I'm Afraid of Americans

My next collection is I'm Afraid of Americans. In some ways it's hard to know what to say about these stories & vignettes.

They are set in and are also from the South Bay area of Los Angeles during the '80s, after decades of immigration from Back East and The Midwest, Mexico, Central America, Vietnam and the Pacific Islands. The pieces are portraits of Americans and others, moments of culture shock, the framework of American culture seen through very foreign eyes.

Some are specifically set in and around a minority-majority high school in the aftermath of Proposition 13 and Ronald Reagan's ascent; others are snapshots of souls in a zeitgeist.

Three selections have now been published at Unlikely Stories:

Learning About Electricity
Processing Data
Roberta's Funeral

Thank you, Unlikely Stories!

Last year The Gravity of the Thing published an early version of The Cohort of Mist, Fog and Fire from the same collection. Thank you, TGOTT, and see you at Wordstock!

"Therapy" appeared in Vine Leaves Literary Journal in 2013, and in Vine Leaves' 2013 Best Of.

I'm Afraid of Americans will be published in Spring, 2018 and will be added to the fine selection at GobQ Books. The print edition will also be available at Mother Foucault's Bookshop, Powell's,  Broadway Books and Amazon. And there will be e-books.

untitled

on my desktop
sam beckett's
far too observant eyes
tell me
gentleness
does not
survive

Sept. 19, 1940 - May 9, 2017

No mouth had, nor no mind expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for -

The Crucifixes

I'm very pleased with this book, pleased with it beyond reason. The design by R.V. Branham is simple and beautiful; the Democratica font reminds me of Uncial and Half Uncial lettering, mediaeval manuscripts.

That alone would be wondrous.

But the thing about it, I came to realize, is that it reminded me that when I was 13 one of our set texts was a kid's biography of Marie Curie. And remembering that, the feeling of reading it, I realized that that child and I hadn't admired Marie Curie, but Maria Sklodowska. I didn't imagine the lab, the nuclear industry, the Nobel prizes. The later part of the book had little hold on me. Only the search and the finding.

This book is the radium distilled from the pitchblende.

The Third Man

Last weekend I watched The Third Man – had never seen it, had always put it on when I was really too tired to watch anything. Wish that image of Orson Welles (small tower of black) walking into the bright sterility of bombed out buildings and a Ferris wheel had been in my mind much earlier. It would have explained the Millennium Wheel outside the Houses of Parliament so well.

(It’s not the wheel: it’s the 800 years of slowly successful struggle against the divine right of kleptocracy that lie in ruins behind it.)

Angel IV

islands of pain in the midst of the burning
dark as Greek seas, dark as the slaughter of daughters
pass into night
while the wings reach out, peach, apricot, nectarine
and the fire shouts gold,
glory, fear me –

dark as slaughter around us now.
we wait for we don’t know what.

Passing