows another friend
who put in the right word
with a senator on the right committee
with the right influence
for the right amount
at the right time.
Jimmy doesn't have those friends.
It's hot,
he writes,
so hot the air is weighted.
The jungle smells like nothing
he's known before.
Sound is swallowed whole
yet a branch's crack
gives away a position in a trigger flash.
He hasn't seen the Enemy, he says,
but three men in the squad were picked off
on patrol yesterday
and another died
when he stepped on a mine;
a censor has blacked-out the details.
The strategies don't work, he says.
The information is always wrong,
Intelligence always gets it wrong,
and how can you pull a flanking maneuver
in a jungle so thick
it takes five minutes to hack away five feet.
The Enemy disappears.
New men arrive
old ones die,
others rotate out.
His feet swell
from jungle fungus,
he can smell himself.
The strategies don't work, he says,
he's just trying to stay alive.
I don't believe in the war.
I think the country is wrong,
I think Jimmy was wrong
to go when the rest of us found ways
to stay behind.
But I don't tell him this,
I write about the high school game,
some friends of ours
that moved away,
the woods behind the house.
My letter comes back marked deceased.
3.
I have thought about him,
less and less,
until I see my sons
behind the house.
At the instant the sun folds
and the outline of their shadows
run from the trees
Jimmy isn't dead.
His name isn't sandblasted
onto black granite
in a mall somewhere in Washington.
Where Jimmy is
warrior children still run
through phantom woods
throwing pine cone grenades
making gun sounds with pointed sticks
rushing forward in frantic charges
to sweep aside their friends
who this afternoon
must play the Enemy.
Where Jimmy is
the strategies work--
the flanking maneuver,
the interlocking fields of fire,
the enfilade.
There is no friendly fire misdirected
gouging out dirt craters of rock and mangled bone
where the squad's men used to hide,
there are no dust-offs to ambush
there are no shit-covered pungi sticks
there are no hills to climb in pouring rain
where every wave of new men are repulsed
by tumbling tracer rounds,
casualties do not run 70%,
there are no sucking chest wounds,
there are no screams in triage,
no one cries for Jesus
or his mother,
no one worries about body counts,
or punching his ticket,
or short time,
or the coming Tet.
Jimmy doesn't die
in a firefight
for a patch of ground
we win today
and give back tomorrow.
Jimmy doesn't die
in a firefight
where the choppers can't get in
where the radio's down
where the Lieutenant is dead
no one's in command.
Jimmy doesn't die
by a single round
through the heart
that stands him up
like a heavy bag
before he slumps into the grass.
Where Jimmy is
there are only golden afternoons
where sunset holds off another few minutes
enough time for a last skirmish
a last battle among friends
a last game
because Jimmy says so.
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
A POEM FOR DAPHNE, NO. 117
by Duane Locke
Clouds,
So admired by the drugged, absinthed, syphilitic Baudelaire
Are still there,
High up, distant-vaporous,
To be loved
By women
Who spent most of their lives in kitchens or brothels.
This is what clouds are for, not rain,
To be
The only lovers of Baudelaire,
And the only lovers
Of these housewives who spent their lives in kitchens,
Or these whores who spend their lives in brothels.
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
Marbled Composition Notebooks
by Richard Fein
Islands of white dot the two black hard covers.
Hardness, marbling, permanence.
Lasting words deserve being chiseled in marble,
the psalm of David, the to-be-or-not-to-be of the Bard, Lincoln's
timeless address,
would fit well on the heavy-thread-bound paper within.
Schoolchildren are wrongly assigned these notebooks,
for the pages are unforgiving of error.
These pages must be ripped from the binding,,
with the remaining scraps bookmarks
for every repented word, sentence, paragraph, or page.
Only certainties should be inscribed in such notebooks.
A looseleaf is more relaxed.
Its pages are already mutilated with trinities of holes.
On each page something new can be scribbled,
then with a click of the three metal rings
each page can be shuffled among previous pages.
Regretted sheets are slipped off from the rings leaving no trace.
Don't choose one over the other. Both books are needed.
First in a barely legible script, jot down all rambling
and slide the papers into the looseleaf.
Be patient. Add some sheets. Remove even more. Be patient.
