Jennifer Busskohl, writing as J.B. Kohl

From her new book, One Too Many Blows to the Head, a collaboration with Eric Beetner:

Ray was a hard cord of a man, with muscles coiled tight enough to fire bullets without a gun if needed. His hands were cuffed together and rested on the table in front of him. Like the cuffs would do me and Bob any good if Ray decided to pounce.

Bob wiped the sweat off his forehead when he saw me and led me over to the corner to tell me what he’d got so far . . . which wasn’t much. “Says he was there looking for a girl.”

“Whore?”

Bob nodded.

I moved back over to the table and told Ray I was sorry about his brother—and that was the truth. I was sorry about a lot of things and his brother’s death was just one more on the list. “Let’s talk about what you were really doing in Negrotown.”

His fists clenched a little when I said that, the tendons of his wrists straining against the metal of the cuffs. “Get those off him, Bob,” I said.

Bob looked like he wanted to argue, but he took the cuffs off and stepped back, like maybe he’d let a tiger out of the cage or something. Ray just nodded and sat there, not giving in to the urge to rub the raw spots.

“You want a cigarette?” I asked.

“Don’t smoke.”

I shrugged. “So how about it? What were you doing there?”

“What makes you think I’m lying about the girl?”

“I think you’ve been too busy to think about girls.”

He was silent.

“Tell me about the fight.”

Nathan M. Richardson – Poet, Author, Publisher

Make Merry

“Better your anger and fears
flow like ink from a pen onto the page,
or paint onto a canvas,
than blood on the sidewalk.
Better your blows strike the faces of drums
or cords of melody,
than the backs and faces of
women and children!”

Nathan M. Richardson

This little aphorism was born from the many poetry readings and workshops Nathan teaches independently and through Young Audiences of Virginia. It is the message he brings to youth, that their creative gifts can be used counteract the challenges of life. It is also currently under review by the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence for use as a promotional supporting that cause! Find out more at www.scpublishing.com.
nathan@scpublishing.com

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Mac McKinney: Post-Katrina Blues

Beauvoir

Biloxi was under the sea for quite a while:

Did fish swim through
Jefferson Davis’s cobwebs?

Beauvoir, glowing icon of Southern history,
symbol of past and future glory,
got hammered that August day, 2005.

Her wings got clipped, this
house of the Confederacy,
wooden siding, structure ripped away,
old mansion windows shattered.

The white apparition above Highway 90
groaned and screamed for hours,
Katrina more cruel than the Yankees.

Mac McKinney

Lori M. Hobson

From her book Momma Sayings and Life Reflections:

What does success look like to you? How do you define it? Is it writing a book, building a business or making a certain amount of money? Clearly success looks different to different people. Equally clear is that success looks quite different from the inside than it looks from the outside. Those of us who are working to build something for ourselves and our children can relate to the long hours, setbacks and disappointments. We know what it took to get that house, that car, those clothes, etc.

When you pursue your dreams you may expect to encounter certain obstacles. Things like lack of financing, time or support. When you are a member of a minority group (this includes females), you expect to meet people who don’t believe in you because of who or what you are.

There is one thing that goes with the territory that could easily blindside you. That thing is haters. A hater is a person who cannot handle your success. He or she is bothered by the fact that you have been blessed. A hater is someone who wants what you have but doesn’t want to or can’t do what is necessary to get it. Unfortunately they are quite often the people who are closest to you.

One of the things that I learned about myself years ago was that I have a ‘light’ that people find attractive. Most of the time people are attracted to my light and they want to talk to me, be in my presence, ask me questions, etc. It’s great and it makes me a good friend, counselor, speaker and trainer.

However there is a small percentage of people who are also attracted to my light but want to put it out. When I realized this, I tried (to no avail) to hide my light so people wouldn’t try to hurt me. It didn’t take long to figure out that it is impossible to hide your light, especially from those who are most intimidated by it.

In the message Our Greatest Fear, Marianne Williamson says in part, “Our greatest fear is not that we are inadequate, but that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that frightens us. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you.” My interpretation of Marianne’s comments is that you should be who you really are always. Don’t attempt to hide your light and don’t let haters put it out.

A friend and mentor once told me that the difference between a star and a superstar is motivation and perseverance. When people hate on you it means that you are doing something right. The next time you encounter a hater tell them, you don’t hate me because I think I’m all that, you hate me because you think I’m all that. Look them in the eye and tell them to BRING IT!

Nelson Farley and Ghosts

One of Nelson Farley’s hobbies is ghostbusting. There have probably been more ghosts in his house than in any haunted house; but most of them weren’t haunting, just visiting. This hobby inspired the license plates on his two Cadillac Sevilles: GOSBUSTR on the yellow ‘83, and GSTBSTR on the blue ‘85.

In the early 1990’s, my girlfriend’s son, Eric, taped a documentary on ghosts for me. One incident involved the Cabot, an American pocket carrier during World War II.

After the war, San Diego used the Cabot as a floating museum. One young woman, after touring this museum, reported that it was haunted by a young American sailor.

During a battle in 1942, the Cabot was hit by a kamikaze. The Cabot returned to service after repairs and finished out the war. It appeared the museum’s ghost died in the kamikaze attack.

By the time I got Eric’s tape, I had been educated by owners of haunted houses: leave their ghosts undisturbed. But I could still sit in my Hilton home on Hopkins Street and do what needed doing. The procedure is simple: I pray and then alter my state of consciousness by meditation. I ask my guides to bring me the haunting soul so I can talk to him. The talk is based on the summary of the law which Jesus cited as the two greatest commandments: You are to love God with all your heart, mind, strength, and soul and to love your neighbor as yourself. Those are three requirements really: love God, neighbor and self, I then explain why haunting is a hindrance to each of the three. It is important to first acknowledge the soul’s predicament, as best you know it. It is also helpful to remind them this is an invitation, and not a command. At the end, I ask them to look around for whomever they want as a guide and to go to the light with them, and then I bless them on their way.

As I finished my discourse, I saw the starboard side of a carrier with about two hundred men looking over the side at me. Many of these men were manning antiaircraft guns. They were smiling, but I was offended. ‘”Why were you hiding? I would have been there for you, too!” They didn’t reply, although I believe they understood. I did not understand: They were not hiding but welcoming their friend home from the war.

As I came out of meditation to the awareness of my room, I saw another man standing in the doorway to my small room. He was about 5′ 10″, and might have weighed 145 pounds if dripping wet. He wore a pilots’ uniform, complete with goggles, but no parachute. Only one country in World War II did not equip their pilots with parachutes, “Would you-please do for me what you just did for him?” He was shy and polite; not a warrior on a deadly mission, but a likable young man. I would, but first I asked my guides to see if there were any more like him. When I finished this second séance, I saw a second pilot. This one was short, stocky, confident, and seemed very much in charge of the situation. Certainly, this was the guide. He had three Zeros, in the early-war gray; and a second young pilot just as tall and skinny as the first. The slim one opened his mouth to speak, but no sound came forth: he was speechless. The message was clear though, and I liked it. The last thing I saw was the three warbirds flying off to their spiritual destination.

W. Michael Farmer Writes About the Old West

W. Michael Farmer was born in 1944 in Nashville, Tennessee. He holds a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Tennessee, and has taught graduate students, managed atmospheric instrumentation projects and databases, served as an advisor to the U.S. Army and NATO, published technical books and papers, managed small businesses, and traveled widely in the United States, Canada, Europe, and Pacific Rim countries. Living for nearly fifteen years in Las Cruces, New Mexico, he studied the region’s rich history, lived in its culture, traveled its deserts, mountains, and ranges and learned truth derived from fiction is as valid as any physical theory. He now lives and writes in the Tidewater area of Virginia, in Smithfield.

Read a Mike Farmer short story of the Old West at the link below.

A Charge Clearly Proved

Wil LaVeist and Unemployment

Fired Up: How To Win When You Lose Your Job

“But as for you, you meant evil against me; but God meant it for good, in order to bring it about as it is this day, to save many people alive.”

– Joseph

To go to work one morning only to be fired without a clue by the afternoon can be as depressing as any other loss – even the death of a loved one. This is because in America what we do for a living is often intimately tied to who we are. When someone you meet asks, “So, what do you do for a living?” How do you answer when you’ve just lost your job? But like any other major crisis where you’ve been rejected, being terminated can be the defining moment that actually launches you to your true destiny. Fired Up is an intimate account that shows in raw detail how to climb out of a personal crisis.

Fired Up: How To Win When You Lose Your Job offers a concrete plan for coping and climbing back from any crisis, only in this case it’s a blindsiding firing. After being terminated, you will likely go through the various stages of grief, such as denial and anger, before reaching acceptance and hopefully forgiveness. I went through most of the stages, but got stuck at anger. In Fired Up I share the steps I took to cope, recover and eventually forgive, enabling me to move on toward my true career destiny, which, by the way, is what true success is really about. More than 1.5 million jobs were lost in the U.S. in 2008. Those aren’t just statistics, but actually people, some with children in college, or elderly parents they are caring for, or mortgages to pay. Many of them, like me, didn’t see the firing coming. Of course not all terminations are unfair or financially devastating. In fact, many are simply necessary, nothing personal and just business. But when you’re fired without warning, your life can be turned upside down and inside out. Fired Up helps employers realize that being humane when letting people go is better for business, and employees to understand that shock may be just what was needed for them to become who they were truly intended to be.