Finally, carefully copy a few lines
from the precariously connected looseleaf papers,
a lifetime's distillation,
into the tightly threaded pages between the composition covers.
If the marbled musings are then thrown into the winds,
the few leaves they're inscribed on will not scatter.
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
Avatars Descending
by Glenn Osborn
When we came into the club that night--the night that Zinc reinvented
Avatars Descending--the place was already on fire. The opening band,
Timequest, had apparently outdone themselves, and the bubbling buzz as
we moved through the crowd with our instruments was not what we were
used to--it was warm and musical, but it wasn't about us.
We'd built our rep over five years on the road. We weren't the Rolling
Stones, but people in three or four states knew our music. When we
walked into a club, people cheered. But not tonight. Tonight people
just moved aside and kept talking as we pressed through. People seemed
to hardly notice us, in spite of the fact that we were an hour late.
The owner, Frankie, intercepted us about ten feet inside the door and
collared Lanny. Over the noise of the crowd I heard him say, "You're
the luckiest man on earth tonight." He pointed at the stage, where the
first band was almost done knocking down. "They blew this place away,
and when you didn't show, they blew it away again. If they didn't have
to leave for another gig, you'd be out the door right now, man. Go
ahead, you guys. Let's see if you can top that." Then he just walked
back behind the bar.
It took us the usual half hour to set up and we could tell something
was different. Nobody seemed to care if we were there or not. They
were talking and dancing to the jukebox and ordering beers. Usually
there's a kind of lull while you're setting up and people seem
impatient. Tonight they didn't.
Neither did I. I was the reason we were late. I was the one who had
punched Zinc and bloodied his nose and I was the one who refused to
play that night until Zinc apologized to me for fucking around with my
girl Juice. You can't go fucking around with the chicks of other
bandmembers. Zinc knew that as well as anyone.
Well, he wouldn't do it. Wouldn't apologize. But then Juice came into
the room and told Zinc to leave, and she didn't say it very nicely.
This changed the complexion of things. After he left, Juice told me,
Look, honey, he was just flirting, and so was I. We're all friends,
and shit happens. You oughta drop it, Marion.
I hated it when she called me by my real name. What I did, though, was
pick up the case for the Roland and walk ahead of her out the door,
down the hallway of the hotel and out into a cold November night. I
decided to deal with the Juice situation later. As soon as I climbed
in the back of the van and shut the door, Lanny floored the fucker and
set me down hard.
When we were finished setting up, Chip put Frankie on a mic at the
mixing board and the guy seemed to have forgotten our tardiness. After
he spouted a list of upcoming bands, he said We're very glad tonight
to present a band you all know from their CDs on Record Records--and
here he started screaming our band name over and over--Elevator Music!
Elevator Music! Elevator... He didn't seem to comprehend the irony of
the name, which was only to be sneered.
Chris just cut him off with a cymbal crash and we were into the first
chorus of our most popular song, Elvira Madigan's Problem. I figured
about one percent of the people in the room knew who Elvira Madigan
was, but who gave a shit. The song was getting some air play in
Dayton, our home town, and East Lansing, Ann Arbor and Detroit. And
this was Toledo, gritty gateway to the sea. They knew us here.
But they didn't give a damn. You can tell when you're not going over
and that night you could smell it. Some people stood close by the
stage and watched--drunks and maybe the local music reporter--but we
had none of our usual crowd control.
We finished the song and Lanny plucked a few bottom notes, like he was
sending out an SOS. Then he took off the Fender and strapped on the
Gibson. It had a raunchier sound that he usually saved for the last
couple of songs. I flipped a few switches on the keyboard and bounced
out a couple of arpeggios to test the sound of the room. Chris rattled
through a series of reggae rim shots. Zinc just stood there, his
Stratocaster waving a small arc in time with some beat playing in his
mind.
We played dance numbers and we played ballads, and Zinc bled into the
mic. I almost felt some sympathy for the bastard. Yeah. The Devil.
When you've got a dead crowd in a club, the best thing to do is to
play some covers. You learn that fast on the road. So we hit everybody
from Curtis Mayfield to Talking Heads to Warren Zevon. At one point,
out of the blue, Chris tapped the first few slow beats and we were
into CSNY's Guinevere, for Christ's sake.