Barbara Drucker Smith Reminisces

PREJUDICE

In the 1930’s there was a sign at the Cavalier Hotel in Virginia Beach that read, “No dogs or Jews allowed.” In 1942, I was in the second grade at Woodrow Wilson Elementary in Newport News, Virginia. One day in early December, I started singing a Christmas Carol in class along with my classmates. My teacher stopped the singing and reminded me in a loud voice how inappropriate for me to be singing Christmas Carols. I stopped singing, flushed with embarrassment to be spotted singing and to be singled out for it in front of my peers. I knew why she did this as she was Jewish and so was I.

A six-year-old classmate asked me to go with her to a service. I did and it was in a tent crammed with people. Taking center stage was a loud-voiced man giving a continuous damnation and hellfire sermon. When people were asked to come forward, my friend tried her best to drag me to the front to accept Jesus as my savior so that I would be saved. But I repeatedly refused which left her confused and me mortified at even being in the situation.

Another six-year-old friend invited me to go swimming at the James River Country Club.  I ran to get ready. Mother stopped me and said that the club is restricted. Jews are not welcome as members. I wanted to go anyway, but I did not go. Later in my teens, this same girl needed a ride to her tennis date at the same club. I drove her there wearing a
slack outfit. She was in a short white tennis outfit. As I let her out I felt left out knowing that I was not allowed or welcome to play on those courts.

One December, I got out of my first grade class and started walking home. An older boy started throwing stones at me and screaming “Jew, where are your horns”. I ran as fast as my feet would go and blocks later I no longer heard his voice so I looked around, saw no one, and slowed down to a trot. When I got to the curb near my home, I sat down. A car screeched to a halt just missing a dog by a hair. I put my hands in my lap and started crying partially for the dog being saved but mostly for my hurt feelings at the insults, stone throwing, chase, and overt prejudice of the older boy. I later learned that Michelangelo’s sculpture of Moses in Italy does have horns. Michelangelo mistook the Hebrew word that means both sacred light and horns. The Hebrew text reads Moses’s head is surrounded by sacred light.

As a teen, I developed a camaraderie with a non-Jewish boy interested in folk music. He would play his guitar for hours on my front porch and I would sing the folk songs. He asked me out to go on a movie date. My parents refused to let me interdate. I was heartbroken. He felt hurt and could not understand why I wouldn’t go with him. This shows that prejudice is a two-way street. We ended up going to an every-Saturday-night ritual of musicians and artists that gathered at the home of a musical couple so that we could be part of a group that enjoyed music. We both took piano lessons from the same teacher. Eventually, our friendship petered out and we went our separate ways.

When I went to College, there was a quota system at many of the prestigious colleges … At my College only 10 per cent of the freshman class could be Jews.

Shonda Buchanan, Poet

This poem, and much of the poetry I write that deals with family, illustrates to me how the lack of knowing our Indian heritage and legacy led to family dysfunction, and in many cases, abuse. I traced my heritage to the Coharie Tribe of Sampson County, North Carolina and Eastern Band Cherokee in Halifax, North Carolina. On my father’s side, I have Choctaw. My family poetry is a way for me to reconnect with the past and move towards a better future.

VelmaJean

i remember nights when
you pushed my skin
into a blue corner
fanning the Michigan moon
into a white fire

my youth in your fingers
like candle wax

the clock forging ahead
there wasn’t much time

you worked quietly
diligently against the famous
bruises you grew deft at hiding
from your own sisters, unaware
that they were hiding theirs
from you
gifts of hard love, no
gifts from hell

but still, i grew to something

it was that flame you pushed
into me, smoothed it down
seeded it in my navel for later

knowing that i was young
you were older. wiser.
married a third time
seven children from virginhood
one father from innocence
one mother from forgiveness

i remember nights
when you rubbed my back, singing
swing low
sweet chariot, coming for to carry me home
sweet low, sweet chariot

you spilled vicks over my
chest, my mosquito bumps
dime-thin back
humming long into
the dusk
forcing the bronchitis
that almost killed me twice
into a soft wheeze

i lived
bred off plantation prayer
menthol

later, forgetful
i never knew your stiff back
held me
at the kitchen sink
your fingers soapy with dishwater and tears

all the knowing of a woman
in that water as you sniffed, moved
away

i thought you were making it all
look harder then it really was

men, love, holding things
raising us
i said nothing

but i was a child
it was alright
i grew into something

theses memories come
i am folding them away
for my daughter
into her like all good
mother spiders do
while they wash dishes
spin white flames
watch, hum