Playing three-minute pop songs, you burn through a lot of music real
fast. We'd only been on the stage half an hour when Lanny blew into
his mic his usual spiel about tipping the waiters and ordering another
round and that we'd be back in a few minutes. I watched Chris and
could tell he was ready to keep on playing until we had them under our
spell. The way it worked pretty much every night, that was what he had
in mind. But Lanny unstrapped and walked off the stage. The rest of us
followed quickly. The crowd couldn't have cared less.
Chris went to the bar and ordered a margarita. Lanny sulked over a
glass of water. Zinc and I walked out the back door and into the
blackness, now crossed at a sharp angle with blowing snow. I'd seen
Juice in the lobby and just waved. She understood.
Normally, Zinc doesn't say much. He even has a Bob Dylan attitude
about his music: It speaks for itself. He doesn't have to explain.
Lanny gets us organized, and we recognize him as the leader of the
band, but Zinc is our creative genius.
Choosing to speak a few syllables, he said to me, Bounce, stay loose.
That's all he said. Then he took off running across the parking lot. I
saw him crouch and slide like a base stealer onto a little drift, then
make a snow angel and laugh his ass off. I went back inside and looked
for Juice.
She was at the bar with Aim--Amy--Chip the sound man's lady and driver
of what we called the Groupie Van, a 1978 Chrysler sedan that looked
as if it had been on the set of a Mad Max movie. While Aim drove,
Juice kept the books and made arrangements. She decided where we'd
stop to eat and the motels we'd stay in. Sometimes they were joined by
a genuine groupie, for Zinc or for Chris.
I walked over to Juice and Aim and didn't know what to say. I felt
sheepish and guilty but still angry. Just to fill the silence I asked
Juice for a cigarette, then went back to the stage and stood behind
the Roland, watching the crowd, catching occasional looks and sending
back a honky tonk riff in exchange. Chris and Lanny and Zinc ambled on
together and I knew they'd come from the van and a line of coke.
Lanny started it off. Pluck, pluck, cluck, cluck. Funky Chicken. We
played a couple more covers. Van Morrison, Into the Mystic. Fats
Domino, Blueberry Hill. Steely Dan, Haitian Divorce. People began to
dance again. They forgot about Timequest and just boogied. That's what
they'd come there for and we were louder than the jukebox.
My left hand was sore and swollen. Zinc's nose looked broken and
streaks of purple and red were spreading under his eyes, but his hands
on the fret board were sure as the feet of a mountain climber, only
much faster. After a ballad break for Boz Skags's Pain of Love, from
"Slow Dancer," which brought out all the damaged romantics, Chris
tapped us into the first bar of our own Avatars Descending. Lanny
whomped out enough bass to cover the deficiency I felt in my left hand
and we caught each other's eyes and smiled. Zinc strode across the
stage like he always does on that song, which made the crowd push
toward the stage in mock belligerence.
Then Zinc did something totally out of character. Over Chris and
Lanny's continued steady beat and bottom, he stung out the first few
notes again of Avatars Descending. But like it was a hymn. Chip picked
it up with a snare ruffle and Lanny dropped in with what looked to
Chip, at the mixing board, like a boa constrictor undulating on top of
a parade of fenceposts.
All of us sing, so all of us had mics. Lanny looked at his as if it
were there to interview him. In the one beat he missed, Zinc shouted,
"G!" as if pulling a rabbit out of a hat.
Avatars Descending is in the key of E minor. It rumbles with blues
undertones through a lament about the death of leadership and descends
into an anarchic battle, just to prove the point. At the beginning, it
always gets people dancing and at the end it always makes them go for
another drink.
Before the echo of Zinc's demand had faded, I hit a 10-finger G Major,
held down the keys and stabbed the wah-wah peddle with my right foot.
Chris hit a couple of triplets and danced off into a ska shuffle that
Lanny knew instinctively to lope along on right behind the beat. The
moment was like people have reported in auto accidents or tornadoes;
time slows down and you can feel nanoseconds, see things happening as
if they were, ironically, moving slowly.
I could go on for an hours about those few seconds after Zinc shouted
"G!" but what's more interesting started with the smile on Zinc's face
the moment he saw what we had collectively done with his command.
Many musicians have said, and I'll confirm it, that music is better
than sex. When the band is in the groove, a Ferrari cranking on all
twelve cylinders, there is a palpable joy that spreads from player to
player and then from one dancer or listener to another and you can
literally see a wave of pleasure spread out over the room.
Zinc set off a tsunami that night. Some aural god--Pan, perhaps, or
the Pied Piper--spoke directly to his hands and bypassed his brain
entirely. From where I stood behind the Roland, I could see him
leaning into the crowd like a man trying to find his way in the dark.
But what came out of the amps and flowed out through the Marshal's and
into the room was like the snap of a whip.
Crack! And you could see every face in the room snap toward the stage.
Then Zinc proceeded to deconstruct Avatars Descending, playing it
backward and upside down. It was the same song we all knew, same song
the crowd knew, but no one had ever heard it before. Not like this.
He played like the avatars the song was about, like a cross between
Django Reinhardt and Robert Johnson...
...that crippled gypsy,
your deadly crossroads...
Same song, same lyric, but the burn Zinc put on it that night...it was
like a whole new song. Where he came up with switching to the key of
G, I don't know, but the effect was like spraying butane onto a
campfire. First, a deep, funky mist arose and then a hissing, the
vibrato he forced onto the strings of his guitar. Chris switched to
brushes and Lanny took a step back, plowing a deep furrow under Zinc's
lead. There was a button on the Roland, one of a hundred, right above
Calliope and just under Anthem that I couldn't read because of the
sweat in my eyes. I'd never hit it before. I thought it said Blood.
What the hell.
I played a vamp over the top of Zinc's solo. The synthesizer screamed
like a wild animal. Zinc turned only his head at me, his body still
leaning into the crowd. I could see in his eyes a question: Are you
following me? Will you follow me? I answered with a flattened seventh
that overrode his guitar for a moment then sank like a handkerchief
thrown onto the crest of a wave. Yes, is what it said.
No one knows, not even Zinc, probably, what he did with his pedals,
five or six of them, and his wah-wah bar and the volume controls on
his guitar. Blazing notes from outer space burst from the Marshals
like a field of asteroids.
Out on the dance floor, couples broke apart and groups of people
formed and danced toward the stage. Then the whole dance floor became
something like a single couple dancing. They weren't dancing with
themselves and they weren't dancing with one other person. They were
dancing with each and every person on the dance floor. They were
dancing with abandon. Even the shy girls and the nerdy guys came out.
It was ecstatic for the crowd and it was ecstatic for the band,
co-conspirators in the ecstasy of music.
Lanny was the first to rise above the stage. I watched his feet go
limp as if he were swimming, floating a foot or so over the jumble of
cables. Then all of us followed, trusting entirely the force that
lifted us, father music, mother harmony. Zinc shot forward and drifted
like a mad cloud over the dancers, and the whole place pushed beneath
him and began to move in synchronicity with our music. The barstools,
empty of people, gathered and bent themselves into shapes resembling
trophies. I saw Chris and his kit levitate, the drums rising to become
vibrating planets. And then the majesty of our music pulled me toward
the ceiling, gravity impotent. Looks on the faces of the dancers made
me think they might be penitents at a joyous, tearful shrine.
Zinc's final note, an A-flat seventh delivered from on high and
processed through his bank of effects, sounded like the scream of a
dying bull, an avatar descending. That note granted each of the
dancers an extra day of life and provided resolution to their lost
demands. It looked to me as if we had just panned a pie plate full of
twenty-four-carat gold, which I would gladly have hurled back into the
river just to have kept that feeling alive for another five seconds.
That night we treated them the way the wind treats a flag. When we
finished, they were spent, cruising numbly past the nirvana they'd
come there for, crashing onto the dance floor, smiling.
And when the music actually ended, hours later, I still had the Juice
situation to deal with. But on that night, after that delirious magic,
that proof that music is better than sex, Zinc could have my girl.
Hell, he could fuck my mother and I wouldn't care.
~~~
It was only a few months later, though, that the tensions overwhelmed
us all. I told Juice to take a hike and that left Aim alone in the
Chrysler, which infuriated Chip, and that, in turn, set up a
side-taking battle that left us all bloody. By mutual decision, we
called it quits. Another great band joined the parade of broken dreams
along the musical highway.