family reunion, fourth of july in kalamazoo, 1999

i.
tina laughs, hands on belly
crow-black and hard

like her husband didn’t just paint his toenails
red ‘on a dare’ and leave her for another man

rochelle sits cross-legged on ground rocking
back and forth into a sulfur breeze
wrapped in a thin blanket
and her backwoods dreams of peace
bound in a ceremony of missing sons
already begun

firecrackers scatter dust
at her feet, grinning, she tell bobbie ann
‘shut the hell up, trick’
as whistlers pierce air, sing last breath song
pulsing siren goodbyes, finally jumping curb
extinguishing in street

breeze kicks up

children race around us like black dandelions
willowy fingers douse alleyway with inch-worm secrets
hide-go-seek screams reach out
reminding us of other willows and dandelions
in posthumous fields

bobbie ann’s smile spreads wide across her face
like the sahara, she folds all forty-one
years of her life / her famous left hook
her two women into a round planet on her chest
letting no one in
chain smoking the night away

ball up her fist, shake it, tell rochelle
‘das ya mama, ugly’

cigarette smoke settles on my locks like a caul

everything i know about love i learned from them and
mama
seen twisted wrists / noses clotted with blood
their laughter burning a hole in god’s palm

seen tender dark corners their hearts20have held up
like last stands / in waist deep snowdrifts
like the color of rain depended on it/ yes, seen war

ii.
bobbie’s son, david, eats up our small town
in desperate lurch at freedom before
he marries nashville preacher daughter

at twenty-two swaying like ypsilanti timber
above us, determined to remain uncut, all his clippings
his two a.m. love-making with men he has forgotten
the names will be swept neatly under a rock

my youngest brother
popeye’s toffee-hued skin has sprouted a garden of tattoos
as if the paper he usta draw on wasn’t enough

i spin when i try to read their indigo treaties
binding his flesh all at once agreements he made with
manhood before i could save him / agreements broken

under night’s charade of falling i see his eyes winking
in and out of view/ stars behind clouds

he sells weed to pay bills and buy special size shirts
to drape his salty mammoth body
he has been hurt by women
clenching and unclenching
his hannibal fists marching against the air
his brow carved into a totem
i know life isn’t kissing him back

at three hundred pounds a piece
he and my nephew jason
are the proverbial town giants
with hands that could swat us down
like african flies but these two, they hug us instead
in the end, no matter
how much the women yell

iii.
this july fourth night / we shift positions
chill kisses ankles, we move to warmth
congregate on yvonne’s
yellow porch on south side

produce pomegranate stories from
folds of our clothing and breathe

my daughter’s nine-year old legs
float across hazy lawn in game of tag

she, cousins, neighbors’ kids all chant
what children chant when they are
young lions
and it is summer and an undulation of fireflies
have risen for them
in the crushed sapphire
blue dusk

i always / forget how beautiful
kalamazoo is

again, tina’s crow laughter
piles out of her mouth like mama’s
in the darkness/ thinking she has slipped
in among us, unnoticed
i search for the one who pushed
us into this world, wondering if
she knew it would be like this
black indians in a zoo/ no heritage/ no men

we women / howling

Sofia M. Starnes, Poet

One of my poems, The Soul’s Landscape, likens the relationship between the soul and the body to that of a marriage, with the soul pursuing the body, to create a self. The poem’s metaphor applies with equal force to poetry, to the relationship between the text and the body of the poem.

The Soul’s Landscape

Ah, what the soul gives for shape –
to be handled head-first

at the temple, to be cumbered
with cotton, white puffs

from plantations in heat; what it gives,
for the flick, flick elastic

on wrists, loose-leaf palms it befriends,
at its youngest – for the sake

of all this, and this place.
Love me now with your

hands (says the soul, half-exploring its
landscape), better me

with embodiment; come, angle the ribs
where they beach into

longing; come, finger the oval description
of death, smallest hope

for cessation. When the room is redundant
of space, and its walls

wish for closure, thumb my corners
up, inward, wade your lips

through the ridge where they meet,
to allow recollection.

I must love with the tissue and the gloss
that embody: cellule, elegy,

ghost, danger, languish… all those words
out of context for souls,

god-forsaken, whiplash of the neck –
Interim

is the word I would use the most cautiously;
how precarious its hum,

ear to earth, plumbing earth, earthwise.

From: A Commerce of Moments
Pavement Saw Press, Ohio, 2003
First published in Pavement Saw Magazine

(Comment excerpted from http://herecomeseverybody.blogspot.com/2005/08/sofia-m.html)