After Elevator Music broke up I used to see Zinc play now and then,
standing in for any band that needed a guitar. In fact I saw him only
a couple of months ago, outside the Social Security office. Said he
was on tour with a warm up band for Phish. I laughed. Phish doesn't do
warm up bands, I said. They just get out there and put on a show. What
the fuck are you talking about, Zinc?
It was a joke, Bounce. I don't play anymore.
I thought about that night when I punched him. I felt the weight of
that in what he had just said, but when he walked off without saying
another word, I thought, Jesus, can that be true?
If I'd had a guitar in my hands right then, I'd have thrown it at him
and yelled, Play this, you asshole! And it's impossible for me to
believe he wouldn't have picked it up the way any guitar addict would
and checked out the craftsmanship, the quality of the pegs, the
distance of the strings from the fretboard and that he wouldn't have
tested it, wouldn't have burst through one of his leads--maybe from
Avatars Descending. But I didn't have a guitar to throw and Zinc just
kept on walking.
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
about the authors
** Michael Ansa [ michaelansa@yahoo.com ]
Michael Ansa is a native of Ghana and a high school English teacher in
Boston. He also teaches Ashtanga Yoga and is in the process of
compiling a series of poems on immigration and spiritual/ cultural
displacement entitled, "The Year We Forgot." Two of Michael's poems
from this series can be seen in the January 2002 issue of
coffeepressjournal.com.
** Russ Bickerstaff [ staticstudio@emailaccount.com ]
Russ Bickerstaff is a performance poet based out of Milwaukee,
Wisconsin. He has been performing for 6 years. He is currently working
on a couple of novels that no one else knows about. He is also more or
less unemployed. There are exactly thirty teeth in his head. He has a
BA in psychology, which he received at the University of Wisconsin at
Milwaukee in July of 2000, shortly after identifying a few structures
in the dissected brain of a sheep. He has been engaged to be married
twice. In neither circumstance was he the one who popped the question.
** Richard Fein [ bardofbyte@aol.com ]
I have been published in many web and print journals. I'm considered
by most literary critics to be the greatest poet since Rod Mckuen and
Jewel. But the highlight of my life was when I was arrested in
communist East Germany for espionage because of an inflatable doll in
my possession. But that's another story.
** Duane Locke [ duanelocke@netzero.net ]
Duane Locke lives alone in a two-story decaying house in the sunny
Tampa slums. He lives isolated and estranged as an alien, not
understanding the customs, the costumes, the language (some form of
postmodern English) of his neighbors. The egregious ugliness of his
neighborhood has recently been mitigated by the esthetic efforts of
the police force who put bright orange and yellow posters on the posts
to advertise the location is a shopping mall for drugs. His alley is
the dumping ground for stolen cars. One advantage of living in this
neighborhood, if your car is stolen, you can step out in the back and
pick it up. Also, the burglars are afraid to come in on account of the
muggers.
** Luis E. Munoz [ lemunoz33@hotmail.com ]
Luis E. Munoz is an English literature junior at Arizona State
University outside Phoenix.
** Glenn Osborn [ gosborn@accesstoledo.com ]
Glenn Osborn is a freelance writer, designer and photographer living
in Perrysburg, Ohio. He is a founder of the Scrawl: The Writers Asylum
( http://www.stwa.net ), a collaborative workshop for writers, and
has been managing editor and designer of the website's ezine, The
Story Garden ( http://www.stwa.net/tsg/ ). He operates
HandsOnWebsites, a site design firm at http://www.HandsOnWebsites.com
and recently has developed a successful photography business marketing
prints of his digital photographs of flowers
( http://www.HandsOnWebsites.com/blossoms ).
** Ian Randall Wilson [ IanRWilson05@aol.com ]
Ian Randall Wilson is the managing editor of the poetry annual 88: A
Journal of Contemporary American Poetry. Recent work has appeared in
The Alaska Quarterly Review, Spinning Jenny and Spork. His first
fiction collection, Hunger and Other Stories, was published by
Hollyridge Press. He is on the faculty at the UCLA Extension where he
teaches classes in fiction. He is also an executive at MGM Studios.
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